Raider to Non-Raider: an exhibition on thoughts and misconceptions

[Malzian]

Time invested in a field doesn't necessarily equal skill in said field, someone who is truly skilled wouldn't be impressive if just anyone could do it with some time investment.

Just as a small aside here, as a teacher... the American Educational system would beg to disagree with you. (Not that I necessarily agree with them on it 100%, though.)

[Atmora]

Since I kinda went off and got detailed I should probably bring up something topic relevant.

So what's wrong with adding little Easter eggs or secret endings to harder content. It happens all the time in other MMOs and single player games. Like in the original Halo you got a secret ending if you beat the game on Legendary, which if you've played the original Halo there's a huge jump between Legendary and the other difficulties. Or if you look at Final Fantasy itself there were always side bosses that were way harder then the final boss that the vast majority of the people playing the game never beat and often times those bosses had world building and story locked behind them. Another example from a JRPG is Shin Megami Tensei Nocturn, which actually has it's canon ending locked behind beating a bonus boss that requires hundreds of hours of grinding a few very select party members. Not to mention WoW has had bonus bosses that were restricted to the highest raid tier a was mentioned before in this thread.

[Malzian]

Since I kinda went off and got detailed I should probably bring up something topic relevant.

So what's wrong with adding little Easter eggs or secret endings to harder content. It happens all the time in other MMOs and single player games. Like in the original Halo you got a secret ending if you beat the game on Legendary, which if you've played the original Halo there's a huge jump between Legendary and the other difficulties. Or if you look at Final Fantasy itself there were always side bosses that were way harder then the final boss that the vast majority of the people playing the game never beat and often times those bosses had world building and story locked behind them. Another example from a JRPG is Shin Megami Tensei Nocturn, which actually has it's canon ending locked behind beating a bonus boss that requires hundreds of hours of grinding a few very select party members. Not to mention WoW has had bonus bosses that were restricted to the highest raid tier a was mentioned before in this thread.

Okay, I've said this in another thread but I'll repeat it here.... You can not compare a single-player games like Halo or the Shin Megami Tensei series to an MMO. Their diametrically opposed to each other in how you approach them. In a single player game you play at your pace, do the things you want to do when you want to do them and fit them into your free time on your own terms. You are free to challenge the hardest content all at once or in 20 minute intervals if you see fit. You can not do that in an MMO with raid content. Sorry, but there's just no viable comparison to be made in it.

[Atmora]

That's why I also mentioned WoW as well and games from the Final Fantasy series, the point was to have a wide array of different and similar genres to draw comparison from. Not o mention you can take this game at your own pace if you want, you can attempt to clear everything as fast as possible by joining a static and going at content non stop, you can attempt to slowly PUG it at a rate you feel comfortable, or you can wait for it to get easier and do it then. If that's not a variety of time investment options I don't know what is. PUGin savage is more than doable by the way, plenty I players have cleared a3s in PUGs.

[Vincent_Mateus]

As someone who greatly enjoyed the challenge of savage coil when it was difficult, and the rush of handling mechanics precisely and trusting your team mates implicitly, I feel nothing but disdain for Alexander Savage. My static fell apart, 5 major statics on my server dissolved or transferred and I can't even get back in to raid anymore. I'm imminently qualified as arguably the best dragoon on my server (I'm mildly elitist, what can I say) and I still can't catch a break because nobody wants in. The fights are boring.

What I would have preferred, is for them to have released normal mode alongside savage, or even after since it's only purpose is for the bleeding hearts that wanna experience raid story, and rather than streamline savage, drop the NM players off right in front of boss rooms (Faust for example). Add expanded area's that the savage players would get to experience, because Alexander seems cramped and claustrophobic in comparison to T1, or even T3. Let the savage players who are crashing against the savage wall have something that distinctly makes it different, because these boring mechanic changes are insulting. AS1 and AS2 are incredibly boring already, AS3 and 4 are gear checks, 3 being the more enjoyable of the 2, while 4 is just a grind of attrition. The mechanics are lack luster and require very little coordination in comparison to things as simple even as t12/13, or savage 7/8. The difficulty shouldn't be hidden behind a gear wall, but behind a veil of true mechanical difficulty that inspires players to improve and rely on one another.

