the normal content is too easy

[Stanazolol]

If they're designed to be done for hours on end, why are they 20-45 minutes apiece and only give significant rewards once a day? If you're spending hours a day wiping on a normal dungeon run, then you're either a horrible player or you're playing a very poorly designed game. It's a daily roulette, not an hourly one. You're basically being rewarded for doing daily community service and helping a new player progress through MSQ/questing. It's not like Bozja or Ultimates where you're expected to invest hours trying to progress through the content. Normal content was clearly designed as a casual experience. The reason you don't approve of normal difficulty is that you would rather design the entire game as a meritocracy. I've done my time in WoW, and I've seen how toxic and unfun games that are designed as meritocracies can become. I'm not saying that meritocracies don't have their time and place, but that time and place is in Ultimates and in try-hard modes like Bozja and solo PotD/HoH. There's no shortage of difficult content in this game.

The point was, responding to the person pretending like normal content is only easy because we've run it countless times, that for one, its designed to be run countless times, and two its moot because they're super easy even the first time.

[Ronduwil]

The point was, responding to the person pretending like normal content is only easy because we've run it countless times, that for one, its designed to be run countless times, and two its moot because they're super easy even the first time.

My point is that it's not designed to be run countless times. It's designed to be run one time. They provide overinflated incentives to get you to do them repeatedly despite the fact they they were only designed to be challenging the first time around. The content itself is designed to be compelling for new players. The rewards are designed to be compelling for the older players. Asking SE to make normal content more difficult is effectively asking for the content to suck for new players. SE understands that old players wouldn't normally want to run this stuff, so they offer high end rewards for it.

Blizzard takes the opposite approach. Their content is designed to be overly challenging for everyone, so they effectively stripped all rewards from their normal modes and locked them exclusively behind their hard modes. The reward system is designed to make the content compelling to people who normally wouldn't be bothered to do it. In my case, it worked for a time. In Cataclysm I went from being a dungeoneer who occasionally dabbled in raids to being a crucial member of a Heroic raiding guild who got the first Heroic Deathwing clear for the Alliance on my server. At the end of that, though, I was burned out and tired of feeling conflicted every time I had to choose between letting my raid down and letting one of my kids down when their extracurricular activities conflicted with raid nights. To be clear, even though my kids always won out, I still felt bad for the rest of my guild. That's why I'm now playing this game and not WoW. I would rather be rewarded for helping out newer players than rewarded for gatekeeping and try-harding.

Even now that my kids are grown, I have no desire whatsoever to pore over raid logs and practice on target dummies for hours on end. In fact, I'm glad SE bans DPS meters because it's all the more reason for me to not even install them. You can call me lazy if you want, and that's fine by me. I'm playing a video game here, not curing cancer. If I wanted to be productive in my downtime, I wouldn't be playing FFXIV.