Raiding community issues: recruitment, player expectations, & attitudes

[Aquaslash]

Quite frankly nobody should be using creator as a benchmark for anything. Synced Coil? sure! Gordias and Midas! Excellent! Creator as a test for anything other than telling left from right? Nah.

[Zojha]

While that is true for the game as it is now, would it still hold true if you couldn't buy better/equal gear with the tomes? If you needed the gear from A1S-A4S to get into A5S and on, then maybe people would actually think that doing the raids might be more worthwhile?

But that then means that once you get the A1S entry gear, there cannot be any further gear upgrades outside of raids, or the first raid gear would be invalidated. This in turn means that the only gear progression to be had from then on is in raids and thus, they become the only "endgame" for people who care about gear progression.

And not just for a few patches - forever. The moment any reset is scheduled, the most recent gear is going to be pointless again.

Honestly? If raids suck that much that you need to coax people into them like that, maybe they simply aren't fun and the real issue lies therein. It reminds me of the Diadem debate, truth be told.

[Nixxe]

I don't raid in this game, but when I raided in WoW I was in a top 100 world guild and we weren't much different. We were looking for people ready to step into a spot and fill it, not fixer-uppers. We were a little flexible about ilvl because we DE'd a ton of gear after the first week every week anyway and if someone had exceptionally strong parses, we might overlook bad current tier progression or a low ilvl. However, if you're good enough, it's very much a recruiter's market and there's no reason to settle. I'd be rather surprised if this game is significantly different in those respects.

Also, generally speaking, when people were like "Oh, I had this amazing progress two years ago and then quit raiding, but now I'm back," don't hold your breath that they'll be any good. They usually aren't. It might not be as big of a problem in this game because it's younger and there has been less time for it to drastically change, but there's a reason current progress is highly valued.

[aleph_null]

If you were a raider in the previous tier who just came back from a break you probably should state it, especially considering the current tier is far easier than previous tiers. If I was recruiting for a non hc static I'd gladly take someone who cleared a4s or a8s since it's easy to get them caught up with gear ilv (we're at a "catch up" patch anyway, i250-260 gears aren't hard to get and i270 upgrade items can be farmed).

But if you're talking about raiders back in coil era, their skills may no longer be relevant anymore considering the difference between lv 50 and 60 rotations and cds, so I'd be quite skeptical. I'd have to see how they perform at lv 60 before deciding whether to accept them or not. Heck they may not even like their main job back then anymore since some jobs play very differently at lv 60 compared to at lv 50. They probably should start by applying to casual groups that don't require current raid progress.

There are also several reasons why people demand progress in current raid tier when recruiting. They might currently be at certain floor/phase and don't really want to retrain someone from the start (personally I might give them some chance if they cleared a4s or a8s since that definitely says something about their skill).

Think of it as something like applying for an advanced high level job when you're switching from a different field (raid tier). Not everything you gained from that other field can be useful or transferrable to the new job (gordias/midas -> creator might be very close, but coils -> creator are completely different things).

[MagicofGaia]

To be completely honest with you...I don't think it is elitist for static groups to have certain conditions in order to join.
...

It would be nice, sure, if people gave people more of a chance to prove themselves, but again they have every right to not bother since it is their group and if the majority of the members in it don't have enough time to spend on teaching someone new then that is their right. I would say it is because no matter how good of a player you are you are still going to need some time to learn the mechanics in the fights you've never even been in and maybe those groups didn't want to give up their own time to deal with that.

So maybe the best option would be to make your own group?

I appreciate many people offering their own voices to this. I think too many though are missing the mark a little. This is not coming from a player frustrated and diplomatically b***ing about it, as I'm quite seasoned in X|V historically. This is coming from a leadership perspective hoping to wake some people up. This may never reach the eyes of a minority of FC leadership overall, but I believe it is vital more time and attention be paid to an individual's raiding history as opposed to 2 very small and narrow guidelines for yes / no.

When you look at 2 applicants: a) the individual who has raided in mmo's for 6-10 years and just needs a couple-few weeks to get up to snuff or b) the player who has been playing for a few months and is more comparatively ready to take on content. In terms of wanting to play together long term, it's not a decision in my mind if I had to choose.

I lead a LS turned FC from 1.0~final coil, and had to take a raiding break due to wife's pregnancy. I've come back and am establishing a new group: http://arcsystems.guildwork.com/

[Miste]

I appreciate many people offering their own voices to this. I think too many though are missing the mark a little.

I apologize if I misunderstood some of what you posted, but most of what I posted still stands though that it isn't elitism like you claimed.

I believe it is vital more time and attention be paid to an individual's raiding history as opposed to 2 very small and narrow guidelines for yes / no.
When you look at 2 applicants: a) the individual who has raided in mmo's for 6-10 years and just needs a couple-few weeks to get up to snuff or b) the player who has been playing for a few months and is more comparatively ready to take on content. In terms of wanting to play together long term, it's not a decision in my mind if I had to choose.

Everything you say here is your own personal ideas of how to recruit. That's great and all, but I guess I just don't personally see the point in trying to tell other groups how they should recruit. Each group is going to recruit what they agree is best for them and their members and while I agree it would be good if people were a bit more open-minded the members of those groups are allowed to have reasons not to be.

