The Masked Carnivale is Some of the Worst Content in FFXIV

[TheRealMadruck]

...for starters, "what is wrong with the FF14 Community" for you. Just because you don't like the responses OP gets doesn't give you the right to generalize the entire FF14 Community about what is wrong with them.

I will respond to most of the post even if I wasn't addressed directly because there is a lot to talk about. I'll highlight key points, but generally address each paragraph as complete as possible.

Whats wrong WITHIN the FF14 community? How is it you directly quote me and yet mischaracterize what I said? As I know reading comprehension is difficult as WITHIN does not imply a whole community but sure I will answer this question. There are segments WITHIN this community that will automatically pounce implicitly negative comments towards anyone who critiques SE or this game to shut them down for speaking their mind.

Firstly, where is your "most" coming from? You throw a "how do you know that?" later down there in my face when I made an educated perception based on JamieRose's history of BLU complaint threads or any complaint about difficult content for that matter, yet you seem to be perfectly fine using "most" or "typically 20% or less of players" with your source being "trust me bro". Pick your poison, either it is ok for both of us to use it or stop being a hypocrite, be the better debater and post your sources and statistics.

The mere existence of 3rd party plugins does not imply "most" people complete difficult content with minor or significant help from them, only that it is possible and most likely that certain groups do. Speaking from experience as a long-term Savage + Ultimate raider + raid leader since Stormblood, reliance on 3rd party plugins to play has been generally met with negative opinions and has been ground for replacement, especially after the DSR World First race. If a playerbase relies on them, that isn't bad game design, that is a terrible community mentality - the entire game can be done with console-only players. It is a choice people make, not a requirement.

As for the pandering argument, I'm heavily assuming that World of Warcraft is a key contributor here. What WoW did was pandering most of their resources to raiding and combat design, which is where I sympathize with the playerbase of being disappointed. Comparing this to Final Fantasy XIV, which has evolved to have many different types of content available for a wide variety of core groups and minority groups, is equal to comparing apples to oranges. If FFXIV lacks anything, it is a reasonable difficulty curve rather than the vertical difficulty spikes we have now when going from Normal to EX to Savage.

Are you seriously asking me how I know how many players are using illegal addons? I will not mention this illegal addon but learn to do a basic internet search will you! You can directly see total downloads of it on its web page versus going to another website to see the total number of people who have gotten savage clears via achievements. This isn't rocket science!

BLU has a difficulty curve, it is called the Masked Carnivale. You pick up tricks and concepts from doing previous stages and rearrange what you learned for later stages. It doesn't have an easy mode because the stage progression IS the easy mode until you are good enough for the final stages. It can be broken with a wide variety of spells abusing debuffs, elemental weaknesses, physical weaknesses, conditional effects and more. It is clear that they don't intend to give you the final bits of BLU story for free just like how a JRPG has you go through the motions of beating progressively harder bosses to progress the story.

Congratulations on grasping the main critique from the original poster. The critique is how Blu content does not coincide with the other standards of the game as everything else does as I stated in my original post i.e. normal raids vs savage.

Massively disingenuous take that doesn't split up the "80-90% who don't care about savage" into its subsections, which would then lead down to a healthy pie chart actually indicating this is a theme park MMORPG with various minority content being done by varyingly sized groups of players.

PVE is more than just Normal, EX, Savage and Ultimate, there are raids of varying difficulty and sizes, dungeons, criterion dungeons, deep dungeons, exploration zones, hunting (well, before it became a 200+man zerg fest), Treasure Maps, Blue Mage. Besides PVE; PVP has had a solid surge with mixed reception, but more than a dry stain of a blood before 6.1. Various side activities and progression paths exist - housing (apartments and smalls count), island sanctuary, Gold Saucer GATEs, Triple Triad, Chocobo Racing, Mahjong, Crafting + Gathering to become self sufficient, get sufficient gear at ease and have a stable Gil source, hell the community finds its own way to make content for themselves like FC events, screenshot contests (discounting 3rd party plugin stuff)... your perception of "Savage/Ultimate content is for a minority" is skewed because there is a ton of content that likely addresses minorities.

I can tell you don't like or know factual stats huh? Let me again break it down. Compare the total estimated players from either SE's own posts or the estimated players based on achievements which any person can do in less than 10 secs on another site. Then compare that to the total number of players who have gotten the Apotheosis Agria I achievement. So my perception is not skewed but generally accurate. Math is amazing!

Now for the one that addresses me - as I mentioned at the top, I don't have clairvoyance nor do I claim such. What I have is experience, both in the sense that I know that the game is infinitely less unfair, difficult and punishing than some claim it is which is why I explained each of their issues AND in the sense that from experience every time I saw Jamie post about Blue Mage it has been overwhelmingly negative, complaining about the "difficulty" a disproportionately large amount of times and making comments like "I would really think that person should be fired." or "I would not be the least bit sad if it was erased from the game.".

And similarly as mentioned above, claiming a "vast number of them (players who actually do BLU)" is relying on addons to clear BLU content based on some download statistics that may or may not be related to BLU raiding / MC is not only far-fetched, it is extremely difficult to prove. Does it include all regions or only NA/EU/West? What are the numbers based on? Do players who try a plugin once and then don't use it for BLU count?

Please, do me a favour, if you are going to talk about numbers and statistics throughout a post then actually give us the sources of your numbers - if you claim things, then the burden of proof is on you.

Do you know what a reasonable inference is? Do you know you can make pretty accurate assumptions based on statistics again ANYONE can google if they know how to use the internet. Let me help you. Search for "FF14 total number of active players". Then compare the estimated numbers versus total who have completed Apotheosis Agria I. Not hard! As for your "burden of proof" comment, I will be as vague as possible because I will not provide voice nor mention to illegal addons from third parties on here. And you are right about one thing, I don't like addons because of its implications within the game or players who have to cheat the game while they claim to "get gud" to others. This may not be you, but this includes many I have seen firsthand in game over 10 years since Beta and when one specific illegal addon became more popular.