Put back Extreme trial on raid finder again...please

[Talraen]

On a side note, you seem pretty obsessed with calling newbies peasants and unwashed masses...

Discrimination isn't always a bad thing, either. This is why games like Overwatch have ranked matchmaking--it sucks for a newbie to get paired with someone who plays nonstop. It sucks for someone who wants to farm something to know that every DF that pops comes with the possibility of someone hopping in without even watching the vid and expecting the fight to be easy enough to do.

If a player doesn't want to teach they shouldn't be forced to, and yet without raid finder the chances are high that they'll have to. A fight that should take ten minutes suddenly takes up to 90 and what time the player had to farm is now up, and so is the free time the player set aside to farm. So they'll go instead to party finder and pray nobody sneaks in hoping for a carry, and DF will be even more dead than RF Uncleared is, meaning people hoping to just experience the fight have even less chance of doing so.

People certain treat new players like the unwashed masses. Do you have a better analogy?

Matchmaking in competitive games is not a fair comparison. It's actually kind of the opposite in a cooperative experience. If you're inexperienced and you get put against an experienced player in Overwatch, you're going to fail (lose). But if you're inexperienced and you get paired with experienced players in a trial, you're more likely to succeed. (And if you get paired only with inexperienced people, you're less likely to succeed.)

Your interpretation of how DF and RF will affect things is based on the premise that players with clears are universally unwilling to help new players. I can't honestly say if that's true or not, since I don't do Extreme trials except with friends, but it seems pretty unlikely to me. And if there's even one person with a clear who will use DF if RF isn't available, that's still a positive for a player without a clear. I don't understand how you can argue it makes new players less likely to get a clear. At worst, it's no different.

Keep in mind the premise of the OP's request is that new players are a liability. If that's the case, why are we expecting them to get clears with each other?

[aleph_null]

Your interpretation of how DF and RF will affect things is based on the premise that players with clears are universally unwilling to help new players. I can't honestly say if that's true or not, since I don't do Extreme trials except with friends, but it seems pretty unlikely to me. And if there's even one person with a clear who will use DF if RF isn't available, that's still a positive for a player without a clear.

Not exactly, pre 3.3 DF for hard contents like thordan ex and a3s-a4s (post nerf and overgearing) in NA/EU data centers seemed to be pretty much dysfunctional, since new players won't be able to learn the whole fights in 60-90 minutes. DF queues for those fights became useless since people who want to practice later phases or aim to clear, let alone farm can't do what they want then they get matched with someone who's new to the fights. It's just an unofficial "first phase practice" queue, presumably with very abysmal clear rate, though I'm not playing in NA/EU data centers so I can only say that based on what people say in the forum. If those players who want to clear/farm won't queue, then even the newbies won't benefit at all since there's literally no chance for them to clear. The DF system in JP data centers worked because of the culture adopted by the players here, where DF is pretty much reserved for farming (or at least those who are ready to aim to clear), with little exceptions of people who have no idea queuing into those hard fights.

Keep in mind the premise of the OP's request is that new players are a liability. If that's the case, why are we expecting them to get clears with each other?

We are expecting them to learn the fight first before expecting clears. Other than sophia and zurvan I don't remember any previous ex trial being possible to be cleared by people new to the fight within one lockout.

[Talraen]

Not exactly, pre 3.3 DF for hard contents like thordan ex and a3s-a4s (post nerf and overgearing) in NA/EU data centers seemed to be pretty much dysfunctional, since new players won't be able to learn the whole fights in 60-90 minutes. DF queues for those fights became useless since people who want to practice later phases or aim to clear, let alone farm can't do what they want then they get matched with someone who's new to the fights. It's just an unofficial "first phase practice" queue, presumably with very abysmal clear rate, though I'm not playing in NA/EU data centers so I can only say that based on what people say in the forum. If those players who want to clear/farm won't queue, then even the newbies won't benefit at all since there's literally no chance for them to clear. The DF system in JP data centers worked because of the culture adopted by the players here, where DF is pretty much reserved for farming (or at least those who are ready to aim to clear), with little exceptions of people who have no idea queuing into those hard fights.

You said that if "those players who want to clear/farm won't queue, then even the newbies won't benefit at all since there's literally no chance for them to clear" but the alternative (the raid finder option, which is what is being asked for in this thread) is that the people who are farming will queue and the newbies still won't benefit at all, because they can't queue with them. Unless you mean that newbies will be able to use the duty finder to queue with other newbies who also don't have clears, but I don't know why that would improve their chances either.

We are expecting them to learn the fight first before expecting clears. Other than sophia and zurvan I don't remember any previous ex trial being possible to be cleared by people new to the fight within one lockout.

This thread is about an option to prevent people without a clear from queuing with people who don't want to queue with them. If those people learn the fight, or have even done it on another character, they still can't queue with them in the raid finder. So how does them learning the fight help them here?

[Feidam]

As to the person who complained about the raid mechanics in primal battles...I'm not sure what the issue here is. It has always been that way. The difference was you had hard mode primals which gave you a reward to progress, the. Extremes came along with another reward. Only extremes are giving people rewards now. This also needs to change imo.

