We Need that Feeling back of "CoP"(first release)

[Raymeo]

Just a new generation has grown up and is ready to start spending their parents money and sacrificing precious opportunities for teenage sexual encounters. There still exist an entire generation before them who enjoy more difficult content and while these new players may be a good addition to a subscription base, that doesn't mean everyone has to just stop drop and rolled everything out exclusively for their tastes.

What makes you think that they're doing it exclusively for the new generation's tastes? It's like you said yourself, immediately before that...

The players from 6 years didn't magically evolve into casual loving gaming due to Unicorn blood in the water supply.

See, you think you're being sarcastic, but you're absolutely right. Without any unicorn blood involved, I actually grew up and acquired responsibilities over the past eight years, and I doubt that I'm the only one. (Yes, eight years, not six. CoP was 2004, but I understand. We oldies want to feel younger now, right?) So while you may think that our generation is still hardcore, you're really only able to speak for yourself. Believe it or not, there are people in our generation who don't cry in their pancakes whenever casual content gets added to their games, and instead find themselves appreciating the fact that there's something new for them to do between meetings or during playdates.

And don't get me wrong, I loved CoP and still want FFXIV to make me feel like that game did when I played it. You can see my lengthy post earlier in this thread for my analysis if you'd like. So how can I be an advocate for more casual content and the feeling of CoP at the same time, you may ask? Easily, because I don't think you understand what "casual" means. It doesn't mean being terribad at playing. That's what "noob" means. "Casual" simply means having less time to play every day.

With that vocabulary out of the way, you can see that casual gamers can still be just as skilled as hardcore players, with the only difference being that they have less time to kill. Since time does not equal difficulty, (challenge is what equals difficulty,) there's no reason why we can't have something of the same caliber as CoP in difficulty, storytelling, and exploration while still allowing the casual gamers to participate. All it takes is keeping the things that I just listed (engaging difficulty, storytelling, and exploration), while simply cutting out CoP's time sinks like farming Mistmelts all night, waiting on two hour abilities between wipes, and grinding easy prey mobs for two weeks just to pop an NM. Poof, everybody's happy because (a) the skilled casuals finally have enough time to complete a mission or NM pop when they log in and (b) the hardcore players find that their level of challenge is preserved, and they're still able to keep ahead of the casuals in progression by having the time to advance in missions more frequently and pop NMs more times.