Embracing Diversity: A Belated 10th Anniversary Reflection

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

All the 10th Anniversary of A Realm Reborn stuff got me in a reflective mood, and sometimes it takes a while for me to put things to words. With the EU Fan Festival on the horizon, now seems like a good time for a post about playerbase diversity.

Cards on the table here, I definitely have the hardcore mindset. I saw my first optimization spreadsheet before my first job stone. My original reason for playing this game was deep systems worth learning, and it's been immensely frustrating to see those removed over time - but I don't blame casual players for that.

Blaming casual players would be short-sighted. Not only due to raw numbers of subscription fees, but because everyone was new once. Even the best players in the world weren't born knowing how to play this game. They had to learn it, which means they had to first see something in the game that inspired them to learn that deeply.

Very few people will be inspired by a harsh "you're not getting anywhere until you git gud" - especially not in the face of an ever-advancing patch cycle - to break through the wall of a game that only caters to hardcore players. Not nearly enough to replace the midcore and hardcore players who will leave due to factors outside the game, no matter how much they're catered to. And without replacing those players, the high-end population dwindles and dies off.

But what about a low barrier to entry and a gentle on-ramp that rewards each added piece of effort and commitment? Most people presented with such a game will stay casual players - but so many more people get to actually enjoy the game that the total number of players stepping up to midcore and hardcore is much greater. That method can sustain a population interested in high-end content.

Sure, I want a good new / casual player experience for the sake of bringing joy to others. But I also want that for the sake of having players to raid with in ten years! For the sake of having something harder than expert crafts in ten years! It's the player's side of Damion Schubert's advice to game designers: "if you don't want to do it because being accessible and inclusive is inherently good and noble, do it for the crassly capitalistic reason that you'll SELL MORE GAMES." *

Hardcore players need casual players, plain and simple.

But casual players also need hardcore players. "Look to those who walked before to lead those who walk after" isn't just about literal date of joining the game, it's about depth of knowledge and willingness to share.

Ever used a guide to farming moogle tomes? Someone had to make that and neatly format it, even if it's "just" an infographic showing the eligible duties and rewards. If they gave recommendations and/or strategies, then behind that is more work of considering options. Ever used a Fashion Report weekly recommendation? Every week, those are created by many players cooperating to manually test out possible items and dyes - there are too many possibilities to be covered by a single character's judging attempts - before the options are distilled down into the "Easy 80" and "Easy 100" recommendations and put on the fancy image. Ever heard the dungeon tanking advice "use one defensive cooldown at a time"? Before anyone could give that advice and have it be well-founded, they had to find out that buffs stack multiplicatively, and that's not stated in the game so it must have required painstaking tests to average out damage variance. Ever used a weekly recommendation for Island Sanctuary, or a guide on how to set up your pasture to provide for those recommendations? Players had to dive deep into the virtual market system to figure out how to predict each item's demand spikes, and then either manually write a recommendation or write a program to do it. Some of those players are currently hard at work improving their system to recommend for Felicitous Favors.

That's not something that mildly interested or casual players do. That kind of work requires the deep love of a hardcore player, even if the content is meant to welcome casual players.

And that's even before considering the time and money required to run a fansite. Here's Cole Evyx talking about the time, money, and social effort involved in getting a fansite off the ground and then maintaining it. Remember when XIV Style went down and the gearset display was eventually taken up by Eorzea Collection? As much as I liked the XIV Style's clean gearset view, I don't blame them one bit. It's hard work and it's ongoing work.

Without enough hardcore players, no one steps up to replace a guide writer or site maintainer when they need to step down - let alone improve the overall availability of resources - and all players suffer for it. Paying for that work can help to a degree, but it can't magically find someone with the right combination of expertise and social comfort if there's no one fit for the role. (It might get someone who's a bad fit and in it for the money / feeling of power, and then all players still suffer for it.)

We need each other. Again from Damion Schubert, emphasis mine: "A playerbase is an ecosystem. One that's up and running is incredibly delicate. It's incredibly easy to write off a low percentage portion of the playerbase without fully realizing they're load-bearing.

"It's a pretty common mistake running MMOs, TBH." *

He has a point, and it's not just about the spectrum from casual to hardcore. Remember the "take a break and play other games" advice? That's all well and good for some players to be doing, from casual players who just want to see the story, to hardcore players who are done the raid tier and waiting for the next one, to people with intermittent busy periods outside the game. It's a good thing that the game accommodates intermittent play. But if everyone did that, who would keep Free Companies running, keep other social spaces running, or offer a helping hand to sprouts and returners? Logging back in to an empty Free Company / linkshell and no one to give a refresher is disheartening.

