Chaotic Alliance Raid is a fun fight, but awful content

If casual people struggle with Dawntrail dungeons or were struggling with Bozja stuff I do not know what to expect with this fight (I was already not looking forward with the comment on 12 people still fighting like it's 24)

Waiting for Field Exploration and Beast Master gonna be a pain, huh

OP does have a point. It feels like an unfortunate combination of multiple things caused this content to suffer, but a lot of it could've been avoided if the dev team were clear on who they want to design it for.

The dev team first introduced chaotic as a harder alliance raid that's aimed to be around the difficulty of an extreme fight, that's what most people would know about it. Then they put widely desirable rewards behind it, which entices more than just the raiding playerbase.

So the end result we have is that people who aren't prepared for anything harder than an extreme fight piling into chaotic and making mistakes that most raiders would avoid making, which frustrates both sides. The raiding side gets frustrated because people are failing mechanics that are commonplace in savage+ and should normally be easily handled while the side that usually only do extreme fights are frustrated because they think the fight is overtuned.

I hope the dev team learns from this and makes it clear who the content is for so that the next piece of content doesn't pit the playerbase against each other and cause frustration again.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

I hope the dev team learns from this and makes it clear who the content is for so that the next piece of content doesn't pit the playerbase against each other and cause frustration again.

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The worst in that is that they freaking told us it WAS supposed to be extreme but the fighting went overboard and made a savage. Can't you course correct? They proudly announced us that the designer couldn't follow the assignment, and they didn't care. You design a game for the players, not for what your dev personnaly like. People complained about mechanic where the party wipe when one fails during EW extreme (I know several raiders that stopped doing some of the EW EX because those mechanics were not fun to them anymore). But the guys behind the fight seem to think it's a good idea against most of the population. Go figures.

As a casual player who only plays maybe 1-2 times a week these days, I'm happy with how the fight is. Chaotic gives me something more to do than just re-clearing Savage and Extreme fights or random, light Ultimate prog.

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Don't get me wrong, I love the fight, I'm addicted to the fight. But I can't help but feel disappointed in its implementation and how Square seems insistent on creating content designed for a shallow grave instead of content that will continue to be lively long-term

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I'd prefer getting vouchers for the extremes etc and then trade in for specific things at least that way they could add new items to it so it stays fresh.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

OP does have a point. It feels like an unfortunate combination of multiple things caused this content to suffer, but a lot of it could've been avoided if the dev team were clear on who they want to design it for.

The dev team first introduced chaotic as a harder alliance raid that's aimed to be around the difficulty of an extreme fight, that's what most people would know about it. Then they put widely desirable rewards behind it, which entices more than just the raiding playerbase.

So the end result we have is that people who aren't prepared for anything harder than an extreme fight piling into chaotic and making mistakes that most raiders would avoid making, which frustrates both sides. The raiding side gets frustrated because people are failing mechanics that are commonplace in savage+ and should normally be easily handled while the side that usually only do extreme fights are frustrated because they think the fight is overtuned.

I hope the dev team learns from this and makes it clear who the content is for so that the next piece of content doesn't pit the playerbase against each other and cause frustration again.

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Chaotic is absolutely an extreme level fight closer to Shinryu or Thordan EX. All of the mechanics are very simple to execute and there's a wealthy amount of forgiveness with the deaths outside of the tile transition. The tile phase is the core of the fight and thats literally it. Get it down up to swap (and at least know how to handle the outer adjustment, I recommend learning B alliance first if possible) and you are clear ready afterwards. So thats roughly 50 to 55%.

The issue you could argue is that the playerbase as a whole sucks. Look at these forums and you see how people complain when you ask them to even connect two brain cells to complete a goal/fight etc. People comparing this to savage haven't did many savage fights if at all. There's no savage fight you can spam tank LBs every 2 mins to survive multiple failed towers simultaneously and if timed right, the damage from two seperate mechs is completely nullified.

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Originally Posted by Fuyuqi

There are tons of ways to make content more difficult without needing to use body checks and still have it not be able to be cleared with people having no clue what they're doing. Like in P8S where a failed snake mechanic may not wipe the entire party but would result in damage downs that would make the DPS check impossible.

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Snakes are literally the same type of body check as the towers of the Chaotic raid. If anyone is dead at the end of the cast, the party won't have the necessary debuffs to solve the mechanic. And at best, only a single exploding snake could be survived when anticipated and mitigated properly. Same is true for the towers, the group can survive one or two exploding. In fact, with tank lb mitigation (which is the current strat used by PF for 2nd set of towers), quite a few exploding towers can be survived.

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Originally Posted by Fuyuqi

Why not design mechanics in a way that allow for recovery or seeing further mechs (allowing for practice and then clean-up later) instead of making them overly punishing in content that isn't intended to be savage-tier difficulty?

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But that's the thing, in relative terms, this fight features quite a lot of recoverable mechanics. Which is very much in contrast to p8s or p12s where quite a lot of failed mechanics / towers explode for <max damage number>, meaning they wipe the raid automatically, even if unsynced and mitigated and through invulns. Is the tower mechanic less forgiving than other mechanics in this fight? Sure. But it's not unforgiving. Especially since the first set of towers happens in a controlled manner, with everyone reliably being in the same position when they happen. Lots of people failing at this point is just that, people failing. Meaning this mechanic should be their prog point, not "kill" parties. I am not arguing that the Chaotic Raids are easy, but it is important that this encounter is accurately described for exactly what it is, not what people "feel" like it is.

