Well, I suppose I wanted to start off this thread off by venting my frustrations, but I decided to ease into this long read on the note I wish to conclude on: extending the olive branch. Too many times, players of distinctive play styles, raiders and non-raiders alike, are at odds. Our principles on fun and our beliefs about design are seemingly unaligned and that causes us to dig in our heels. Yet, I would propose that the fundamentals of our views are exactly the same. No matter if you're a Raider, non-raider, casual, committed, noob or elite player, we all want the game to be fun and rewarding. I hope after posting this, people who might see raiders as some stereotype with snobbish attitudes gain a greater appreciation for the fact we are just some fellow humans trying to have fun in a game that we enjoy along side you.
I would feel disingenuous if I claimed I did not have a chip on my shoulder. Mainly because of reading these forums daily only to see how poorly any raiding feedback is remarked on. Sure, there are a host of bad ideas, such as simply removing normal alex from the game. But there are good ideas and compromises need to be had. Raiders still make up about 10% of the player base. They need some loving too and when things are not fun, raiders provide feedback about the content designed for them. So, when things are not fun, we come to the forums to provide some feedback only to be met with harsh skepticism, dismissive attitudes, and preconceived misconceptions malformed into trollish responses. Why is it that people want to ruin the gaming experience for anyone, on either side (raider or non-raider), especially if they are trying to provide feedback? It's like 80% of the replies I have seen the last week are "hurr durr, elitist gonna elite, qq moar special snowflakes." Yes we are a minority, but that does not dehumanize us. It does not invalidate what what have to say about the content that IS designed for us. We pay money too, we want the game to succeed too. We want to have fun too!
People in other threads, such as this person (I left their name out), are the reason I wanted to write this thread:
This player admits, in other posts, to not even being in the end game, yet they have plenty of opinions to offer up about it that are completely dismissive. The post is riddled with inflammatory language and presumptuous positions that serve only to provoke and already discontent portion of the player base. Why does this person even bother opening the thread if they feel this strongly? How can they offer educated and insightful feedback about alex savage when they don't even attempt it? Countless one-post wonders, on both sides, go into threads to marginalize, complain about complaining, and derail the topic to focus on their own PoV which usually tends to be irrelevant to the OP. Not all ideas are good, but this tier sucks so much that raiders are quitting in droves and it's best to collect feedback from this disparaged part of the player base before there is no raiding community left.All the tears from the so called hard core raiders are amazing to me. Crying about grinding normal for gear to run savage...aw sorry you can't just walk into the top tier raid.
To be blunt, YOU choose to grind gear in savage. There are other gearing options, but they require a bit more patience than you are willing to show. Oh, but you'll whine that the story in normal mode is the same as Savage and once you've seen it in Normal there is no more incentive to run Savage...except that it sure as hell seems to me that if seeing the story once destroys your incentive to run savage, you'll only ever run it once anyway. Except of course that's not the case since you'll want the gear, minion, mount and title to show how great you are.
So really what is the complaint? Perhaps you are just too impatient to gear up more gradually, and find Savage too difficult without tip-top gear. In which case welcome to the world of every 'casual' player looking at Coil, knowing they'll need HW gear and the echo to get through. How does it feel to be faced with content you're not good enough to beat without mechanically over gearing it?
I think this boils down to Savage being hard enough that even 4 different carrots on a stick are insufficient incentive for wannabe raiders to just run the content, so instead they come here to cry about Normal and demand that filthy casuals be locked out of their precious raid content again. When the truth is, the top tier raiders are farming Savage and the intermediate raiders are either just getting on with grinding gear for Savage, or crying in their mead over repitition (the grind) killing their incentive.
All these so called solutions serve to do Is nothing but place intermediate raiders above/ahead of the general population of the game. Perhaps this is when the pro'bro' raider should whisper 'git gud' in your ear?
With that being said, I feel I have vented some of my frustrations and I can move on to the main purpose of this thread, I want to help humanize raiders and non-raiders alike. Now, I can do my part and explain my position as a raider and provide my own thoughts on the raiding community, but please add your own feelings about what it means for you to be a raider or a non-raider.
So, I will get some of the obvious stuff out of the way first:
- Most raiders arn't the douchey elitist stereotype we all have come to know
- We come in an entire spectrum of skill level from just getting by RavEX to World 1st A4S
- Not every raider cares about what loot other players have
- What we derive enjoyment from when raiding differs from player to player.
