Request for HC characters

[ArchlordPie]

tl;dr: Just go back to WoW.

For some context, "HC" or "hardcore" characters in other games, such as WoW and Diablo, are characters with permanent death enabled. If they die at any time, for any reason, whether that reason is the player's fault or not, the character is lost forever. Some games let you change the character into a non-hardcore version after they die. Others just delete them outright.

The operative phrase there is "for any reason, whether that reason is the player's fault or not". If you disconnect while fighting something and die before you reconnect, too bad. If another player pulls a zillion mobs, you happen to wind up on their aggro table, and that player themself dies, and then all the mobs run over to you and delete you next? Too bad. If you're running instanced content and happen to mess up a boss mechanic and die to it? That's it for that character, go next.

There's a reason WoW has entirely separate servers dedicated to hardcore characters. The mode at its core is too easy to troll unless the guy considering trolling it has as much to lose as their potential victim(s). MPK is against ToS but "plausible deniability" is very easy to establish if you know what you're doing. There's nothing stopping someone from ending a HC character by popping into a random dungeon as tank, wall-to-wall pulling, not popping anything, dropping dead, and going "oops mb" as the SAM dies and screams their head off over having to start over again.

So you wouldn't just need separate servers in 14's case. You'd need a dedicated data center for it that has cross-DC travel disabled both ways. And that's a hard sell for a mode that's likely to appeal to less than 1% of FF14's total playerbase.

But let's assume that's not an issue. What do you do about the MSQ? Because that's a huge pile of effectively free experience players can get just from walking places and skipping cutscenes. What do you do about MSQ solo duties if you do away with the MSQ? Force them to be done on Normal? What happens to a character if they time out of a duty but don't actually run out of health? Does that still end a HC run? What's stopping someone from starting a MSQ solo duty, doing the bare minimum to not get AFK kicked, letting the duty time out so it's considered failed, then restarting it on Very Easy, which is now available because the duty was failed once?

Now the flip side of the coin: would you want to lose your character for messing up In From The Cold, or one of the several duties where you aren't actually playing as your character?

Say you're in a dungeon and realize you've messed up a one-shot mechanic. What's stopping you from abandoning the duty before the mechanic actually kills you? Basically everyone's willing to sit through a 30 minute penalty in order to save a HC character. Is that considered MPK if you do that as the tank and the boss winds up killing all your teammates?

Long story short, there are both IRL logistics and game design hurdles to overcome in potentially adding a hardcore mode to FF14, to the point where it's better off for SE to just not invest in it at all, and for people who desire it to just go play a game that offers it.