Going to the same route as WoW. The game is TOO easy

[DarkEiraStar]

The game and the story should be accessible to 100% of the player base. I get that there are plenty of people that only have fun if they're challenged, and there are people that have fun even if they're not. I have fun playing Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley. I'd hardly call those challenging games. At the end of the day you're only going to get out of the game what you put into it. Games should be fun and if you're not having fun move on. You're just wasting your money.

[Adrestia]

The game and the story should be accessible to 100% of the player base. I get that there are plenty of people that only have fun if they're challenged, and there are people that have fun even if they're not. I have fun playing Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley. I'd hardly call those challenging games. At the end of the day you're only going to get out of the game what you put into it. Games should be fun and if you're not having fun move on. You're just wasting your money.

I’m genuinely curious, what is your original statement here based on?

Even many single player JRPGs have difficulty that increases over time. If difficulty increases, then there surely must be some people for whom, somewhere along the way, the difficulty becomes too hard to continue. If you go outside classic turn-based JRPG design, it gets even more exacerbated. I can assure you there are people who never beat Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea’s main story due to the difficulty. And those aren’t Dark Souls. They aren’t even twitch reaction games. The strategy required is just beyond some people and/or their “fun limit.”

You definitely can’t rescue the princess from the castle if you consistently choke on the jumps in 8-1. That’s not a flaw in game design. That’s what makes Super Mario Bros a game instead of a movie.

[DarkEiraStar]

I’m genuinely curious, what is your original statement here based on?

Even many single player JRPGs have difficulty that increases over time. If difficulty increases, then there surely must be some people for whom, somewhere along the way, the difficulty becomes too hard to continue. If you go outside classic turn-based JRPG design, it gets even more exacerbated. I can assure you there are people who never beat Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea’s main story due to the difficulty. And those aren’t Dark Souls. They aren’t even twitch reaction games. The strategy required is just beyond some people and/or their “fun limit.”

You definitely can’t rescue the princess from the castle if you consistently choke on the jumps in 8-1. That’s not a flaw in game design. That’s what makes Super Mario Bros a game instead of a movie.

To be clear this isn't even a matter of difficultly, its a matter of perception. OP perceives FFXIV as becoming too "easy" and therefore not fun. Yet how many people would really continue to pay $13-$15 a month if they could only access half or less of the content that they wanted to played because the game was designed only for the most skilled players.

The community in WoW ruined the game long before the current expansion. All endgame content became gated behind max item levels that you could only get by already having done the content. Hardcore and Midcore got to have an exclusive club and feel superior to the casuals that only were allowed a watered down version of the raids.

The first sign of an MOO dying is not the hardcore or the midcore leaving.

[Adrestia]

To be clear this isn't even a matter of difficultly, its a matter of perception. OP perceives FFXIV as becoming too "easy" and therefore not fun. Yet how many people would really continue to pay $13-$15 a month if they could only access half or less of the content that they wanted to played because the game was designed only for the most skilled players.

The community in WoW ruined the game long before the current expansion. All endgame content became gated behind max item levels that you could only get by already having done the content. Hardcore and Midcore got to have an exclusive club and feel superior to the casuals that only were allowed a watered down version of the raids.

The first sign of an MOO dying is not the hardcore or the midcore leaving.

Umm...did we play the same WoW? With the advent of Badges of Justice (tomestones) in The Burning Crusade, WoW pioneered the concept that even if you take a break or start later, you can catch up to current tier item levels. If you can’t do Mythic raids today, it’s not because you don’t have access to strong enough gear from the last half dozen raid tiers.

For what it’s worth, I hate the badge/tomestones system for creating this race to the top and the death of old content. In EverQuest, “raid gear” and “all the other gear” were on such disparate power levels that if you wanted to raid top tier content from any of the last 3 or 4 years, you had to go back and progress through expansions to gear your people up. I realize in today’s MMO ecosystem that must sound terrible, what with old raids being ghost towns and the gear being dramatically worse than what you get for completing your first solo quest in the newest expansion. But back in EQ, when this instant gratification catch-up gear wasn’t available, that old content wasn’t abandoned. Instead, on any given server, you’d have some guilds raiding the latest content, some raiding the previous expansion, and some the expansion before that. Everyone still bought the new expansion because it offered a lot more than just endgame raids. They were just content to get to those raids a bit later (or never raid at all).

[DarkEiraStar]

Umm...did we play the same WoW? With the advent of Badges of Justice (tomestones) in The Burning Crusade, WoW pioneered the concept that even if you take a break or start later, you can catch up to current tier item levels. If you can’t do Mythic raids today, it’s not because you don’t have access to strong enough gear from the last half dozen raid tiers.

