Do players really want hard content?

General Discussion General Discussion
43

Abyss dungeons, Valtan and argos are all a good level of challange-mechanics and I enjoyed learning these.

But Vykass is far too much for me, I used to consider myself a good gamer but I just can’t process vykass at all especially gate 2 with the wings and orbs part the timings are so unforgiving even in gate 1 where I understand the mechanics fully I still find myself failing the orb kite and orb memory bits 3/4 times. Have cleared gates 1-2 but not three and feel like dead weight when doing this raid.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but this is the first game I have ever had so much difficulty with processing what’s going on an reacting fast enough (with all other effects turned off) I won’t blame latency at 180-250ms as that shouldn’t mean I’m missing things like orbs, it’s on me not reacting and moving fast enough.

Hopefully clown is more Valtan like. I am pretty much just going to ignore doing vykas now because I just feel so useless and bad every time I try. I like a challenge but this one seems insurmountable for me, I got worse this week compared to last and letting down 7 other people because I’m not upto their level also weighs heavy (they are very nice people and don’t get angry, but I can tell they are disappointed)

Thankfully I can still get enjoyment out of working on my alt army, and my main (sorc) dosen’t actually need vykas cloths for her gear sets according to maxroll.

I like that this game has a bit of something for everyone, and that there is challenge in the content. For me personally though vykas is to unforgiving.

1 Like
44

I no longer care about engravings, correct stats or jewelry bc of phenols, char level, or even wearing all blue gear.

New 1370 exists and we were all new at one time. Note this doesn’t mean I’m happy to see 3 fresh 1370 in my alt yoho who has bothered to get 4x3, but Not going to waste energy caring about it. Just go on, get content done.

What I do care about and will insta-quit any content over, is when the new alt clearly doesn’t give any damn about even trying to use zero cost, automatically given items.

Examples -

  • every fresh 1370 that unlocks yoho by definition also unlocked 1370 chaos. So even if only few gems slots filled and all low level 1 and 2, that is fine. This shows the player at least tries. Got some free gems with first 2 chaos, slotted them in, great.

But I’ve seen tons, so many players who clearly not only want carry, but gives zero shits about slotting even 1 single level 1 gem.

  • to those that say well it is MM, you get what you get so stfu or use PF. Sorry, no. Almost zero ppl really mean this. What they mean is they have almost no expectations, not zero expectations.

If MM = zero expectations then they’d all be happy with true example has today - player who was asked by another in my party why zero gems when should have at least couple level 1 matching their build. His literal answer was idc, this is MM so stfu, and oh btw lolz haven’t even slotted skills or skill points. He admitted every skill was level 1, hundreds of free points avail to assign but didn’t give a shit and we the party was entitlement anoles for not carrying him since this was MM.

So no, sorry - MM means most reaonable areas of variables should have no expectations (gear quality, stats, engraving level and number, gem level etc). Agree these are all standard variables and you get what you get in MM.

But not assigning skill points is not a standard variable. That is is permanent, or should be, step in every char regardless brand new or not. Same for you ran 2 chaos dungeons, why the F not slot whatever few gems you got? Whatever crazy build you are using, you will always get at least few gems matching, so slotting none is same as not assigning skill points.

Same for deliberately dying. If dies all 3 deaths in guardian bc he sucks, brand new doesn’t know mech, or made mistakes, ok fine - on board with that is MM randomness. But when a player openly admits or even brags is not going to miss even free pots until he uses up all 3 deaths, that is not ‘standard’ MM variable we accept as doing MM. That is self admitted troll.

So answer to OP - if player actually is seen to be trying, idc how bad, gear, gems, whatever. May not be happy about it, but that’s just MMO randomness and I got bad draw that hand. If player clearly doesn’t give a shit, then why should I?

45

As a returning player getting close to 1415 all this gatekeeping and bussing is putting me off continuing playing and it kinda feels like the player base is more toxic then when I played on release. I should be looking forward to valtan not dreading it

2 Likes
46

truth. so many friend groups came here just to raid and had no interest in the community at all. They didnt give a shit if there were even other players

1 Like
47

Dailies are the most challenging content Jessique,
I find it most challenging to not fall asleep doing these…

1 Like
48

The difficulty of the game was a big attraction for a majority of people so i would say yes they do.

49

This. I’m going to be one of those players who are 1460+ doing normal vykas because hard mode is just an unfun slog.
Valtan is an enjoyable fight where you can see where you goof up and try to improve. vykas is like tying to do a dance recital while a booba lady yells at you. At least in normal vykas if someone goofs up you pop a time stop and move on. Hard mode is just yelling, people hammering their end raid button and wasted evenings.

No. Thanks.

50

Especially legion raids will always be tuned for korea, the other regions have next to no saying over that. Unless theres a mass exodus of players due to hard content, there isnt anything gonna change. Upcoming raids and even abyss dungeons will be very hard if not even impossible to just pug in the first weeks.

51

If it’s 50-75% of the normal reward minus the bullshit gimmicks, why not? No stress experience and as a casual (myself as well) it’s not like you were gonna keep up with the Whales and hardcore no-lifers anyways.

