Duty Complete should mean duty complete :)

[Raven2014]

Filling and leaving PFs is a significant time cost,

Then I suggest you economize your time. Yes some PF does take a lot of time to fill, but for me it has never been waste time 'cause I don't just sit around. Either I do some solo stuff while waiting, or I tab out playing/watching something else. If you spend 1h just starring at the screen while waiting your party to fill ... again that's a you problem.

Just like I said in the other thread I don't answer the question "is this patch worth 4 months of waiting", 'cause it's not like I stopped doing everything else for it to drop before moving on.

especially if you're in the habit of leaving early.

I feel now you're just trying to shift the narrative to a different thing. I don't leave PF early if the issue doesn't stem from dishonesty. I had spent entire lock out on "clear" party, sometime even two lockout with the same party without a clear. We took turn making mistake round robin style, but no one lied about their progress so it's fine. Just like I normally don't leave after a few bad pull in a "re-clear" party when there is no bonus pop up, 'cause like other had note, even in a party when everyone is legit/honest doesn't mean it will be smooth sailing.

I leave early simply due to a simple reason: I don't want to obligate the people who are not honest. And like ... isn't that your issue as well? And this is such a stupid argument as well. Say, if it's simply because I spent an large amount of time/resource into a deal with someone who tried to scam me, I simply obligate to go through with it or I'm the bad guy?

I don't practice sunk cost fallacies, and yes I'm damn proud of it.

But some people like me are just so "spoiled" that this game of lying and not respecting other peoples' time or their wishes isn't such a trivial thing

My dude I don't even know what you're ranting about any more. The reason I disagree with your suggestion because it takes away the legit applicable way using C41 [Duty Complete] and make it much more difficult for "honest" people. Yes people can be dishonest, but the game provide an effective way to make your own inform decision (bonus warning). I'm always of the opinion that yes, rule and law should be made to the deter bad actors, but they should never reach a point when it will also punish good people for the shake of deterring those bad actors, which is exactly what your suggestion will do.

But you're shifting your goal post around now that I don't think you're actually complaining about anything any more, but merely for the shake of contrarian.

[MakoMight]

My dude, chill out a bit. I just posted a reply, and you seem to be assuming everything I wrote is me disagreeing with everything you wrote, which as you pointed out is not the case. Talk about overdramatizing

[Raven2014]

Just have to cover all base 'cause like I said I don't even know what is the issue you're making the topic for, since what I thought was the reason you already said is not. I can stop making assumption once you're honest and present your argument.

Can't argue with people using a shotgun approach when you're purposely dancing around. :P

And at the end of the day, I'm not the one who came to the forum to make a thread about an issue that was well within my ability to control, that was you.

[MakoMight]

Sheesh, talk about moving the goalpost. I actually explained quite well what the misunderstanding was, but if you want to intentionally misread everything in bad faith... there's a simple explanation why none of the arguments seem to make sense!

[Raven2014]

I didn't make the thread, you did. So unlike you, I don't have a goal post to move.

[MakoMight]

Make that two of us confused then? You don't know why I made that thread I don't know why you're arguing against imaginary arguments

[Amarande]

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.

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")?

[Absimiliard]

Naah, if you bothered to read the very first post on the thread you'd know the only thing I'm pretending is I shouldn't be able to put up a duty complete loot party for a duty I haven't completed

But please do explain to me if you think that you should be able to!

Sounds to me like maybe you should quit being so defensive and instead consider the rest of the thread to find out what others might be reacting to.

But seriously, just curate your groups. Your initial gripe completely ceases to be a problem when you just don't let inadequate players join. Though, you do seem to have a few misconceptions. For one, it is not the "culture" of NA for people that haven't cleared to put up clear groups. This happens in every region that isn't JP, and even then the lack of it in JP is because they use PF almost exclusively for practice and DF for clears. Throwing up clear groups when you haven't cleared, barring cases where it's someone looking to clear again on an alt, is mostly just written off as a dick move, and it'll get you blacklisted super hard by the competent portion of the PF raiding community if you keep doing it. The other thing you appear to have a misconception about is the frequency of these of "pseudo-statics." More people clear with complete randoms than they do with the aforementioned pseudo-statics, though some PF players do form them.

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.

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.

I can't help but feel you fundamentally misunderstood something somewhere along the way. At what point is expressing annoyance at "failing" to things completely beyond your control entitlement? To be annoyed at losing out through no fault of one's own is quite human, and it does not indicate any sort of a sense of entitlement whatsoever. Particularly if you then proceed to solve this problem by curating your groups. Once again, I reiterate that curation of groups is a fine practice. The OP is indeed correct in their assertion that no one is entitled to a clear. If you aren't good enough, you deserve to be excluded. Simple as that. People that suck do not deserve help, unless that help is in the form of teaching them to not suck. People that don't suck will eventually clear if they keep at it.

