Quote Originally Posted by Auteur View Post
Outside material like begs to differ, ex: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/67805...eborn/73747720. Begs the question why does SE want to keep producing more AS raids that are going to further create horrendous P.R. and scare away new people from joining the game. Seems like a disastrous raid as a whole and should be scrapped entirely sooner rather than later.
The FFXIV team made a commitment to the current split (Normal/Savage) for the 3.X raids because the most common complaint from the most hardcore raiders through 2.X was that Binding Coil was too easy and not a serious challenge. At the same time, the majority of players did not go through Binding Coil and many of them felt left out because of the story they were missing by not doing serious raiding.

When Gordias Savage was released, it was fairly clear early on that it required some serious coordination and skill (in the form of very intense DPS checks, mostly) from all players in a party, and players on a number of lower population servers migrated to Gilgamesh in the early days of Gordias (and throughout) because "that's where the raiders are." This, along with Gilgamesh's large population, leads to a lot of negativity regarding casual and low-skilled players.

The response from the FFXIV team was to make Midas Savage more forgiving on the DPS check front, but the mechanics were more complicated, and A6S was poorly done. The FFXIV team still received complaints about this, and have stated that the next tier of Savage will be more akin to Final Coil (aka the "easy" stuff that was complained about that led to Savage in the first place) with the expectation that it will be fully cleared by the best groups in a week, and most serious groups should be able to clear it reasonably quickly.

The overall story is one of players complaining about two things (raid not hard enough, raid too hard) and the FFXIV development team responding by offering Normal and Savage difficulties. Player reaction has generally indicated that the complaint about raids not being hard enough was generally overblown, considering the clear rates of Gordias and Midas Savage, and the FFXIV team has been adjusting as they learn to make it more viable.

Again, this is one facet of a fairly large amount of content available at max level, and I don't believe that Savage has generated anything resembling "horrendous PR" or otherwise scared players away. Player whining on the official forums and other venues greatly overstates the issues, as it is with most MMOs.