Old content has become so easy that it is no longer fun

[kpxmanifesto]

And if the game learning curve gets so much improved that "lowest common denominator" thinks the content is to easy only then you can think on making it harder.

So let me get this straight. You're saying the game appeals mostly to the lowest common denominator?

[sharknado]

So let me get this straight. You're saying the game appeals mostly to the lowest common denominator?

Yes.

* mentioned recovery mechanics
* mentioned policies
* logs/parses only personal and overall gray area
* sub just for patch/story as recognized/highlighted playstyle by Yoshi
* good tank can handle weak healer and vice versa preventing single points of failure in groups with singular representations (dungeons)
* popular perception and presentation of the game as casual friendly / especially when comparing to WoW.
* and likely more

And looking at it current popularity and my personal opinion it's pretty cool game. Even sproutbringer from WoW make a lot of people enjoy the game for what it is and not trying to make it "like WoW". Mythic wow first guilds went for savage and not even complained that old or leveling content is easy (and likely fall of many times in that easy content).

To make content harder and not kick most of their playerbase Blizzard had to make 4 raid difficulties and 4 dungeon difficulties with one being infinite. And when bad players and good players mixed for the first time during WoTLK party finder the good players were shocked how bad players can get and with time the level didn't really change while animosity, aggression, hostility between player groups have risen. Mythic world first locked themselves in their guilds, HC/Mythic prog guilds developed scoring systems to filter out bad players and bad players got LFR and lowest dungeon difficulties or world quests. Not everyone wanted or could "improve".

I'm not sure if you would accept a dungeon for your daily roulette suddenly taking 2h instead of 20 min just because you didn't got enough good people in the group to carry it. Day after day...

[kpxmanifesto]

Yes.

Ok, just help me clarify your point of view. What player skill level, in your opinion, represents the "lowest common denominator" in FFXIV?

[kpxmanifesto]

* popular perception and presentation of the game as casual friendly / especially when comparing to WoW.

The game doesn't want new players learning the bare minimum of the boss mechanics to be the standard?

Yes.

Also, I don't understand your reasoning here. You're telling me that the game is presented as casual friendly, but when I ask you if the game doesn't want new players learning the bare minimum of the boss mechanics, you said "yes." How can a game be casual friendly if the game doesn't want new players learning the bare minimum of boss mechanics?

[Lunalepsy]

See title. Lack of ilvl syncing and general power creep and tuning adjustments with expansions have rendered pretty much all content pre-Stormblood into a joke, and even Stormblood and Shadowbringers content has suffered a fair bit. I had hoped the stat squish might address this somewhat, but it's just as bad if not worse.

Dungeon packs die in 10 seconds and the bosses don't fare much better. Trial fights which are supposed to be epic story moments get deleted before you even get to see half their mechanics or hear half their music. There is no damage even if you fail mechanics, pretty much the only way to die is Doom or if you fall off the edge of the arena.

I dread signing up for any roulette besides Expert these days because probably 80% of the time I will be put into a piece of old content that was once fun but is now a dull chore because of poor scaling. At that point I have to wonder if I'm playing the game to enjoy myself or simply to farm currency.

It's not only a bad experience for veteran players, it's a poor representation of the game for new players. They have to play through hundreds of hours of content before seeing a fight that doesn't instantly fall over before it can do anything. If you don't already know what the mechanics do it's impossible to tell how they work because there's almost no penalty for failing them, and even if you somehow die the rest of the party will just clear without you. You can't learn anything about the game.

Min ilvl helps but is not perfect, and not an option for the vast majority of players. You cannot sign up for roulettes min ilvl and even if you could, few would do so without increased reward.

I don't think it's fair to say "just do Extreme/Savage then" either. The vast majority of content in the game is normal mode and there's no reason it shouldn't be fun. Everyone has reason to run that content, not just players who don't do Extreme/Savage. Trivial content isn't fun. If people want content to remain trivial so it's faster to farm, they may as well just implement a system where you wait some given amount of time and then have the rewards given to you automatically.

I humbly ask the devs to do something. Even just dialling up the enemy HP on old content by a bit would go a long way. Implementing ilvl scaling for old trials and normal raids would be nice too. If you're worried about people complaining about their duties taking longer, feel free to increase the rewards by an appropriate amount too.

What do you expect? It's a WoW clone. We're lucky that we're forced to do older content to level up.

[sharknado]

How can a game be casual friendly if the game doesn't want new players learning the bare minimum of boss mechanics?

Not everyone will want to learn things or improve and games won't reject them just because so they also have to be compatible with such players. New players that actually want to learn and improve will have to engage with game teaching systems and bit more dedicated one - with third party content. Content creators do a good job, while the game systems are dated and there is to much changes between initial and modern content plus a lot of checks (ilvl, job stone, job quests etc.) are very loose or none existent. So MSQ and related "popular" optional content will be either carry-compatible or easy enough for sprouts to handle it (but not easy to them, only for us).

