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

[Tsuga]

This posts highlights my EXACT problems with endgame in FFXIV.

I love this game, and have been playing it nearly non-stop since 1.0's launch, but I find that the harder the content I dip my feet into - the less fun that I have. The exception to this is when I get to play content entirely with my FC, but those chances are few and far between considering that so many of them have dropped off or log in less and less often. I also find that I'm logging in less often the further we get away from patches, since I've heard nothing but horror stories about the endgame content that I haven't participated in.

I want to run harder dungeons because the idea of difficult content excites me, but the fact that everything is mechanics driven isn't difficult, it's just a hurdle to jump over. If you go in blind you don't know the hurdle is there, so most of the time you have to look up a tutorial online, which defeats the thrill of the hurdle, and then it's just a matter of going through the dungeon over and over again - all while being ditched, belittled by others, and becoming more and more disheartened - until you get really good at jumping over that hurdle, then once you get good at jumping over the hurdle it then becomes boring, and tedious when other people don't know how to jump over the hurdle, so now you're on the other end of that negative relationship between the people who know how to do the content and the people who don't. IMO the structure of the content and boss fights makes playing the content a negative experience when you aren't playing with close friends, when it should be exciting and fun for everybody, experienced or not.