Chaotic Alliance Raid is a fun fight, but awful content

[Fuyuqi]

The Chaotic Alliance raid is hard content. It might get nerfed, it might not. More of the rewards might get unlocked for MB trade, they might not. The content might be unsynced later, it might not. At the moment, the situation is, what it is. It's hard content. Anyone who wants to have the rewards right now, will have to face the content the way it is now. This non-stop crying about spilled milk is nothing a functioning human adult who pays their own subscription to this very much not-essential-to-life-and-liberty product should be proud of.

From what I can tell, you don't even have the achievement for clearing the fight. I'd appreciate it if you didn't derail my thread with elitism and telling people to stop complaining about the difficulty and go to the other threads already complaining about the fight difficulty. At the end of the day, this pattern of awful reward design and misunderstanding of what players across the board want is bad for the long-term health of the game and I want Square to do better for its players. I want as many people as possible to find this game fulfilling enough to continue to be active so that I can have a lively community to play with in the game I enjoy the most, and I'd like to hope most other people feel the same way.

[ovIm]

I want as many people as possible to find this game fulfilling enough to continue to be active so that I can have a lively community to play with in the game I enjoy the most, and I'd like to hope most other people feel the same way.

This is pretty much the best kind of MMO sentiment right there. A big, happy, engaged population will never be bad for a games health.
And in that regard, CS3 is doing this game an incredible disservice. It's damn sad. In your threadstarter, you said something very true:

Square seems insistent on creating content designed for a shallow grave instead of content that will continue to be lively long-term

CS3 seems to generally struggle with making content long lived. Almost everything they build has a, often rather short, shelf life, and the players of this game deserve better for their money.

[AllenThyl]

There are tons of ways to make content more difficult without needing to use body checks and still have it not be able to be cleared with people having no clue what they're doing. Like in P8S where a failed snake mechanic may not wipe the entire party but would result in damage downs that would make the DPS check impossible.

Snakes are literally the same type of body check as the towers of the Chaotic raid. If anyone is dead at the end of the cast, the party won't have the necessary debuffs to solve the mechanic. And at best, only a single exploding snake could be survived when anticipated and mitigated properly. Same is true for the towers, the group can survive one or two exploding. In fact, with tank lb mitigation (which is the current strat used by PF for 2nd set of towers), quite a few exploding towers can be survived.

Why not design mechanics in a way that allow for recovery or seeing further mechs (allowing for practice and then clean-up later) instead of making them overly punishing in content that isn't intended to be savage-tier difficulty?

But that's the thing, in relative terms, this fight features quite a lot of recoverable mechanics. Which is very much in contrast to p8s or p12s where quite a lot of failed mechanics / towers explode for <max damage number>, meaning they wipe the raid automatically, even if unsynced and mitigated and through invulns. Is the tower mechanic less forgiving than other mechanics in this fight? Sure. But it's not unforgiving. Especially since the first set of towers happens in a controlled manner, with everyone reliably being in the same position when they happen. Lots of people failing at this point is just that, people failing. Meaning this mechanic should be their prog point, not "kill" parties. I am not arguing that the Chaotic Raids are easy, but it is important that this encounter is accurately described for exactly what it is, not what people "feel" like it is.

From what I can tell, you don't even have the achievement for clearing the fight. I'd appreciate it if you didn't derail my thread with elitism and telling people to stop complaining about the difficulty and go to the other threads already complaining about the fight difficulty. At the end of the day, this pattern of awful reward design and misunderstanding of what players across the board want is bad for the long-term health of the game and I want Square to do better for its players. I want as many people as possible to find this game fulfilling enough to continue to be active so that I can have a lively community to play with in the game I enjoy the most, and I'd like to hope most other people feel the same way.

I'm sure the irony of "elitism" after looking at my prog status is completely lost on you. Be very careful with such arguments, they backfire faster than one might like.
The issue isn't the difficulty of the fight, it's people's approach to it. The fight is what it is, with the rewards the way they are. The issue is how people engage with this fact. And for some people, this engagement shows a deeply unhealthy relationship with this video game. People complain that the game developers don't release any content for them to enjoy and they are deeply unhappy, yet are still subscribed for one reason or another. Like yeah, that's the best kind of customer SE could hope for. No need to spend costly developer resources to make content, still getting money. The RoI numbers are simply through the roof. This kind of consumer behavior is literally the driving force behind the phenomenon of "enshittification".

Further, SE is in the business of making money for its shareholder. The playerbase is just a means to an end. That is why it is important that the community also lays the blame precisely where it belongs, with the developers. Instead, people have been slagging the "hardcores" as "responsible" for the difficulty / reward structure of the CoD raid, that Yoshi-P is just doing it to get "browny points" with some streamers. That may well be, but it was still Yoshi-P's decision to do. Just as the "dumbing down of jobs" was done by the developers, not because of "the casuals". You want as many people as possible to find this game fulfilling, totally fine, and I agree. However, there is a very growing number of people who find this game pretty unfulfilling, yet give it their money and time at every opportunity. And that, is pretty concerning, not only for the individuals, but for the health of the game itself. And community cohesion certainly isn't helped by having people slap essentialist labels like "casual" and "hardcore" at each other like any of these groups are homogeneous.