I dont think anyone can disagree with this article.Follow

You do it all the time to me (and anyone else with a different view than you) though. Even so far as to tell me what I supposedly mean.

Edited, Aug 19th 2016 4:28pm by Theonehio

It's just one of those things...

I don't feel that Hio's argument is weak because the concepts are not at all new and also not exclusive to XIV. This is par for the course. You have to play the game if you want to win the prize.


To borrow a page from your book... why do you play it if you don't enjoy it? You've asked others including myself this very question and the answer always boils down to player preference.

This is why it seems like the players are being blamed. We all knew(anyone with previous experience anyway) what to expect from a game based on the vertical progression model. You can't really point the finger at the developers of the game because they brought almost exactly what was expected.

Doctors and lawyers make boatloads of money. They go through school, pre-law/med, more school, residency, ect. ect. It's a grind. The reward for that grind is a hefty salary. The comparison isn't direct, but the concepts are parallel. Grind = gain. The longer and harder you work, the higher the ceiling is for your reward and it's not much different in vertical progression.

This is really nothing new and we all should have expected it before even putting the disc in the tray. It sucks that people who genuinely don't have time to raid that would enjoy it can't do so. I just don't have any sympathy for players who do have the means, but make a conscious decision not to exercise that freedom. The reason(s) doesn't matter.

This article is comparing chalk with cheese, it's always been the case that they saw wow as the pinnacle of success to be copied and xi was not.

If XIV players think they are ever really going to copy anything from xi you're deluded, from the start the devs were told yoo look at wow as to how it's done. You are never going to get a prettier xi, you're never going to get anything other than what wow does because that is where the developers are looking for their inspiration.

Whether you agree or not, it is what it is. This is a game based on and that will never deviate from wow, the good thing is that it can try appeal to a bigger audience doing that. The bad thing is that when wow brings out a new expansion you're going to lose vast numbers more players than you already have. They played their cards, what's done is done.

Tons of people do this too every day in XIV, heck most still run content they don't enjoy because it rewards things.

Palace of the Dead (Rewards)
Certain Roulettes (I promise most people doing this aren't solo queuing the trials and dungeons you land in unless they absolutely have to.)
Alexander/Beast Tribe spamming for relic (I refuse to believe people spamming these enjoy spamming it for the 100th time for no reward other than an item towards your unidentified.)

And so on.

So that pretty much falls under: "The game nor anything else isn't preventing you from doing things, you simply choose not to."

Not sure why that's such a bad thing.

Edited, Aug 20th 2016 6:40pm by Theonehio

Indeed, which makes it no different than any other content, ESPECIALLY in this game. However, given that SE weekly locksout gear and PUNISHES you for going back to help others doesn't help things either.



The funny thing about zero tolerance as you put it:

The game itself has zero tolerance for anything but what is designed, so definitely don't lump that into social aspect. No one BUT a WAR/PLD/DRK can tank simply because no other classes not only can produce as much enmity, but doesn't come anywhere near the defense and mitigation requirements. Not even Titan/Topaz/Onyx Carby can end-game tank properly due to their special nature (it would be highly OP if they could.)

Otherwise, as long as you have melee/ranged/caster mix you're fine, because the game punishes you for stacking classes, something people complained to SE to make happen, because of saltiness of Manaburns back in FFXI prime days.



In the more than 20+ MMOs I've played for any decent amount of time, "Raid content" tends to be the content that actually lasts the longest when you ignore artifical barriers because it is USUALLY designed to be a culmination of all you've done in order to tackle it and thus get rewarded for it.

Content like Weeping City for example would be done within a day if you were allowed to farm it for points to purchase gear without weekly restriction. Diadem proved that content in XIV has an EXTREMELY short life span if you can use it as an alternate to raid content. Diadem was fine as a concept because it works as an alternative, but it pretty much obsoleted any set of content you could think of at the time. So it's not that that group of people "think they're more important", they just realize what content tends to last the most.

SERIOUSLY think about the content FFXIV adds and which set of content tends to last even 2 weeks after a major patch goes live. Barring forcing us back into obsoleted content, it's usually the raid content, rarely the fluff content and before it gets taken out of context, as usual, it's not because of the difficulty either, because people were still doing Binding Coil well into the CT days because it offered more than just gear.



When it comes to XIV though...I really wonder who are the "in-betweeners", since I'm classified as a casual player, I'm just not going to pretend 1-3 hours a day sometimes every other 4 days isn't enough time to get through this game's content, especially once you learn it (since a full run of Midas Savage 1-4 is about 4 hours at the slowest pace possible given 4's mechanic orgy.) Yet when I see people mention casual players..it gets said they don't do "hardcore raids" or "ex primals"..so like..what IS casual? what IS midcore? Since 3.x actually did better at introducing "not just side grades"...for example you had Sephirot Ex, gave you 220 weapons, you have Lore weapons, which takes 7 weeks of Midas 4 Normal and 1k Lore tomes to get if you refuse to do Savage Midas for the token drop, then you had Nidhogg Ex and now you have Deep Dungeon when considering weapons alone (as they matter the most for any kind of progression.)



