Zepla: The Players Endwalker Left Behind

[Renathras]

Since this forum heavily discussed Zepla's last video, she's now put out her follow-up video of the last one. Let's discuss:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2-CV9cKC1s

EDIT:

Summary of her points, by popular request:

1) She starts by making VERY general categories of sections of the playerbase, noting that hard and fast rules don't always fit. In general, she defines casual players as those who don't necessarily have a lot of time to play or play the game to chill out and relax; the harder/hardcore (the latter term she doesn't like so much) where people are expected to do research outside of the game, spend more time practicing everything, and show up on a schedule with other players to perform; in the middle, content would be for "someone who doesn't want to fall asleep" doing normal content stuff, but don't want the huge commitment of harder content like Savage and some Extremes.

2) To this middle group, she says in the past we had Bozja and Eurkea, though in the past (her last video), mentioned that the Relic was "peak casual" content, since it didn't involve raiding or the like, and that she struggled to feel engaged in some of it. She was originally going to make this video about casual players lacking content. She poked her feeds and decided that casual players were fine with roulettes and stuff and enjoy content going smooth all the time and being predictable, which she herself finds boring and she enjoys things being chaotic and being uncertain, at least after the first few times of doing it.

3) She thinks Bozja was good midcore content that could be easily jumped into, be more engaging than story content, more chaotic, but also didn't feel really punishing for failure (though I'll note personally, people felt different at the time from the CLL Mettle loss...)

4) But this is the content that is missing. When she talks to her Savage friends, they define midcore as Savage raids or maybe Extremes, but that isn't what casual or new players say is midcore, and that this was surprising and upsetting to her in a way. Casual players have been telling her, when she's asked why they don't think about doing that content, that they feel the jump in difficulty is too large and there's no middle-ground. Something she seems now to agree with as she's reflected on that feedback. That there's no real bridge to prepare you for that leap, and that it's a large jump from the easy side of things to the hardcore content that demands guide and rotation and "a whole powerpoint presentation", and she says she knows this is hard for her fellow raiders to see, who see Extreme as a joke and have a hard time imagining the experience of these other players.

5) She says that midcore content is the "essential bridge" between the two sides.

6) She mentions Eureka as an example of this bridge, due to BA. (I personally think this is a bad example, since BA's perma-death tends to freak people out, but CLL/DR(normal)/Dalriada is probably a good example). "You need people to be in the same place sometimes"; she feels that that type of content brings both ends of the community together to clear content, which helps bridge the gap and keep people's perspectives more grounded in reality.

7) She says some people want to count Extreme trials as medium content, and while she seems to think it's become hardcore, she says it doesn't really matter at this point since there's only one per patch anyway, "one piece of content every four months you can only do a few times" and that people tend to wait for the next expansion to farm anyway, so this doesn't really help much even IF we were to call it middle content, which is debatable to begin with.

8) She thought Criterion would be this, as easy, normal, and hard, but instead it was casual, hardcore, harder-core, and not really a bridge. And likewise, that Deep Dungeon didn't really allow it; she says in both cases it was really group focused. "Honestly, once I feel like the content is asking you to get a group together that needs to be consistent for several days and like needs to know what's going on, we're kind of moving far beyond that being an easy thing to just jump into with low pressure and not be too worried about screwing up. That's when we're moving further into this hard content territory. And, of course, we know that solo Deep Dungeon is some of the most hardcore content in the game."

9) She read a post from the forums about a player saying there's no real midcore content and they don't feel like they fit anywhere, and this is kind of depressing to Zepla since she likes high end content and there's not really a way for people to dip their toes into content to get to the higher end. That when people ask her for advice, she suggests syncing older content that was more midcore difficulty to try and progress to harder that way, and that's really a jank way of doing it since midcore content doesn't seem to exist now for that middle step.

10) She doesn't want it to seem like she thinks casual should be "piss easy" all the time and thinks it should be exciting, though she recognizes exciting doesn't necessarily mean harder. She (I think confusingly, given how she's defined the terms) thinks of herself as a midcore player on the harder end. But regardless, she thinks this gap in the middle is a big problem right now. And she encourages feedback and comments and wants the community to play the game together, have at least some types of things they can do together, and thinks it's healthy for everyone.

