Quote Originally Posted by Altina_Orion View Post
Recently, that tension has sharpened into two dominant narratives: that FFXIV caters too much to raiders at the expense of casual players, and conversely, that it has become so casual-focused that high-end players are starved for meaningful content.
It's objectively the case that raiders are not starved for content. We've never had more raid content in the entire history of the game. That was true in Endwalker as well, due to having 7 Extremes, 12 Savages, 2 Ultimates, 3 Criterions, 5 Unreals (I know this is old content but it's popular), 1 Deep Dungeon (debateable, but many raiders like the solo challenge).

The issue in Endwalker raids was purely the depth - all roles doing the same mechanics, giant hitboxes, and staying too safe with mechanic development and uptime mechanics. Which have been addressed in Dawntrail, so raiders have never had it so good.

And this time, we not only have all the raids that were in Endwalker, but also a 4-person post-Deep Dungeon raid boss, Chaotic, Forked Tower and likely another in 7.5. There is really nobody that can say with credibility that there aren't any high-end duties in Dawntrail!

However, it was also fair to argue that Endwalker was full of casual content at the exact same time. The problem is that it was extremely casual - as in 2-10 minutes of your day type casual:
  • Island Sanctuary: 5-10mins - click mammet quests, collect materials from mammets/animals, add some things to workshop for the week, set new tasks to gather for the week, logout.
  • Expert Roulette: 12 mins
  • Hunt train: ~20 mins
  • Seasonal Event: ~10mins
  • Alliance Raid: 20-40mins (depending on boss HP bloat)
  • Variant: do all 12 routes, never do it again ever because no roulette
  • Beast Tribe: ~5-10mins
  • Custom Deliveries: ~5-10mins
  • MSQ: 1 day
  • Normal Raids: Few hours prog on release day maybe, 40 min reclears per week thereafter, then just 10mins once you've got normal raid gear.
  • Crafting/Gathering/Ocean Fishing/Gold Saucer/PvP/House: Varies since old but popular casual content.
The core of the problem isn’t the existence of hardcore or casual content, it’s that the systems designed for both lack longevity.
I think there is enough longevity in raid content: Ultimates have titles/glowing weapons and most people don't clear them fast (easily know many people that have been progging them months), Savage is a long-term prog for many people (sorry week1 clearers, but you don't represent everyone, look at how many weeks people complained about their P8S, P10S or M6S prog) and then there's reclears. Extremes see many people farm them 99 times for the mount, which can be spaced out over a few weeks. Clearly Chaotic kept people progging ages. If you go for the mounts or weapon glam, Criterion could keep you farming a lot. Deep Dungeon solos are a prog.
FFXIV should introduce a Mythic+ style scalable dungeon system.
They've even done this for the Masked Carnivale, so they can do it. We wondered if this was what Variant or Criterion dungeons were going to be as well. And there's still the question of why not make use of the around 100 existing dungeons for this rather than making new ones.
stop segregating field exploration content to X.25+ patches
It's an improvement from Endwalker that we have this. It's something more to do than just click mammets, hand in a beast tribe quest or do the same expert dungeon for the 133rd time.

But obviously the Forked Tower issue suddenly asks them to be progression raiders in a way that CEs don't, and CLL showed a way to do it where the entry system is good, the challenge is there and sometimes the run fails or has loads of full wipes but casual players clear it a lot still, and where the confident raider types fought Lyon which had more reponsiblity riding on it. They just need to replicate that format but inject other fresh ideas in place of the prisoners that involve teamwork.