We have midcore content... just too little too late.

[Absurdity]

This is honestly a major problem the dev team has with XIV. Many times the rewards for doing the content are not worth doing said content for.

The new EX is a great example, oh a weapon worse than what I have even on my alt jobs because I do savage content. I'm not even going to bother unlocking it unless the skin looks nice, which in general the EX weapons are meh. Plus next expansion they will release a nicer looking crafted version I can just buy on the market board.

Same issue happened with the criterion dungeons. Not going to be arsed to do something for absolute shit tier rewards.

Meanwhile, as an exception as a player I have no interest in Island Sanctuary style content, but the rewards for it are worth the time investment to get it up and running nearly automated, so I pushed through and got my island setup to farm the currency with minimal input and collect rewards.

Basically the content needs to have rewards equivalent to the time spent and relevant for the patch cycle if they have stats attached.

I would add that for midcore content it would need rewards that are both worth doing and require a reasonable time investment.


Let's take Criterion/Variant dungeons as an example again.

Variant had most of the interesting rewards, but because it was so incredibly easy I managed to get the achievement mount and all the rewards I wanted from it within 2 days. I understand that variant dungeons are not supposed to be midcore content, it's the easy mode, but 2 days isn't exactly a lot of mileage to get out of patch content that's supposed to keep you playing for the next 4 months.

Criterion on the other hand only has 1 reward we really need to talk about, the mount, if you're unlucky you will need to run Criterion 25 times to get this mount. Considering the average completion time of Criterion that's something few people can be bothered to do, which means people cleared Criterion once and then never touched it again.