The difficulty of Normal Content in this game needs to increase.

[Kolaina]

Players are bad because the content it too easy, up the content and then people will be forced to get better you do it.

It's treating the root cause

Id argue players are bad because the community is soft. Point out a mistake someone’s making and get chewed by the rest of the party / alliance.

The game tries to teach players. But players complained and content gets dumbed down. Aurum vale 2nd boss now has visible markers when the fight was intended to make sure you knew the mechanics by name. Bardums mettle 2nd boss is 100% mechanic and you only need 1 person capable for the group to pass.

If you want to wall off players, do it in solo content. Or allow players to speak up with critique when someone isn’t pulling their weight. But I still say OP is just an elitist who wants to raise the bar too high when you consider the other threads they start

[Kes13a]

But I still say OP is just an elitist who wants to raise the bar too high when you consider the other threads they start

they do seem to start a lot complaining about other players skill level.

if my friends and I run something and someone is, to put it kindly, struggling, we will laugh about it after, and then go into the next dungeon. The OP seems to stew about it and think their elite skills should not be witnessed by the rest of us mere mortals. I dont know if there are any good answers. MSQ should never be gated to a certain skill level, since the end result will be loss of subs. side content, different story since all that is optional.

[Gemina]

Just a take on XIV's poor design when it comes to content.

The average skill level of people in this game is terribly low.

The Dungeons and Trials along the way do NOTHING to help people get better at the game. The difficulty of content never changes, so the average player has no reason to get better.

The game does not get harder the longer you play it.

The gap between normal and extreme content only exists because the normal content of the game is so stupidly easy and doesn't get any harder as the game progresses.

Push people out of their comfort zone, Slowly increase the difficulty of content as the expansions go on.

Try not to worry about things like this too much. NM content isn't really intended to be difficult as the skill levels of the casual players who want to get through it are all over the place.

Just try to focus on finding content in the game you do find enjoyable instead of attempting to rearrange cement.

[Absimiliard]

Again, increasing the difficulty of normal content is not going to increase player skill. This has been clearly demonstrated by the game's gradual increase in difficulty over the years. Your average player still ineffectually flails around like it's 2002, and the most dangerous enemy they've ever faced is a bipedal hyena with a higher body count than God.

Rather than improve, people whined until SE changed the TOS to make telling people to git gud a bannable offense. Hell, I half expect them to do away with vuln stacks at some point because a rather disconcerting number of people now consider the debuff a form of shaming. Not that vuln stacks helped anyway. They placed additional stress on healers while at the same time completely failing to teach players not to stand in the dumb.

[RyuDragnier]

What they need is to have more intermediate level content that falls somewhere between Normal and Extreme and go all the way up to Extreme+ to have a proper stepping stone for most people to access the harder stuff.

That's the EX trials. Each one is different on the difficulty scale. Just this expansion we have the following from easiest to hardest:

EX1 > EX2 > EX5 > EX3 > EX4

The first EX is a joke that has a safety dorito for almost all of it, and outside of tankbusters the entire party can stack on each other with no real issues. EX2 has a few trouble mechanics that are easily dealt with. EX5 is another safety dorito with some difficult mechanics. EX3 has quite a few trouble mechanics but the higher ilvl makes it a bit easier. EX4 is a fast paced mechanical vomit on par with a Savage fight.

[Effendi]

Just a take on XIV's poor design when it comes to content.

The average skill level of people in this game is terribly low.

The Dungeons and Trials along the way do NOTHING to help people get better at the game. The difficulty of content never changes, so the average player has no reason to get better.

The game does not get harder the longer you play it.

The gap between normal and extreme content only exists because the normal content of the game is so stupidly easy and doesn't get any harder as the game progresses.

Push people out of their comfort zone, Slowly increase the difficulty of content as the expansions go on.

No.

There are ways to increase your personal challenge without impacting the community at large.

And if the ultimate's don't do it for you no more, I'm sure there are other more interesting games out there for you.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

No.

There are ways to increase your personal challenge without impacting the community at large.

And if the ultimate's don't do it for you no more, I'm sure there are other more interesting games out there for you.

Doesn't look like they've cleared the savage tier yet, so maybe they are complaining about low player skill there?

[Amarande]

But they won't get any harder because apparently the devs consider Orbonne Moastery so impossibly hard that it's the only Alliance Raid with an Echo buff...

The trouble is the other 23 adds you bring into the boss fight with you.

There's only so far you can go with that many randomly matched players before it becomes impractical due to the probability of any such matched group having a few potatoes in it. Exhibit A: The uselessness of LFR in WoW in basically every tier that can't be made virtually sub-CT levels of braindead. Case rested. LOL

What I could get behind, however, is an extra difficulty level to help better prepare people for the more difficult content, and then use this extra difficulty level as a requisite to enter the more difficult content, e.g., savage or extreme, rather than the only requisite simply being to finish the story.

The former is great (it seems something lacking in general - to the level of being a zeitgeist issue, there was actually a news comment thread on Y Combinator the other day where parents were comparing how kids sports were in their day to their kids' day: "semi-casual" leagues with a modicum of seriousness have been disappearing there too, leaving the participation-trophy leagues and the super serious competitive travel leagues as all there is. I even have to wonder if younger generations' opinions on team events in general are differently enough colored by that shift as to make it a major reason for people being on different pages here as well?).

The latter would be terrible, because eventually (and for very rapid paces of "eventually" in this community) the leg-up difficulty would be deserted, leaving later comers stranded. Imagine if we had this with EW launch? What's that, you didn't have a work from home job and the place you do work doesn't have a permissive enough policy that you can sit at your desk and do remote desktop shenanigans to game the queue, so you could barely play till the rush died down? The community's words would be all too clear - "TOO BAD." GCBTW, though, right?

One still needs to play the game of finding BiS for their job and mix in tome gear, but even that isn't too bad and only takes a few weeks of farming.

It's more than a few weeks, unless it's shifting to another same-role job.

Which is another lovely problem we have here. There's a role shortage, but we don't want those durned DPS to slack on gear, so we don't lower ilvl requirements, so anyone who switches roles midstream like we were encouraging them to? Oh sorry, now you're stuck in crafted and can't join any of the PFs that we need that role for. Lol. Even WoW is better with this (if you switch to tank or healer there, pretty much all you need is a pulse and not completely paper gear and you're in).

[RyuDragnier]

Doesn't look like they've cleared the savage tier yet, so maybe they are complaining about low player skill there?

Well to be fair, the Savage tier this time is on par with Gordias for difficulty, with the last fight feeling like an ultimate itself.

[Payadopa]

I wish they would incentivise min ilvl as a normal thing to do with a party and if you aren't up for it use a trust that can be set to easy or normal but with less chests or something. Same with trials. The first dungeon run is fun, further ones boring since every dungeon boss only has a gimmick or two. And the homogeneous jobs don't help.