The dream of Mythic is basically dead... Frost Interview with Yoshida

[LittleImp]

It's also very unrewarding for the skilled player to be constantly putting in work carrying the casual playerbase, yet rarely receive recognition or their own content and are often shunned as a "tryhard" or "elitist" by the very players they carry. Why bother?

This kind of stuff genuinely erodes my interest in the game. I've joined random mostly-casual FCs a few times, only for people to immediately develop a negative predisposition towards me as soon as they find out hardcore content is my main interest, even if they're people I've never personally interacted with. I've taught people to raid, only to have their friends accuse me of "ruining" or "tainting" them. I wish I was kidding. If you spend time on twitter or in facebook groups for this game, there is genuine "beware of raiders" and "don't befriend raiders" discourse pretty frequently.

When I started playing the game in HW I was fed the same kind of stuff by my gr00mer FC leader at the time, and embarrassingly ended up engaging in 'you pull it you tank it' behavior under his encouragement. Newer players are trained to be in a state of constant insecurity and told that the elitist boogeyman is constantly watching them, when in reality truly elitist interactions are extremely rare in game, even in higher difficulty content. This insecurity and frankly, paranoia, is what causes casual players to lash out when they feel they've been slighted or demeaned, even if they're just reading something completely incorrectly.

I've had to talk grown adults down from literal hissy fits in voice chat, simply because they misunderstood a literal compliment someone else in the group gave them, and assumed they were instead being criticized by an "elitist".

[Liam_Harper]

This kind of stuff genuinely erodes my interest in the game. I've joined random mostly-casual FCs a few times, only for people to immediately develop a negative predisposition towards me as soon as they find out hardcore content is my main interest, even if they're people I've never personally interacted with. I've taught people to raid, only to have their friends accuse me of "ruining" or "tainting" them. I wish I was kidding.

Sad to say I've experienced similar too. I used to organize EX and Savage in my FC, which went great until a bump with performance during the last boss of a tier. As in mathematically impossible to progress until worked on. I tried everything to be as accommodating as possible, open practice runs, friendly mentoring but in the end some became distant towards me as if I was causing trouble, leading to an eventual silent demotion from the officer group. The game has such a safety bubble environment that anyone who tries to disturb that, even for good reason, can be resented. Things like that definitely erode interest in the game.

Overall in ff14, even if you know things will be a struggle and why, you're meant to stay silent and try to carry the extra weight so the rest of the group can sit happy in the illusion that everything is good.

[Coupain]

This kind of stuff genuinely erodes my interest in the game. I've joined random mostly-casual FCs a few times, only for people to immediately develop a negative predisposition towards me as soon as they find out hardcore content is my main interest, even if they're people I've never personally interacted with. I've taught people to raid, only to have their friends accuse me of "ruining" or "tainting" them. I wish I was kidding. If you spend time on twitter or in facebook groups for this game, there is genuine "beware of raiders" and "don't befriend raiders" discourse pretty frequently.

Same as you.

I would say that my skill in game is in average clear and scoring of deep dungeons on team, primal extremes ( content that i enjoy the most ) and savages kills on three or four month which is not elitist i think.

I have joined a lot of casual/midcore FC and the last one kicked me. My mistake : I asked the kill of a the primal extreme and Unreal of the new patch week 1…because it was elitist.

The only « elitist » thing that i have done on 7 years of playing this game was… one pull of Alexander Ultimate….

On the other side, when they need a deep dungeon clear or if it s week 7 or 8 of the primal, often old mate from this FC ask me fo help to kill lol

Sorry for my english

[Theodric]

This kind of stuff genuinely erodes my interest in the game. I've joined random mostly-casual FCs a few times, only for people to immediately develop a negative predisposition towards me as soon as they find out hardcore content is my main interest, even if they're people I've never personally interacted with. I've taught people to raid, only to have their friends accuse me of "ruining" or "tainting" them. I wish I was kidding. If you spend time on twitter or in facebook groups for this game, there is genuine "beware of raiders" and "don't befriend raiders" discourse pretty frequently.

When I started playing the game in HW I was fed the same kind of stuff by my gr00mer FC leader at the time, and embarrassingly ended up engaging in 'you pull it you tank it' behavior under his encouragement. Newer players are trained to be in a state of constant insecurity and told that the elitist boogeyman is constantly watching them, when in reality truly elitist interactions are extremely rare in game, even in higher difficulty content. This insecurity and frankly, paranoia, is what causes casual players to lash out when they feel they've been slighted or demeaned, even if they're just reading something completely incorrectly.

