Dungeons we need to talk dungeons

[Nishira]

I’m a ‘WoW refugee’ and I think it’s a bit more complex than that. Some of those players will want something like Mythic Dungeons, others very much don’t. Personally I’d say the biggest reason for WoW’s decline has been the narrowing down of meaningful content, and alienating large portions of their playerbase that way. The game got less and less fun for casuals. The game got less and less fun for crafters. The game got less and less fun for raiders. There’s not one type of ‘refugee’ from there and what they want from FF14 will be extremely varied too. I just want FF14 to be FF14, I’m not looking for a WoW clone. I love the crazy amount of things one can do here, the first few weeks I went NOOO whenever I’d get more helpful tooltips because it was just overload! Lol

Personally I’m happy Mythic Dungeons type of content most likely won’t be a thing here because I did not enjoy the effects of it, or the attitudes it bred.

[RitsukoSonoda]

I’m a ‘WoW refugee’ and I think it’s a bit more complex than that. Some of those players will want something like Mythic Dungeons, others very much don’t. Personally I’d say the biggest reason for WoW’s decline has been the narrowing down of meaningful content, and alienating large portions of their playerbase that way. The game got less and less fun for casuals. The game got less and less fun for crafters. The game got less and less fun for raiders. There’s not one type of ‘refugee’ from there and what they want from FF14 will be extremely varied too. I just want FF14 to be FF14, I’m not looking for a WoW clone. I love the crazy amount of things one can do here, the first few weeks I went NOOO whenever I’d get more helpful tooltips because it was just overload! Lol

Personally I’m happy Mythic Dungeons type of content most likely won’t be a thing here because I did not enjoy the effects of it, or the attitudes it bred.

Right but at the same time there are people coming from WoW asking for those things.

The thing I see here in regards to the arguments of splitting content as braindead easy for "casual" then branding everything else as "optional harder" is it's drawing a line people can divide themselves over. So long as that line is there it will never end. So just remove the line because it's causing more problems than it's trying to solve. Ideally the content people label "casual" should have slowly built up the players so they could walk into the "optional harder" content without feeling like they just picked a fight with Fatalis 5 minutes after starting a new character in a monster hunter game. The only difference here being that the "optional harder" content of FFXIV doesn't auto fail when that person carts 3 times in 60 seconds so they can just lay around hoping everyone else will clear it for them.

[Artemiz]

The "dividing line" and the term "casual" are not made by the developers though. It's players who do that. There should be content for all levels of ability in a good MMO, I think SE have done that in a healthy way.

[Nishira]

I think that is the question pretty much. Is it causing more problems than it’s trying to solve? Or does it solve more problems than it creates? I have no idea myself, I have no intimate knowledge of how the game evolved over time and the probable reasons as to why.

Not trying to argue with you btw, I fully get your point

[Ath192]

The "dividing line" and the term "casual" are not made by the developers though. It's players who do that. There should be content for all levels of ability in a good MMO, I think SE have done that in a healthy way.

The reality that I live in as a long time player is that if all you've done is the normal difficulty content, get to level 80, and decide to do a current Extreme or Savage you are in for a rude awakening and a world of toxicity, because there is no middle ground bridging the gap in skill at all. Now this is what I've seen, so take my anecdotal evidence as you want. But I've been at the end of it when I was new, and I've seen it happen every tier this expansion and I've seen it happen in lots of Ex fights. If it weren't for a friend who helped me with my rotation years ago I wouldn't have even known there was an optimal rotation.

In order to not break TOS people simply stay quiet and boot the bad player most of the time. Without telling him why, trying to help him, explain anything. Because they know the person may get offended, report them, and have a GM take their side and ban them. Even if all they said is you need to work on your rotation and do this as "X" job. "Because that is enforcing a play style and is a TOS breach"

I think the effects of this are widely known, and felt throughout the entire game and chilling to the point it has killed off a lot of the social aspect of the game. Dungeon runs are silent, no one tries to explain anything. All you get is a "o/" and a "gg" at the end.

I honestly don't know how making the game easy has affected the health of subscriber numbers for the game. I honestly don't, the free trial, positive press/reviews and WOW fallout would make it impossible to determine imo. But if they are going to moderate this game as heavily as they do (and TBH that is fair, it does stop a lot of bad things from being said) then the game should have a better difficulty scale so that it can teach the players how to be better prepared for its end game challenges by punishing them with failure and deaths so they improve during their journey towards the end.

