Another World First Clear got disqualified due to "Cheating"

[ForteNightshade]

I have to agree.

It is niche content anyway. And the people who engage with the content don't even seem to play it at the intended difficulty. People say they want more difficult content, but their actions speak otherwise.

It seems only a percentage of an percantage is playing it without cheating. The main value of ultimates is the PR FF14 gets out of the world first race and streams, but when the only PR is that everyone is cheating in FF14, then there is nothing to gain here.

The main value of Ultimate is keeping a sizable enough portion of the raid scene alive during odd numbered patches. Without it, Savage becomes effectively worthless outside parsing and speed kills which, ironically, is yet another third party aspect XIV doesn't like but won't police because it's profitable. While Ultimate is niche, it's also extremely cost efficient due to the low amount of resources invested into it. Yoshida outright said UwU was roughly 95% reused assets. With the final phase being entirely new since TEA, you could argue it's more 85-90% nowadays. The end result is essentially free content that keeps the raid scene active. As Yoshida put it, Ultimate is aspirational content. UCoB is seven years old and still regularly run to this day. Almost nothing else in the game has that level of longevity. Up until FRU released, both DSR and TOP had handfuls of PFs up daily.

What resources that are invested into Ultimate won't impact casual players whatsoever nor provide any new content. It would simply make a good portion of the raid scene quit, meaning a lot less of the good players in PF helping others clear. After all, what's the point of Savage gear if there's no content that requires it? And no Criterion will not hold interest. The Savage version saw the lowest portion in the game's entire history (2.2% from all three regions combined) because the rewards were dreadful.

I agree. People are just modding/cheating their way through it or straight out buy the kills. There is no need for hard content if people don't want to play it on the intended difficulty.

The vast majority of hard content is effectively souped-up versions of their easier counterpart, thus making them very cost effective. Case in point, while Savage is technically developed first and then scaled down for the Normal equivalent. Very little "extra" is left over. You can gleam this yourself by watching a clear of M1S then do M1N yourself. Almost everything is there in terms of assets and models, which are where the bulk of costs go. The fourth fight is the sole expectation as that gets a separate phase.

Why is this all important? Because if you were to scrap Savage entirely, very little resources would be gained to do anything else. At best, you'd get a 5th Normal mode or a slightly extended version of the four fights (think one extra mechanic). Put another way, Savage and Ultimate wouldn't equate to say, a third Exploratory zone, a completely revamped and revolutionized Island Sanctuary or anything remotely substantial. This isn't unique to XIV either but what virtually all games do when developing harder content/difficulty modes. They're cheap and efficient to keep a portion of the playerbase content without impacting resources much. In XIV's case, the loss of players quitting if both Savage and Ultimate were gone would far outpace any costs or resources saved.

Something to keep in mind is nearly all of the social media presence XIV has comes from the raid scene. All the guide makers, content creators and streamers are predominantly raiders. All of whom would no longer have any reason to play XIV. Especially when this game already has a problem with content longevity.

As for selling clears. That isn't unique to difficulty but rarity. Go have a garner on Ebay and you'll see the Mountain Dew mount that was quite literally "buy a product" levels of "difficulty" going for more than any legacy Ultimate. What it boils down to is if something is rare, some people with money to throw away will, regardless if it's difficult, rare or simply time consuming.

[KuroMaboroshi]

Disregarding the obvious venting surrounding some of them and just trying to address arguments like these...

[...]How about SE makes content like midcore or anything for the majority playerbase then update after update of savages and ultimates? There is your solution.[...]

SE might as well dedicate themselves to make more mid-core content than this.
What the majority of players would play, instead of maybe the top 2% or so.

...in what I hope is reasonably good faith:

Definitions of "midcore" are going to vary so widely that it's a nebulous request. Personally I'd say alongside Extremes, many early Savage fights each tier could easily fall under that label as well. But difficulty is an inherently subjective measurement so that's like arguing taste.

So let's focus instead on engagement, which we can track to some extent. And the truth there is:
Savages (and even a few Ultimates) are more popular than some like to make everyone believe.

According to achievment tracking website FFXIVCollect, roughly 6.3% of tracked characters have cleared the current Savage tier (based on having the achievment). Luckybancho gives a similar number, putting ownership of the M4S mount at around 11.3% of the currently active playerbase. Even if we lowball it (although Luckybancho tracks more overall characters so that one is bound to be more precise, as per FFXIVCollect's own statement) with the first number, and then round further down to 5% to account for an insane amount of alts (which we have no way of proving or disproving actually exist), that is still 5% of people who have cleared the tier. Many more have likely at least attempted it. Looking at PF, many people each week still seem to be trying and they don't show up in the statistics yet.

Looking at older savages for more "final" clear rates is always a bit tricky since unsynching makes them way easier to pass, but if we take the most recent non-Dawntrail Savage, Anabaseios, it sits at a comfortable 10% of players, while the first one, Asphodelos, reaches a whopping 20%, which is likely closer to the amount of people that attempted it. Every fifth player was interested enough in Savage to clear it, even if some of those are late clears or unsynchs.

