Quote Originally Posted by MakoMight View Post
Nobody is entitled to clear hard, team-based content.

The hardest fights in the game take a lot of teamwork and communication. People who PF early week savage or on content ultimates usually form pseudo statics. And sure, I know people who I think had the ability to clear and couldn't because of static drama or whatever, hey, it's not a single player game that's a big part of what the fight requires and a big part of the skillset for raiding. People who think they're above the fray, don't need to deal with learners, or statics, or schedule, or whatever and then get frustrated that clearing is hard need to figure that out, not lie about it. And if your only options is to wait until later in the patch lifecycle when there are lots of vets around to c41 you... you might not be as good or as deserving as you think you are. Sorry, them's the breaks, lying your way to your clear doesn't become okay because you're frustrated.
Quote Originally Posted by Absimiliard View Post
So we're just going to pretend it's not okay to be annoyed when you perform all mechanics in a fight flawlessly, maintain excellent DPS, mitigate/self-heal appropriately, and communicate well with your team of randos only to still fail utterly because nearly every PF group has one or two people that really have no business being there in the first place.
This is all making me wonder if us working adults should basically just understand we're basically all Taylor Swift here.

"Hi, it's me. I'm the problem - it's me."

In other words, especially because of the teamwork and communication matters, the moment we found out we weren't going to have that 9-5 office job with lots of reliable evening time for guilds/statics, it was time to just respectfully bow out of the MMO genre, or to accept that all we deserve is tourist level content (unsync counts in most cases, as except for a few particularly tricky 1-2 xpac old Savage fights, unsync EX/Savage fights tend to even make the average DF dungeon look dangerous).

And by attempting to include ourselves in the PUG world (especially when we also go for the siren song of wanting to be able to play on a flexible basis with a network of friends rather than commit to a specific seven), all we're managing to do is ultimately make MMOs in general worse for everyone - because with these handicaps and the demands of difficult content, PUGs really only work well for the extremes, i.e., either when the content is so far below everyone that it's a cake walk anyway, or when everyone is significantly above average personal skill in order to make up for the lack of nakama-no-kizuna in a random team vs. a static that know each other's habits well.

In fact, that this isn't even a XIV specific thing, it explains certain clashes in WoW as well (where it is further muddied by the fact that a less strict play culture seems to work in the most commonly pugged content - i.e., Mythic+ - as long as the level is not too high, while at the higher levels much the same kind of arguments consistently crop up there as here).

The "entitlement" matter would seem to support this theory as well: older gamers are, I expect, much more likely to support a culture where people deserve to be helped and to get their clears (simply because that's how older RPGs mostly were - if you played long enough - which was largely due to RNG based failures and slow processing times - and didn't give up, you reasonably should expect to get the clear eventually), whereas the modern tendency definitely appears to be to reject this in favor of "sorry, but only some are good enough" and that completionism is not for everyone anymore.

It makes one wonder: is there even still a place for the working adult in cooperative based games anymore, unless in fact our RL is amenable to scheduled play? Or is everything in fact as bleak as this conclusion suggests and it's time to accept that our only choices are trivial (or trivialized) content, solo play, or competitive match based games (where it is generally much more feasible to set players up with appropriate opposition than in PvE games where challenges are much more fixed - i.e., that there has in fact become a total inversion from the old logical chestnut that "competition is serious, cooperation is chill")?