Thread: The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

Originally Posted by RiceisNice

If the option is that we can only have 2 tiers of difficulty , "EX" difficulty and savage difficulty with be an ideal curve.

That goes back to the ARR model, essentially, no? Or by EX do you mean a bit easier than old Coil?

I guess my confusion is this: we got Normal mode because enough people who weren't interested in doing Coil still wanted to see the story from Coil. Velhart's "broken record" is that they should have tried to get these people to do Coil (somehow), rather than making an easy mode of the raid content. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that (I think Normal is a cesspool), but what could have been done to get those players interested in raiding that hasn't already been tried in ARR (because those methods obviously didn't work well enough because the demand for Normal was high enough to warrant the creation of that content)?

I suspect there is significant overlap between the groups of players that the Zodiac/Anima questlines were made for (those not wanting to do challenging content) and those players who wanted to see the Coil story but didn't want to do the content at the difficulty necessary to see it. So, I'm not necessary sure that even lowering the difficulty to a certain degree (to say, be more in line with EX primals) would really encourage those players to get into harder content, as challenging content doesn't really appeal to them to begin with.

Something else has to happen in between, I think, to motivate those players. Velhart seems to think it's possible to do that and thinks it would be a better approach than creating the Normal mode that we got. So my question is, what is that? I don't really have any ideas in this regard, personally.

Originally Posted by Alahra

That goes back to the ARR model, essentially, no? Or by EX do you mean a bit easier than old Coil?

I guess my confusion is this: we got Normal mode because enough people who weren't interested in doing Coil still wanted to see the story from Coil. Velhart's "broken record" is that they should have tried to get these people to do Coil (somehow), rather than making an easy mode of the raid content. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that (I think Normal is a cesspool), but what could have been done to get those players interested in raiding that hasn't already been tried in ARR (because those methods obviously didn't work well enough because the demand for Normal was high enough to warrant the creation of that content)?

Yes, ARR's model + Savage mode for each tier. People would eventually do FCoB without a static anyway because it was open to DF, much like our current normal mode alexander. With this setup, you'd be able to satisfy the three groups eventually, while our current model doesn't set up for that.

Originally Posted by RiceisNice

Yes, ARR's model + Savage mode for each tier. People would eventually do FCoB without a static anyway because it was open to DF, much like our current normal mode alexander.

But there are a lot of people who didn't do Coil, even when it was in DF. That's where the desire for a Story mode came from in the first place (which resulted in Normal). That's what I'm trying to figure out: are those players individuals who can be persuaded to take on the harder content in some way? Even after Echo buffs, huge mechanical changes to things like T7, and months for strategies to become known, there were still players requesting a Story mode for Coil.

Should that mode thereby be scrapped now that it's already been implemented once, to go back to that model without some way to make it possible for the players for which Normal was designed to see the story? If, how do you set things up so that they will want to tackle that content in the more difficult raid so that they can see the story?

Originally Posted by Alahra

But there are a lot of people who didn't do Coil, even when it was in DF. That's where the desire for a Story mode came from in the first place (which resulted in Normal). That's what I'm trying to figure out: are those players individuals who can be persuaded to take on the harder content in some way? Even after Echo buffs, huge mechanical changes to things like T7, and months for strategies to become known, there were still players requesting a Story mode for Coil.

Coil after the nerfs and echo is essentially the story mode difficulty comparable to what we have now with Alexander Normal. Honestly at that point if you hadn't cleared coil, you weren't interested in it to begin with. I mean it's a comparable perspective of the players who complain about FCoB being too easy without having stepped in there.

Originally Posted by RiceisNice

Honestly at that point if you hadn't cleared coil, you weren't interested in it to begin with.

But the thing is, that group of players who weren't interested in doing it was large enough that they made a whole new raid difficulty just for them. I don't think that's something that it would be wise to just suddenly take away, from a numbers perspective (because I don't think the development team could justify two difficulties every raid tier if they weren't hitting a huge section of the playerbase with at least one of them).

You can posit all you what about what you think they should have done in response to that demand, but they've already made their response and for better or for worse, Normal is probably here to stay. Personally I think the gap between the two difficulties should be a lot smaller (with Normal getting harder and Savage getting easier), but I'm pretty sure we're not getting rid of the general structure.

Personally, I don't think Story mode was necessary for Alexander at all, as the main reason people wanted to see the Coil story was because it was actually part of the main narrative carrying forward from 1.0. Alexander's story is separate, though (and also terrible, but that's neither here nor there), but the fact is that we got it and the developers consider it successful content (whether or not your personal metrics for successful content are the same as theirs).

Originally Posted by Ibi

I don't know that the motivation was necessarily lacking for Coil. The pool of people who wanted to see the story and never even tried Coil on the basis that they thought it would be too challenging is probably very small when compared to the pool of people who tried, couldn't get through it for whatever reason, and gave up.

Whatever the reasons were, SE warranted there was enough demand for Normal mode that it's what we got.

Originally Posted by Ibi

The problem with that is that you need either a) vastly more content than we're ever going to get from this development team, in order to cover the full range of player capabilities while keeping the steps close together, or b) to either set the bottom end of the scale relatively high or the top end of the scale relative low, so that the steps can be close together even though there aren't that many of them.

And that's ultimately my concern—I can't see a way for the developers to really create the necessary content to really bridge the gap, so I was curious if others had some other ideas that I hadn't been able to think of that perhaps aren't necessarily tied to content.

There were already plenty of "stepping stones" in ARR, especially in 2.0/2.1, and those steps weren't gradual enough for the segment of the playerbase in question here. So we'd need a lot more content (I think the closest we came was in 2.0/2.1, which had 6 end-game Primal battles and a 24-man raid—a wealth of content we've not seen in the game since then and aren't likely to see again, sadly).

I think the Normal/Savage split has ultimately been pretty harmful to the game as a whole, but it's probably here to stay (at least until 4.0 maybe), so it seems to me to be best to address feedback in such a way as to work within the framework we're likely stuck with.