Don't do chaotic raid again

[Menriq]

I'm having a hard time understanding some of the points you are trying to make. For example you have this:

It's really a shame that they don't use this content as a stepping stone towards higher difficulty levels,

but then

as higher difficulty levels won't motivate the majority of the player base to engage with them.

So you are saying this should be a stepping stone, but then turn around and say that stepping stone won't motivate the majority of the player base to engage with them.

On top of that, you say

Creating a stepping-stone content that introduces players to Extreme difficulty would have been perfect.

but then later say

It would also be nice if they stopped using synonyms to quantify difficulty levels, as it has become completely meaningless. Unreal,Chaotic, Extreme, Savage, Ultimate, l—stop,
these terms no longer mean anything.

Especially for someone who is new to the game, it can be very confusing, as there is no way to gauge these difficulty levels without participating.

So adding more steps wouldn't make it even more confusing? Naming is naming. WoW has LFR, normal, heroic, etc.

As for difficulty, this is always going to be subjective. How many different versions are needed when for some, EX is too difficult, but others say it's midcore. People complain about lack of content in patches now, can you imagine how much less would be in if they say "Here is the new trial and it's 7 different versions?" because everyone has a different definition of what is difficult?

I'm not saying the idea of what you are saying is bad. However, at some point, no matter what you do, people are going to be cut off no matter what.

[AllenThyl]

It's really a shame that they don't use this content as a stepping stone towards higher difficulty levels,
as higher difficulty levels won't motivate the majority of the player base to engage with them.

Why? Why is such a thing even required? The normal raids exist. The Alliance Raids exist (and the DT difficulty is up quite a bit compared to EW). The Extreme trials exist, especially EX1 and EX2 are quite a bit easier mechanics wise. And with current gear, also more forgiving. The current Unreal exists, which is basically the most beginner friendly Unreal there could possibly be! At some point, if someone is interested in the harder content, they will have no choice but to actually go into said harder content. All this talk about "introduction" and "stepping stones" and similar nonsense is just the normal excuses people make for procrastination. There is no shame to join a "beginner learning" group, I regularly see them in pf. There is also no shame in making one. And there is especially no shame in just trying to get the first mechanics of a fight down until comfortable, instead of prog lying, which has become way too common.

It’s fair to create content for everyone, including the top 1%, but there needs to be a balance.

Absolutely blatant lie. It's frankly disgusting how easily you just make up a statistic like that without becoming ashamed of yourself.
According to lalachievement,
- 61.1% of characters have finished the DT MSQ.
- 54.6% of characters have cleared m4n once
- 22.1% of characters have cleared m4s once

That's not "1%". Even if you start liberally applying modifiers like "raiders with alts" and all that. Heck, I give you a modifier of 20%, it would still be higher than "1%". High end content isn't a "niche" thing in FF14. A significant portion of the player base engages in high level combat content. Just because YOU have a thousand and one excuses to not even start, doesn't mean everyone else has your problems as well. Stop projecting.

[Kaurhz]

In my case, it's just information overload. I try to read up on how dungeons/trials/raids work before entering them, even when I'm unsync for the express purpose of soloing it first *and then* doing it normally when it pops up in roulette later. But man, trying to keep track of EVERYTHING per expansion is daunting as I make my way through post-Stormblood (where soloing Rathalos in particular was 18 minutes of agony, and I doubt doing it with a group is any funner) especially when I still can't even 100% clear prior content without issue. I am guaranteed to die at least once per run of Shadow of Mhach (especially Dun Scaith because a lot of people just do not have Esuna on their hotbars it seems), and knowing that Return to Ivalice is HARDER with another set of bosses to figure out, or that now I have to remember Alexander mechanics on top of Omega ones means I find myself just not wanting to do Ivalice and Omega because I honestly don't think I can keep track of it all (and dungeons and trials aren't much better about trying to memorize every little thing), but since I already unlocked them, now I just don't do raid roulettes at all because I don't want to be "that guy" in the cutscene who ends up contributing nothing because I didn't read up on the fights this time, and the game isn't great about teaching you DURING a fight before snapshots or non-markers go off.

And no, I don't buy into that whole "nobody minds if you fail while learning" crap when there's countless stories of people talking about how much they hate sprouts/casuals, including THIS very topic, assuming they don't immediately treat me with disdain when they see I'm from Dynamis because it seems a lot of people from Aether/Primal/Crystal just assume we're all stupid and need to be carried or kicked. My experience with the social element of this game is that it ranges from non-existent to outright hostile, and I'm convinced after two years of playing that the whole "most friendly and welcoming community" was a complete lie and I find myself moving further and further away from group content and trying to squeeze out whatever solo bits I can find because frankly, it doesn't seem like most of the playerbase wants me here anyway to the point of being gleeful when others got skilled out of a hairstyle of all things.

For being a mode that Square-Enix allegedly wanted to bridge the gap between casual and hardcore, it's made the chasm wider than ever with just how much both types of players don't want to deal with the other one.

See a lot of this problem is caused by their yoyoing of the default difficulty. If you design fights that require these skills initially, which is fair, and then give a good decade between when those skills once more get normalized (or don't indefinitely), then it's going to trip most people up when they need to use Esuna, or silence for example on content that is well over a decade old. Every time I die to doom on Dun Scaith, I just think of monumental disappointment, that the devs have been wholly incapable of sticking to their guns. If they did, we wouldn't be having an issue where players in most cases are letting players die to something like Doom. Abilities like Esuna and Silence need to be more normalized.

