Endwalker hates mid-core players

[Chasingstars]

I don't know what the devs are smoking if they consider relics mid-core.

ARR core relics are insanely grindy and casuals simply don't bother. Arguably the same with HW relics.

Eureka is especially gatekeepy with its compounding subsystems, so also definitely not something casuals pursue.

And Bozja is only modestly less demanding than Eureka, and like Eureka most casuals didn't even bother participating in it.

The only relics that have even marginally been "casual" have been Endwalker relics, and not only have they been criticized for lacking any real content, but I think it was a poor decision to designate *any* prestige weapon grind as "casual".

Roulettes are casual. Gold Saucer is casual. Retainers and housing and glams are casual. If relics are supposed to be "casual", then the devs are losing their touch, and I suppose nothing in the game is intended to mean anything anymore under this guise of "listening to fans" and "accessibility".

They are considered "midcore" because the only thing holding a player back is typically time-investment, gil, and accumulating whatever resources the relic wants.

The only difference between a casual player, a midcore, and a hardcore is how quickly they complete their given relic and how many get completed. A hardcore player can be expected to complete a relic for each and every class. Meanwhile a casual player will take far longer because they are not as deeply attached as to doing it. So midcore are the mix of the two where they may not care about collecting every relic, but they will care enough to collect what relics they actually want for the handful of jobs they actually play. A midcore may even only want one whole weapon and once they are done, they don't care about the rest of the stuff associated with this relic grind.

Midcore are even weirder because they can be really hardcore about specific aspects of a piece of content, but also simultaneously are casual about content within the same sphere. They might have completed P8S, but then for the next tier they can't be bothered to do it. They might do hardcore content, but its only because it has a title or mount or weapon that they actually want.

[SieyaM]

In Endwalkers, for causal players, there are:
Island Sanctuary
Seasonal events
MSQ and Sidequests
Dungeons
Custom Deliveries
Beast tribes
Eureka Orthos
Variant dungeons.

For hard-core players, there are:
12 Savage raids
2 Ultimates
3 Criterion Savages

For mid-core players, there are:
7 Extreme trials
3 Criterion dungeons
5 Unreal trials (not exactly new content)

I think having more mid-core content, can help players transition from causal to hard-core content, so it is not exactly only helpful for mid-core players only.

According to this list hard-core players only got 2 more things than mid-core, which doesn't seem like a lot.

[Zeastria]

Another CORE issue is also the longevity of said content, you can easily eat up most content in matters of days.
replayability is lacking and so are the rewards!.

Midcore content to me is content you can clear w/o a static and dosnt demand weeks to clear..
Content you can jump in fresh and get to clear in 1-2days.
Exemple: Abyssal fracture EX. it can be learned + cleared + farmed in a day with randoms.

[Bonoki]

So, I asked a lot of my raider friends and most of them said that they felt that Savage is Midcore and only current Ultimate (DSR and TOP, not the other three) are Hardcore.
Lately I've been getting the impression that Hardcore content is reduced to Midcore content with age and experience. Or alternatively, when something harder releases, then the previous Hardcore thing is bumped down a tier.
In the context of Savage, it's hardcore content until the world races are completed. Then it becomes Midcore content when the guides and braindead strats are made up. As people finish their 8 weeks and experience across the player base is gained, then it falls to midcore tier. After my general interactions with several people on the subject, this seems to be the case. Things aren't created with being midcore in mind, they are reduced to becoming midcore with time.

[Asari5]

i guess 'most' of us agree when i say dungeons are casual content and savage is hard content

so we could say anything between, the bridge so to say, is midcore.

this means we have normal raid and extrem trials. other than that there isnt much left.
a-raids have been there, but not anymore.

when we look at this content its pretty much everything harder than dungeons without body checks involving the whole group... there you have mid-core content.



not like every fight fits into it, but thats impossible anyway. difficulty is a spectrum. you have extrems with body checks which arent on savage lvl and then you have fights like P1S which isnt really savage lvl either

and if someone thinks: what? wait.... extrem is too difficult to be mid-core then thise few players might just be low end players.. thats alright.
or the other way around players might just be too good... high end player? (i dont wanna use hardcore because too many relate that to time)

[Colt47]

I mean, the issue with FFXIV is that savage became more mainstream due to shadowbringers and it caused feedback to tilt towards the "progression = power" spectrum, as it got a lot of people into using savage as a gearing mechanism for jobs when it was supposed to be a self contained eco system for challenge runners. They added Ultimate into the game as well so now there is a question as to who savage is supposed to be for, since Ultimate is now the new challenge runner mode.