1 Like
52

I enjoy playing different classes and getting better at playing them. I AT LEAST get 3x3 engravings on all my 1370 alts and always aim for cruel fighter in all guardian raids/abyss dungeons/abyss raids (Argos). I mainly have the alts to increase the amount of materials I get weekly, but I also plan to raid on all of them when they are high enough item level to do Valtan/Vykas. On my 1415 alts, the game is way more fun because I can do Valtan, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try on the 1370 content because it’s boring in comparison. If you’re playing an alt that is not fun, don’t make it.

53
  1. 1370s we see today are not mostly new players but day 1s and returning (bots are back).
  2. like hell are they gunna waste pheons and buy overpriced acc. to gear an alt that’s just fodder.
  3. Yeah who would’ve thought playing an inferior version of your characters sucks

KR version doesn’t have the issue of bots RMT, overpriced relics, gold. NA does and devs/ AGS didn’t tweak our version enough to combat this so welcome to the worse version of Lost Bots.

1 Like
54

Good discussion in here in my opinion. I think kind of what gets lost is that this is an MMO that you play with other people which often makes it hard to hit the sweet spot for the difficulty since it’s different for different people. I remember playing Rock Band with my friends where we would all be playing together even though some of us were playing on hard, others played on normal and others played on easy. It allowed us all to play together at the difficulty we wanted and everyone had fun. That’s not really possible with a game like this.

I think the annoyance factor comes in with the difficulty ramping. Why make all of the previous content so easy then suddenly ramp up the challenge at the end? Many of my friends who played this game got bored with it and left because there was such a grind at the beginning where nothing was challenging at all. I for one would like to see more challenging versions of Chaos Dungeons, Boss Rush and Dimensional Cubes because now those are just boring to do repeatedly. Also look at how many people farm Yoho even though there are more challenging Guardians to do but most people don’t want the challenge or trust others to be up for the challenge in matchmaking for that matter. Tweaking some of the lateral content could help with making the daily grind feel less boring. Sometimes it’s not so much that people don’t want challenging content but rather that they don’t want to grind farmable content where others are failing meaning they have to try again possibly with a different group and waste more time doing old content.

Which once again is why I have such a problem with the 1370 gate. There’s no way around it. Those dungeons are completely do-able with a full group of 1370 characters. I did it multiple times this week because the event got two of my alts up to 1370 as well as having a 3rd that got there before the patch. But so many people just don’t even want to try if they aren’t getting carried. For the other content, you can go over the required iLvl for the content before trying it or just skip it all together like I did for the Gate of Paradise dungeons on nearly all of my characters.

55

They think they do… but they don’t.

1 Like
56

People think they want challenging content. Until its content they cant clear, now they’re paying for carries and complaining that theirs no way to make gold, because they spend the gold made from the raid for the carry run to even be in the raid…on every single one of their characters.

That fact that people are paying 2-2.2k gold for argos runs shows how insane this player base actually is.

1 Like
57

Think this game designed by sadists. As this game will gets harder and harder

58

They are not insane they have money and want to do it fast I mostly do carry runs on Argos for 1370 with 165+ roster and they pay around 1,7-2k sonfor sure its not their first character … its still worth for them while they do same on their mains or even more characters… Yes I also buy carry runs for my 1370 alt, but looking only for 1,4-1,6k max. Its still more worth than doing only P1 I have more mats and gold.

59

As someone that raided in other mmos and, at least in the old days, wiped 2-3 days multiple hours on a boss for weeks…
First the actual content is not that hard yet.
Second the feeling of climbing that mountain as a group is awesome. (static groups in mind)

60

Ngl at first it was
but after x-th wipe sometimes i wanna to yell “ok i dont wanna runn wih x guy, he still cant do this simple mech”
because in the end its just waiting for worst person to learn fight

valtan idc i can carry this
on vykas i cant help when he nukes people with purple donut, fail blac/blue orbs, keeps staring at medusa when not supposed to or drop speed pool on slow pools

61

Yeah I’m sure we all had this moment at least once :sweat_smile:
We didn’t have any problems with that, although we got 2 guys that still are not able to safely do the typing check xD

Anyway i think its a refreshing difficulty in a game that pretty much isnt difficult overall.

62

Answering the title, yes people do want hard content.

If we were to straight up remove any form of challenge from this game I’d quit in a flash because there’s no longer any incentive to me gearing up. We can debate on how people choose to play (not using pots, using pots, quiting etc) but my honest opinion is that the game doesn’t need to change.

What does need to change though is the fact that people will intentionally joined experienced runs without any experience at all, and then rant on here or reddit about people stopping them from learning. I could count on one hand the ammount of “Learning runs” I’ve seen past the first week of new content.

The problem is the players themselves, often people cry and cry but they don’t do anything that actually makes a difference.

Step out of your comfort zones and form your learning groups etc. If the game in general despite doing everything you can possibly do for yourself is just too difficult for you, then I’m afraid you’re playing the wrong game, I’d suggest ffxiv.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, aren’t we just servers that are clones of Korea, we simply follow their updates, whatever happens in korea comes to our server eventually (that or somebody has to dig out info to force them to update the game properly) Is it even possible to add something that korea doesn’t have on na/eu?