The health problem of hiding numbers while catering to high-end raiders

[Dzian]

Sad way to have fun but oh well. Its not like there's a huge pot of gold waiting for you at the end of that rainbow.

Not Really. It's a combination of many factors including the basic difference between a Hobbie and a Passtime, basic perceptions of self-esteem and other psychological traits, drive and motivation etc.

The difference between a Hobby and a Passtime for example can be boiled down to effort. A hobby is typically something you are passionate about and want to do well. want to improve yourself. It might be playing video games on harder modes, Going to track days with your car, Carpentry or DIY, or It might even be cake decorating. or playing on a local 5-a-side sports team. It's something you strive to do well and get better at and grow yourself.

A Passtime is pretty much exactly as the name suggests. it's just something you do to pass the time. without as much effort or passion. You might just blast away some hours on a video game on easy or watch Netflix, Have a kick about with your mates in the park. Neither is right or wrong. both are very valid ways to do things.

Then there are the psychological factors, and how people perceive their self-worth and self-esteem. Video games often get labelled as escapism for example, and this tends to come from a more negative psychological impact of people who are unhappy with life, they can't succeed in life so they escape to video games where they play on easy and can accomplish things. it's also where a lot of the fomo bs comes from because if there's something they can't accomplish they feel inferior or do not measure up..

It also means that people who play on harder difficulties often get labelled as try-hards or elitists and it's often claimed these people need video games to give them their self-worth by doing or having something other players can't or don’t have.

But this is often wrong, As the people who play games on harder difficulties tend not to do so to escape their lives. they do so to supplement their lives to continue to challenge themselves and grow.. In much the same way the guys who entered a local 5-a-side tournament wanted to do something more than just have a kick about in the park.

I myself don't really raid anymore here. I find it pointless and just no fun with all the dumbing down and simplifications they've done over the years. but often when it comes to other games I play I generally do ramp them up to hard mode. That doesn't make me a hardcore elitist or anything though. It took me over 9 months to finish Sekiro for example as I might have only played it for a few hours one evening a week. It’s a long way from being elite or hardcore. it's actually super casual but to some people just the fact I beat Sekiro means I’m a hardcore gamer.

Here I do use ACT sometimes and while my logs and stuff have been hidden since the earliest days of Heavensward. Its not uncommon to see myself in the 60th-70th percentiles. Which is funny because it's right there where the casual lazy players call you a try-hard. but also right where the more competitive raiders be like "git gud scrub" either way I dont care too much. as I've said time and time again i don't care for the treadmill grind or bis bs so if my i597 samurai can rock out 69th percentile in Storms Crown Ex. with a 595 or whatever ilevel the Endsinger blade is. I'm more than happy with that. If gear was better and more interesting and if the treadmill wasn't so tedious I'd probably make more effort to have better gear.

But when everything is just throw-away junk on an endless treadmill... Mehhhh fk it. That's not fun to me. but to many people it is.. so yay for them..

[Pablomaldito]

its a Finala Fantasy thats trying to be world of warcraft,

To be fair, becoming more like World of Warcraft was a major factor FFXIV 2.0's successful rising from the ashes of 1.0.

[caffe_macchiato]

Extremely fine tuned high-end content requiring perfect execution of rotations and min-maxing of stats exist while those same numbers are hidden from the players.

We don’t need SE to show us the numbers when add-ons do it for us. Yoshida is very well-aware that third-party tools are crucial to FFXIV’s success as a raiding MMO, but for legal liability purposes he can’t explicitly endorse them. The suits at the top likely mandated a ban on those tools. Yoshida himself was a big WoW player and likely had all the works including DBM and raider.io. So Yoshida “looks the other way” while giving us a wink and a nudge. I wouldn’t be surprised if he used them himself during testing. So for all intents and purposes, the need for damage numbers has been filled, and it’s never going to be taken away from us. FFXIV has filled the shoes that WoW left behind.

[Deveryn]

Speaking from ignorance on savage level, but my impression was that endgame fine tuning was really only an issue for week 1 clears. Aren’t fights progressively easier as time goes by and raiders get better gear from weekly stuff?

…so doesn’t that make this whole thing moot? If a fight is so hard it can’t be cleared week 1…doesn’t it just get cleared week 2? Or 3?

Moreover, comparing the difficulty of 14s fights to other MMOs is rather disingenuous- 14 largely boils down to memorization and pre-planning and worst case, just waiting to get better gear that is guaranteed to come along. Most MMOs once you hit the ceiling, that’s it.


