Is Endgame Just a Cycle of "Static Killers?"

[SpookyGhost]

With all due respect, this is a primary point where I will severely disagree with statics and proponents of these kind of statics. A video game is not meant to be a projection of someone's dissatisfaction or wish to cross-apply their actual career; I like my actual career very much and don't intend on taking a second job via playing FF14. Realistically, some people may not be as satisfied and consequently they project. That's their prerogative, but attempting to cater to this community is very very bad for the health of the game.

Okay. But raiding is meant to be the hardest/most challenging content and requires many, many hours to kill it. If your argument is "there shouldn't be hard content" - then I agree, personally. I don't think it's beneficial to the game to continue producing content for 1% of the community, especially when progression for everyone who doesn't raid is non-existant (literally just capping tomes weekly, which we've been doing since 2.0). But I think this idea that raiding is a second job as opposed to just being similar to how you'd apply for a job is a bit misguided. You don't need to work 9-5 6 days a week as a raider, you just need to show up when the group raids. You decide what group you're going to join, and if their raid hours don't match what you're willing to put in then you don't join that group. Raiding can be as hardcore or as casual as you want it to be, it all depends on what kind of group you put yourself in. If you want to play with the really good players who kill the content really quickly then you have to put in the effort.

And SE knows this. This isn't a F2P MMO where whales and hardcores are awarded and the dev wants to cater to them because they spend a load of cash. Here in a sub MMO, a casual headcount is valued pretty much the same as a hardcore player; they are paying the same sub.

Right, correct, it's very much geared toward the casual player with Savage being the outlier. It is weird, however, that people think a content called "Savage X" is meant to be accessible. Surely if they know it's supposed to be a ball buster that they should study up and try to play well. That's what JP does, they know that if they play horribly they'll be a hindrance to their group so they strive to be a productive cog in that machine. Obviously as I said, you can remove raiding entirely, take those resources, and put them into different stuff that's more easily accessible - I wouldn't have a problem with that though I imagine a portion of the community would. Just making Savage more midcore and less hardcore is the right decision for now, imo, but another option they have is to keep the raids but split them into 3 difficulties - accommodating for all skill levels. This would take more resources than they're currently putting in though so idk.

Also, the mentality "I realize a lot of players in this group are going to be below average" is inofitself quite presumptuous and arguably condescending. But again, that's an individual's prerogative I suppose, but also exemplifies the problematic mindset of static raiders.

I played with them before, most of them were really good players (one was the best BRD/MCH on the server, even) but the conflicting mentalities of how the group needed to progress lead to arguments and hostility which in turn lead to the fall of the group. It's just how it goes when you have people with different goals in the same group - doesn't really work out.