Why does everyone complain about STORY based MMO's?

[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

[Jojoya]

Most Final Fantasy games try harder than this with difficulty in their stories. And XIII aside have better level design.
They also have actual character management as a staple in jrpgs is the prep you do in a fight by fight basis. Even action rpgs like Kingdom Hearts have this.

A lot of text and cutscenes isn't what defines jrpgs. They lost that uniqueness to every other genre with narrative since the mid 2000s.

Single player games are always going to have the advantage when it comes to making more difficult content. Players feel no pressure to try to keep up with their friends. They can tackle the game's challenges at their own pace.

Those games also aren't dependent on recurring revenue like MMOs (whether subscription or microtransactions) because the volume of technical and customer support needed for the game should be fairly low past any initial release problems. Once the player has bought the game, the game company has all the money they're going to get from the player unless they later release a DLC the player wants. If a player gives up in frustration over difficulty, the company isn't going to be losing out on recurring revenue needed to support game operations.

MMOs that try to go the higher difficulty route with their content either don't last long or are stuck reliant on a very small, dedicated (and hopefully moderately wealthy) player base. A large gaming corporation that has a responsibility to its shareholders to produce profits isn't going to design their game around the high end players demanding difficult challenges. Those players are capable of playing less difficult content and possibly will still enjoy it even if it's not exactly what they're looking for. Less skilled players aren't capable of playing the high difficulty content and won't enjoy what they can't play.

MSQ difficulty is not going to increase from here on out. Too many players are hitting their skill caps as it is, needing other players to help carry them through content (wouldn't need the Very Easy modes for the solo duties otherwise). If some players want more difficult content, they should be asking for additional side content to meet that desire instead of asking for MSQ to be made more difficult.

[ZedxKayn]

Too many players are hitting their skill caps as it is, needing other players to help carry them through content (wouldn't need the Very Easy modes for the solo duties otherwise). If some players want more difficult content, they should be asking for additional side content to meet that desire instead of asking for MSQ to be made more difficult.

I don't think that the problem is that players are hitting their skill ceiling, is that it's never really explained at all how to play well, in addition to just being able to be carried through the content, players basically have no feedback whatsoever on how they're doing or if they're playing the game right. I firmly believe most of the players would find the MSQ to be of baby difficulty if they understood how the game functions. But it is never explained to them.

[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!

[AmpelioB]

the samereason why digimon fans are complaining for the newest digimon game that is literally a visual novel with battle elements, they can't read.

[SentioftheHoukai]

My take is the main difference is how you proceed as a developer. When people say they're really enjoying something, even though it would be nice to know more specifics, it's passable to simply translate that as "the approach we're using right now is working, keep doing more of the same." When someone just says something is "bad" on the other hand, without specifying what, it's a lot more difficult to make changes. Knowing "everything is likely good" is much more informative than "something is not good, but who knows what or why."

I see the issue as less a community "allergic to criticism" (the multiple threads providing specific, constructive criticism on things like certain races, for example, show a community completely accepting of criticism), and more taking issue with people who directly insult and attack the dev team while proclaiming themselves the all-knowing arbiters of what is "good" or "bad," and frequently it ultimately boils down to "the devs wrote a different story than I wanted them to write, so I'm going to call it bad."

And for every person who seems to get on people's cases for disliking something about EW, I can likely equally point to another person who seems unable to accept that many people enjoy it.



This is also a great point. The data points at the moment, though, show that the current expansion is their most successful. The opening and patch-release peaks have seen the largest playerbase yet, and even the between-patch troughs are still significantly higher in terms of active players than similar troughs in any past expansion. Taking specific critiques under advisement is useful, but completely altering your approach when the overall feedback is overwhelmingly positive is generally a terrible strategy.

Oh, Striker why must you spurn me like this?

taking issue with people who directly insult and attack the dev team while proclaiming themselves the all-knowing arbiters of what is "good" or "bad," and frequently it ultimately boils down to "the devs wrote a different story than I wanted them to write, so I'm going to call it bad."

Once again, I must humbly request that you either provide proof that one of us has declared ourselves Ultimate Arbiters of Morality or modify thy catchphrase. It's beginning to grate and contributes naught to the discussion at hand.

Your fellow Venatori refuse to deign to acknowledge you exist. Surely you see this as the issue it remains?

[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.

[Midareyukki]

That's the point of them.
They're meant to relieve tension after a climax and build towards the next.

If the story was sitting at 100% from the get go, it would honestly take away from from the high points in the story.

Good story writing always has highs and lows, so that the high's really feel impactful.

If this was the intended result, boy howdy did half the fanbase not perceive it that way.

You're not always going to get the intended response out of people. Not everyone cried watching Titanic, not everyone gets scared watching a Saw movie.

But when the writing is so polarizing for the way it's handled, then yes, it's a failed moment, even if it has people who enjoyed it. And we have countless posts here of people pointing out that for as much as they liked the Loporrits, their inclusion was literally Mood Whiplash. Simply because it was too soon.

Yes, there has to be catharsis, you need to find a way in the story to diffuse the tension felt by the reader after a climactic event. But there are ways to do it, and dropping everything we're meant to feel and all the questions we have, including the incoming dread, just for what people felt was forced and dragged out comic relief isn't one of them. Had they come just a bit later, even one more cutscene than they did, it would honestly have been fine! SOMETHING should have come in between to diffuse that tension, but many people felt there was nothing to lower their heightened emotional state before getting such a shock.

It's like a valley. You should take your audience a few levels down before changing the mood and the genre tropes, that way they, you and even the plot is allowed to cement what just happened and willingly proceed to the next stage without feeling like they're still mulling over. Failure to do that will make people feel frustrated and like you just dismissed what just happened. And the Loporrits' introduction wasn't a nice valley, it was a cliff.

It went from "You just killed the big guy, the main antagonist, this early on in the plot, but the moment you did you're made to feel like something bad is going to happen, and you never saw your character be in that much pain" to "ok now open this door to meet moon rabbits and kinda throw all your worries away". That is not normal, even if this is fantasy. If we're dealing with human-like beings who feel human-like emotions and behave human-like, then we're not just going to be all smiles and giggles that soon after such an event.

It's like water. If you're used to hot water, you won't like it when I suddenly turn the hot water off and make the water freezing cold. Not even glasses like it when you do that, they tend to break when there's sudden temperature changes, you're meant to slowly reduce the temperature to avoid a shock. And that's what happened. They WERE meant to diffuse the tension. They FAILED not because of their purpose, but the timing they were implemented.