I finally won't have to raid to endgame!Follow

To simplify what sandpark said: There is a difference between "casual" and "bad."

I'm a pretty good player. I did well in XI for many years. If I felt that Alexander Savage was worth my time, I could probably bother with it. I don't. I'm casual. I just started a new job and I've been reduced to 5 hours of personal time during the even hours during which time I need to eat, shower, and take care of household stuff that can't wait until the weekend.

There are casual veterans and there are total hardcore noobs. Neither group is necessarily good or bad; it just comes down to the players.

That logic only works if you count the entirety of FFXI's fanbase as enjoys of demanding content. Yet, when you look at the participation brackets for even it's story content through the years, it's clear that most people in there wouldn't even press demanding story content, let alone endgame.

Even among FFXI's base, there is a clear indication that hardcore-style content is simply in a hefty minority. FFXI itself was a niche - hardcore content with that, was niche on a niche.

The MMO base has grown astronomically since then. The hardcore numbers? Haven't kept up the pace. That's why game after game sees a significant subscription/profits drop when they dedicate their release content to heavily to hardcore players. Which is why SE hedges its bets in that department - which, I think is the wrong solution. Design content well, and you can have it cater to both.

Making a portion of your content that is appealing to the majority of your base is wise. Catering to your minority, and ONLY to your minority isn't. The goal is to design content that would bring these groups into the same content - even if they enjoy them in different ways. Right now, SE is dicing things up, increasing their workload for a minor faction of their base, when they could be making content that appeals to wide audience that includes their hardcore crowd.

There should be absolutely no reason why a piece of content should be so obstructively demanding that your average player is disinclined to attempt it without major incentives. That does not mean you don't produce content for the hardcore crowd. What it means is that difficulty should not exist on an island separate from other content.

You can achieve that by designing for dynamic difficulty, rather than static difficulty, then reward on performance.

Edited, Sep 30th 2015 10:33am by Hyrist

This is why the argument goes in a circle, essentially being told "that style of gameplay has no place in gaming and anything you say will be brushed off." Like the post I linked on the official forums was a good post and the thread was good until..surprise surprise...the people against raiding decided to derail it. So yeah, that's essentially being said, despite Demon/Dark Souls being one of the best selling series in a long time, but that's aside the point.



This. I mean really..when it comes to XI, anyone who's SERIOUSLY played it (I don't mean RPed your way through the game or something) will know "Completion" is rarely a thing because the game didn't require FULL completion of certain content to access other content. You can access Dynamis long before you finish even your national storyline beyond Rank 6. You can access sky without completion..all of it. You can access sea with the majority of it done but you will not have access to the inner palace, but you will Limbus. You can access Einherjar very early on in the ToAU storyline. You can access WoE by being on damn near the 2nd mission of WoTG and so on. If someone has no interest in it..cool, don't do it (as said) but that doesn't mean people won't do it. Even then, just because say, Voidwatch had "low numbers" doesn't mean it failed either. You know what did have low interest? Voidwalker, the /rest in overworld pop monster system. That lasted a short time because it wasn't great.

So I'll post the thread, once again:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/264391-Raider-to-Non-Raider-an-exhibition-on-thoughts-and-misconceptions.



This. People say "Coil bad Coil bad!" but that topic on the OF explains it well and explains why people loved coil. If you didn't coil, that's cool..doesn't mean a sizable portion didn't because it's end-game content, something EVERY MMO has. Coil was harder than Alexander Story Mode due to when and where it came - It was the transition of 1.23 > 2.0 and the itemization completely changed along with battle system. Alexander Savage shouldn't exist in its form, it should be more along the lines of coil as 3.0 is the same kind of reset without the entire battle system shift. No one cared for Savage Coil because it was an experiment, by Yoshida, which btw he said he would ONLY introduce if A LOT OF DEMAND was given for it...and well...look at your duty finder list. (Then again, if you don't raid, coil won't be on your list at all.)

So we could go in circles..all in all, trying to say raid component should be taken out of the game is silly simply because someone doesn't care for it or partake in it.


Also yes, FFXI was a niche.