Some players have to keep continuity, both socially and as a repository of community knowledge. Let's call this group "continuous players". It doesn't work if these players stay subscribed just to keep a house, or chat with friends, or log in and find themselves bored. To be that repository of community knowledge, they must be actively partaking in and enjoying the content they're knowledgeable about, or their brains will forget those details as no longer relevant. Habits and subscription numbers don't tell the whole story.

Imagine a casual continuous player who caps their tomes via Expert Roulette every week. That means they do at least 5 Expert Roulettes a week, so with the 2-dungeon roulette they see each dungeon 2.5 times a week. In an 18-week major patch, the shortest current length, they see each dungeon 45 times. And each dungeon (other than the x.5) stays in for 2 major patches, so they're seeing most of the modern endgame dungeons 90 times each even if they stop for the week after capping tomes.

What if they use hunt trains? Also repetitive. Other roulettes? More variety within each roulette, but also more roulettes needed to cap. Treasure maps? There are only so many 'rooms'. The repetition is unavoidable, since it's just not practical for SE to make content fast enough to avoid that.

With that kind of repetition, a midcore or hardcore mindset isn't needed to get better over time. Just trying one's best each time will do that, and the players who can be helpful and share knowledge are going to try their best. So not only does this player wind up doing content repeatedly, they also wind up improving within the arena of casual content even if they never set foot in high-end content. Something has to make sure that the content remains fun to them once they find it easy - while also respecting that maybe they don't want to raid!

"Do harder content" and "take a break" as the options to a bored player don't keep the game's community running. And without a community to interact with, whether competitively or cooperatively or both, why shouldn't one just play a singleplayer or small group multiplayer game that can focus on their preferred niche?

Our strength for the future isn't in our raw numbers, but in our interactions and supporting each other. If we want ten more years, we need to accept that we're all different, and have diverse reasons for being here. That we each get more for ourselves in a game that's not built around just one type of player, but instead built to embrace that diversity.


* I'd love to just link the original essay in full, but Twitter problems got it locked. Nowadays, to see the essay we have to go through nine separate links on the Wayback Machine, courtesy of the Internet Archive. It's still well worth the read if the topic interests you:

1. part one
2. part two
3. part three
4. part four
5. part five
6. part six
7. part seven
8. part eight
9. part nine, addenda as replies

[Jeeqbit]

I saw my first optimization spreadsheet before my first job stone.

I definitely didn't. I just enjoyed the MSQ and took it slowly over a year and a half. The half was a break I took after Heavensward released because the theme of Coerthas Western Highlands and all its fetch quests burned me out.

Even the best players in the world weren't born knowing how to play this game. They had to learn it, which means they had to first see something in the game that inspired them to learn that deeply.

True, unless they came here from another game that inspired learning that deeply about MMORPGs such as WoW. But a lot of people do actually play this as their first MMORPG.

Very few people will be inspired by a harsh "you're not getting anywhere until you git gud"

True and that has often come up as an issue in MMORPGs.

what about a low barrier to entry and a gentle on-ramp that rewards each added piece of effort and commitment?

It seems like a good idea, but I think SE is concerned about the people who don't want it to be a ramp and just want it all to be easy, such as the people coming from single player FFs who play purely for the story and aren't actually very good at playing.

Using the latest extreme trial as an example, everyone likes to say it's easy and some would even say it's the easiest one they've done, or that it's free after the meteor mechanic. That is true, in a party of gamers or veteran players. It's not true with a party of new players or roleplayers. They will often wipe endlessly to the mechanics after meteors and not be able to clear.

I've landed in some fresh prog parties that got all the way to clear within 1-2 hours, but I have been in some that even if they got beyond meteors it was just a disaster for 4-8 hours despite teaching them and it wasn't getting much better.

That's why what is difficult to one person may not be to another, despite that they have been through this ramp of previous trials and dungeons and even the normal version of the trial that is actually relatively similar mechanically and just toned down in a few areas. I even got into the normal version the other day and there were deaths everywhere, same whenever I've got the previous normal trial. What has the ramp of easy content really done to help them clear easy content?

There is a ramp for easy content, too, just so we are clear. We start off in ARR dodging red circles (reinforced by recent Duty Support revamps such as in Aurum Vale). In current dungeons, they have moved away from that to where you actually need to look at the environment or remember the script in order to do mechanics successfully, with red telegraphing at the last moment so that you learn the mechanic for the future.

What has that ramp up to an emphasis on looking at your environment done to prevent deaths in normal mode trials, particularly the recent ones where people actually keep dying?

Some people just won't improve to the same degree as another and that is the problem. In this game, a big part of the problem with a ramp is returning players have effectively not been through that ramp if they have been away long enough and you see returning players all of the time.

