Quote Originally Posted by DoctorMog View Post
Don't believe that we want the whole game on hardmode. That is not the case.

We want something here and there that poses a serious challenge.

It's just a request for "something challenging"
Exactly why I say they should have built off of FFXI as a foundation (yes yes I know people will kill their first borns just because I mentioned FFXI):

"Light" content, e.g Assaults (this alone could have been in place of Guildleves or Guildleves built around this, it has much more variance than eventually being a kill quest.)
"Light" content like Limbus except for bosses (which were challenges back when they were introduced, i.e Proto Omega/Ultima)
"Light" content like Missions with hard fights sprinkled in, CoP was almost perfect in this regard.
"Light/Hard" content like Campaign which varied depending on if you're doing OPs (Shadow Lord fight for example) or the plain battles.
"Hard" content like Dynamis, Sea Gods, Sky Gods, Shinryu (unless you brew it), Abyssea Zone bosses, Neo Omega etc.
"Hard" content like Salvage which was more strategizing than difficulty at times.

So on, XI had the perfect set up in terms of content, while people hated having to work with others (....) It scaled beautifully in terms of what was and wasn't a challenge. For example if SE were to introduce a new Bahamut fight in FFXI, it'll be a challenge, if they were to introduce a Bahamut fight in XIV, it'll be a push over because they have to please the casual playerbase as well as the "hardcore" playerbase so the overall difficulty would be set very low in order to fit all playstyles. Like Ifrit is a decent challenge, but realistically latency problems from poor servers optimization gave it the slight challenge it does have.