Don't do chaotic raid again

[AllenThyl]

Why are you here? Why do you play the game? Because you have such a seething contempt for the average player. If this game is making you that unhappy, maybe you need to reconsider why you play.

I am here, because I like playing the game. I enjoy having PvP matches with others who also like engaging in PvP. I like learning and doing mechanics, and I like engaging in content, whichever level it is. It's like a sport for me. The point is playing the game itself. Which should also be YOUR motivation. Because if it isn't, that means you are paying for, and spending time, in an activity that you do not like for the activity itself. That's not healthy, that's addiction. We had the same stupid discussion in the "why are people bad and keep staying bad" thread. This kind of behavior, i.e. paying for a game without actually wanting to play the game, is only acceptable with video games (which has some very sinister implications for the state of modern society). If you join a tennis club, buy all the gear for it, but just stand around the court all day, you won't get a nod of approval by the people actually interested in tennis. People will rightly call that out, very likely removing club access, if you become a hindrance in other people's ability to enjoy the tennis provided by the club. However, in video games, the "I don't even like being here" crowd demands everything be catered to them all times with 0 humility and 0 respect for anyone else's time or enjoyment. "You don't pay my sub".

I don't have "seething contempt" for the average player. But I do know what video game addiction looks like, and I do know how comfortable and powerful the delusions are that people have while suffering it. At the end of the day, this is a video game, more importantly, an action combat MMORPG. The point of this game, the point of any game, is the game itself. I find it utterly shocking how many openly state how little they actually like engaging with any battle content that is more than a striking dummy without fail state. With the amount of time some posters here spend arguing, they could have practiced 3 lockouts! Constant demand for "a bit more difficult content", but the slightly increased difficulty of MSQ is now too much, even the easy extreme trials are too much and don't count, nothing ever counts and nothing will ever satisfy these cries. Because fundamentally, they are dishonest. Absolutely, utterly, dishonest. No design or solution can ever satisfy a dishonest requirement.

As I said, the divide is between the people playing "for fun" and those who find playing the game to be fun. The first group is a pain in the butt to have around, because the definition of "fun" is always nihilistic and dismissive of anyone else. It's a selfish and self-soothing, while ultimately self-destructive, behavior. I can experience that from time to time when I zone into a 27 minute ShB+ levelling dungeon in mentor roulette, that has fallen apart because 4 people who are just here to "have fun" managed to draw each other in roulette.

Here is the thing, to get back to the topic. The Chaotic Alliance Raid is good content. The failure is on the community alone, with people joining who are not prepared and not interested to be prepared. Who are lying about their prog point and / or have an overly inflated assessment of their own prog point. 75% clear rate of a mechanic (unless it's the "cursed" pattern) is unacceptably low. Everyone who doesn't like EX level content, well, it's not for you. You aren't the center of the universe. If you aren't interested, you aren't interested, nothing wrong with it, you aren't a lesser being for it. You can buy the rewards with money on the market board, prices will very likely drop. But stop with the endless and dishonest excuses about how rewards you want are gated behind bit more difficult combat content in a combat game you play and pay for.

[ArchlordPie]

I find it worth mentioning that "midcore" in FF14 doesn't actually exist. The two difficulties are "standard" and "high-end", and the only meaningful distinction is "if it was in Raid Finder at some point, it's considered high-end."

Quite frankly, the people who want harder content in 14 that doesn't come with the pre-planning, group coordination, and time commitment required by EX and Savage need to find another game to play. Something like the Mage Tower in WoW would be a much better fit for them. I'd suggest solo Deep Dungeons, but that would come with a heavy time commitment in order to find success.

I absolutely see the appeal of that sort of thing. You can join and leave at any time without ruining the content for everyone else who's participating, it's hard enough that you have to shut the second monitor off and actively play the game, punishing enough that an actual fail state exists yet easy enough that the only time your group sees the fail state is when it REALLY DESERVES to fail... honestly, most of Bozja successfully hit this mark and I'm surprised that we got island sanctuaries of all things instead of another Bozja last expansion.

But don't misunderstand me. Eureka and Bozja are technically "standard" content. Probably about as hard as "standard" is going to get in this game, and that's probably a good thing.