-A former 'Elitist' Raider

[CosmicKirby]

Well, an award for the longest post ever on the forums. If you are posting for personal catharsis, congrats on a job well done. If you are posting for the purpose of communicating to others, you may want to try to make your points quicker so as to not lose all your potential readers.

Yeah.

The first drafts of some of my Literature finals in college were fewer words than this.

I honestly skimmed it a bit, scrolled down to find more, and just browsed the bullet points.

Snip

Yeah, I've heard literally no positive feedback on A3S and A4S being well-designed or fun. I've heard some positive feedback on the other floors at least. The only reason my group is having trouble with mechanics in A3S is the incredibly large RNG element of the fight, almost every single one of the mechanics selects people in a random fashion, or spawns adds in a random fashion, making some pulls just randomly more difficult scenarios.

[Kalsam]

I like to agree with a lot of your points. It just sadly seems like the majority giving a bad rep to each side of the spectrum are wannabes.

For example; I currently am waiting on my friends to be ready to run Savage. So I personally am not in there atm. Has this stopped me from studying the fights? Nope! I'm checking out videos, guides, streams... Getting an idea of what to expect so we can all go in on the jobs we prefer, and not bang our heads on the wall endlessly.
BUT... there has been a number of times I've had someone in a group start telling me off about not knowing 'shit all about savage' just because I'm not IN it at this time.

I actually got angry enough at one person recently to say: "So, you just go into the fight... no studying, no prep. You decide you're going to be the useless garbage of the group because YOU can't figure out a fight without smashing your head into it over and over. Good job on letting your group carry you."

I've even had a reverse, where someone in the group told me off, saying "Let them play how they want, f*ing elitist" for just trying to help a tank become better. I wasn't rude, even said "Hey, just a friendly tip from another tank..." Showing that I wasn't trying to call them bad or anything. I was just doing what any good player should do; help others do good too.

*sighs* I mean, seriously... too many damn wannabes out there, making the true "elitists" (raiders) and "casuals" (non-raiders) look bad. :P

[Malzian]

That's why I also mentioned WoW as well and games from the Final Fantasy series, the point was to have a wide array of different and similar genres to draw comparison from. Not o mention you can take this game at your own pace if you want, you can attempt to clear everything as fast as possible by joining a static and going at content non stop, you can attempt to slowly PUG it at a rate you feel comfortable, or you can wait for it to get easier and do it then. If that's not a variety of time investment options I don't know what is. PUGin savage is more than doable by the way, plenty I players have cleared a3s in PUGs.

Okay, since WoW is a viable comparison, let's look at that. Now, I will note that I personally did not play WoW (for very long...) so most of what I will say comes from the plethora of people that I know played it.

The thing about raiding in WoW, no matter the expansion, no matter the raid, there always was a large number of parallel paths for you to advance through in order to accomplish what you needed to do in order to be ready for the raid. This meant that whenever you logged in, you had something to do. We should also note that the WoW raids mostly came out with expansions, which were not presented as often as we get content patches in XIV, meaning that devs had a lot more time to actively develop those raids before release.

Also note that Blizzard has a HUGE group of devs dedicated to producing these raids (many of which I've been lucky enough to meet personally...) so they have a lot of talent to pull from in both the sophistication of the encounters they can develop as well as the overall quantity they can push out.

XIV's dev team for this is, by comparison, relatively small and they push out the content at a much faster rate than most other companies do. This means, sadly, that the content is often not as polished and isn't close to the same volume as other games. Because of this, unlike the multithreaded path that people can follow at their place in WoW, you basically have only one path into Savage, and it's a hugely lackluster set of encounters. In the long and short of it, I think the only reliable way that we will ever get good quality raids with enough content wrapped around them is if they expand the dev team, because no one will accept them pushing out content slower then they are right now.

As someone who greatly enjoyed the challenge of savage coil when it was difficult, and the rush of handling mechanics precisely and trusting your team mates implicitly, I feel nothing but disdain for Alexander Savage. My static fell apart, 5 major statics on my server dissolved or transferred and I can't even get back in to raid anymore. I'm imminently qualified as arguably the best dragoon on my server (I'm mildly elitist, what can I say) and I still can't catch a break because nobody wants in. The fights are boring.

