Is anyone else bothered by the lack of incentive for mediocre players to improve?

[Samsta]

stuff

How exactly does high ilvl requirement mean you want to be carried through content? People just want to take less risks, which is understandable. So you are having problem with people in this game? But that is not something a game can fix. I mean right now you are just blabbering about "lowly players" "the do not even care" and I have a really hard time getting your point, the game itself can't fix the player base. You really can't carry anyone through the hardest content, you need everyone to be good to complete those fights, so I don't understand how would you fix this problem of yours. A problem that I don't even recognize, sure I have seen some bad players but it's not any major problem, the things you talk about (especially the blizzard spamming) sound really weird, I have never seen that.


And again why do you care about what other people do, surely they don't affect your playing experience if you have a fc that you can run content with? The rest of your post I am just gonna ignore but I will say this: players who truly help the community don't have to repeatedly stress that fact on the forums like you do.

[SarcasmMisser]

You really can't carry anyone through the hardest content, you need everyone to be good to complete those fights, so I don't understand how would you fix this problem of yours.

I'm sure I'm a broken record at this point but there is nothing in the game that you can't carry. Nothing is that tightly tuned to the top gear, which makes sense since nothing should be tuned to the gear it drops.

I do really hope though that coil 6-9 is a lot tighter than 1-5 overall, and the difficulty is more progressive. 1-4 is just way too easy, and yes even considering i70-i80 gear which is what I first cleared it in. It just encourages bad play to have most of the loot drop in such easy content.

[Devaking55]

As a different way of looking at it, you could say that if they're good enough to get the tomes required to get the gear, why then don't they deserve it? I mean, if I work hard to be able buy something I'm going to need in order to TRY to face a harder challenge, then how can you say I didn't earn it? Gear isn't a substitute for skill, period. That doesn't mean people with less skill deserve lesser gear.

problem with this is you can get carried into myth gear. gear should be the reward for skill, and yes people with less skill should have less gear because they arent able to complete content for better loots, this is what is called progression.

[illuminapanic]

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So are you saying that when you see an i80+ requirement group, that you feel more able to complete the dungeon? I guess everyone doesn't have the perfect environment like you because from personal experience, I see the same problems from a minimum entry group as an i80+ group. The failure rate is the same if people don't know how to play.

Echo buff, btw, is suppose to "fix people" in this game. It boosts you everytime or every week (I'm not sure which) you fail at turn 1-5. It'll be at the point where you will face roll it even just pressing 3 buttons. At the moment it's only for coil but I wouldn't be surprised as time goes on that it gets implemented for the extreme primals as well for every wipe that occurs . And who ever said anything about wanting the game to fix people? I simply stated that people want to be carried in this game and it's a problem.

Who truly helps the community? The people that tell you to fuck off while playing improperly and refusing to listen to advice? Nope. The people that offer the advice? Sure. The people who give false hopes by requiring an absurd entry but fail to do their part? Nope. I don't "truly" help the community by going completely out of my way, of course not, but I do join df's and pf's and do my part. I TRY to help people who aren't able to form groups or have an fc/ls to help them.

[Grotesque]

There are way more ppl who appreciate an advice than who don't. It is just selective recognition to think otherwise, because we recognize bad things 3-5 times more intensive than good things, psychological stuff.

Whatever illuminapanic says, I can second it. When I'm bored and in the mood to help and no friends are online for sell runs then it is Titan HM where I join through party finder. Nicest group I had was a fresh random Titan HM group, 6 out of the 7 others were willing to listen. We weeded out the stubborn guy and replaced him and got another newcomer. It took 9 runs from "First touch to Titan HM" to "Fck his stony ass down to little tidbits" and they were all really thankful for receiving advice, how to tackle his mechanics. The technically hardest part about any Titan fight is dodging bombs combined with Landslide until you got the clue about it. Some are simply not the researcher type of player who can figure out such mechanics by themselves completely, but if you explain it with reasoning they understand and learn it. Same with raid groups, normally you have a raid leader who is smart enough to guide his troup, which doesn't mean that the others don't have to think to figure out mechanics, but as said, some aren't researchers. I think that is ok.

[Edellis]

This thread = TL;DR now

Luckly, the devs don't think anything like the OP, so this discussion is moot.

[Samsta]

text

When I see groups with high ilvl requirements I get assured that we are not going to fail because of gear or because people make small mistakes. It is about leaving room for error, if you have the change to do it more safely why wouldn't you? It is just a human nature, of course I don't think the actual ilvl has anything to do with actual skill level of players who join, but the changes of success are still higher, because you can make more mistakes that would maybe wipe the party if played with lower ilvl, but now they maybe are recoverable.

I can't really add anything to this, I am just wondering why you are complaining here if you do not want to fix this situation of yours. I myself have not experienced these things so often that I would consider them to be a problem, and even if I would I don't see any point posting here without the goal of fixing this and offering solutions. There will always be baddies, that is just how it is.