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Originally Posted by Fuyuqi

From what I can tell, you don't even have the achievement for clearing the fight. I'd appreciate it if you didn't derail my thread with elitism and telling people to stop complaining about the difficulty and go to the other threads already complaining about the fight difficulty. At the end of the day, this pattern of awful reward design and misunderstanding of what players across the board want is bad for the long-term health of the game and I want Square to do better for its players. I want as many people as possible to find this game fulfilling enough to continue to be active so that I can have a lively community to play with in the game I enjoy the most, and I'd like to hope most other people feel the same way.

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I'm sure the irony of "elitism" after looking at my prog status is completely lost on you. Be very careful with such arguments, they backfire faster than one might like.
The issue isn't the difficulty of the fight, it's people's approach to it. The fight is what it is, with the rewards the way they are. The issue is how people engage with this fact. And for some people, this engagement shows a deeply unhealthy relationship with this video game. People complain that the game developers don't release any content for them to enjoy and they are deeply unhappy, yet are still subscribed for one reason or another. Like yeah, that's the best kind of customer SE could hope for. No need to spend costly developer resources to make content, still getting money. The RoI numbers are simply through the roof. This kind of consumer behavior is literally the driving force behind the phenomenon of "enshittification".

Further, SE is in the business of making money for its shareholder. The playerbase is just a means to an end. That is why it is important that the community also lays the blame precisely where it belongs, with the developers. Instead, people have been slagging the "hardcores" as "responsible" for the difficulty / reward structure of the CoD raid, that Yoshi-P is just doing it to get "browny points" with some streamers. That may well be, but it was still Yoshi-P's decision to do. Just as the "dumbing down of jobs" was done by the developers, not because of "the casuals". You want as many people as possible to find this game fulfilling, totally fine, and I agree. However, there is a very growing number of people who find this game pretty unfulfilling, yet give it their money and time at every opportunity. And that, is pretty concerning, not only for the individuals, but for the health of the game itself. And community cohesion certainly isn't helped by having people slap essentialist labels like "casual" and "hardcore" at each other like any of these groups are homogeneous.

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Originally Posted by Havenchild

The issue you could argue is that the playerbase as a whole sucks. Look at these forums and you see how people complain when you ask them to even connect two brain cells to complete a goal/fight etc. People comparing this to savage haven't did many savage fights if at all. There's no savage fight you can spam tank LBs every 2 mins to survive multiple failed towers simultaneously and if timed right, the damage from two seperate mechs is completely nullified.

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The problem in tile phase is that its 24 people that even get switched up in between and if someone is dead in the phase change or while being swapped then the whole thing easily devolves into a mess even with few deaths there.
It's enough for one player to not move after swap while the baited aoes go out for another person to just straight up die because they can't run anywhere. Two players if they panic and run to the opposide direction.
You can totally salvage that sure but not with pf communication.
Hell your 8 player group can do towers perfectly and still die because there was a mistake anywhere else.

Also it IS savage difficulty. Even the japanese side compares it to second fight savage and Yoshida himself admitted it. Heck even streamers like Happy who downplays the difficulty says the middle phase is where the savage lies.
You can argue that some Ex are actually just as hard but Thordan Ex?

There is no savage fight were you can LBback to back sure but you can just nullify some mechanics with tank invuln which is the same thing more or less.
The problem is not the fight or the mechanics themself but the unforgivness in tile phase to player deaths.
If that wasn't there then it would be far better to prog in PF.

We can argue about the difficulty or unprepared players on and on but can you guys maybe stop at one point with the crappy insults against a certain part of the playerbase?

All the discussion around this fight both here and on reddit is making me realize that FFXIV's problem is not that it lacks enough specifically casual, specifically "midcore," or specifically hardcore content; it's that FFXIV has nothing in it that people log in and do just because it's fun.

Nearly all of the repeatable content in the game is run via Duty Finder (minimal filtering) or Party Finder (somewhat more filtering), but both allow for some degree of an antagonistic experience. There's no "this is gonna be fun to play regardless of who I end up playing with"; rather, it's more "god, I hope I have a good group so that this goes by quickly and I can get my big dopamine hit." It's a fundamental gap in the FFXIV experience.

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Originally Posted by TemporalFruitsAndVeggies

All the discussion around this fight both here and on reddit is making me realize that FFXIV's problem is not that it lacks enough specifically casual, specifically "midcore," or specifically hardcore content; it's that FFXIV has nothing in it that people log in and do just because it's fun.

Nearly all of the repeatable content in the game is run via Duty Finder (minimal filtering) or Party Finder (somewhat more filtering), but both allow for some degree of an antagonistic experience. There's no "this is gonna be fun to play regardless of who I end up playing with"; rather, it's more "god, I hope I have a good group so that this goes by quickly and I can get my big dopamine hit." It's a fundamental gap in the FFXIV experience.

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Until you play a healer and it becomes ‘god I hope my team is bad…’ lol *cries in Art of War II*

The thing about players logging onto ffxiv and doing things not because it’s fun but because they feel they need to do it is something I hadn’t thought of but it feels very true. Whether it’s getting gear/etc from chaotic raids or queuing up for expert to cap tomes; you almost never see anyone say ‘I’m just doing this because it’s fun’ lol. Allied Tribes are another good example - I don’t think anyone has ever been like ‘wow I’m doing these because they’re fun’, it’s only ever ‘I like/dislike the rewards’, ‘I like the fast exp’, etc lol.