Parsing? Drama? ToS? Solution!

[Hyrist]

The devs should kindly reinforce what is and isn't casual friendly content and start adding more difficult content back into the game.

If the game itself is enforcing the need to self improve to progress, then people will naturally adjust to the ever growing difficulty and competency should naturally reassert itself amongst those who want to see all the content.

This is the most non invasive way to force it without out right gating people out of savage and EX. It's fair and realistic and something this game used to do very well until SB. When MMO set the bar low it only allows people who don't try pass through with their hands held.

I get your approach, but the problem you run into that, from the business perspective, is falloff. Even before the 'casualization' of the game, you have a very small percentage of people completeting harder content, so them adding more of it, that players won't enjoy, will cause friction.

This friction is what caused Normal Raids to exist.

Also, I'm confused as to how you are thinking to accomplish reinforcing the non-casual content. Anything on the level of Extreme Trials and above is already gated by requiring you to use Party Finder. A pop-up disclaimer is just going to go ignored with all the rest of the help text. And trying to tilt the game to be 'more difficult' means you're going to bleed people if you put it in there way.

So, let me suggest some groundwork barriers for the suggestions.

1. We have to recognize existing trends and elements in the game - so, while fights in the story defiantly had more mechanics, they did make the fights through the story overall more easy to get into thanks to Trust System.
2. We're on restriction on manpower, so to add something, we must take something that could be updated and/or added away. SE's current trend of already doing so has sort of dictated that rule to us.
3. We have to keep in mind the expected participation limits when adding this content. Are we expecting to sacrifice potentially 95% of the player base enjoying another piece of casual content for 5%? Is that a wise decision for a company that's already showing strains of development time and manpower to make?
4. What sort of reward system for this new content do we add in? We're already enticing more powerful gear rewards across the board when it comes to Ex and Savage content, how do we entice players to do this content if our existing system already covers the essentials through multiple means?

Angus, I'm not saying your ideas are wrong off the bat, but there's a lot to consider here when you make a broad statement to say "Make the game harder/make more hard content." We're no longer in an era where people will tolerate needless difficulty for its own sake. Make the game too unappealing to casuals and you'll loose them. And like it or not, even with the staggered subscriptions, they're holding up the game. SE needs to (and will) make those decisions carefully and I would like to make suggestions with the same considerations in mind.

Edit About Dungeon Diffiuclties:

Gating people on story won't work. It was attempted by putting story in raids and the backlash was catastrophic. We're already adding mechanics into each dungeon and building off of already existing concepts. (Stack Mechanics, unique mechanics, indicators for common actions to be done within the raiding scene. Even soft enrage mechanics in dungeons made a return with Amarot.) So, how further do we educate them on basics they've already been shown repeatedly? If you overtune the basic dungeon fights people will just use Trusts to bypass that, and they have to be passable by Trusts or that system they've created is useless. You'd have to individually tune each dungeon to correspond requirements for each role to increase the difficulty and that's a huge amount of manpower to tune something 4 different ways for each dungeon. Do we restrict it to non-trust dungeons?

No I think if we're going to encourage the building of skills more than we do already, we're going to have to come with a better intermediary than simply tuning the storyline harder. We're already getting more mechanics there, and people are pushing through.

Given this I am leaning more towards gating.