My theory is this and it’s the same for any looter shooter type game:
There isn’t a dev on the planet capable of providing enough content to satisfy a hardcore gamer.
No matter what you do you will never be able to keep up with someone who can spend literally 90% of their life gaming.
Example1: when I started playing warframe I had 5 years of content open to me, I burned through that in 18 months, 18 months, I had all the frames, all the pinnacle gear, everything the game had to offer.
Example 2: I have come back to D2 twice, the first time was the launch of forsaken, I started on a new platform, so 3 characters from scratch, it took me 3 months to burn through 12 months of content, I had 3 max level characters at that time with all the gear I wanted.
No dev can keep up with that, I don’t care who they are.
By the way when I started warframe after 5 years of development and when I started forsaken from scratch? two of the best experiences I’ve had in gaming for a long time.
I strongly believe that’s how this type of game should be played, not non stop from day 1 to the end of its life.
English
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[quote]There isn’t a dev on the planet capable of providing enough content to satisfy a hardcore gamer.[/quote] No, there isn't. And they're not the playerbase you want to target anyway. Let's use another game as an example; In Final Fantasy 14 there are several tiers of raids. Eight man raids come first; they usually drop tokens, you don't get top tier gear, but you get tokens you can farm for good stuff; these exist to teach people the basic mechanics and structure of that raid, they can be done with the Duty Finder, the game's system designed to throw you into random groups with random people, and after the first week or so, people generally pick up on the content well enough that they run smoothly. However that isn't hard enough, is it? A premade guild will clear that stuff within the first three days! So we get Savage mode. Savage is basically just hard mode and aren't put into the duty finder until they become dead content and the general playerbase is considered over-geared for it by virtue of level and gear caps rising to the point where you can overpower the mechanics. They take the mechanics up to ten, introduce new phases; but generally it's just a harder version of the same thing. So clearly, these aren't meant for the casual player to simply join and enjoy - but at the same time; they have their own loot pools, their own gear sets and their own cosmetics. As a result a lot of the raiders who simply can't get a static raid group competent enough to clear savage content when it's live feel very hard done that they just get denied this content. But, here's the problem; it'll be cleared by the time the week is out and the hardcore raiders will be back to demanding newer, harder content as soon as they finish it. So now we have a problem where the dev team has to budget and design the same raid twice, basically to appease roughly ten percent of the playerbase, who aren't even going to appreciate it because they're just going to complain that it was too short, too easy and demand more immediately. All while they have to design the twenty-four-man raid as well. These are called Alliance Raids and, generally, are easier and more accessible to a general audience than the regular raids are as they're designed for twenty four people to just mob the encounters. They may be big scale companies, but designing huge end-game content drops still consumes a lot of time, energy and resources. Which brings me to Ultimate Raids. Ultimate raids are an overhaul of the previous expansion's raid featuring new content, new bosses and new loot; designed solely to appease the tiny percentage of people who could actually do savage content and had it on farm - which, may I remind you, is roughly ten percent or less of the entire playerbase - it is bar-none the hardest content in the game and features remixes and expansions on all of the mechanics featured in the raid, and the latest one dropped recently and, drum roll please, it took a week for the world's first to claim it. But not just that - but the world's first refused to stream it, or record it, as is their right of course, not because they didn't want the pressure or anything. But, in their own words, because they "didn't want anyone else to learn how to beat it" - they wanted to be, literally, the only people to clear that content. They didn't want to help anyone else. They didn't want to contribute anything to the community. Now, here's the catch; the devs of Final Fantasy Fourteen have gone on record saying that the effort and resources involved in designing these ultimate raids is so intense and time consuming that it costs them more to make one, than it does to make the other raids. That if they were to make more than one an expansion, they would basically have to cut out the other content, like the twenty-four and eight-man raids. For what is ultimately the smallest, most selfish percentage of the userbase. A percentage who aren't even satisfied with this content because as soon as they clear it, they demand the next one - and already ask for more even if it comes at the expense of the other ninety percent of the userbase. And that's the problem that Destiny has fallen into; Bungie is catering to that ten percent. They've revised their entire progression system to appease them. Why are these people who contribute nothing to the game and its community, and actively want to take away from everyone else in an online experience, allowed to hold it hostage?
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I agree totally, hardcore are a vocal minority, I’ve even suggested that content with no matchmaking is a complete waste of dev time and company money because only a small amount of people bother with it. Since my guys stopped playing, about the first month after release of D2 I haven’t touched a raid or any other content without matchmaking.
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Dead right dont see datto and the hardcore crew posting any videos lately I doubt they are even playing.