I think a big thing players need to remember: this game is intended for casual play. Originally they only added savage/ex/etc because they were surprised people wanted more to do once they finished 2.0. YoshiP had said he expected people would play, have fun, then go play other games during content drought..but people wanted more krunk… so they added relics with massive grinds and hard fights like binding coil. They want to cater to everyone, but hard-content players are not the target audience.


Remember they even made a tv drama entirely around a son carrying his dad through binding coil. That’s the target.

This exactly.

Let's not forget people actually cleared on week 1. Some people are actually just that good. Everything we need to clear is already in the game. The content gets tuned for use with gear provided. Figure out your best stat build and get to learning. You have ample time to get things right. Things do get better as people get better gear and learn the fights more.

You don't need another meter to tell you how well you all did. There are already enough ways to tell. You either hit enrage or you didn't. If you did, maybe stop getting KO'd so much.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he used them himself during testing.

If they use those tools, then what's the point in continuing to use them once testing is complete?

[Jojoya]

Have you ever considered that some find showing off their e-resume fun?

Nah, preposterous...

It's fine for those who find meaning in it and want to compare themselves against others who likewise find meaning in it.

It's not fine when they try to drag others who want nothing to do with e-resumes down into it so they can get an even bigger ego boost.

I'm not against parsers at all. They were a great tool for self-improvment back when I was still seriously raiding. What I'm against are the people who use them the wrong way, such as to shove their e-resumes in the faces of people who aren't interested. As someone else pointed out, FFXIV being a casual game makes it a bit of a strange choice for those who want to show off. Most of us just don't care.

Don't ban the parser. Ban the players who misuse them.

[Striker44]

To be fair, becoming more like World of Warcraft was a major factor FFXIV 2.0's successful rising from the ashes of 1.0.

I would say also to be fair, though, the WoW that FFXIV 2.0 modeled itself after is very different from the WoW of today that caters to the M+ and high-end raider crew. It's actually the shift in focus that caused WoW numbers to plummet.

[Ralphe2449]

I would say also to be fair, though, the WoW that FFXIV 2.0 modeled itself after is very different from the WoW of today that caters to the M+ and high-end raider crew. It's actually the shift in focus that caused WoW numbers to plummet.

This.

Today's wow is literally a game that caters solely to raidloggers and the entire design is based "but if we give good rewards to casual/solo content our raidloggers will complain" so casual/solo content is both underdeveloped and unrewarding, and let's not even talk about the abomination that is today's story, I heard their new xpac's "casual" content is "flying" xD

FF14 is thankfully a far different game to WoW and that is why it has beaten WoW, it caters to everyone and doesnt treat raiders like somekind of special class of player, it has a decent story, it has fun and rewarding casual/solo content and now they are even starting to explore pvp as well more seriously.

If FF14 was anything like today's WoW people wouldnt have massively moved to FF14 during shadowbringers.

[Atelier-Bagur]

This.

Today's wow is literally a game that caters solely to raidloggers and the entire design is based "but if we give good rewards to casual/solo content our raidloggers will complain" so casual/solo content is both underdeveloped and unrewarding, and let's not even talk about the abomination that is today's story, I heard their new xpac's "casual" content is "flying" xD

FF14 is thankfully a far different game to WoW and that is why it has beaten WoW, it caters to everyone and doesnt treat raiders like somekind of special class of player, it has a decent story, it has fun and rewarding casual/solo content and now they are even starting to explore pvp as well more seriously.

If FF14 was anything like today's WoW people wouldnt have massively moved to FF14 during shadowbringers.

To be fair, the recent resurgent of new players in FFXIV wasnt due to Shadowbringers at all. It was just simply because it was at the right place at the right time with what the Blizzard sexual harrasment scandals atm and people finally being fed up with recent lackluster expansions alongside streamers giving attention to other MMOs, so FFXIV was a simple target.

[kaynide]

I wouldn’t be surprised if he used them himself during testing.

As someone who has seen the backend of several MMO servers (including FFXI) and also seen how that works in full, let me tell you they do not need any plugins we could come up with to get extremely comprehensive data on what goes on in any particular fight/instance/etc.

The amount of data at their fingertips available in a matter of keystrokes is staggering. Remember that they have the duty record function available to use? That's a "baby's first keystroke recorder" compared to what they have. Not user friendly to use mind you..which is why we don't get it.

[AsakuraAsteria]

I have to say clear 6.2 savage in week 1 is absolutely NOT chasing an impossible goal, but ofc the job balance is really bad, but not everyone has to clear it in week 1 right? savage raids will become eaiser when you get high ilv gears after many weeks.

Agree with some comments that in FFXIV you are hard to check many stuffs(job damage/boss damage type/attributes), SE should fix them(even i believe people just use the 3rd party tools lol).