Midcore is NOT a Difficulty setting - It's an Investment!

[Voryn]

Your definition doesn’t seem understandable to me because you’re often saying “THIS is what content needs to be midcore” yet you’re mostly listing things that also apply to someone doing Extreme or Savage in party finder and going at their own pace.

content that offers degrees of challenge, allowing players to invest time without requiring a rigid commitment

You go as far as you want, and in PF your level of commitment is completely up to you. My first time raiding was Asphodelos in party finder and I only did P1S and P2S

solo or with friends

Hop on either together or by yourself as long as the weekly loot lockout is considered. As was my case when doing PF

Varied challenges

The one depends on how you define things, although seems to me like it’s a condition that’s met each tier as the devs try to differentiate each raid (to varying degrees of success imo, although I feel Dawntrail’s raids are really varied design-wise)

Rewarding players’ time, not just their skill level

Aren’t you gradually making your way through progging a raid if you’re less skilled, but just at a slower rate? You may not have the “number go up” that something like Eureka gives you butas you have raid sessions you get closer to clearing and will feel yourself getting more comfortable on your chosen job. And then the victory comes once you get to the end and are playing cleanly enough

While you don’t need to form static groups, many players create Discord communities to loosely organize, guide others, and navigate challenging encounters like a rite of passage

People are at least doing this in NA, I’ve joined multiple discords of people who PF together over these last few months just by joining prog parties for fun to practice playing healer.

[Exploratory zone] systems allow players to set their own pace and build toward high-stakes content over time, creating a sense of progression.

Hop on whenever you want and go at the pace that works for you. And unless the devs screw up, savage tiers are roughly in ascending difficulty

The thing I’m most interested is when you say how midcore is special:

It needs to engage both casual and hardcore players by rewarding time and effort, not through sheer difficulty.

Is your time and effort not rewarded by gradually learning an encounter and then clearing it?

I think you should clarify what you mean about skill, difficulty, and feeling overwhelmed, because it seems like that’s the main thing that differentiates midcore and hardcore to you. Otherwise, so many aspects of your definition can be applied to Extreme and Savage content and then raiders like me are just gonna ask “but isn’t Extreme and Savage midcore?”

[Yeol]

You've said you haven't done chaotic yourself, and I assume your opinion on it is based on what you read online.

Let me tell you that mechanic wise this fight is not as hard as people are claiming. It's almost extreme level when looking at individual responsibilities.

People will tell you that 80% of the wipes happen because people die before towers, but nobody will give you the details as to why that happens.

It's not because the previous mechanics are hard, and not because people don't know how the mechanics should be resolved. Since the majority of the time people will go to their correct spot, only to die without understanding why.

The explanation is simple. Alot of the mechanics you do on the ads are old mechanics everyone has done on bosses. The only difference is the hitbox size. Bosses have big hitboxes while the ads have a samller hitbox.

Players tend to treat the ads hitbox as if it was a boss hitbox and position themselves very close to it. Which results in players been to close to eachother when they shouldn't be.

[Rithy255]

Thing I'm asking myself is what would be between extreme and savage? I feel like a lot of the first tiers of the fight is already that (Honestly I found M1S, P1S more easy then some EXT's).

I'll be honest It's one of the most talked about things but I think we're actually "missing" in terms of gameplay is the job design themselves, it's all good designing different types of content, some that is easy, some that are midcore and super hard content, but you know what would give those sort of things like... I don't know 20x more replay value? the jobs actually feeling unique and fun inside of that set content, bringing something would be a pretty different experience ect.

Though we do need some sort of grindy bozja content, I wouldn't really call it "midcore" I'd just call it high investment content, gives you something to work towards Endwalker was lacking massively in that and a lot of people who like these sorts of grinds felt that

[Nero-Voidstails]

Thing I'm asking myself is what would be between extreme and savage? I feel like a lot of the first tiers of the fight is already that (Honestly I found M1S, P1S more easy then some EXT's).

I'll be honest It's one of the most talked about things but I think we're actually "missing" in terms of gameplay is the job design themselves, it's all good designing different types of content, some that is easy, some that are midcore and super hard content, but you know what would give those sort of things like... I don't know 20x more replay value? the jobs actually feeling unique and fun inside of that set content, bringing something would be a pretty different experience ect.

Though we do need some sort of grindy bozja content, I wouldn't really call it "midcore" I'd just call it high investment content, gives you something to work towards Endwalker was lacking massively in that and a lot of people who like these sorts of grinds felt that

I think DR from Bozja could be use there and alot of the fight too and there is a thing in those that people tend to forget is yes there is a set amount of mechanic but they all happen on random orders and I think red comet is one of the best examples I could use actually

[CNitsah]

I feel like Eureka/Bozja are good point to define what is midcore : as much as doing it once for the story (and maybe one relic) is pretty much casual, farming it for month to get several/all of them is definitely midcore. I dare you to pretend a player that got all the SB relics is a casual player.

