Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[Voidmage]

I always laugh when YoshiP says in an interview that they want to make content for everyone from now on and thats why we have the new deep dungeon stuff shoehorned in, while forked tower and chaotic is still unplayable pieces of...content. Somehow the content for everyone means we also get a hard version of things, but for some reason i highly doubt the next ultimate will have a normal mode when you actually survive stuff and normal raids with the savage exclusive boss forms.

All in all lets just stop the copium, its obvious that square wants to cater to the hardcore raiders and it is objectively, actively reducing the playerbase in dawntrail and overall interest in the game.

I would wait for now given they have just introduced quantum and seem to genuinely want feedback on it.

If for example the next variant has no criterion but scalable difficulty or the next chaotic is more accessible for nonraiders then they are on the right track.
If the whole thing boils down to hardcore raiders getting content in patches that are usually more casual and the nonraiders are being left out with either nothing or a barely existing reward structure, then yeah they deserve every criticism and hate they can get.

That's actually my greatest fear with quantum. That they only take feedback from the raiding content creators and all we are left will be mini ultimates as the only noteworthy content out of it.

I agree with your points in that raiders definitely have no reason to complain in DT (since EW to be frank).
Not necessarily because of quantity but quality.
The raid series is considered as great, chaotic was in itself a fun fight and Forked tower at least had much love put into its design at least.
Non hard content like OC has been underwhelming so far with CE even seemingly being the same thing for 4 zones.
FT's "cost" argument especially was a slap in the face.

They have to step up their game and stop regarding non raiding content as a thing "they have to do" and I think that's the actual answer to this thread.
Normal content feels like an obligation from their part while they would love it more to work on hard raiding content.
The amount of effort and love put between these two is stunningly different.

[Hyperia]

I would wait for now given they have just introduced quantum and seem to genuinely want feedback on it.

I would love to comment on Quantum but it appears, from reading comments, that they have gated it badly behind multiple grinds.

1. Grind to floor 100
2. Grind aetherpool to max level to get to 100
3. Grind tokens to do the 100 fight at Quantum levels
4. Hardest of all, get a group to do all of the above

If they really wanted to get good feedback from the community as a whole, they should have made the Quantum fight unlock at the end of the story or even lower. As a result, their feedback is going to be very skewed to the hardcore players with some midcore players.

Though... while they said they want feedback, they have already strongly indicated that they are fully commited to Quantum for 8.0 regardless of the feedback they get.

I consider this more of a technology preview for the hardcore players in order to keep them around and not quit because they keep hearing we are getting "less content" because the fights are all merged due to Quantum.

[aiqa]

What I've come to dislike about FF difficulty in recent alliance raids, is how many fights have a tricky part near the end. Often balanced in a such a way that you can completely skip it with enough dps. That means with a better team, that could handle the trickier parts perfectly well, never gets to see it. And a team that is already struggling, then gets hit with some even more tricky mechanics.

Giving better players the easy mode fight is not how content should be designed.

[FuturePastNow]

What I've come to dislike about FF difficulty in recent alliance raids, is how many fights have a tricky part near the end. Often balanced in a such a way that you can completely skip it with enough dps. That means with a better team, that could handle the trickier parts perfectly well, never gets to see it. And a team that is already struggling, then gets hit with some even more tricky mechanics.

Giving better players the easy mode fight is not how content should be designed.

The intent of that design is so people doing it when it's brand new get a bit more challenge, while players who get it in alliance roulette years from now will have a relatively painless experience (since a critical mass of players will know the fight and everyone's gear will be synced to well above the content's ilevel). I do wish the interesting mechanics happened earlier in the fights, and I think the FFXI raids have been trying to compromise on that, but yes they are spicier when players aren't as good.

I'm a weirdo who thinks alliance raids are the most fun when they turn into mass casualty events though

[aiqa]

The intent of that design is so people doing it when it's brand new get a bit more challenge, while players who get it in alliance roulette years from now will have a relatively painless experience (since a critical mass of players will know the fight and everyone's gear will be synced to well above the content's ilevel). I do wish the interesting mechanics happened earlier in the fights, and I think the FFXI raids have been trying to compromise on that, but yes they are spicier when players aren't as good.

I'm a weirdo who thinks alliance raids are the most fun when they turn into mass casualty events though

That might be the intent, but it doesn't work like that. If you have a bunch of savage geared players from the same time where the alliance raid was released, the team can already easily skip those mechanics. Or when people get one tier higher tome/crafted gear than when the alliance raid was released. Or even if you just have a group of mostly good players with contemporary tome gear/crafted gear.