[Boblawblah]

Two things:

1. If you really want discussion, leading with the snarky "takes Zepla's word as law" isn't the best idea

2. Mind giving a summary of her points in point form? I'm not going to watch that as I think it's probably just rehashing everything for the 1000th time but maybe I'm wrong.

[R041]

[AlexiaD]

Two things:

1. If you really want discussion, leading with the snarky "takes Zepla's word as law" isn't the best idea

2. Mind giving a summary of her points in point form? I'm not going to watch that as I think it's probably just rehashing everything for the 1000th time but maybe I'm wrong.

this tbh, for both points

[EZGIL]

[Carin-Eri]

Two things:

2. Mind giving a summary of her points in point form? I'm not going to watch that as I think it's probably just rehashing everything for the 1000th time but maybe I'm wrong.

Agreed. To be honest it does feel as if she picked up on the fact that her previous video/commentary generated lengthy discussions and decided to capitalise on it somewhat.

[AlexiaD]

There you go.



I'm old enough to remember complaints from doing so before, but done.



There was neither condescention nor bitterness (I could see you thinking snark, but no bitterness at all). And funny you praise the brevity while two people above, one who routinely gets annoyed at my post length, are asking for longer. So I edited to add it in.

EDIT:



You did literally ask for it:

I edited it 30 secs ago before you posted your edit lol, I thought you were going to go on a massive wall of text again, I know you, but hey good for the summary, thanks

her takes are terrible tbh aside from the bozja/eureka take and that it was missing in EW.

[Boblawblah]

clipped for content limit

Thank you Ren, no insult was intended with my comment, I just had little faith that there would be new content.

[SargeTheSeagull]

She's not wrong. I still remember when I got into savage in Eden's Gate and I and a friend of mine formed a new static of people who'd never touched savage before. I didn't know what a GCD was. I didn't know what an opener was. I didn't know what a rotation was or a burst window for that matter. Half of that group quit because they didn't realize how huge the difficulty jump was. Normal content is so easy you basically cannot fail and extreme/savage is so hard that if a single person makes one mistake, it's a wipe. Now, my friend and I got good and have cleared nearly every raid tier since but most of that static totally fell apart and either quit raiding or quit the game altogether but her main point about how there's no midcore content to bridge the difficulty gap is dead-on. This has been an issue since I started playing in 3.3 but the absence of an adventuring foray in EW has made it way more obvious.

[VerdeLuck]

I would disagree with BA being midcore, it has the same hallmarks of what makes something generally hardcore.
-punishing deaths/limited chances to raise
-required to be there on a schedule to practice/attempt
-requires reading extensive guides beforehand
-requires specific gearing before entering the instance to attempt a clear
-requires a preplanned group and being in discord voice to attempt (this is requiring more than most EXs and most Savages in PF)

I dont think that style of duty is going to be the midcore savior that she thinks it will.

Also from what I've seen in-game, forcing hardcore and casual players to interact together for content generally creates a situation where
-hardcore players get frustrated at lack of progress and feels like they're being drug down and trapped in content when they could be farming something else.
-casuals feel they're being constantly pressured or berated for small mistakes and that what they do is not worthy of the potentially toxic responses they get from the hardcore players trying to push them along.
-eventually they self-segregate anyways because the hardcore players will organize in discord/PF with their strict requirements to make sure the runs go smooth, and the remaining players will be causals who just run the content as casual content.


For a criticism of Zepla, I looked back through her videos and she seems to have cleared multiple ultimates (or at least DSR before TOP came out). I'm not certain how she exactly defines herself as a midcore player in this context and claims to know what those midcore players want, when she is very much like the hardcore ultimate players she mentioned before, looking down with a skewed perspective.
It seems like she's just trying to guess, like how previously she said relics were peak casual content, and then realized she was far off on how casual players want to play. If she was wrong about that it's possible she's wrong again.
Which if she's just guessing, that's fine but I wouldn't hold her up as an expert then if she's not in the demographic she's trying to talk about and is just making guesses based on what she sees in her twitch chat/youtube comments.