(tl;dr at bottom)
That's true, but the whole idea was that you did something hard before doing something long.
In order to get any weapon at i90 at launch, you had to do one of two things.
1.) Beat Turn 5. (Doing something hardcore)
2.) Beat the three primals on hard mode and then farm your butt off. (Doing something midcore + time investment)
You had to do something that was not a faceroll fest to get a i lvl 90 weapon. Heaps of people were stuck on Titan. I found the fight to be very challenging in AK gear. I found Coil harder in Darklight gear. This is coming from a guy who eventually led a static through T13, so I'm definitely not a casual.
Relics to me never became casual, even as they shifted away from having to clear hard content to do. They eventually ended up being a little ridiculous. But it all comes down to defining what casual is. I define casual as logging on for half a hour - two hours max a day, doing roulettes, getting your tomes and doing the 24 mans.
It is truly casual to spend months grinding out an ultimate weapon? Was it truly casual to spend loads of time doing atma, then doing all those animus books? Or spend literally millions of gil melding for the steps after? Farming light?
Nah.. I think the Soldiery tome weapons and onward are casual. I think true casuals would be just fine with using 'x' number of tomes to buy that weapon and just be fine with it.
But I see time investment as something that isn't casual. If you're going to invest an extreme amount of time on one thing (relic), even if it's easy to do, that's still a major investment you're making in a video game. Free time is as valuable to me as it's ever been. It's a time sink, much like raiding is, except you get one thing instead of a chance for multiple things.
So, I judge casual-ism to be something that doesn't require 1.) too much skill and 2.) time. I didn't go for the relics after atma. I thought it was too much time investment. I was doing Coil at the time and I thought Relics were just as hardcore!
Why? Because I was a college student with a part time job. But I spent every ounce of my free time RP'ing or learning how to be better at PLD for my midcore static and playing very seriously during our raid times, spending a lot more time learning the hard stuff than a casual would, and doing things like clearing T5.
But, my definition of casual can be different from other people's.
Was the DPS requirement because of low item level, or because of lack of skill? Was it because the DPS were bad or because they could not find a way to get better gear besides farming Myth?
So, I can't really form a reasonable angle on arguing against that. However, I will say that in my own experience I had slight problems in T4, but nothing too major that wouldn't take a week or so to conquer. This coming from a group that did the Enrage strat (I in fact didn't do it the honest way until later). Running into trouble is totally midcore content in my opinion. If we classify Titan hard as midcore than oh boy.. a shit ton of people had issues clearing it.
But, at the same time, you could go into a party finder for Titan hard and beat it. You could do a Party Finder T4 run and beat it. It wasn't unheard of. Not common, but common enough to be totally doable if you were geared in Myth and worked with your party to do it.
Was T5 like that? Hell no. At launch, Turn 5 was the fight you absolutely needed a static for.
Nowadays we have two turns of Alex you NEED a static for: 3 and 4. Yet no midcore people are trying Alex Savage 1 and 2. Probably because of the dps checks in those first two turns. Probably because of the horror stories. I dunno honestly! I don't see a lot of PF's for those two turns at all. Why was it that I saw Coil all the time/primal fights all the time in PF in the past and now very few Alex 1 and 2's?
I agree on your first Alex thing. That might be why there aren't PF savage parties. Maybe people are just sick and tired of Alex.
Extreme primals, Coil and Alex.. I know I'm making points entirely from my point of view, but the reason is simple. As you said:
Yes. Yes it is.
It's hard to explain the in-between. What's easy and what's hard. It's difficult to reason exactly what kind of challenge people truly want when they say things like "I enjoy how this game doesn't hold your hand" and then a month later talk about how the raids are too hard/dungeons too long. Then to have complaints about how easy content is when 20% of the playerbase hasn't even cleared Alex 4 normal.