If they want the most recent alliance raids to be a challenge, they need to restrict ilevel far tighter, and even then place the tricky mechanics a bit earlier in the fight. And they can loosen the ilevel cap when they want players to start skipping things in later patches.

[0blivion]

i had a one-handed player in my party actively playing better than the able-bodied ones. a couple days after, i had a vision impaired party member who, again, did much better than some of the well-sighted people. this is a skill issue on OP's part, stop using disabled people to pretend it isn't just you underperforming.

[Amarande]

All in all lets just stop the copium, its obvious that square wants to cater to the hardcore raiders and it is objectively, actively reducing the playerbase in dawntrail and overall interest in the game.

It's definitely gone in that direction and I'm not 100% sure why.

As I have noted before I tend to keep coming back to the thought that either it's because the Endwalker launch disaster has induced them to try to focus on a more specific audience (Stormblood was def an everyone's game, Shadowbringers started out that way but the evolution was stunted by Covid, Endwalker launch showed "oops servers can't really handle being everyone's game") or because Blizzard is more aggressively currying the casual endgame playerbase (especially with the simplification coming with Midnight through the revocation of combat addons etc) and for 20 years now the MMO industry lesson has been "don't go straight up head-to-head with WoW, just don't" (I mean look at how SWTOR and LOTRO have both faded into niche status, despite having two of the literally most iconic geekly licenses there are).

If the whole thing boils down to hardcore raiders getting content in patches that are usually more casual and the nonraiders are being left out with either nothing or a barely existing reward structure, then yeah they deserve every criticism and hate they can get.

That's actually my greatest fear with quantum. That they only take feedback from the raiding content creators and all we are left will be mini ultimates as the only noteworthy content out of it.

Not just raiding content creators, consider overall raiding community - while there are places like these forums and Reddit, "the community" tends to center around Discord and there are two things that one finds quickly in virtually all visible raiding Discords: Moderation is designed to actively marginalize the voice of anyone who isn't either hardcore or aspiring hardcore (others are labeled as either misinformed or "bad and don't want to improve" or other excuses to discredit and those who don't fall in line or quiet themselves are banned/muted), and forum format communities are actively dunked on with a "don't listen to them" admonition.

Often balanced in a such a way that you can completely skip it with enough dps. That means with a better team, that could handle the trickier parts perfectly well, never gets to see it. And a team that is already struggling, then gets hit with some even more tricky mechanics.

Giving better players the easy mode fight is not how content should be designed.

100%, this 100%. It's been the case in places since Shadowbringers actually and it's not just Alliance raids. Compare ShB Extremes and Savage to Stormblood ones for instance, in StB you almost always saw all the relevant mechanics by "halftime" (relative to enrage) and after was mainly repeats and remixes with often the final 30-60 seconds being simple raidwide spam allowing you to lock in for that last DPS push, while in ShB you got fun things like Cycles and Black Smokers to punish you for getting that far and make it far less likely you'd pull it out.

It's like they realized Skip Soar or Disband was bad when they made Stormblood and then backpedaled on it (and almost EVERYTHING that made Stormblood super chill and cool) in the later xpacs (even ShB and EW where we were still riding high and the rot was less front and center) ...

[Mesarthim]

The amount of effort between eureka/bozja and PoTD floor 50 is... not comparable.

[AyumiCosplayGlam]

The amount of effort between eureka/bozja and PoTD floor 50 is... not comparable.

The logic is the same. PotD is a requirement because it apparently teaches the players how deep dungeons work.
Maybe the word completing them is a bit harsh, maybe i should have said reach mettle lvl 10 or reach elemental level 5 or whatever.

It still makes no sense that a content that has 0 connection between each other is requiring you to interact with it just because it uses the same progression structure. A 5 level tutorial quest would easily solve this issue if its needed at all.

[Mesarthim]

Spending your entire time leveling to max in a field operation, making a relic in the process, is not the same as spending up to a couple of hours in a deep dungeon.

While I don't defend the requirement people really need to stop complaining all of the time. If you do it once you never have to do it again on that character. It's easier than it has ever been to clear it. If people can't do potd floor 50 I find it hard to believe they suddenly only have interest in the new one now.]

You know full well how SE operates. They aren't going to change it. The PoTD buff is likely as good as it is going to be.