Endwalker hates mid-core players

[Araxes]

That list aint completely right. There is no mid core. There is only super easy and super hard. Until a few years ago i was doing savage raids and extremes but for me it was to much stress for to little reward.
My Wife started playing like a year ago and while shes dying of boredom in normal dungeons, she would never dream of killing a current extreme primal.

So no. There is no midcore. For me personally, midcore would be extremes or Criterions without timelimit. Its always the "we devs make it easy for us" Timelimit. That is also the Reason everybody has to slot full DPS materia on every Job that exists.

[SeverianLyonesse]

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.

But that's the thing. *Most* things in FFXIV and MMOs are "time investment", and "time investment" is often a barrier separating mid-core/hardcore and casual players. And gil/resources, especially for relics, really just translates to time investment into related/auxiliary grinds.

The most defining feature of any game's casual playerbase is nonengagement with "content". Either deliberate avoidance of any challenge (skill-based) or demand (time-based), or quite literally not having the free time to play the game in that way.

Most casual players generally don't play these games for hours every night, and when they run into opportunities to "grind" for things they often will not participate unless the content itself can be broken into bite sized chunks. If a casual ever does achieve a "mid-core" goal, it will often have been almost a secondary effect of casually playing content they enjoy, and not their primary focal point.

So I just don't agree with the notion that heavily time-invested content is "casual", simply because it does not require skill. Casuals see time-investment as either intimidating or a waste, and will not engage no matter how easy the content is. Bozja and Eureka are not especially difficult content (though they do have some sort of learning curve), but that didn't stop me from quitting once I realized field notes and actions were just rote, long-term gambling that I didn't have the patience for. That seems a pretty crucial axis of distinction of casuals vs. mid-cores: mid-cores have the time and interest to grind content; casuals have a much lower threshold of peacing out to go dance in Limsa.

That list aint completely right. There is no mid core. There is only super easy and super hard. Until a few years ago i was doing savage raids and extremes but for me it was to much stress for to little reward.
My Wife started playing like a year ago and while shes dying of boredom in normal dungeons, she would never dream of killing a current extreme primal.

So no. There is no midcore. For me personally, midcore would be extremes or Criterions without timelimit. Its always the "we devs make it easy for us" Timelimit. That is also the Reason everybody has to slot full DPS materia on every Job that exists.

To me, mid-core is the design space of things which require some degree of time-investment/grind and learning mechanics/systems, without needing to invest into optimization or training schedules.

Anything that does not require "investment" or "planning" is casual. All of the social subsystems, retainers/trusts, Gold Saucer, roulettes, dungeons, most 24-man raids. A casual's rule of thumb is either (a) quick, or (b) hard to fail with no experience, or (c) not participating and going to some bar in the housing district.

Anything that requires substantial investment, particularly BiS, melding, strats, and statics, but also to an extent pots and food and add-ons, is hardcore. That definitely includes current tier savages and ultimates, but also current expansion savages and the current-tier extreme trial. There never is much hardcore content in FFXIV, with long droughts between patches, which is where we see a very vocal minority complain about "not enough content".

Mid-core is what exists in that space between the two, things that require too much skill or time to be of interest to casuals, but can be prepped/geared/trained for cheaply and quickly with reasonable odds of success. Anything that amounts to a boring "grind" is naturally going to gravitate to this middle zone: Eureka, Bozja, Diadem/crafting, older Extreme mounts and older Savage glams, alt job leveling and deep dungeons, Lord of Verminion. I would describe most self-contained and "parasitic" side content to fall into Mid-core, because it often is not consequential to the main story and casual enjoyment, is secluded away enough behind side quests and subsystems as to be easily neglected/missed, but also is absolutely not challenging to play once the player is oriented to the systems.

[SieyaM]

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.

I would guess that this is the result of having so much of the combat being scripted without deviation. It feels to me that combat in XIV is more about memorizing a pattern and executing it and not about knowing how your abilities work and when it's appropriate to use them. Jobs have very static rotations to follow without deviation and once an encounter has been learned it is simply repeating it.

[Colt47]

I would guess that this is the result of having so much of the combat being scripted without deviation. It feels to me that combat in XIV is more about memorizing a pattern and executing it and not about knowing how your abilities work and when it's appropriate to use them. Jobs have very static rotations to follow without deviation and once an encounter has been learned it is simply repeating it.