It was developed in 1997-2001.
It was being developed alongside Playonline, which originally was a hub with FFIX as it's forefront for walkthrough information.
It released officially in 2002.

How big were MMORPGs in 2002? How mainstream where they?

Edited, Sep 30th 2015 8:15am by Theonehio

Edited, Sep 30th 2015 8:17am by Theonehio

You're proving my point for me. The primary audience in 2015 isn't the same as 2002, yet certain outspoken people seem to demand that content be designed off of 2002's expectations.



Apples and Oranges. Dark Souls from the ground up is meant to appeal to a Niche Audience. They succeed off of a budget that expects their audience, and the franchise sells itself off of that. A Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, wants to cast a wide net.

To do that more successfully, you do NOT want to make your core base feel dejected. Hardcore players are not FFXIV's bread and butter attraction - that isn't the case for most MMO populations, in fact.



And again, your argument falls flat on its face because you're not taking into the full account. FFXI was a niche game, and the game was successful because most of its content fell along the same theme.

Both content that was harder than the base, and content that was by far easier, wound up being unpopular. To the point where there was a huge population shuffle come Abyssea's age.

FFXIV caters in its majority to the casual play-style. Is there any wonder why the hardcore raiding is not popular? Even the Coils of Bahamut were niche, though its participation went up as its difficulty eased.



So far I see completely, and utterly no justifications reasons, or even decent excuses as to why Raiding shouldn't be re-designed to cater to a wider audience. Alexander Normal's numbers show that if it's within a certain bracket of difficulty, people will do it. Even those who've completed their looting of it go back to help others freely - you can't say that for the harder Raids given how much of a hassle to complete they can be.

This is literally just defensive knee-jerking because people don't want their special slice of pie changed - for fear they won't enjoy the result. I've seen this sort of BS on both sides of the table and it's moronic.


There is absolutely nothing wrong with disseminating content, breaking down the reasoning why the content is desired or undesired, and reassembling it to make it so that more of your playerbase. It's just that people hate being told that they're fringe - because in today's day and age nobody understands the concept of compromise. And I for one am tired of content segregation. The line between Thayo's motivations and Hio's should not exist - they should be debating on HOW they execute content - Not if/not and why.


I'm beginning to think Laxedrane never looked at my idea and that Hio just glossed over what points triggered her.

Tell you what, let's go over a piece of FFXIV raid content (any turn or floor) and break it down on how I would change it. I have two examples, but I want to see what other's come up for as contention.


Edited, Sep 30th 2015 12:03pm by Hyrist

Ok, let me see if I can rephrase this appropriately.

What if we designed it so that the content itself bridged the gap? It could even start lower so that players who weren't turned on by EX Primals could feel endgaged, and then work their way up?

This is why I say dynamic difficulty is superior. The players choose, within the fights themselves, just how hard the fight goes.

And if you go with a scoring system rather than a static reward system, you get that incentive to do better, to push harder, and to improve upon what you do.

We have an example of how this would work - First Coil, Second Turn. The difficulty of the final boss is dependent on what mini-bosses you leave alive and defeat. It even affects its move-set. This sort of system could be used to increase raid difficulty dynamically - with a point system that scales with the difficulty you actively choose within the fight itself. With rewards ( we can debate that subject later) scaling depending on your performance scores. Clearing with each higher 'Grade' unlocks new rewards to purchase with the points earned by your score.

That was the idea I had for solving our endgame debacle.

I'm not sure we should get rid of high difficulty all together. Having something to strive for is a good policy, within reason. However when you sacrifice majority appeal for the sake of that reaching, then you've essentially crossed that line.

The reason why I push for Dyamic difficulty is that, even if you drop off in that appeal, that piece of content is still broadly enticing - but instead of having separate instances of each difficulty, you'll have people going into content and not activating the triggers that they can't accomplish. They'll still be pushing for long term rewards. They're still populating the raid, so that means there is always the possibility of finding people that will make that smaller step into the more difficulty field. And those who do push still get distinguished. In fact, with the sytem have in mind, there's more ways and chances to become accomplished and distinguished beyond the simple "I've got world first!" "I've got Server First!" "I've beaten it." tiers.

