square please challenge us a little

[Archaell]

It's hard to make the dungeons more difficult when the min. ilvl is set so low.

For it to work we would either need to slow down the progression of new players or introduce item level sync in current content... neither of which would be players happy about.

[Zojha]

It's hard to make the dungeons more difficult when the min. ilvl is set so low.

Making good difficulty is problematic as a whole.

You can up the numbers on damage/mitigation (or reducing iLvL), which is the easiest way, but also not very interesting, as gameplay is unaffected - making mechanics more punishing falls into the same category. You can add more mechanics to consider, which means the fight requires more memorization and awareness (Randomization of mechanics falls into this as well). You can reduce the time people have to react to things, but that means people with latency will underperform through no fault of their own.

Aaand...that's it for the current battle system.

[Xlantaa]

In my opinion. It is the players who lock it themselves in this.

Let's put a example:

Normal daily roulette. We got Aurum Vale (is not hard, but can be challenguing for newies). We get a pro-hyper-megallevel tank with item elvel 50000000, 67000 runs on Alexander Savage (or any other player, doesn't matter really) and the best loot in the game, and we get few newies or low level character ungeared. The mega-tank leaves or force DC beacuse want a quick dungeon and dont' want spent more than 5 minutes in a dungeon.

Let's say SquareEnix add a challenguing labirynth dungeon with puzzles and hard enemies like a lot of people suggested here (including myself). People enter, get a slow and hard dungeon. Then leaves of force DC. Come to the forums: "Please, SE, remove labirynth and puzzles from dungeons, we cannot speedrun everything!!! I don't like stay more than 20 minutes in a dungeon, must be done quick and if possible, and let me blame if the others have low DPS!"

Then stay those who are at level 60 but they didn't bother in learn how to use a class.

This is my vision of the situation. Is not only low skilled players as most people sugested (oh yeah because ALL is their fault >.>). "Pro players" (or whatever you want call them) and speedrunners are the core or the problem for me. Dungeons have become just a race and a show of who can get DPS high numbers. And the behaviour or speedrun everything is telling the devs what is people doing and that's what's giving us.


So, yes. We need first change the mentality. And, most of all, stop with the Speedrun mentality. Then maybe we can get something interesting.

[Kerii]

-snip-

I wasn't talking about new/bad players if it makes you feel better. At least they make an effort and cooperate. xD

[Xlantaa]

I wasn't talking about new/bad players if it makes you feel better. At least they make an effort and cooperate. xD

I was talking more about the general think in this forum, not specifically your comment, of course

[Zojha]

So, yes. We need first change the mentality. And, most of all, stop with the Speedrun mentality. Then maybe we can get something interesting.

Good luck with that.

The desire to speedrun something comes from the fact that you have stopped running the content for the fun of it and instead only run it for the rewards, which also means it is now in competition with other pieces of content offering the same/similar rewards (Reward per time/effort efficiency comes into play here). This is caused by repetition of the content, or rather, the diminishing enjoyment of the content itself. You can see the opposite effect in PvP games - against all reward efficiency, people who stomp their opposition frequently prolong the game artificially in order to stomp them more, simply because they enjoy the stomping (And since this comes at the opposing team's expense, they'll have a guy going:"Surrender@20!", as they now no longer enjoy it and therefore want to end it ASAP).
At times, it's also because you have become so experienced with the content that speedrunning is the only way it can engage you - that's no different for puzzles. People have speedrun even games as expansive as Ocarina of Time and I wager those were people who already knew the game inside out.

This is different from the desire to keep content duration limited. The longer something takes, the more likely it is that unforeseen IRL events occur - it's primarily a casual desire and much akin to having frequent save spots/an anytime save feature. It shrinks the time block people have to dedicate for a certain piece of content. For reward efficiency, it doesn't matter if a content takes 20 minutes, 40 or 2 hours - you just multiply the rewards accordingly. I am willing to bet however that the shorter ones would still be preferred.
There's also the matter of expectation: If you are used to dungeons taking 25 minutes, that's what you will expect of dungeons and consequently, you'll be inclined to get into a dungeon if you only have half an hour of free time.

So yeah...I can only repeat:"Good luck". I don't see how you would be able to change the mentality.

[SpookyGhost]

"Please, SE, remove labirynth and puzzles from dungeons, we cannot speedrun everything!!![...]

That wasn't the problem with Lab. The problem was getting 24 people to coordinate. Look at Ozma, he doesn't even require much coordination and people can't do him properly.

Anyway, the speedrun mentality will never go away unless they make it go away. It's always better to get things done as quick as possible and when everything is exactly the same every time you go in a dungeon then you're going to feel more inclined to zoom through.

[Welsper59]

Anyway, the speedrun mentality will never go away unless they make it go away. It's always better to get things done as quick as possible and when everything is exactly the same every time you go in a dungeon then you're going to feel more inclined to zoom through.

This is actually faulty logic (even if it is sound), simply due to prior experience. In WoW, with Cataclysm, the devs tried to bring back a need to slow down runs by requiring things like CC for most parties. In other words, a return to old school gameplay. We're at a point in time where the idea is promising, but the actual practice is (hypocritically) met with hate by the very people who argued for that same return because of the fact it's slower than we're accustomed to. Once the speedrun mentality has been established, which this game has almost always been, you can't break it so easily.

The devs would need to start slow, and despite any hate/dislike/whatever they meet on the matter, they cannot relent. Steps of Faith was a good example of introducing the concept, albeit not the best example, and ideally where they shouldn't have caved in with changing. Make a dungeon that does, in fact, require some form of CC. Make BLMs with Sleep the more ideal job to have for ease of the run, but also allow it to be something where the other jobs with Bind, Stun, whatever can manage in their own way. Remove diminishing returns on most status debuffs for PvE content, because that crap obviously serves little to no purpose anyway now. Stun probably still needs DR though, or maybe increase resource cost by a lot, since PLD can spam that lol. Return to us the freedoms that the genre traditionally gave us back in the day with choosing (within reason) how we tackle content. If a BLM wants to sleep chain trash mobs, let them.

Once the waters have been tested, and it seems well accepted, bring out more opportunities to test us for our GROUP efforts rather than our individual ones. DPS output is an individual effort, but working together with stun orders and watching each others backs is a group effort and something that is sorely missing from this genre today.

[Khalithar]

This is actually faulty logic (even if it is sound), simply due to prior experience. In WoW, with Cataclysm, the devs tried to bring back a need to slow down runs by requiring things like CC for most parties. In other words, a return to old school gameplay.

I loved Cataclysm for this reason. It required everyone to step up compared to the difficulty from Wotlk and a lot of players that couldn't hack it were given a wake up. From there the players I knew either got better and stepped up or they quit running the high level content. Of course, for those of us that raided at that time, once we got the raid gear we went back to speedrunning since once you overgeared them the harder dungeons were a joke. The dungeons were only difficult the first time through, eventually we just overpowered the mobs and brute forced most mechanics without issue.

Edit: Although at the time I basically stopped pugging. I only ran the dungeons with raid geared friends from my raiding guild or their alts, i.e. people I gamed with all the time (synergy and knowing how to work together is definitely a thing), knew how to play their role at the raid level, and had the really good gear.

[Antonio_Xul]

If you want a challenge, just do Savage, Ex Primals Synched & Coils Synched! There's your challenge. Doing instances with new, unskilled or learning players is also challenging, which I also don't take for granted for its challenge.