Old content has become so easy that it is no longer fun

[van_arn]

Have fun seeing vote abandon get spammed. I see so many Experienced players alone die to simple trivial mechanics makes me wonder how half of them got through the game. Throw new players into the mix and duty finder becomes frustration finder cause of the brain dead players you will run into.

There'll be a period of readjustment, yes. That's fine.

Again, it's not a matter of making things hardcore. It's a matter of making things easy.

If people want trivial, then they have beastmen dailies and fates. People might actually do fate parties again outside of gemstone farming.

[Ath192]

Whenever I do thordan, I play my own game of trying to soak as much damage as possible. I still havent found a way to kill myself yet.

I started in September. It does kinda ruin the story moments, when you are expecting a epic fight, only to recive a total joke haha. The worst offenders for me were castrum, prae and Thordan, who apparently always was a joke hehe. Things got better in stormblood

I have tried to kill myself in that fight too lol! You really can't. That is a very very sad boss. Way to ruin Heavensward. All that build up for a boss that can't even harm you.

[NanaWiloh]

There'll be a period of readjustment, yes. That's fine.

Again, it's not a matter of making things hardcore. It's a matter of making things easy.

If people want trivial, then they have beastmen dailies and fates. People might actually do fate parties again outside of gemstone farming.

Adjust to the idea of dying more to easy then they have to trivial.

[DiaDeem]

Here's my two cents:

I've been playing since ARR launched in 2013, and I've never considered old content as the main source of "fun" in the usual sense of the word. Job/dungeon/fight mechanics that we take for granted can be harder than we realize for new players... or not, it really depends on each new player. I've always felt satisfied about running old content for the sake of the rewards and just help new players to clear it.

While I see what you mean, I'm a bit torn about it. Sastasha (Hard)'s final boss (The Kraken) used to be a SLOG because how much HP the boss had at the time. It wasn't harder, or more fun. It was just a boring slog. Wiping 3 times to the Coincounter in AV because the tank kept getting one-shot by the swipe wasn't fun or challenging, it was just tiering. The Steps of Faith was brutal when it first came out, and it legit was bottlenecking entrance to HW if you didn't have an FC or a group of friends willing to help you with the clear. That wasn't fun either. The Void Ark fights were never hard. They just took 90 years because everything had so much HP. Then you have things like Cape Westwind or Prae Lahabrea, which were never hard to begin with.

Let's say we buff Story Ifrit. We give it more HP and make the plumes/eruptions one shot people. Would that be more fun? Unless it's 4 new people, usually a single veteran (or two if you wanna stretch it) can carry old fights just by virtue of avoiding every single attack from experience. At that stage you only make Ifrit last longer, newbies die more, and you may just clear the fight regardless on a single pull anyway. Newbies would only get frustrated and I doubt most people would even care to explain why they died to mechanics and just do the duty and leave as soon as they're done. Not sure making the fight last longer helps too much. Chances are you're just doing Ifrit on your leveling roulette anyway, and we could make an argument about how a longer fight would help newbies, but the thread seemed to be about "old content being fun" for veterans, unless I got something wrong. As a quick statement: I don't think MSQ should be skill-gated. Everything should be clearable for the sake of progressing the story.

My issue is that I feel every single piece of content would have to be rebalanced individually if we really wanted to make things air-tight.

Would I like to see maybe Ultima in Prae be a little harder? Yeah, sure. Though Prae needs a lot more work than just that.
Do we need to make say.... Castrum Abania or Snowcloak "harder"? No.. not really, I don't see the point.

For this discussion I believe it is important to point out exactly what parts of the game you think would truly benefit from a rebalance to make them harder. Some stuff I feel is just fine being easy to clear for the sake of progress.

[van_arn]

Here's my two cents:

I've been playing since ARR launched in 2013, and I've never considered old content as the main source of "fun" in the usual sense of the word. Job/dungeon/fight mechanics that we take for granted can be harder than we realize for new players... or not, it really depends on each new player. I've always felt satisfied about running old content for the sake of the rewards and just help new players to clear it.

The problem is we're generally on the polar opposite end of the spectrum from the specifics you describe. No, I'm not saying content should be brought back to how it was "in the good old days." Final Steps of Faith and Titan Hard were roadblocks, sure, but they don't need to be like they were. They are exceptions that would need to be handled individually. The issue is everything (some rare exceptions apply, such as Curtain Call) is far too generous when synced now.

It's not about making things "hardcore." It's about making queued content require some semblance of gameplay beyond just rushing through to get a reward. Ignoring mechanics should always be reserved for unsynced clears, never synced clears.

[kpxmanifesto]

Very bad example as Tanks have very strong self heals right now.