If they want to teach people and pro-actively improve their skills they would start updating the part that is teaching and increase amount of harder content. They already mentioned they will change Westwind and Centri/Prae. If the chances will be limited to those instances due to how they aged badly then it's rater obvious they either don't care or don't see a problem with current old/initial content. They could even add simple things to limit edge cases - making job stone required > lvl 30 instances, require relative up-to-date with job quests and be more aggressive with required ilvl for leveling dungeons when someone tries to go with bad gear. If they don't really want to do that then either they see the current state as fine or they don't see it as anything important... and remember that there are people that don't want to or can't "learn" and games will want to keep them if it's not some extreme edge case. There always will be a group that just won't perform so why bother doing harder mandatory content? WoW had to add 4 difficulty levels for same instance to please as much people as possible. If FF14 will sit on one difficulty level then don't expect anything amazing.

They will also be talking about longer timeline for the game - if they will want to move the game in a different direction, like refreshing everything for modern player then very likely the game will be less faceroll but also better at teaching stuff.

Current content is easy for experienced players, it's not really that easy for very new and very casual players. As majority of content is single difficulty level the difficulty will stay at the level decided by that "lowest common denominator".

[kpxmanifesto]

Not everyone will want to learn things or improve

And you want to cater to these people? Yikes. If they're not looking to learn or improve, why play the game at all at that point?

New players that actually want to learn and improve will have to engage with game teaching systems and bit more dedicated one - with third party content.

Or you know, just play the game normally. Most players don't need to watch a youtube video to learn old content. The old content is that easy.

As majority of content is single difficulty level the difficulty will stay at the level decided by that "lowest common denominator".

Do you know the definition of the "lowest common denominator?" It seems to me you're talking about the bottom of the bell curve, not the lowest common denominator.

[Cubsbane]

Well, I'm glad you find it ridiculously easy and all that, but I don't, currently. Of all the things I've done on the way to HW, Crystal Tower raids are the places I've actually died several times.

Since it's an MSQ required raid, people in it will be often new, and/or doing it just to get through the MSQ. Making it harder may cause issues both for the group who just want to go on with their MSQ and now feel stuck in the most boring expansion of the game, and for the veterans like yourself who don't understand why some of us are dying in said ridiculously easy raid and screwing it up.

Coils, on the other hand, are not required, and I have heard they are a bit more difficult and nobody minds.

But that's the thing, I'm not a veteran. I started playing mid-2019.

The reason you're dying and screwing up is because you're new to the game. You also might not be watching a guide or hearing about mechanics, so they take you by surprise (note: I do not think you should NEED to watch a guide to join a raid, just that obviously if you do you have an advantage). Maybe you're too focused on your rotation so you miss it when everyone runs to a safe spot; this is something that absolutely happened to me when I first did them.

How many of your deaths were to things like Curtain Call or Ancient Flare? Those are instadeath mechanics. Once you learn how to avoid them... that's it. You run to a thing, and then do nothing for a bit as the mechanic resolves. Syrcus is supposed to require a bit more coordination and respecting of mechanics, but you can ignore most of them now. "Now" meaning "since way before I joined".

You probably didn't realize how many times you completely missed something you were supposed to do, and just got healed up.

Also, you don't need to do Crystal Tower for MSQ until Shadowbringers. Not even 5.0, but 5.3. You're gonna complain about being "stuck" in the best-received expansion ever? Considered by some even as what makes FFXIV the best Final Fantasy?

You wouldn't be stuck, anyway. You'd be fine. You'd learn from your mistakes, you'd watch from the ground to figure out what was going on. Maybe it'd take more than 1 try. The majority of people in Syrcus aren't even new, so some confused people would just make it a bit more interesting. Right now, everyone is just asleep.

Coils are at a higher difficulty than other "normal mode" raids and are not part of roulette, so they're a completely different conversation.

[sharknado]

And you want to cater to these people? Yikes. If they're not looking to learn or improve, why play the game at all at that point?

You nor I have nothing to say about whom this game caters to. It's the game owner decision and that's their decision as of now.

Or you know, just play the game normally. Most players don't need to watch a youtube video to learn old content. The old content is that easy.

Most people don't watch anything. And even if there is no first-time doom mechanic they can fail due to low performance. And if the content is "that easy" then do some older instances with sprouts and with long timers and compare the clear time. Then if the content would be much higher if you would get a sprout group you would spend hours instead of minutes in a normal dungeon. As this isn't fun beginners and casuals would quit and tryhards like you would move out of random duty finder because you would not want them to "learn" on your expense so PF would be used and only "experienced" players would be allowed to join in.

[MidnightEquinox]

The reason you're dying and screwing up is because you're new to the game.

If content is truly easy, me being new to the game would have been irrelevant. "It's easy if you have enough experience" means that it isn't easy. Dark Souls is also easy if you have 3k hours in it. The exaggeration does not do your argument favors, it just makes it very confusing to understand, and it's not clear if you're just out of touch with a chunk of the sort of people who play games or what.

By your own admission, it's boring to veteran players. And, yes, 3 years is sufficient for veteran status. A training raid should not be your definition of hard. And since this appears to be the first alliance raid series people get, yes, it's effectively a training raid.

The point is that if you make it more difficult, people like me will probably start causing total wipes, which will result in people very angry at new people / bad players / whatever.

Also, you don't need to do Crystal Tower for MSQ until Shadowbringers. Not even 5.0, but 5.3. You're gonna complain about being "stuck" in the best-received expansion ever? Considered by some even as what makes FFXIV the best Final Fantasy?

Crystal Tower is required for ARR progression right now. ARR is not where you want your playerbase to get stuck, given that a lot of us struggle to not fall asleep there, and the hook of the "great amazing story" is not yet present.