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

[Amarande]

I guess I'll just say this on Savage: It is content that is unlike any other content in the game because it is utterly unforgiving and often times cruel and unfair, not because of the game design but because of the people that interact with it, and unfortunately that is something that the FFXIV team has never really addressed before. They can see the metrics and understand the rate that people clear it, but they have little insight into the pains that organizers at different levels have for dealing with the content, and I've been through many heart breaks with this style of content over the past few years.

The fact is that there is just too wide a disparity in the personal lives of people and the circumstances of internet connectivity to dogpile everyone into the same pile with savage tier content as it stands.

Indeed, which is partly what the whole "megaDiscord" community paradigm that the XIV playerbase so loves also misses: you, as you said, literally can't dogpile everyone together.

Some people are lucky enough to live in Southern California where they get a tiny ping to FFXIV (just as I, living in Chicagoland, get a sub-20 ping to WoW when I play that, because Blizzard has a data center in the city). Some live on the East Coast, or in Oceania prior to the introduction of Materia, and can barely play some classes optimally because of the ping. It is unfair to expect the same class perfection from both.

Some people work from home or don't have a day job and can put many more hours a day into practicing a video game, while some of us work demanding outside the home warehouse jobs where we're away from a computer (or even from mobile social apps) for 10 hours a day and then come home tired. It is unfair to place the same learning pace expectations on both.

Etc.

Unless an idea of the megaDiscord culture really is, intentionally, exactly the sinister one that comes to mind: namely, that the solution to this is for one (naturally, it will be the most driven group with the most free time) subgroup of players to dominate and subjugate all mainstream endgame play to the point that players that do not fit into that class begin to feel unwelcome and drop out, unless they are fortunate enough to find a static separate from the hivemind (but seeing this hivemind tends to control the primary static recruitment venues too, this is not encouraging) - thus leaving an effectively unified playerbase through exclusion.

I should hope not, but I've been getting that vibe through several years of sifting throgh Discords until I ultimately gave up on the platform (and the rest of MSSM, really) altogether ...

[Ransu]

I'm on the east coast and my average ping is around 80....that's hardly an issue.

[Colt47]

I'm on the east coast and my average ping is around 80....that's hardly an issue.

It's more like the life situation of someone else impacts everyone else in the group and due to the difficulty to clear, unless the people have a huge number of hours to grind and very good synergy with timing pots and other factors, it takes too long to get through the final stretch. People often say that groups have to have the right chemistry to stick together long enough to clear a savage, but really it comes down to not having problems from real life and avoiding burnout. That and people setting expectations on the first two or three fights, then not realizing what they are in for on the final stretch because of the increased difficulty and gear requirements.