Difficulty ramp up in savage tier far more pronounced than other mmos

If the tier is meant to be challenging to a hardcore audience, why are the first two or three fights of the tier designed to be at an extreme difficulty, which is geared to midcore and casual raiders? Back in WoW's Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Kel'thuzad was not really that much more difficult than the other wing bosses in Naxxramas. This was true for most raids in WoW. Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the difficulty spike as small as possible so that the audience completing the first half of the tier are likely to clear the second half? It feels like large numbers of players are getting baited into trying to complete a full set of dyable armor that they will never be able to finish.

Complicating this entire situation is the loot system itself, which makes loot acquisition completely inconsistent between players. You'll find some that get decked out quickly relative to the tier and others who don't win a single coffer for 5 weeks straight. Wouldn't it be better to use a loot system like what is done in normal mode or just swap to a currency system for the tier? I feel players who get the clear should be rewarded equally for it. Most raiders struggle to complete the second fight in the tier on week one, and most aren't even hitting the final boss week four. As it is right now, most raiders would need to raid well into the next patch to consistently get a full set for just one job based on the books.

Players are asking for savage loot drops from criterion dungeons just to be able to get stuff at a reasonable time. Doesn't making a player raid for a minimum of 8 weeks run counter Yoshida's stance that people should take breaks from the game to not become burned out? Anecdotally, it feels like most harassment in savage comes from burned out players.

Yoshida's stance is if you're burned out take a break. Doesn't mean they are not going to create end game content that takes awhile for those that want it. You're not supposed to be able to clear everything week 1 unless you're a top tier player. Every mmo is like this.

I want to say the biggest reason for endgame burnout is the pace that the community expects of players, which is literally even more stringent than WoW's of all things, and the fact that XIV's community is built around the "unity" part of "community" to such an unhealthy level.

Ideally, you should be able to take your time, gear up, and push through Savage (or EX, too) at the pace which you find comfortable.

In reality, it turns out anything but. PF puts up the Duty Complete wall as soon as it possibly can get away with it, so there's an uncomfortable push to always rush content as soon as it comes out, and thus correspondingly to have to tackle it with the very minimum gear or close, as if you take your time you are cut off from an increasingly large portion of the playerbase and increasingly forced to stew with the crowd that has two left feet (plus, with the way mechanics are nowadays, it does not take a very high percentage of the playerbase to be stumblebums to make the majority of parties effective non-starters from the very first).

The community's compassion for the left behind is extremely poor, with the dominant response to complaint about this state of affairs being "well, you should have rushed it when everyone else was." In other words, exacerbating the whole "you need to week one it" (or in the case of EX, often day one it, and too bad if you work full time on Tuesday) mentality that contributes so much stress.

Almost everything in XIV tends to be dominated by a very small number of large Discord communities, so alternative mindsets also tend to be heavily suppressed in this way too (especially due to the extreme weakness of FCs compared to guilds in virtually every other MMO in regards to endgame activity) - failure to conform to the established culture inevitably results in the moderators issuing the "shut up or pack up (and go)" ultimatum (just ask me how I know, lol). Due in no small part to the outsized weight of responsibility Discord places on community owners even among social media as a whole, it is much more difficult than many realize to organize a competing community compared to the old days, though.

I'm honestly not sure where the solution lies here myself.

To be fair, there's only two difficulties consisting of only 4 bosses, which doesn't leave much room for ramping up difficulty. WoW has 4 difficulties and a raid usually has between 8 to 12 bosses. It's something I wish FF14 would expand upon, not just normal raids but for alliance raids as well. Instead all we got is WoW's equivalent of LFR and Mythic, with Extreme trials being about Heroic difficulty.

They've had this issue for a while with savage and it's one of the thorns in the side for making it enjoyable to more people. It comes down to the structure of the system they put in place and the uniqueness of the rewards sending a message that this isn't just for people who want to challenge themselves, but also for people to get unique rewards for glamour. Basically, it was the same issue WoW had going through Cataclysm before they added the easier difficulties of raids and tiered loot.

It could be they just lack the resources to really build out a system properly. If they had an easier tier of savage that had all the gear dyable I'd just do it and not even bother with the 630+ iLvL version because there's no point to it with how they design the other content, and it isn't like they don't already have ultimates that are readily available for people who really want a challenge.

From someone looking into this from the outside, it looks like they are scared the content isn't worth making based on gameplay or that the total number of people doing it would be too low, so they stuck loot in it that is unique to prop it up like a baloon-man sign in front of a used car dealership. But that approach is provably a bad choice given the rampant burnout that happens along with all the other social problems. P3S was like the poster child to this, and in shadowbringers E8S was rather similar just because of the community being unable to come up with some common strategy for light rampant.

