Quote Originally Posted by Artemiz View Post
No FFXI is clearly harder, but much less popular. How much those two factors influence each other is open for debate but you used FFXI as an example of how harder is better. Im suggesting its difficulty caused a lot of people to quit.

My overall point about dungeon difficulty is that we have easy dungeons now as a direct consequence of the problems caused by having harder dungeons when the game launched. It used to be harder to tank, so we ended up with a shortage of tanks and tanks bailing at the start of certain dungeons. This lead to long queues. It used to be harder to heal, same thing, shortage of healers. We've had stricter DPS checks, it led to wipes and abandoned dungeon runs.

People are asking to start rolling that back, but with it you will get the problems back too.

Dungeons are designed for everyone to play. So they are tuned to make that possible with as little friction as possible. For players seeking a greater challenge the game has provided it. Asking to raise the difficulty floor will lead to less players, and more drama. SE know this, because we've seen it and done it before.
However making everything easier has resulted in other problems. Players that took the time to learn how to play the game are quitting because of boredom because the game is too easy resulting in people seeing various duties abandoned more often before they even start because the odds of encountering a player in DF that hasn't learned basic mechanics has increased. This also translates to problems with the content labeled "harder" because the easy mode players are not going to sit around satisfied with easy mode rewards. They want the shiny things they see in the "harder" content too. So it makes more sense to have the things leading up to that "harder" content be harder as well so that they're atleast prepared for the "harder" content when they jump into it. Back in the days you talk about where dungeons were harder it was fairly common to clear EX primals through DF. Now, not so much. Harder duties didn't make a shortage of tanks or healers. The playerbase created a shortage of tanks and healers. Anything SE does to try and "fix" this implied shortage is nothing more than using a band-aid to try and stop a leaking water pipe. This is due to a mentality of wanting to be the "hero" in the party and a majority of the player base associated this role with being the one that pushes button and makes big damage numbers hence DPS. Tanks will likely be the most in demand role when Endwalker launches simply because DPS and Healer are getting new job options. Tank and healer felt non existent when stormblood launched because they added 2 new dps jobs which were ones that were asked for by a large amount of the player base. Healer was the most in demand role when Shadowbringers launched because it launched with a new tank and DPS.