Well, they actually did it, the absolute madmen

[Limonia]

I know of a pld who weren\\'t able to clear the Sadu instance. He randomly pressed some buttons of his combo instead of using the combo itself. He didn\\'t understand the gcd at all. After getting help from other players he learned how fighting in this game works and managed to beat Sadu. With this very easy mode he probably would have beaten her by rolling his face across the keyboard.

I recently did a normal raid roulette and got O6 (the one with the paintings). After a while I noticed that the ninja almost exclusively used throwing dagger, a few fuma shuriken and some uncomboed combo attacks, nothing else. My bf recorded that fight on ps4 afterwards to see if I was right and yes, he never once used a combo. (And no, I didn\\'t explain how it works to him, I\\'m not good enough at explaining)

I honestly have no idea how those even got as far as they did. But the game obviously is easy enough that they did. Why do we need to make it even easier? I\\'m casual myself as I can\\'t do this tier\\'s savage and extreme modes because of health issues (and nausea in the first eden battle), so it\\'s not that I want everyone to be perfect players.

But instead of catering to the ones that don\\'t even try at all, they rather punish everyone that does by letting really bad players join dungeons with randoms.
They could instead make the hall of the novice better, explaining how combos and buffs work and so on, so that bad players can become better players. Or make it so that if you choose the very easy mode you can only do df content with npcs or so.

[Nedkel]

its the MSQ and has never stopped anyone before. what?

sure, you can argue that MSQ should be difficult. and gated. and only those with a thin bubble of superiority can truly appreciate and reap the rewards of their valiant efforts....



....but no- the MSQ really has NOT been challenging. so this addition is.... confusing, and wholly unnecessary. because franly.... the MSQ was never hard enough to block people to begin with. im sure most of us collectively would struggle to think of more than 10-15 solo instances with any higher than base challenge that the other required dungeons didnt already recycle 15 times. but we have it, so it's... whatever. big deal.



honestly, the most depressing thing about all this is... this just screams of gatekeeping. for a gate that doesnt exist. so you had to build one. and now that you did, you can point to it as an excuse to be passive aggressive, and otherwise torment people. As this community does. It's always something. Balmung vs Greg, Jump potions, WoW refugees, Crystal, and now this. I wonder how long before we get another new addition. We truly have had this conversation and the same points have been said by the same people several times now.

If its SO EASY, why would you care if anyone get it even easier?
Its not like this stuff actually teach anyone of anything, am i right? They could even implement skipping the story missions it would not make any difference.

They go through the easy content, they fail and they choose to make it super easy, what does that make any difference?
Bigger problem are jump potion, just yesterday i had a sprout who did not even know that he should dodge the AOEs, just standing there and casting literal two spells.

[SamSmoot]

That's basically roleplay duties. Your only job is to click click click and not stand in AOEs. Which is too much for some people still.

My problem wasn't taking damage, it was doing it. All my non-echo tries ended with the boss at around 20-50% health when the timer ran out.

[Kirsten_Rev]

You know, a lot of people seem to forget that more skilled players who actually use DF have been left out to dry by SE for quite some time now.

Content has been steadily weakened in order to accommodate people who aren't as skilled, which is why we see people asking for challenging 4-person content - something that used to exist in ARR, but not anymore. PotD and HoH have been introduced to speed people through leveling without a care in the world for mechanics, if they don't use a Jump potion which is even easier. SE finally is throwing this group a bone with iLevel requirements for Leveling dungeons, but then they're taking a bone away with this MSQ difficulty feature that removes one of the few, weak barriers left to people jumping into the DF without the necessary skills to succeed.

And, worst of all, not once through the years do I recall SE even acknowledging the issue as a problem they're looking at solving. That's the piece that is missing. Nobody criticizing this change is looking to marginalize people with disabilities or children, or even casual gamers who don't particularly care that much. They're just pointing out that as the skill checks have gone by the wayside, the Duty Finder has gotten worse, which negatively impacts the game for them. And SE has, to this point, completely ignored their concerns.

Strengthen the Halls of the Novice. Introduce new tiers to it. Force people to go through it before they can access DF - even if they use a Jump potion. Open up easy mode for MSQ - but then keep DF locked until someone has shown they can succeed on Normal difficulty, or have cleared a current-tier dungeon with their Trusts, something like that. SE can be accommodating to players who aren't at the cutting edge, while also keeping at least half an eye out for people who want to jump into a Roulette without worrying about getting a healer who has no idea what they're doing.

That's all people are asking for. Is that so unreasonable, to ask that their needs be considered, too?

[SummonerSenah]

Just out of curiosity, how many of those of you that are against this change also cheese your ilvls to exclusively get Crystal Tower raids in Alliance Raid Roulette? How can you argue that SE is making things too easy when you yourself avoid "hard" content? You think you are somehow different from someone that wants to do a MSQ duty on easy mode, but you're basically running Alliance Raid on easy mode every day.

[Kytrin]

I don't see what the big deal is? It's solo content. Has nothing at all to do with duty finder and group content and no real bearing on how well you perform in a party. My party tactics are often completely different from my solo tactics as I can't rely on healers or tanks as a dps.