Like at the end of the day, there is only so much time before the next patch cycle when the next big thing hits and everyone is stuck in a rat race to get what they want out of the currently released content. They really should gear the savage into two tiers and expect or anticipate that most players who participate pick the right tier for themselves and then clear it before or just slightly after the half patch (usually .x5). Right now whatever metric they are using is likely based purely on some small percentage of players that are outliers rather than the swath of people who are doing mid to casual raiding. Many don't finish the tier before the next big patch hits.

I don't think first and second floor are that difficult, they're challenging but that's point of Savage. Even for pugs I'm pretty sure most can cleared both floors in week one, assuming they have 1-2 hrs raid session per day.

If they were to put more gears in V&C, they need to put in more ilvl each tier instead of just +i30 per tier which in my opinion too low.
At least i50-i60 (e.g. i600 to i660 for this tier) so there is spot for V&C gears and gears for Patch 6.3 later.
Then they need to reskin/design more gears, sounds like a more work to do but I hope they consider this path.

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Originally Posted by Dionysius

I don't think first and second floor are that difficult, they're challenging but that's point of Savage. Even for pugs I'm pretty sure most can cleared both floors in week one, assuming they have 1-2 hrs raid session per day.

If they were to put more gears in V&C, they need to put in more ilvl each tier instead of just +i30 per tier which in my opinion too low.
At least i50-i60 (e.g. i600 to i660 for this tier) so there is spot for V&C gears and gears for Patch 6.3 later.
Then they need to reskin/design more gears, sounds like a more work to do but I hope they consider this path.

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It depends a lot on data center. When they opened up the data centers for travel I saw a huge difference between something like Aether and Crystal. My own experience comes from Crystal and Primal pre-server openings where it was mostly people who enjoy the game more like something you can keep putting effort into and get incremental rewards out of it. Aether there's just more people trying to do it and clearing the first two or three is not too bad. The final fight this tier is a lot of mechanics at once and they definitely went more puzzle solving for the p2.

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Originally Posted by Amarande

I want to say the biggest reason for endgame burnout is the pace that the community expects of players, which is literally even more stringent than WoW's of all things, and the fact that XIV's community is built around the "unity" part of "community" to such an unhealthy level.

Ideally, you should be able to take your time, gear up, and push through Savage (or EX, too) at the pace which you find comfortable.

In reality, it turns out anything but. PF puts up the Duty Complete wall as soon as it possibly can get away with it, so there's an uncomfortable push to always rush content as soon as it comes out, and thus correspondingly to have to tackle it with the very minimum gear or close, as if you take your time you are cut off from an increasingly large portion of the playerbase and increasingly forced to stew with the crowd that has two left feet (plus, with the way mechanics are nowadays, it does not take a very high percentage of the playerbase to be stumblebums to make the majority of parties effective non-starters from the very first).

The community's compassion for the left behind is extremely poor, with the dominant response to complaint about this state of affairs being "well, you should have rushed it when everyone else was." In other words, exacerbating the whole "you need to week one it" (or in the case of EX, often day one it, and too bad if you work full time on Tuesday) mentality that contributes so much stress.

Almost everything in XIV tends to be dominated by a very small number of large Discord communities, so alternative mindsets also tend to be heavily suppressed in this way too (especially due to the extreme weakness of FCs compared to guilds in virtually every other MMO in regards to endgame activity) - failure to conform to the established culture inevitably results in the moderators issuing the "shut up or pack up (and go)" ultimatum (just ask me how I know, lol). Due in no small part to the outsized weight of responsibility Discord places on community owners even among social media as a whole, it is much more difficult than many realize to organize a competing community compared to the old days, though.

I'm honestly not sure where the solution lies here myself.

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It goes both ways and it sucks either way. They didn't used to have the duty complete stuff in PF. It was just an open field of players joining clear groups with having no clue what they are doing. Not everyone does it, but there's always that 1 player that doesn't want to join practice parties and would hope to get carried through a clear. Modern PF ya it sucks if you miss out as the practice parties become less and less, but its just the nature of end game. You can always make your own PF at that point and you're more than likely to get people to join.

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Originally Posted by Ransu

It goes both ways and it sucks either way.

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Yeah, sometimes I've wondered if the addition of Duty Complete was a mistake. The long term downsides seem at least as much as the upsides, unless there's something I'm missing in such an assessment.

Also the player culture here is EXTREMELY rigid regarding it. For instance, in WoW, it was so common to let people into raid PUGs without the stated credentials that it was pretty much a safe assumption that when joining any given group that there will be at least one or two less experienced players in the party. In XIV, if you, as leader, take down the Duty Complete requirement to let someone in after having previously had it up, there is a strong sense of massive social faux pas to the point of feeling you're only barely on the good side of "actually reportable."