- Some raiders raid for loot
- Some raiders raid for story
- Some raiders raid for cool armor and vanity
- Some raiders raid for the pure challenge
- Most raiders raid for a combination of those reasons
Now, the less obvious stuff, more just how I personally feel (IE my opinion).
I think raiders have sort of a trifecta as to why they raid. Think of it as an RBG scale where red is story, blue is challenge, and green is gear progression. Most raiders have some even handed combination of motivating factors to raid. We also have to consider people might only care about 1 or 2 of those reasons and completely disregard the others. Either way, I am sure you get the picture, the triforce of raiding so to speak. I am sure every player, raider or not, has this similar trifecta for their preferred content.
If you look at this spectrum and apply it to alex savage, you can see why we are so frustrated as a sect of this game's game community. You guys won the gear argument back at launch of 2.0. There will never be an item level gap between raiders and non-raiders for more than a few months. There is little time to savor standing out with beastly dps or pulling an otherwise impossible pull. It's all the same and it's all standardized. I don't think raiders care in particular about other people having gear. I think raiders just like to show off with a higher level of performance and that stands out more where there is an ilvl gap. They want to be the guy or girl who shows up in your expert and impresses you with their stellar heals, the amount of trash they pulled or the way the boss seemingly melted. If anything, we enjoy peacock-ing our performance much more than just having some ilvl to hold over your head. An ilvl is virtually meaningless unless you can actually make use of it and most of us raider's know that, that's why we are still here despite gear being much less of a raid reward in this game contrasted to other MMO's. Although this particular point is moot, because FFXIV will always tild towards casual persuasions, I think it was important to say so that people get why we care about gear. It's not because we want to just have a higher ilvl, we want our performance to shine. Our performance is far more important to us that ilvl will EVER be.
We will never have the best ilvl and we have to accept that, but we have other rewards to look forward to such as story. In ARR, we still had such a mysterious story. It was difficult for it be spoiled because no one ever talked about it in my LS or FC out of respect for people working on the coil story. In addition, the only way to get the coil story was to either raid, wait for nerfs, or spoil it on youtube. Sure, the coil story had 1.0 backing it, but we only need to look at the absolute amazing story thus far in heavensward to know that SE could have done much better with Alex. Even BCoB was epic. You literally fought on a petrified arm of bahamut while bearing witness to his thralls sneaking about orchestrating a dark rebirth of the dreadwyrm. With Alex, we have a lackluster story that was spoiled from day one. There was no hype, there was no mystery, and even worse, you could not go to reddit or this forum without seeing some form of unlabeled spoilers. Having the lore gated behind a raid with no normal mode restricted the lore to a community that would black ball douches that tried to spoil any of it for other raiders. Having a normal mode diminished the built-in spoiler fail safe many of my LS and FC had.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think having a normal mode is a bad thing! However, the implementation of savage was done all wrong. With zero changes between normal and savage's story or build-up, savage was stale before it even showed up to the dinner table. We had a stale story going into a mind numbingly hard raid. This was a huge blow for many of us. We expected and understood that our gear is a fleeting reward, at best. But so many of us, myself included, had such high hopes for the story only to find it hard turned to ash in our mouths upon tasting the savage version.
Lastly, the challenge portion of raiding. This has and will always be our bread and butter of raiding. Getting together with a group of your friends and allies to go into battle against an intimidating foe! You stand as a team facing an insurmountable task looking at a visage of difficulty and your fingers begin to twitch with anticipation. Intimidating, yet delightful, a shiver of crawls down your spine following goose bumps as your team inches closer and closer to victory. The the mats gathered, the food cooked, pots made every week, every last gil spent on resources, the countless hours of wipes spanning weeks of blood, sweat, and tears culminate to that moment, that last percent! The defining instance highlighted by such pure intensity that almost no one is talking, the moment right before the boss goes down and many nerdgasams are had. That moment is so thrilling and chilling, it's what so many of us raid for.
Sadly... This sole reason, the heart of what raiding brings to the table for me, is not enough to sustain an entire team of players... Why? Because we are just as diverse as the entire player community of ffxiv. Teams are not perfect, we have weak links, friends we rather play with than kick out over skill short comings. It only takes one weak link in a3s to keep you from getting a kill, would you kick someone out of you raid group to progress? Especially if you have raided with them since 2.0? Our values are also different. Because some raiders want to only raid for that gear prestige, it can be difficult to maintain roster with talented players that can down this content. My team is on a4s and we are losing one of our tanks after he found out that alex gear would not be the theoretical BiS gear in 3.1. It was the last straw for him, he saw no point in sticking around if the gear from alex savage will be inferior in 3.1. He was certainly used to gear becoming outdated, but not while the tier is still vastly under-completed (IE alex savage is not old content yet).
