"Play XIV if(cont)" and"you have a responsibility to" are not statements that coexist

[Stepjam]

I
There are people out there who will downright tell people that they don't deserve to play Final Fantasy XIV because of a mistake they made. And that's not healthy for any game, let alone a Final Fantasy game.

Assholes exist everywhere. It's part of life. If someone is expecting you to be perfect in a dungeon, that's their problem.

That said, I've run into more players who don't understand the basics of their class even at lvl 80 than I've met players who expect perfection in story difficulty content. And to be honest, if you are at endgame, you don't have the excuse of being new. You've been playing for hundreds of hours. Most RPGs (games in general really) are much shorter amd ask much more of you within their length.
It's inconsiderate of other people's time to refuse to put in the basic effort to understand how your class works at endgame. I'm not expecting every player to put out mad deeps in dungeons. I do expect, for example, for a lvl 80 BLM to not spam fire 1. And that's a thing I've run into.

[Packetdancer]

That said, I've run into more players who don't understand the basics of their class even at lvl 80 than I've met players who expect perfection in story difficulty content. And to be honest, if you are at endgame, you don't have the excuse of being new. You've been playing for hundreds of hours.

While I agree on the relative frequency of "people demanding perfect performance in content" versus "people who inexplicably seem to be just bonking their head onto the keyboard at level 80", the hundreds-of-hours isn't always true. There are folks who story-skip and jump potion because they want to catch up with friends. There are folks who picked up GNB as their first tank and leveled it entirely through Heaven-on-High and PvP or whatever, so have no idea how it works at level 80 in normal content. And there are folks who have SMN at 80 only by virtue of the fact that they leveled SCH, and may have very little idea how to play SMN optimally. Or at all. (Or vice versa; I know a lot of people who leveled SMN and have no idea how to play SCH.)

However, even if there are reasons someone might not know how to play the job they're queued on at 80... none of that makes it less frustrating when you queue up for Expert and end up in a dungeon where the tank doesn't know what mitigations even are, much less how/when to use them. (Or knows what they are, at least to the point they'll hit all of them at the same time.)

I tend to look at it like we're all in line at a fast food place. Many of us have been there before; we know our order, we'd like to place the order and get the food and keep moving. Some folks, it's their first time and they're going to stare at the menu for a little while before choosing because they don't know what they want. And yeah, that slows down the line a little bit, but everyone's had their own first time and folks will generally be understanding. But not knowing how to play your job at 80 at all and going into endgame content with random strangers is the equivalent of someone getting to the window at the drive-thru and trying to order pizza, and being told it's a burger joint. And then trying to order pasta, and being told it's a burger joint. And then trying to order BBQ brisket, and being told it's a burger joint. And then trying to order fried chicken, and being told it's a burger joint. And then...

After a while, everyone else in the line behind them is going to start getting really annoyed at how long something they expected to go quickly is taking.

If you don't know what you want to order at a drive-thru, it's polite to pull aside (and discuss with friends if necessary) before going in, rather than holding up the line. And if you don't have any idea how to play a job at 80, it's polite to try running some things with Trusts—or grouping up with friends/FC members—to get some practice before launching into roulettes.

(Mind you, yelling at folks who do launch themselves into said roulettes probably doesn't actually do much to fix the situation, and will only make people feel defensive and less willing to listen to advice.)

[Jojoya]

That said, I've run into more players who don't understand the basics of their class even at lvl 80 than I've met players who expect perfection in story difficulty content. And to be honest, if you are at endgame, you don't have the excuse of being new. You've been playing for hundreds of hours. Most RPGs (games in general really) are much shorter amd ask much more of you within their length.

Hundreds of hours of time played does not mean hundreds of hours of combat experience. The bulk of game time for a new player is watching cutscenes, reading dialog and traveling to the next quest objective. We end up with something closer to 15 hours of combat time (mostly in dungeons where a new player is getting carried by veteran players who know the dungeon inside and out, and are overpowered due to the way level sync works) per 100 hours played.

So when it comes to combat, someone at 80 could still have the excuse of being new because the game hasn't put them in the position of needing to learn how to use their job competently. Get the occasional "kill 5 beasties" as a quest objective? Those beasties can be killed using the basic attack combo with no need to dive into more advanced aspects of the job kit (assuming the player has access to most of it at their level). It's hard to learn when combat doesn't last long enough in most of the combat situations you encounter.

I can't blame the new player that much when they haven't really had an opportunity to learn in an environment that is dumbed done for the sake of veteran players who want to get in and out of that dungeon they've done dozens of times before as fast as possible. Think about it - dungeons have been given a 90 minute expiration timer but many veteran players get angry if the dungeon run lasts more than 15 minutes. How is the new player supposed to learn when they're effectively being dragged along in the wake of a speed run? How much better would they be if things actually took time to die so they had to learn how to use more than just Fire 1 efficiently?

It's really easy to forget as a veteran MMO player what it's like to be a new player without a clue what to expect or what you should be doing. I can remember being a WoW noob with only single player RPG experience to draw on. There were some really dumb mistakes and assumptions I had been making when I first started playing that I could only recognize in hindsight. But I had to learn faster there because WoW is much more heavily combat focused during the leveling experience than FFXIV is.

Am I going to cut the new player in this game, even if they're at level cap, some slack as a result? Absolutely. Not everyone is a gaming genius.