[Mawlzy]

I find it worth mentioning that "midcore" in FF14 doesn't actually exist. The two difficulties are "standard" and "high-end", and the only meaningful distinction is "if it was in Raid Finder at some point, it's considered high-end."

Quite frankly, the people who want harder content in 14 that doesn't come with the pre-planning, group coordination, and time commitment required by EX and Savage need to find another game to play.

You may well be right assuming the current design philosophy persists, but isn't this problematic for the health of the game? If the population you identify leaves, not only does that hit SE's bottom line, it also magnifies the current schism between the remaining populations.

Can the game not adapt to meet the desires of the players?

[Yodada]

A wise man said some time ago. If you want hard and engaging content. Go play Ultimate *Shruge*

[Kaurhz]

Yes, of course, for people who have spent thousands of hours in a game learning absolutely nothing along the way and making no conscious effort to improve, everything above "dodge this 3 second telegraphed AoE" will feel like an insurmountable challenge. If the only measure of "success" one had during all that time was "clearing one way or another, even if dead on the floor for 80% of the fight", that's the player's own fault. Even normal content has lots of different mechanics that can be learned if anyone actually wants to learn. However, experience tell, that just dividing up into the alliance groups and having 4 people stand on the Atomos platform is too much to ask of players with triple digit clears of this dungeon.

A significant portion of the playerbase has used the fact that the normal content is tuned to be forgiving, as an excuse to not learn any mechanics ever. Alexander raids regularly wipe groups because expecting to learn which platform to pull the adds to, or when to turn into a gorilla, or how to freeze a tornado, is toxic elitism. Aetherochemical Research Facitilty features a 2 person enumeration tower. But why learn that, when you could just let the person explode? With current gear scaling most will survive with a sliver of health, or can be rezzed otherwise. Even dead healers are no problems, tanks at that level can solo. And since "completion" is the only quality measure, there is no difference. Same for the Eden raids, just let the enumerations explode, sacrifice some dps instead of soaking their tether. Just heal and rezz through it, never learn.

Whilst I can agree somewhat, I actually think the problem is more on the developers than it is on the players, if failing a mechanic is in many cases inconsequential then players simply aren't going to notice in many cases whether they are doing well or not, and there are far more instances in normal content where it is inconsequential than it is consequential, and more often than not the latter is in older, less modern content, and with the volume of instances, you're only going to encounter these mechanics a handful of times. Since playing this game I've perhaps had Fist of the Son 2-3 times, and much of the execution is only going to come with repetitive practice, something that people doing it on-content had the luxury of, and something players doing it a decade later don't really. There's a small handful of mechanics which are consistent, e.g., tethers or stack markers, but a lot of instances can also have gimmick-y mechanics which are almost always exclusive to that specific instance, e.g., A5N, or are only done a handful of times across the many many instances the game now has.

I've had plenty of casual friends that started mid-Endwalker, and didn't learn as much in those several months as to what they did when doing Dawntrail on-content for a meager 3 weeks, simply because they were only getting most of those duties a handful of times, so I think it is less about being conscious of learning and more being put in the position where it actually matters, and in duties where they can, even on an individual level, e.g., vulnerability debuff, I've seen players just laugh at it, pop a bloodbath and then plunge it into irrelevancy. If the incoming damage on the person isn't consequential then bad habits develop, and this is where the problem is on the devs because they are facilitating bad habits to occur.

Even those that are conscious of learning, most of that is only by luxury of doing it on-patch where there's gear rewards used as actual progression to incentivize them going in more than once or twice, like, most people aren't going to go "Man, perhaps I should go do that 1 Alexander turn again so I can make sure I understand that 1 mechanic which someone else did with the monkey.

[CNitsah]

I've had plenty of casual friends that started mid-Endwalker, and didn't learn as much in those several months as to what they did when doing Dawntrail on-content for a meager 3 weeks, simply because they were only getting most of those duties a handful of times, so I think it is less about being conscious of learning and more being put in the position where it actually matters, and in duties where they can, even on an individual level, e.g., vulnerability debuff, I've seen players just laugh at it, pop a bloodbath and then plunge it into irrelevancy. If the incoming damage on the person isn't consequential then bad habits develop, and this is where the problem is on the devs because they are facilitating bad habits to occur.