I just personally think they got it really right at launch, and now it feels so much more unbalanced than it used to. I wanna do Thordan, but I feel like the last three or so phases is too hard for PF. I wanna do something harder than the faceroll dungeons, but I don't want to be in a static anymore. Right now, Thordan is really the only thing that caters to people like me.
But Square says that Thordan is for statics stuck on Alex 2. The way they perceive that content is to help raiders, not provide the non-raiders with challenge. I think that's gonna get them in trouble with the people that play this game every single day and sub every single month, and that's gonna hurt their bottom line.
And yet, ironically...
Truth.
Whether it be more staff, a different philosophy moving forward, further effort of communication, or even changing up the Diadem which fell on its ass when it came out when it probably was supposed to fill in the gap a bit..
Something needs to happen.
TL;DR: Midcore content is hard to define, I don't see timesinks as casual, and with such diverse opinions like this I don't envy Square Enix but they need to do something about the people inbetween casual and hardcore.
(12-04-2015, 10:11 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: I'll contest that. Primal Hard Modes were stepping stones to your Relic Weapon, which at i80 was better-or-equal to anything you could get besides. Upgrading a relic to i90, the top of the heap, was simple; Do your dungeons at level 50.
That's true, but the whole idea was that you did something hard before doing something long.
In order to get any weapon at i90 at launch, you had to do one of two things.
1.) Beat Turn 5. (Doing something hardcore)
2.) Beat the three primals on hard mode and then farm your butt off. (Doing something midcore + time investment)
You had to do something that was not a faceroll fest to get a i lvl 90 weapon. Heaps of people were stuck on Titan. I found the fight to be very challenging in AK gear. I found Coil harder in Darklight gear. This is coming from a guy who eventually led a static through T13, so I'm definitely not a casual.
Relics to me never became casual, even as they shifted away from having to clear hard content to do. They eventually ended up being a little ridiculous. But it all comes down to defining what casual is. I define casual as logging on for half a hour - two hours max a day, doing roulettes, getting your tomes and doing the 24 mans.
It is truly casual to spend months grinding out an ultimate weapon? Was it truly casual to spend loads of time doing atma, then doing all those animus books? Or spend literally millions of gil melding for the steps after? Farming light?
Nah.. I think the Soldiery tome weapons and onward are casual. I think true casuals would be just fine with using 'x' number of tomes to buy that weapon and just be fine with it.
But I see time investment as something that isn't casual. If you're going to invest an extreme amount of time on one thing (relic), even if it's easy to do, that's still a major investment you're making in a video game. Free time is as valuable to me as it's ever been. It's a time sink, much like raiding is, except you get one thing instead of a chance for multiple things.
So, I judge casual-ism to be something that doesn't require 1.) too much skill and 2.) time. I didn't go for the relics after atma. I thought it was too much time investment. I was doing Coil at the time and I thought Relics were just as hardcore!
Why? Because I was a college student with a part time job. But I spent every ounce of my free time RP'ing or learning how to be better at PLD for my midcore static and playing very seriously during our raid times, spending a lot more time learning the hard stuff than a casual would, and doing things like clearing T5.
But, my definition of casual can be different from other people's.
(12-04-2015, 10:11 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: The midcore hasn't ever really been catered to: Any primal weapon lagged behind the casual relic weapons, and raid content DID have a steep jump: Groups able to clear T2 before the Enrage "strategy" still ran into trouble in T4, which had a very clear DPS requirement. That doesn't even touch the multi-phase gauntlet that was Twintania.
Was the DPS requirement because of low item level, or because of lack of skill? Was it because the DPS were bad or because they could not find a way to get better gear besides farming Myth?
So, I can't really form a reasonable angle on arguing against that. However, I will say that in my own experience I had slight problems in T4, but nothing too major that wouldn't take a week or so to conquer. This coming from a group that did the Enrage strat (I in fact didn't do it the honest way until later). Running into trouble is totally midcore content in my opinion. If we classify Titan hard as midcore than oh boy.. a shit ton of people had issues clearing it.
