Why does everyone complain about STORY based MMO's?

[Lauront]

I agree with the comments that the MSQ content could stand to be a bit difficult - and no, not muh Dark Souls, or even ex or savage etc. With trusts being rolled out across mandatory MSQ content, you can include an ez-mode option with those. SE may not be doing that, and doing the opposite by "streamlining" content to accommodate them, but they nonetheless could use them that way - if they wanted to - and allow the DF and regular trust versions to suffer a bit less, as a result... the MSQ includes some of the most formidable foes the MC faces; it's just a shame the mechanical difficulty can't fully showcase this, and so often they must rely on story contrivances that don't really cut it for me. Atm I'd rate the story about "meh", especially as a follow-up to SHB, so it's not a strong selling point to me.

You people sure love to dismiss any opinion you dislike with the same old "muh minority".

Sure, but why bring metacritic in the first place then? Endwalker's user rating is based on 1.4k reviews, which are also less than 1% of the "millions who play". It's less than 0.1% actually.
If you want play the numbers game, don't use such blatant double standards.

Forums are not the whole community, but there are representative of a certain demographic of players. Same for Reddit. Same for Twitter. Same for Metacritic. Same for your server's Novice Network. You can't use one as the definitive judge of quality (which is stupid in the first place, because being popular has never shielded anything from criticism like you always love to imply), and ignore the others.

Also, let's not pretend gaming companies haven't cottoned onto the fact that people place far more weight on "user scores" than paid critic reviews and now also target those. As you say though, if we're going to use the tiny sample argument, Metacritic is no different and far from exempt from it.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

I agree with the comments that the MSQ content could stand to be a bit difficult - and no, not muh Dark Souls, or even ex or savage etc. With trusts being rolled out across mandatory MSQ content, you can include an ez-mode option with those.

I really wish people would stop advocating for trust to be "ez-mode". If you want easy, you go get carried by other players. You can just kiss the dirt while they complete the mission.

[Lauront]

I really wish people would stop advocating for trust to be "ez-mode". If you want easy, you go get carried by other players. You can just kiss the dirt while they complete the mission.

They're not advocating for it to be that - although in practice I wouldn't be surprised if SE sanded down all difficulty in regular content to make it easier to code for them. They're asking for it to be an option you can pick for content undertaken this way, as is already the case in some solo content if you fail it first time round. What you describe above could have been SE's answer to people who think the content should be "accessible" to everyone but they don't seem to be willing to take that approach and instead seem to want to design around the lowest common denominator.

[Raoabolic]

What you describe above could have been SE's answer to people who think the content should be "accessible" to everyone but they don't seem to be willing to take that approach and instead seem to want to design around the lowest common denominator.

Listen, SE is a company and even the lowest common denominator can purchase mogstation items. No need to scare away the money! lol

[Lauront]

Listen, SE is a company and even the lowest common denominator can purchase mogstation items. No need to scare away the money! lol

It's that old saying, there's many ways to skin a cat (not that I'd recommend doing that.) Their current approach to me seems to be the bluntest, crudest one they can take, especially since they're rolling out a mechanic to all MSQ content to make the game more "single player" friendly, which could provide an alternative method to achieve a similar result. Those games usually have difficulty settings!

[Misplaced_Marbles]

They're not advocating for it to be that - although in practice I wouldn't be surprised if SE sanded down all difficulty in regular content to make it easier to code for them. They're asking for it to be an option you can pick for content undertaken this way, as is already the case in some solo content if you fail it first time round.

Then it would work just as well in duty finder as it would with trust. I'm just wondering why trust is always brought up, when in reality it needs you to pay attention quite unlike duty finder (because kicking or pointing out laziness is a taboo in "GCBTW" or something).

What you describe above could have been SE's answer to people who think the content should be "accessible" to everyone but they don't seem to be willing to take that approach and instead seem to want to design around the lowest common denominator.

Which is the reason why "muh Dark Souls, or even ex or savage etc." are the only things where playing a game isn't as boring as watching paint dry. Being more single player friendly should give them the chance to make the gameplay less braindead, but it never needed to be that way in the first place. As always, the root of the problem is foolish design decisions made by one moron or another in charge.

Regardless, it's clear to me that it's time for another break.