Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[Valence]

The problem isn't even that; the problem is the scripted, lazily designed fights. The problem is the "survive damage" or "don't take damage" pattern instead of "cancel damage."

They could have created fights that were challenging and fun enough for any players to complete (turn a lever, move the boss to a specific position at a specific time so it takes damage from the outside, press a button, carry special item, kill the adds' to avoid a fatal debuff), but no. It's easier for them to speed up the pace of AoE attacks and bombard players with damage and flashes of light, rather than properly develop interactive elements in the fights.

There were fights like this in ARR and HW, but they reworked them so that now everyone is forced to just run away from AOE, or memorize their pattern, and if someone considers this an interesting challenge, I feel sorry for them, because it’s just boring to be a trained monkey, dependent on ping or reaction speed, and not on thinking with your brain and knowing the way in which the mechanics should be solved.

In my opinion over this topic, we've been seeing a consistent crack in the community between the old design and the new and it's not going to get better over time. That's on them for changing the game's genre halfway through.

[Myotis]

In my opinion over this topic, we've been seeing a consistent crack in the community between the old design and the new and it's not going to get better over time. That's on them for changing the game's genre halfway through.

at this point from an MMO they are making some action-rpg game where action is overtaken by insta deaths during the fights.
It's boring to learn those patterns where to stand all the time over and over again each time something new comes out.

[Supersnow845]

Which came from the original massive change that was the jobs

You aren’t going to see them change from this current encounter formula until the jobs are changed because the current beige slop jobs cannot support any other design without being unbelievably boring

[Xapapetsu]

I know there has been a lot of chatter about player drop off recently, and it has mostly been attributed to lack of content. However, I think there may be another factor at play here, and this is coming from a personal pov, so please hear me out.

There is a player base in this game that likes to do stuff at max level and ins't doing the latest difficulty dungeon ... they enjoy housing, glam and a myriad of other things, which has been the attraction of ffxiv in the first place ... and this for a long time has been the draw of the game for many players, including older players, disabled players, those who may play for themselves, with their children, or even grandchildren in some cases. They happily made their way through the MSQ, making mistakes and learning, not burdening other players with their lack of speed and reactions, and making their way via duty support to end game.

However, come DT and things changed.. The speed with which aoe's are chucked out is ridiculous for some players except almost professional players. Yes, we can work out our mistakes, yes, we can move when need, but not at that speed. Not as an older/disabled player.

I think that it's not only the lack of content, diffuculty of content or whatever ... I think alot of older and/or disabled players that enjoyed the game and invested a lot of money through subs and/or online store purchases, have now decided it all too much and cancelled their subs. They cannnot progress any further, especially if, as Yoshi has said, it will get even more difficult.

I know my post is coming from only one part of the fandom, but I also know that many other parts are unhappy, so what should they do ... or will they go down the Blizz route and not listen to anyone?

I hate saying these things, but we need to quit using old age or disabilities as an excuse for not learning how to properly play. We're playing an MMO, let's be honest, 90% of us are old 40+ and I have inattentive ADHD, so realistically I fit that category of not being able to do high-end content because I'm old and I can't catch on to mechanics quickly because of lack of focus, but here I am running savage an ultimates. There are FFXIV players with multiple missing fingers or even missing arms that run high-end content. It's not a lack of ability we're talking about when it comes to difficulty it's a lack of willingness to adapt and grow. If people worse off than us can do high-end content why can't casual players learn normal content.

[Masha_Awandah]

I hate saying these things, but we need to quit using old age or disabilities as an excuse for not learning how to properly play. We're playing an MMO, let's be honest, 90% of us are old 40+ and I have inattentive ADHD, so realistically I fit that category of not being able to do high-end content because I'm old and I can't catch on to mechanics quickly because of lack of focus, but here I am running savage an ultimates. There are FFXIV players with multiple missing fingers or even missing arms that run high-end content. It's not a lack of ability we're talking about when it comes to difficulty it's a lack of willingness to adapt and grow. If people worse off than us can do high-end content why can't casual players learn normal content.

Because not every disability is the same. I'm personally lucky enough that the worst I have to deal with is hands going numb while gaming, but when it does happen I have no choice but to endure the pain until the end of the duty or stop playing entirely.

Learning is a lot harder when your hands don't move properly, and that's just my example. I'm sure there's plenty of other people with different issues than yours or mine.

[RajNish]

In my opinion over this topic, we've been seeing a consistent crack in the community between the old design and the new and it's not going to get better over time. That's on them for changing the game's genre halfway through.

I completely agree. The game is clearly heading in the wrong direction. Fights haven't felt like role-playing for a long time now; there's no lore, no interesting strategies, no Warrior of Light as such, instead there's a crowd of 4 or 8 people running around the field like headless chickens until they learned the mechanics, or running like robots once they did, that's all.

I have inattentive ADHD, so realistically I fit that category of not being able to do high-end content because I'm old and I can't catch on to mechanics quickly because of lack of focus, but here I am running savage an ultimates.

I hate saying these things, but we need to quit using "here I am running savage an ultimates" as an example or response to all the criticism. You see, if you enjoy and have the opportunity to spend hours battling and tormenting yourself with low-quality content and memorizing endless AoEs, that's your choice, but that doesn't mean other people enjoy the same things. The problem isn't even age or disabilities; the problem is that developers only see one way to make content more challenging.

