People Enjoy hard Games

[Atelier-Bagur]

When most of the challenge is coordinating other players to perform well rather than yourself, then thats not challenge, thata just frustrating.

Its why trying to use the Dark Souls or Elden Ring analogy doesnt apply with MMOs because the reason its super popular is because those are solo challenges which have more room for finding satisfaction and reward.

Im not too keen with FFXIV's strict and formulaic raid design where almost everything is a straight dance. It got boring for me after a while.

No joke, I had more fun running Dun Scaith with randos than Pandemonium with people I mostly know because theres a larger margin of error and good players can still save the whole group from large mistakes rather than one player messing up the whole raid. Hot take here

[Absimiliard]

Its why trying to use the Dark Souls or Elden Ring analogy doesnt apply with MMOs because the reason its super popular is because those are solo challenges which have more room for finding satisfaction and reward.

Pretty much hit the nail on the head here. I believe this is a big part of the raid scene in MMOs across the board going into decline as it has. Part of it is of course also the result of the genre itself being in a state of decline, but that's a different discussion entirely. At the end of the day, most people do want a challenge. Thing is players nowadays tend to prefer facing challenges on their own terms and overcoming them on their own merits, absent the help (or more likely hindrance) of others. The herding of cats truly does typify your average MMO raiding experience, and that just gets old after a while.

No joke, I had more fun running Dun Scaith with randos than Pandemonium with people I mostly know because theres a larger margin of error and good players can still save the whole group from large mistakes rather than one player messing up the whole raid. Hot take here

I'm not so sure if this is a hot take. Burnout is real, and it's becoming increasingly common these days. Most of the raiders I know have decided to become casual players and use the game to unwind after work. They turn a Soulslike or whip out ye olde Battle Toads if they want to overcome a challenge.

[Post]

Here's the thing though, Dun Scaith has teeth.

It's recoverable, but it has teeth.

Compare it to Nophica, who is basically the endboss for sirensong sea (except she hits the tank less hard) and Menphina who will actually aim her half room cleave at 0 players in a raid of goddamn 24.

There's too much difficulty and not allowing your support jobs to step up and save the run between so many body checks, and such tight mechanics that there's basically only one way to actually succeed something that appears complex, and then there's enough difficulty that players at least feel engaged by more than just the sound and graphic design. You know, like a game. Not a movie.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Here's the thing though, Dun Scaith has teeth.

It's recoverable, but it has teeth.

The last in each set of alliance raids keeps better than the two before it, since they're closer to the item level sync. Compare World of Darkness to Labyrinth of the Ancients, or Paradigm's Breach to Copied Factory, or Orbonne (even after Thunder God's nerf) to Rabanastre.

[Post]

The item level difference isn't what makes Halone do the first mechanic twice in a row just in case the concept of "she telegraphs 4 attacks in sequence" was too hard for one person in 24 to wrap their brain around, or the 'three separate cages' mechanic from the first alliance raid series that players are required by the MSQ to have played yet easier because you don't need to coordinate who goes where at all.

Anyways, every fight in Ivalice is tougher than Euphrosyne (even Belias can have some players screw up and wipe the raid), even with that ilvl difference.

I can't speak to Aglaia on release, but damn if I didn't even conceive of dying a single time on my first time through, especially when compared to LotA and The Copied Factory. I wasn't playing those two right on release week either.

[shiraneko]

Creativity is rewarded in Elden Ring. You can beat the same boss in wildly different ways depending on your build, the tools you use, and the way you approach the fight. FF14 offers none of this. FF14 asks you to dance a specific dance, and if you are at-level there are generally no alternative steps you can take. FF14 has right answers and wrong answers, and sometimes a continuum between them along which you can be more or less right. Creativity can help you find the solution, but it can't help you find a meaningfully different one.

Other games also have a "correct" way to beat an encounter, but either the meta isn't there yet or the community doesn't push into it. In elden ring and other souls games you can say you have creativity to beat a boss, but there's always going to be the build or rotation or strategy that beats it the fastest. Elden ring being a single player game, there's no push to play optimally other than speedrunning.. but take Monster Hunter World for example, after the DPS meter became standard in coop it's clear what builds are better sometimes you would even get shunned for not doing enough dps or not being meta. Same in Tera where before the DPS meter was standard people did whatever they want, then afterwards it became about playing optimally. So, you can be creative and play as an ice mage in 14 too, but that's obviously not optimal. Similarly pretty much any encounter that requires doing damage has "the" solution. This is especially true in 14 because doing damage is the only metric that matters in a boss fight (ex: CC, dispelling, almost doesn't exist at all), and the way that you output that damage has basically no variance because they're tuned around job rotations that are balanced to all be within a few % of their role. Also because 14 is a tab target where you just lock on the boss and do damage, unlike other action combat games where active evading/blocking and hitting/missing the target is a thing.

[shiraneko]

This is why healers are in a bad spot right now imo. Since the only metric that matters is damage, you're just naturally pushed into doing damage because it's optimal. Under this design philosophy, you can either give healers a more complex damage kit to make them less boring, or make the healing requirement higher by having more incoming damage, but you can't really do the latter without changing how encounters are fundamentally right now (more random bursty damage, moving away from encounters being a dance and more randomness, harder heal checks like those in wow) Also just making the healing kit/rotation more complex won't work without also changing boss encounters because then it'll just be more healing kit that you don't need (which is already the case for anything not ultimate or week1-4 savage).