My time is valuable. You want to learn the game? Sure, I'll try to teach you. The raiding community as a whole can only benefit from having a greater supply of capable players. If, however, you're some bumbling idiot in PF expecting a carry, why should I waste my time? Git gud or get out. Either way, I'll just keep right on excluding people as I see fit. And for the record, people clear savage in PF all the time. It takes a little extra time and effort, but dogged determination will see the job through to its end all the same.

In summation:

[Amarande]

But seriously, just curate your groups. Your initial gripe completely ceases to be a problem when you just don't let inadequate players join. Though, you do seem to have a few misconceptions. For one, it is not the "culture" of NA for people that haven't cleared to put up clear groups. This happens in every region that isn't JP, and even then the lack of it in JP is because they use PF almost exclusively for practice and DF for clears.

That curating your groups is a good idea isn't debated, I'm pretty sure. A main debate in this thread however is just how one may acceptably go about doing this, with how limited PF's tools are.

I suppose then in the long run, it's really going to come down to "the ingame tools are not sufficient to allow effective curation" and therefore that most people should in fact either be pushing harder to get and commit to statics (like how the advice in WoW always is "get a guild" even if it means distancing from your friends to commit to formal affiliation to a raiding guild) or be using passworded groups filled via social media communities?

As I suggested: PUGs just don't work that great. When they do, it's usually either because the content is relatively trivial(ized) at that point so you don't need to fuss much about who joins, or because the people doing the content are upper tier players (e.g., "the hardcore rush" at the very beginning of content) whose skill covers for the disadvantages of random grouping; in between, the viability of the PUG paradigm itself might simply be very limited, unless you get lucky or you can push many hours in a single session without breaking (so as not to have to lose so much time on getting the group "in sync" - not to mention the greater chance of going zero to clear which eliminates a lot of the problems ITT on the face).

Throwing up clear groups when you haven't cleared, barring cases where it's someone looking to clear again on an alt, is mostly just written off as a dick move, and it'll get you blacklisted super hard by the competent portion of the PF raiding community if you keep doing it.

I actually have to wonder now how much impact this factor really does have.

Were many of us perhaps then simply screwed from a few fits of frustrated pique early in our endgame careers, especially if we came over from other MMOs where the PUG community was more sanguine about people trying to speed up their progress in this way?

Which means a perception that PF has declined or is unusually unproductive compared to others' accounts may actually be indicative that the better players have gone behind your back on Discord for already-committed sins and noted you down as someone not to join, at which point nothing might be able to really improve matters short of forming a static with people outside that culture (which, judging by the size of The Balance, seems to be pretty dang consolidated at this point)?


And thus that combined with the "stalky Lodestone" flaw there really might not be much left after that but to either give up current endgame altogether or start all over from "Hear, feel, think" and the ride to Gridania with the twins?

(Come to think of it, I'd also noticed during the last few times I'd tried current EX/Savage - around 4.4-5.2 - PF seemed to be markedly better if I joined someone else's party than if I created it, suggesting that my name being on the PF is already a scarlet letter ...)

The other thing you appear to have a misconception about is the frequency of these of "pseudo-statics." More people clear with complete randoms than they do with the aforementioned pseudo-statics, though some PF players do form them.

To be also fair, in many games, the upper tier is also sufficiently narrow that some of this pseudo-staticity phenomenon likely occurs as a natural outcome (the fewer players in a pool, the more often they meet each other - you see it for instance in top tier PvP in most games even with nominally random matching).

I can't help but feel you fundamentally misunderstood something somewhere along the way. At what point is expressing annoyance at "failing" to things completely beyond your control entitlement? To be annoyed at losing out through no fault of one's own is quite human, and it does not indicate any sort of a sense of entitlement whatsoever. Particularly if you then proceed to solve this problem by curating your groups.

Sure, but again the problem is this thread seems to waffle both ways on this.

"You should curate your groups." "But how dare you use the few tools available to curate your groups in ways that we don't approve of, why are you even allowed to use those settings?!"

[Absimiliard]

, but again the problem is this thread seems to waffle both ways on this.

"You should curate your groups." "But how dare you use the few tools available to curate your groups in ways that we don't approve of, why are you even allowed to use those settings?!"

I mean, there's always the google doc option for those unable or unwilling to utilize certain "curation aids." I've known people that maintained an impressively comprehensive list of PF players they'd encountered, sorted according to personal skill, adaptability, and ability to work with the team. It was surprisingly effective, although it did leave the list of viable candidates a little bit short at times. Most of them would clear the dossiers at the beginning of each new tier to give a fair chance to everyone, figuring some of the ones they'd blacklisted might've been new or just hadn't found their "legs," so to speak.