I'm not talking about the game itself, but the player base. If you wanted to do raiding outside of LFR you had to either raid with your guild or pug. If for whatever reason you couldn't raid with your guild and didn't want to leave you were left with pugging. And the vast majority of pug groups wanted you to have x ilvl (which you was often way higher than you needed or could only get by doing that raid) and proof that you had already completed the raid by sharing your achievement.

[Melichoir]

To be clear this isn't even a matter of difficultly, its a matter of perception. OP perceives FFXIV as becoming too "easy" and therefore not fun. Yet how many people would really continue to pay $13-$15 a month if they could only access half or less of the content that they wanted to played because the game was designed only for the most skilled players.

The community in WoW ruined the game long before the current expansion. All endgame content became gated behind max item levels that you could only get by already having done the content. Hardcore and Midcore got to have an exclusive club and feel superior to the casuals that only were allowed a watered down version of the raids.

The first sign of an MOO dying is not the hardcore or the midcore leaving.

Well WoW is a complex bag to unpack, because a lot went on there that has lead it to it's current state and its not a point-to-this specific-issue kind of problem.

However, if you created to much division between the best players and the average player, yeah thats gonna create problems. But, if you drop the skill floor out completely, youll end up killing your MMO as well. You cant have it so casual that most game content can be completed by literally pushing 2 skill buttons. Here's the rub: You have to find a balance with the average player that they CAN make the leap to Savage and Ultimate stuff with invested effort, while at the same time making sure those tiers are tough for the people who want it tough. This usually means raising the skill floor, not dropping it, on average players over time. The higher level they get, their skill should increase. Not just get stronger simply because they have better stats/gear.

The issue with balancing 'down' is that it is leads to a self feedback loop. Make content easy, average players think that is the average, creates a larger and larger gulf between the hardcore players and the average players, which obviously fuels resentment. This gets worse because average players stop feeling like they can realistically bridge that gap, and when devs try to implement more difficult content, players whove been trained on the easy mode cant cut it effectively and complain its to hard. This usually results in it being made easier which lowers the quality of play on average players, thus creating a larger gap and preventing harder mechanics.


As the Savage and Ultimate raids scale up in difficulty, so too must the average dungeon content. This means the average player should get better as well. With how FFXIV handles some of the midcore content and how people have difficulty even doing mechanics that have been around since the beginning of HW, or how they complain the Burn is to hard to do, its clear that there is some merit to the idea that midcore and casual content mightve been to easy. That or players have have been poorly trained to expect dungeons where they can complete the content by pressing two buttons or just pressing random skills without even trying to do proper rotations. While it's not indicative of all players, if I see a BLM at level 70 just spamming fire and bliz and doing nothing else but using transpose when they run out of mana, that is a problem. Those players are ignoring most of their kit and class mechanics and should fail dungeons and trials. That isnt a matter of "Playing the game my way" at that point, but deciding that you cant be bothered to even play the game at all but expect the rewards.

Like I said before, if youre in 390s and pulling 2-3k dps as a DPS, youre not doing something right. If a tnak can sit in tank stance spamming ONLY their aggro combo and get the near same DPS as you, this is a big problem in the quality of skill. And oddly, what Ive seen is the people most hostile to the idea of making things harder are the very same people who just push one or two buttons to play their class and never seem to want to improve. As long as their is a visible path to improvement, I would hazard MOST players would be ok with upping the difficulty.

[Edax]

But, if you drop the skill floor out completely, youll end up killing your MMO as well. You cant have it so casual that most game content can be completed by literally pushing 2 skill buttons.

False. Literally OSRunescape has just an autoattack and a special attack. That MMORPG is still going on strong.

If anything, Runescape 3 killed itself by adding a hotbar and a bunch of skills that the playerbase wasn't interested in. Why push 12 buttons to do the same job when you can just click once? It's needless busywork.

[Shirosama]

Stop with this nonsense.

If you haven't beaten savage and ultimate you have 0 to say about how "easy" the game is period.

[SerLuke]

Standing in a spot wating a fate spawn, rinse & repeat. "fun"

Or maybe he was one of the people actually spawning the fates and having fun instead of standing around?

[Vahlnir]

Or maybe he was one of the people actually spawning the fates and having fun instead of standing around?

There's nothing necessarily fun about spawning them either. Kill x amount of mobs to spawn y. Sooo thrilling and engaging!