Lol not sure if this is a troll post, but that's the point I'm bringing up.

[Xuto-cxb]

This is a difficult issue for the devs to address. They aren't allotted the resources to go back to old content and the sales they've been getting tell them to keep going as is. But this IS a story based game, intended to be a FF first and MMO second. People playing through the story are dealing with joke content for far too long. And even the toughest normal content really only barely measures up to needing any level of awakeness.

Que for alliance roulette, you get CT 9 times out of 10. Que for normal raid roulette, you get the first two of alexander 9 times out of ten. I suspect the meme level of ease turns people off, because I rarely get anything beyond that. At least that's been my experience.

Too many bosses have mechanics that can be skipped or ignored, even in SB. So when people run into something at all challenging to with mechanics that have to be respected, they give up and quit. And that makes others not want to bother too. This game has conditioned people to only accept laughably easy content.

But it's not going to improve. SE is a business and FFXIV prints money. They're not going to waste money on old content, no matter how nice it would be to have things be beefed up a bit.

[Joint]

See title. Lack of ilvl syncing and general power creep and tuning adjustments with expansions have rendered pretty much all content pre-Stormblood into a joke, and even Stormblood and Shadowbringers content has suffered a fair bit. I had hoped the stat squish might address this somewhat, but it's just as bad if not worse.

Dungeon packs die in 10 seconds and the bosses don't fare much better. Trial fights which are supposed to be epic story moments get deleted before you even get to see half their mechanics or hear half their music. There is no damage even if you fail mechanics, pretty much the only way to die is Doom or if you fall off the edge of the arena.

I dread signing up for any roulette besides Expert these days because probably 80% of the time I will be put into a piece of old content that was once fun but is now a dull chore because of poor scaling. At that point I have to wonder if I'm playing the game to enjoy myself or simply to farm currency.

It's not only a bad experience for veteran players, it's a poor representation of the game for new players. They have to play through hundreds of hours of content before seeing a fight that doesn't instantly fall over before it can do anything. If you don't already know what the mechanics do it's impossible to tell how they work because there's almost no penalty for failing them, and even if you somehow die the rest of the party will just clear without you. You can't learn anything about the game.

Min ilvl helps but is not perfect, and not an option for the vast majority of players. You cannot sign up for roulettes min ilvl and even if you could, few would do so without increased reward.

I don't think it's fair to say "just do Extreme/Savage then" either. The vast majority of content in the game is normal mode and there's no reason it shouldn't be fun. Everyone has reason to run that content, not just players who don't do Extreme/Savage. Trivial content isn't fun. If people want content to remain trivial so it's faster to farm, they may as well just implement a system where you wait some given amount of time and then have the rewards given to you automatically.

I humbly ask the devs to do something. Even just dialling up the enemy HP on old content by a bit would go a long way. Implementing ilvl scaling for old trials and normal raids would be nice too. If you're worried about people complaining about their duties taking longer, feel free to increase the rewards by an appropriate amount too.

Old content was always made easy once you are one or two expansions after it. It's been like that since day one. Last expansion I could clear ALL SAVAGE HW trials solo except sephirot Savage HW raids, Duo for all but the last set. It's like this in j about every mmo. You cant P{OSSIBLY expect old content to be relevant forever.

If you want content harder content but refuse to do the harder content? You are trying to say normal mode is supposed to be hard, but it's not. It's ENTRY level even when it's current. They aren't gonna waste time and money making OLD content hard because it may be hard for new people that aren't being carried by their brother (you aren't new so you know all the mechanics, he doesn't). Send him in the duty alone and when he gets out ask him. otherwise this is just an opinion of a MAX level character.

[MidnightEquinox]

There's not much benefit to adding mechanics requirements to older content. Running group content, unlike solo content, relies on player critical mass, which naturally dwindles for older content and moves to new content and any content that offers good rewards. Things get worse when such content ends up being done by mixes of newbies and veterans - while the theory of newbies learning mechanics this way sounds good, that's pretty much never what happens in practice. Most veterans in older content seem to get very frustrated very quickly if things go less than smooth, few are in there to enjoy the mechanics, most are in there for rewards. And if you remove the rewards, nobody will go there at all.

If veteran players are frustrated by the performance we newer players offer in some content they feel compelled to run, I think a better solution would be removing some of these things from MSQ, but I imagine the developers put them in MSQ to help new players get their feet wet.

[Ath192]

The easy fix is to make all roulette content min ilvl by default. It won’t make it that much harder and at least the content will not be so underwhelming new players wishing for fulfilling experiences quit out of boredom.

Barely and Dev time spent in this and more challenge.