Now, I know what some of you might be saying, these are just typical raid problems and I would agree with you. Part of running a raid team is inevitably replacing someone, but you have to understand that because of the sharp increase in alexander savage, the talent pool shrunk considerably. In ARR, the end game raid, the binding coils, was defeatable by a wider range of skill level among raiders. We have less people who can do this content as well as less motivating factors to compel new talent to step up to the savage game. I would like to reference Golidlox and the three bears here in saying we had the just right porridge in ARR. Coils was not bleeding edge hard and world first groups blew through the challenge, but it was not a push over raid either leaving many raid statics occupied for several months. SE threw the just right porridge out the window and we are stuck with cold version and a too hot version of a raid. This has caused many midcore raiders just to up and leave the game. Even high end raiders peppered throughout the raiding statics on any given server are leaving. It's infrequent for a team to be comprised of 8/8 top server players. its often more like a grab bag of skill levels. Statics are imploding right and left as some of these teams are unable to carry their weak link or two anymore. High end to mid core, people don't want to carry on when the raid is THIS challenging and when its EVEN MORE CHALLENGING to fill a roster after losing people week after week.
If you made it this far, thank you for taking the to humor my ramblings, We are almost done and I will soon wrap this up. Anyways, this is the situation us raiders are contending with now. Many teams are stuck and imploding on a3s. Teams on a4s are fighting to keep a roster full for content that will have 1/3 it's value, bis gear, taken away in 6 weeks. Another 1/3 of the content, the story, has been so underwhelming and unhyped that no one cares about it, and the last 1/3, the challenge, is not well designed for most raiders. This challenge was tailored for lucrezia and sever 1st groups, Alex savage, the only meaningful raid in the game, alienates, disparages, and disenfranchised a lion's share of ARR raiders. What they had is now gone, the four bosses they looked forward to every six month have been tuned so high, only the best of the best raiders will see full clears. The rest of the raiding population will be stuck with the first two floors until there are nerfs, another raid tier, or both.
I hope this gives you insight to as why I raid and why I think other's raid and the problems we are facing. I am sure my assumptions and assertions are close to the mark and I hope that we as a community can hone in on what makes the game fun for raiders and non-raiders alike.
All too quickly we forget that we should not be divided, but united. We should coalesce under the banner of this game, a story and universe we have invested in and love. I want non-raiders to have their cake and enjoy it just as much as I want my own, perhaps we can find a way to share our cake together? We can find a way to communicate as a player base that has the same goals in mind: we want the game to be fun and rewarding. Instead of dismissing feedback so quickly we can elaborate on what would make an idea a better one rather than becoming so quickly polarized over a bad or malformed idea. We have all been guilty of it from time to time, I know I certainly have been, but we need to do something other than argue without purpose.
The outlook is grim for my brethren and myself. I look upon my FC list and my linkshells and my eyes well up a bit knowing so many of those grey names are gone for ever... My friends, my buddies, people I have shared epic victories with are trickling out of this game over the current raid tier. My FC is vacant, my static disparaged, and my linkshells are ghost towns. The end game raiding community I knew in ARR is virtually gone and there is no new raiding community emerging in it's place.
I love this game, more than any mmo I have played since ff11, but when my friends go, I can't imagine myself wanting to recreate that all over again. It would feel cheap or fake. This is bad for us raiders, we are all feeling this weight press upon us, especially those pushing a3s and a4s.
Understand that this is a make or break tier for many statics out there and we are coming to the forums with our experiences and our feelings about this content we care so deeply about. We, as raiders, need to do a better job about being open minded when it comes to solutions non-raiders have to offer. Non-raiders, if you want to be part of the dialogue, more of you have to indulge in a bit of empathy. Try to understand our perspective and that we are not a bunch of whiny children. Rather, we are a very passionate loyal portion of the player base who is extremely frustrated right now over several reasons. Just saying "you guys are angry you had your stuff taken away" completely minimizes our entire plight. The issues are deeper than the typical e-peen and special snowflake arguments. We want to stick around and play this game, but the current raid, alex savage floors 1-4 is not a sustainable model for a raiding community.
Thank you for taking the time to read my post.
Lucius Eventide
edit:typos and missing a few words