Why the hate with endgame fights?

[KaivaC]

I'm gonna be a little bit slow to respond tonight...but that being said...

Considering no one can even spell my name right it seems, I'm not sure.

And I see a couple of us actually saying why we dislike things and giving reasons, and the rest of the people essentially just defending their own raids as well as essentially saying "You must clear OS4 to be able to talk on it." Not like me nor others have zero savage experience, nor that savage in this game is a long, multi-tiered fight that you need to do multiple steps that take months; we're talking four single bosses that you can spend a couple hours learning all of their attacks, and maybe 6 hours to 2-4 weeks to fully defeat. All of the fights you even prep by watching a video or faq to understand every attack in theory, then go in to do it in practice.

As fo Kaiva's help, she isn't even on my data center. So it looks good as a gesture but was useless to me.

Yeah...I just looked on what worlds are on which datacentres, and didn't realize that Lamia was on Primal. That was a mistake on my part. But offer was still valid and I would still go in with you - might have to get an alt there, but yeah, I wouldn't have no problem going in with you just to see things from your perspective. Insofar as the raiding thing, I myself have not beaten O4S...I haven't even made it to Neo, personally. But I do feel that the true Savage experience comes with O3S. There's really no comparison between O3S and O1S/O2S...the difficulty between the first two and that one is very steep. I'm not sure if you saw my recurring posts in Tales from the DF, but it took me a literal month to get my first clear on O3S. And that was me trying every single day for no less than 2 hours at a time.

About these myths...are they really myths now? To be honest, those of us who are regulars on the forum still only represent a small amount of the playerbase. But these myths have been seen enough that multiple people have shared it - what about the stories that aren't shared? Some may be overexaggerated, yes, but it's been seen often enough that they aren't really myths anymore. I mean, shoot, Tales from the DF has amassed over 14,000 posts. That's crazy.

[Oscura]

Considering no one can even spell my name right it seems, I'm not sure.

To be blunt, it wouldn't matter if I was perfectly polite. Whenever you say anything that counteracts the values of people, they will always take the negative stance against it. People are too wrapped up in raids as a form of identity that no real challenge to them will ever be tolerated; any real discussion of them just warps back to reaffirming the shared belief, i.e. raids are wonderful and players just need to git gud. And when you get piled on enough, you really start to get annoyed with people and the whole shared belief itself. You get tired of people always overemphasizing ice mages, or complaining about the skill of the playerbase despite things going really well, or teh many little myths that build up and get reinforced, and it creates this big divide between the myth and what you experience in game.

I don't recall ever spelling your name as anything but "Riyah."

Also yes, it does matter if you're polite. Do you think it's just a coincidence your posts get so much heat? It has nothing to do with, "oh no, they posted a dissenting opinion, let's dogpile on them!" There are plenty of posts that are anti-parser, plenty of posts that say "I don't like raiding," or "I don't want to raid," or "raiding encourages toxicity." A lot of them either go ignored, get one or two responses, and then the world moves on. Ultimately because at the end of the day, most of those posts are just more or less posts that express an opinion.

Your posts express less opinion, and more constant degradation and disrespect for the character or thoughts or even intelligence of those you disagree with. You've gone on the record to call people scrubs, to call raiders pig-headed, you've implied raiders are too dimwitted to react to the game's meta being changed, you've constantly asserted that savage is not an "achievement," and assume every raider demands your respect for completing it, showing your needless self-importance.

People will always debate with someone who disagrees with them, but the reason you're frequently targeted is because you're nasty. You make far too many assumptions and you generalize entire groups of people. More than anyone I've seen on this forum. The grand majority of your posts are just poorly informed but you repeat yourself as if it'll one day come true because of insistence.

Personally, I don't care if people "challenge," raiding. Raiding will never be removed from the game, so if someone says "I don't like raiding, it's too hard," or "I don't want to raid, I feel too pressured," I just shrug and ignore it. People on these forums are too damn self-important, and just assume everyone cares about specifically them. The grand majority of people do not care about you. People will move on regardless of whatever the hell you say.

Also, I know you really hate the "ice mage," thing, but it exists, just because you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it hasn't happened. I can recall the exact moment it happened to me, it was in copperbell hard. I will literally never forget that run. You know what though? Despite all the stuff they put us through, our premade never kicked them from the run. Even though we were literally given the reply as they were spamming Blizzard II, "I only use blizzard attacks because I roleplay an ice mage." Their search info even said so. I have no idea if it was them trolling, but it happened.