I've had to talk grown adults down from literal hissy fits in voice chat, simply because they misunderstood a literal compliment someone else in the group gave them, and assumed they were instead being criticized by an "elitist".

I've had similar experiences and I wouldn't consider myself a 'hardcore' player so much as someone who just likes to dabble in as much of the game as possible and collect minions, mounts and neat glamour.

I've never played a game with such a flaky community before. It's a real shame - I like a lot of stuff about FFXIV. It's not a perfect game and I have my beef with it, but out of all the options where MMO's are concerned it's at the top of the pile for me on almost every front.

It's just...so hard to find people to do stuff with, though. From treasure maps to deep dungeons to BLU challenges...

[NYCLouisGamer]

I've had similar experiences and I wouldn't consider myself a 'hardcore' player so much as someone who just likes to dabble in as much of the game as possible and collect minions, mounts and neat glamour.

I've never played a game with such a flaky community before. It's a real shame - I like a lot of stuff about FFXIV. It's not a perfect game and I have my beef with it, but out of all the options where MMO's are concerned it's at the top of the pile for me on almost every front.

It's just...so hard to find people to do stuff with, though. From treasure maps to deep dungeons to BLU challenges...

FFXIV is the only MMORPG that I know of that is both based on a single-player RPG experience and is a theme park. It's bread & butter is an audience that came directly from casual & ultra-casual content.

Dark Souls will risk your success in order to preserve enjoyment. FFXIV will risk your enjoyment in order to preserve success.

[Dracian]

It's a real shame, because a "Savage+" system for dungeons would do a lot of good for this game. The way I envisioned it would be like this:

"Savage" difficulty would present gear roughly equivalent to starter end-game gear or a little above. So, say in Shadowbringers it would drop items around i435. Savage+1 would be slightly harder but drop i440. Rinse and repeat until you get Savage+5 would end up around i460, which is between Normal, but not quite up to Savage raid gear level. Then, every time a new raid is released, we'd get another 5 levels of Savage+ difficulties to bridge the game in gear, with the top-level always being around 5ilvl below Savage (and maybe missing a materia slot or something).

To make the dungeons more interesting, I'd bring in a system like PoTD/HoH with modifiers and items that you can use to change up the runs.

That way it would serve as a side gearing source, allowing players to fill in slots they may be having some bad luck on in their main raids or in the alliance raids. As well as providing an alternative gearing path outside of just tomestone gear. Plus, it could keep all of those unique dungeon gearsets viable longer, as the game could just scale them up as rewards. Not to mention time-based leaderboards, community races/events that could be built around it, etc.

I know I personally would spend a lot of time on that type of content, especially if they made it difficult enough to require coordination, cooldowns, and maybe some light CC/slowing here and there (with items available for jobs that may not have certain abilities).

[Shurrikhan]

....

Agreed, on most of this. Or at least, I think, the spirit of it.

The following is a bit tangential, though. Sorry.

I guess what annoys me most is that even truly optimizing, say, a Brayflox NM run in week 1 (albeit, week 1 among other legacy players, so already leveled up to sync) of ARR had more going on than most dungeons seem to now. Dungeon design has obviously improved in almost every way except fundamental creativity (and ARR dungeons were nothing great in that regard, either), and most toolkits are far more robust (perhaps Monk being the only exception, and only then in terms of certain rotational elements and interplay with CC), but there was more variance in how a run ought to be optimized based on one's composition, and just more cross-role engagement possible (kite loops for mitigation, focus-targeting, deliberate threat-passing, etc.).

Naturally, novelty breeds experimentation (and age, stagnation), but a lot of that change has been the result of deliberate trimming, too. There was a point at which they had this available pool of depth and, rather than tune around it or otherwise reward it, polish it, or the like, they decided to obfuscate any such lack of effort that might otherwise have been seen... by removing those mechanics entirely. That, to me, is a worrisome direction that only tends towards narrower and narrower, more and more limiting, ruts in design.

