PF is not just bad at times, it's unfair (rant)

[Miradelle]

The reality is, you just have to teach them how to reprisal/feint/addle. This is a team game, and when you sign up for PF M12S, you need to have patience. Yeah, it does suck when your party is dying to the first raidwide constantly at the very start of the pull, but everyone goes through that. Your standards are way too high to expect people who are on the final floor of the savage tier to mitigate, only world first raiders do that.

And sure, prog liars might join your group, but have you considered it will take you longer to fill the PF if you exclude them? You have two options: you either deal with the prog liar, and you get 30 minutes of p1 prog after waiting in PF for hours .. or you wait in PF for these magical unicorns that are so good at the game that they are able to mitigate, who may never show up. I personally would take the former, because even if I didn't get any prog myself, I at least helped the prog liar to get further. So overall, the happiness in PF increases.

Hardcore content will not survive if you stay on this trajectory, because as we all know, people will quit in droves if you exclude the prog liars, especially after a couple of dozen of bad pulls.

[b3nzyme]

.

Well, just like how it took 2 hours to fill one group (and they lied) id rather play with a small pool.of people who dont lie than a large pool.of people that do. You dont see week 1 clearing streamers bringing random unvetted pugs in on their world race, so why would i want liars in my.specific phase 2 prog groups? Ive already suffered here, so your argument is apples to oranges with an entirely different subject focus

Hardcore content will not survive if you stay on this trajectory, because as we all know, people will quit in droves if you exclude the prog liars, especially after a couple of dozen of bad pulls.

And no, there is too much evidence to the contrary

[Hastatus]

FFXIV seems to be grinding failure opportunities more and more frequently to artificially lengthen play time turning fun into misery. Patch 7.4 has felt like a maximization of failure opportunities everywhere I look. First I went to OC again because 8 new accessories were released and I thought maybe if I have them I would be motivated enough to try to wade through the excessive preplanning and Discord stuff that FT requires. After about 150 CEs, 300 Fates, and about 500 chests...I never saw a single drop. I have done many daily Frontlines, and like the past year or so it still feels like the chances of being on the winning team are tiny compared to what I experienced in early EW. I only recall winning three times in patch 7.4, and yep my achievement for the new map is still at 1 win. Ok I'll go fishing for the new fish...oh some of them have a downtime of weeks and one of them has a downtime of months and the weather might be while I am unable to play. I guess Purse of Riches will have to wait until spring or summer. Ok maybe I'll go try this new Raid series. I gave up at M6S last time because it took over a hundred pulls to even find a single group in PF who could do the add phase. Ok M9S went fine, but after almost 20 hours of M10S, studying videos over and over, looking at spreadsheets mapping the timelines of when I might be able to cleave if tanks can position the bosses right, studying the parses of high ranking players, and having won 3 pieces of gear from M9S...it's still not enough. The failure epidemic is so steeping Savage right now that I have seen many PF descriptions that are technically against the ToS: enrage% this, checking that, passport please, and so on. I easily cleared the Spire of Trial DPS checks without food or pots but I clearly still cannot do enough damage in the actual Raid. As far as I'm concerned there is a malicious reason why SE doesn't want you to know whether you did enough personal damage after reaching enrages.

Sure I can go do the Normal Raids or the single Extreme with a 95-100% success rate, but I also don't want to win all the time either.

All the endgame content FFXIV releases now is either win nearly all the time or fail nearly all the time with nothing reasonable in the middle. I've played and completed the most difficult challenges in all kinds of games for decades. The current system is extremely unhealthy and becoming predatory in nature. I would only recommend FFXIV to players who are going to stick to playing older content. The tuning and lack of clear skill level requirements for endgame content feels like AI slop treating players like numbers rather than those who are meant to be entertained.

[Miradelle]

And no, there is too much evidence to the contrary

Well, my evidence is Aidorouge. They seem to know what they're talking about.

[b3nzyme]

Well, my evidence is Aidorouge. They seem to know what they're talking about.

Hahah. I just got to thinking about the example of the prog liar being taught, and the overall happiness increasing. Nay, the rest of us had our hapiness decrease, so the average went down. Maybe its just me being tired but i laughed out loud thinking about the other 7 people being imagined as inconsequential drones instead of humans in that example. Ugh. I need to get offline for a bit lol

[Gurgeh]

Games fault.
Because game can fix it.
Add counters/flags to each instance for multiple key prog points. Thousand ways to 'present' that. Pick one. You could even add more inventoty tokens to the game if your feeling maliciously lazy about the dev work.
But it has to be done
When you pass a prog point your counter go up.
PF leaders can pick two prog points and say, I want X clears off the first and Y clears off the second.
Instance dev picks 5 prog points to label in the game. (If five is not enough it's a bad game design, or your need to "play other games" because your too fussy)

I dont want to hear technical excuses because they can only be poor. The only excuse is "we made mistakes in the past design and we are not stepping outside them"
The storage is still cheap.
The compute is cheap.
The data transfer is cheap if you stick to what's needed query transactions. If your transferring a whole characters entire history have state to enter an instance that's just dumb.
Dont tell me it's impossible to pull 5 bytes (if that) over http on demand from a new database, even if that database is the other side of the world.
You could probably even do it NoSQL if your feeling lazy.
You could certainly do it SQL.