I've only played wow briefly but I enjoyed healing in it a lot because of how many skills you had to work with and it pushed you into using the whole kit during high damage instances, which came in a variety of ways such as pools that don't instantly kill you but do a lot of dmg, removable stacking dots/debuffs, aoe heals not being able to cover everyone bc they only target 4-5 people so you had to group people up and/or work with your cohealers, and just harder heal checks in general. It would be nice if Yoship took notes and tried to change up the encounter design to make things more dynamic. But I'm kind of losing hope.. because every patch that has come out since I started playing (4.3) has been the dumbing down of healers and other jobs. :/

[RitsukoSonoda]

Other games also have a "correct" way to beat an encounter, but either the meta isn't there yet or the community doesn't push into it. In elden ring and other souls games you can say you have creativity to beat a boss, but there's always going to be the build or rotation or strategy that beats it the fastest. Elden ring being a single player game, there's no push to play optimally other than speedrunning.. but take Monster Hunter World for example, after the DPS meter became standard in coop it's clear what builds are better sometimes you would even get shunned for not doing enough dps or not being meta. Same in Tera where before the DPS meter was standard people did whatever they want, then afterwards it became about playing optimally.

The "DPS Meta" for Monster Hunter games however was a double edged sword that created it's own share of problems due to the builds being glass cannons that got carted if the monster so much as sneezed (or farted in the case of a certain pink monkey) on the player resulting in a higher percentage of failed quests due to people playing with something beyond their skill level just because something online told them it was the "correct build". World/Iceborn/Rise/Sunbreak I primarily used an "Immortal" Gunlance build that may take an extra couple minutes to kill a monster but would shrug off just about everything that did hit me. Exceptions would be autocart skills like Safi Jiva's Sapphire Star and Behemoth's Ecliptic Meteor. However I could face tank Alatreon's unmitigated AoE when people failed to break it's horns. Rise/Sunbreak lacks monsters with instacart by design attacks so I could literally AFK in the middle of fighting anything and still be standing when I get back to the game. Clearing 100% of hunts going 2-3 min slower is still far more productive than only clearing 30% of hunts because of quest failures due to excessive carting.

FFXIV's "DPS Meta" exists because the game lacks these kinds of variables. It's basically just get highest ilvl gear, slot materia for preferred substat not already capped on each gear piece by default, then press skill buttons in order while following footsteps on dance floor. For the most part it's just a matter of how long it takes people to paint said footsteps on the floor for others to follow.

[Renathras]

The only thing being spoken by the people in that case is that there's a lot of reasons to pick SMN. What people don't seem to realise is that not everyone who plays SMN enjoys it. Just like how not everyone who did Eureka enjoyed it.

Isn't this true of all content, though?

Not everyone who does Ultimates, Savages, Extremes, Criterion, etc enjoys it. Not everyone that plays X Job (fill in X with literally any Job in the game) enjoys it.

Unless you have a scientific, official poll of people to determine how many people play a Job and enjoy it vs those that play the Job and don't enjoy it, this is a meaningless argument since it applies to literally everything. "People like BLM because it's a challenge! This proves people want Jobs to be more challenging!" "Well, not everyone that plays BLM enjoys it, just like how not everyone who did Eureka enjoyed it."

Would you accept that as a valid counter argument?

You could try to move the goalpost "SURELY no one plays BLM unless they enjoy it! It's not like it does more damage, can be a ranged Melee, or has any advantage or benefit where anyone would pick it over an easier Job!" isn't really a valid argument, either because (as I sarcastically stated in that imaginary quote) there are advantages BLM holds over SMN and RDM that might make people feel pressured to play it even if they don't really personally enjoy it or what it requires of them.

.

So you can't really use this as an argument. ESPECIALLY since it's not in vacuum:

WAR is one of the top played Tanks (even before it became top damage, it was still highly played)
WHM is the most played Healer (despite it being the least meta choice and weakest overall)
DNC is the most played Ranged (this also destroys the argument WAR and WHM are only most played because they start at level 1, as DNC clearly does not)
SGE is the second most played Healer and is the second easiest and easier than its competition, SGE (again debunking the "starts at level 1" argument)
RPR is the most played Melee outside of JP (and 2nd there) and SAM the most played in Japan (2nd in the West), and they are the two easiest of the Melees to play to most people (again debunking the "starts at level 1" argument)

The people kind of have spoken.

My personal philosophy is the game should have a range of Jobs from simple to complex (but you know and disagree with this), but the alternative is them all being WAR/WHM/DNC/SMN-like. I just think they need to stop changing existing Jobs. Adding new Jobs for new playstyles is the way to go. If they want "simple BLM" in the future, they need to leave BLM alone and just add a new Caster "elementalist" or whatever to fill that niche. Don't take from people what they already have, that's my view. And this goes both for making Jobs simpler and for making them more complex than they currently are.

[Rolder50]

Again I want to point out that having a lot of players on a job does not mean the job is good. People will flock to the easiest job specifically because it's easy. Lowest common denominator and all that.