NA needs to start using the Raid Finder

Is the chaotic raid tuned a little too high? Maybe. I won't argue that, It's very difficult to carry anyone through, one person's mistake can snowball and ruin the whole fight and no amount of item level bloat will save you from 2+ people missing a tower soak.

But the bigger problem I've had with this content is attitude of so many in the party finder. I've never seen a group last more than 2 or 3 pulls. Someone will, legitimately or not, rage quit after a wipe. Then we either wait to refill the party finder which can take time, or what has been more likely there is a mass exodus or the party just disbands all together, only for the majority of that group to join the next one on the list in the party finder. We'll have the same 10-15 people who will make the same mistakes and we will do the whole dance again until either the bad apples get gud or don't make it into the next pf and we'll do this for a few hours because we seem to as a whole lack the maturity and/or communication skills to provide constructive criticism or even just vote kick the one or two bad players.

With the raid finder, you wouldn't have as many rage quits as they would suffer the 30 minute penalty, There would be an option to vote abandon if the group isn't up to snuff. and randomness of the queue I'd hope to get a completely fresh group instead of slight variations on the same one for hours on end as we migrate from one pf to another. It would enforce the slightest amount of patience and good behavior

The cons have always been the fear of getting people unprepared and unwilling to learn the fights expecting to be carried; barely meeting the item level requirements turning out to be more a hindrance than a help. Which is fair, Its the reason why mentor roulette is such a nightmare. But for the chaotic raid at least, I don't think item level has been the barrier to success for most, its been the poor communication, and maybe one or two people consistently missing towers who you could just vote kick and probably not run into again for at least a little while.

Honestly I see the logic behind your point but I think the culture is too set on PF, which is what I would prefer anyway. I've given up entirely on clearing the chaotic due to just how difficult it is to get a full PF as well as one that isn't prog lying or doesn't have someone who rage quits after 2 wipes, Maybe if I can find a discord server for it or something. Anyways, I think the downsides of the Raid Finder outweigh the downsides of PF. PF You can at least be (relatively) certain everyone will be using a specific strategy or guide. DF people might be split on what one to use or come into disagreements on what role they want. I think RF would have even more selfish people expecting to get carried or people who are genuinely just clueless to what kind of content Chaotic is. I think the control you have over who is in your group in PF (keeping certain players out, i.e people you've black listed) makes up for the negatives there are.

Party Finder has pros and cons. I do not like Party Finder culture a lot of reasons, and like it for others. Raid Finder would help remove the "someone is the party leader" factor and reduce the anxiety of participating, but it wouldn't help with most of the problems.

People could still leave, not be very good, play around with markers for ages, run out of time to play due to real life, you're not playing with a consistent party like you do in a static so your progress resets, and so on. It also could add new problems like being at a different phase than everyone else.

The reason we started using Party Finder goes back to Heavensward. Back then, we had no cross-world Party Finder, so we DID use Raid Finder. An average tank in there did not know what a tank swap was. I'd queue into Sophia Extreme and wait for the tank to swap off me and they... didn't. Not a single tank hardly ever did this. It was hopeless. It was one of the first mechanics and none of the tanks were any good at the most basic function of their job, tank busters.

The absolute most casual, most new tanks, that had probably just started tanking moments before they queued, would enter it as if it was casual content, and had no idea what they were doing. And didn't learn as the pulls went on. Let alone know what mitigation was.

So once we got cross-world Party Finder, people began to migrate to it, for obvious reasons. The casual players that have no clue what they are doing would not be brave enough to join a party they can be kicked from and troll it by having not done the most basic research or preparation on how to play their job ie. enough to press "Provoke" so the party can progress.

They did still use Raid Finder for Zurvan but there is a meme some players will have heard from back then of "skip soar" which seemed to finally push everyone else to PF.

24 person statics will be the norm.

NA as usual will make everyone join out-of-game FF14 discord #57 for scheduled organized runs where everyone listens to the raid leader over voice.

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Originally Posted by St0rmy

Honestly I see the logic behind your point but I think the culture is too set on PF, which is what I would prefer anyway. I've given up entirely on clearing the chaotic due to just how difficult it is to get a full PF as well as one that isn't prog lying or doesn't have someone who rage quits after 2 wipes, Maybe if I can find a discord server for it or something. Anyways, I think the downsides of the Raid Finder outweigh the downsides of PF. PF You can at least be (relatively) certain everyone will be using a specific strategy or guide. DF people might be split on what one to use or come into disagreements on what role they want. I think RF would have even more selfish people expecting to get carried or people who are genuinely just clueless to what kind of content Chaotic is. I think the control you have over who is in your group in PF (keeping certain players out, i.e people you've black listed) makes up for the negatives there are.

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Just study and stick to it. It took me 2 days to clear. But those two days I was really committed (about 4 hours each) when people leave, stay and reform if it's possible. If not, move to another of course. Also, you have to move to Aether to find groups that fill, I wish we could stay in Primal but you have to be pragmatic and Aether is better for filling.

And due to the nature of the content it has few things to do with whether you are personally good or not, the only thing you can do is your part and hope everyone else does too.

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Originally Posted by MoofiaBossVal

NA as usual will make everyone join out-of-game FF14 discord #57 for scheduled organized runs where everyone listens to the raid leader over voice.

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Are you saying you'll have to actually socialize in an MMORPG ?

That sure sounds horrible, I hope people will be okay

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Originally Posted by Clockworks

Are you saying you'll have to actually socialize in an MMORPG ?

That sure sounds horrible, I hope people will be okay

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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 Clockworks

Are you saying you'll have to actually socialize in an MMORPG ?

