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

[Amarande]

I agree that not everything needs to be subject to absolute efficiency, but the majority of people queueing for roulettes aren't there because we find the encounters fun. Most of us just want it over with.

Yeah, this is the real elephant in the room with roulettes (for dungeons, anyway. For trials and raids, it is the fact that there are over 40 different encounters each, and trials in particular often have tricksy bits that can easily go south if people forgot what to do. Which they will, mind you, if nothing else because of roulettes' natural bias towards the lowest end most braindead content simply because the natural progression of things means they get queued for more often, so you really don't get to stay in practice on things like say Diamond).

In a nutshell, people insist on queuing for stuff that they don't enjoy, then project on the people for whom it is greener and still fun.

The trouble is you need those tomestones, I suppose. Hunt trains help, but that brings in another form of grumpery, as it necessitates that culture of "hunts belong to the Discord, don't touch unless you're told it's ok" and the loss of the ability to just go and pick off a hunt (A ranks were nominally made for 8, right?) with your FC/buddies without catching mass contumely and salt.

But otherwise, what could you do? I guess you can spam PotD at 90 but the weekly time investment in that (it's what, 45 runs to cap? Not counting uncapped needs for crafting etc.) would actually be pretty painful.

But, the whole drive to shave 120 seconds from Sastasha or Cutter's Cry, or Holminster's Switch, or <pick some normal dungeon or trial> drives me bonkers. In the name of saving two minutes, they'll pull too much, kill the tank three times, and of course, completely lose the time they were supposedly trying to save in the first place.

Omg this. It happens on all levels of content too. Savage as well, when I did Sigmascape back in the day basically every O5S group would insist on attempting the ghost cheese, even though almost no PUGs got it right and even one mess up meant losing more time than you stood to save (to be fair, as a healer main, I also can appreciate why the cheese was wanted more and more later in the tier, as there was a mechanical as well as time aspect).

As for the bifurcation of seriousness and loss of the middle, btw, here is the Y Combinator comment I referred to earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34714698

I actually wonder if this is a driver for the ugly shift in MMOs - between working adults feeling pushed out by the time and scheduling issues (therefore, weakening the presence of the older generations) and the younger generations who may have just never really known the "kinda serious, but not like a job" tier culture because team events growing up are now an eerily similar kind of all or nothing?