I've also never bothered complaining about the skill of the average player, I just objectively acknowledge it. I just do not care enough about people to even bother. I've had dps and tanks fill in for EX farms for wolves with my static that parse grey on FFlogs, and you know what we did, and what I did? Nothing. We continued to run with them, thanked them for their time when we finished, since we were clearing, and then moved on.

Edit: To add onto this, I've done plenty of learning parties helping inexperienced or new friends to EX primals. We've even let random players fill, and we taught them the fight and then usually got it on farm with that group. It is no exaggeration to say that I have plenty of patience for the average or casual player, and that I actually genuinely enjoy helping learning groups and/or starting them for inexperienced people. You would never know this though, since you just assumed I screech at the mere sight of someone with less skill than me, that I'm completely disconnected from them, and have no idea how their minds work.

That's the problem, you assume everyone who disagrees with you has some vendetta against different levels of skill. I literally do not care how well anyone plays outside of my static, and it's why I don't care about whether or not parsers are officially supported either. I don't care if I wake up one day and you yourself world first clear Sigmascape. I don't care who clears it if it's not my group. I have better things to do than be concerned about what other people are doing when it has no bearing on me at all.

[HyoMinPark]

I’m probably going to sound mean, so I apologize in advance because that isn’t really my intention, but...

Considering no one can even spell my name right it seems, I'm not sure.

I have always taken care to spell your name correctly, regardless of how well we get along on these forums; it’s common courtesy and I consider it a sign of respect even though you don’t seem to respect me (or people like me, i.e., “raiders”) at all. “Riyah.” So your “no one” is an exaggeration.

And I see a couple of us actually saying why we dislike things and giving reasons, and the rest of the people essentially just defending their own raids as well as essentially saying "You must clear OS4 to be able to talk on it." Not like me nor others have zero savage experience, nor that savage in this game is a long, multi-tiered fight that you need to do multiple steps that take months; we're talking four single bosses that you can spend a couple hours learning all of their attacks, and maybe 6 hours to 2-4 weeks to fully defeat. All of the fights you even prep by watching a video or faq to understand every attack in theory, then go in to do it in practice.

What I’m gathering from this, and I apologize if I’m misinterpreting it, but based on your previous posts in this thread, “non-raiders” or “non-serious raiders” are allowed to speak on the state of Savage raids and Ultimate, but when a raider wants to discuss the state of the more casual, non-raid content (e.g., difficulty curve scaling), they are told that they “don’t even understand the content” and aren’t allowed to have opinions on it because “they’re raiders”? How is that fair?

How can an individual that has never cleared V3S or V4S or even Ultimate talk about the state of the content? How can an individual that has never stepped foot into either of those instances talk about the state of it? Maybe this isn’t a fair comparison, but that would be like going to your dentist and asking for the latest cutting-edge developments in dermatology. Shouldn’t the dermatologists be the ones give you the low-down on those sort of things? Not your dentist who probably isn’t as familiar with them as a dermatologist would be? Sure, I suppose they could make presumptions about it (e.g., I don’t PvP, but based off of some hearsay, I’ve heard Frontlines is Bot City and Rival Wings queues are dying/horrendous on Aether; however, I’m not going to discuss the state of the content, nor its design because I don’t participate in it that often), but they cannot give an “expert’s”, or knowledgeable, opinion.

I have no problem with people disagreeing with my opinions and stances on things when they do so politely, and I welcome civil discussion that isn’t mudslinging and going around in circles for several posts. But you do not usually offer polite debates. You are just downright hostile and disrespectful a lot of the time to anyone that you deem “a toxic raider”—and that definition, based off of your myriad of posts in various threads ranging from the state of Savage to parsers, is any raider. I understand that you don’t like them that much; I don’t know why. But at least try to be a little bit respectful. People would be more keen to listen to you if you were...

To be blunt, it wouldn't matter if I was perfectly polite.

As stated above, it would.

Whenever you say anything that counteracts the values of people, they will always take the negative stance against it. People are too wrapped up in raids as a form of identity that no real challenge to them will ever be tolerated; any real discussion of them just warps back to reaffirming the shared belief, i.e. raids are wonderful and players just need to git gud.

The irony of you saying this... like dualgunner said, you do the exact same, just at the opposite end of the spectrum. That’s fine if you want to call someone out for something like this, but you should acknowledge that 1. It’s probably not the majority of raiders, and to stop making sweeping generalizations of a sub-group of players (however large OR small they may be), and 2. The fact that you practice it—just, again, at the opposite end of the spectrum—makes you hypocritical in your judgment of other people.

