Removing Mount as achievement reward from Variant Dungeon is a bad development choice

[Jeeqbit]

Absolutely not casual friendly. If you need to find a PF for a chance at clearing something and spend 2 hours on it, it's NOT casual friendly.

Let's say that you use PF to find 1 person. Usually that does not take long. It's finding more that does. Often you can join a random FC and ask if someone wants to do it in FC chat as well.

That, and you need to have unlocked PoTD 1-50 to be able to run PT.

POTD 1-50 is nothing with a high enough aetherpool, and they changed it so that your aetherpool gets boosted massively very quickly by getting silver coffers, so provided you do the standard strategy of keeping next to the walls and using a DPS such as Machinist, you can make a solo run through it very easily. With my aetherpool, soloing 1-50 on a Machinist is a cakewalk because it's the "easy mode" of POTD.

I think they also made it drop potions, so in the unlikely event it's not a cakewalk, you can heal yourself using both potions and DD potions, as well as Second Chance.

Let's say there's a reason why so few people actually run Deep Dungeons

The reason people didn't run them was because anything beyond 30 could not be queued for. Which meant you and 3 others needed to set aside 4-6 hours of uninterrupted gameplay to get through it. Needless to say, nobody including myself felt like joining a PF for 4-6 hours; I might have done so for 3 hours, but it was just pushing it. When parties did form, someone would go AFK near the end ruining the run, or they'd wipe near the end losing 4 hours of prog.

In contrast, Pilgrim's Traverse is more like 20-40 minutes per 10 floors, and you can queue every 10 floors separately and start new save files every 10 or 20 floors. This eliminates the need to set aside 4 hours of prog. The challenge log and mount reward has meant that queues pop without the need for PF, especially on reset days.

saying it's "casual friendly" is wrong.

So my point is that it's no longer something that requires you to set aside 4 hours like most DD, nor is it something that requires you to set aside a whole day or more for a solo run like POTD. It's something you can merely set aside 40 minutes for, and the queue is likely to actually pop at all level ranges unlike the others. That means you could just do 10 floors per day, spending less than 1 hour a day on it, which is about as casual as it could get.

The higher floors of deep dungeons have always been fun, but losing the prog has not been fun; moreover, progressing the Eureka Orthos bosses is impossibly difficult when you have to spend 4 hours just to experience a single prog pull. Once again, Pilgrim's Traverse solved this entirely and made it very easy to get right back to the boss you wiped to and try again. And it even lets you solo practice the last boss once you have seen it (even if you wiped to it) without going through the 30 floors before it.

[Zelda206]

"Please expect more of this to come in 8.0. We're looking forward to it. Also please stop getting angry with our choices and our staff, mmkay?" -- something Square Enix has said and shown to the effect of

[Veritas-Ancora]

Seeing that torn up Carpet at the end (13th route), I was livid learning that we don't get the carpet via completing all 12 routes like all we get is a Philosopher sandwich?...a sleeping mask ?...Gee thanks for the title *iguess* but I'd prefer if we got the carpet. Now I gotta do advance?? Man time to get stressed out for a carpet. Thanks alot whoever in the team decided this. Also I entirely forgot about the hairstyle and framer's kit. Wow. Just why did you guys not add in the twines and shit for savage gear? That would've been great. I'm so mad the more I think on this.

I'm also mad about this. It feels like a last minute bait-and-switch.

It's really frustrating that they make all this content and then forget to give you the carrot.

[Jeeqbit]

I'm also mad about this. It feels like a last minute bait-and-switch.

Maybe it feels that way, but there's absolutely no chance that this is the case.

Variant (Advanced) would have no point to it without a reward. There'd be no reason to do it like at all. After all the work they put into giving us the much-requested "midcore" content. Whereas there is every reason to do the normal version of Variant - to complete the lore and unlock subsequent ones.

[NovalisCrystalis]

Maybe it feels that way, but there's absolutely no chance that this is the case.

