please stop make the game easier.

[LineageRazor]

on the other hand as wide as the audience may be it does a real bad job at keeping them interested... and I think the lack of difficulty is likely a part of that.

Lack of difficulty for whom? Keep whom interested?

Seeing folks complain about the ease of endgame content that can, and does, stymie 90% of the playerbase, is as common as breathing on these forums. Choose any Ex or Savage fight - ANY, old or new - and I guarantee there were plenty of folks to consider it difficult, often insurmountably so, at the time it was released. I remember folks in a thread being incredulous to hear that there were STILL folks who could not skip Soar on Zurvan toward the end of Heavensward - but it was even worse that that; not just some folks, but MOST folks couldn't do so, even in farm parties. Skilled endgame players have VERY poor conception of the actual skill levels of the majority of players in this game, and tend to assume that most are at least near their level. This is absolutely not the case.

For SE, the sweet spot for endgame content is when the most players possible find the content to be difficult, but not impossible. That level of difficulty is, naturally, going to be incredibly low for players at the top of the curve; folks who can devote three or more nights of practice to the game per week, never have any trouble capping tomestones each week, spend time researching stat weights and optimal DPS rotations and can execute them with near-spot-on regularity, and so on and so forth. Folks that meet those criteria are an extremely small proportion of the game's population, so it's not a big surprise that SE isn't going to tune a lot of content to favor them.

[Kamatsu]

Skilled endgame players have VERY poor conception of the actual skill levels of the majority of players in this game, and tend to assume that most are at least near their level. This is absolutely not the case.

They have what I call 'Associative Bias" - Most people will tend to associate with people of similar values, past-times, hobbies, etc. What this means in games such as this is that those who are higher personal skill level will tend to associate more/only with those of similar skill level - this means their view on the 'player base' skill level is warped, since the majority of players they see / deal with are of similar level to them.

While FFXIV has random grouping via the Duty Roulette, how many of these players use it just by themselves? I'd bet most of the time these players are in groups of 2/3/4 when queuing for dungeons/trials/raids via DR, so their contact with other players is either limited or none. How many of these players enter end-game raids & such solo? Doubt many do, they most likely have a groups/FC/Static/etc to do it with... and these will all be players of equivalent skill level to them.

Thus their contact and knowledge of other players skill level is limited, and what they view the common player as... is based on the skill level of those they associate with - ie associative bias.

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.

[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......

[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.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Seeing folks complain about the ease of endgame content that can, and does, stymie 90% of the playerbase, is as common as breathing on these forums. Choose any Ex or Savage fight - ANY, old or new - and I guarantee there were plenty of folks to consider it difficult, often insurmountably so, at the time it was released. I remember folks in a thread being incredulous to hear that there were STILL folks who could not skip Soar on Zurvan toward the end of Heavensward - but it was even worse that that; not just some folks, but MOST folks couldn't do so, even in farm parties. Skilled endgame players have VERY poor conception of the actual skill levels of the majority of players in this game, and tend to assume that most are at least near their level. This is absolutely not the case.

This stems from the fact XIV has little to no difficulty curve. Expert dungeons, trials and normal mode raids are all incredibly easy with very few exceptions. The next logical progression is Extreme, which is considerably harder than anything which came before it. Skip Soar persisted because people have no idea how to execute a proper opener. Is that an issue with Zurvan's difficulty or perhaps XIV doing precisely little to explain how jobs function? Newer players shouldn't be expected to use third party resources, however you have little choice should you want to learn anything beyond a standard combo. Scaling down the difficulty does nothing to incentivize improvement. In fact, it does the opposite. Stormblood made numerous shifts towards being easier yet... nothing changed. People have no reason to improve, or believe themselves better than they actually are. Countless times where people get agitated about damage in chat, they're the ones failing.

No. Skilled players are plenty aware of how poor the overall playerbase is. They simply don't make excuses for them. Many of those same players are more than willing to offer advice; they are usually the ones making guides. Being skilled does not inherently mean you lack objectivity.

Because look at Wildstar, a game made for the raid and content elitists.

Man it sure is doing good.

Oh wait, it went free to play because no one will play it.

A common misconception; one I used to assume based on bad word of mouth. Wild Star failed due to poor combat design, lackluster secondary content and an aesthetic which didn't appeal to its demographic. The raid focus certainly contributed, but it was merely one reason among many.

[Tridus]

Lack of difficulty for whom? Keep whom interested?

Seeing folks complain about the ease of endgame content that can, and does, stymie 90% of the playerbase, is as common as breathing on these forums. Choose any Ex or Savage fight - ANY, old or new - and I guarantee there were plenty of folks to consider it difficult, often insurmountably so, at the time it was released. I remember folks in a thread being incredulous to hear that there were STILL folks who could not skip Soar on Zurvan toward the end of Heavensward - but it was even worse that that; not just some folks, but MOST folks couldn't do so, even in farm parties. Skilled endgame players have VERY poor conception of the actual skill levels of the majority of players in this game, and tend to assume that most are at least near their level. This is absolutely not the case.

^ 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 savage data on FFLogs, ignoring that most of the playerbase doesn't exist in either of those things.

The other difference is that we want content that's fun and challenging for us. That's going to vary from person to person, but we're very good judges of what is fun and challenging for us individually. SE has to cater to as many people as realistic to make money. It's a very different thing than a savage raider saying "stuff is too easy."

[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?

[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.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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

A good number of dungeons fit that description. Even the story mode trials give echo upon failure, thereby adding less incentive to improve. Why care if you wipe when the game will gift you permanent Trick Attack?