So, can we just ban damage meters already.

[Nezerius]

Bahamut is much, much easier than normal Eden. The only difficulty back then was servers at the other end of the world, and people being simply bad, both at playing their classes, and at doing mechanics.

The difficulty actually almost always went upwards, and right now, the game is not easy, the playerbase is just good. "gnngnn, but the dude I ran into in E11N last night", yes. There are bad players. That doesn't change the fact E11N is harder than Phenix, for example.

This just shows that you've never run any of the Coil raids when they were current content, or pre-nerf (mainly second coil getting a bunch of nerfs)

Sure, current day savage is harder than Coil, but the normal modes definitely aren't. Coil's difficulty is even the reason why normal mode exists, because players complained that they couldn't experience the raid story.

[Saefinn]

This just shows that you've never run any of the Coil raids when they were current content, or pre-nerf (mainly second coil getting a bunch of nerfs)

Sure, current day savage is harder than Coil, but the normal modes definitely aren't. Coil's difficulty is even the reason why normal mode exists, because players complained that they couldn't experience the raid story.

Pretty much. The punishment for mistakes was generally harsher too. Whilst I know the servers were worse back then, it was one of the reasons Titan EX was a toughie because you had to learn to compensate for lag. But to be honest, that was something you learned to do anyway back then. Heck, being an EU player on a US server I still have that problem. Doing Titan Savage was a good throw back to Titan EX in that respect because I have to compensate for lag in that too and have died to it. Eden Normal is definitely easier. I've been able to jump into DF for all of the Normal Eden Raids and clear with zero wipes, or one or two wipes depending on the competency of the group and the raid.

Coils was a different matter. I joined multiple PF groups to get a Twintania clear. And I had to do learning parties first and we'd mark them by phase too, exactly like people do with Savage raids today. I don't think they were as mechanically complex as some raids today, but stuff hit harder, more insta death mechanics were there and your healers weren't sat there with a million oGCD's and actually had work to do, normal Eden raids aren't like that. And to a degree server lag added to the challenge, but not to the degree implied.

[Colt47]

A bit of some lost history on dps meters coming from someone who played WoW at release. So back in the day of Everyquest and WoW, there were no damage checks on bosses and you could have a massive crowd of people all pounding on a world boss to get the thing down, with the only real responsibility being the tank had to make sure he kept the thing facing the right way, off tanks were on the ready incase the main tank died, and healers were setup like a conveyor belt to keep the tank and replacement tanks up while the rest of the people just beat on the big loot pinyata.

But there was a flaw in this: The dps could be lazy bums. You might have someone literally fall asleep on their desk and when he wakes up, the fight was over. Heck, I still remember when a buddy of mine went to grab a burger while we were in Molten Core and came back 10 minutes later with the raid lead none the wiser. To the developers this was a flaw, so they added an enrage timer to bosses in order to encourage dps players to actually engage in the gameplay. This happened I think after The Burning Crusade. The thing was, the lack of dps meters made end game content accessible to everything at the cost of quality. No one really cared about DPS unless they were trying to set a record on a clear, so you'd get a lot of Damage dealers mostly picking being a damage dealer for the lower level of responsibility and engagement.

When DPS meters got introduced, it changed just about everything and pushed tons of people out of end game raiding. There were no duty finder easy mode raids: you had normal raids and sometimes an extremely hard version. People would team up and run these end game raids like a business or second job and this lasted for a pretty darn long time. It wasn't until Mists of Pandaria that Raid Finder got introduced, and RF is what set the death knell for the whole "mid-core business like raiding guild". The issue was, damage was still something you wanted to be able to output because they still had enrage timers in content above RF, and at this point everyone was about efficiency, so even non-raiding groups would run dps meters to try and be more efficient.

Now, as far as FFXIV goes, I don't know exactly what prompted them to ban DPS meters in the first place, but I feel that they generally were taking the toxicity of WoW at the time as an indicator that DPS meters are a bad thing for the community. Technically, DPS meters are not a very good barometer of skill. The issue is that a dps meter only cares about numbers and rotation buttons hit: It doesn't take into account something like your ping, or the woes of technology, or if the boss mechanic happens to prevent you from doing damage. It takes a lot of knowledge just to USE a dps meter properly and honestly, I feel the issues with the dps meter go outside of the DPS meter and into game design itself.

[ItMe]

But there was a flaw in this: The dps could be lazy bums.

This was an interesting read.
I was under the impression enrages were added to prevent parties chain rezzing through bosses they don't understand.
Thanks for the lost history.

[KeshLives]

and at this point everyone was about efficiency, so even non-raiding groups would run dps meters to try and be more efficient.

Unfortunately, this little consequence has been very far-reaching in WoW. This endless quest for efficiency has gone too far, and now you're seeing people harassing people in low-level dungeons for not using the 'right' class, or not putting out enough DPS according to some DPS meter reader. Sure, if you're raiding heroic or mythic (savage/extreme/ultimate here) you need to see who's contributing better, etc, but on low-level, and even max-level normal and heroic 5-mans (normal/hard here), it's simply asinine. Since I left my hardcore raid tank days behind somewhere in Cata, having to deal with these people sucked a lot of enjoyment out of what I *did* do in WoW.