I mean if you want to spread a good message of being more open-minded when it comes to recruiting for raids then that's great, but labeling groups that don't recruit based on your personal ideas for it elitist seems a bit bleh, you know? Best to spread a good message without labeling certain groups terms that could be considered derogatory.

Just how I feel about your idea/post anyway. I hope you get the people you need for your team; Excalibur represent

[aleph_null]

When you look at 2 applicants: a) the individual who has raided in mmo's for 6-10 years and just needs a couple-few weeks to get up to snuff or b) the player who has been playing for a few months and is more comparatively ready to take on content. In terms of wanting to play together long term, it's not a decision in my mind if I had to choose.

I lead a LS turned FC from 1.0~final coil, and had to take a raiding break due to wife's pregnancy. I've come back and am establishing a new group: http://arcsystems.guildwork.com/

That's the thing though, some groups may not want to wait for a few weeks until you get caught up with the rest, some groups only recently cleared the raid so they may want to quickly farm gears and get BiS, so they'd prefer someone who's ready to join the farm. Different needs for different groups.

As for the 6-10 years raiding exp vs players who played for a few months but cleared current raid tier comparison, aren't you being sorta elitist yourself? Seems like you're implying that your past exp makes you better than the newer raider, despite them being more up to date with current raid tier and possibly even cleared it. Not trying to be rude but after months/years of break you may take a while to be able to perform at their current level, especially if the last time you raided in this game is during the previous expansion (fcob) since there are new jobs/skills/strats/meta etc so it may be quite different from before. Maybe you can and will outperform them in a few weeks but there's no guarantee on that (again, no offense) while the other person can clearly show what they're capable of in this tier from their gears (which implies they cleared the floors) and possibly even fflogs parses.

Well anyway welcome back, glad you got everything sorted and started a new group. Hope you enjoy raiding again.

[JunseiKei]

Many established groups looking for MC~(S)HC players are judging the worthiness of a potential recruit solely based on a couple things:
-Current ilvl
-Current raid tier progression

This is why whenever my group had to look for replacements, all we looked for was loyalty, a willingness to learn and an understanding that this is raiding- it comes with certain expectations (raid times are sacred, let us know if you had something come up and can't make it and to respect the rule to not just join another group and progress ahead). We long ago decided we can work with a bad DPS as long as they want to learn and we can teach the new recruit the fight. Our particular group is about getting through it together than we need to have this on farm now.

Despite the lax requirements, I'm sure most people would label our group "elitist" or "hardcore" (depending on the perspective since both terms have been misused and warped). We have no problems pointing out when someone's DPS is bad, someone messed up a cooldown, left cleric stance on, mitigation wasn't applied in time, people avoiding the damage clip from overkill and not being counted toward DPS (FFlogs BS), so they leave the add up and causes us to wipe, tank was too slow to pull into position, tank was slow on aggro, overhealing (I long ago gave up telling my co-healer to just let HoTs do the work if an AoE wasn't coming out within so much time. I just take the overheal hit and not care).

We're friendly. Mostly. I sometimes bite. We don't treat this like a business because we're not trying to beat [other] people. We just want to clear the content. If we want to be competitive, most of us play actual competitive games (Street Fighter, Tekken, For Honor, Overwatch, King of Fighters).

However, yeah, I have to agree, a lot of the players put these stipulations make finding a group very frustrating and hard to start off (or even return to) unless you're in an FC that starts their raids or with a group of friends with intentions of raiding. I would like to point out your timing if you're just starting out to raid again. This tier has been out since a little before Las Vegas Fanfest back in mid October 2016 and Stormblood is literally 3 months away. Part of the issue you're running into now is most people that have had it on farm and are simply gearing ALT jobs up for the upcoming expansion since the gear will probably last into lvl 65-68. The raid cycle is basically over.

[Ririta]

While that is true for the game as it is now, would it still hold true if you couldn't buy better/equal gear with the tomes? If you needed the gear from A1S-A4S to get into A5S and on, then maybe people would actually think that doing the raids might be more worthwhile?

I'm of the opinion that the tomestones should only be used to buy gear that brings you to the "lowest expected for endgame" in HWs case this would be gear that lets you enter A1 or maybe A1S. More or less reseting the gear every time they add a new batch of raids is silly in my opinion, since it means that the previous raidtier is made outdated completely, as it's not needed for anything anymore. It's also this that makes the devteam having to keep making up so many reasons for people to do the older content in the game. A raidtier getting outdated in 3-4 months is just ridicolous.

If you do that then you run into the same problem that WoW had - it was extremely hard to replace veteran raiders.

The perfect system for raiding was Coil. Gear wise, everyone was equal, but the real valuable was the clear and how BIS would help you in the next tier. However, for that to work again, we'd need to go back into a single difficulty mode, which would displease a lot of people.

Personally, I enjoyed the Coil model, the problem was that the best story line was on it. So I felt a lot of pressure to do it.

[JunseiKei]

The perfect system for raiding was Coil. Gear wise, everyone was equal, but the real valuable was the clear and how BIS would help you in the next tier. However, for that to work again, we'd need to go back into a single difficulty mode, which would displease a lot of people.

Personally, I enjoyed the Coil model, the problem was that the best story line was on it. So I felt a lot of pressure to do it.

Do you mean unable to proceed to the next tier unless you completed the previous one?