"Elitism" vs "Casualism"

[Vahlnir]

I feel like that's not always the case. As in my example above. If people are offering guidance and there are constant failings which are your fault, you have to know you're not performing up to basic expectation. That's by no means every case, or even many, but there are those out there that prefer to be willfully ignorant to their abilities.

It isn't always the case, which is why I said "some". There are plenty of people who genuinely don't care about improving themselves, but I would say there are just as many that simply aren't aware.

[Laesha]

Some of it doesn't fall on the players themselves though. The game does a very poor job of teaching and encouraging people to improve their performances in any give role, and for the most part people can be carried with little to no consequence from their fellow players from start to finish. Extreme, Savage and Ultimate are the only places where performance really matters. I'm not saying that anything below that doesn't matter, just that there isn't many consequences for poor play before Extreme and up content. I think the normal Eden raids have been a bit of a step up in terms of difficulty, but most of the time players can still win through attrition alone.

I think this is a really big part of it. But not only does the game do a bad job of allowing players to slide by via attrition, but it also does a really bad job of incentivizing improvement. Obviously, there are incentives. Quicker gear upgrades, dyable glams, titles, etc. are all available to people who do savage+ earlier than the rest of the player base. But there just is no incentive for anyone to play harder to save me 2 minutes on a dungeon, kill a trial faster. The only place rankings exist in the actual game is in ranked pvp (which is... yikes...). Frankly, i don't know what they could do that would incentivize it without breaking the progression system (and making the gap even larger).

I really think unless the game itself sets a benchmark, any expectations set by the community are worthless. The goalposts are just too all over the place. We have people saying "best git u in the 90th percentile or u trashuhhhh," while others are saying all they want are people to do their rotation or aoe on packs. There can be no community standard with such wildly varying expectations.

For me, the thing that finally got me sitting on the casual side of the fence was "skip soar" That was the dumbest community divide about standards and what was and wasn't okay. It just illustrated that even when a group is perfectly capable of beating a fight, there are more than enough whiners to cause a fuss over something as trivial as a few % difference during a phase transition. Skipping a mechanic (that really isn't that difficult) is also not a good enough incentive to kick someone who is parsing green but doing the fight just fine.

[ElciaDeiLinus]

I think this is a really big part of it. But not only does the game do a bad job of allowing players to slide by via attrition, but it also does a really bad job of incentivizing improvement. Obviously, there are incentives. Quicker gear upgrades, dyable glams, titles, etc. are all available to people who do savage+ earlier than the rest of the player base.

Thing is, people who don't look up guides in the first place probably are mostly unaware of what they can even get from top end content... or even really what top end content is. It used to be regular raids, then it was hard, extreme, savage, ultimate- then the side stuff like BA. I find WoW's difficulty levels have gotten out of hand- but at least it's pretty clear what their order is. They're also going to be unaware of many of the rewards, and if gear can be obtained even more slowly through easier pug content that's an ideal situation- elitists can get their gear fast through premades, casuals can take longer in groups that won't bother the elitists.

SE should however consider ways to encourage good solo play. Their tutorial stuff is all from the base game and thus dated, and was very basic anyway. There's two things they could do to fix what's basically a complete lack of information and direction for players in game.

1- Update tutorials. Go through rotations and important abilities, as well as some of the most useful macros for that class. This would do two things- make it clear that knowing the rotation is an expectation from SE, and give players that want to get better instruction and a place to practice. Naturally- put a reward behind it for incentive.

2- Challenge content. Best example is WoW Legion's Mage Tower- if you wanted to complete it you had to know how to play your class well, needing to know rotations and good use of your damage abilities AND how to utilize defensives at the right time and several other utility abilities. It also provided a unique, well sought set of glamours as an incentive. It didn't teach you to play your class, but it required you to be able to and it was very rewarding to do. In FFXIV- make this part of the weapon glamour quests, or put a unique armour for each class behind it. That won't entice everyone, but it's been made pretty clear that glamours/cosmetics are valuable to a lot of players- probably more so than gear stats which everyone knows lose value every patch- a glamour never loses value.

This of course is a fair bit of work for SE- both designing the unique glamours, and designing a decent amount of challenging solo content. Glamours however I think are one of the things that can drive casuals to get better at a game. They're absolutely a better incentive than stat gear, or random guy in a pug telling them they suck and to uninstall.

[Laesha]

snip

I think challenge modes are something that this game is desperately missing. I think that would be a lot of fun. I would do that just to do it. PotD and HoH flirt with this, and i do enjoy them a lot. But I think there are other ways they could explore this idea that would be very cool.

[Goji1639]

This raises a question of whether the reason content is easy cause the devs want it to be easy or they're dumbing content down because players refuse to improve. Im not saying dungeons need to be extreme, but it would be nice if bosses and mobs actually were a threat if you didnt have people paying attention. Worst that happens is someone dies and the fight takes longer.

The extra minute or two doesnt piss most players off. Maybe makes the impatient ones more frustrated cause "things to do". But I tend to see far more frustration at lazy play than time spent. As long as it's not an hours worth of time, people dont mind taking a little longer to complete a dungeon if the people are putting effort in. But what aggravates people is when it's clear a player is under performing and not doing anything to address it. Cause then it's taking longer to do content not cause of inexperience, but because of lazyness.

