More Difficult Single Player Content Please

[MasamuneBranford]

The 150 hours of story missions to get to endgame is pretty much the biggest hurdle to get a new player into this game. The story "is" good. So that's a plus. However - I have tried to get a large chunk of my friends into this game - and they basically tap out around the 100 hour mark due to the fact that the difficulty is yawn-worthy all the way through.

Listen - people love Final Fantasy. Anyone would happily jump at the chance to play a 150 hour Final Fantasy game. All the pieces are in place to have such a game except for the difficulty factor. The "new" dungeon difficulty is fine - some of the "instance" battles are fine - it's the quests that make up 90% of the 150 hours where the difficulty simply does not exist. Let's make the main scenario a little bit more fun by actually requiring the player to be attentive. I'm not even proposing a difficulty that would cause the player to "die" more - rather I'm proposing a difficulty where the player has to be awake and make quick decisions.

[kazeandi]

I don't think the normal throwaway side-quests need a higher difficulty level. People only do them on the second, third or fourth alt class anyways while waiting for the DF to pop, while the reward is not that great for the time invested.
If you want to up the difficulty for quests, hand out better rewards, exp or loot.

The type of player who wants everything in hard-mode for ~reasons~ seems to forget that most of us fellow players come home after a hard day at work to play an hour or two, maybe do a dungeon and generally only want to relax. If I want to be challenged 100% of the time, there's solo games for that.

Sure, if I was a student, living off of my parents cash, no side job, not much to do during my free time, maybe I'd crave more difficult things, too, but then again, there's savage content and other stuff to do solo that's group oriented.