RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

Telluride · **09-03-2015, 12:44 PM**

(09-03-2015, 12:10 PM)Berrod Armstrong Wrote:
(09-03-2015, 12:09 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: To sound like a grognard:

I long for the playerbase that meets a challenge and rises to it instead of bitching straight to the developer for nerfs.
*~*~*~*dramatically turns, his hair flying in the breeze as he looks longingly back at 2.1 Pharos Sirius*~*~*~*

Agreed, and I'm a casual.

However, I do believe Main Story Quest trials and dungeons should be tuned for everyone to complete without too much difficulty. Unlockable side dungeons though.

Hurt me. Hurt me good.

Thing is, there is no one Playerbase, as the above exchange is already showing: Grognard, Casual, PVPer, RPer, Raider... while there are people who fit all the categories, or more than one, many people tend to have much more regard for one aspect of a game than the other, and if a change to one aspect impacts another, the buzzing starts.

I take examples from my gaming past, particularly from LOTRO and SWTOR, as examples, but these are common to every game. In both of the aforementioned games, nerfs were applied to certain classes for PVP purposes, when the changes were completely unnecessary for PVE, and threw off playing strategies for raiders and solo PVE players. The non-PVPers were incensed and lashed out at both the devs and the PVP folks, the latter of whom, of course, lashed back.

It's hard for a single playerbase to rise up when a large part of it feels as if they've been ripped off/screwed/nerfed to satisfy another part of the base, with which the former part hasn't much reason to care about, in their opinions.

I've actually seen LESS of this sort of thing in FFXIV than in, well, just about any other game. We're arguing more over hairstyles than much of anything else at the moment, and if you step back with a wider perspective, that's not too terrible a place to be. As negative as some people may think I am, I look at FFXIV, and then remember when my Champion got nerfed in LOTRO, and when the Orbital Barrage ability in SWTOR got nerfed, and how much of a furious impact THOSE made, and realize that, well, I can live without fancy hair.

Don't neglect those occasions when a playerbase DOES rise to a challenge, and handles it so well that the devs step in and break up their solutions, because exploit, yadda yadda. Sometimes nobody actually has a problem EXCEPT the devs, and those generate nerfs, too.

We've talked about biases, and I have mine - I have some criteria that I like in a game of this sort, and I stick with FFXIV because it's done the best job of meeting those in a good while, even if it fails at some others.

Also, I stand by a personal mantra - just because something is harder doesn't mean it is automatically more fulfilling and BETTER. Give the grognards and the difficulty seekers things to do - that's what all those endgame options are about - but valuing difficulty ONLY for difficulty's sake is, in my opinion, pretty ridiculous, especially when you have a game that intends to stick the same content over and over again in our faces in the form of dailies. Difficulty is not always its own reward.

One heck of a nice run!

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes