People are bad at this game

[Alcyon1]

I'm all about helping new players out, but I think Hard Mode dungeons and certain other endgame content should probably have higher iLvl restrictions in place, because otherwise its just frustrating to run things. Not because the players are terrible (some are, but most aren't), but because the mechanics can just be unforgiving for people who don't have decent gear.

The restriction is the minimal gear to pass the dungeon. If you need to overgear the game to complete it, you are terrible.

[Iymala]

In all honesty, FFXIV has the lowest average skill level amongst its players out of every online game I've ever played.

I do not think it has more, personally. I have seen a lot of horribly skilled players in about every MMO I have played. FFXIV does make their failures more apparent as many fights have repeated dance style sequences. You cannot make it through 1 set of plumes luckily and beat the fight.... those plumes are coming again and again. I think the amount of movement mechanics really help the bad people stand out.

[Merlinian]

In all honesty, FFXIV has the lowest average skill level amongst its players out of every online game I've ever played.

/signed, the worst i ever encounterd since starting with AC in 2001. I will also play ESO, at least there I can kill them.

[Maero]

And i agree with Nakiamiie. Myself i am new to mmo's yes but to be real have dealt with so called "experts" or vets and pretty sad actually when i preformed better then them, lol
When the game first came out i do not think they advertised it as being hardcore, so another words those that complain for the sake of complaining knew well before hand that this game was more casual

[ColorOfSakura]

The restriction is the minimal gear to pass the dungeon. If you need to overgear the game to complete it, you are terrible.

That's....very much not how things work though. Because in theory, yes, you should be able to clear things like Haukke Hard and Pharos Sirius with the required item level. The reality is that generally that's not going to happen.


Why? Because Square is good at underestimating item levels. Some of them are set a little low. I ran Haukke Hard with some FC members who are experienced (but hadn't run Haukke Hard yet) and were running tomes for new classes, and we dropped to Halicarnassus multiple times despite being somewhat over the iLvl 48 requirement. I was doing fine healing everyone, but the DPS had trouble burning down Lady Amandine in time to avoid the final Blood Rain. None of us are terrible MMO players and they've run Coil before with their mains. But getting to the final boss and being unable to clear it regardless of whatever tactics we attempted seems to me like "The iLvl restriction is set lower than feasible to clear this."

I'm not saying it should be a cakewalk (it shouldn't - its endgame content afterall), but it should be at least somewhat possible with a full team at the minimum required item level, and at least with Haukke Hard, it's very likely to not happen.

[bokchoykn]

snip

Good post!

I didn't really analyze this game versus other games when I made that statement. It was just how I've perceived the players of this game. And you're totally right that this game makes end-game more accessible to unskilled players and more likely for unskilled players to interact with skilled players. So yes, those things you've mentioned will probably affect my perception.

However, looking back, I still think it's true that the players of this game has a noticeably lower average skill level.

Let's compare this game to World of Warcraft, the MMO I've had the most extensive experience with, and probably #2 on my "low average skill level ranking". The biggest difference is that WoW, as I remember it, was much more demanding of its players. (Note: I only played until WotLK.)

• WoW required players to understand their class enough to choose the right talents and customizations for their character such as gear, enchantments, glyphs, gems. FFXIV is not nearly as demanding in this area. Not everyone did it correctly, but this is one element of understanding that a player needed to be "good" that is less prevalent in FFXIV. It was easy to make bad choices in WoW, and bad choices punished you. In FFXIV, "just put all your attribute points into X and get something i90 for each of your slots" is more than enough to beat every encounter.
  
  
• When it comes to manual dexterity, FFXIV has 2.5s as their base global cooldown, with the ability to weave off-GCD abilities in between. This is rather long compared to most other games. If you play FFXIV for a long time and switch to another game (MMO or otherwise), that game suddenly feels so fast paced. Switch back to FFXIV, and the game feels like you're making decisions in slow-mo.
  
  
• WoW didn't have unforgiving mechanics that weren't affected by latency and netcode? I recall a fight called Heigan the Unclean in Naxxramas. It wasn't the most difficult fight, but you had to continuously dodge hazards similarly to how you'd dodge Plumes, Landslides and Bombs. You have to account for latency, so you have to move "ahead" of what you see on the screen. The concept was exactly the same: If you barely dodged the animation, you were too slow and you're gonna get hit. There were tons of mechanics that were just like this in WoW. Move out of the hazard in advance or die instantly. This is DEFINITELY not unique to FFXIV.
  
  
• FFXIV fights are all completely scripted. The only random elements: which player the boss chooses to target with certain abilities, and the orientation of things like Titan's Bomb formations. WoW had mostly scripted encounters too, but also had encounters where the boss chose from a list of possible attacks at random, and you had to react accordingly. This concept is completely foreign to FFXIV's boss design.
  