[Hiroradius]

There's basically none. If they continue with their mediocrity (really, sub-mediocrity in most cases), they'll eventually be handed the gear they couldn't normally attain, without making an effort to improve themselves.

Further, the developers' stance on 'strategies' like the Turn 2 enrage garbage makes it seem like they have no intention of challenging these players to improve; every turn of Bahamut's Coil, excluding Twintania, can be powered through just by having enough gear, which is handed out for free in Turn 1 and Turn 2.

This degrades the sense of accomplishment for everyone, both the skilled players who worked hard to down the bosses, and the bad players who are just whacking loot pinatas and patting themselves on the back.

I hate to bring in World of Warcraft as a comparison, but I think they did it right, with the three sets of gear (Raid Finder, Normal, and Heroic). If you're a sub-par player who wants to whack a loot pinata, you get sub-par gear for it. Those who want to challenge themselves get regular gear, and those who want to really push the encounters get higher tier gear.

There's no way this is healthy for the game in the long term.

Just an FYI, WoW is the game that started the whole dumbing down raids and handing gear and making it easily accessible for casual players. As soon as a new patch comes out, they always gave everyone a way of getting the previous level gear.

And seeing as how WoW has been going for how many years? Yes it does seem to work. The problem is people are starting to want the hardcore back, the true MMO where you had to work to get what you wanted, but from a current money standpoint, that model no longer works, if you keep making games where everyone can get the uber loot, then more people will play, but what they fail to see if while initial numbers will always be high, they fall off very quickly.

Look at FF11, even now it still has a somewhat strong fan base, and that game you had to work HARD to get what you wanted, it was not designed for the casual players, and FF11's biggest complaint is also it's greatest accomplishment, it was HARD.. Same with Everquest, same with Vanilla WoW. Heck look at Rift, some of the new raids have been out for months and STILL haven't been beating, the game does have VERY loyal fan base, and is a great game (their fate/rift system destroys this insult of a fate system that ff14 has). But if you also notice, when it was pay to play it started out great, the game was too hard, and casual players dropped like flies. It is now free to play, and casual players have a way of getting the gear.. they can buy it for a few hundrend dollars.

Now the turn 2 strat, that was found by people LOOKING for an exploit because they couldn't figure out how to pass the rot while dpsing while avoiding lazers, etc. These strategies will ALWAYS be found because people need to exploit it. AK, first boss, have the healer jump up into the tree and now you don't have to deal with the golems.. really? Dealing with the golems was what made the boss fight interesting, but people couldn't do it, because they had to take their focus off the boss and lower their dps so they wouldn't do it and the healer would wipe from healing agro.

[Lyrro]

Now the turn 2 strat, that was found by people LOOKING for an exploit because they couldn't figure out how to pass the rot while dpsing while avoiding lazers, etc. These strategies will ALWAYS be found because people need to exploit it. AK, first boss, have the healer jump up into the tree and now you don't have to deal with the golems.. really? Dealing with the golems was what made the boss fight interesting, but people couldn't do it, because they had to take their focus off the boss and lower their dps so they wouldn't do it and the healer would wipe from healing agro.

This is a sad but true statement, and what's even more depressing is the fact that a lot of these strategies take just as long to figure out as it would've taken to just master the normal strategies.With the upcoming support for addons this problem is only going to get worse because people will then be able to apply addons to show their dps and so the race to be top dps will only get more intense. Going to go with another ct example, just because I have to run ct so many times each week for gear, but the Vassago are one of the more fun examples of this. Groups tend to focus on their vassago and ignore napalms/balloons because they want to be the first group to down their vassago because, for some reason, being the first party to kill your vassago makes you look so impressive despite the fact that your party was responsible for a wipe or two in the attempt because you failed to kill the napalms that spawned at your side of the arena.

As is, being mediocre often requires just as much skill as actually being skilled which is a sad irony. A lot of these strategies were discovered by parties wiping over and over, trying and failing enough times to realize that the exploit exists or just spending an hour or two sneaking around in these areas because they wiped so many times that they've decided they can't do it the legit way so they need to find an exploit. These players then decide that they should tell a friend, who tells a friend, who posts it on youtube and the next thing you know everyone's doing it that way. It's like that idiot everyone knows at work who puts more effort into getting out of doing a task than it would've taken to just do the task, only that guy's usually not stupid enough to announce to the world that he's doing it. Unfortunately, SE's decision to support this behavior has only encouraged people to do it more and more, but they are the ones investing money and they're the ones at risk should the fan base start to wain. It's just too bad they don't realize that a lot of their fan base from FFXI actually enjoyed the challenge and that's a big part of the reason the game was so successful for so long. A rather large chunk of my friends who play FFXIV only still play it because, at the moment, there's not a lot of options on what to play MMO wise. Once something else comes out, pretty much anything else at this point, SE is going to lose a lot of it's less casual players.

[OSUBuckeye4]

There is an easy way to solve your problem OP. Find 7 friends who are as amazing as you and run every piece of content exclusively with them.

You will never have to deal with random people who stink ever again (unless you want to get some lol'z in CT).