So, I'm in FFXIV enjoying myself instead. I'm pretty good at dodging stuff...and if I miss one, or the healer misses a heal on the tank, or whatever, and we wipe once? No big deal, no rage, no ragequits. We just get up, do it again, and get it right. I think max wipes on any one boss so far has been three, and I think that was only once since I came back in mid-January. Wipes are rare, and usually involves a mass-kill mechanic if you're not in the bubble, or a debuff the player has to remove themselves somehow. Both are things you may not know about the first time through.

It's a mindset, and WoW has tons of it. FFXIV has only a little of this mindset, at the highest-difficulty content, and it's not encouraged below that, from what I can see. I like it that way, too.

[Colt47]

The issue is largely linked to the state of the community in the life cycle of an MMO along with how that MMO is designed. WoW is literally all about the raiding and hardmode dungeons when you get to the end game, where as FFXIV is basically a giant buffet of things to do with savage and extremes being only one component of them. The reason that FFXIV reps have the attitude they do towards DPS meters is that the savage community needs them, but at the same time they don't want the meters to start influencing things outside of savage.

I think the easiest answer to dps meters is make dpsing really strait forward and unclutter the UI with too many actions. That way even newer players can max dps easily and it renders the usage redundant. Problem is that is near impossible because even if they make rotation really easy, that doesn't account for situations with optimal ability weaving. Also I think a lot of dps concerns in leveling roulette are caused by Shadowbringers dungeons. The gulf between 73 and 74 in don mheg can be pretty darn obvious, and there are dungeons with boss encounter design that simply do not work well for specific jobs (blackmage in particular).

[Colt47]

This was an interesting read.
I was under the impression enrages were added to prevent parties chain rezzing through bosses they don't understand.
Thanks for the lost history.

Oh yeah, these things were marathons. Big raid encounters were more about keeping up on dodging attacks, healing, rotating in the next guy, etc. WoW Molten Core was basically people going in a pack of 40 and eating potato chips while your big boss was shouting orders around in ventrillo, since discord wasn't even a thing yet.

Really it came down to a decision of, did it make more sense for fights to be shorter, but have some kind of timer on them to force people to really push out the numbers, or stick with the old way of doing things where end game hardmode was more about really big group fights that took hours to beat. I think WoW Molten Core was sort of the start of the mid-life transition between the two types of raiding.

[ItMe]

Oh yeah, these things were marathons. Big raid encounters were more about keeping up on dodging attacks, healing, rotating in the next guy, etc. WoW Molten Core was basically people going in a pack of 40 and eating potato chips while your big boss was shouting orders around in ventrillo, since discord wasn't even a thing yet.

Hahaha~

Potato chip raids does sound kinda neat though.
Content you can do when you don't wanna do content but just wanna use your game to socalize.

Did FF11 have these?
They would have come out during its lifetime, but over also heard of people being in a single boss fight so long they die of exhaustion.

WTF is Ventrillo?

[Bright-Flower]

Ventrillo was (is? No idea if it's still a thing) a voice chat program used back in the day. Later replaced by other programs, I think Discord is the go to these days.

[KeshLives]

Oh yeah, these things were marathons. Big raid encounters were more about keeping up on dodging attacks, healing, rotating in the next guy, etc. WoW Molten Core was basically people going in a pack of 40 and eating potato chips while your big boss was shouting orders around in ventrillo, since discord wasn't even a thing yet.

Really it came down to a decision of, did it make more sense for fights to be shorter, but have some kind of timer on them to force people to really push out the numbers, or stick with the old way of doing things where end game hardmode was more about really big group fights that took hours to beat. I think WoW Molten Core was sort of the start of the mid-life transition between the two types of raiding.

We were using TeamSpeak back then, Vent wasn't quite there yet. Another was Mumble.

I was a main tank in the Molten Core days, and yeah, you'd have 40 people, and several of those people were pushing one button, and some of them weren't pushing it every GCD, I think. I was too busy to worry about it. BWL would get a little harder. AQ40 took 40 people that were at least awake, and original Naxx *in 2005 or 2006, whichever, you had to be ready to go. There was a definite difference. (Not to be confused with Wrath Naxx. It was a fun raid, but, it wasn't Vanilla Naxx...)

Funniest raid-wipe moment for me came in BWL. There were four or 5 debuffs running around on the Chromaggus fight. There were people detailed to decurse/depoison/de-disease/de-magic all of those, and everyone had some special sand for the 5th debuff. If you got all 5 debuffs, you'd turn into a dragonoid creature, and start killing the raid. I was off-tank that night, and got all 5 debuffs, and killed the raid. Was hilarious. Much laughter ensued. If that had happened *now* in WoW, there would be much rage and much screaming at other people. In 2005, we just said, "Hey, decursors, pay a little more attention, it got away from us that time!!" and that was all that was said.

Different times, but looking back it highlights where the drive for efficiency in all things has gotten us to in WoW. Again, that's why I'm here, not there, but I can still enjoy the memories, can't I?