That's one of those things that sounds great on paper but I have to wonder if it would really play out like that in real life. Even if you make it dynamic and change the difficulty and rewards accordingly there's still going to end up being a "right way" and everything else is "worthless."

If you don't give extra rewards for "hard mode" then people will just gravitate to whatever is easiest (T2 enrage strategy.) If you do add extra or better rewards then PF will just be filled with "hard mode only" because who wants a lesser reward when you could theoretically have a better one? In practice there's no difference between a dynamic boss and having two separate difficulty modes (normal and savage,) but it feels different, and that's very important to a lot of people.

Token drops with dynamic difficulty would also be a good solution. Make the rewards scale to be more valuable for the higher difficulty levels, but with everyone working toward the same gear pieces. Like a win on easy mode would grant 5 tokens, while a savage win would grant 25 tokens.

Of course, the result would be EVERYONE would just spam the easy content and ignore the savage content (unless completion lockouts were put in place). But then people would complain about lockouts, and the hardcore content would STILL be empty.

XIV also lacks properly scalable content right now. With the adjustments to Duty Finder and how you can unsync and enter content with a smaller party than designed, it's getting there, but it's still far too limited in application. Part of this is because of the maximum party size of 8 and no ability to form alliances outside of Crystal Tower, but it's also because the only content that ever needs more than 8 people outside of open world is CT stuff.

What we need is content that can let anywhere from 3-4 very very good people to a full 24 man alliance go through and do stuff. I think the airship exploration might be tacking in that direction (especially if we can eventually form alliances.)

This also comes with its own built in challenge mode: Can I do with 3 people what other people need 8 to do?

XI had a great deal of content that scaled like this, especially in Abyssea and Adoulin and with later adjustments to Dynamis. We were able to defeat Arch Dynamis Lord in Neo-Dynamis with 5-7 people with a 50% success rate. When that content first came out, it needed a full alliance.

Blizzard actually DID do something along the lines of what Hyrist is suggesting in Ulduar, where they had your approach to the fight change the difficulty of the fight and the loot table.

But after that they pretty much said that they couldn't come up with enough ways to do that for future raids that wouldn't have just seemed contrived or stupid. The big red button is only really funny once.

Ulduar was probably the best raid an MMO has ever seen in terms of it's implementation. I agree that it was pretty thoughtful and even innovative how they were able to vary the ways you could switch to hard mode either before or during the encounter, but at the end of the day there was still only a normal mode and a hard mode. This was also at the peak of WoW's subscription base and Blizz had the resources to handle it. They've since moved to 4 flavors of the same raid and many people attribute the mass exodus(5 million subs lost in as many months) to that.


I'm not shooting your idea down. I guess if the process of making hard mode attempts isn't permanent(a la Flame Leviathan) then you might have people attempting higher difficulty. I don't see it leading to more interest in hard mode raiding though. The mechanics behind how you unlock difficulty isn't what turns people off from raiding, it's having to seek out a group, having to be committed to ample learning time and finding a group of like-minded people.

Most people shy away from raiding because they view it as work. That won't go away until you address the issues mentioned. The only ideas put forth thus far to remedy these situations also led to other issues players felt needed attention.

It might take you a little less time to assemble a PUG, but unless the number of players released back into the pool you will still end up with people who don't have a static. I also think the game mechanics would need another overhaul.

Players have always been skewed toward DPS >> healer > tank. Your typical WoW raid group is 9-10 players consisting of 2 tanks, 3 healers and 4-5 DPS. It's designed that way to offset the imbalance of players in each role. 2 tanks are a lock, but you basically use the formula that you can add 3 more DPS for each additional healer you add beyond that.

What is the typical group composition for raiding in FFXIV? If the group size were reduced from 8 to 6, which role(s) are getting cut? If you look at the way dungeon groups are set in WoW you have a tank, a healer and 3 DPS. It fits the way players populate roles naturally. FFXI was very similar in composition. These models fit the distribution of roles among the population of players.

If you were to cut a healer and a tank out of the current group of 8 in FFXIV(makes sense since they are the high demand roles), where does that leave the remaining roles against the current encounter mechanics? It honestly sounds like they'd have to make some pretty major adjustments to compensate for something like that.