[bswpayton]

As to the person who complained about the raid mechanics in primal battles...I'm not sure what the issue here is. It has always been that way. The difference was you had hard mode primals which gave you a reward to progress, the. Extremes came along with another reward. Only extremes are giving people rewards now. This also needs to change imo.

hard moods are way to easy to get a reward from

[Feidam]

hard moods are way to easy to get a reward from

They weren't back in ARR, however hard mode in HW is different than ARR. hard mode should be the entry lvl primal difficultly for endgame. Primals during story should be easy. hard mode should rewards commiserate to it's difficulty and then extreme should have advanced rewards. This also gives multiple levels of endgame difficulty for various players.

[Moomba33]

In my experience this is a good move. RF did not work for solo queue into old ex primals.
I got my Thordan and Sepirot Ex clears in DF before they were moved to RF. Never got either to pop in RF under any setting.
Got into Nidhogg Ex twice in RF with hours of queuing before finally giving up and moving to PF.
Sophia was the one ex primal I had work in RF. Most likely because she was released at the same time as RF and considered PUG friendly.
Zurvon I got into once or twice before his queues died. I think Cross Server party finder killed him and the RF in general since I didn't have any luck with Sophia queues either post 3.5.

As a tool for checking if everyone in your premade had a clear RF was useful. But I think that can be fixed by just adjusting the PF to have a checkbox for clears only and not letting people without clears join groups with that checked off.

[Ririta]

As to the person who complained about the raid mechanics in primal battles...I'm not sure what the issue here is. It has always been that way.

Not really. Extreme primals had one or two gimmicks that followed you through the whole fight, usually making it harder to do as you go but never changing the main concept (for example, Leviathan can dash in the middle section in the last phase; Ifrit gets countless Nails; you deal with Ramuh's infatuation together with Rolling Thunder; etc). You learned the gimmick and you went in to clear, not to "practice" (honestly the whole concept of "practicing" in MMORPGs sounds ridiculous to me)

Now in Heavensward extreme primals started having several phases with countless raid mechanics that you had to grind. By "raid mechanics" I mean "stuff that you must know and practice if you want to clear", while said "stuff" changes every phase. So things like adaptation and individual skill are thrown aside for memorization and practice. Sure it's cute to see it work, but I honestly have to wonder how people think that being part of a choreography is fun. It's the same thing that made raiding kind of a chore, but people disliked Melusine so... I guess the majority wins.

I've commented about it on another thread and how this kind of design encourages the behaviour seen in this thread. It doesn't helps that ARR primals were also more rewarding. But I don't expect it to change in Stormblood. Just glad I had my fill in ARR.

Edit: forgot to add, while Titan was also a "choreography", outside of Gaols and tableflips his mechanics were just AoEs so you could react (though if you had high ping you'd have to memorize when Landslides and Weight of Land were used to move out of the way just as he casted them)

[Vidu]

Now in Heavensward extreme primals started having several phases with countless raid mechanics that you had to grind. By "raid mechanics" I mean "stuff that you must know and practice if you want to clear", while said "stuff" changes every phase. So things like adaptation and individual skill are thrown aside for memorization and practice. Sure it's cute to see it work, but I honestly have to wonder how people think that being part of a choreography is fun. It's the same thing that made raiding kind of a chore, but people disliked Melusine so... I guess the majority wins.

Well, a lot of people like to dance - as in: following a choreography (I mean, its the very origin of the word, right?) - instead of just jumping around the ballroom freely like a little bunny.
While quickly reacting and judging a situation can be a lot of fun too, following a certain pattern and executing it perfectly has a certain... beauty to me - maybe I'm sounding a bit to melodramatic here, but a well structured fight, that allows you to slide from one mechanic into the next one without chaos breaking lose has a certain appeal to it!
...and if I want chaos and reacting to new situations, I do some PvP - which can be more challenging than any EX-primal.

In addition to the whole "HMs need rewards again"-thing... HMs replaced the storymodes pretty much. The only HMs with rewards (beside the rare drop and the TT-card) are Garuda, Titan and Ifrit. The reason for that being: The HM was already the more difficult, challenging version of the storymode (a fight that didnt gave rewards at all!). Since then, we basically lost the storymode and replaced it with the HM-version. The Hardmodes are now the storymodes while the Extreme version has techincally replaced the HM.
I'm not saying that I dont want rewards from HMs (slightly weaker weapons could be nice for example) but I'd like to point out that this more a "naming error" in a sense. Hardmodes arent hardmoes - they're storymodes.

This is because the nature of the duty finder is to make sure all content is being done (so people can get clears). Hard mode primals are in roulette, so they're covered even without a fight-specific reward. Extreme primals aren't in roulette, which is why they added a different incentive with a low drop rate (mounts) so people would keep doing them.

I dont actually believe/agree a 100% with this because you forget another reason to give people this incentive: Its in place to keep them playing and give them "something to do". Ypu gotta keep people busy or they'll unsub - so putting this drops in place turns ex-primals into a grind, thats going to make people stick to the game. Its not only to help new people to get their clears, its also to make sure that experienced people have a reason to keep playing after they killed that primal.

[Talraen]

As to the person who complained about the raid mechanics in primal battles...I'm not sure what the issue here is. It has always been that way. The difference was you had hard mode primals which gave you a reward to progress, the. Extremes came along with another reward. Only extremes are giving people rewards now. This also needs to change imo.

This is because the nature of the duty finder is to make sure all content is being done (so people can get clears). Hard mode primals are in roulette, so they're covered even without a fight-specific reward. Extreme primals aren't in roulette, which is why they added a different incentive with a low drop rate (mounts) so people would keep doing them.

The irony is that mounts exist specifically to keep people doing content so new people can get clears, yet the main content people want to exclude people from is those very farms.