Variant (Advanced) would have no point to it without a reward. There'd be no reason to do it like at all. After all the work they put into giving us the much-requested "midcore" content. Whereas there is every reason to do the normal version of Variant - to complete the lore and unlock subsequent ones.

You'd fix this by adding more rewards. There is always a way to make something worth while. This game has so much to offer. I mean we are getting Endwalker weapon esters...that is a old reward (hard to get too so this is made "easier") this tells me they can supply but did not. I'm still a bit mad normally I don't engage with people. But I just cannot accept this when I know there is a way.

[AstreMcClain]

The problem is everybody and their brother and sister want to call themselves casual.

"I only do roulettes and duty finder content. Extremes, Savage, Ultimates and Criteron are out of my league. I'm a casual"
"I'll do Extreme trials, maybe a Savage Raid. Ultimates is where I draw the line. I'm a casual"
"I'll do all the content. Roulettes, Extremes, Savage, Ultimates. Anything, but I'm a casual!"

It seems like nobody wants to call themselves high end or hardcore. At best, they'll call themselves midcore.

I feel like the people who are like this actively try and make everything seem casual.

Pricia is right. Back in ARR and Heavensward Casual was defined as being able to hop into something and just do it with minimal wipes and the like. Hardmode Dungeons/Trials were the harder content that casual players could enjoy and wipe constantly; Everything changed once Stormblood and the Myriad of Streamers beginning to do harder content more, with the "Extremes are casual content" starting to appear during the WoW Exodus starting around Shadowbringers (Not blaming WoW players at all; They're used to Mythic + which is notoriously harder content and the sentiment of "Extremes are causal content" started coming in because they don't see difficulty the same way XIV players did- because that was their normal- So of course the mentality spread like a virus).

I'm half-expecting them to just remove "Extreme" from the title of trials at some point.

We USED to have a stable difficulty curve back then:

Normal > Hard > Extreme > Savage

Now it's expected and just:

Normal > Extreme > Savage > Ultimate

Hard Mode was that balance of "Harder but not too hard" content.

[Jeeqbit]

You'd fix this by adding more rewards.

Well yes, but obviously they perceive there to be a limit to the number of rewards they can make since they constantly talk about development resources and being overworked.

Based on development panels and blog posts they have done, the development of something such as a mount would start like 6-8 months prior, so if they decide they want to add one later than that, it's potentially too late because it goes through procedures like concept art, modeling, animating, adjusting for races, testing, UI, localization, etc.

They could probably significantly speed it up by just doing a reskin, which is probably why we keep getting reskins in Cosmic Exploration. For a reskin there's obviously no need to really concept, model, re-animate, adjust or test.

I don't feel it would have cut it to put current gear upgrades behind anything except Criterion, because there are people still progging Savage and if it was rewarded from Advanced, then it may as well be added to hunts and alliance raids too as if it's 7.5. And I still think the hardest version of it would need a mount reward in case of players not being motivated by gear.

In any case, there are clearly management issues at play. Since the issue they bring up constantly is development resources and priorities, obviously by their own admission, there are management issues. While Yoshi-P may have saved the game, it does not mean he is perfect and issues have been becoming clear over time, where other games and developers (including modders) can achieve things that hundreds of Square Enix employees cannot do.

[Turtledeluxe]

I'm really tired of this fanbase pretending if has no imagination (or maybe you don't) when there's an active, overflowing cash shop in place in this subscription based game. If they put any less risk or effort into their current reward model, the game would verge on being an actual scam. Hence why we are seeing increased skepticism around seemingly minor changes, because we are inching closer to the rails coming completely off.

I also hope those of you talking about thE jOuRnEy are being paid for that level of propaganda and obfuscation.

[Deejudanne]

We lost the fucking basic 12 route completion mount that we always got before.

This is such a non-issue, why not put that stupid carpet as a reward???

Why do you people insist on defending every horrible change the game makes???

because the guy thinks riding everything SE shits out will reward him somehow