Quote Originally Posted by Sacae View Post

It's true that hardcore content is gated. But not by raiders, it's gated by the design of the game. the jump from normal content to Extreme in ShB and EW was *insane.* You went from faceroll easy to "die a hundred times because nothing makes sense and everything kills you."

Dungeons and Normal Trials and Normal Raids and Alliance Raids are not just there for you to walk through and mutter about how pretty they are. they are supposed to be a linear progression that challenges you gradually and sets you up for endgame content. The devs WANT people to do extremes and raids, that's why they put so much time and effort into them.
This for me was very important in SHB I did bozja as a super casual and new player, and I cleared the Red Chocobo deathless a few times then I randomly saw someone in chat saying it was harder than some extremes and that actually pushed me into trying Extremes (I had a really bad raiding anxiety) also I was in a good FC at the time that use to run and teach Extremes was funny cuz I even found some Ivalice mechs harder than some extremes mechs, that eventually pushed me into Savages in EW (even tho that was also out of necessity cuz the content in EW was boring and didn't find much stuff to do). Right now DT is perfectly tunned to push players to actually play the game and learn mechs which is amazing cuz this isn't a walking simulator like EW alliances there should be some kind of improvement and push players to be better and try new stuff, if you ask me I would rather be casual in shb that learned and improved with the game than a EW raider that actually got bored with 90% of the content.