[Xapapetsu]

I completely agree. The game is clearly heading in the wrong direction. Fights haven't felt like role-playing for a long time now; there's no lore, no interesting strategies, no Warrior of Light as such, instead there's a crowd of 4 or 8 people running around the field like headless chickens until they learned the mechanics, or running like robots once they did, that's all.



I hate saying these things, but we need to quit using "here I am running savage an ultimates" as an example or response to all the criticism. You see, if you enjoy and have the opportunity to spend hours battling and tormenting yourself with low-quality content and memorizing endless AoEs, that's your choice, but that doesn't mean other people enjoy the same things. The problem isn't even age or disabilities; the problem is that developers only see one way to make content more challenging.

I never said people need to enjoy the content, they don't, the devs are also free to make whatever type of game they want instead of catering to what a specific group of people want. All I said was that using the excuse of being old or having a disability shouldn't be the response to a level of difficulty in a game. Sure some people are disabled to the point they legitimately cannot progress but that percentage is extremely low and FFXIV isn't the issue because they wouldn't be able to progress in any game that requires any level of reaction time if their disability is that bad. They would be better off in ultra casual games like animal crossing since it would fit their needs. FFXIV has a way to drag them through all normal content and that's duty finder, all normal content can be cleared with missing roles and missing players so if one is dead 99% of the time that doesn't prevent them from finishing the fight and moving forward with the story, it's also has a very easy mode for solo instances which makes the damage almost nothing so that they can still clear.

[Crafoutis]

Put the ''difficulty'' back into jobs.

From someone for who things come easily: doing the thing isn't the hard part.

I shouldn't find it difficult to make my Warrior combo correctly, that should be instinct.

The difficulty should come in the decision-making from the outside (the encounter), not from the execution (the player's kit)

[Azurarok]

It's not very rpg-like if we're not doing any decision making with the player's kit imo, seems more like a shmup really.

[Amarande]

I feel like people are over-dismissive of the disabled here. Disabilities come in a number of types.

Neurodivergent spectrum (an issue which A LOT of older generation gamers especially grapple with) people for instance frequently struggle intensely with sensory overload, which has been one of the latest gimmicks heavily used as "difficulty" these days.

People with vision issues genuinely ran into issues with EX4 to the point SE had to adjust color tones somewhat as a result.

Hand issues are becoming an increasingly severe problem if you have them (this started to really be noticeable with the mandatory full party QTE in the 5.3 trial; I remember a friend telling me it almost stopped her from continuing MSQ, and this was a person who was skilled enough to deal with the then-current Eden Savage tier!).

Age becomes an issue as well because reaction time slows down with age and we're being given less and less reaction time to register what's often less and less clear clues. Even skilled players cannot but switch to a "die and learn" methodology as the brain often simply does not operate fast enough to be able to deal with certain mechanics outside of pre-knowledge and reflex grooving (even the reaction times associated with DANGEROUS DRIVING - and we know how dangerous that is IRL - are slower than the ones asked from FFXIV raiding).

And essentially the game has frog boiled its way from being a more cognitive challenge (which older and less abled could handle better and gave older FFXIV so much of its enjoyment) to almost entirely an athletic one (which favors the young and abled and is apt to leave a lot of older people to the kind of embarrassing career end Brett Favre experienced, for instance lol).

It is true that WoW is even more fast paced in ways (1.5s GCD) but at the same time: it usually is structured to allow much more meaningful reactive play, and it's also slower in some ways.

Keep in mind that ranged attacks have a significantly longer range in WoW, also that the arenas are MUCH BIGGER which lends itself more to mechanics of the "you need someone out here to handle xyz that will happen there" type vs. the "stack on his butt" chestnut of FFXIV, and to rather less frantic avoidance of huge no-zones (especially when you also consider that in-combat speed boosts are much less uniform across WoW classes, and have been heavily muted in most of the post-WoD era due to "well, you see, agile movement is Demon Hunter's class fantasy!" leading to a round of heavy mobility nerfs back in Legion).

Also, while the WoW GCD is faster, the game is far lighter on oGCDs: you don't tend to have a lot of them in your damage rotation as you do here; they are almost exclusively for utility actions such as interrupts (and sometimes - keeping in mind that unlike SE, Blizz often change things up so much in a new xpac that it often almost might as well be a new game altogether - they try playing around with putting even those on the GCD, although this was vocally not well received by the players).

The big problem is we're likely hitting the limits of FFXIV's design: Job homogenization is all but forced by the fact that every slot in an 8 player raid is so severely oversubscribed (even WoW runs into issues with that for small group content on the reg such as high end Mythic+ teams being extremely homogenous and this meta often trickling down to the minds of group leads at much lower levels) and a lot of more varied mechanics have been tried and didn't work well within the system (Coils were a big graveyard of this), which leaves "push people to play big-league perfectly" as about the only thing they have left. I hope the new Myth Arc if we get one isn't too long, because I see maintenance mode in the nearer rather than further future for FFXIV as a result (and I sometimes wonder if this is why they compressed Endwalker which was IIRC originally meant to be a pair of expansions).

(And then there's the fact that Western feedback is stunted by 3000-char limits - Japanese being a LOT more space efficient generally - and janky editing requirements, dangit. LOL)