Difficulty ramp up in savage tier far more pronounced than other mmos

[Amarande]

I want to say the biggest reason for endgame burnout is the pace that the community expects of players, which is literally even more stringent than WoW's of all things, and the fact that XIV's community is built around the "unity" part of "community" to such an unhealthy level.

Ideally, you should be able to take your time, gear up, and push through Savage (or EX, too) at the pace which you find comfortable.

In reality, it turns out anything but. PF puts up the Duty Complete wall as soon as it possibly can get away with it, so there's an uncomfortable push to always rush content as soon as it comes out, and thus correspondingly to have to tackle it with the very minimum gear or close, as if you take your time you are cut off from an increasingly large portion of the playerbase and increasingly forced to stew with the crowd that has two left feet (plus, with the way mechanics are nowadays, it does not take a very high percentage of the playerbase to be stumblebums to make the majority of parties effective non-starters from the very first).

The community's compassion for the left behind is extremely poor, with the dominant response to complaint about this state of affairs being "well, you should have rushed it when everyone else was." In other words, exacerbating the whole "you need to week one it" (or in the case of EX, often day one it, and too bad if you work full time on Tuesday) mentality that contributes so much stress.

Almost everything in XIV tends to be dominated by a very small number of large Discord communities, so alternative mindsets also tend to be heavily suppressed in this way too (especially due to the extreme weakness of FCs compared to guilds in virtually every other MMO in regards to endgame activity) - failure to conform to the established culture inevitably results in the moderators issuing the "shut up or pack up (and go)" ultimatum (just ask me how I know, lol). Due in no small part to the outsized weight of responsibility Discord places on community owners even among social media as a whole, it is much more difficult than many realize to organize a competing community compared to the old days, though.

I'm honestly not sure where the solution lies here myself.

[Ransu]

I want to say the biggest reason for endgame burnout is the pace that the community expects of players, which is literally even more stringent than WoW's of all things, and the fact that XIV's community is built around the "unity" part of "community" to such an unhealthy level.

Ideally, you should be able to take your time, gear up, and push through Savage (or EX, too) at the pace which you find comfortable.

In reality, it turns out anything but. PF puts up the Duty Complete wall as soon as it possibly can get away with it, so there's an uncomfortable push to always rush content as soon as it comes out, and thus correspondingly to have to tackle it with the very minimum gear or close, as if you take your time you are cut off from an increasingly large portion of the playerbase and increasingly forced to stew with the crowd that has two left feet (plus, with the way mechanics are nowadays, it does not take a very high percentage of the playerbase to be stumblebums to make the majority of parties effective non-starters from the very first).

The community's compassion for the left behind is extremely poor, with the dominant response to complaint about this state of affairs being "well, you should have rushed it when everyone else was." In other words, exacerbating the whole "you need to week one it" (or in the case of EX, often day one it, and too bad if you work full time on Tuesday) mentality that contributes so much stress.

Almost everything in XIV tends to be dominated by a very small number of large Discord communities, so alternative mindsets also tend to be heavily suppressed in this way too (especially due to the extreme weakness of FCs compared to guilds in virtually every other MMO in regards to endgame activity) - failure to conform to the established culture inevitably results in the moderators issuing the "shut up or pack up (and go)" ultimatum (just ask me how I know, lol). Due in no small part to the outsized weight of responsibility Discord places on community owners even among social media as a whole, it is much more difficult than many realize to organize a competing community compared to the old days, though.

I'm honestly not sure where the solution lies here myself.

It goes both ways and it sucks either way. They didn't used to have the duty complete stuff in PF. It was just an open field of players joining clear groups with having no clue what they are doing. Not everyone does it, but there's always that 1 player that doesn't want to join practice parties and would hope to get carried through a clear. Modern PF ya it sucks if you miss out as the practice parties become less and less, but its just the nature of end game. You can always make your own PF at that point and you're more than likely to get people to join.

[Amarande]

It goes both ways and it sucks either way.

Yeah, sometimes I've wondered if the addition of Duty Complete was a mistake. The long term downsides seem at least as much as the upsides, unless there's something I'm missing in such an assessment.

Also the player culture here is EXTREMELY rigid regarding it. For instance, in WoW, it was so common to let people into raid PUGs without the stated credentials that it was pretty much a safe assumption that when joining any given group that there will be at least one or two less experienced players in the party. In XIV, if you, as leader, take down the Duty Complete requirement to let someone in after having previously had it up, there is a strong sense of massive social faux pas to the point of feeling you're only barely on the good side of "actually reportable."

Also for that matter, it always feels like PF leaders here have very limited real authority over their groups, rather they are expected to simply be representatives of "the community." Not only on things like that, but also on matters like strategy. It was another thing that soured any desire I had to bother with the second Eden tier: regardless of how much I knew that Ilya was a terrible strategy and I should be using Ayatori or the other one I forget the name of offhand, I was to understand that did not matter. I'm on NA, "NA PF" - which I am to apparently understand as a monolithic meta-guild rather than as a loose collection of individual group leads and their joiners - uses Ilya, therefore, I should just suck it up and learn a crappy strategy and even attempting to post otherwise would be basically just spitting into the wind.

In fact, NA strats routinely feel like stressful rubbish to me, while the JP strats seem developed with PUG comfort and reliability first, like a PUG strat should. But JP would mean a 170+ ping, language barrier, and the anxiety that if I ever bite off more than I can chew, I could be permanently added to a do not party list and have to transfer back in sackcloth and ashes to NA to even get to play at all.

I'd really like to see these monolithisms broken up, and broken up hard, and players encouraged to develop their own playstyles (subject only to the "okay, can you find n-1 others to join you?" pressure rather than to a whole community).

But I'm still not sure how, short of somehow being able to convince people in quantity to move off Discord (because that platform is no good for making a public community unless you have an absurd amount of free time to mod or you're basically okay with you and everyone who joins being permabanned from the platform eventually), or FCs actually being able to thrive in the way that guilds do in WoW or SWTOR (thus being able to form groups with little or no hivemind contact) ...