That doesn't mean Extreme cannot be considered as midcore but limiting it to difficulty is wrong. In the end this whole "lack of midcore content" really was a "lack of content with shelf-life content", and it became more and more obvious as the time went. I give SE credit for trying to answer the complaint, but I hope that, with the criticism about the Chaotic raid (or everything surrounding the fight itself, that's pretty well recieved by those it's aimed at), they'll realise they missed the point of the criticism. Chaotic seem to be a really good fight for those who enjoy that, but I feel it's not the right answer to the "nothing to do/lack of midcore content" complaints.

[BigCheez]

Midcore is the middle ground—content that offers degrees of challenge, allowing players to invest time without requiring a rigid commitment. Examples include Deep Dungeons, Eureka/Bozja, and Variant Dungeons. These activities can be tackled solo or with friends, offering varied challenges and rewarding players’ time, not just their skill level.

Eureka/Bozja and variant dungeon require absolutely no investment whatsoever. They're "jump in and play" and content.

You're absolutely correct that midcore is not a difficulty setting, but a level of investment, but I don't understand how you can go from that to saying that exploration zones and variant dungeon are midcore content when they don't require any prep or organisation. You don't need to be invested in the content whatsoever.

I guess you could make a case for deep dungeon being midcore because a full clear is a significant undertaking but you can get all the rewards without a full clear and it's super easy for 1 person who knows what to do to carry a group through without even being in VC.

[CNitsah]

Eureka/Bozja and variant dungeon require absolutely no investment whatsoever. They're "jump in and play" and content.

You're absolutely correct that midcore is not a difficulty setting, but a level of investment, but I don't understand how you can go from that to saying that exploration zones and variant dungeon are midcore content when they don't require any prep or organisation. You don't need to be invested in the content whatsoever.

I guess you could make a case for deep dungeon being midcore because a full clear is a significant undertaking but you can get all the rewards without a full clear and it's super easy for 1 person who knows what to do to carry a group through without even being in VC.

Did you read the rest of the thread? Or even the first post? I mean half of the post talk about how those are an investment, and there was only a dozen post before yours... You're gonna tell me that farming several relics don't require investment, because it's easy to enter?

[BigCheez]

Did you read the rest of the thread? Or even the first post? I mean, you're gonna tell me that farming several relics don't require investment, because it's easy to enter?

You don't need to finish a single relic weapon to engage with the content in a meaningful way. Most players haven't completed every sidequest. Are sidequests midcore content? Most players don't have the big fish title. Is fishing hardcore? The King/Queen Bean title is incredibly rare. I guess Fall Guys is hardcore content too.

This is a very strange way to go about slapping labels on things.

[CNitsah]

You don't need to finish a single relic weapon to engage with the content in a meaningful way. Most players haven't completed every sidequest. Are sidequests midcore content? Most players don't have the big fish title. Is fishing hardcore? The King/Queen Bean title is incredibly rare. I guess Fall Guys is hardcore content too.

This is a very strange way to go about slapping labels on things.

If you read the post litterally two posts above yours, you'd have seen that my point is "doing Eureka (or bozja) once for the story (maybe one relic) is casual territory, farming it to get several/all of them" is midcore territory. What matter is how you engage with that content : the same content can be casual or midcore depending of you engage with it. This has nothing to do with the rarety. No side quest aren't midcore or hardcore, it's casual content, the fact people don't do them is because they buffed the xp of msq so much they are useless, and most of them are unintersting. Yes Fishing can be midcore, if you try to get every fish out there, even the hard to get. No Fall Guy title isn't, because the rarity is due to the fact it's not a permanent event.

The whole point of the thread is about not sticking labels depending of type of content but how people (have the possibility to) interact with said content : that's how exploratory zone can be considered as midcore. If the same content was once and never again, it would be casual. Please don't try to put word in my mouth when you clearly didn't read the thread.

[TemporalFruitsAndVeggies]

While "midcore" itself is not a new word, the term "midcore content" is one that seems to exist basically entirely within this game's community, and after reading pages and pages of forum posts and reddit threads about it, it refers to, as best as I can tell, "unicorn" content that is:

-- Long, requiring weeks or, preferably, months to complete

-- Just difficult enough to not be completely brain-dead, but not difficult enough to introduce a non-trivial risk of failure or involve personal responsibility to other players

-- Consistently rewarding

-- Fun

So basically casual content, but less crappy then the casual content we have now. Or, in other words, "I wish FFXIV were a good game for non-progression raiders." It is not, sorry. I wish it were, but basically all discourse from the last couple years points to the fact that people are just clinging on because they can't imagine not playing the game anymore, despite the fact that it isn't fun for them.