Community expectations

[LineageRazor]

It's also a reason why they chose to make a normal mode for raids. Most of the ressources are used to design the normal mode, that almost every player does. It's much more useful that designing a whole raid that only 10% of people will clear.

Just to interject here, I don't think this is really true. Judging by what we can see of the Normal and Savage raids, it looks much more as though they built the Savage first, and then cranked back on the damage and difficulty and removed some of the worst mechanics in order to create the Normal version. The abilities used in Normal mode are almost always a subset of the abilities from Savage. Heck, Alexander 5 even has an arena that reflects this, with two spigots that are never used in normal mode but are there all the same.

I think that the last time SE built the easier mode first was in the days of Titan, Ifrit, and Garuda. All the Savage/Extreme content since, it looks much more like the normal mode is a toned-down version of the Savage/Extreme, rather than Savage/Extreme being an amped-up version of the normal.

I'm pretty sure most players who come to this game dream of one day being powerful enough to take on the toughest content. It's the same with any game you buy - you want to get the most you can out of it, experience all it has to offer. Most of them never quite reach that goal (as evidenced by the low clear rates), whether it be because they recognize that they just don't have the skill, dedication, or patience, or because they get turned off by the endgame community, or simply because they found something else in the game that they enjoy more. The raids, though, were built for raiders first, and afterwards scaled back to provide an offering for non-raiders. The normal version is there to give the folks that can't or won't raid the opportunity to feel like they've experienced the whole game.

[Yonanja]

-snip-

I agree completly. Without the harder stuff to do, what's left in the game to give anyone a feeling of "there's still more to do"? It's true that maybe only 10% or even fewer of the playerbase might see and do the harder stuff, but at the same time, it's something that keeps many of them playing the game. Hoping and dreaming about being able to do it and having the rewards from those places. Without the harders stuff, what would keep players from just going "well, I've seen and done everything now, better unsub until next patch", leaving the game a graveyard after a month of every major patch.

FF have enough trouble keeping players yerning for "the next step" as it is, every other patch being more or less a complete gear-reset.

[Kallera]

Snip.

I disagree with this, there are plenty of games I happily buy and play stages and missions over and over, without really getting bored or losing sight of goals. It's only because this game is incredibly on-rails ("look at all this customization with materia! now slap on one type of materia onto your gear in the parameters we dictate with our caps or get judged by your peers." "raised all your members again with lb?, good, you're doomed anyway at the end with my 99990 move." "crafted that fancy sword, good job, you made the weakest weapon this tier. should tide a returnee over for two weeks.") that they run into this problem time and again.