Why is FFXIV considered to be so hard/hardcore?

IMHO hardcore was original EQ, where if you died, you had to run back to wherever you died completely naked without your gear to pick it back up.

That sort of mechanic would never fly with kids today, they couldnt stand it. When I played EQ at launch though, it was the norm, and it made you approach things very, very differently when you knew a bad pull could leave you naked and a hell of a long way from your gear.

Nowadays there's no sense of loss really. You keep your gear when you die. You dont lose XP (yes in some older MMO's you could lose levels if you died too much!), and you just pop back into the fight fresh as a daisy.

So when someone calls modern day MMO players "spoiled", its because most of them have never played any MMO with those types of rules, so they have no idea what hardcore really is.

Ask an EQ veteran about "breaking into Hate" for a raid some time. That was a raid... and a hell of a lot of work, and gave far more satisfaction than anything FFXIV could ever offer. You earned the drops there, it wasnt a Salvation Army handout like FFXIV has.

So no, FFXIV isnt hardcore, its not even in the same ballpark, city or galaxy. Its kiddie land compared to MMO's that came before it, but only because thats what the tastes of the modern gamer seem to want and they're the ones paying for the subs that keep the game afloat.

The loudest voice we hear is that of puggers.

It's extremely hard to pug endgame. If someone messes up, it's so hard to make a comeback. I also think that so many people don't know how to play their job. That's not really a problem when doing Alex maps or Stone Vigil, but when doing endgame, it shows.

The FC's/statics don't have serious problems. Some progress faster than others, but you get the feel of the fight with the group. In pugs it's so time consuming, not worth it.

Should SE make content even more easy, I sure hope the savage modes stay with rewards other than titles.

I find it interesting that it's always Titan and T5 as an example for difficulty, or plumes/landslides and divebombs. I don't understand how these keep hitting the same people.

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Originally Posted by abzoluut

The loudest voice we hear is that of puggers.

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if somehow yoshi decides to remove Duty finder or any form of match making mechanism maybe we'll see the glory days of "looking for party" in XI and people will actually be encouraged to get out of their comfort zone and start socializing/making statics doing things together..etc.

It's not hardcore. It's just an abundance of incredibly casual, with a tiny amount of massive grind or insta-kill mechanics and latency issues.

There's hardly any content for those that are in between.

You either follow the pug model and have no hope of insta kill encounters, so get to grinding... or you are in a static, committed... for a tiny amount of content. There aren't large server pickup raids or other fun mid range encounters (cept for CT, I guess). It's an incredibly narrow game, content wise.

The design completely segregates those that do the tiny amount of high end through lockouts.... so there is hardly any overlap between player communities... with most if not all cross sectional interactions going through DF, which removes consequences for actions and makes community building impossible.

Games like EQ were certainly much more "hardcore". They also felt much more rewarding for the grinds they did have - and those grinds served as socialization mechanisms for building server communities.

With tiny group locking encounters, cross server small party casual completion, and leveling being very solo able, this game has undermined server community cohesion in almost every design choice.

As far as rewards go - this is the only game I have never even been tempted to bother with "end game" instances, because they will be obsolete so quickly....and they offer no real "experience" in the same sense that the older games offered you a new zone or epic level "experience (Plane of Time...loved it)... these are just a couple of instanced rooms with a boss stuck in them (loot pinata)... it's not very epic. Certainly nothing on the level of fighting a dragon in EQ.

All of that might even be overlooked if this FF game lived up to the story line expectation I have of SE... but once you "beat the game", it goes down the toilet. ..and the only thing worse than the rehashed content is the rehashed story elements of the primals. It's bad enough that you have to reuse encounters, but to drag the story into justifying such a short cut design is just plain sad.... and then there are the fillers... like making perfume... /gag

I'm not down on SE... love the company- love Bravely Default... but playing each of these, even though they are different products, the quality and strategy differences are readily apparent. This is a homogenized product for a broad market. It's perfectly fine if that is what you want- Personally, I think that it is unworthy of the FF title, despite the pretty graphics.

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Originally Posted by Dano

if somehow yoshi decides to remove Duty finder or any form of match making mechanism maybe we'll see the glory days of "looking for party" in XI and people will actually be encouraged to get out of their comfort zone and start socializing/making statics doing things together..etc.

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I just wanna say I remember those glory days back in runescape and I can say this... I remember wanting vomiting all over the place and the desperation and the abject failure and the eventual hacking that it lead to. Thanks but you'll forgive me if I want to light a match on those glory days and watch them burn. Duty finder even with all its faults is still a great feature and has made the game incredibly friendly to play. And I say that from the stand point as a veteran.

