Players since 2.0, how do you feel the raiding community compares now?

I'm curious about how people feel the raiding community has changed over the last 4+ years of raids.

Now feel free to chime in if you haven't been playing for the full 4 years but I would just say if you do, please try not to assume how things were before you started. Kindly I would say just "Just the facts ma'am".meme....etc

But mostly I wanted to connect with others who've been actively trying to raid these last 4+ years and through all the changes and modifications to see how you feel about it now. Obviously things are always better when we first start and it's new, but hey, if you are still with us, enlighten us as to what kept you here and why you think it was worth it or not. Do you find yourself bound to a system and friends that you just can't let go when you wish you could? Do you happily chug along this whole time with no worries? ETC

So if this was a AA meeting, I guess I'm supposed to go first right? I'll keep it short. I was overwhelmed and overjoyed with FFXIV when I joined. I had been playing Rift at the time (which I just have to point out had a system way better than F.A.T.E for their overworld but that's another story) but after that game went free to play and obviously would eventually fall to the pay2win problem that nearly all free to play games do, I was on the lookout for something better. And I found it in FFXIV, the fighting system seemed a bit slow in comparison to rift and other games I had played like WoW, Aion and etc but it was really fun and I've always been a fan of the single player FF games. But my, what happened? It was a slow process to be sure. I can't say the process was bad for SE as a company though. They have gained more users than ever before. But where during the first 2 years I had a active fc where we were all excited to tackle the challenges of the various raids and primals, now a days I think you'd be lucky to find a fc that would do primals with you on anything but a "let's go in blind" situation. Then when it comes to savage, I've seen fc's just outright refuse to even go into savage. Your mileage my vary and these are just my experiences but I'm just saying FCs have seemed to become no more than some glorified linkshell when in the beginning they were a mark of pride depending on what <tag> you carried. Currently raiding involves having a static spanned over many servers, which means you probably don't get to do much with them besides raid. Having Discord is almost required if you want to keep in contact with them, though recently SE seems to be trying to slowly patch in alternatives for people that don't want to have to get a second program just to communicate with their static. I see many people just resort to pugging everything and actually having much better luck just doing that if they can stomach all the kinds of personalities they meet trying to clear savage. But ok, I rambled enough... I lied, I guess that wasn't short.

So what are your stories?

I will admit I am selfish in my motivations for asking. I have friends that play still and what I'm looking for is to find meaning to keep playing instead of bugging those friends to go play some other game with me instead. This isn't one of those "This game sucks, to the nine realms with you guys!" posts. I legit want to stay but I'm struggling to find reasons and I'm running out of excuses. So I just wondered if the community I've been with so long could help me remember the reasons I possibly forgot. After all, we sometimes get discouraged and overlook the brighter things on occasion.

Please excuse my writing style if you can. I never was good at writing.

I played WOW for many years when it first launched day one to be exact, that is so many years ago though. I feel that WOW's raid designs(i stopped WOW when wrath came out) are better than FFXIV to me FFXIV Raids feel like just multiple primals in a row tbh! Personally, the raids in FFXIV are okay nothing special I find the raids are too much focused on a DPS race style,where every character feels like a DPS with other abilities tied to them i.e defensive, mitigation and enmity to name a few. Other than that if I did not know the people who I am playing with over these years I would have just packed up long ago, the main reason I continue is that of the people I play with "excuse the pun" they are what makes the raids entertaining. Crafting and gathering are okay, I was never one for gimmicks in games like houses and glamour etc. But the world is changing and so is gaming, the player base like gimmicks in games or QOL adjustments things to keep themselves busy and not just doing the same battle stuff over and over, some players glamour themselves multiple times a day, some people decorate houses multiple times or even sell their services to other players.

So there are options, but if you are only interested in battle then you will find yourself getting bored quickly.

Im on Odin and back in ARR when we only had coil raiding was something that wasnt done by most of the server.It could only be fully completed by exceptionally great players.The meta back then was no Warrior allowed.2 PLD tanks.
Nowadays raiding on Odin for savage seems to be more of a casual thing than an exception.I see much more complaining in the community blaming other jobs for not being able to clear raids etc.Its much worse attitude than it used to be.Atleast back in ARR people tried and succeed with Warrior in raid before it got buffed.Now people are lazy and dont want to try with whats not the fastest clear setup.

To put it short.Current raid attitude is just 'Rush rush rush' whereas it used to be for the challenge.

I remember it being worse, tbh, harder to join a static for and harder to swap out members for if someone decided to stop raiding. More of them dropped without notice, too.

People weren't any more or less "toxic" -- that's rarely ever seemed an issue in itself -- but the size and impetus to entering raiding on any particular day, etc., all seem better now than then. I'd wager there were better than in ARR even before the cross-world PF.

Honestly, I miss and I don't miss the 2.0 raiding. I remember back then when there were "hubs" for raiders to gather together and dive into the content. Eastern La Noscea (Wineport) for BCOB, North Shroud (Fallgourd Float) for SCOB and Northern Thanalan (Ceruleum Processing Plant) for FCOB. Even though it also happened during Gordias, it seemed like it didn't have the same popularity.

