the normal content is too easy

[Zarkovitch]

The reason is design like that it because succesful. It show by facts how popular the game is right now.

[Banriikku]

In a game accessibility do not mean lesser difficulty. By no means...
It means, possibilty to reach this content. Simply reducing difficulty will result in accessibility but the price is engagement and as a result the content will become repetitve and pointless.

In my opinion the content needs a skill floor definition and this can not be "i can turn on the pc".

Also regarding the argument Success:
Success is not defined by how many player log in or how many accounts beeing made. It is a combination of many things together. If you are looking only for one metric you will get a lot of problems on your hand as a dev. I like the free trial campaign but this is not a success metric on it self - its free and no money is made from this directly only if its succeeds and the player starts paying.
An online game needs new but also old players or it will starve in the long run.

WoW used to only to cater for the veterans as an extreme but FF14 goes just the other extreme and only looks out for the newcomers. Both decisions are not good and will result in problems. I hope the new dungeon is a result of the dev team recognizing this problem and giving the old and new players alike stuff in the future.

[Godzillaxpowerrangers]

I remember when steeps was new and how it was a decent challenge but then they nerfed it because it was road blocking so many. Same for uncle cid in monastery.

[EnigmaticDodo]

You are preaching to the choir.

The choir hears you, yet cannot sing your song.

We all languish.

Welcome to the state of the game.


I feel like it's better to give up at this point, but people who are better than I fight on. I cheer for you. I hope for the best. That's only so much though.

Good luck!

[LittleImp]

The reason is design like that it because succesful. It show by facts how popular the game is right now.

This game actually isn't that popular though. Sure, it's grown a bit within its lane over the years, but people in the community seem to overestimate how big this games reach actually is.

This game has never even managed to achieve 1/5th of what was WoWs peak subscriber count. There are games out there that pull in more users in a single day than this game manages to pull in over a span of 3 months.

Retention on this game is always surprisingly low when a major influx of players is brought in by an external source. Their content model actually alienates a lot of potential players, with lack of difficulty, MSQ gating and slow combat pacing being extremely common complaints. In my personal experience, of all of the friends I've introduced this game to, only 1 actually made it out of ARR.

[Raoabolic]

The reason is design like that it because succesful. It show by facts how popular the game is right now.

Selling horse armor was successful. Doesn't mean it's good for the game. lol

[Avatre]

They definitely need to adjust things to slowly increase difficulty as you progress. Right now, everything feels flat for the curve, rather than going up steadily as you go along. We shouldn't be able to do a lot of the half paying attention that is happening a lot of the time.

Not to mention adjusting rewards from some roulettes, or the way they work entirely, to make it so the higher duties actually start popping more than 1/10 of the time(if that often).

[angienessyo]

I think the last time we had normal content that everyone at the time thought was challenging was Shinryu normal. And when that trial was relevant there was constant threads about how it was too hard and the devs shouldn't make story content difficult. So I don't see them cranking up the difficulty again for normal stuff any time soon.

[Striker44]

This game actually isn't that popular though. Sure, it's grown a bit within its lane over the years, but people in the community seem to overestimate how big this games reach actually is.

This game has never even managed to achieve 1/5th of what was WoWs peak subscriber count. There are games out there that pull in more users in a single day than this game manages to pull in over a span of 3 months.

Retention on this game is always surprisingly low when a major influx of players is brought in by an external source. Their content model actually alienates a lot of potential players, with lack of difficulty, MSQ gating and slow combat pacing being extremely common complaints. In my personal experience, of all of the friends I've introduced this game to, only 1 actually made it out of ARR.

It is actually very popular right now, all things considered. This isn't the age of the MMO anymore like it was in the early 2000's. WoW achieved its amazing feat by creating a casual-friendly game at the perfect time the genre itself was peaking. Speaking frankly, you could design the literal perfect MMO right now and you still wouldn't come close to reaching WoW's peak, simply because you have an entire younger generation of gamers who have moved away from long-term MMO's and to the immediate gratification of the Mobile, MOBA, and FTP genres. In this day and age, an FTP w/ microtransactions on a mobile device is always going to get more players than a subscription-based MMO. That's just reality.

Given that environment, EW has been an enormous success. It blew away all previous xpacs, and even the late-patch troughs (which happen in *every* game in this genre) are still miles above the number of players during similar late-patch troughs in previous expansions. Take a trip around YT or even Reddit (of all places) and you'll see a massive amount of praise for EW.

[benji42]

I definitely agree about things being over-telegraphed. One of the best experiences I've ever had in a dungeon was Tam Tara hard. There were 3 new players and it was really fun explaining how the fights worked instead of them just being able to go in blind like most others. The other players actually had fun because we talked?? i know crazy that happens in an MMO lol. It's not even a hard dungeon. The way dungeons work now just stifles any positive social interaction