In the end, I just want some variety in intrinsically enjoyable combat experiences. When the game launched, I enjoyed dungeons immensely, because they had these different factors of play available to them that excited me (even if I could certain imagine, even then, their being much more polished or better situated). Moreover, they excited me in ways that pulling to gate, AoE spam, pulling to gate, AoE spam, and a boss kill, on repeat, just can't do for me except under such tuning as forces out certain elements of deliberate, choiceful play and wherein that play is itself interesting. ("Non-choices", like simply playing in a blatantly nonoptimal manner, need not apply.)

Bringing back in a level of situation (apparent relative reward, related gameplay loops, cohesion, etc.) that gives us the most possibilities for engagement, or both the number of competitive ways by which to approach a situation and the depth of engagement in following one such path, seems essential to providing more variety in enjoyable combat experiences. But that requires some actual commitment to a difficulty level that won't necessarily be open to every player on the first run, and ideally a way to smoothly scale up from there so that players can retain that same level of challenge for themselves for as far as they wish to go. That kind of design can't shy away from polish or just throw over it a blanket of "All enemies are now immune, so stop talking about it."

[Dracian]

....

A couple of things happened that led to what you are referring to. The first is that class rotations become longer and more complex with each subsequent expansion. But, in order to minimize the amount of buttons we have to manage on our hotbars, stuff got cut, and most of that was crowd control and situational abilities (such as Quelling Strikes). What was left was basically spread across entire roles, so that you didn't have to try and hunt for a specific job to do something. That's the overarching problem. They can't give us anything more complex than wall-to-wall trash pulls, because we don't have the tools to manage those.

The second was that the developers really wanted to streamline the dungeon experience to be no more than around a 15 minute chunk of content. Gone are the branching pathways of Toto-rak, or anything beyond hallways and trash packs. I'd love to see this be better balanced, but I doubt it.

[Shurrikhan]

A couple of things happened that led to what you are referring to. The first is that class rotations become longer and more complex with each subsequent expansion. But, in order to minimize the amount of buttons we have to manage on our hotbars, stuff got cut, and most of that was crowd control and situational abilities (such as Quelling Strikes). What was left was basically spread across entire roles, so that you didn't have to try and hunt for a specific job to do something. That's the overarching problem. They can't give us anything more complex than wall-to-wall trash pulls, because we don't have the tools to manage those.

That's not remotely the full story, though.

We have more than enough buttons to have many times more depth than we currently provide. Our bars are simply notoriously inefficient. The single decision to "do single-target GCD damage" on Dragoon, for instance, has seven buttons allotted to it.

For the devs to create such inefficient design, and all the while retain bloat that does nothing but devalue mechanics already made¹, makes it incredibly disingenuous to for them to then say that "there is room left to allow for dungeons to be anything but the same old pull all, AoE spam, pull all, AoE spam, boss, repeat."

¹ This includes such skill as Lucid Dreaming, which mostly turns MP from something to actually manage into UI bloat appended to a one-minute CD, or Arm's Length, which merely removes the effects of most meaningful knockback mechanics, effectively wasting that part of fight design or converting it from pre-positioning into yet another button press.

The second was that the game really wanted to streamline the dungeon experience to be no more than around a 15 minute chunk of content.

The game is not sentient. So what community or part thereof are we talking about? How did the developers come to know that the majority of players wanted dungeons to be nearly as defined by their time spent sprinting along a hallway as actually fighting? And if not, why is it their decision being sold as such?

Moreover, why did it need to be a ubiquitous change, instead of dungeons simply offering a wider range of rewards proportionate to their likely clear times, and the roulettes bonuses themselves de-emphasized to allow for more choice in consecutive play length (and more choice in when players can spend their hours free time per week to pursue weekly-capped goals)?

[Bruenor]

It's a real shame, because a "Savage+" system for dungeons would do a lot of good for this game.

Funny whenever systems like that come on board, I usually leave that MMORPG. I started with Everquest in 1999. When it got raid or die, I left it for WoW the casual MMORPG. As WoW started turning into raid or die, I started trying just about any other game. Since I play with my kids, I usually ended up having to go back to WoW or stop playing with them.

What I LOVE about FFXIV is how casual it is and how the whole extreme gamer attitude isn't very prevalent here.Mythic+,timers and their attitude flowed down to regular dungeons to the point where a first time tank in a leveling dungeon better know every skip and be able to pull half the dungeon or get kicked. The guise of make it hard for me ruined the game for almost everyone but the top % and people are leaving in droves right now.