If the player reaches endgame, and wants to stay longer, these are the challenges they will face as a fighter.

Edit:
btw one the most appalling experiences in my gameplay so far is the way experienced players treat newbies on reset days (Tuesday) in the first fight of the tier.
Since this is the fight most newbies are still stuck on and trying to clear/learn but also experienced players have to go through the amount of passive aggressiveness, boots, and sometimes outright insults I've seen is so sad.
This is the point where plenty of players quit and wait for the next expansion if they ever return at all. They gave up, just thought they were bad at the game. I've been a witness to this more than once.

[Shurrikhan]

The "dividing line" and the term "casual" are not made by the developers though. It's players who do that. There should be content for all levels of ability in a good MMO, I think SE have done that in a healthy way.

I think one of the core things missed from earlier MMO experiences though (in WoW or elsewhere), and perhaps one of the discussions most worth having, is that at certain times (more of matter of patches than expansions, to be honest), it didn't particularly matter if someone was "casual" or not. Those spheres didn't so delineate themselves. And yet, somehow, both sides felt neither especially

1. unengaged (as when there are insufficient difficulties at or higher than what would be doable by and engaging to a median player and/or the median difficulty has insufficient cognitive load or "stuff to do" in combat)...
2. nor excluded (as when there is seemingly insufficient content at or below difficulties that would be enjoyably doable by and engaging to a median player and/or the learning curve does not properly leverage earlier difficulty to promote later accessibility).

And, honestly, that may have had far less to do with difficulty range or the number of options or even the player climate so much as simply (A) proper use of learning curves, (B) available creativity and range of combat-related interaction even in solo play, and (C) use of reward systems (which can quickly become overbearing and thereby deemphasize intrinsic reward if led to become overly central to the gameplay loop).

[Gameovers]

You can tell who's played since the beginning and who hasn't by what they ask for. I remember dungeons during HW - when I started playing. No this isn't my starter account. It's just my main account as my starter account was tied to a dead PSN I no longer use. - But the wipes and complaints were ALOT. People complained everything was too hard, people complained classes were overly busy to the point they needed spread sheets, heck, people complained solo instances were too hard. - The one in Stormblood being the biggest one.- So I can see why things got nerfed. Tho I think if they ever wanted to fix the problem then things need to actually hit harder. It'll fix healing, cause now things hit WAY harder. Slow down the ilvl progression so we don't over power things and dungeons, and add more one shot mechs. Doing these things I think will fix most of the issues. Cause just changing the way dungeons look won't do it for long term as players will just find the fastest way to do it and you WILL be shamed if you go against the grain.

If you don't beleive me... it already happens now. Try and go off the path in one of those old dungeons and watch what happens. If chat doesn't instantly go >:O D:??? Or :/ then those people weren't long time players and got lost.

[Shurrikhan]

Sure, that's the point, but a 4 person party empirically has a much higher point of failure than an 8 person party does though, which is exactly Yoshi-P's point.

Yeah, of course... but why is that necessarily an issue? It's an altogether different form of difficulty. It takes less damage to end you, but you're also dealing with less damage.

If the healer dies in a 4 person party and you don't have a SMN/RDM, it's an automatic failure (assuming its actually tuned difficulty wise that a tank can't just perpetually self heal themselves).

That's not even true in mid-high tier Mythic+ (and their equivalent rez-capable DPS). Granted, there are more tools there, such as CC and self-healing tools, which increase one's potential responsibilities and engagement ("difficulty") even as they make recovery more achievable (and a given fight more "accessible"), but if fights that much harder are still doable, having more than a single difficulty level isn't going to suddenly turn dungeon-running into a repetitive wipe-fest off of the smallest possible mistake outside the average player's control.

Take a look at Pharos Sirius when it was first released; the dungeon was leagues more difficult than its competitor released at the same time as it, on top of being far harder than most dungeons. If you had a bad healer, you were automatically GG before the dungeon even began.

Which competitor? Moreover, only the first and last boss truly demanded a healer, even pre-nerf. The rest of the dungeon, I ended up three-manning many a time while waiting for a refill. It wasn't nearly so auto-fail as you make out.

Contrast an 8 person party where you not only have greater odds of having a rezzer dps in your party, but also a 2nd healer that can salvage the run.

