please stop make the game easier.

[Dzian]

This IMO is the main cause for people saying "oh, it's easy for everyone"... because that's all they see. Players of equivalent skill would naturally make the content easy, and even if there is 1-2 'normal' players in a duty... 2-3 highly skilled players will easily manage the fights regardless of the 'lesser skilled' players mistakes/handicaps/etc. So to them they still see the content as easy, and believe that all players find it easy... because they don't realize that with 2-3 skilled ppl in a group can easily carry 1-2 bad players and still make everything look/seem easy.

While I don't deny there's certainly some truth to that. I do think it's only one side of the coin.

When you read a lot of the posts people make about the game being easy. they don't mean its easy for them. they genuinely do mean it's easy for everyone. and in many cases they go on to validate there arguments by giving examples of content that is literally so easy it would take more effort to actually fail it than it would to succeed.

one of the biggest and more recent examples of this is kugane castle. even at like i280 ish with your 290 job gear and whatever right side junk you got. you simply cannot fail at yojimbo.. it is virtually impossible from a mechanical point of view. your entire party can afk and let daigorro pick up all the coins. you still will not die....

another example is the drowned city of scaella. I'll be totally honest here that second boss. I don't know any of the mechs for. I just stand there on my blm and nuke the hell out of it. stood in a puddle, got some tether? none of it matters even if I end up with 7-8 stacks of whatever that debuff is I will not die...

these level 70 dungeons are actually less dangerous than things like brayflox longstops / haukke manor around level 30.. and that's incredibly backwards in design choice.

even raids are going the same way. first time my friends and I did o5 for example we must have been whisked off to the passanger cars so many times often leaving no healers on the freight car or something and still no one was ever in any real danger..

we cleared o6 2 or 3 times before half of us even noticed the duty action button was a thing......

[Paladinleeds]

Satan is that you?

Admittedly I fell asleep shortly after posting that, so I was probably in one of those "Head not screwed on properly" moments. You'd be surprised how far my mind wanders when I'm tired. It's scary at times! But, I do think it's something worth remaining out in the field. Maybe we can draw more... amenable ideas from that admittedly extreme idea of mine.

[Narcotics]

^ This. Players are terrible at judging the skill level of the playerbase. We don't have the data necessary to do it well (because we don't have attempt vs clear rates across the entire playerbase), but we try and do it anyway and the result tends to be not pretty. You see the same thing in the other direction with high end players that insist they're average. No, no you're not. Not even close. It's a skewed definition of "average" that uses the forums and...

The definition of "too easy" is when you would literally have to not try in order to fail. When you can ignore mechanics and clear, the content is a joke. As a casual player of this game, I still want to play well...a game. It's not much of a game when it's been designed to baby you through content. Like what's the point? Really? What are we playing for in the end if we're just having everything given to us unless we're doing savage content which makes up for about .1% of the game?

[QueenSophie]

skills change to make it easier for casual gamers,
raids deals less dmg/ easier dmg check than in lvl 50.
raid mechanic mostly like the same, just building on it. like do it "harder"
higher drop rate by primae mounts
let ppl do raids 20 lvls above.
"srsly?" 1mio mgp for 3 lines from khloe?


why you do taht SE?
i loved to play this game as lvl 50 was max lvl. you have accomplished something as oyu killed titan and ramuh, which much ppl tried and not killed it for months, try it and finally killed it, and you know you did it. you felt special.
when u kill a primae now, its just easy, you dont have to comunicate like before to go past the phases.

even the bosses has less phases now.or "much phases" with same skills just you have to do them alittle otherwise.

earlier every phase had an full other mechanic to do. and not the same just other handled.

every player, played since begin or ilvl 110 was max on lvl50 know i mean.

so painful...

[Kamatsu]

While I don't deny there's certainly some truth to that. I do think it's only one side of the coin.

When you read a lot of the posts people make about the game being easy. they don't mean its easy for them. they genuinely do mean it's easy for everyone. and in many cases they go on to validate there arguments by giving examples of content that is literally so easy it would take more effort to actually fail it than it would to succeed.

one of the biggest and more recent examples of this is kugane castle. even at like i280 ish with your 290 job gear and whatever right side junk you got. you simply cannot fail at yojimbo.. it is virtually impossible from a mechanical point of view. your entire party can afk and let daigorro pick up all the coins. you still will not die....

Interesting anecdotal response - the 1st time I did Kogane Castle we wiped on the 1st series of trash mobs (yeah, we sucked :P). Then again on the 1st boss, and again on 2nd boss. We eventually got through and completed the dungeon, but it was a group of 4 'new' players (what are the odds of that? lol) all in quest provided gear. It was not 'cakewalk easy', but we still had fun as we chatted and joked as we did it... even with the wipes and problems we had. We did not find it "easy" to do, or a cakewalk that we could sleepwalk through.