Without enough hardcore players, no one steps up to replace a guide writer or site maintainer when they need to step down

True. I help thousands of casual players a year in this area who make use of resources and information that I'm able to give them because I play a lot more than them. Whether people like this would entirely stop contributing without a focus on hardcore players I don't know, because maybe some would stay? I don't know and I wonder how you can be so sure.

A playerbase is an ecosystem.

I wish more people understood that. Almost everyone's hot takes ignore this fact.

The repetition is unavoidable, since it's just not practical for SE to make content fast enough to avoid that.

Wow, someone actually said the truth. Probably one of the few people to ever say this truth on the entire forum. Granted, you can make it random to a degree (such as the way deep dungeons do it) or random mechanic combinations, but that's it.

So not only does this player wind up doing content repeatedly, they also wind up improving within the arena of casual content

And this is why there isn't a problem with the battle mentor requirements, by the way. In most cases, they have done content repeatedly to meet those requirements and have experience to share about it with sprouts.

[PetThisMiqo]

I appreciate the time and effort you have taken to write this wonderous piece on how we could use more diversity within this game. I do not believe we need to increase the amount of hardcore players though. This game needs to focus on being made more accessible. I want my friends and my friend's friends to be able to play this game with ease. Anyone that desires it should be able to enjoy the wide variety of content present in this expansive game. Thankfully Square Enix seems to have shown an interest in continuing to make the game more approachable and enjoyable for all.

[OdinelStarrei]

I appreciate the time and effort you have taken to write this wonderous piece on how we could use more diversity within this game. I do not believe we need to increase the amount of hardcore players though. This game needs to focus on being made more accessible. I want my friends and my friend's friends to be able to play this game with ease. Anyone that desires it should be able to enjoy the wide variety of content present in this expansive game. Thankfully Square Enix seems to have shown an interest in continuing to make the game more approachable and enjoyable for all.

It's one thing to necro threads. Fanning the embers of dying flames. It's another thing to deliberately antagonize other people. I get that, it can be funny to make people angry.

What I don't understand, is why you would go out of your way to deliberately make a post like this, on a topic someone obviously put time, effort, and consideration into with sources, without stooping to the level of insulting others or championing further division, but instead promoting and celebrating the idea of an MMO ecosystem. I am somewhat convinced you aren't the usual suspects, or at least, not a version of them seen before, as even in the most baiting of threads, they were not this particular skew of consistently callous, insidious, or masturbatory.

If the interactions between users are no longer seen as in being in good faith or even legitimate without the undercurrent of malice or contempt, what is the point of even having a community in the first place?
This is a rare, great post. Can't you at least do this somewhere else?

[Tahbitha]

SE is concerned about the people who don't want it to be a ramp and just want it all to be easy, such as the people coming from single player FFs who play purely for the story and aren't actually very good at playing.

I am one of those people who came to FF XIV having played the single-player FFs (yes, all of them) and I do play purely for the story. I'll never do any of the high-end content in the game. Not because I am a poor player, not because I am lazy, and not because I can't make a time commitment. I don't do high-level raiding because I am in FF XIV to relax and have fun and I don't want to do high-level raiding content. And that isn't going to change. And there are millions more like me in the game.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that players who don't raid, want raiding to be easy. Most of us couldn't care less about raiding regardless of the difficulty.

[Theodric]

I agree with the premise of the thread. A healthy MMO appeals to a broad variety of players and personal tastes as opposed to a select few. I am very much a casual player but casual does not equal wanting to see the game stripped of any and all difficulty and depth. I'd like to see more content with staying power that is geared towards midcore and hardcore players.

Eureka and Bozja fulfilled that niche for me. Perhaps Crystalline Conflict could have if I were able to queue up for it with my partner - but that isn't an option, unfortunately.

[PetThisMiqo]

It's one thing to necro threads. Fanning the embers of dying flames. It's another thing to deliberately antagonize other people. I get that, it can be funny to make people angry.

What I don't understand, is why you would go out of your way to deliberately make a post like this, on a topic someone obviously put time, effort, and consideration into with sources, without stooping to the level of insulting others or championing further division, but instead promoting and celebrating the idea of an MMO ecosystem. I am somewhat convinced you aren't the usual suspects, or at least, not a version of them seen before, as even in the most baiting of threads, they were not this particular skew of consistently callous, insidious, or masturbatory.

If the interactions between users are no longer seen as in being in good faith or even legitimate without the undercurrent of malice or contempt, what is the point of even having a community in the first place?
This is a rare, great post. Can't you at least do this somewhere else?

There seems to be a misunderstanding here. I gave great credit to the author of this thread for their work and I remarked on what I felt was unnecessary. I do not see how that could be seen as improper.