Back then FFlogs wasn't a thing, which I certainly miss a lot. Nowdays, some statics require you to show them your FFlogs as some sort of resume, so you have that constant pressure during raid. But honestly, I have mixed feelings with it, as it also helps me to recruit people, knowing that they probably won't hold the group back. However, even though parsing was a thing since BCOB, it was more of a group-only information.


What I certainly don't miss, is the lack of cross-world recruiting like we have now. Which I guess was the end of the "hub" style raid. However, the trade off was something nice: Being able to recruit people for your static without forcing them to transfer over your server. Without it, raids like Gordias were a pain in the butt, since some servers weren't raid-heavy (I was from Hyperion back then), so looking for people (that were leaving every week) was really annoying.

Ultimately, my first raid experience was in WoW, and I'd rather have their raid style over what we have now. A huge place to explore with bosses scattered around with their own scenarios. Trash mob that may or may not drop nice loot and a sense of... knowing that you're actually raiding the place, not just moving from floor to floor.

I'd say one of the greatest additions was cross realm pf. Having been on the admittedly small Coeurl my whole time in game, it was very hard to not only find a group, but find a good one as everybody had formed into cliques.

Xpf helps that a lot, since I'm no longer restricted to static raiding on-server.

Personally speaking, I've grown a lot since 2.x raiding myself; gotten better at buff and dot management, team coordination, and optimization in general.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lilseph

Ultimately, my first raid experience was in WoW, and I'd rather have their raid style over what we have now. A huge place to explore with bosses scattered around with their own scenarios. Trash mob that may or may not drop nice loot and a sense of... knowing that you're actually raiding the place, not just moving from floor to floor.

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Thats what I dislike about the raids as well. They are harder trials. Thats it. Although, as a fan of the series and of the game as well, I do enjoy doing them.

The dungeons in this game are linear, the 24 man raids are linear, the trials are linear... it would be nice if in the future they release raid content for 8 players that was nonlinear or at the very least had some exploration and hard trash pulls.

i want to apologize with my english ^^

i m a player who play since april 2014 non stop and i feel a lot of differences in raiding community
The first difference i feel are with people who live only with meta meta meta and are worried to be not meta and in 2.0 it doesnt exist, we raid with any job before ^^

An other difference is with the parser obsession. Before Gordias, people who raid only wanted the victory, it was harder than now and when we have the victory of t9 or t13, be a low dps was not an obession because the victory and the down was there. It doesnt exist anymore.

To join a static now it s like to aplly a real job you have to check your logs, you are not treat as a Player anymore but treat as a lot of numbers and people in progress want to make numbers numbers numbers before larning mechanics and when you have the down, the first thing in a game log is « whoaou i made 700 k of dps ».

i Feel sorry of that because for exemple i am a healer and in progress in a PF it s hard now to learn mechanic when you have the another healer who play like a dps

Another thing is the cross server, of course it was a good thing but before it was a proud to be « first server » when you down a turn especially when you are 8 of the same FC. It doesnt exist anymore too

From my perspective, having raided since first Coil (and done endgame in 1.0 as well), raiding is much easier and more casual now (since Omega). You are able to clear the whole tier even in pugs, you are able to beat fights even with mistakes and deaths, and you don't really need to know your job in-and-out to be able to perform well enough.

Regarding what was said about parsers, do you feel the SE's ban/discourage on them has made them somehow even more "popular"?

I know in games like WoW, Rift and others where parsing was allowed it was still important but it was handled differently it seemed. Now its like you join a party only to get booted for no reason which sucks, only to find out someone peeked at your logs and was displeased with what they saw. Though, often ironically it's not the good players I see that do this. For example I was in a pug earlier where this guy would boot anyone he didn't like their logs, or so he said. But while he thought his own logs were good, he died 3-4 times every pull... So perhaps he had a few good clears but he wasn't consistent is what I'm saying. FFLOGs doesn't say whether or not a person can do mechanics well, it just says they had a good run at some point and you are supposed to trust they can reproduce that on command which ironically might not always be what they can do. So generally in the past some of the people that were the most concerned about parsers paradoxically ended up being some of the worst players I played with. I mean I cleared Neo Exdeath perhaps not in any quick fashion but before the weekly lockout was lifted at least. I was far from a all-star player but you get to see people in pugs you know? The people I'd call the best players were the ones who could do mechanics consistently but maybe didn't have the highest logs(but granted their logs were good, just not perhaps super purple 99%). Generally they weren't troublemakers either and were polite. It's a group game you know? So the people who can do their job and just be considerate of others were the people in the pugs I had the most success with.

Seems like there is always this unpleasant guy making a pf and judging people harshly as they join as if he is batman or something. Like he has some tragic backstory so now he's super militant about how he forms parties.. 0.o It's almost like the people that get judged hardest sometimes become the people they hate. Either you die a hero or live long enough to become the villain?