Quote Originally Posted by Yolteotl View Post
I'm not gonna waste my time citing all the times SE has stated that the game is focused on casual play, because it has been stated repeatedly since before the 1st alpha had even been released over 2 1/2 years ago.
Oh, you're talking about Tanaka, then. Well, you know, back then the game was also advertised as being designed around play casual enough that players could complete the entire storyline as a DoH/L. Obviously, things have changed, and there's a new producer in charge.

Matching Casual and Heavy Players

Online games have a hierarchy to them, or at least that’s what I like to call it. It’s often described using a pyramid, the width of the pyramid being representative of the number of players. At the peak are the hard-cores—the minority of players who completely immerse themselves in the game, playing day and night and often forgetting their biological imperatives. As you work your way down the pyramid, players become increasingly casual. It bears mentioning that this model illustrates the quantity of players only, not quality.

In the first generation of MMORPGs, the pyramids were skinny and tall. In the current generation, while I think the peak should still stay way up there, the slopes projecting down from it should be less extreme. What I want to make is a theme park where both casuals and hard-cores can exist and play together. That’s the minimum requirement I think a modern MMORPG should fulfill.

I hope you heavy gamers out there will hurry to clear the game’s latest contents. I hope you beat Ifrit before anyone else and get those new weapons. I hope other players will see you and want to do the same. I hope you try and clear the beastman strongholds with less than the maximum number of players. And I hope you post on the forums about all your accomplishments.

I hope you more casual players will enjoy traveling around Eorzea by chocobo and airship with your in-game and real-life friends while working your way up to end-game content like the Ifrit fight. By then, the battle strats will be worked out, and you’ll be able to fight at your own pace. There’s no need to rush. Both play styles have their place. Should the need arise, we’ll look into adjusting the level of difficulty, or introducing a system that lets you set it yourself.

For any given content, the difference in the amount of time players need to figure it out and get the loot will unavoidably vary.

Hard-core gamers are hard-core gamers because they are always leading the charge. Following close behind their trailblazing are the “mid-cores.” And then there’s the casual gamers making progress at their own pace.

To realize the ideal we have in place, we need a powerful matching system capable of connecting all of these players, whatever their rates of progression might be. We plan to study what other MMORPGs have achieved here, and make it one of our main tasks as we move forward, together with add-ons and the UI.

Speaking of the UI, we are well aware that there are still difficulties with the mouse/keyboard interface. I’m a mouse/keyboard man myself, so believe me when I say I plan to continue making both little and big improvements with global standards in mind.

The ideal we’ve put in place may be a bit up there, but we have every intention of achieving it, and will do everything in our power to do so.
Quote Originally Posted by Yolteotl View Post
The point was, it's a game. And if you feel the dev's are completely ignoring a sector of the player base who want things even more challenging, you're probably right but doesn't mean they are going to stop ignoring it anytime soon as they still desire to build a strong casual base for ARR than to put in old-school oriented content that the casuals would never touch.
But they aren't ignoring the hardcore players. The slow, upward slope of difficulty from Ifrit (Hard) to Rivenroad (Hard) is evidence that they care and they're listening. As broken as 1.0's engine is, the battle designer still tried to challenge himself to release content that was ever harder (and even posted to his defeat when it was cleared sooner than he thought).

My point is, they have to cater to both sides. They can't just release content too hard for 80% of the playerbase to complete or there simply won't be enough subscriptions to stay afloat; yet they also can't just make the game faceroll easy, lest the game become devoid of any real sense of accomplishment.

I see people who consider themselves hardcore players posting on the forums asking for equal parts of difficulty; we ask for content that's really fucking hard, that forces us to pull longer nights, and tests our strategy-forming abilities, but we also acknowledge that the game needs to have low level dungeons/drops/nms for casual players, and that's fine. I only ever see casual players posting threads whining and begging for primal weapons/DL/relic/White Ravens/etc to be handed to them, and demanding that the game cater to their needs and only their needs, whilst they mock hardcore players as sadists with no lives who overestimate their accomplishments.