Quote Originally Posted by Odett View Post
I feel the same way. Getting informed of the fight really speeds up things, and I really don't understand the "I want to go in blind" people, because unless you're making a blind PF, you're only relegating responsibility to someone else in the group.
From a personal, more subjective standpoint:
Have you ever run a new dungeon with an entire group of people who didn't know what to expect? It's an incredible amount of fun and for that first (and maybe only) run the game doesn't feel so heavily scripted. Flexibility, improvisation and skill are most important instead of being a slave to routine. The first run through Stone Vigil HM, the appearance of a second Giruveganaus while we were trying to figure out how the first one worked instantly killed two players in our party. We actually managed to win that battle (yay SMN battle rez!), but it was touch and go for a little bit and that was far more exciting than it is now where the only danger is falling asleep from boredom. People want to go in blind to experience that exhilaration and the surprise of the reveal.

From an objective standpoint:
The game tells players to sign themselves up in Duty Finder and defeat X. It doesn't say, "Look up a video or read a guide, then register for Duty Finder." When I started playing I never said I was new because... well, because why? I don't know if it's standard MMO practice or not because this is my first MMO, but I will say it's completely reasonable for players to stay quiet about doing something the first time, or not understand/wanting to watch a video of a dungeon before they do it because nothing in-game states otherwise and FFXIV is designed so that everything but Coil + EX primals (give or take a Levi) can be beaten totally blind. Now I will say if I'm new to content, just so nobody goes ballistic in the midst of an instance but I still won't look up a guide. The one time I did, for Twintania, it made things worse because the group I was in was doing it differently from the video and I was stuck with trying to reconcile what we were doing in-game with what I watched online. It made things much harder and the video only ended up hindering me.

Ultimately, it all comes down to player skill. I've seen first-timers do really well in endgame content with hardly any explanation, and I've seen first-timers with paragraphs of clarification or explanations via voice-chat fail utterly. A bad player that watches a video is still a bad player.