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Originally Posted by Cessna

I just wanna say I remember those glory days back in runescape and I can say this... I remember wanting vomiting all over the place and the desperation and the abject failure and the eventual hacking that it lead to. Thanks but you'll forgive me if I want to light a match on those glory days and watch them burn. Duty finder even with all its faults is still a great feature and has made the game incredibly friendly to play. And I say that from the stand point as a veteran.

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The Duty Finder is fine. It doesn't stop people from socializing unless those people just plain don't want to socialize.

I have no idea why you'd want to "vomit all over the place", but then again you are referring to that Runescape game. I guess if I played that, I probably would want to throw up too. In XI though the only "hacking" one could do was usually Fishing botting and while it was annoying seeing players just afk fishing up fish, for a long time there was something a normal player could do about it. Ah man, I miss the days of MPKing fish bots. Ah.. good times, good times.

Anyway, socializing is something that you pretty much had to do in order to get yourself recognized and known on your server. The more well known you were, the more apt people were to want to party with you and do stuff. The system worked great. If you built up a bad reputation for yourself, players were less likely to want to do things with you. Which generally makes a person not want to do that.

This kind of thing isn't as prevalent in today's world of 'instant match-ups with random players for the sake of expedience' but it still exists. People still talk to one another, make friends online with strangers and play with those people they befriend.

This brings me to what I consider the problem with FFXIV:ARR. So you are a social person and have quite a variety of in-game friends (as well as possible IRL friends that might play with you), and you want to do content with a variety of your friends. Too bad. You can only do a normal dungeon with 3 other players, and endgame-type content with up to 7 others only. No more than that, because that's what the XIV devs determined.

A group of 4 is a very small group. A group of 8 players is still a small group of individuals. Yet this is the max capacity we have for forming groups to do any content, a very limited room for the many friends you might have. Even when they opened CT up so that 1 full party could be "pre-made", the content itself is designed for 3 full parties. Only 1/3 of the amount of people able to do CT can even be from the same server intentionally.

The devs really need to figure out a way to allow alliances to form before queing up for multiple party content/raids. Right now there truly isn't a reason for having large FC's to be honest. There is no content in the game, except for hunts, that allows for a large group of people to play together. Hunt's don't really even count considering it's just a mindless zerg whether organized and courteous or chaotic and greedy.

Everything in this game is only designed for one full 8-man party, or one 4-man (half party) to que up and do. They really need to hurry up and change that.

I don't dislike doing content with strangers, I actually like the DF and what it does, but I feel it certainly would be better if you could do large scale content with all players you knew. Or at the very least they all be from your own server. How often am I going to see another player from another server, really? Outside of a randomly joined DF instance, never.

Nothing is hard if you do it enough times, however... when you have 380ping and there are one shot mechanics that kill you even though you have been out of the plume/whatever for 3 steps and started casting a spell... it makes people frustrated; and frustrated people talk a lot.

My tunnel brings me down to 220 ping, it's ok. *shrugs*

Though it does mean that things like stacking must be done absolutely... because if say in the case of the divebomb - the target is standing a yalm in front of me... chances are that persons placement is going to get me struck unless I go stand on them before the target comes up.

So in combat situations I need to have a mentality of 'do this to save myself' rather then 'is everyone ok where they are'
I need to play more selfishly to make up for my connection shortcomings to make sure I do not let the team down in the big picture.
But I have a static so its not a problem for me personally... but for PUGs in the same conditions - I can understand.

Difficulty is subjective. That is why some people would consider it hard, while others consider it easy.
There are also many elements that require quite a lot of grind, which is why some would consider it reasonably "hardcore".

I think you are over-inflating people's opinions of this game however. I haven't seen any comments saying that it is the hardest MMO on the market..

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Originally Posted by Dano

if somehow yoshi decides to remove Duty finder or any form of match making mechanism maybe we'll see the glory days of "looking for party" in XI and people will actually be encouraged to get out of their comfort zone and start socializing/making statics doing things together..etc.

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To make those contents not too easy, it should remove pre-made party, playing with random players is the real true socialization.

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Originally Posted by Raminax

This line reminds me of the Hot Heart of Magic/Shining Statue of Siel in Aion. *sniff* Oh, the pain.

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Oh god, and even that was a cakewalk in comparison to Balic crafts. I finally made myself a 55 Eternal Balic Staff and by then my Legendary was already +10 so I sold it for 900m Kinah. FFXIV you can level any craft to 50 in a day and then craft anything in the game the same day, granted to reliably HQ it you need all of the jobs but 2 per week is pretty damn quick. Again, everything in XIV is designed for casual players and newcomers to the genre.