Quote Originally Posted by Avoidy View Post
Basically if you're the type of person who's bored by normal difficulty stuff but either can't get 8 people together for savage or you just aren't interested in the prog process of wiping for potentially weeks because of other people, you get 1 EX trial roughly every time a new tier comes out and that is it. And people sorta stop running it after the first week because of how the content rollouts work. For example, when Barb EX came out, a week later the new savage came out so everyone I knew stopped caring about barb EX and the PF quality plummeted. I might be off-base here but I think the game's making a mistake by not appealing to this middle of the road group. Maybe criterion dungeons will scratch that itch. idk. People have been asking for harder dungeons for years, but the way the devs phrased its implementation, it sounded like they wanted to just make even more shit for the savage raiding crowd, since it's tuned for savage bis. I genuinely wonder if there's even a place for mid-tier difficulty stuff in this game anymore.
Lately, I frequently feel like social media is strangling the middle of the road, the ordinary gamer (who are likely like myself, older, decently skilled but definitely had our gaming prime years ago) - specifically, the community's massive over-reliance on Discord.

I'm not against the idea of hopping in voice for content that benefits from it, I'd be fine with having to install Ventrilo or TeamSpeak like old times, but Discord specifically is problematic - specifically the way their Trust and Safety enforcement works, which more or less makes it impossible to run a publicly visible community unless you have an incredible amount of free time. As a result, middle of the road working adults are shut out from having much of a voice; the public face of XIV's community disproportionately slants to the hardcore crowd and SE likely is influenced by what they see.

We need a new platform. Even going back to TS/Vent/IRC would likely be better than the warping effect Discord (a fitting name) has. I'm not sure how to go about persuading people to stop doubling down on Disc, though