To put it into another perspective, if we stick solely to FFXIVCollect data points for the rest of this post (which again is probably lowballing those numbers), 23% of people cleared the Normal mode of the current raid tier. So roughly one fourth of those also successfully went through all of the Savage tier.

Also, more people finished this Savage tier than:
-did 20 or more current treasure map dungeons in Dawntrail
-finished their Field records in Bozja/Zadnor
-queued Rival Wings PvP 100 times
I could go through the listings and find many more examples, but the point I'm trying to make is that there are many, many pieces of content in XIV that have an engagement rate of about the same as Savage. Savage is not the one outlier of content that almost no one does that some try to make it out to be. Especially considering many of those pieces of content are significantly older already which should lead to higher completion rates.

And the cherry on top: Some of the older Ultimates even have similar clear rates or higher to the current Savage. Weapon's Refrain sits at a comfy 12% clear rate of tracked characters.

Now, of course one can make the argument that then logically all of those pieces of content should be removed and the game should only ever focus on content that 50%+ of the playerbase engage in. But then even supposed "midcore" content is going to way of the dodo. The last few Extremes of Endwalker, which can by now be unsynced (at which point you're not even really doing the content anymore) sit between 40% and 15%. Not even all Beast Tribe Quests from previous expansiosn, the easiest content of them all, reach 50% completion rates. It's an insane standard to hold any content to.

[ForteNightshade]

As opposed to all the casual and midcore players that keep bleeding off since 7.0 launched because there's nothing noteworthy for them to do right now?

But hey, if FF14 wants to pretend hardcore raiders are all that's needed for a healthy playerbase, I'll send WildStar their way and they can be besties.

The lack of casual or midcore content has quite literally nothing to do with Savage or Ultimate. Neither have any impact on each other. Like I said, you could scrap both and it wouldn't even be the resource equivalent of the current 24 man because everything they offer already exists. That's the entire point. They are cheap, cost efficient content that requires minimal investment. Especially Ultimate.

And you don't have to take my word for it either. As I noted above, Yoshida outright admitted just how little resources are put into Ultimate despite its spectacle. You're trying to conflate two entirely different issues.

So why is there a lack of casual content? Because it's expensive to develop new animations, assets, models and etc and SE doesn't fund FFXIV nearly to the extent it should. Put simply, don't blame raiders for the lack of content, especially when they also want other things to do too. Blame SE for funneling so much of XIV's revenue into their next big failure.

[Kuroka]

That doesn't change the fact that more attention gets put into hardcore content despite being supposedly asset flips only for a sizable portion of it to be CHEATED THROUGH ANYWAY to the point that Yoshida himself was asking "why bother then" at one point.

Its mean but id find it very funny if yoshida actually just cancels the next one... *wishfull thinking*

[IOwn92FCHouses]

That doesn't change the fact that more attention gets put into hardcore content despite being supposedly asset flips only for a sizable portion of it to be CHEATED THROUGH ANYWAY to the point that Yoshida himself was asking "why bother then" at one point.

Whether you like it or not, it's players versus players competing against each other for things to do every patch cycle, and when you get a front-loaded patch for one side and nothing for the other, the casuals and midcore left with nothing are going to be banging on the hardcore's door wondering "what makes you so special" especially when the group being spoiled has the audacity to trivialize what they were given, where it's harder to prove who DOESN'T cheat at this point with how often people keep getting caught, or the general prevalence of third-party tools.

You can blame Square-Enix for creating the scarcity, but we can rightly blame the raiders for preening and crowing about the part of the pie they walked away with and then threw on the ground, smug grin and all.

1) lmao for you thinking the hardcore crowd is being pandered to after the easiest savage tier we've ever had, the worst job balance since hw, and the worst job quality ever.

2) You sure so have a lot of hate for "raiders" considering those players are the reason the other 90% of the community can get through combat content in a reasonable time.

Honestly, the ignorance is cute.

[shigaisen]

Just shut it all down, no one gets to play the game anymore, period. Won't have to worry about cheaters and content of any level if there's no more game.

[Mijeme]

Yoshi P will still make Ultimates for the game but he wont merit or congratulate the World First anymore and I doubt the community regians his trust unless the WF all plays on PS5 Pro.

[Kes13a]

Yoshi P will still make Ultimates for the game but he wont merit or congratulate the World First anymore and I doubt the community regians his trust unless the WF all plays on PS5 Pro.

that works both ways, and the goodwill is running low.

[Atreides]

I don't know why people expect a statement from Yoshida, his last stance on it was like many mentioned before that he won't comment or congratulate world first groups anymore.

[MaxCarnage]

Some people are just so used to modding every game they play that they are unable to play it vanilla. No one should be surprised.