And when you get piled on enough, you really start to get annoyed with people and the whole shared belief itself. You get tired of people always overemphasizing ice mages, or complaining about the skill of the playerbase despite things going really well, or teh many little myths that build up and get reinforced, and it creates this big divide between the myth and what you experience in game.

I don’t know how big of a “myth” Ice Mages or, or how big of a “myth” poor performance is, but the Duty Finder thread is ~1,400 pages long. Maybe some are exaggerations, but most probably are not. Ancedotes being ancedotes, I have met my fair share of questionable performances. I’ve never met an Ice Mage, but I’ve met a lot of DPS that don’t AOE when needed, healers that don’t heal or DPS, but just stand there gazing into space, tanks that don’t mitigate, etc., and this ranges from baby content all the way to Ultimate Savage. I do not expect perfection from people; but I expect some semblance of effort and teamwork when grouped up with people, just like I would for a school or work project.

I just think that you should consider your last statement, though: people like to frame raiders as these “toxic elitists” when that’s not the case for a lot of them (I won’t say there aren’t some that are, because there most definitely are, and I have met them), thereby tainting the views of others that they “shouldn’t get involved in the raiding scene” because it’s so full of these “toxic elitists”. You want to apply your last statement to the raiders generalizing casuals, but it can go both ways—you yourself have been quite guilty of generalizing all raiders, when I hope that you know we aren’t all the same. Please consider that.


With that, I am going to bed. It is late, and homework is finally finished. Raid was...tiring. And I just want to go to sleep now. Apologies for any sloppy spelling or grammar mistakes I have made in my half-asleep state.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Quote me where I said that I personally was offended by those statements? My comments were to say that people could interpret blanket statements like those negatively, and as a result, be a reason they view the so called end game community as toxic. But please, as you requested on me, show me where I said that I myself was offended by the statements you asked me to quote.

And? Interpretation is entirely subjective. You have no further basis to argue someone will interpret those quotes as toxic as I say the contrary. At this point, you're now just advocating for safe spaces. Just so we are absolutely clear. In my sole opinion, if you are that easily offended, you shouldn't touch Savage. Why? People aren't going to hold back their opinions because you can't handle criticism.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

To be blunt, it wouldn't matter if I was perfectly polite. Whenever you say anything that counteracts the values of people, they will always take the negative stance against it.

No. You do not get to play the victim card.

I specifically called out your lack of experience because you insisted raiders are basically idiots who cannot grasp the casual mindset. Sebazy and I purposely described how difficulty scaling might work and you promptly ignored us. Nearly every single post you make in regards to raids takes an absolute stance. You even go out of your way to cite Alte Roite as a gimmicky fight, which anyone who has actually done would it laugh at such a description.

That alone demonstrates you have no business speaking about a subject you clearly aren't well-versed in. If you came into these threads and simply added, "I don't like how the raids are structured" or outright claimed you're just not interested in Savage. No one would have said anything nor would we be having these arguments. You do the precise opposite—antagonizing everyone who dares to have positive opinions towards raiding. The fact you claimed clearing Savage or Ultimate isn't an achievement screams arrogance. You talk down to raiders, call them toxic, elitists and every other name yet get defensive when they don't take kindly to the hypocrisy.

You get tired of people always overemphasizing ice mages, or complaining about the skill of the playerbase despite things going really well

This, this quote right here is what irks people. You don't do hard content. How the hell do you have basis for this opinion? Have you been farming Shinryu? I have. People are awful. Just last week I did Nidhogg, unsynced and had two DPS who compared couldn't break 2k. Unlike you, I have farmed every single Primal except Susano and Lakshmi. I have pugged Savage and used to raid Hard modes for fun. The amount of bad players you witness doing this is staggering.

The most popular thread on these forums are people showcasing just how abysmal many average players are. You can claim endlessly how overemphasised these assertions are but neither stand as any higher justification than the other. They are both anecdotes.

If you were "perfectly polite" people wouldn't be fed up with you. Alas, you take an absolute stance on nearly everything, react hostile to raiders, or frankly, anyone with a dissenting opinion and scurry away whenever you get caught in an argument you can't cherry pick. Has it ever occurred to you all these negative responses are your own doing? No, of course not. You're just a victim of the toxic raiders; all of them with different backgrounds, experience levels and opinions just coincidentally got together one day to pick on poor lil you. Get over yourself.

[KaivaC]

At this point, both casuals and raiders have had lies and slander made about them by the other side. Outliers of one end call the others lazy and unwilling to work; outliers on the other end call their opponents "toxic" and "unwilling to treat onlookers with basic respect." Let's dispense with both here and now: those are outliers on both ends.

