Endgame gearing in FFXIV

[Amarande]

Stop pugging? Seriously, the answer is that simple. They are not just going to give away a guaranteed piece just because you cleared. You already get a book and if you want less rng then join a static where people work together and pass on stuff they don't need. I guarantee most of you spend more time pugging than you would playing on a "schedule" with your average static.

Yeah, try that when you're an old school nerd and for RL reasons work a full time 2nd shift job.

There used to be a ton of late night activity in XIV when I returned and rerolled in late 4.0, but all of a sudden sometime around late 4.1-early 4.2 it seemed like most of the night owls precipitously vanished and never came back and the game became all about conforming to prime time. I'm not sure what happened in early 2018 to cause that, but something apparently did. WFH and stay-at-home orders during Covid certainly made it worse too, because it basically mandated by fiat that everyone but us essential workers conform to the standard 9-5, but the trend had started long before that. Housing rollouts (4.1 and 4.2 both had one) that forced people to learn to be up supremely early to have a decent chance at all maybe? I don't know. There's the early bird wrinkle for tribal quest rollouts but that's generally considered casual enough content not to matter ...

In any case, true (ie., midnight-oil hours, as these days, starting as early as 9:30pm is considered "late night" by MMO culture now; again, I'm not sure what changed, when I was growing up "late" basically didn't start till at least when the post-primetime news came on TV ...) late night statics are rare, even before considering playstyle, temperament, and whether there's room for your role.

There's off-region play, but that involves bad ping to JP/OCE, and EU is if anything even more hardcore than NA from all I've heard.

There's also the fact that statics almost entirely seem to be a "get into one at the very beginning of the even patch" dealie, especially if you have that weird schedule to limit your choices. Trendiness has apparently also intensified (see that 1/3 of the playerbase statistic from earlier in the thread). I don't even know what sprouts, returners, general misfits, and those playing at a more relaxed pace for stress reasons are supposed to do when they hit endgame now given the pace that PF has started to acquire.

I'm thinking of moving to Crystal literally because of its casual misfits rep, honestly But seriously, something that this game desperately needs is a static culture that's accommodating to more types of player, like how WoW basically seemed to have an endgame guild for almost anyone unless you were literal cyanide (heck, there probably were guilds just for toxic people, too lol), or a lot of folks are going to continue to be stuck with PF, with the issues consistently mentioned.

[Ransu]

Yeah, try that when you're an old school nerd and for RL reasons work a full time 2nd shift job.

There used to be a ton of late night activity in XIV when I returned and rerolled in late 4.0, but all of a sudden sometime around late 4.1-early 4.2 it seemed like most of the night owls precipitously vanished and never came back and the game became all about conforming to prime time. I'm not sure what happened in early 2018 to cause that, but something apparently did. WFH and stay-at-home orders during Covid certainly made it worse too, because it basically mandated by fiat that everyone but us essential workers conform to the standard 9-5, but the trend had started long before that. Housing rollouts (4.1 and 4.2 both had one) that forced people to learn to be up supremely early to have a decent chance at all maybe? I don't know. There's the early bird wrinkle for tribal quest rollouts but that's generally considered casual enough content not to matter ...

In any case, true (ie., midnight-oil hours, as these days, starting as early as 9:30pm is considered "late night" by MMO culture now; again, I'm not sure what changed, when I was growing up "late" basically didn't start till at least when the post-primetime news came on TV ...) late night statics are rare, even before considering playstyle, temperament, and whether there's room for your role.

There's off-region play, but that involves bad ping to JP/OCE, and EU is if anything even more hardcore than NA from all I've heard.

There's also the fact that statics almost entirely seem to be a "get into one at the very beginning of the even patch" dealie, especially if you have that weird schedule to limit your choices. Trendiness has apparently also intensified (see that 1/3 of the playerbase statistic from earlier in the thread). I don't even know what sprouts, returners, general misfits, and those playing at a more relaxed pace for stress reasons are supposed to do when they hit endgame now given the pace that PF has started to acquire.

I'm thinking of moving to Crystal literally because of its casual misfits rep, honestly But seriously, something that this game desperately needs is a static culture that's accommodating to more types of player, like how WoW basically seemed to have an endgame guild for almost anyone unless you were literal cyanide (heck, there probably were guilds just for toxic people, too lol), or a lot of folks are going to continue to be stuck with PF, with the issues consistently mentioned.

What does being an "old school nerd" have to do with anything? That's a weird thing to say.

Not all statics start on Tuesdays and I see plenty of recruitment posts of statics doing late night runs. Have you ever considered joining the recruitment discord? If you're only looking at the forums or PF you're not looking very hard.

[Amarande]

What does being an "old school nerd" have to do with anything? That's a weird thing to say.

Not all statics start on Tuesdays and I see plenty of recruitment posts of statics doing late night runs. Have you ever considered joining the recruitment discord? If you're only looking at the forums or PF you're not looking very hard.

I guess part of it is that I got accustomed to a very different culture overall when it came to online chat and gaming (which seems to have undergone a massive sea change that might have entirely happened in 2016, it's hard to tell because before that it still felt like oldschool was alive and well and then I spent most of 2016 struggling IRL, not getting back on my feet enough to MMO until spring of the next year). Also being socially awkward and neurodivergent doesn't seem to do me any favors these days too, while it was common enough among the old guard Xennial generation online to be much more easily accepted, nowadays gaming seems to be a regular person's activity to the point that us "spoony" types are just as awkward online as IRL

I recall joining a recruitment Discord at some point in Stormblood and not really being able to find much of anything suitable in it; I usually try to get the lay of the static land by browsing the ffxiv recruitment subreddit lately. When I mean late night, I mean the real late night (like, after 11:30PM-midnight late, and I'm also Central US time which seems not to help much either). Like I said, there seemed to be a lot more night owls, and then something happened in 2018 that suddenly made everyone need to go to bed early and I'm not even sure what.

Also Discord in general has always felt particularly awkward to me compared to previous gamer hangout venues. Servers almost invariably seem to come in only two types, the huge public ones that tend to be extremely heavily moderated (and thus particularly anxiety inducing for someone like me, and sadly I more than a few times lost my cool as a result) and tiny private ones that you have to be told about to even know they exist (and which are usually so tiny that they are largely ineffective for actual grouping, even though they are usually good places to chill socially). I feel we used to have more choice in general, but this seems to have dried up and been absorbed into the huge centralized servers (when World Visit came out the effect was especially devastating, with server cultures being lost in the merge to DC level organization instead), so now it's like you have one acceptable player mindset per Data Center that you either are forced to conform to or you're practically pushed out of content altogether ...