  
• DPS races were a lot more demanding in WoW. Currently, in FFXIV, when i85+ players should push 250+ DPS vs Titan EX, the norm is actually 150-200. In WoW, there were fights where if you weren't pushing close to your capacity for DPS, you won't win. In FFXIV, because there are no custom UI mods and because using third party damage parsers are frowned upon and technically illegal, there is nothing to hold players accountable for doing low DPS. The end result is that players who play DPS classes are worse at their job in FFXIV than they were in WoW.
  
  
• WoW had tougher challenges. In addition to the standard raid encounters, they implemented "Heroic Mode" content as well as alternate kill methods that were much more difficult and yielded higher rewards. FFXIV's Hard/Extreme mode primals aren't quite the same difficulty as WoW's Heroic Raids and Hard Mode methods. Basically, the degree of difficulty for the hardest WoW achievements is much higher than FFXIV's Twintania and Extreme Primals. Having this extra level of difficulty pushes players to higher limits.
  
  
• Finally, end-game content in FFXIV is 8-man. Wow was 40-man and then subsequently 25. Coordinating with 25 or 40 people is significantly more difficult than coordinating with 8 people. That's 3x-5x as many people who can screw up and wipe the raid. (Crystal Tower allows 24, but it's a joke anyway)

In the end, despite the game being significantly less demanding, the ratio between bad to good is still very high. Meanwhile, the players in the community are demanding an easier game.

[Alcyon1]

I was doing fine healing everyone, but the DPS had trouble burning down Lady Amandine in time to avoid the final Blood Rain. None of us are terrible MMO players and they've run Coil before with their mains. But getting to the final boss and being unable to clear it regardless of whatever tactics we attempted seems to me like "The iLvl restriction is set lower than feasible to clear this."

LB ? Tank LB ? Saving CD's for Amandine ? Tanking the boss where she spawns to switch on her faster ?
-"The iLvl restriction is set lower than feasible to clear this." is not true, it can be "we are not good enough to pass it with the correct iLvl restriction".

[kayuwoody]

Snip!

The lack of build options (skills/talents/stats/gear) on FFXIV has been a pet peeve of mine since the beginning. Everyone's cookie cutter here, there's not much room for creative character builds.

Latency will exist in any online game of course, but SE compounded the problem with 300ms position updates (waaat) and game design like how the animation isn't linked in "real time" to the actual cast. The most obvious example being landslides. Take lag out of the picture: say I have 0 lag, and I can move out of the AoE and then back in with complete safety as long as I do it after the cast bar. The animation can hit my toon right in the face without the skill actually hitting me. That's really counter intuitive.

I also raided pretty hard core till WotLK (highfive). So I know the fights (I derped often enough at Heigan :P). Burning Crusade, Ulduar and Icecrown hard modes were some of my favorite MMO encounters. The thing is if you were anywhere near clearing that content pre nerfs, you weren't in a casual guild. There was a pretty vast difference between raiding guilds and casuals in WoW, no argument there
While the average WoW player was pretty unskilled, the highest tier of content required pretty decent players. But as the average player made up the majority, the ratio's skewed. I think it's not that much different here, but if push came to shove I would probably rate this slightly worse than WoW too in terms of average player skill, with the major reason that this game isn't challenging enough for the more serious raiders. So basically I agree with you, just hadn't really thought about it that way before!

[ColorOfSakura]

LB ? Tank LB ? Saving CD's for Amandine ? Tanking the boss where she spawns to switch on her faster ?
-"The iLvl restriction is set lower than feasible to clear this." is not true, it can be "we are not good enough to pass it with the correct iLvl restriction".

Considering a vast amount of high level fairly hardcore players agree that the iLvl for Haukke Hard is set too low, I'm disinclined to agree with you.

- We kept tanking the boss to where the next set of adds spawn. We used multiple tactics and kept getting killed right then. The Tank LB wouldn't have helped us, Amandine wasn't down far enough for us to even survive a damage mitigated Blood Rain. The Tank saved all his cooldowns. Seriously - we tried multiple ways of tackling it. It wasn't just "LOL WE LOST" and quit. We tried like 7 times or so before we decided it wasn't going to happen. The DPS just couldn't out put the required damage to get her down fast enough.

Honestly, if we were that bad at it, we wouldn't have even made it past Ash.

[Alcyon1]

I think it's not that much different here, but if push came to shove I would probably rate this slightly worse than WoW too in terms of average player skill, with the major reason that this game isn't challenging enough for the more serious raiders. So basically I agree with you, just hadn't really thought about it that way before!

That's probably why a vast majority of FC cannot kill Twin.