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

[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?