But, at the same time, you could go into a party finder for Titan hard and beat it. You could do a Party Finder T4 run and beat it. It wasn't unheard of. Not common, but common enough to be totally doable if you were geared in Myth and worked with your party to do it.
Was T5 like that? Hell no. At launch, Turn 5 was the fight you absolutely needed a static for.
Nowadays we have two turns of Alex you NEED a static for: 3 and 4. Yet no midcore people are trying Alex Savage 1 and 2. Probably because of the dps checks in those first two turns. Probably because of the horror stories. I dunno honestly! I don't see a lot of PF's for those two turns at all. Why was it that I saw Coil all the time/primal fights all the time in PF in the past and now very few Alex 1 and 2's?
(12-04-2015, 10:11 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: I think Heavensward is very young right now, and it shows: Alexander was useful for a while, but right now as an unlocked encounter it means 1) the only people doing it need it and 2) that means you're getting 8/8 lots on every drop. This makes the encounter unfun and extremely unrewarding.
Extreme Primals are a weird spot: They offered a reward in 2.1 that was tantamount to a new relic, but a new relic didn't take that much work in the first place. They buffed T5 weapons to be i95 for a slight edge, but multiclass people could still just fill up on the weekly rewards, or just do new relics.
Defining "midcore" is difficult. I'm someone who has cleared all of Alexander and has zero desire to go back. I find Void Ark unfun and the encounters a bit tedious. How does SE capture my attention? I'm content to just do my Trial/Expert/Daily Hunts and be done with the game. I spend maybe an hour each day playing, and only because I happened to find MCH fun (despite it being not good in specific encounters).
The game isn't too different now than it was in 2.x: Log in, clear <content you prefer>, pass time until reset. The issue now is that the only content "worth" doing are the dungeons, maybe, if you're not raiding, which few are, and if you're not why care about esoterics?
I don't envy them, but right now balancing what is on tap is impossible.
I agree on your first Alex thing. That might be why there aren't PF savage parties. Maybe people are just sick and tired of Alex.
Extreme primals, Coil and Alex.. I know I'm making points entirely from my point of view, but the reason is simple. As you said:
(12-04-2015, 10:11 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: Defining "midcore" is difficult.
Yes. Yes it is.
It's hard to explain the in-between. What's easy and what's hard. It's difficult to reason exactly what kind of challenge people truly want when they say things like "I enjoy how this game doesn't hold your hand" and then a month later talk about how the raids are too hard/dungeons too long. Then to have complaints about how easy content is when 20% of the playerbase hasn't even cleared Alex 4 normal.
I just personally think they got it really right at launch, and now it feels so much more unbalanced than it used to. I wanna do Thordan, but I feel like the last three or so phases is too hard for PF. I wanna do something harder than the faceroll dungeons, but I don't want to be in a static anymore. Right now, Thordan is really the only thing that caters to people like me.
But Square says that Thordan is for statics stuck on Alex 2. The way they perceive that content is to help raiders, not provide the non-raiders with challenge. I think that's gonna get them in trouble with the people that play this game every single day and sub every single month, and that's gonna hurt their bottom line.
And yet, ironically...
(12-04-2015, 10:11 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: The game isn't too different now than it was in 2.x: Log in, clear <content you prefer>, pass time until reset. The issue now is that the only content "worth" doing are the dungeons, maybe, if you're not raiding, which few are, and if you're not why care about esoterics?
I don't envy them, but right now balancing what is on tap is impossible.
Truth.
Whether it be more staff, a different philosophy moving forward, further effort of communication, or even changing up the Diadem which fell on its ass when it came out when it probably was supposed to fill in the gap a bit..
Something needs to happen.
TL;DR: Midcore content is hard to define, I don't see timesinks as casual, and with such diverse opinions like this I don't envy Square Enix but they need to do something about the people inbetween casual and hardcore.