But you also then need to contrast the 4-man experience to the possibilities for player kills provided by 8-man mechanics at equivalent difficulty, the stronger tank-busters that would leverage cotanks external mitigation and the near-guarantee of a shield and the cotank rotating in for their CDs, the tighter DPS checks per their being a lower standard deviation in group output, many more potential one-shot mechanics precisely because a rezzer is likely to survive, etc., etc.

btw one the most appalling experiences in my gameplay so far is the way experienced players treat newbies on reset days (Tuesday) in the first fight of the tier.

This, btw, is one of the most noticeable downsides of trying to funnel every (highly distinct) type of player through the same weekly/daily grind loops, especially in a game so centered around (stale) reward schemes.

[RitsukoSonoda]

I think one of the core things missed from earlier MMO experiences though (in WoW or elsewhere), and perhaps one of the discussions most worth having, is that at certain times (more of matter of patches than expansions, to be honest), it didn't particularly matter if someone was "casual" or not. Those spheres didn't so delineate themselves. And yet, somehow, both sides felt neither especially

1. unengaged (as when there are insufficient difficulties at or higher than what would be doable by and engaging to a median player and/or the median difficulty has insufficient cognitive load or "stuff to do" in combat)...
2. nor excluded (as when there is seemingly insufficient content at or below difficulties that would be enjoyably doable by and engaging to a median player and/or the learning curve does not properly leverage earlier difficulty to promote later accessibility).

And, honestly, that may have had far less to do with difficulty range or the number of options or even the player climate so much as simply (A) proper use of learning curves, (B) available creativity and range of combat-related interaction even in solo play, and (C) use of reward systems (which can quickly become overbearing and thereby deemphasize intrinsic reward if led to become overly central to the gameplay loop).

Looking back I don't think casual started being used by players as a skill tier until WoW started getting popular. Before then Casual and Hardcore just indicated the average time a person spent playing the game and meant nothing in regards to player skill. There were highly skilled players in FFXI that were casual players that were only in game a few hours a week and on the same end there were Hardcore players that were in game more often than not that couldn't even clear the instanced story battles. Something FFXI had that most of these MMOs that came after it don't was a very large amount of horizontal progression. If a player didn't like 1 of the options or routes to obtain endgame level gear there were a number of other options available to them. It wasn't constantly powercreeping every update or expansion via an ilvl increase or level cap increase. It had a few early on up thru around early Zilart then stayed at that level through multiple expansions over years before they finally increased it again late in the title's time span.

One of the things about FFXI though is that a majority of the game's areas were accessible without having to complete the MSQ story lines. For the most part they only needed to be done to specific points if you wanted to unlock specific "endgame" content. This actually when looking at this title and other more recent MMOs to me feels like a better game design choice falling more in line with open world RPGs like Skyrim, Fallout 3/4, Outer Worlds, Biomutant, FFXV, etc where players were free to wander off to poke at optional content in all kinds of difficulties and level ranges then come back to the main story when they wanted to progress it. It didn't feel obligatory to do in order to progress and do anything else.

The stat squish they say will happen in Endwalker will hopefully slow down the power creep. I am curious about how this will impact duties in the level ranges indicated since the enemies in them are going to need to be retuned or balanced as well otherwise everyone is going to get facerolled by the first group of monsters when they enter. (Though I would atleast find that funny the first time it happened.)

[Anxin]

As far the harking back to the days of ARR Hard modes... we remember these very differently. Trying to get a group to complete Arum Vale and Pharos Sirius Hard pre nerf was... good luck. More often than not you'd go through at least three tanks in Arum Vale before one stuck it out, and getting a group to finish Pharos Sirius was hell. I don't know about you, but for me the rewards would have to justify the pain one would be required to go through to finish. While such an experience can be fun with friends, the moment you toss in a pug it is game over.

I used to queue Pharos as a healer in those days because I enjoyed the challenge pugs offered and wanted to help others finish it. Same with Aurum Vale (I still queue there time-to-time). For me, the reward was helping others get through the content and enjoying the differing group dynamics. Pixels and stats don't motivate me. But I realize not everyone enjoys that sort of reward. I guess that is why I favor more randomization in critter attacks and wish some mobs would play a game of "kill the healer" in dungeons: it would make random groups more dynamic.