How to make the 3rd raid difficulty work

[Cetonis]

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Anecdotes ignoring scale. The number of groups putting any serious amount of time into getting speedkill rankings is in the (low) double digits. Mayyybe two hundred players at best, probably less. Similarly miniscule numbers of players do the other things you linked. That's not worth making an entire piece of content for.

Several thousand people each put the time in to clear Gordias and Midas Savage. Thousands more spent a lot of time trying. Those offered unique, extra-powerful weapons at the end. Zero complaints about said weapon existing. I don't recall substantive complaints about Coil gear either. It was just the story issue.

The catch-up gear process is about fairness to people wanting to start raiding on the next tier, and about incentivizing odd patch casual content, not about responding to desperate cries over raid gear exclusivity.

If you're SE, why in the hell would you put a bunch of effort into a whole new piece of content, and then run the risk of people not caring by offering some pure vanity reward for it? When there's absolutely zero downside whatsoever to making the reward more enticing.

[Ghishlain]

Anecdotes ignoring scale. The number of groups putting any serious amount of time into getting speedkill rankings is in the (low) double digits. Mayyybe two hundred players at best, probably less. Similarly miniscule numbers of players do the other things you linked. That's not worth making an entire piece of content for.

Several thousand people each put the time in to clear Gordias and Midas Savage. Thousands more spent a lot of time trying. Those offered unique, extra-powerful weapons at the end. Zero complaints about said weapon existing. I don't recall substantive complaints about Coil gear either. It was just the story issue.

The catch-up gear process is about fairness to people wanting to start raiding on the next tier, and about incentivizing odd patch casual content, not about responding to desperate cries over raid gear exclusivity.

If you're SE, why in the hell would you put a bunch of effort into a whole new piece of content, and then run the risk of people not caring by offering some pure vanity reward for it? When there's absolutely zero downside whatsoever to making the reward more enticing.

I'm going to just have to agree to disagree. I do not believe an ilvl incentive is necessary.

I will openly admit that I am biased as well. I've always felt that my critical comment towards the "it's too easy!" crowd is the fact that the vast majority of those players haven't even attempted to try to challenge themselves. Like you've said in your previous post, min-sync A4S or A8S, doing A4S with Nisi, heck even do A8S and not sacrificing Water. Even A8S with current gear scores and echo presents a pretty stark challenge compared to A12S with the same gear.

I think for me the biggest issue with giving an ilvl incentive is that suddenly there will be a group of players who feel entitled to attain that boost, even if the intent of the content was to crush you over a million times before you can beat it. It'll lead to, for the lack of a better word, whining.

I do believe part of this issue is the fact that there isn't enough content. I feel we both agree that there needs to be more content overall that is appealing to both the midcore and to elite players alike (note not elitist players) and the fact that YoshiP is contemplating this "next level of challenge" is a good thing for the game's health. You can't have super hard content as it'll alienate the midcore and you can't have above average content as it'll alienate the elite players so it'll be good to have the two different levels of content available and should placate many of the "too easy!" or "too hard!" comments.

I'll also expand on my thoughts about why I do not believe ilvl reward is important as it stems from my own perception on how they should do this challenging content. The content should be designed with min ilvl forced on, thus it becomes a matter of player skill to clear the content and not player gear. ilvl rewards mean nothing to this content and thus no need to be rewarded either. However, rewarding ilvl boosts would encourage what I stated in my third paragraph of this post - more whining. Perhaps that won't happen, and perhaps I'm being too critical of the overall population, but that is my thoughts behind it.

Time will tell what will happen because in the end, all these posts are our personal opinions for the Dev team to read and for others to provide additional input or disagreements too.

[Magic-Mal]

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Beating super hard content for gear that's only 10 ilvls higher, that may or may not even be BiS(because of side stats), and that will also be made trash in the next patch where the average crafter has gear as strong as yours, is not a great incentive to me at all.

As long as you keep the difficulty synced, a mount will never be trashed. A hairstyle will never be trashed. A minion will never be trashed. A weapon glamour or armor glamour will never be trashed. Music will never be trashed. Furniture will never be trashed, unless you trash it.

However if the content only rewards i280 gear but we're at i380 and the content is still synced, people won't even bother. You're doing irrelevant content that's really hard. Because it's all outdated.

Vanity rewards are never outdated. People still farm ponies allllll the time. And people will still farm birds later.

a previous post:

(Examples)
Glamour:
-Faust/Hummelfaust/Faust Z armors and weapons
-A10S Gobbiewhatshisname's gunblade or gear
-E.D.D Lance

Furniture:
-Alexander Statue
-Cruise Chaser statue
-Faust Z striking dummy

Minions:
-Wind-Up Steamroller
-Wind-Up Refurbisher

Mounts:
-Gobwidow
-Onslaughter

These are the kinds of rewards I'd expect from the "end of the game when you beat everything" challenge.

When it comes to raiders, they always are showing off the stuff no matter how ugly it is because it's prestige stuff. So that's not even an issue.