What I would have preferred, is for them to have released normal mode alongside savage, or even after since it's only purpose is for the bleeding hearts that wanna experience raid story, and rather than streamline savage, drop the NM players off right in front of boss rooms (Faust for example). Add expanded area's that the savage players would get to experience, because Alexander seems cramped and claustrophobic in comparison to T1, or even T3. Let the savage players who are crashing against the savage wall have something that distinctly makes it different, because these boring mechanic changes are insulting. AS1 and AS2 are incredibly boring already, AS3 and 4 are gear checks, 3 being the more enjoyable of the 2, while 4 is just a grind of attrition. The mechanics are lack luster and require very little coordination in comparison to things as simple even as t12/13, or savage 7/8. The difficulty shouldn't be hidden behind a gear wall, but behind a veil of true mechanical difficulty that inspires players to improve and rely on one another.

-A former 'Elitist' Raider

I also highly disagree with the level of these checks in most cases. They're too reliant on the numbers... iLvl, frame-perfect DPS, frame perfect heals. They don't allow a team to adapt and rather force them into creating a standard methodical approach which you set up and never, ever... ever deviate from. Due to this, because it is so implicit that you must do these specific things at specific times in specific ways (or die), groups rarely want to help teach anyone new anymore. That, in itself, puts off a lot of people from even trying the content.

I can hardly count the number of groups that look for replacements that state: "Must know mechanics" or "Must have experience." Much like the job market, it's hard to -get- experience doing something if no one is willing to even let you try it in the first place. I can also say that I've seen plenty of PF groups that even say all that while cursing people out who haven't even joined yet because they haven't done something yet. Yes, the mechanics of the fight are boring, tedious and in many cases dumb... That's part of why I haven't bothered with Savage and really only do A1 and A2, because the fights for A3 and A4 are just uninteresting.

[Evtrai]

Also note that Blizzard has a HUGE group of devs dedicated to producing these raids (many of which I've been lucky enough to meet personally...) so they have a lot of talent to pull from in both the sophistication of the encounters they can develop as well as the overall quantity they can push out.

XIV's dev team for this is, by comparison, relatively small

I'm curious where people is getting this dev quantity information, you can look at the credits when they roll and it lasts forever, and I'm only talking about japanese names, not the NA and EU team names which are pretty small, just for information, the credits roll of heavensward lasts more than 25 minutes.

[zosia]

That's why I also mentioned WoW as well and games from the Final Fantasy series, the point was to have a wide array of different and similar genres to draw comparison from. Not o mention you can take this game at your own pace if you want, you can attempt to clear everything as fast as possible by joining a static and going at content non stop, you can attempt to slowly PUG it at a rate you feel comfortable, or you can wait for it to get easier and do it then. If that's not a variety of time investment options I don't know what is. PUGin savage is more than doable by the way, plenty I players have cleared a3s in PUGs.

Wow does it so right when it comes to raiding. I wish we could have a company like SE that valued it's players as much as they do paired with the wow encounter teams.

The wow raiding models works very well for many reasons... Sadly, I think many of the reasons wow's raids are so great would not be palatable to the non-raiding audience in this game.

Wow gives raiders and non-raiders access to the story via four different modes of raiding. Nothing needs to be nerfed and each difficulty has it's proper place. You literally can raid as any type of player from the most casual to the most hard core.

The nice thing about wow raiding is the more you put into it, the more you get out of it:

LFR gives the worst of the raiding gear with a generic design, but it's still power progression for players that can only play a handful or hours each week.

Normal gives decent gear with a good amount of the raid rewards and achievements available to this difficulty.

Heroic gives better loot since it's harder.

Mythic gives the best gear in the game until the next raid tier comes out. Gear has unique models. I am assuming mythic also awards mounts, extra bosses, and titles.


Obviously, we can't have the highest ilvl in the game for more than 2-3 months. I do think raiders in this game could get an extra boss, different looking gear sets, and some titles since that seems to be a standard in the MMO genre.