People Enjoy hard Games

[PercibelTheren]

You're not wrong. Profits above all else for a company like Square Enix.

Casual players carry every game. Sorry, but hardcore players are just an extremely loud minority. If you make a game hostile to casual players, it dies because its population falls off a cliff. It's always been like that. Just look at all the "hardcore full loot PvP" games everyone claims to love. None of them have been successful.

[Shurrikhan]

Casual players carry every game. Sorry, but hardcore players are just an extremely loud minority. If you make a game hostile to casual players, it dies because its population falls off a cliff. It's always been like that. Just look at all the "hardcore full loot PvP" games everyone claims to love. None of them have been successful.

Equating those who feel shafted by increased job simplifications and lack of midcore content in the interest of focusing only on what attracts the most casual of players or buoys XIV's Twitch presence to the "hardcore" players of "hardcore full loot PvP" games is... quite the stretch.

[PercibelTheren]

Equating those who feel shafted by increased job simplifications and lack of midcore content in the interest of focusing only on what attracts the most casual of players or buoys XIV's Twitch presence to the "hardcore" players of "hardcore full loot PvP" games is... quite the stretch.

I never said that. Neither do I think not having more midcore content would be bad. Heck, I'm a pretty midcore player myself. I would welcome more things to do. I'm just sick of all the hate towards casual players. They're not the problem. The dev team not wanting to bother with balancing things and thus making all jobs play the same is.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Casual players carry every game. Sorry, but hardcore players are just an extremely loud minority. If you make a game hostile to casual players, it dies because its population falls off a cliff. It's always been like that. Just look at all the "hardcore full loot PvP" games everyone claims to love. None of them have been successful.

IMO I disagree with that assessment. I'd say the majority of most player bases is the players in the middle range. And it's those players in the middle range that end up being the ones that have to suffer from the noisy, obnoxious, whiny, entitled, easy mode players that are being labeled casual when the actual casual players are the ones in the middle range that enjoy challenging and engaging content that isn't tuned to push skill proficiencies or limits but doesn't just hand everything to you like it's candy on Halloween.

[Rolder50]

IMO I disagree with that assessment. I'd say the majority of most player bases is the players in the middle range. And it's those players in the middle range that end up being the ones that have to suffer from the noisy, obnoxious, whiny, entitled, easy mode players that are being labeled casual when the actual casual players are the ones in the middle range that enjoy challenging and engaging content that isn't tuned to push skill proficiencies or limits but doesn't just hand everything to you like it's candy on Halloween.

I'm in this category. I don't have the time or energy to push the super difficult content like Ultimate, but I DO want some content that at least makes me think. Which FF14 is severely lacking in.

[Lauront]

I'm in this category. I don't have the time or energy to push the super difficult content like Ultimate, but I DO want some content that at least makes me think. Which FF14 is severely lacking in.

Same. If you don't have the time to put into its more hardcore content but also don't want everything to be a cakewalk, that's where the game struggles to provide. As someone who has become a more casual player, it does not mean I want or like easy/unchallenging content. Quite the opposite, it's off-putting to me if it's too easy.

It's one of those reasons I was annoyed by 16 not offering a harder difficulty from the outset, as well. I don't feel it respected my time particularly well by demanding I play through it once and the base difficulty was not fun to me.

Likewise in XIV, I'd like more optional segregation of the MSQ difficulty levels, as well as more midcore content in general. I second this poster in this being something where I believe WoW currently does a better job on delivering. I have some issues with that game but it does get some things right.

This kind of comes to my thoughts on the overall issue. I feel like the challenge should come from what the game is doing. Enemies need to hit harder and faster, and players need less ways to invalidate it all.

I think that's a good summary of what a lot of games get wrong, XIV included.

[ZephyrMenodora]

I'm in this category. I don't have the time or energy to push the super difficult content like Ultimate, but I DO want some content that at least makes me think. Which FF14 is severely lacking in.

This is how I feel. I'm past the point in my life where I have time to coordinate with other people and schedule my life around progging. Most content for a long-time player like me is only really challenging the first couple times doing it. After that because most of these encounters are memory-based, once you know the patterns it's very simplistic. So most players who plan on doing content more than once or twice, which most do because it takes more than 2 runs to finish gear, will find the game easy very early into each patch.

As a healer it's a bit sad how choreographed when I need to use heal OCDs. Just very simple and not super exciting, unless I get new/bad players which makes it more fun.

[WeebPolice]

I never said that.

Casual players carry every game. Sorry, but hardcore players are just an extremely loud minority. If you make a game hostile to casual players, it dies because its population falls off a cliff. It's always been like that. Just look at all the "hardcore full loot PvP" games everyone claims to love. None of them have been successful.

Nobody is lobbying for SE to make the game hostile to casual players yet you brought that up.

[Ivtrix]

Nobody is lobbying for SE to make the game hostile to casual players yet you brought that up.

Yeah idk why so many players people who don’t engage with anything extreme and up take the is as a personal attack, I think everyone is in agreement that the msq and normal mode content should be accessible, but there needs to be better slope into endgame content.

The same issue with SMN. The number of people who get so huffy thinking the calls to make SMN more engaging is a personal attack. Here’s a reality check: every single job at its core is easy to play. What people are interested in and where the difficult comes in is the optimization of the job. SMN doesn’t really have any. And when you don’t engage in any content that has a hard enrage check (extreme and up), it’s just not something that is really considered or something you are required to think about. It’s optional for casual content, and it’s entirely for more advanced content. It’s why people gatekeep endgame conversations, it’s not personal but it requires a different mentality. That’s why you see a lot of pushback against two specific serial posters; one who continually demonstrated they don’t understand the game on a fundamental level and another one who has labeled all endgame players with a broad brush in a self crusade against “cheaters and elitists”. These players claim that they have provoked the “official forums bully mob”, but in reality the content of their posts just shows they lack the experience to what actually happens in high level group content, since they don’t actively participate in it.

The reality is that the difficulty in this game is 100% optional (extreme to ultimate is literally not required at all to enjoy the msq), and the MSQ encounters are always going to be balanced around high completion rates. It’s why certain players are scoffed at when they contribute to balance discussions. No one should be excluded on job feedback at a base level, but to not realize that balance in this game is based around 2 things; week 1 savage and ultimate is ignorant.

When people say they want harder games, what they want in a MMO is more optional difficulty, which comes from both encounter design, and higher level optimizations of the jobs which plays very heavily into a jobs theoretical maximum dps. No one should be coming for casual content.

[SophiaDL]

post too long to quote

That's the problem with casuals, at least in FFXIV, they want it their way and only their way, they cant accept that people want challenging content because then they feel like they "HAVE" to do it (yet it provides basically nothing to do so, aside from a small ilevel increase), they just have to get the same thing as everybody, else they will cry about it endlessly on the forums about how they are treated differently.

The difficulty of the content in itself is the reason why I refuse to do the content FFXIV has to offer and I would rather do content in WoW, and use FFXIV for the social aspect and housing, content in FFXIV is an absolute joke, a slow paced complete bore with 0 job uniqueness and no "cool" spells, a 2 minutes meta that reinforces even more the bore effect of it, and with a more than mediocre difficulty that is barely equal to HC in WoW, and I am sure I am not the only one to think that way, the casual side of this game is happy, but the side that actually wants a challenge and wants to play the game is not.