Quote Originally Posted by Aidorouge View Post
I'm not completely adverse to difficult content, I just immediately shrink and duck out of doing it when failure drags OTHER people down with me versus messing up and I'm the only corpse, and that goes double in a game like Final Fantasy 14 where "dying/failing = you are bad, never queue again" is a common sentiment, and there's way more people that will jump down your throat for costing them a wipe then will tell you to just keep going.
I'm just quoting this because it's actually a really, really good point to make.

Have I run really difficult solo content in a game a couple of hundred times to get the reward? I have! Am I willing to waste everyone else's time while I learn a fight they already know and suffer through me fat-fingering my keys a few dozen times? Absolutely not. Will that particular issue stop me from playing that high-level content at all? It will! And that's only compounded by the additional factor of Blazzta WuTang discussing his relationship with my mother afterwards. I'm too old and tired and disgruntled to put myself through that sort of thing a dozen times over 28 different hour-of-waiting 24 man parties.

So what's the answer?

Given that MMOs have always struggled with the "only 5% of our users engage with raid content" type of thing, I'm actually wondering if - maybe - the real thing that MMOs need to get raid participation up is the ability to practice the fights. No-reward (or first completion reward, to encourage trying) all-bot-run instances that let you see and practice the mechanics as much as you'd like before queueing up for the real deal.

That would give static teams the ability to play the content with progression rewards 300 times in a row if they wanted to, while also letting people with less time practice the fight's mechanics sans-reward on their own terms.