We Really Need To Talk About The State And Path Of FFXIV

[Edax]

But they do plan to do that in the next stage... so because armor is at 350/370 even though its safe penta... its bad?

In the state Pagos was released, it wasn't even worth doing it for many players, which would just make that next stage unattainable. Maybe with the train awkwardly reintroduced more players will get to see it, but I wonder how many just left Pagos for good after the first week.

[SaitoHikari]

I haven't really poked my head around here much in weeks... But when a couple friends linked me to this recent trainwreck, I want to ask.

How in the seven hells did the usual suspects manage to derail a perfectly good thread talking about this game's content design/cycle problems into yet another parser/raider debate?

Some of you have some major problems.

(Also, why is it always the healer mains who keep injecting this argument everywhere?)

I always find it hilarious when people say this game caters to raiders. If that were the case, why has our content (Savage) gotten progressively easier to allow for more accessibility, and why was our other content (Ultimate) canceled for 4.51? If you think FFXIV caters to the raiders, you must be playing this game in an alternate dimension. Because it doesn't.

As for "killing this game", the game isn't dying. But it is certainly becoming more and more stale with its staggered releases, same ol' formula after five years, and centerpiece content seeming to always be a disappointment. That's hardly the fault of the raiders, though. Unless you want to try to blame them for something like the state of Pagos.

I mean, I've played other MMOs that have actually catered to raiders before. Sometimes almost exclusively. Said games had a content cycle far worse than FFXIV as well. FFXIV is far, -far- from catering to raiders.

In this instance the opportunity for casual players to have the same high ilvl as raiders simultaneously was taken away. This random pink gear dropped from this particular period of Diadem also had random stats that in some cases made them better than the current savage gear. The raiding community was quite vocal about their upset that casual, non-raiding members would have any chance (RNG or not) to have gear just as good as their savage clear gear. These items were removed entirely (unless you were lucky enough to get one before the patch out) to appease the raiding community.

I'm not arguing if this is right or wrong. I'm simply saying the raiding community has affected the state of the game and everyone's experience in this case.

That was also something that literally happened two and a half years ago. The devs did acknowledge that having the Diadem armor share the same item level of raid gear at the time was a bad idea (in a raid tier so infamously difficult and poorly balanced that it resulted in an outright mass transfer exodus of raiders from many servers that was only resolved by the creation of the cross server party finder almost a whole year after the fact), but that was a very minor footnote compared to all the other problems of Diadem.

And before anyone snips at me for being a raider myself, I was one of the many people who were ticked off at original Diadem for being so horribly designed and un-future proofed. I didn't become an actual raider until almost a full year after Diadem's release, and I'm not going to stand by and watch people attempt to pin Diadem's death on the raiding community in what is quite possibly one of the most absurd attempts at revisionist history ever.

And the whole thing about raiders being ticked off about the ilvl 280 weapon? That didn't happen. As pointed out already, literally 95% of the rage was from relic weapon holders (some of which ARE raiders too), who spent an entire expansion pouring resources into building up their weapons, suddenly having said weapon outclassed by a RNG drop barely one week after the final step was released. It showed an incredible lack of respect for the community and a painfully obvious attempt by the developers to rope people into keeping Diadem active to tide people over until SB came out. I admit much of the rage subsided when most people realized they were never going to have a shot at the RNG weapon due to the fact that only one person out of the entire instance would get it, the weapon said person received was entirely random, and how obtuse triggering the emergency mission was in the first place was (and I say this as someone who spearheaded the effort on these forums trying to figure out what made them spawn, to no success other than a theory that couldn't be reasonably tested). That was to say nothing about whether or not the emergency mission would even succeed, because once *one* mistake was made, it was almost impossible for the instance to recover.

Point being, raiders really had nothing to do with Diadem being abandoned, when it was always treated like boring trash from the entire community at the very start. Much like how raiders have nothing to do with Eureka's failures today, or the earlier version that I've read several times on these forums a little over half a year ago, Ultimate being blamed for the '1 new dungeon per odd numbered patch' pattern.

I wonder, when the game is perceived to be receiving less new content over time, why is it the raiding community that is always blamed by certain people first?

[Dualgunner]

Because it's too easy to treat raiders like some 1% social class of "haves", and through othering them like that they're now scapegoats for everything bad.

