NA needs to start using the Raid Finder

I think it's fine if social media apps like discord are used as a supplement to the socialisation in the game. But these days it is far more common that if you want to do certain content you are 100% forced to join one of these servers, otherwise you just can not do the content. This is an internet wide problem and not just ffxiv. Really wish internet culture would shift away from over relying on discord for everything.

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Originally Posted by MoofiaBossVal

No, the game does not facilitate natural socialization and the forming of friendships inside the game itself like classic MMOs did. As for the FF14 discords, I do not think it is good for each sector of the game to be monopolized by cliques, or for information to be locked away in corners of the internet that are not indexed and are aggravating to search through. Want to do Baldesion Arsenal? Got to join that group's BA server, because good luck forming a BA run ingame. Want to prog a criterion dungeon or an ultimate raid? Gotta join a discord. PvP? Discord. Want to find out what your class' endgame rotation and stat priority is? Discord. The list goes on.

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Originally Posted by Buttobi

I think it's fine if social media apps like discord are used as a supplement to the socialisation in the game. But these days it is far more common that if you want to do certain content you are 100% forced to join one of these servers, otherwise you just can not do the content. This is an internet wide problem and not just ffxiv. Really wish internet culture would shift away from over relying on discord for everything.

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Discord really is part of a cancer that is destroying internet knowledge bases. It's non-indexed, non-persistent and linear in nature. It's a chat, not a forum or a wiki. And yet people are happy to gate their information behind this weird chat service instead of making it actually publicly available because its so easy to make a Discord server.

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Originally Posted by ovIm

Discord really is part of a cancer that is destroying internet knowledge bases. It's non-indexed, non-persistent and linear in nature. It's a chat, not a forum or a wiki. And yet people are happy to gate their information behind this weird chat service instead of making it actually publicly available because its so easy to make a Discord server.

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Yep, it is completely replacing wikis and forums even though it is a completely terrible platform for that type of thing. And as we can see from ffxiv, it is also making it harder to jump into specific types of content because the community has collectively decided that this should be the primary way of organising things. I can't say I am not guilty of this either, I have organised Rival Wings queue syncs for years through the use of discord, but I think this just highlights how hard it can be to organise things through in game means.

There are discord bots that can cache information if the server owner wants to. And many people still make a website in addition like The Balance does. Beside that, discord has a way to find discord servers now.

Even if it was all cached, Google results have all been ruined by AI and all the reddit posts that come up for things are often outdated or misleading (ie. we have multiple fights featuring Titan and Shiva so it could deliver the wrong information to a new player). The reality is there is so much in the game, and it changes from time to time, that it's better to just ask a veteran player for the answer, which many people do in their FC, the Novice Network, forums, or on discord.

Discord is part of the internet now. It brought together refugees from lots of different chat and voice platforms - messengers, Skype, voice chat software, IRC, Steam, etc. They came from all directions to that one place and now it's part of the internet more than any of the others were. It became a platform for marketing by influencers, developers and businesses, and even used by schools. Even if SE reinvents its own version of Discord inside the game, people may not even use it. They use Discord for a reason. It was better than all the competition somehow and created a deeper feeling of community than the rest.

Trying to ignore Discord is like trying to ignore YouTube, Google, Facebook and other super popular apps. I suppose you can but... you know they are there, and you'll keep hearing about them.

People may not all be aware but Discord's co-founder plays FFXIV and made Discord in large part due to it. It was probably part of its success because making stuff go viral in the FFXIV community is especially effective and there was a peer pressure for raid groups and PUGs to install it over the other bad voice apps (every single one of those was trash).

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

There are discord bots that can cache information if the server owner wants to. And many people still make a website in addition like The Balance does. Beside that, discord has a way to find discord servers now.

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Most people don't though, there are way too many projects around where the solution to getting information is "join the Discord". Finding Discord servers through the Discord App is only available when the admin enables that. Besides, there is a limit to how many Discord servers a singular user is allowed to join. Moving information away from the web and into Discord is bad for the health of publicly available information, period.

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Even if it was all cached, Google results have all been ruined by AI and all the reddit posts that come up for things are often outdated or misleading (ie. we have multiple fights featuring Titan and Shiva so it could deliver the wrong information to a new player). The reality is there is so much in the game, and it changes from time to time, that it's better to just ask a veteran player for the answer, which many people do in their FC, the Novice Network, forums, or on discord.

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Lets not make the failure of search engines the base to excuse the move of information from actual publicly available spaces to spaces hidden behind closed applications.
Yes, a lot of things change in the game, which is why there are wikis that are better at not only cataloging, but also finding and archiving information. Discord is just a chat, but is being used as much more, to the detriment of the internet.

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Discord is part of the internet now. It brought together refugees from lots of different chat and voice platforms - messengers, Skype, voice chat software, IRC, Steam, etc. They came from all directions to that one place and now it's part of the internet more than any of the others were. It became a platform for marketing by influencers, developers and businesses, and even used by schools. Even if SE reinvents its own version of Discord inside the game, people may not even use it. They use Discord for a reason. It was better than all the competition somehow and created a deeper feeling of community than the rest.

