Quote Originally Posted by Packetdancer View Post
As I've pointed out before, how often does anyone take alternate paths in any ARR dungeon that has side areas? How often does anyone bother with the puzzles in Qarn? Even in 1.x, there were people who posted the "optimal" path through Toto-Rak to hit all three diremites. We've demonstrated that no matter what they give us as a dungeon, we will optimize it down to the shortest path possible to get rewards, and then run that path as fast as we can, pulling everything until the dungeon forces us to stop.

And that is not on the "casuals", that is on those of us who do higher-end content. Most "casual" players I encounter would be happy to do the puzzles in Qarn or wander into side hallways, because they're not the ones trying to speed-run the dungeons. You want the devs to cater to us? They did; I would lay solid odds that's a big part of why more recent dungeons are now pre-optimized into linear hallways for us.
You have it backwards. Part of the fun in re-running MMO dungeons comes from knowing all the little routing and pulling tricks and being able to show off your skills. You make a video game dungeon so people can discern which parts are necessary and find the route through. That is not a flaw of the content, that is the intent. Puzzles are not worthless for having solutions!

Other games solve the problem of people optimizing away side paths and pulling everything by putting stuff in side paths that makes people want to go down them and creating enemies that are capable of killing careless players. FF14 "solves" the problem by preemptively removing the possibility of fun, churning out bland hallways with automatic pull partitions and useless loot you'll replace after an hour. It's terrible, robotic, cynical design.

"But people will be rude to new players who don't know the routes!"

Just like how they're rude to new players who want to watch the long story cutscenes in ARR dungeons? No, they aren't, because the community and moderators already come down hard on jerks who ruin the new player experience.