The truth is that the vast majority of people who do PF savage are not the same kind of people that do savage week 1 - week 4. The main difference is in mind-set as those who are doing week 1-4 generally aren't just blindly saying "go see video and shut up" which seems to be the mentality of the PF and a lot of statics that take a long time to clear. The fights are static, but the variable is the person and the people around them, so the real challenge in savage is identifying the pattern and then working out and making sure everyone knows what they are doing. It's not that savage suddenly becomes mid-core content later on, it's that for some people it is mid-core and others it is hard-core, and the only real measuring stick is how many hours they need before the people in the group finally figure out what they are supposed to do in relation to one another. Technically, if we go by mid-core being the ability to skip mechanics, then the first tier is the only one that really becomes mid-core under the new gear crunch and possibly the first two fights of the second tier.

[SieyaM]

The truth is that the vast majority of people who do PF savage are not the same kind of people that do savage week 1 - week 4. The main difference is in mind-set as those who are doing week 1-4 generally aren't just blindly saying "go see video and shut up" which seems to be the mentality of the PF and a lot of statics that take a long time to clear. The fights are static, but the variable is the person and the people around them, so the real challenge in savage is identifying the pattern and then working out and making sure everyone knows what they are doing. It's not that savage suddenly becomes mid-core content later on, it's that for some people it is mid-core and others it is hard-core, and the only real measuring stick is how many hours they need before the people in the group finally figure out what they are supposed to do in relation to one another. Technically, if we go by mid-core being the ability to skip mechanics, then the first tier is the only one that really becomes mid-core under the new gear crunch and possibly the first two fights of the second tier.

The problem for me is more so that no matter the content you engage in you will be hammering out the same rotation. There is no instance where you will want to deviate from the rotation that has been set in stone by both the design team and community. The only other MMO I played with any sincerity is Everquest and that had a much slower but much more flexible approach to combat. The abilities you used and how your party played could vary greatly depending on what classes happened to be present. It also took know what your abilities did and what would be appropriate to use as the situation unfolded. Everything in XIV just feels so rigid.

[OgruMogru]

We need unreal versions of older savage tiers! A whole tier at a time on a rotating basis just like the unreal ex ones.

[Turtledeluxe]

The problem for me is more so that no matter the content you engage in you will be hammering out the same rotation. There is no instance where you will want to deviate from the rotation that has been set in stone by both the design team and community. The only other MMO I played with any sincerity is Everquest and that had a much slower but much more flexible approach to combat. The abilities you used and how your party played could vary greatly depending on what classes happened to be present. It also took know what your abilities did and what would be appropriate to use as the situation unfolded. Everything in XIV just feels so rigid.

The people who play this game the most don't care about how fun your class is to play at all. They care about one thing and one thing only-- an illusion of balance so they can fool themselves into believing this is the one game where any class is viable and there is no meta for group play, which is a total joke. There is and will always be meta party composition irrespective of balance. Their voices only grow lower when the meta is something they are OK with-- then everything is balanced and all classes are fine.

FFXIV's most dedicated players can't stand class depth or choices. Every class needs to be equally braindead and not special in any way...hence why they are being homogenized and streamlined into oblivion.

[Absurdity]

FFXIV's most dedicated players can't stand class depth or choices. Every class needs to be equally braindead and not special in any way...hence why they are being homogenized and streamlined into oblivion.

I wouldn't call that dedicated.
Dedication is when you take a job's quirks and learn to work around them to still play it to it's maximum potential.
Wanting the gameplay to be reduced to mindless button mashing is the opposite of dedication, it means you can achieve the maximum potential without actually having to invest anything.

[Turtledeluxe]

I wouldn't call that dedicated.
Dedication is when you take a job's quirks and learn to work around them to still play it to it's maximum potential.
Wanting the gameplay to be reduced to mindless button mashing is the opposite of dedication, it means you can achieve the maximum potential without actually having to invest anything.

What I mean when I say dedicated is people who play the range of combat the most. People who finish MSQ and move on to Savage and then Ultimates etc. They do not care about casual or mid core players nor do they care about the state of jobs outside, as I said, "balance".

And I love that counter arguments for combat or class design mostly boil down to "well that would create imbalance and we would go back to Heavensward when no one brought x class to raids". So casual and mid core players need to run a full analysis to be qualified to speak on job Design but minmaxers can appeal to some imaginary version of the game no one has access to where x class wasn't special enough? Funny how that works.