While true, raiding isn't why this happen...far from it or it would have happened with XI as well because most of the sought after gear was ALWAYS from events like Dynamis, while Sky/Sea open world had it's share of drops as well, but open world systems like Campaign/Besieged/Voidwatch/etc also still existed. What DID happen, were people saying open world is "outdated"...really, look back on the 1.0 forum archive or the beta forums, hell even look back to pre 2.0 interviews where Yoshida said Open world won't be a focus outside of FATEs.

I'm not sure how Raiding has anything to do with open world being forgotten in this game, since as proven with Diadem, people would GLADLY move away from instance raiding if there's a decent open world "raid."

Sadly, this is all part of Yoshi's "the formula won't change because it works" he said during E3, because 4 Man has a particular balance, 8 man has a particular balance. 24 man is the only set of content that can change everything because if they tune 24 man to be a "hardcore raid", they can EASILY retune 4/8 man content to be anything from "easy" to "hard" content and save 24 man for the top tier drops since it literally solves the 3-4 bosses every 6 months they release in one raid lol.

Since idk, no matter what you say or suggest, just the mere mention of raiding is "wrong."

Coil had high participation levels and extremely higher clear rates overall? Wrong for this game!
Ex primals that take memorization and learning? WRONG!
Alexander Savage? Ain't that cute, BUT IT'S STILL WRONG!

So realistically, to some people, raiding is just "wrong" and they want to see it gone, yet would fight tooth and nail if you were to say "get rid of chocobo racing or the golden saucer" since even looking at ticket sales (the best way to gauge how many people actually bother with utilizing that content system), GS has THE lowest participation rate of any content in the game. Even on Balmung where people use it more for RP atmosphere than anything. Chocobo Racing was dead in the dirt, but you'd still have some people queuing for it every now and then. Lord of Verminion was dead in the dirt, people still do it every now and then. Triple Triad is dead in the water..people still participate every now and then..yet if you say get rid of that content, you'll become public enemy #1, but it's perfectly okay to say get rid of a progression component.

I just meant that you have to put in the work to get the reward. What Thayos and others consistently complain about are things related to raiding, but not the actual raiding. The only thing I really see about raiding directly are in regards to how dangerous the mechanics can be. I don't really know of any other way for content to present a challenge unless you're forced to execute on a high level.


Though I don't praise SE for bootlegging mechanics from other games, I feel like they'd be better served allowing players some sort of limited currency to spend on 'bonus loot rolls'.

Complete a weekly quest and earn a token that you can spend after defeating a boss for a shot at a piece of loot you might want. I don't see it drawing players to raiding, but I feel like it could keep them there and certainly foster keeping them involved and running the content more frequently if it suits them.


Do you trade the punishing mechanics in for added time spent assembling your group? Do you accept the mechanics being even more punishing for the freedom of going in with smaller groups? It's coming out either way, it's just a matter of where. If they're going to maintain the grind/reward ratio then there isn't much wiggle room anywhere else.

I don't even know why the social aspect of the game is even being mentioned. People can't even be bothered to login to voice chat just to listen, much less to interact with other people... a large part of what makes these games unique in my opinion. Nearly everything I learned about FFXI was a result of talking to other players either in group chat, voice chat, in forums like this one or even in that one cafe across town.

As much as I think XI has it all over XIV in terms of core mechanics, I wouldn't give a **** about either of them without the interactions I had with other people and not the actual content.

Words, and ideas. I have them.

The feeling of progression raiding and reward for difficulty, I feel, can still be preserved while removing much of the haves/have-nots mentality and punishment that the playerbase experiences with a simple on/off pass/fail style endgame.

But to start off, here's the disclaimers.

No, I don't feel like the 'best rewards" should be reserved for the players that do the hardest difficulty. I believe that those who do the hardest difficulty should spend the least amount of time getting their rewards, so they can move on to other content or help others, or gear other classes/jobs/roles/etc.

I feel difficulty is being substituted for engagement in the current endgame - it can afford to more forgiving and more random in its mechanical elements, less random in it's drop rates, and more random in its stat distribution. In short Diadem's loot system was cool and could be used at the raid level - provided raids were not as difficult, and drop rates were not as suffocated. It's proven that this sort of system enhances replay-ability in other like games. Difficulty wise, I still think there is a way to obtain variant difficulties that still maintain a consistent level of satisfaction, while each difficulty providing variations within their own occurrences, as well as independently of each difficulty - but it would require the mechanics to become a bit more forgiving in terms of user error.