[WhyAmIHere]

Because it's too easy to treat raiders like some 1% social class of "haves", and through othering them like that they're now scapegoats for everything bad.

Humans. We all want to feel/be validated in our existences, whilst simultaneously wanting to have a scapegoat to take the fall for our own misgivings.

Instead of simply going "I dislike this thing, I will go and do something else," people will speak out against those things to meet the above. OP made some good points about the content of the game, glamour especially. (I have a retainer full and all 200 slots in the dresser filled because I cycle through looks too much.)
But people who felt they needed to interject their feelings as facts took the thread into a much wilder rodeo of insults, denigration, and logical fallacies.

case in point (inb4 pot meet kettle):

Unfortunately i am not on aether or i would do so with dual, bourne, etc. But anyone on primal. I'm sorry for heated rhetoric, but I don't like people calling others embarassments, and i'm happy to prove that even as a casual, i can understand and do raids just as good as the lot of you. Hmm. The only issue is i don't want to beat it because it makes me look like i want a carry; i had one issue with someone inviting me for the first time on a raid when they all had it on farm and i had never stepped inside of it.

You...
Do you even realize how inane this sentiment is?
"I don't find value in a thing, but because I'm being challenged to prove I'm not a bad I welcome anyone on my data center to "not carry" me through 99% of a content to prove I'm not bad!"

1) no one will humor you. You're purposely proposing an endeavor with failure as the stated outcome and expecting to use that as a case in a point for your own self-fulfillment.
2) I dislike this whole "casuals can raid too!" thing you're doing. Being a "casual" doesnt equal being bad at the game, just as being a "raider" doesn't equal being good at the game.
3) I'm a casual raider. I didn't even care about savage content until this tier. Why? I wanted to punch Kefka in his stupid beautiful face. I didn't care about the gear, and if I wanted the challenge I'd go back to playing Monster Hunter. There, I feel rewarded more than in XIV.

[Sigma-Astra]

Well, that's the whole thing isn't it? Riyah wanted to prove to me that they're not terrible and at the same time aside from myself being on a different data center, what exactly is there to prove? I go through Ridorana with her and she demonstrates that she knows her chosen job's rotation. That's not enough and it's not the same as walking into Savage and trying to use your job's rotation when you have a cluster of crap going on left and right.

That's the problem here. I don't care if you're casual and can do raids, I care about someone being able to perform their job to a 99.8% satisfactory rate while mechanics are going on. You can't compare the skill it takes to get through Ridorana towards the skill it takes to get through Guardian. And unless Riyah wants to start learning the Doom Train on Savage level, proving anything through casual content is pointless as 99% of it can be facerolled, meaning....you can still be terrible and pass quite easily.

It's a bit harder to carry a person that doesn't know what they're doing: job wise & mechanics wise, through the Doom Train and higher up.

That was my point.

in b4 someone says that I'm saying I'm perfect. I'm not, I'd rather do the painting on BLM than the goddamn train, but lo and behold, when normal circumstances were done before the lockout was lifted, the train had to come first.....unfortunately.

[Delily]

I think of all the FFXI players saying stuff like "I played XI for 13 years"

/10character

[Annoynymoose]

At this point, talking to a wall is better than trying to explain things over and over again to Riyah. I swear nothing gets through her. At all.

[Mahrze]

In the state Pagos was released, it wasn't even worth doing it for many players, which would just make that next stage unattainable. Maybe with the train awkwardly reintroduced more players will get to see it, but I wonder how many just left Pagos for good after the first week.

So? it'll be nerfed to a degree by then and likely nerfed again just like they did with Anemos. They always do this.

[Velhart]

I love how we get these threads at the end of every odd patch cycle. Keep the tradition alive, folks!

[Alleo]

I haven't really poked my head around here much in weeks... But when a couple friends linked me to this recent trainwreck, I want to ask.

How in the seven hells did the usual suspects manage to derail a perfectly good thread talking about this game's content design/cycle problems into yet another parser/raider debate?

Some of you have some major problems.

Well raiding was one point of the OP but its still sad that most of the pages are about raiding and weapons (honestly lets just rename this thread into "My opinion about raiding"). Would have been nice to at least have a variety of discussions about the path of FF14 since raids are only one smaller part of it but sadly any try to branch it off have mostly been useless. Well I will come back to the thread and skip through the posts in the hope to have at least a bit more different discussions.