Please, Developers, Please! Put an end to Easy Mode thinking

[AmyRae]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you aren't a professional video game industry analyst, and if you are then I am truly sorry for you and your unfortunate choice of career. I don't think they need to make the game WoW-casual exclusive in order to have enough money to develop a game I would enjoy.

Not to mention if they don't develop content that I can enjoy=I'm not playing it=I don't care.

If they exclusively develop content you enjoy, you won't be playing that either, simply because there's not enough people like that around to support the game.

Hardcore players are a dying breed. The people who used to play hardcore have (mostly) grown up and now have jobs, kids, and/or sex to worry about, not logging in 3 a.m. every night for a few hours for a chance to slay a rare monster. And kids have grown up with casual games like WoW and simply can't be convinced to take a step back from that.

You're going to have accept that at best hardcore players will have to co-exist with casual ones and not everything is going to be as hard as you like it to be. There's just no market for big name hardcore MMOs anymore. The mainstream wants casual play.

[AmyRae]

I'm sorry your life is so hard. How do you manage to do all of those things which all human beings have done for thousands of years and still have a hobby?!

I am also sorry that you apparently wasted your youth playing an MMO nonstop and missing out on everything else life has to offer and are now bitter.

If you want to just "tune out" maybe you should try becoming addicted to drugs. Why demand massive game worlds be developed and then emptied of all substance just so you have an effortless "escape" from your wonderful terrible life.

What is this I don't even

[Sephrick]

I'm sorry your life is so hard. How do you manage to do all of those things which all human beings have done for thousands of years and still have a hobby?!

I am also sorry that you apparently wasted your youth playing an MMO nonstop and missing out on everything else life has to offer and are now bitter.

If you want to just "tune out" maybe you should try becoming addicted to drugs. Why demand massive game worlds be developed and then emptied of all substance just so you have an effortless "escape" from your wonderful terrible life.

The person you quoted made a valid point so you turn to vague personal insults? Always a good way to win folks over.

From the onset, XIV was intended to be a game for an audience more broad than XI.

With that in mind, SE sunk a lot of dough into development.

Look at Demon's Souls as a good example. It was designed to be a hardcore game. It's punishing, brutal and as boring as XI was after a while. But it was designed to make a profit off the kind of low sales you get from a small niche marke. When it finally hit 500k units sold well after its release, Altus was elated with the "success." But it was a hardcore game designed to profit off the kind of sales that sort of game can generate.

XIV was made to pull in a casual audience -- albeit it was rushed out the door before it was fully designed. So the original "casuals and hardcores living in harmony" concept never came to be. But just because the hardcore audience is mainly the one that currently is playing doesn't change the amount of money and man hours they've already sunk into making the game.

They need to sell more units. And to do that they need to give people a reason to invest enough time each month to keep paying.

People have netflix (qwikster). Console games with in-depth multiplayer. High level characters in other mmos. And, as AmyRae mentioned, the general activities of day to day life. SE needs to give these people a reason to spend time in Eorzea, and a brutal unrewarding time sink just won't cut it.

SE could have designed a game for what's left of a hardcore generation. But they didn't. And nothing is going to change that fact. Now they need to deliver on the promises they've made and continue to make if they ever expect to even break even on this game.

[Murugan]

The person you quoted made a valid point so you turn to vague personal insults? Always a good way to win folks over.

Hardcore players are a dying breed. The people who used to play hardcore have (mostly) grown up and now have jobs, kids, and/or sex to worry about.

What exactly is this if not a vague personal insult at anyone who enjoys content that is not simply handed to them for the 15 dollars a month they pay nothing ("hardcore" players).


That's like saying anyone who enjoys a narrative given in a form longer or deeper than a comic book or thirty minute network television show clearly has "no life" because who in their right mind has an attention span like that? Don't even ask a "normal" person to read more than 114 characters! This is the 21st century....

This whole equating playing "hardcore" (again meaning just wanting content that requires a little effort) with abnormal/unhealthy time investment, comes from people like AmyRae who either make huge assumptions about other people or who personally may have had a serious problem balancing their life with an MMO when they were young and are now intensely bitter about it (yet strangely still play MMO's...).

I would imagine I play MMO's much less than many of these so called "casual players", I bet I play MMO's considerably less than most Farmville players spend on their farms, and I certainly spend less time on the forums than many of them here. Let's not sit here and pretend the whole "make it casual "accessible"' argument has to do with time constraints alone. That argument might work if we are talking about a leveling grind that requires months of daily effort, or an in-game economy with items costing the equivalent of a part time job's amount of work, but simple quests for a chocobo? Having to unravel a mystery? Difficult encounters?

Is it that these "casuals" don't have a lot of time, or do they just have an issue with thinking?