In addition, I feel as if there lacks a permanence in rewards. I feel that raids need a unique take-away for each successive progress. These rewards need not be best-in-use, but they should add more interesting dynamics to the game and jobs that get them.

There is a substantial loss of proactive teamwork within the game. There's very little cross job or cross role cooperation, especially in a means of feeling like they have a sizable impact on the game itself - and most that does exist feels simply like an independent component that adds to a team, rather than a team focused effort culminating in a large impact. (Everyone does their job, rather than help one another meet a goal.) The lack of this element, I feel, is one of the major factors why the limits of enemy mechanics feel more exposed.

I have ideas for all of these factors - in ways I feel the majority of the players, even some to many raiders, may wind up enjoying. But because of the specific environment here. I feel hesitant to share them.

The arguments here are more repetitive than the gear-grind and raiding is in FFXIV, and nobody and no one seems remotely interested in shifting. Even as I keep trying to find middle-of-the-road ideas.

Edited, Aug 21st 2016 5:56am by Hyrist

Again, we seem to experience the game very differently. Aside from from Final Steps of Faith during those first first few days, I have never seen anyone auto-leave any of those things.

"Barely even do the easy content" is a misnomer, and an outright lie when you look at last cycle's Story mode participation/clear numbers. Complaints on OF and other sites are a vocal minority, talking about a minority of their experiences. Basic psycology easily explains that the issue here is that when you flood a person with similar experiences over and over again, even if the vast majority of them are positive or neutral, the negatives are the ones that stick in the human mind the most. Compound that with the typical tropes of an English speaking gaming community (wont to tantrum at the drop of a hat) and you get your explanation. - in short, a few bad apples may stand out, but they don't ruin the bunch.

Metrics across the board from MMOs already indicate much higher participation and clear numbers across the board for lower to mid end raiding, and note that most of this is done without enticing the best gear available in the patch. The highest participation and clears is always for the raiding that allows for open groups to find their sources together. This opens up the pool of players to find positive experiences, for raiders, who are more like to find the negatives in the bunch (or more accurately see negative behavior blossom) due to continual strain and frustration -

Mayhap hardship does not bind people together as much as it did in the good-old days? I wonder.

Anyways, people should really stop treating like appealing to the midcore is some impossible task. The metrics and tools for doing so are already there, and in many cases are in use in various forms. They just need to be more universally applied.

Anyways, I feel like I stumbled upon and idea that would suitably provide raid progression without the over-reliance upon the gear power creep we currently have, and enhance the current gameplay mechanics to boot. It was kinda staring us in the face really - as a form of it already exists in the game. SE tends to create good pieces, and then doesn't have the sense of putting them together.

If PVP is a system that merits itself its own additional ability set - then why don't we have Raid skills? More particularly we could have a small number of raid skills particular to each raid, that could be leveled up, and, upon completion, some of these specific skills could then be taken outside the raids for general use (Albiet at a less efficient strength than say a raid skill used in its specific raid, some of them would/could be disabled in some raids to preserve balance.) Instead of hard locking these rewards behind the highest difficulty to start, make them by far more efficient to achieve and level by taking the highest route - FFXI's Ambuscade comes to mind. You can then supplement bragging-rights rewards in the form of glamours or furniture items as per normal, and leave gearing to a more universal approach.

More specifically, the use of these skills will likely need to be implemented at some point to keep raiding from becoming too familiar- as there are only so many enemy-to-player mechanics they can produce, they may as well make a progression mechanic out of them. It would be best if they were to implement them as a teamwork-based mechanics who's functions are based on roll (Less Skewer, more Thrown Weapon type abilities, that are shared between everyone of a particular role.)

Anyways, this could be expounded on, at a later date.

Edited, Aug 21st 2016 1:33pm by Hyrist

Just this morning when a friend asked if I can do trial in progress as people bailed within the first few minutes, and ironically, I ended up in a DIFFERENT party that had people bail of them too. I even solo queued Final Steps of faith on tank just to see how often things go down hill.

http://i.imgur.com/Kxeb2oE.jpg

And here's solo queue, where the person chose to run away with the akh morn and rest of the party chased after and killed themselves.

http://i.imgur.com/3jXFMyM.jpg

So while it seems like an exaggeration, it really isn't. It IS pretty bad, so you're very lucky you don't run into it. That's why I always question the whole "casual/midcore" argument when it comes to the raid scene when I have so many videos, screenshots and parse logs of pickup groups on Sarga that were doing Coil, even back when we could only gather via shout/chilling in Wineport.



Edited, Aug 21st 2016 1:58pm by Theonehio

Yeah, I still stand behind my belief that most players are actually pretty chill (presuming you treat them like actual people). While I won't deny coming across the occasional rage quitter or know-it-all-yet-do-nothing-well, they've largely been a tiny percentage of my gaming PUGing.

