Issue With End Game Raiding

[Saccharin]

Getting 8 people together to do scheduled content is difficult. And when you have content that requires several weeks of practice to clear and people slam their heads against walls for it, it leads to burn out. Couple this with the fact I believe we're just so far into the game's life cycle now that there might be a diminishing pool of veteran raiders willing to run on a schedule every week (and not enough new, incoming players to replenish the ranks), and you can see why it might be getting harder and harder for people to make this work.

This got me thinking about what possibly could be done. Then an idea popped into my head - how about introducing smaller team compositions for end game raid. Getting maybe 6 people or even as few as 4 together would be much easier than 8, and would possible allow for more groups to exist, increasing the overall active raid scene. So like, a 4-person version of Alex Savage or Coil? I don't know if this could work, but it was a thought. Obviously this would change a lot of the dynamics, but I know other MMOs (including WoW) have done smaller-group compositions while also offering larger group compositions.

Are you kidding. Eight players for a raid is nothing. If people fail at gathering 8 players for a few weeks then they fail at raiding as an FC. You mentioned WoW and their flexible system starts at 10 player - more than FF14s raids.

Let's face it the first tier of Alex proved that FF14 raid player base is just not 'hardcore' and that's why Tier 2 Alex was much easier than the first.

The other solution I know people will bring up is introduce a third tier for raid content, between the "Story" difficulty and Savage. I thought I heard that isn't what the team is looking to do (at least right now), but no idea if that would be considered in the future. Again, I'm not sure this would entirely solve my dilemma - as I said, I wasn't finding the raid content difficult, it was finding a group to play with.

All we need is the current story mode and the savage. FF14 doesn't have the raid playerbase that WoW does so extra modes just bloat an already messy ilevel range and fragment then even more.

Which stinks because right now, I want to raid. I want to be playing the game. But because of these reasons (schedules, limited groups, only wanting to play this job, not wanting to go too far back in progression), I'm getting left out.

If you can't set a few hours a week aside for raiding then you can't raid. Simple.