People Enjoy hard Games

[Jojoya]

I wasn't taking a potshot at you. I was merely asking a question based on what you said wondering who actually looks up guides for normal content.

Strange. Let's look at your reply to me again.

Does anyone know of someone who looked up a guide for Euphrosyne because they couldn’t figure it out themselves? Just wondering if someone legit couldn’t stop dying until they looked up a guide.

I for one don’t believe there is any and would be quite surprised. If anyone legit couldn’t beat it please come forward. I don’t mean this to look down on you, just legitimately curious if we actually haven’t hit rock bottom difficulty wise in alliance raids.

I also don’t mean you died. I mean you couldn’t stop dying because you could never comprehend what was going on in the raid until you looked up a guide.

If you didn't mean me, why did you quote me and not the person you intended to reply to?

I'm not twisting your words. I'm taking them as they are written.

The answer on normal guides is not a lot of people.

I looked up FFXIV Euphrosyne guide on youtube, the top hit is a video by MTQ at 65K views, If I do the same thing for The Voidcast Dais EX, Hector's has over a quarter million views. Clearly if the majority of the playerbase is "Casual" if people actually looked up guides for normal content in XIV then the guide view count should be astronomically higher than the minority of the playerbase that does harder content.

One problem with going by views is that it's not going to tell you how many of those are repeat views.

I would definitely expect something like Hector's Voidcast guide to get multiple repeat views as groups are trying to figure out what to do.

An Alliance guide is less likely to get the repeat views (though I'm sure it still gets some).

I also didn't claim what percentage of players bothered to look at the guide. What I said was players who prefer to wait until guides are out wait until slightly slight in the week to do it and are then followed over the weekend by players who usually don't use the guides at all.

At least you established that yes, there are players who watch the guides even if you personally don't know any.

Players with skill will absolutely be able to clear Normal blind. That doesn't mean that all player can, or that there aren't others who still want that safety net of watching a guide first.

I'm also not certain that using view counts on CLL is the best way to determine how many players found it interesting. It may be that it was the Resistance story that players found interesting but CLL was a roadblock they didn't like but had to pass. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong about it, only that using the view counts on guides is not a good way to determine it.

Literally add "has done x amounts of runs" participation award cosmetics and mounts for the current content. Tier it so that you get better rewards the longer you play. This way you don't need to timegate gear drops into a weekly lockout that pushes grinders away.

Effectively putting cosmetic progression behind only being able to complete the hardest mode with rng is not how you onboard grinders who want to take baby steps with learning the easier mode first. It just tells people they can kick dirt if they're not using 3rd party addons and in a premade clique and study youtube videos all day. Do note they could still have cosmetics locked behind the hardest mode, but it'd be in addition to, instead of, the participation awards (and optimally a recolor only, to avoid QQs while still being able to show prestige in game).

In other words, if you give mounts/cosmetic rewards specifically for participation, you won't need to worry about how much you need to sabotage loot to bait out participation anymore. Even Blizzard realized this with their Trading Post, albeit they just double dip rather than use trading post instead of.

It sounds like you just want a greater variety of rewards to earn as opposed to being genuinely opposed to timegating. Even your proposed rewards would run into a time gate of sorts by requiring time spent to complete the X number of rewards.

There's nothing that says the actual combat gear can't continue to be time gated while the cosmetics only need the participation requirements met.

Loot has always been the bait to get people into content. Players have been conditioned by marketing and social media to feel like they're owed something for their time instead of enjoying the content for its own sake. Look at Criterion - it's gotten a lot of praise as content. Then the same people turn around and say they won't do it unless they get better rewards from it. What's a developer to do when making good content alone still isn't enough to satisfy players?

As for Blizzard's Trading Post, I have bad news for you. It turns out it's been a microtransaction monetization scheme all along. As time passes, the costs of the rewards are increasing while the currency that can be earned through game play isn't. No player will ever be able to get all the rewards they might want without going heavy into the microtransactions.