This game doesn't do enough to help people clear Ex/Savage content.

[gotaname1]

Meanwhile on Crystal....

[Ftail]

Different groups different tastes, different expectations nothing wrong with rejecting people regardless of how arbitrary.

My group has slowly shifted to ultimate clear/experience only are allowed to join from simply tryouts and first come first served.

Fair enough, you can reject anyone for any reason.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I've never understood this sort of philosophy of only inviting people with FFlogs as I have them hidden. I haven't savage raided since Stormblood since they butchered SCH and haven't had a static since then. I've been playing SCH since 2.0 release, but I've rarely ever been asked for my FFlogs, instead most static groups asked me to come as a trial member for the week and depending on my DPS and my ability to do the mechanics I was granted a spot in the raid group if I did well. Only once I've failed to join a static this way, it was for Turn 5 of Twintania before the couple of nerfs and the echo buff to it.

FFlogs gives you a heads up as to what kind of experience someone has, but I remember being in a static where the BLM was the only member who uploaded logs. He would cherry pick logs on all fights, if we killed something 20 times he would have only 2 logs of it where he did well. Meanwhile he would stand in aoe's and make it frustrating to do a fight while healing him. If FFlogs uploaded every single clear from every single person in the game, I wouldn't have an issue with it.

My thing is if you want to recruit someone to a static try giving them a try and see how they do instead of declining giving them a chance based off of FFlogs.

I'm pretty sure what Forte meant was to get a partial hindsight of how a player actually performing instead of just plainly seeing their numbers and decide solely based on them. The log doesn't always tell full story because some reasons that the others had already mentioned in previous replies.

[Absurdity]

That's why you don't just go unga bunga while staring at someone's dps in a log. It has the entire fight as clearly visible information and if someone has a terrible log you can easily look through it to see if it was their own fault or if they had to make up for other people's mistakes.

If you try to join a static and they go "hurr durr dps bad" because they never bothered to actually analyse your logs then that's a static you don't really want to join in the first place.

[Goji1639]

The solution for stuff like this is trusts. You should be able to run every raid of every difficulty with a trust.

It shouldn't reward any loot, titles, achievements, etc. but it should exist as an option to learn the content and practice. If we wanted to go even deeper into it, we could use this as a way to "certify" people for said content to varying degrees. Things like DPS, uptime, flawless execution of mechanics can earn you little proficiency tags that will make statics more confident in bringing you along, even if you don't have a real clear under your belt yet.

Learning this kind of content has always been a catch22 in MMORPGs; no group wants you if you're not experienced, but you can't get experience without a group. There NEEDS to be ways to get that experience without a group.

[Nethereal]

The solution for stuff like this is trusts. You should be able to run every raid of every difficulty with a trust.

It shouldn't reward any loot, titles, achievements, etc. but it should exist as an option to learn the content and practice. If we wanted to go even deeper into it, we could use this as a way to "certify" people for said content to varying degrees. Things like DPS, uptime, flawless execution of mechanics can earn you little proficiency tags that will make statics more confident in bringing you along, even if you don't have a real clear under your belt yet.

Learning this kind of content has always been a catch22 in MMORPGs; no group wants you if you're not experienced, but you can't get experience without a group. There NEEDS to be ways to get that experience without a group.

I think the grim reality most people don't want to face is sometimes the responsibility falls on you the player to fix the issue.
No group wants you because you have no experience? Not true you can make your own group with your own specifications and goals.
It's just not as easy as joining one already made. The degrees of difficulty vary per game but that's usually what it comes down to.

Making a new group totally inexperienced really puts your ignorance on display and not a lot of people have the courage to do it.

[Goji1639]

I think the grim reality most people don't want to face is sometimes the responsibility falls on you the player to fix the issue.
No group wants you because you have no experience? Not true you can make your own group with your own specifications and goals.
It's just not as easy as joining one already made. The degrees of difficulty vary per game but that's usually what it comes down to.

Making a new group totally inexperienced really puts your ignorance on display and not a lot of people have the courage to do it.

Right, you can make your own group that takes hours to fill and disbands after 3 wipes, because most people who join learning parties are still just hoping they'll luck into a situation where they can get carried. People who want to learn but don't already have a static have no reasonable way in.

Trusts are the answer; SE just needs to go all in on them.

This game is casual friendly in a lot of ways, but I do agree with this thread in that it does a horrible job of giving casual players a way into the more challenging content. I've personally kind of given up on this game in that regard. I am looking forward to Lost Ark, though.

[SturmChurro]

Right, you can make your own group that takes hours to fill and disbands after 3 wipes, because most people who join learning parties are still just hoping they'll luck into a situation where they can get carried. People who want to learn but don't already have a static have no reasonable way in.

Trusts are the answer; SE just needs to go all in on them.

This game is casual friendly in a lot of ways, but I do agree with this thread in that it does a horrible job of giving casual players a way into the more challenging content. I've personally kind of given up on this game in that regard. I am looking forward to Lost Ark, though.

Are you talking about trusts for extreme or savage content?

[SaberMaxwell]

Aside from many other issues, they'd never make Trusts available for extreme, Savage, or Ultimate because the devs would then be officiating strats. That's a line they'll probably never cross because that itself can create tension--heck, look at the number of people who subscribe to "Happy strats" as gospel for a lot of content, and any who do otherwise cause great discontent in a group. Maybe that's not so much a thing anymore, I don't pf much, but back in HW and ARR God help you if you disobeyed Mr Happy's strats. It'd be even worse with SE official strats.

The other big reason, is because figuring out what the mechanics are and how to handle them is itself part of the fight, and it's a part that would vanish if SE official strats were published via Trust runs of Savage. The world race would basically be destroyed.

All that to say I disagree trusts are the answer. They don't need to be everywhere, and though they could be neat in some 8 man instances I disagree that they should be in anything Extreme or up.

[ZedxKayn]

It's even more than just making strats official. Part of the difficulty of harder content is getting everyone to do the mechanic without dying, it's why prog takes the time it does, trusts do not provide the human error element and would trivialize the content.