[Personal Opinion] FFXIV is too casual friendly

[Frowny]

we're not willing to teach

How many times have you've seen someone goof, but you explain what to do and get ignored? It is REALLY hard to teach people when they don't want to be taught. At that point, toss them in the wild and have them sink or swim.

Given the amount of "farm" ex primal parties I join

Yet again, someone thinking in an extreme when it was mentioned many times this is NOT what people want.

[Greedalox]

Given the amount of "farm" ex primal parties I join - no thank you.

Making it more difficult will just mean having a harder time finding someone competent to do stuff further limiting who can clear what - are you in a big raid FC that runs stuff all the time? Congrats you're now the only ones who get to do anything because the rest of us will be saddled with people who are crappy whose crappiness will only be enhanced by increased difficulty.

The issue is that most fights in FFXIV are styled as "wipe or win" meaning that one person not knowing what they're doing/being bad can ruin the fight for 7 other people because few fights are recoverable once a big screwup happens.

I have no interest in wiping a dungeon 4 times with terrible players 5 times and having it take an hour+.

People are bad because the only difficult content in the game is leaps and bounds above anything they've done in the game beforehand so they just don't do it. Take Aurum Vale for example, it's an immensely easy dungeon like the rest if you put in a little effort, but it's often referred to as "too difficult" because people spent the last 48 levels being coddled with situations where it's near impossible to lose. People are bad when the difficulty of the game is a flatline near zero until a MASSIVE spike to the top 5% of the players.

Playing along with the theme park theme of the thread, it's like spending your whole childhood on Caterpillar ChooChoo Train Ride and then your parents force you on to the Hellevator randomly, of course you won't take it well.

What this game needs is a proper difficulty curve so that players can get better, your idea is terrible of just letting bads be bads considering it's for something as silly as your pony/bird farm groups instead of playerbase advancement and cohesion.

[ckc22]

What this game needs is a proper difficulty curve so that players can get better, your idea is terrible of just letting bads be bads considering it's for something as silly as your pony/bird farm groups instead of playerbase advancement and cohesion.

I'm not arguing that they couldn't do something. I'm arguing that "just make it harder" which is what 90% of people say when this topic comes up is a bad idea that will only make things more miserable for people who aren't bad / probably make people who are bad quit.

[Greedalox]

I'm not arguing that they couldn't do something. I'm arguing that "just make it harder" which is what 90% of people say when this topic comes up is a bad idea that will only make things more miserable for people who aren't bad / probably make people who are bad quit.

So how do you propose on upping the heat without lighting a fire? You can't make a curve or difficulty increase without doing just that- making it harder.

[XiXiQ]

The game really is hard enough - not necessarilly because of the content itself, but because of the ridiculous amount of skills/buttons (at 60, you're looking at 32+, throw in PVP for yet more). Most classes are supposed to have 6-8 balls in the air at the same time in a juggling act (all timers). And that's not all that needs to be covered in 2.5 secs, somewhere in there you're also trying to see what the boss is casting, and if some particular class in the group requires some kind of cover/buff. This skill bloat is killing the game, turning players against each other - and the more they pile on, the more the gap widens.

[Empress]

At this point I feel like until we see more info from the Fan Fests to see how this "new combat system" will work, I really don't see how this game will get any less boring. Atm its just the same boring drull over and over per patch until 4.0 and I doubt its gonna change anytime soon because they aren't gonna add anything major til then. As much as I would love to NOT be bored during dungeons I can't even be excited playing the game and I'm just praying to god that the combat system overhaul will be HUGE and not something stupid and minor. It has to change dramatically to make the game itself more engaging. Changing numbers on damages and mobs wont fix this game going down the drain.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I'm not arguing that they couldn't do something. I'm arguing that "just make it harder" which is what 90% of people say when this topic comes up is a bad idea that will only make things more miserable for people who aren't bad / probably make people who are bad quit.

Weeping City proved otherwise. People whined about its difficult yet once the devs outright said they wouldn't nerf it, people eventually sucked it up. You can push your playerbase to a reasonable extent. Without some difficulty curve people just don't have any incentive to get better. Why upgrade your gear when year old esoteric stuff will handle Xelphatol just fine. Frankly, I would rather play with better players than carry lazy ones through content. Case in point, I recently got a Monk who not only was wearing ilvl 145 crap in A1N. He wouldn't do a single positional. The Ninja wasn't much better. I legitimately had to stop attacking because I would have killed the fight boss before they did enough to the second. So these two lazy players basically leeched off mine and the rest of the party's efforts.

Content like that drives away my interest. Sure, it was A1N, but it isn't like The Creator normal or Xelphatol demand much more. If they keep things exactly as they are, the midcore and above will inevitably lose interest when newer games offer more. And contrary to what people think, the midcore is much larger than it's given credit for.

[Dzian]

Given the amount of "farm" ex primal parties I join - no thank you.

I think the reason why a lot of "Farm Parties" fail so badly is because a lot of players don't learn or understand a fights mechanics. all they do is learn a sequence of actions that allows them to win.

that works fine in similar groups because following that sequence works and as a group can clear it.

The problem In my experience is that if that sequence is changed a fight can wipe very very quickly because suddenly all those players don't have a clue what they are doing.

if a fight goes averagely then the sequence of mechanincs and boss moves goes A B C D E F G H and all these players know whats coming next and the group works...

the problems tend to be when a fight starts well. so the sequence might go A B C D F I ..... the group started really well so E was skipped so was G and H. and in the confusion half the group dies to I and the other half suddenly has no clue whats coming next or what they need to do to survive it.

It's a down side to fights being so heavily scripted, because as long as the sequence works players won't need to understand the mechanics. which in turn means they don't need to improve....

Soph ex is a pretty recent example where I'd quite often get players that don't understand the mechanics of the tilts and repeatedly fall off, In the end rather than learn the mechanic they just go to wherever I am and that works for that run. the problem is the next farm group they join might have 8 people that don't understand the tilts all relying on someone else to get it right and that's when the group fails...

[Pondera]

Actually, I think the game is striking a pretty perfect balance. Allow me to illustrate.
Until you finish the HW Main quest and level your first class to 60, you are newbie-lowbie. No derogatory terms or offense meant, but it's accurate. This is content everyone is expected to you, and asking to skip it is frowned upon.
After HW MSQ, you move onto gearing. Pretty fun and pretty casual friendly. There's a lot of room to forgive mistakes, and the higher players are given incentives to do this older, easier content with you, so no problem.
Then we move onto expert roulette and this is where the casual pandering should stop. You've got pretty respectable gear, can do whatever you want to do in the open world, and can experience a good chunk of the game.
Raids, Expert Trials and savage raids are where you need to pay attention. If you want to run around and have fun, do it somewhere else because if you lose focus for even a moment, THESE THINGS WILL KILL YOU.

Overall, this is a good balance that doesn't need to change. Casuals are given lots of content, and there is stuff reserved for the more dedicated, and this should not be changed. Why would someone be handed top tier equipment for anything less than top tier effort? I ran into a wall some weeks ago with Sophia, and got pretty mad about it, but I'd respect this game a good bit less if it just handed the loot to me or diminished the difficult of its content.

[Frowny]

Then we move onto expert roulette and this is where the casual pandering should stop.

Should, but doesn't currently.