Also for that matter, it always feels like PF leaders here have very limited real authority over their groups, rather they are expected to simply be representatives of "the community." Not only on things like that, but also on matters like strategy. It was another thing that soured any desire I had to bother with the second Eden tier: regardless of how much I knew that Ilya was a terrible strategy and I should be using Ayatori or the other one I forget the name of offhand, I was to understand that did not matter. I'm on NA, "NA PF" - which I am to apparently understand as a monolithic meta-guild rather than as a loose collection of individual group leads and their joiners - uses Ilya, therefore, I should just suck it up and learn a crappy strategy and even attempting to post otherwise would be basically just spitting into the wind.

In fact, NA strats routinely feel like stressful rubbish to me, while the JP strats seem developed with PUG comfort and reliability first, like a PUG strat should. But JP would mean a 170+ ping, language barrier, and the anxiety that if I ever bite off more than I can chew, I could be permanently added to a do not party list and have to transfer back in sackcloth and ashes to NA to even get to play at all.

I'd really like to see these monolithisms broken up, and broken up hard, and players encouraged to develop their own playstyles (subject only to the "okay, can you find n-1 others to join you?" pressure rather than to a whole community).

But I'm still not sure how, short of somehow being able to convince people in quantity to move off Discord (because that platform is no good for making a public community unless you have an absurd amount of free time to mod or you're basically okay with you and everyone who joins being permabanned from the platform eventually), or FCs actually being able to thrive in the way that guilds do in WoW or SWTOR (thus being able to form groups with little or no hivemind contact) ...

I guess I'll just say this on Savage: It is content that is unlike any other content in the game because it is utterly unforgiving and often times cruel and unfair, not because of the game design but because of the people that interact with it, and unfortunately that is something that the FFXIV team has never really addressed before. They can see the metrics and understand the rate that people clear it, but they have little insight into the pains that organizers at different levels have for dealing with the content, and I've been through many heart breaks with this style of content over the past few years.

The fact is that there is just too wide a disparity in the personal lives of people and the circumstances of internet connectivity to dogpile everyone into the same pile with savage tier content as it stands. They shouldn't nerf existing content, but they definitely could use an optionally toned down second half. Because at the end of the day lets say that two weeks from the next major patch where the next raid tier drops the majority of groups have cleared savage: What is the point if you only can enjoy the reward for two weeks? They are constantly releasing new content through interim patches, was it worth it to miss all that other content because of bad circumstance? What about all those people that just started late by a few weeks?

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Originally Posted by Colt47

I guess I'll just say this on Savage: It is content that is unlike any other content in the game because it is utterly unforgiving and often times cruel and unfair, not because of the game design but because of the people that interact with it, and unfortunately that is something that the FFXIV team has never really addressed before. They can see the metrics and understand the rate that people clear it, but they have little insight into the pains that organizers at different levels have for dealing with the content, and I've been through many heart breaks with this style of content over the past few years.

The fact is that there is just too wide a disparity in the personal lives of people and the circumstances of internet connectivity to dogpile everyone into the same pile with savage tier content as it stands.

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Indeed, which is partly what the whole "megaDiscord" community paradigm that the XIV playerbase so loves also misses: you, as you said, literally can't dogpile everyone together.

Some people are lucky enough to live in Southern California where they get a tiny ping to FFXIV (just as I, living in Chicagoland, get a sub-20 ping to WoW when I play that, because Blizzard has a data center in the city). Some live on the East Coast, or in Oceania prior to the introduction of Materia, and can barely play some classes optimally because of the ping. It is unfair to expect the same class perfection from both.

Some people work from home or don't have a day job and can put many more hours a day into practicing a video game, while some of us work demanding outside the home warehouse jobs where we're away from a computer (or even from mobile social apps) for 10 hours a day and then come home tired. It is unfair to place the same learning pace expectations on both.

Etc.

Unless an idea of the megaDiscord culture really is, intentionally, exactly the sinister one that comes to mind: namely, that the solution to this is for one (naturally, it will be the most driven group with the most free time) subgroup of players to dominate and subjugate all mainstream endgame play to the point that players that do not fit into that class begin to feel unwelcome and drop out, unless they are fortunate enough to find a static separate from the hivemind (but seeing this hivemind tends to control the primary static recruitment venues too, this is not encouraging) - thus leaving an effectively unified playerbase through exclusion.

I should hope not, but I've been getting that vibe through several years of sifting throgh Discords until I ultimately gave up on the platform (and the rest of MSSM, really) altogether ...

I'm on the east coast and my average ping is around 80....that's hardly an issue.

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Originally Posted by Ransu

I'm on the east coast and my average ping is around 80....that's hardly an issue.

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It's more like the life situation of someone else impacts everyone else in the group and due to the difficulty to clear, unless the people have a huge number of hours to grind and very good synergy with timing pots and other factors, it takes too long to get through the final stretch. People often say that groups have to have the right chemistry to stick together long enough to clear a savage, but really it comes down to not having problems from real life and avoiding burnout. That and people setting expectations on the first two or three fights, then not realizing what they are in for on the final stretch because of the increased difficulty and gear requirements.