But does that mean it's too hard? No, just as your anecdotal comments about forum posters saying it's 'easy' doesn't mean it's dead easy either. It might be easy for you and others of decent skill, or those without disabilities... yet that doesn't mean the content will be easy for everyone, and vise-versa.

So again, what you're doing is the exact same thing I talked about - your referring to comments on the forum to back you up, yet a games forums is a minority of it's player's. Most players never, ever visit or post on a forum... it's usually the high-end players and/or 'invested' players (regardless of skill) who visit and post. Yes, you do have casual's and lower-skill people here, but the vast majority of ppl posting on forums are those interested in lore, improving themselves, doing well, being as best skilled as they can, etc.... thus post's on here about how easy something in the game are... is biased towards the higher-skilled players, and not the norm.

BTW - it's been stated by a few MMO dev's about the low rate of visiting to official forums, so it's not something I'm just saying. For instance years ago Blizzard confirmed that only around 15% of their player base had ever visited the official WoW forums at that time (iirc it was back in 2012 this was said). LotRO dev's confirmed similar number's for their forums. I believe STO dev's also had the same to say at some point.

You are correct in that there are many sides to the coin - in regards to how easy/hard some content is, the claim by some that many people do not want to get better (this is true, many ppl don't care to improve.. they just want to log into a game and play without any thought of improving or such as they find the idea of that as 'work' and thus stressful, and they play games for 'fun' and don't find it 'fun' to min/max or such), how people view things due to the people they associate with, etc.

But as pointed out as well, we do not have the metrics - we do not see how many times dungeons/trials are failed, or how many times groups wipe, or how many times ppl clear content on their 1st try... or whether they are in groups of other new players to the content or with experienced well-geared players, etc. Fact is we can only go by what we read on forums, what we see in game, and what we see friends/FC's/map-talk talking about.... and all these things are biased as this limits the extent of the knowledge we have and causes a skewed view of things... because the vast majority of ppl playing the game won't speak up, they do not post on forums, they don't speak on map/zone chat, they likely aren't in a FC, etc... so you'll never see/hear their stories of struggle, woe, or success.

[bass9020]

First boss of Gubal Library(3.0, last dungeon before cap) compared to the second boss of Amdapor Keep(original endgame capped dungeon). That right there shows the hand holding the devs have done to this game in terms of making content "easier". Interesting mechanics and more ways to use CC are what we need in this game, difficulty can be more than just one shot attacks or prolonged fights due to hp sponges.

[Metsonm]

First boss of Gubal Library(3.0, last dungeon before cap) compared to the second boss of Amdapor Keep(original endgame capped dungeon). That right there shows the hand holding the devs have done to this game in terms of making content "easier". Interesting mechanics and more ways to use CC are what we need in this game, difficulty can be more than just one shot attacks or prolonged fights due to hp sponges.

You say that, but I've had horrible runs where we had to take something like 3 attempts on Gubal because people couldn't handle the side switching.

[RiyahArp]

Alexander Normal had ton of interesting mechanics, from turning into a gorilla to using a gobwalker to stepping on the right color platform, to time literally freezing. People shortchange how varied this game's boss fights can be.

[KisaiTenshi]

The definition of "too easy" is when you would literally have to not try in order to fail. When you can ignore mechanics and clear, the content is a joke. As a casual player of this game, I still want to play well...a game. It's not much of a game when it's been designed to baby you through content. Like what's the point? Really? What are we playing for in the end if we're just having everything given to us unless we're doing savage content which makes up for about .1% of the game?

The problem here is that MMORPG, at least the Japanese and Korean variety rely on a gear grind. When the content is new, you need the best available gear to play it, or you can't get through it. Hence minimum ilevel is a thing. No more complaining about gear. If you can enter the dungeon, you can complete the dungeon. If people vote abandon, it's because whoa, there's a challenge involved, it's not a faceroll.

Yet that creates this environment where people who have the best gear, go back to old content and breeze through it, ignoring the mechanics, thus creating carry situations for too much of the content. This is the problem with the MSQ. Only when the content is new, does it offer any challenge. Once you're overgeared for it, you too will wonder why it was hard at all. Arguments back at 2.0 release often had people unwilling to run content at all through the duty finder because people were woefully undergeared for it, yet you don't get the gear you need unless you play the content. Do people not remember any of the content ever having challenge? Have all new players to the game after 2.1 been carried through all content?

That's the funny thing about Eureka, in a way it's shoving actual difficulty in peoples faces, because everyone started from the same place. After one or two patches it will likely be just as much of a faceroll as all other content becomes.

Like perhaps what Square-Enix should be doing is creating it's own leaderboard system for clear times of each content at each patch (eg like this https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...lo_party=party ), and creating way to playback the top-10 or so clears in-game through the duty recorder.

[MistakeNot]

The definition of "too easy" is when you would literally have to not try in order to fail.

Good thing there isn't any content like that in the game then.