Trying to ignore Discord is like trying to ignore YouTube, Google, Facebook and other super popular apps. I suppose you can but... you know they are there, and you'll keep hearing about them.

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No one wants to erase Discord, or deny its part of the internet. The fact that we have Discord is good for communication. We are criticizing the misuse of a chat application. Discord is a text and voice chat service..

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People may not all be aware but Discord's co-founder plays FFXIV and made Discord in large part due to it. It was probably part of its success because making stuff go viral in the FFXIV community is especially effective and there was a peer pressure for raid groups and PUGs to install it over the other bad voice apps (every single one of those was trash).

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Doesnt change the fact that the usage of a non-indexable non-persistent linear chat application to make information available is like trying to fit the square peg in the round hole. it may be done, but its still the wrong way to do things.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Trying to ignore Discord is like trying to ignore YouTube, Google, Facebook and other super popular apps. I suppose you can but... you know they are there, and you'll keep hearing about them.

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To be honest, I just see it as a necessary evil at this point. Personally I do not want to see SE add "their version of discord" in the game cause like you said, no one would use it. What I would like to see is better tools to organise content that requires a large amount of players.

I mentioned Rival Wings organising in my previous post. For the people that are unaware, this is a 48 man PvP mode that does not have a roulette or ranked mode attached to it. The only way to make it pop is having the community come together and organise specific times and dates to play this. The in game tools for this are absolutely horrendous. As someone who organised these for 5 years, I had to go around every populated area spamming shout macros while using the shitty teleport and world travel interfaces. It was also common for us to have to use the pvp tab in the party finder to advertise, something that is technically not allowed in the party finder I admit but what choice do we have? If it was not for discord supplementing these efforts, I am sure it would have never popped at all. I just want to see better in game features to let players organise these things more intuitively.

I do not organise large scale raids like the chaotic raid or BA/DRS but I am sure people that organise those have similair issues, which is why they resort to discord. Basically my point is that discord should stay a supplement to the game rather than a necessity, especially with large scale content (20+ people).

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Originally Posted by Buttobi

I do not organise large scale raids like the chaotic raid or BA/DRS but I am sure people that organise those have similair issues, which is why they resort to discord. Basically my point is that discord should stay a supplement to the game rather than a necessity, especially with large scale content (20+ people).

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Well technically, people could use Raid Finder. Just nobody does. So in a way, they have provided the tool for it.

People could create a Fellowship for it and then announce the start time via a Fellowship Notification. But anyone reading this is probably laughing. Yet, SE has tried to create an alternative to discord for announcing events there.

They could create a CWLS for it and recruit to it via a Fellowship, announce the start time via the Fellowship, then invite people at the time via the CWLS. But again, that isn't what most people do.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Well technically, people could use Raid Finder. Just nobody does. So in a way, they have provided the tool for it.

People could create a Fellowship for it and then announce the start time via a Fellowship Notification. But anyone reading this is probably laughing. Yet, SE has tried to create an alternative to discord for announcing events there.

They could create a CWLS for it and recruit to it via a Fellowship, announce the start time via the Fellowship, then invite people at the time via the CWLS. But again, that isn't what most people do.

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I can assure you that a lot of organisers have attempted to use CLWS and fellowships. On their own they just do not have much reach. The reason could be many things. Personally I think fellowships are implemented badly and have an incredibly confusing UI and UX. It took me a while to figure out which messages would even send out notifications, apparently it's by changing the sticky'd notice. That is just one example. These features are useful but they leave a lot to be desired.

My issue has been more with the "pseudo disbands" in the party finder. A single failed pull and people start leaving, the group dissolves, only to reform with the majority of the same people but while wasting anywhere from 5-45 minutes reorganizing.

We are incapable of having a mature discussion about why the pull failed, was it bad luck? carelessness? bad snapshot? someone just has no idea what they're doing?
Is this because we're being afraid of being reported for "toxicity"? One player will just scream "YoU dOnT pAy My SuB!!!" It does feel like everyone is so overly sensitive that it's almost easier to leave and say nothing at all then try to talk out what may have went wrong.

The raid finder would at least stop people from leaving after a single attempt, lest they eat the 30 minute penalty, and if they did or we'd need replace one bad player that was vote kicked with in progress queues and not waste hours reorganizing.

I know its pollyannaish of me but I just wish people had a little more patience in this large scale battles

I loved when NA had to rely on raid finder when it first came out for Sophia EX. Those who weren't here then we didn't have XPF yet, it was just local tab PF at the time. I got so many re-clears without any issue, and plus you can comm people after the clear so I compiled a lot. So if anything we downgraded when party finder culture took over with the addition of XPF, the usage of RF died in NA along with it.

Raid finder is subject to the same duty finder rules when not full premade in like the leaving early penalty, and party leader just having to hit replace when one person leaves. So you have 24 people queue for "duty complete" for a reclear, you get one bad apple, hit replace and you clear. Sure vote disbands happen, but that's okay that means the majority believe this isn't clearable and we need to re-queue with different people.