Its not people that are broken. People are people, that's the bit you have to "work with"

Actually thinking on it, NoSQL. Partition by character ID, now you just throw new named documents in. Again if your storing the whole of a character or even the whole of their history in one document, that's just dumb.

Actually the truth is that, certainly pre AI inflation, with NoSQL you could have had a prog counter for every mechanic and it would have cost little extra.

[Aidorouge]

Well, just like how it took 2 hours to fill one group (and they lied) id rather play with a small pool.of people who dont lie than a large pool.of people that do. You dont see week 1 clearing streamers bringing random unvetted pugs in on their world race, so why would i want liars in my.specific phase 2 prog groups? Ive already suffered here, so your argument is apples to oranges with an entirely different subject focus

Yes, but, how long until that small pool fills up versus drying up? And from what I've gathered world racers don't play with pugs at all, they only play with their respective statics, so they're not even drawing from the same pool you are.

Maybe I just don't understand the hardcore mentality of willfully putting one's self through content that takes hours to clear, and most of that is spent just waiting for enough people to show up to begin with.
+++

Well, my evidence is Aidorouge. They seem to know what they're talking about.

Ha, I'd hardly consider myself an expert authority on hardcore content given I don't do a single bit of it, and even admitted that people shouldn't have to be forced to play with other people that are dragging them down if they're genuinely THAT bad at said hardcore content.

But that's the thing, I don't do hardcore content precisely I wouldn't be good at it, and wouldn't want to be making someone else's day miserable or giving them a reason to be hostile. Getting blacklisted because I flubbed a Savage fight isn't worth diminishing my overall player pool across other content, and I doubt I'm the only one who avoids hardcore content for the same reason.

I neither add or take away from the pool, but I CAN see the water line getting lower for others every time there's another topic about people's frustrations with PF groups. Ironically, such topics probably just help to remind some people why they stay out of the content. Not because OP is a bad person or anything of course, but because the content comes off sounding bad, and otherwise good people get stuck dealing with it.

[Ath192]

Ok I'm here for one more post.

Your problem is reduced to the fact that you play by your rigid standards and do not adapt to your environment. You know what happens to animals in nature when they can't adapt? They go extinct.

Yes, life isn't fair. What else is new?

Anyways, I've had some fun times pugging and while there are a few really bad groups I've joined I have to say I've had a lot of good groups too and the experience has been decent. I spend a lot of time complaining about this game but collaborating with people in pugs to bring down a difficult boss isn't one the complaints I have about it.

Read the room, identify the good raiders, re-join their groups, add them to your friends list, socialize. We cleared M11S last night and half the people in my group were familiar to me and we simply kept rejoining each other. It's not the fight or the system, its the people you need to watch for.

Some of my other pug brothers weren't there for the clear though, and I'll wish them luck. This is war. Not everyone will make it. Anyways I'm sure 12S will be a prog disaster too, and just like every other floor before I will adapt and overcome.

My goal is to clear, not to die a martyr upholding rigid standards in a video game where half the people don't give a lick and the other half are drunk.

[0blivion]

OP, you're not wrong, but because this game has tons of leeches who don't want to pull their weight, your best bet is to get a static. Like others have mentioned, there is a point in the weeks right after release where if you haven't cleared the first two fights, you will be hardstuck for weeks until the bad actors have gotten blacklisted from enough party leaders so that any decent party has a chance of forming. The insistence of the community on being nice to those who waste their time doesn't help,either. Form a static or make your own PF and kick progliars through whatever criteria you determine alright to kick them.

Also, if I'm confident in executing mechanics based on guides alone, I'll just tell the party lead my prog point and and let them decide. More often than not, they let me, and if they don't, that's fine, too. lol

[Valence]

Well, just like how it took 2 hours to fill one group (and they lied) id rather play with a small pool.of people who dont lie than a large pool.of people that do. You dont see week 1 clearing streamers bringing random unvetted pugs in on their world race, so why would i want liars in my.specific phase 2 prog groups? Ive already suffered here, so your argument is apples to oranges with an entirely different subject focus

Sounds to me like what you want is a static at this point.