
Originally Posted by
fusional
but then shouldn't the rewards line up with the difficulty? ie: the hardest boss should drop the best stuff (body pieces). but everyone wants the best stuff. so everyone will want to farm the optional boss, making it seem less optional.
i mean, i would personally be totally fine with it, because if it's hard enough it makes the stuff it drops even more rare, because not as many people will be able to farm it (at least at first). but certainly the community would be extremely upset about it (the same people who still call ifrit/moogle difficult).
square basically only has two options- either they try to find some kind of tentative balance between easy and hard stuff , or they have separate easy and difficult content altogether. they're currently trying to use the former, and the result is both the people who want easy/easier content and the people who want hard/harder content are unhappy with it.
so it seems the only thing they can really do to appease both sides is to have the easy and difficult content be different.
WoW sort of did this by having regular and hard/heroic versions of each raid or boss. the bosses drop the same loot either way, but if you did the hard/heroic version you get a buffed version of the regular item, and that was what set the rewards apart.
other than that, you could also dial it back to TBC-era WoW where there were different tiers of raid progression, and each subsequent tier was harder, with improved loot. the top guilds push all the way to the end tier and farm it, and other girls maybe only got through the first couple.
it seemed fair to me, but naturally people complained a lot and felt entitled to the same loot/opportunities that the top guilds had, and so blizz changed it in recent patches to be more casual-friendly. and it has alienated quite a lot of their hardcore playerbase.
i mean, if Player A is able to complete a raid/boss Player B can't come anywhere near matching, why should player B still be entitled to the same or similar stuff as Player A without all the investment or execution?
so that's the challenge Square faces, and what the community has to keep in mind when making suggestions about this sort of thing. you have to keep every demographic in mind and make sure there's something for everyone, rather than just having everyone making suggestions that fall in line solely with their own gaming preferences.
and i'm being a negative nancy about it because most of what i'm seeing is "well i don't like speed runs for X reasons so here are some suggestions i would personally think is fun, without really caring about the implications it would have on other players with different and/or more demanding expectations"