I'm not an awful player, I read my tooltips and know my rotation, but I've still gotten my butt kicked repeatedly on some of those solo instances. Wasn't fast enough, didn't have the strategy timed exactly right, was too squishy despite being in lvl appropriate gear, etc. With this option, if I've gotten my butt kicked enough that I'm getting echo anyway, it's time to dial it back a notch so I can do something other than yell and scream curses at the game as I sit through cuts and dialogue for the 12th time.

It's a thing that's happened to more than one of my friends too. I've got a friend who spent literally weeks stuck in one of the stormblood solo instances because the AI was too stupid to heal her and she's a very squishy BLM. This was after re-reading her tooltips, refining her rotation, and upgrading her gear to the best she could get at the time. So yeah, I think it's a great feature and am delighted to see it.

[Bright-Flower]

Just out of curiosity, how many of those of you that are against this change also cheese your ilvls to exclusively get Crystal Tower raids in Alliance Raid Roulette? How can you argue that SE is making things too easy when you yourself avoid "hard" content? You think you are somehow different from someone that wants to do a MSQ duty on easy mode, but you're basically running Alliance Raid on easy mode every day.

What makes you think the people against this change and the people that drop their ilvl for easy alliance roulette are the same people?

I'm fine with this change but this line of reasoning always baffles me. When people say 'The same people that want X also hypocritically like Y' as if the playerbase is some sort of monolith with one set of opinions. Or that everyone that shares one oppinion probably shares another.

[Eli85]

Its function, without explicit player control, has been in the game for ages now. If there was going to be a disastrous effect as a result, it would have already happened.

Though to be honest, I'm surprised that someone who in another thread bragged about being able to intuit "99%" of trial mechanics on the first try, and talked about having the expectation that players come to the game with a basic level of brain function, is apparently not aware about how the game currently works.

Do you even try to pug non-faceroll content through PF? It takes a long, long time before you find a competent group of 8 to do content that isn't all that hard in the first place. So, it's bad already, and more nudges in the less-than-ideal direction could very well lead to a near unusable PF, which certainly qualifies as disastrous.

I do know how the game works, thank you very much. None of what I said in either thread contradicts each other. When you view both my positions, you see a rather ... poor view of player skill in this game, and when you pug enough non-faceroll content, you will see that it is entirely justified. So, to be clear, yes, players with a basic level of brain function should be able to intuit 99% of mechanics and execute them flawlessly, but because that doesn't happen, it just goes to show you how bad XIV players really are.

[Maeka]

Eh, I do my Roulettes every day and 80% of everybody I run into are passable.

I will admit I've not done Alliance Roulette but eh. *shrug* The 567, Leveling, and Trials seem to be just fine.

Occasionally you will run into an idiot that can't play whatsoever, but I find that's few and far between, I would say 1 in 15-20 runs, if that. Usually what I find happens is that people are simply undergeared rather than not able to play their jobs.

Allowing someone to breeze through MSQ Solo Duties is in no way going to affect the quality of PUGs or Duty Finder, because quite simply, if I did the MSQ Solo Duties as, say, WHM and then I Q up as, say, BLM (I will admit I am terrible at playing BLM), then I'm still going to suck. The solo duties and their difficulty (or lack thereof) would have had no bearing whatsoever on that.

So, to be clear, yes, players with a basic level of brain function should be able to intuit 99% of mechanics and execute them flawlessly, but because that doesn't happen, it just goes to show you how bad XIV players really are.

Gotta love the tone in this. "If you screw up at mechanics then you're entirely terrible and your brain doesn't work right".

Let's just ignore the fact that there's a variety of reasons why someone might mess up a mechanic... they were distracted, they were tired, they were sleep deprived, they were intoxicated, or maybe they haven't done that particular boss in 3 years and forgot the mechanics. Or they tried and the game decided that Titan threw them off the ledge when they were 15+ feet out of the AoE marker when the ability finished casting but the game claims they got hit anyways (which I have seen happen).

None of these point to a "terrible" player. Sometimes things happen and people mess up. Sometimes bosses are somewhat obtuse about what you're supposed to do, that have weird mechanics the game does not explain whatsoever that you were somehow supposed to just know. Like, for example, the Yeti in Snowcloak. Nowhere does the game demonstrate you can freeze the little black guys and use the snowball to stop the overpowered AoE from being cast. The game doesn't even tell you that you CAN freeze the little guys, nor does it give you a warning that this will be necessary to stop an incoming AoE that comes without warning. The only way you'd know that was if somebody told you (or stumbling upon it by dumb luck, because sometimes it is hard to hit the little guys with the freeze AoE when you're trying).

Later bosses get a bit better at demonstrating their special mechanics ahead of time (like the first boss of Akadaemia Anyder), but some of those earlier bosses didn't.

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

Wow. This is still going. People who are arguing about this affecting overall skill levels: you are not the stewards of good gameplay. The game's job is not to teach people how to play it but to be playable. Period. If you're so concerned about player aptitude then find someone who sucks and mentore them. Or give advice. Instead of vote kicking and rage quitting and snarling over solo content tiers. So many of you are scared of the game being 'easier' because of the overall badness of the player base but have no interest in actually putting work in to change that. Instead you expect the game to do it--which it is. By lowering the bar.

See how that works?