Why can't Dungeons be longer/harder, but more... piecework?

[Gula]

What the devs should definitely avoid is creating a new kind of content that resets your level and requires you to mindlessly kill mobs with no mechanics until you reach a predetermined level. This is no longer acceptable and is just a worrisome lack of creativity on their part.

I didn't mind in PotD, because leveling was so fast and as long as you ran floors pertaining to your level, it wasn't that hard getting your Aetherpool to +99. But Eureka. Pass. I played it day 1 and dropped it day 1.

[Angus-Beef]

To simply put it. Effort.

I would love none linear dungeons again, harder content, limited deaths, but people do not want to put effort into the game as is. Believe it or not there are even people on the forums who feel ultimate and savage shouldnt be in the game.

Until the people in the game leave who can\'t handle a few extra mechanics and having pay attention in their runs. We won\'t get harder content like that. Sad really.

[Vidu]

I’ve always wondered this. The FFXIV community seems to complain a lot when content is locked behind grindy effort or something that requires a lot of time and energy. But other communities ive seen, they don’t seem to complain as much. I’m not trying to start any fighting, I just never really understood why that was.

My guess would be that at least for the western community a lot of people dont come so much from other MMOs but from other FFs and they have more of an "This is a Final Fantasy game" than an "This is an MMO"-approach. This obviously effects their expectation of the game: FFs are story-heavy, story-driven games and while they can be very grindy at times, those grinds are usually tied to defeating some super-boss or just a meaningless item in your inventory. You can grind in some FFs, but if you choose not to you still gonna see most of the game and most important: Pretty much all of the story.
Most complaints about content being locked behind something that I see are in regards to story and lore being locked - sure, that glamour-thing is a nice extra-bit, but the main reason we got NMs for raids was because people who didnt want to raid were upset that they couldnt experience the coil-story-line.

Its just my personal guess ofc, but I believe that a large part of the FF-audience expects a story-heavy game and cares about having that story told to them - so they're not happy about potentially missing out on that story experience or they're more intrested in having said story told than following a mindless, potentially badly motivated grind.

[reivaxe]

The reason is simple. Like 98% of the player base shows that they don't want long, confusing dngs with gimmicks on how you progress or optional paths. With makes sense, this game has a hella-alot of dngs ... imagine each of them having some the paths and gimmicks you had to remember from the ARR dngs. People will be very annoyed if you ask them to remember the unique design and gimmick of all these dngs. I know this cause I acknowledge that I refuse to touch most older dngs for this very reason.

It's kind of a pie-in-the-sky idea to want them to release as many dngs as they do AND make them more complex than tunnel mobs -> boss. Not cause they can't do it but because most people will simply FORGET how to run them. Liiike ... sure, if there were only 20 dngs in this game I could see them being more creative. But I'm not jumping at the chance to get lost in 70+ unique set ups. Most people see dngs as a pretty looking chore you do for glam and tomes and the devs noticed this and reacted as such.

Want more complex dngs I think asking for more Eureka and HoH is your best bet.

[Nedkel]

First and foremost we need 2 different levels of dungeons.

Ones we have right now, that are not too hard to finish.
Second ones that are a lot harder with random mobs generated around the map and bosses tougher and with more skills.

The higher lvl difficulty dungeons should have more chests and allow us to buy BIS gear giving us tokens of whatever it takes to buy it from vendor.

[yukiiyuki]

And now we wont get any, because we have only 1 dungeon left and it must be tweaked so people could use trusts, therefore nothing will change. Glad that more people starting to see problem that happening right now with this game and what community desires from it.

[lolicon09]

Because some people will bitch about it, followed by the other bunch who love to do the same as the first few. I belive this is why 8-man "raids" turned into boss fights with slightly more mechanics

[monk-dps]

The fanbase did this to themselves when they cried for nerfs years ago. Hell gaming as a whole has suffered from this. Plus I'll be honest. I don't want it either. Not when we have a thread over 2k pages long cause people cant press buttons. Sorry.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

I liked ARR’s dungeon pace. TWO dungeons per patch (one MSQ, one optional). They were still as immersive as the later ones mentioned earlier in this thread.

As far as optional parts to the dungeons, OF COURSE they are going to be skipped over by most people. The DUNGEON DROPS are generally skipped over by most people, let alone crafting gear that needs to be repaired or relic bits once one’s done with that relic. Make optional portions of the dungeon THAT DROP TOMESTONES and people will start to do them. Tomestones are the main reason people run the things after their first visit, after all. Right now, dungeon drops generally serve to pay retainers, and that’s all.

I for one would love to see a dungeon run give Tomestones per chest, and a few extra on the side path (enough that visiting it will give you an additional 15% of the tomestones). Give everyone in the dungeon a job-usable drop as an auto reward for beating the final boss, subject to the Unique tags on the gear. If and only if they have every single piece of taht gear set, then start giving out randomly selected pieces usable by other jobs. Drop the hit-or-miss content and go back to two dungeons per patch to ensure some variety when running the DR’s. Three every two patches is not enough, let alone one every patch. One every patch will do nothing but make people even more sick of each dungeon than they already are. That sickness existed in a much less vitriolic form with two dungeons per patch, and has only gotten worse each time the dungeons per patch have been reduced.

[Shurrikhan]

The 'community' has a 'set way of doing things' and wooooe-be-it-to-you if you dare to deviate from that. You mass pull, you burn it down, and if you don't do that you are bad and deserve to be kicked. You waste everyone's time otherwise. Git gud.

The 'community' doesn't want new things that require straight shot 'pull it all and burn' because that isn't fast-efficient-rewards-out that is the 'way it is'.

To be fair, though, that's not so much "mass pull or get gone" as "do the obviously two-to-three-times as efficient option or get gone". If you change the dungeon designs, you change the optimal choice. Heck, you might even be able to make two choice in tight balance of each other. After all, we still run more than just 8 jobs, so clearly "near-enough to optimal" has a place. A 30 to 60% efficiency loss is just a far cry from 1-3%.

Now, alternatives do not somehow have to be winding dungeons. A "straight-shot" dungeon can still amount to far more than "Sprint, tank AoEs pack 1 while running past, tank AoEs pack 2 while running past, tank reaches and AoEs pack 3, and we all AoE them down; boss; repeat."

There's a lot that's a mere easily manipulated consequence of tuning, mechanical scarcity, and spacing that we take as inseparable from the medium just because each dungeon thus far has so tightly imitated the ones before it. They're not. They're side-effects of something that could change with any new dungeon, possibly even without a sudden spike in general difficulty.

Put simply, players don't want to waste time, and many are playing under time constraints. If a winding 90-minute dungeon (including, say, a semi-weekly bonus) with side paths produced more reward per minute than our current ones (including the daily roulette bonus), players would probably use the 90-minute when possible, and then a few 30-minute ones if they can't manage a second 90-minute in that week. Imo, that's not a rut so much as common sense; it's just the choices that are forced upon them that are in a rut.