The only thing I miss about WoW when playing FFXIV: Scrub's rights.

[Omedon]

Ok, I think some people in this thread may be misunderstanding the entire point of the discussion here, which was a thought experiment to compare the way two different games and potentially their communities are conditioned. That’s not intended to insult, in case that’s been lost in translation.

In WoW, a game that has thrived through rises and falls of its own, the modern game absolutely does not single out the individual player in a place that their friends cannot help them, as part of a trying, testing and gating process to seeing story content. There is an accessible main thoroughfare that, in the modern game, makes most interdependent content optional. There is a path of least resistance that a mega casual player can see the story, gear up and yes, potentially find their way into a random, automatically assembled group some day passing through a gate measured only by item level. In this case, the main flow of the game doesn’t at any point check individual player skill because there isn’t a “fair” way to do that that is automated. They leave it to the community to filter each other, which is how we get monstrosities like raider dot io, which boils one’s experiences down to a single number. It’s highly flawed, but the tiers of difficulty where these addons enable this community filtration/elitism are, once again, entirely optional and not part of the core access level of the game.

In FFXIV, whether the people here want to admit it or not, the burden of elitism and filtration is removed from the players in exchange for a trust that **the game** is doing its job to tell Johnny fanboy who sucks at gaming but loves the story that he “should ask questions and look to improve,” because the game will test if he has or not, so the players are free to kindly suggest courses of improving one’s game. “You can do it Johnny! (And if he can’t thankfully he won’t burden us!)”

Honestly, there are pros and cons to each style, but they do generate entirely separate community discourse. I’d argue that FFXIV’s system is cleaner and more progressive in light of a no-longer-novel internet gaming sphere. We really cannot be trusted any more to be each other’s gatekeepers, and WoW has learned this lesson the hard way. The FFXIV community interactions are generally cleaner, again because we can trust that scrubs won’t make it to our groups because to be in this dungeon your healer has at least somewhere proven that they can win a longass duel as thancred which is a **totally relevant** skill to their healing the dungeon!

Overall, I’m not attacking FFXIV or WoW. I do think FFXIV seemingly has had to to adopt a different style of “protecting us from each other,” but it comes at the cost of holding the story hostage.

But again... I made it through the filter, so it’s all ok!