Chaotic is midcore, in case you were wondering

[OlafQuintessa]

If ever there was confirmation that the producers are totally out of touch...

“During the 6.x era, we received a lot of player feedback regarding a lack of midcore content, as well as a strong desire for more large-scale content,” he tells me. “The chaotic alliance raid is our direct response to these requests. With that in mind, we decided our target audience would primarily be those who fall somewhere between extreme trials and the first two savage encounters.."

- Lead battle designer Masaki "Mr Ozma" Nakagawa
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/final-...ons-and-raids/

I know "midcore" is a somewhat nebulous term, but I think we all agree that challenging content for casuals to try that isn't extreme or savage is what the game really needs. So, how does the lead designer interpret this desire? More extreme/savage content, that you need to get 24 people together for so it's really hard to learn. I think we can give up on anything midcore in ffxiv to be honest.

Yoshi, Ozma - midcore is not halfway between extreme and savage. If you want somewhere to start, think savage with half the mechanics, for 4-8 people. And don't get your raid team to test it, they'll just say it's easy. Find some willing casuals. Thank you.

[Evergrey]

I've always counted EX trials as midcore.
So putting Chaotic halfway between EX and Savage would imo put it as a "high midcore/low hardcore".

[OlafQuintessa]

Extreme is not midcore. Full stop. I've run a largish community for casual players on Ravana and Kujata over the last few years and we've tackled all sorts of things, including extreme. So I've watched a lot of people encounter difficult content (me included, who is not particularly skilled). We've had our successes and failures. It takes a long time to learn extreme fights - not only do they demand a lot of skill (quite rightly), but it takes a looong time to fill learning parties. The joke goes that the savage part is organising 8 people to show up and do it. It takes a lot of commitment, and I respect that. But sitting in PF waiting for people to show up is a miserable way to spend an evening. Not to mention you can do everything right and still fail because of enrage. You really shouldn't have to execute perfect rotations and stress about parses for anything below hardcore stuff. Extreme is fine for what it is, but from my first hand experience it's too big a step up from the casual experience and it's not the middle ground between casual and savage/hardcore we need.

[Collin_Sky]

Extreme is definitely midcore lol

[Supersnow845]

There appears to be a big difference between what NA/EU and what JP considers casual/midcore/hardcore and it seems to stem from differing uses of PF and approach to content

In NA/EU extreme/chaotic/savage are done exclusively through PF and it’s expected people will research accepted strats prior to joining a party. Since there is only a gap between “PF and non PF” the definition of midcore in NA/EU swings more heavily but seems to be more based on initial input. If people believe they need to research strats and deal with PF they are more likely to immediately characterise it as hardcore. So for NA/EU midcore leans more towards the launch orbornne, BA, Diablo armament range. The “it may take 2-3 pulls and you will die if you don’t know what you are doing but you will do it in DF and you can carry dead weight”

JP meanwhile tends to have near everyone do everything and all content if practice is needed is done in PF but clears or clear attempts are done in DF. So for JP who doesn’t have such a harsh gap between “DF and PF” the midcore definition falls much more towards the actual difficulty of the mechanics which puts extreme/chaotic and the easier savages on midcore because they often don’t have a lot of truly difficult mechanics

So it seems like if NA/EU want more BA’s or launch orbornnes they really need to be asking for “difficult casual battle content” and not midcore content because to JP centric developers midcore means more P1S than it does BA

[HyperiusUltima]

If Extreme isn't Midcore, Chaotic isn't Midcore. While this term is nebulous as stated, we we really need something that is a step above your normal dungeons(that isn't Expert - Expert is just the two last dungeons of current patch that are slapped together for the next 4 months. I think it's better to say that Chaotic is more on the level of Savage, as the design was intended for 1st/2nd Floor Savage difficulty.

Generally, we need to gauge what the content will be. Is it Shades' Triangle? Is it something we've never thought of? We as a community need to decide what 'midcore' is, since for the longest time we've had the divide between Casual and Raider deepen and divide people(and create perceptions that are negative for both sides, not to mention).

Personally I think MidCore fits more in terms of content that 'isn't easy to do, but provides a challenge that isn't highly specific like Savage'. One of the components I do think they'll need there is a Enrage Mechanic. There's so few of them that are in normal content that they're blown over before it even becomes a threat, even in Alliance Raid content due to gear scaling. It'd be great if we could get one of those to start with so people can understand that you can't just spoof an encounter with just pressing 1 Button as a DPS.

[OlafQuintessa]

"Extreme is definitely midcore lol"

Mr Ozma would agree with you, which is pretty sad and just proves how out of touch people can be.

[BigCheez]

I know "midcore" is a somewhat nebulous term, but I think we all agree that challenging content for casuals to try that isn't extreme or savage is what the game really needs. So, how does the lead designer interpret this desire? More extreme/savage content, that you need to get 24 people together for so it's really hard to learn. I think we can give up on anything midcore in ffxiv to be honest.

Content for casual players? You mean... Casual content?

Everything up to and including savage is midcore content. If you want no prep, no requirement, low time investment content, stop asking for midcore content. It's casual content with replay value that the game is lacking at the minute.

I think a lot of people are misusing the word "midcore" because they don't want to imply that they're only "casual" players by asking for casual content. But midcore is between casual and hardcore. Hardcore content requires a lot of preparation, organisation, coordination and time investment. Midcore content requires a moderate amount of these things. If it doesn't require these things, it's casual content.

Ask for what you actually want instead of asking for something else and being surprised when your needs aren't met.

[Supersnow845]

Content for casual players? You mean... Casual content?

Everything up to and including savage is midcore content. If you want no prep, no requirement, low time investment content, stop asking for midcore content. It's casual content with replay value that the game is lacking at the minute.

The problem seems to be when you ask for casual content in this game you get content that a lobotomised 2 year old could clear and when you ask for midcore content you get low end of savage

Like they seem to be completely blind to the BA, launch orbornne range of content

[OlafQuintessa]

Good point about the different data centres. I only have experience of the English speaking JP and OCE. Mr Happy showed some stats about Chaotic clears on different DCs. On OCE it was 1%, on JP it was more like 20%. EU and NA were about halfway inbetween. This is probably why we're never getting any kind of midcore that would satisfy people outside of JP. I expect Ozma and Yoshi take their lead from what JP does.

I'm not sure about enrage. Maybe it's important. If there are lots of punishing mechanics with wipes as a consequence, then that's enough challenge so the enrage should be pretty lenient.

I've said before but Ultima Unreal was the perfect midcore - We could go in with just about anyone and clear or almost clear in one evening (so 2-4 hours of actual prog). I know I know raiders are all going to say it was super easy - but, it was quick to fill PFs, you still had a fight to learn and could wipe, but your evening was never wasted. Some old savage unsync is also midcore - still some mechanics to learn but you don't have to worry about enrage. During ShB we learned O4S and O8S unsync in a couple of evenings. O12S was still very hard though.