I can understand somewhat people in this thread, it's 24-man content, and with more people comes a lot more possible fail states, it's fair that people want to mitigate this by ensuring people have taken an appropriate step. But yes. 24-man content is the absolute worst place humanly possible to try and bridge the gap between casual and midcore/hardcore (high-end). I don't think they actually realize but they themselves are exacerbating the issue at this point. The issue with 24-man currently is someone on the team thought it a good enough idea to lock cosmetics behind this content (exclusive to this content). Cosmetics are first and foremost for a lot of people, so many people will just jump straight in paying no heed to anything else. It's like they looked at the feedback about lack of incentive behind V&C dungeons and then someone, somewhere just went screaming at the top of their lungs "THROW THE KITCHEN SINK AT IT PLEASE"

These threads lately do make me reflect quite a bit, and it's funny to me that the game has been running for well over a decade now and they still do not understand the issues with the patch schedule, nor how to introduce that natural path of progression between story content and extreme/savage, or at the very least find that appropriate level of difficulty for normal content, to where that content alone would suffice to ensure that people are ready to step into an extreme.

[Supersnow845]

Absolutely blatant lie. It's frankly disgusting how easily you just make up a statistic like that without becoming ashamed of yourself.

If I wasn’t at risk of getting picked up for RMT concerns I would literally start paying people on this forum to look up hyperbole, it is such a basic concept I have no idea why people still pretend like it’s a disqualification and not a regular part of how a lot of people talk

[Menriq]

If I wasn’t at risk of getting picked up for RMT concerns I would literally start paying people on this forum to look up hyperbole, it is such a basic concept I have no idea why people still pretend like it’s a disqualification and not a regular part of how a lot of people talk

I get what you are saying, but in this day and age, people will believe a lot of things without looking into it themselves, and there are people who really do believe there is just 1% that engage in the higher difficulty.

[FatalFatalis]

Towers are way too punishing for an alliance raid, they need to at least tone down the damage when a tower goes off.

[AllenThyl]

If I wasn’t at risk of getting picked up for RMT concerns I would literally start paying people on this forum to look up hyperbole, it is such a basic concept I have no idea why people still pretend like it’s a disqualification and not a regular part of how a lot of people talk

Because it's dishonest. If "a lot of people" are basically dishonest, that's not a good thing either. Especially in a discussion forum. I mean, what's the point of any discussion, if spewing blatant untruths is an acceptable mode of operation? Even worse, when such a blatant untruth is the whole argument to begin with!

[Superstructure]

You know, they could have made a normal version. Make it slightly harder than Dalriada/Castrum Lacus Litore and that's it.

Normal version loot:

-1 normal raid gear token, 5 tokens per armor piece (ilvl 720, undyable).
-1 normal raid mount token, 50 tokens can be traded for Dais of Darkness mount.
-1 hairstyle token, 30 tokens required for the hairstyle.
-1 armor coffer.

Savage version loot:

-1 savage raid gear token, 1 token per armor piece (ilvl 730, dyable).
-25 normal raid mount tokens.
-1 savage raid mount token, 2 can be traded for Shroud of Darkness mount.
-15 hairstyle tokens.
-2 savage armor coffers.

See? You give us casuals something to do, a reasonable grind. And savage raiders get their exclusive rewards. No one's left behind. Oh well, I can live without that shiny armor or fancy mounts, but why lock the most coveted item of them all, the hairstyle, behind a 24-man savage raid? What was the logic behind the decision? First you lock a new weapon set (figmental weapons) behind ungodly layers of rng and now this? Do you have any respect for our time? Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking for free stuff, but could you at least cook up some alternative ways to get the stuff? If you want people to stay subbed, this is an obvious solution.

[Supersnow845]

Because it's dishonest. If "a lot of people" are basically dishonest, that's not a good thing either. Especially in a discussion forum. I mean, what's the point of any discussion, if spewing blatant untruths is an acceptable mode of operation? Even worse, when such a blatant untruth is the whole argument to begin with!

Okay I’m going to ask you again to look up hyperbole because if you see “they need to balance the 1% that do high end content” and believe that person actually means 1% exactly then that’s on you. It’s obvious they meant a “strong minority” which is exactly what the proportion that does savage is. It’s just a figure of speech like it isn’t deceptive, this isn’t hard to understand

[Kaurhz]

You know, they could have made a normal version. Make it slightly harder than Dalriada/Castrum Lacus Litore and that's it.

Normal version loot:

-1 normal raid gear token, 5 tokens per armor piece (ilvl 720, undyable).
-1 normal raid mount token, 50 tokens can be traded for Dais of Darkness mount.
-1 hairstyle token, 30 tokens required for the hairstyle.
-1 armor coffer.

Savage version loot:

-1 savage raid gear token, 1 token per armor piece (ilvl 730, dyable).
-25 normal raid mount tokens.
-1 savage raid mount token, 2 can be traded for Shroud of Darkness mount.
-15 hairstyle tokens.
-2 savage armor coffers.

See? You give us casuals something to do, a reasonable grind. And savage raiders get their exclusive rewards. No one's left behind. Oh well, I can live without that shiny armor or fancy mounts, but why lock the most coveted item of them all, the hairstyle, behind a 24-man savage raid? What was the logic behind the decision? First you lock a new weapon set (figmental weapons) behind ungodly layers of rng and now this? Do you have any respect for our time? Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking for free stuff, but could you at least cook up some alternative ways to get the stuff? If you want people to stay subbed, this is an obvious solution.

This so much.

I honestly wouldn't find it all as much of an issue if I weren't personally convinced that this content will be on life support by March/April with Discord.