Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Ninjasmine]

This thread is has a lot of contradictory statements in it. 'Mechanics aren't hard and don't take any skill, just simple memorization.' Yet, 'only a small portion of people have cleared these simple memory battles'. I'm lead to believe that either the majority of the populace have horrible memories and thus that's why they can't finish it, or that their reaction times exceed 5-10s so the battles need to be adjusted to where the time it takes you to move out of the way is increased.

If the story is all that matters, why not just look up the cutscenes? I do this with games I cannot afford at the moment, but if I'm still interested in playing the game afterwards, I still buy the game. The battle itself has no story elements, so can logically be skipped with no penalty to you.


There is NO fight in this game where if one person wipes that's it, we have to start over. Example, in a T6 I was in while learning, I was healing along with an amazing co-healer, and managed to get to 10% of boss health(phase 3) with SIX stacks on Roflesia, we weren't over geared. If that's not an example of "individual skill shining through regardless of the skill of the members" I don't know what is. The problem I've ran into more often than not(this coming from someone who enjoys Titan EX even after failing over 50 times), is that a LOT of people in this game give up too quickly. Casual or not, even in learning parties I've participated in people get in, wipe twice and quit. I don't know why you would even join a learning party if you're not there to learn. What's the point of it? Especially if you're gonna leave and not get past first phase. All you're doing is bringing down morale.

All of this 'elitist' and 'hardcore' derogatory talk is sort of amusing. I mean if casuals are the majority of the player base, then more often than not(due to elitist/hardcores sticking to statics and fc/ls i would imagine) wouldn't most of the people you run into would be casual? So maybe the people who you think are rude elitist, are just rude casuals. There are also casuals/non-hardcore who make PFs with the whole 'kick' mentality as well. It's kinda stereotypical for all you casuals and middle people to blame the hardcore for everything, when more than likely you're running into other casuals and middle grounders.

All in all, I think coil is fine. They are eliminating the gate to the primals come next patch, so the mainstreamers will have even more content. The echo's and nerfs DO help, but of course they will never help that one person who just has to get this last skill in and/or who simply refuses to move out of the colored ground effects because they know the healers will raise them. Most of the battle system in this game comes down to individual responsibility and if you look at CT, when you do have a lot of other people to 'pick up the slack', there is more chaos there and less people who know how to play their jobs. Even if the instant-kill mechanics were taken out(like in a majority of the normal dungeons), it's quite clear that people don't have the 'skill' to even play their class to its potential.

[EmiliM]

It's rather heartening to see the thread also gaining a fair bit of traction in the Japanese forums as well. If anything, there appears to be a ton of pent-up frustration all around.

It is unlikely any dev will ever respond to this thread or the Japanese one (to do so would be the equivalent of acknowledging this as an issue, which opens up a whole new can of worms). But I have faith they're being read and monitored and at the very least is giving them something to think about.

I mean if casuals are the majority of the player base, then more often than not(due to elitist/hardcores sticking to statics and fc/ls i would imagine) wouldn't most of the people you run into would be casual? (...) It's kinda stereotypical for all you casuals and middle people to blame the hardcore for everything, when more than likely you're running into other casuals and middle grounders.

Consider, if you will, the following:

Player A clears the Second Coil with his/her static weekly, including T9. This player has already obtained the best gear there is to get for his/her job.

Player B, who - for all intent and purposes - is just as "skilled" as the person above and actually plays twice as much, cannot clear coil because he/she cannot find a static/pug with 7 other players who possesses the same level of "skill" to clear the content with. Thus, this person is stuck with other "lesser skilled" players, who are often labeled as "casuals".

Does Player B qualify as "hardcore"? Or is this person a "casual" who "cries" too much about contents needing adjustment? What if Player A later loses his/her static because some people quit and he/she falls into the same situation as Player B? "The second person needs to find a better group" certainly would sound like a nice answer, if only it wasn't something that everyone is already doing.

It would be nice if everyone neatly fit into categories like "all you casuals" or "us hardcores", wouldn't it? It would be so much easier to oversimplify the issue.

[zPanda]

...
There is NO fight in this game where if one person wipes that's it, we have to start over.

One person can definitely wipe a raid on their own though. Consider T7 for example - you could put 7 of the most elite players in a party who know this fight perfectly - the 1 other person can wipe the raid all by themselves if they don't know that one mechanic ahead of time, no problem lol. In fact, even in T5, if once person is standing in the wrong spot during divebombs, he could basically push the entire party into the barrier and insta-kill the group.l

[Ryihito]

What I want the most in this game now is to be able to explore dungeons/go into dungeons without the number restriction and with chocobos.

[Penguinmayhem]

I think this man has good ideas and the development team might want to actually pay attention to some of this stuff.

[Vladislav]

+10 for awesome post

[MogBeatr]

Please, someone explain to me how memorizing a bosses patterns = skill?

To me, skill is being able go into an unpredictable situation and adapt to the environment and threats on the fly.

[Iriadysa]

Please, someone explain to me how memorizing a bosses patterns = skill?

To me, skill is being able go into an unpredictable situation and adapt to the environment and threats on the fly.

As demonstrated by the community itself, the skill requirement isn't in memorizing the patterns but in executing the required response for those patterns.

Case in point: Titan Extreme.

"But it's lag!"

Case in point: Twintania.

"But..."

Yeah. Ok.

[Gormogon]

snip

Most of the skill comes from being able to mimic what is seen through visual guides and having more awareness of abilities through description you can read or hear. Take those guides away from people downing the content and everyone else would be just as stuck and their excuse wouldn't be because of lag but because they don't know what to do on their own.

Which just like MogBeatr said they wouldn't be able to adapt to that unpredictable situation because that is not the skill they have.

[Iriadysa]

Most of the skill comes from being able to mimic what is seen through visual guides and having more awareness of abilities through description you can read or hear. Take those guides away from people downing the content and everyone else would be just as stuck and their excuse wouldn't be because of lag but because they don't know what to do on their own.

Which just like MogBeatr said they wouldn't be able to adapt to that unpredictable situation because that is not the skill they have.

Except you are making this all up to support a position that has no substance.

Do you guys not see how you keep stepping on each others arguments? Your little rhetoric here implies that mechanics are so confusing and obscure that it's impossible that people understand them on their own. Let's not even talk about the chicken and the egg dilemma, since the guides actually do come from players which had no previous exposure, and let's just focus on the idea that "common players" cannot understand mechanics by themselves.

So what is it? Are mechanics so hard and cryptic that they are impossible to understand? (I mean, I can obviously see how landslide is so confusing...)

So according to the sum of all ideas in this thread we have:

1. Mechanics are impossible to understand. If so, it would be understandable that people would want you to see a guide for them, no? Now, observe this thread: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ture-looks-dim
Can we make our minds please? Are they hard or are they not?

2. Once you copy them, they are easy to execute. Ok, if they are easy to execute, why do people keep using the argument that "aprox. only 5% of players has beat Twintania, so something is clearly wrong". This makes no sense, can we make our mind please? If you watch a TT video they obviously understanding the cryptic and obscure mechanics of the fight is no longer an obstacle, so what's stopping people from victory?

I don't know, it really looks like you people are just venting your frustration with your inability to finish specific content.