Whether it's laziness or inexperience only matters in principle, but either way the result is generally only an extra 5-10 minutes, so why create a fuss? Is it really SO important to be rigidly principled to the point of starting arguments in a GAME that's this easy? If it's a real problem then address it, but if it's a few minutes then really... just let it go. That's my take anyways.

I do wish this game had more challenging small group content, honestly. I enjoy a challenge, but I don't enjoy coordinating schedules with an FC or static. Small group and solo content is so much easier to just do whenever, and I honestly don't understand why this game won't offer any even REMOTELY challenging content for less than 8 players. That's a different issue, though. It'd be nice if these roulettes were challenging but they're not, and I'm not going to brow-beat people over literal minutes in easy content just so I can feel special.

[Penthea]

I do wish this game had more challenging small group content, honestly. I enjoy a challenge, but I don't enjoy coordinating schedules with an FC or static. Small group and solo content is so much easier to just do whenever, and I honestly don't understand why this game won't offer any even REMOTELY challenging content for less than 8 players.

PoTD and HoH do offer a challenge to players but I understand that these are not traditional types of content due to their unique mechanics not seen in other content. They also are lacking in giving reasons for players to go back more than a handful of times. For those searching for a challenge their relevance runs dry pretty quickly unless a group is somewhat obsessed with beating records.

Something like WoW's mythic plus would be an excellent and much needed addition to the game. It would also add another step in the ladder for casual players to aim at. Many players stay in normal mode because for whatever reason they do not want to or cannot do hard mode 8 man content. Having 4 man content with a comparable difficulty in a more traditional pve setting than PoTD/HoH would be filling a niche this game does not yet cover. Mythic plus is very popular in WoW and I don't see why something similar wouldn't also be popular in FFXIV.

[Goji1639]

PoTD and HoH do offer a challenge to players but I understand that these are not traditional types of content due to their unique mechanics not seen in other content. They also are lacking in giving reasons for players to go back more than a handful of times. For those searching for a challenge their relevance runs dry pretty quickly unless a group is somewhat obsessed with beating records.

Something like WoW's mythic plus would be an excellent and much needed addition to the game. It would also add another step in the ladder for casual players to aim at. Many players stay in normal mode because for whatever reason they do not want to or cannot do hard mode 8 man content. Having 4 man content with a comparable difficulty in a more traditional pve setting than PoTD/HoH would be filling a niche this game does not yet cover. Mythic plus is very popular in WoW and I don't see why something similar wouldn't also be popular in FFXIV.

It's kind of why I'm torn between this game and WoW. There are a lot of things I like better about this game, but the very limited endgame and lack of mod support are such a huge sore thumb.

Any kind of legitimate small group and solo endgame progression content would help a lot, and yea PoTD and HoH don't count in my opinion. Those are minigames/gimmicks.

[Awha]

Whether it's laziness or inexperience only matters in principle, but either way the result is generally only an extra 5-10 minutes, so why create a fuss? Is it really SO important to be rigidly principled to the point of starting arguments in a GAME that's this easy? If it's a real problem then address it, but if it's a few minutes then really... just let it go. That's my take anyways.

I do wish this game had more challenging small group content, honestly. I enjoy a challenge, but I don't enjoy coordinating schedules with an FC or static. Small group and solo content is so much easier to just do whenever, and I honestly don't understand why this game won't offer any even REMOTELY challenging content for less than 8 players. That's a different issue, though. It'd be nice if these roulettes were challenging but they're not, and I'm not going to brow-beat people over literal minutes in easy content just so I can feel special.

Problem is people seem to have such a hate boner for Mythic + style content. Small form difficult content that allows for character progression would be awesome, though I do think many would feel that the mythic meta would bleed into normal small form content and dictate the pace even more so then what we already have now.

Though I would gladly welcome it.

[Driavna]

Problem is people seem to have such a hate boner for Mythic + style content. Small form difficult content that allows for character progression would be awesome, though I do think many would feel that the mythic meta would bleed into normal small form content and dictate the pace even more so then what we already have now.

Though I would gladly welcome it.

In most cases that "hate boner" is justified. The introduction of Mythic+ created quite a few (big?) problems:


- ILvL Inflation. A month in and ILvL requirements to join a party are absurd.

- Normal and Heroic difficulty its pointless from a reward perspective, even more when Blizzard removed set bonuses during BFA. Pretty much, from a raiding standpoint, is mythic or nothing. This is why I stopped playing once Legion hit, finding a stable group for heroic is a nightmare.

- https://raider.io If you plan to PUG you better keep up with this.

- The whole drama around keys.

- If you plan to tank you better study, and memorized, the optimal routes for every single instance.


In order to really work for FFXIV it must be a self-contained piece of content, like Eureka or PoTD, with cosmetic rewards only. Also, SE will need to change the way dungeons trash and boss mechanics are approached.

[QooEr]

Whether it's laziness or inexperience only matters in principle, but either way the result is generally only an extra 5-10 minutes, so why create a fuss?

5-10 minutes is a lot when most duties can be completed in around 12 minutes. and if you queue for something thinking something like "oh i have about 20 mins before i have to do X thing, i can fit a leveling roulette!" only to be met with a 30 minute run because of single pulling + curebot and awful dps its uh...