We Need that Feeling back of "CoP"(first release)

[Frein]

But again, this point is moot. Yoshi has already told us his approach on this matter. "Main Storyline" quests will be single-player capable. Grand Company quests are supposed to be designed for party content. It's a good compromise, though I still beleive that creating a difficulty meter in order to allow players to progress at their own pacing (A note to Zakku, you're full of it when you state they can't balance difficulties on fights. They did it easily with Leves, they can do it for instanced fights as well. Heck, there's already two versions of Primals guess what - you fight the weaker version for the story, and the harder version for the loot. The system already exists!)

Let's be honest here, do you consider the laughable main story quests interesting as far as gameplay goes? I don't. I also don't consider them mandatory. I think it's a great tragedy that the quest to save the free nations from the Garlean invasion is so easy your black mage could auto-attack through it. To be honest, a lone character produces such one-dimensional gameplay any "solo challenge" would simply be a gear check, which is the problem I have with soloing in MMOs. They're just terrible single-player games and trying to cater to players who try to play them as such is, I believe, one of the most significant causes of early MMO decline we see so often these days.

Also, look at Ifrit: We have the easy mode Ifrit, so that everyone can "beat" the story, but are you really satisfied with your triumph over a weakling that dies in 10 seconds? Is anyone? I don't think so. The L40 Garuda at least lives long enough for you to see her, but I'd be surprised if anyone has ever wiped fighting her in a L50 group. And there are a lot of very bad players in this game. It just really dilutes the epicness of a boss to have an easily trampled noob mode available. Even though Garuda 2.0 is a longer fight with more phases and the stats are obviously much higher, it's still the same thing you already downed easily.

Since very early in its life WoW has had content that only a small fraction of the playerbase is able to complete (though not really sure how it is since WotLK). Sure, they make their old content obsolete all the time, so players progress through it faster than they did through CoP, but there is always that hardcore boss most people only get to see in videos until much later. My point is, FFXI isn't the only successful MMO to introduce content designed to be very difficult for most players.