Perhaps this is your way of discrediting me. Are you a part of the unhappy, negative posting group that seems to hate this game all too much despite playing it as much as you do? If so then it should be me that asks you to refrain from tainting threads with your aggressive opinions and thoughts.

[chaotix69]

There’s a huge misconception on what makes someone a casual player in this thread. Casual players enjoy challenging content just like the hardcore players do, but a lot of them simply lack the free time that is required to devote to the game. I myself never get into savage or ultimate raids, but it isn’t because i don't want to. I simply have other priorities in life that prevent me from being able to participate in a consistent manner.

I also disagree with the game needing more hardcore players as they tend to be the most annoying to play with, having little to no patience, and just making the experience less enjoyable for everyone around them. Casual players are what makes the game successful. The more you have, the more longevity your game will have. There’s more to gaming than trying to rush and min/max everything.

[Jeeqbit]

Don't make the mistake of assuming that players who don't raid, want raiding to be easy. Most of us couldn't care less about raiding regardless of the difficulty.

I meant the normal content, not the raid content. If SE made the normal story content more of a ramp that slowly becomes closer to raid content, it would present a problem to some people and that could include people who the ramp doesn't apply to, such as a returning player from 2019 who has forgot everything prior.

You could even argue it does get a bit harder with how story mode trials like The Dancing Plague, Seat of Sacrifice and now The Voidcast Daiz and The Abyssal Fracture go with all the deaths. The result is you are joining in-progress into trials like this if you enable that.

I don't trust a lot of healers with healing Doom in Extreme, nevermind in the normal modes, to the point I use some of my Warrior heals to help them out.

What I think SE wants to prevent, as well, is a situation where someone is stuck on a Stormblood trial and once they get beyond it, they get stuck on the next one, and they want that player to get all the way to Endwalker instead of giving up and quitting.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

It seems like a good idea, but I think SE is concerned about the people who don't want it to be a ramp and just want it all to be easy, such as the people coming from single player FFs who play purely for the story and aren't actually very good at playing.

...

There is a ramp for easy content, too, just so we are clear. We start off in ARR dodging red circles (reinforced by recent Duty Support revamps such as in Aurum Vale). In current dungeons, they have moved away from that to where you actually need to look at the environment or remember the script in order to do mechanics successfully, with red telegraphing at the last moment so that you learn the mechanic for the future.

...

Some people just won't improve to the same degree as another and that is the problem. In this game, a big part of the problem with a ramp is returning players have effectively not been through that ramp if they have been away long enough and you see returning players all of the time.

Ah, I should clarify.

I agree that casual content can only get so hard before it starts pushing out some of the players it's aimed at, returning or otherwise, and therefore should stop ramping up after the initial "tutorial" phase. I meant the idea mostly as a ramp between difficulties - that even a player who cares, say, only about having the raiding population to find a static for Pandaemonium Ultimate in four years benefits from the existence of Normal through Savage, because far more players will reach Ultimate level by working through the lower difficulties than if Ultimates were the whole game.

That player shouldn't fight the players who stop at Normal and are content with their capped tome gear, the players who stop at Extreme and are content with their EX weapons, the players who stop at Savage and are content with their Savage BiS sets... all those players can not only coexist in the same game, they can all feel accomplished in the same game because the gearing system is set up to give them rewards that suit the content they do. Someone who plays purely for the story isn't going to feel the performance difference between capped tome gear - or even crafted gear - and a full BiS set, so the game doesn't make them feel like they're missing out, but an experienced raider can feel it and feel rewarded for the effort they put in.

True. I help thousands of casual players a year in this area who make use of resources and information that I'm able to give them because I play a lot more than them. Whether people like this would entirely stop contributing without a focus on hardcore players I don't know, because maybe some would stay? I don't know and I wonder how you can be so sure.

A game that fails to cater to its hardcore players doesn't lose them all immediately unless it does something drastic, true. Some of them will stay for a while, due to social connections or emotional attachment or even being paid for it. But their attrition rate goes way up, and fewer players rise to that level to replace them, so the community at that level starts shrinking and the game starts losing resources... and that puts the demand for resources on fewer and fewer players, creating a negative spiral. (Or it becomes more and more about the money, which is its own negative spiral because that means the help offered isn't any good. Ever seen the "crafting guides" on RMT gil seller websites, that are designed to entice players to lose gil and buy from the site?)

As for how I can be so sure? One part is the design and community management advice of great professional game designers. Another part is having felt community shifts in other games over time. And... unfortunately, FFXIV is already losing resources and the motivation of their writers / maintainers. That deserves discussion in a different post.