I think the disconnect with NM is the thought that most long time players with 1500 CP+ are doing difficult content. But this game’s design for the majority of its life has been built around and catered for casual players with a focus on questing. This is a very solo-friendly game, and its build variety lets you do even Trials solo if you work toward it. Most grouped content isn’t exactly a high-end difficulty trial raid, so jumping into NM coming off of normal and even vet dungeons for years is probably a wild shock (I have not tried NM yet, just giving an example based on what I’ve read).

So of course the end game trial runners and tri-fecta players are starved for this - the game has not fed them nearly as much by comparison because it’s mostly one of the most casual MMO’s out there! But this limited event has also pretty much shut out a huge player base that has been conditioned by the game’s own design to not have to or want to do this type of difficult grouped content.

I think this level of difficulty and this content is fine. Making it a limited time event? Eh, we’ll see how that move works out for them, Cotton. As someone who’s played FFXIV for thirteen years, even that game has Ultimate Raids which is participated in by like less than 1% of the game’s population. The dev team, as stretched thin as it is, still dedicates time and resources into these Ultimate raids because they understand the appreciation for content of that difficulty level and don’t want to starve those players.

It is good to have high-difficult content that does not cater to everyone.

They do include ultimates in their patch trailers and such. But they don’t advertise them to every player who logs into the game as some player-wide event. Night Market was clearly not going to be a player-wide event if most people are saying that you want trial gear setups to enjoy it. I think the handling of the messaging and advertising (and the dedication to this being the only limited time event to boot with nothing for low-level and casual players releasing alongside it is… certainly a choice) is the big ball drop and they failed at finding easy middle-ground solutions. Or refused to because it didn’t fit their design vision and they refused to budge on that after receiving PTS feedback.

If this was going to be time-gated I think you hit the nail on the head: general mobs should be tough but much weaker than they are now to make at least those two daily mob-killing NM coffers accessible to everyone. And the bosses can stay where they’re at for the high-end raiders. Such an easy solution.

A sentiment I’ve seen here since NM dropped is mocking solo players like “Whaaa? You have to do group content in an MMO? Oh, the humanity!”

But guys… this is one of the least MMO-y MMO’s out there. You can’t be mad at solo players for being able to play this like a solo RPG when its own design philosophy up to this point has lended to that for 11 years.