That sure sounds horrible, I hope people will be okay

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It was pretty clear, actually. They are saying people will be forced to socialize outside of the game, not in FFXIV. Which is the issue. It's content made so that any party can clear without voice chat.

Discord requirement was already a bad thing, but at least it was uncommon, especially in 8-man content. Now we have a 3rd party stalking website which has a profile page for each character, and yours must be public and have a log of the required prog point.

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.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The reason we started using Party Finder goes back to Heavensward. Back then, we had no cross-world Party Finder, so we DID use Raid Finder. An average tank in there did not know what a tank swap was. I'd queue into Sophia Extreme and wait for the tank to swap off me and they... didn't. Not a single tank hardly ever did this. It was hopeless. It was one of the first mechanics and none of the tanks were any good at the most basic function of their job, tank busters.

The absolute most casual, most new tanks, that had probably just started tanking moments before they queued, would enter it as if it was casual content, and had no idea what they were doing. And didn't learn as the pulls went on. Let alone know what mitigation was.

So once we got cross-world Party Finder, people began to migrate to it, for obvious reasons. The casual players that have no clue what they are doing would not be brave enough to join a party they can be kicked from and troll it by having not done the most basic research or preparation on how to play their job ie. enough to press "Provoke" so the party can progress.

They did still use Raid Finder for Zurvan but there is a meme some players will have heard from back then of "skip soar" which seemed to finally push everyone else to PF.

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Honestly raid finder for Sophia ex was fine I got most of my totems there. Zurvan ex killed raid finder because literally every group was 1 tank 5 dps and the raid finder couldn't accommodate that.

As a tool it would have been so much better if the filters just worked properly from the offset. Zurvan basically killed raid finder. But it was done for much earlier than that simply because the filters didn't work. Someone who'd never set foot in the content could queue duty completion phase 3. Instead of practice phase 1. That was a fairly crushing blow to the raid finders future.

It should have had milestones and checkpoints. You should never have been able to queue duty completion if you'd never got the boss down to 10% and seen enrage. You should never be able to queue practice phase 3 until you successfully made it to that point without ko...

Just being able to roll straight in duty completion phase 3. And expect to be carried isnwhat killed thebraid finder and also what causes a massive number of pf problems

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Originally Posted by OranKells

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?

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The source of the issue is that FF14 is a retail WoW clone where the game is so easy with trash fodder quests, and duty finder dungeons and trials that automatically teleports you to the instance with other randos you will never see again, that people spend 400+ hours going through the visual novel story and reaching level 100 having never made a friend. It is not like FF11 or vanilla WoW where the game was hard right out of the game and incentivized you to quickly find friends to progress through the game with just to do a levelling party or dungeons, which then leads to the formation of guilds before you reach level cap abd start endgame raiding. FF14 does not develop the community or bonds that are needed to coordinate raiding and withstand some tribulation. So when solo players reach level cap and decide to dip their toes into "endgame", they go into it with the mercenary mentality of PUGing where everyone is just a merc viewing each other as cogs in a machine to be replaced for the best cog. "These other players (who I don't care about) are holding me back (and I don't care to waste my time helping them). I am going to just flip through groups until the stars align (and I get carried)".

And people are coming home from work to unwind, do not want to be pointed out as the weak link holding back 23 others, and it just takes one mistake to qipe so chances are that even a veteran will make a mistake too. So people might be trying to be gracious in the hope that other people will be gracious when they make a mistake too. But this is a game design problem where everyone has too much responsibility. In WoW raids only a handful of roles have that much responsibility, and can be assigned to the best players, so less adept players aren't wiping the group and can still participate and complete and have fun.

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Originally Posted by MoofiaBossVal

The source of the issue is that FF14 is a retail WoW clone where the game is so easy with trash fodder quests, and duty finder dungeons and trials that automatically teleports you to the instance with other randos you will never see again, that people spend 400+ hours going through the visual novel story and reaching level 100 having never made a friend. It is not like FF11 or vanilla WoW where the game was hard right out of the game and incentivized you to quickly find friends to progress through the game with just to do a levelling party or dungeons, which then leads to the formation of guilds before you reach level cap abd start endgame raiding. FF14 does not develop the community or bonds that are needed to coordinate raiding and withstand some tribulation. So when solo players reach level cap and decide to dip their toes into "endgame", they go into it with the mercenary mentality of PUGing where everyone is just a merc viewing each other as cogs in a machine to be replaced for the best cog. "These other players (who I don't care about) are holding me back (and I don't care to waste my time helping them). I am going to just flip through groups until the stars align (and I get carried)".

And people are coming home from work to unwind, do not want to be pointed out as the weak link holding back 23 others, and it just takes one mistake to qipe so chances are that even a veteran will make a mistake too. So people might be trying to be gracious in the hope that other people will be gracious when they make a mistake too. But this is a game design problem where everyone has too much responsibility. In WoW raids only a handful of roles have that much responsibility, and can be assigned to the best players, so less adept players aren't wiping the group and can still participate and complete and have fun.

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Classic WoW never was intended to be hard, infact it was meant to be casual, and it never was hard. People were just bad. Quite like the average FFXIV player who struggles with expert roulette mechanics.

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Originally Posted by MoofiaBossVal

NA as usual will make everyone join out-of-game FF14 discord #57 for scheduled organized runs where everyone listens to the raid leader over voice.

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In the [in]famous words of Dives: "50 DKP minus!"

And just accepting if you had made a mistake, learn from it, own it. Don't be a PirateSoftware.

The problem is that Raid Finder is there. It's just not used.

Are you proposing SE put in measures to make it either more attractive or required? The carrot could be a decent idea. Maybe offer some of the filtering options that people have asked for on PF to RF instead to draw players to use it. I wouldn't think the stick would be a good idea. Players are good at getting around restrictions they don't like.