FFXIV dev team has a really long history with ignoring how the players interact with the game. Being the Hunts, that we don't do as it is intended, but never tried to change considering how players actually engaged with them. Or the whole deep dungeon being limited to 2 saves, strongly limiting the possibility to just pick up the content on the fly, yet still continuing with that for Eureka Orthos, which ended being dead after a couple of weeks. And those are the one that just come directly in my mind. The only time they recognize that kind of things is when they can use that to change something. Like how players used the optimal path in dungeons anyway. Instead of giving nice drop advantages in those non optimal path, they removed them entirely.

[Kaurhz]

FFXIV dev team has a really long history with ignoring how the players interact with the game. Being the Hunts, that we don't do as it is intended, but never tried to change considering how players actually engaged with them. Or the whole deep dungeon being limited to 2 saves, strongly limiting the possibility to just pick up the content on the fly, yet still continuing with that for Eureka Orthos, which ended being dead after a couple of weeks. And those are the one that just come directly in my mind. The only time they recognize that kind of things is when they can use that to simplify something. Like how players used the optimal path in dungeons anyway. Instead of giving nice drop advantages in those non optimal path, they removed them entirely.

Honestly, the sad part with it really is that they aren't actually solving anything with oversimplification.

Like for example, players could go "These raids (Eden), are really a nightmare on anyone with visual impairment like colorblindness, it's not the most friendly of content in that manner" - and it's like somewhere there is someone with cogs rattling in their brain that goes "Let's just outright make it easier, ignore the complaint entirely, and then add more visual bloat, that'll definitely resolve the issue".

The developers don't really do a good job of understanding some of the issues that people have had, and nor do they understand very well how people interact with that content... Or if they do understand, then they don't like it and simply refuse to adjust, just further letting the problem fester.

[Daralii]

Can the game not adapt to meet the desires of the players?

No, there's an extremely rigid formula that has to be adhered to or the studio disappears. You get one piece of semi-experimental content every 3 years and that's it.

[Voidmage]

snip

Honestly you probably would have fewer arguments against yourself if you stopped with words like "slackers" or "just want to be carried" for the non savage raiders.

I have yet to see people who don't at least try to give their best in this fight. Most know what to do but have still some problems executing it because quite frankly the mechanics themself are unforgiving to solve or at least some of them like towers, the following attack when you have no room to move or the tipptoeing of pairs in the tower mechanic to get the proximity attack.

Also yes this fight is on savage difficulty and not Ex.
The Producer said so and as someone who has done quite a number of savage I also think so.
It is harder than P1S and P2S for example and imo harder than E9S (was that the CoD one?) as a good compraistion.
As someone who has last raided in EW I would put it on P3S difficulty personally minus the firestorm-knockback mechanic because that was just cancer and even P3S gave me more breathing room in between.
It is definitely harder than Golbez at least.

At the end of the day like I already said and what i can agree with you: The raid itself is fun, like really fun.
It is good content if you raid higher difficulty content but even the japanese players are starting to wonder for whom this whole thing was actually designed given the rewards and the starting ilvl seem to imply catch up content for those who DON'T do savage.

Right now you start to get ilvl lockouts (poor me stupidly bought the wrong upgrade item) because people realised that the enrage is not as forgiving as it seemed in streamer videos with their bis gear.

Edit:
And that what this fight should have been.
Giving players the change to get the courage to try the harder content. That encourages them to give their best, fail and learn from it.
But these are just the typical high end Ex to mid Savage sheningan mechanics Ozma is so proud of.
Extremely obtuse to lean, punishing and partly frustrating with so many people.
We just got YET ANOTHER end raid content with a boss and a arena. Truly the thing DT needed after Ex, Savage and Ultimate in a row.
With a hairstly from a DESIGN CONTEST to boot lmao.

Edit2:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...3%81%A6/page11
If I read this one forum post correctly the original designer of the hairstyle cant even get it.
Thats... pretty sad.

[RulerOfPotaoes]

This needs to be locked behind Extreme clears.

PF is currently full of people trying to do this raid that don't even do Extreme.

I'm sorry, but this raid isn't for you if you don't even have experience doing midcore content. This is a stepping stone into savage difficulty imo.

Casual > Extreme > Chaotic > Savage > Ultimate.

Gatekeeping sucks, but it seems to be absolutely necessary for what's supposed to be a stepping stone difficulty content. You need to have cleared the previous step first.