(12-04-2015, 09:44 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: I don't think they know how to hold their fans right now. The casual content is okay, but making it the focus is a mistake. Conversely, there's not enough people digging into raid content to make it more than it is. So what now? More Lords of Verminion, an aside that can be experience entirely by a level 15 character? More Alex divides, which don't really lend to one another?
Making an MMO appeal to wide groups is an unenviable task, but they're doing what they can. Me? I just want the fucking roulette queues to work.
I'm loyal to this game, so yeah that's my only concern right now. Because I really think a lot of this stuff can be fixed with the right communication.
I'm gonna make a case here as to why I think people are being alienated.
I think LoV should have been delayed until the fanbase felt like there was enough content to go around and they could be happy with 'misc' content. When the Gold Saucer came out, there was a lot of positive reception for it. But that's because it came out right in the middle of a huge content surge, right between parts 1 and 2 of 2.5 which IMO was my favorite patch cycle.
But because it came out right now when the fanbase is begging for straight up relevant content, not side content, it's become a symbol of the devs not knowing what the people want.
They have shifted their focus more towards casual content since Heavensward, and I think they've gone too far in that department. It alienates the legacy players, it alienates raiders, and it alienates what I believe are the majority of Square's loyal, consistent people who sub (And inevitably provide long term health to the game): midcore players.
They have really screwed midcore players with Heavensward. Dividing the audience between super casual and super hardcore is a very, very bad idea. In 2.0 we had Ifrit, Garuda, Titan Hard which were excellent midcore bottlenecks. The first half of Coil were great midcore bottlenecks.
Coil itself was a great midcore bottleneck because unlike Alex Savage, the difficulty spikes were never extreme. A compelling story motivated players that might not have tried that stuff before to pull their pants up. There were no ridiculous DPS checks where tanks had to go full out STR gear to meet. Coil also was great hardcore content too because usually the last fight in the series was THE hardcore fight.
And then in later patches, the extreme primals became great midcore content.
I feel like Heavensward was supposed to have great midcore content in the form of Bismark and Ravana. However, Bismark was dead on arrival because of i180 upgrade hunt weapons. Which left Ravana.
Since Alex Savage wasn't out yet, all the super hardcore just congested Ravana and Ravana became a scenario where a lot of midcore players felt like it was the only fight they could do, and they had to mingle with the hardcore players.
Since then, we've had exactly two pieces of mid-core content. That and Thordan. All of the other midcore content is completely obsolete now. Hell even Ravana is obsolete now. So all midcore content players have to do now is Thordan. That's a far cry from launch.
Midcore content has gone from being the majority of the content to the extreme minority.
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