Either way, part of the "What do we do?" issue can be traced as far back as the character creation process. XIV and XI are in generally unique positions in that we don't lock a character to a single class. If XIV loosened the reigns a bit on cross-class abilities, you might open the door for some more interesting play styles, assuming they get over the growing ability bloat issue. Meanwhile, most other games try to make it so gearing one job/class per raid cycle takes you 2-3 months, in part due to lockouts. When I consider the effort beyond leveling yet another character, doing all the quests/stories, and potential endgame grinds (like merit points) on top, most of these other titles usually just have me sticking to one character even though I'd be curious to try others if they weren't so stringent on the time requirements. Are you going to have people who are like, "I'm a Paladin and will only play such!" and hypothetically grind out everything in a day/week/whatever? Yes. And that's their own damn fault for being impatient and inflexible. Meanwhile, there's so much potential being lost in not letting us really customize ourselves.

The philosophy of it being okay to occasionally let a character be OP seems to be lost to today's MMO market. One guy who wrecks the **** out of dragons won't be as good as someone who spent the time training to annihilate undead. Yeah, part of this is fairly presenting such scenarios where certain specialties shine like that, but this is also where I say borrowing from the ARPG book of content randomization comes in handy, as well as striving to make the open world more dynamic with things like mob populations shifting beyond day/night/weather mechanics. Technically, dragon guy could and should be able to become as good as undead guy, but when you vary the world enough and make situations where **** retentive planning can't be relied on, it gets harder for there to truly be such a thing as the perfect party/set-up. Instead, it winds up more about covering the basics and hoping fate isn't unkind.

Yet, there's a part of me that wonders if tech hasn't caught up to my idealism.

What? Let's not be revisionist here. The roulette had nothing to do with people "leaving" and everything to do with long queue times for DPS.



... Which actually isn't a terrible thing, and certainly isn't a "casual" player problem. It's usually not the casual players who are obsessed with maximizing efficiency.



Not clicking your link, because I don't want to cloud my judgement of you either here or there. But if you're really that much more pleasant on the OFs, then why aren't you equally pleasant here? Also, I'm not surprised that I've agreed with you on the OFs. I've agreed with you here, too, though you're typically too stubborn in your responses to acknowledge it.



I often describe the differences of needs between hardcore and casual/midcore players both here and on the OFs. I'm consistent in my view that SE needs to create a more suitable endgame for the casual/midcore crowd, and I'm also consistent on how SE can do that.



Again, what???



That has GOT to be a myth. I've gone back and forth with people over many pages on the OFs and not once have I ever been banned. And perhaps that just means that most people on the OFs are reasonable and aren't personally offended by what I say.

As far as me not being worried about bans here, that's also a dumb argument, Hio, and you should know better. You get that same protection here. The only thing I've warned you about recently is putting words in other people's mouths. And that's not a "you" thing. That is a form of harassment that has been the catalyst for people being muted or banned in the past.



No, Hio, I classify you as hardcore not because of how often you play (which is still far more than I play, both in volume and consistency), but because of how you play. How many days after Deep Dungeons came out did it take you to have like five different weapons? You do not play this game casually. It's actually kind of funny that you think of yourself as casual.



Funny you say this, because this is what I was telling you on these forums not too long ago. SE doesn't only listen to the filthy casuals. They've actually made changes to benefit more "serious" players.

See, we agree again!



Doubtful, but let's see what you have to say.



No, most people were not progression raiders. Most people in 2.x tried coil, found it to be way too punishing and gave up. And most people did the same with extreme primals. In fact, during 2.x, the difficulty of Titan HM forced many players to quit (similar to how savage raiding caused many hardcore players to quit), which is why the relic quests were dumbed down and made into a huge grind.

Seriously, let's not be revisionists here.



And I agree with this. There are people out there who enjoy savage raiding, and if SE is going to insist on dedicating so many of its resources to this subset of players, then at least it should do a good job.

Again I must disagree, Thayos. As there is an underlying hypocrisy in the hardcore stance yet to be addressed here.
One of the major justifications for a lot of heated rhetoric against casual content or anything that is not high endgame is that raiding is supposed to be 'core content'. To the point of arguing against the development time used in such ventures.

Pair this with the continued evidence depicting hardcore raids being at best a niche affair and you have pretty much a logical blockade. You either defend raiding as niche and attempt to preserve the playstyle, at the sacrifice of development attention towards other activities better geared for the wider audience, or you forfeit the rigid stance on difficulty and accessibility to have it truly fit the definition of core content, which would be measured by its appeal and participation (which it is fundamentally lacking).

On that point there really is no middle ground. The rhetoric forces a black and white decision.

Personally the later appeals to me more for a multitude of reasons I can't really get into over the phone.

Edited, Aug 22nd 2016 1:31pm by Hyrist