Effectively, savage is warping the system that they created for progression that was fair to just about anyone: Log in and do some kind of end game content, and regardless of what you did you would progress towards better item level. With Savage, someone can not only do that, but leap ahead of everyone else by getting the top end gear on week 2 where the baseline gear is just being introduced. Even if the actual change to stats is not much, it still creates an objectively better path as long as someone can also max tomestones in the same week as progressing savage. So someone could do the "mid core" content that doesn't give an advantage but just gives tomestones and maybe craft materials, or they can go do the slightly harder savage fight and get rewarded with power plus tomestones.

Like, the FFXIV team did this to themselves it isn't anyone in the community being evil here pointing out that they destroyed their own value proposition. There's no way anyone is going to do stuff like criterion or perhaps even unreal if they are just wasting time compared to the almighty gear grinder wheel they stuck in the middle of the game. Casual players are just going to keep doing roulettes and alliance raids so they aren't going to touch these things until they are in the past and they can go in unsync. Heck, even the new deep dungeon is easily ignorable unless someone is grinding up some job they haven't leveled, and PvP is just about the only other content in the patch that has a pull because of the time limited offerings. Not even sure if a casual player would engage in PvP but if anyone here who ignores EX fights, unreals, and criterion does PvP feel free to chime in.

[Atelier-Bagur]

I mean, the issue with FFXIV is that savage became more mainstream due to shadowbringers and it caused feedback to tilt towards the "progression = power" spectrum, as it got a lot of people into using savage as a gearing mechanism for jobs when it was supposed to be a self contained eco system for challenge runners. They added Ultimate into the game as well so now there is a question as to who savage is supposed to be for, since Ultimate is now the new challenge runner mode.

Effectively, savage is warping the system that they created for progression that was fair to just about anyone: Log in and do some kind of end game content, and regardless of what you did you would progress towards better item level. With Savage, someone can not only do that, but leap ahead of everyone else by getting the top end gear on week 2 where the baseline gear is just being introduced. Even if the actual change to stats is not much, it still creates an objectively better path as long as someone can also max tomestones in the same week as progressing savage. So someone could do the "mid core" content that doesn't give an advantage but just gives tomestones and maybe craft materials, or they can go do the slightly harder savage fight and get rewarded with power plus tomestones.

Like, the FFXIV team did this to themselves it isn't anyone in the community being evil here pointing out that they destroyed their own value proposition. There's no way anyone is going to do stuff like criterion or perhaps even unreal if they are just wasting time compared to the almighty gear grinder wheel they stuck in the middle of the game. Casual players are just going to keep doing roulettes and alliance raids so they aren't going to touch these things until they are in the past and they can go in unsync. Heck, even the new deep dungeon is easily ignorable unless someone is grinding up some job they haven't leveled, and PvP is just about the only other content in the patch that has a pull because of the time limited offerings. Not even sure if a casual player would engage in PvP but if anyone here who ignores EX fights, unreals, and criterion does PvP feel free to chime in.

Bottom Line, rewards drives content. You have to give appealing rewards as well as sensible ones to give that content meaning

[Poporito_Popoto]

"Endwalker hates mid-core players"

I know I do. Eff those guys.

[Darkobra]

There's now been enough of these threads that I'm starting to think Endwalker hates players.

[Colt47]

Bottom Line, rewards drives content. You have to give appealing rewards as well as sensible ones to give that content meaning

The one who determines what constitutes a reward is the designer of the game. The impression of what is rewarding is just the result of that choice. It's something that isn't very well grasped by people in general as when someone is playing a game, they are playing within the sandbox the designers built, but it is totally possible to build a game that has no item level progression at end game and still have rewarding content. The issue is that they polluted the original idea by having savage grant higher level gear and then having savage become more popular. What was acceptable prior to ShB isn't the same as what has become acceptable after ShB.