Look 'ma, it's the thread that's on tv!

Just want to throw my opinion here, am a casual, have been since ARR, I don't want to commit and maintain a schedule, I don't want the game to be difficult to the point of being frustrating, I also don't want to feel like I have to commit like I used to on wow. Am mostly on the game because I enjoy leveling, running dungeons and making my friends smile, yet, since shadowbringers on a lesser level and then endwalker, I've felt I've been left behind. None of the content that I reasonably want to engage in challenges me anymore. Dawntrail feels like a step in the right direction to restore what was lost to me in that transition to accomodate more players.

Like, people that are struggling with dawntrail and expressing it in this thread feel like they're missing context, that the only FFXIV they've ever known is SHB and beyond, so they feel slighted, but to a player like me, they took the bar too low for low commitment content, and they are readjusting it. They aren't making a new move out of nowhere here from my perspective, they're fixing mistakes they made in the past. There's also another dimension to understand in this, they can't cater to everyone reasonably, there's a range of players that any given game will cater to, and when they made changes to difficulty in SHB, they did not widen that range, they dragged it to another place in the spectrum, and that left a wide gap between experts/normal raids and savage. Like, to think that they could cater to every player is kinda utopian ? Holding CBU3 to that standard is pretty unreasonable to me. Alternatively, you have the ultimate choice, you can choose not to engage in content that is too hard for you up to yeah, not engaging with the game anymore.

Unexpected difficulty is always jarring at first in a video game, but as you try and try, your standards readjust, you become better, and that's a reward in and of itself. Personally, am pleased by the slight increase in difficulty and how much more dynamic fights are, keeps me attentive and on my feet. And well, I'm a parent-aged gamer well past my prime.

One last thing, let's not forget to put the "dawntrail too hard" criticisms against "endwalker braindead" criticism, just to show the reality that no matter what CBU3 will do, people will complain. It's their game, not mine, so I prefer to defer to them and when the game goes south for me, I speak with my money. I'm willing to bet that this thread made it so many people who wouldn't throw their voice in the mix do so in the end, and from what I can tell, this ultimately worked against the opinion that dawntrail is too hard, which I would describe as "counter-productive". :P