How in the world could someone enjoy lv75 cap only... with all the advancements we've gotten, all the cool things that came along and adjustments. To actively want to do that "content" you have to be kidding me.
I know you were asking a rhetorical question here, but what you probably didn't expect is that someone who has
thousands of hours both playing and developing 75 capped content would be willing to answer your rhetorical question. I don't really have a dog in this fight since I've played both retail and private 75 cap pretty extensively and I think they both have their selling points, but the real fact of the matter is that they just don't appeal to the same types of people either.
75 capped players don't care about advancement like retail players do. These are the folks who have started over again every time a new private server rises and falls, moving on to the next one as it comes up. They know that there's a strong possibility that their character could be gone tomorrow, and they don't care, because the advancement isn't really what keeps them playing. Many of them enjoy the social PVP aspect of the game more than they do the game itself. They wanna join a linkshell, do the DKP thing, and compete with others. Some of them are simply people who played in their teenage years who didn't have the ability to stay up late and grind to get all of the things that they wanted, so they do it on a 75 capped private server instead. They'd do it on a 75 capped retail server if one existed, too. We've actually seen this with WoW Classic, people are more than happy to simply restart to go back in time even in spite of the
"You think you do, but you don't" a la J. Allen Brack.
Many retail players see things the exact same way that J. Allen Brack did in that video clip. The problem is that reality doesn't quite align with that notion because as we saw people
did actually want that and WoW Classic was extremely successful and arguably still is even in spite of the fact that it's in what many people consider to be one of the worst expansions in WoW history - Cataclysm.
In my experience retail players are simply the types of folks who are absolutely addicted to advancement, and are willing to go to insane lengths to advance. The fact that we have so many people who multibox should tell you this. This is a stark contrast to the 75 capped approach of "make some friends, be social." These multiboxers went even further than being isolated with trusts, and are now just paying probably $100 or more a month to play by themselves. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it should make it clear that there is a pretty distinct mindset difference between the two groups of people because multiboxing is pretty common on retail these days. Private servers on the other hand have gone hard in the opposite direction and strictly prohibit multiboxing.
For me personally, I am often intimidated by the overwhelming amount of sheer
things there are in retail. I have tried my best over the past year and some change to learn all of the systems, but the fact of the matter is that I still don't exactly know how I'm supposed to be advancing most of the time because I wasn't there when the content was current and there's not a lot of clear direction as to what it is I should be doing to advance my character. We always point people to the 1 to 119 guide, but once you reach the end of that guide there is still a LOT of things that you need to learn and things to do that are not immediately obvious and there's not really many resources to learn about them aside from a few job guides here and on bgwiki.
If I were a new player I could very easily see myself being turned off by the sheer amount of things I am expected to know. Decision paralysis is one of the biggest things that turns players away from games, and it is the chief complaint against other MMOs that have been around a long time. You see this point made a lot re: WoW and XIV. And while the game is better than it was in 75 cap as far as holding your hand at the start, it is exactly the same as ever once you get out of the starting areas. This is curbed quite a bit on 75 capped private servers by the fact that the game is significantly more social and you will very likely find people willing to answer your questions within your first few hours of playing. I didn't find a linkshell on retail until I was already 99, and that was not for a lack of trying.
On a different note, one of the reasons that as a developer you may want to stick to 75 cap is that if you're doing custom content, 75 capped gear and stats are simply easier to balance around. 119 stat bloat and the overall upscaling in power of spells, abilities, and weapon skills makes balancing content a lot trickier. Itemization is way more optimized and thus your fights have to be a lot more technically intricate to account for that. When I was working on Abyssea for Wings I started to realize just how impressive the Abyssea zones are from a programming standpoint and really changed my perspective on where the development mindset may have been during this time. I actually don't think that they were trying to "wind down" XI to make way for XIV like a lot of people seem to suggest when that topic is brought up, because the amount of effort and detail that had to go into Abyssea is
off the charts. They made some poor design decisions, but the programming it took to build those zones is truly impressive.
Either way, most people who are developers for 75 capped private servers tend to agree that retail XI has a lot of really solid advancements. J. Allen Brack was right about some of what he said in that video clip, specifically that there are bugfixes and features that legitimately made the game better. They took some of those advancements with them when they worked on Classic, and later on went on to make "Season of Discovery," which is "reimagined classic." It has modern quality of life improvements and some class changes while still offering roughly the same sort of content that Classic does. Some of the XI pservers are also doing this too. Horizon is pretty much just Season of Discovery. Catseye is also doing something similar, although they're taking 99 content and scaling it back so that 75 players can do it. They have things like Records of Eminence, Domain Invasion, and are working on VWNMs and Hunts.
So yeah, while it may not appeal to you, not everything is
for you. The day when you truly learn that will be the day that you stop caring how other people are having fun and simply learn to appreciate that cool things can exist without you.
It is like watching kids kick a beat up old soccer ball in a dark dirt lot when 11 feet way is a grass field with boundary lines, goals, lighting, and a nice clean soccer ball. But those kids insist that their field is better because it is how the game is meant to be played.
So what? If they're playing a game and they're having fun playing that game then the objective has been met, fun is literally why games exist. I played street hockey when I was a kid because I lived in Florida where ice hockey wasn't a thing and I was perfectly fine with that. Never once did a Canadian show up and haze me for my roller skates.
Not a huge fan of his, but Asmongold sort of
sums it up nicely as well as per my point of "worrying about too many things." I think this is another reason people who played when they were younger just default back to 75 cap. The mental burden of learning all the new things just isn't worth it. Plus if I go play on that new shiney field, I have to worry about messing up the grass, the paint, etc. I was already happy in my dirt lot, so why not just stay there?
