Quote Originally Posted by Granyala View Post
No.
What players want is fun. Most people do not find wiping fun and frankly put: 85% of this games community does not have, nor cares to acquire, the necessary skills to beat such content. These aren't nerd players of eld that rise to the challenge. The masses of players today have no interest in challenge. They want a quick and easy dopamine fix and then move on.

I am very much against "reward-forcing" gameplay. WoW does that far too much, to the point that the DEVs seemingly no longer care if the game is fun. If participation is too low, they just throw more rewards at the problem.
So why are games like Nier Automata, Dark Souls, Bloodborne etc. more successful than the FF franchise, generally acclaimed, and keep selling like hotcakes years after their release? Why do more and more designers go that route? The quick dopamine fix doesnt work as well as good game design. The decline of many games, among them WoW (look at its playerbase - it was at its peak right after one of the hardest expansion endgames!) is because slowly but surely, cheap dopamine hits fade. FFXIV has developed a massive player retention problem between content patches because these patches barely contain interesting content for more than a week when there is no new raid. The .1 and .3 patches are just the catch-up my little pony patches to make the game easier.

Game design is much more difficult than just a cheap dopamine hit from dropping a bunch of legendary items. Right now, sadly, the MMO genre is lacking the quality of game designers that the aforementioned games have.