Agreed. There are such things as toxic raiders and there are such things as toxic casuals. It's an issue on both ends of the spectrum, though not nearly as bad or elitist as some may have players believe.

So much this sentiment. Bads are bad no matter how competent they are. Most people are not bad people though. Neither the entire casual or raiding community is a cesspool, rather both have bad eggs.

Agreed, like above. Also, thumbs up for the mention. Made me smile

My main goal in continuing this conversation is that I noticed quite a bit of anger/frustration towards people earlier in the thread who stated that they avoided raiding due to their perceptions of a toxic community. Some went to imply that these people were lying or had ulterior motives. I just don't see how this helps. Acting in this manner does nothing to try to understand how their perception developed, and worse yet, probably just helps to affirm their perceptions. I really wish folks would try more often to engage in a good spirited way to help people see past their first impressions.

I feel like this also falls in line with 'don't judge a book by its cover'. A few days ago, we've had a player jump into the forums and just outright say they quit because of terrible leveling experiences with other players. And this is outside of endgame - these are just leveling/MSQ dungeons. And I don't like that they felt what their experiences were gave them the expectation that this is how FFXIV was going to be for the rest of their time here. If they had come back, they would've seen that they had quite a bit of support to show that the community isn't like that.

It's the same here. The discussions here are not indications of a toxic community. As mentioned before, if one actually reads through the discussions (which, at this point, is a daunting task and I personally never expected this thread to go beyond 50 posts), this is not the sign of a toxic community. Nobody, not even in the discussion between myself and Bobs, have devolved into back and forth pointless attacks, though we did definitely engage in an argument. There are conflicting opinions here, but that in itself is no way an indication of a toxic community.

To be honest, if you really want to see something turning truly toxic, there is something called a 'Zexy' thread. Now those, you can make an argument for. Though to be fair, I actually haven't seen her posting on the forums in quite some time.

Sure there is... long term goals. Something this game lacks outside relic weapons. Hopefully Eureka comes through and remedies this.
You don't need content with a million mechanics for it to be fun either. That's just what our devs choose to keep churning out.

To a point, I agree. And I also have respectful hopes for Eureka as well. But with mechanics, it isn't as though they don't make sense. They all serve their purpose and challenge the party. I don't feel with the current raid tier that there are too many mechanics. Everything once you hit O3S can feel overwhelming, yeah, but it's not something that is overwhelming to the point that most players couldn't handle were they to practice.

I wasn't here when ARR originally dropped, so I don't know how small the skill gap was compared to now, and you know, to each their own, but I found most of what I've tried to be very accessible. Even O4S, though it was extremely difficult for me to do, but it wasn't overwhelming to the point that it stopped being fun. And lore-wise, the attacks that these fights throw out at you make sense to me...even though all Savage fights are essentially exaggerated recreations of what you fought in the story-mode version.

My issue doesn't tend to be the healing itself. I pretty much could solo heal A9S.

I would mess a mech and wipe the raid. Best example: In O2S when we had to go to the side without a marker, while having the 2 stack markers. Even with the camera pulled all the way back, I couldn't always see which way to go until it was too late and I would cause a wipe.

After a few of those I mostly stopped even trying.

Sorry it took me like a day to finally respond to this. It's been a rough day between school and late night work D:

I agree with the poster that was below yours - it's very difficult to see the safe spot if the raid agrees to put the markers at the edges, rather than closer to the middle where the wagon wheels are sitting. I struggled with myself immensely, mostly because when it was first released, nobody really knew the range of safe zones. If it helps, if there are issues with memorizing what mechanic is about to come, would it be possible to have a teamspeak or discord up and have somebody calling out the next mechanic about to happen? I found that helpful in Shinryu Ex because I have a really nasty habit of tunnel vision in that fight - I get focused on one mechanic that I completely forget that another mechanic is just about to go off. For example, Hypernova about to explode while I'm DPS'ing a tail and I'm not in a puddle to protect me from a near insta-kill.

[MoroMurasaki]

If it helps, if there are issues with memorizing what mechanic is about to come, would it be possible to have a teamspeak or discord up and have somebody calling out the next mechanic about to happen? I found that helpful in Shinryu Ex because I have a really nasty habit of tunnel vision in that fight - I get focused on one mechanic that I completely forget that another mechanic is just about to go off. For example, Hypernova about to explode while I'm DPS'ing a tail and I'm not in a puddle to protect me from a near insta-kill.

I had this same issue and used the same remedy with Shin EX. I was flubbing things left and right because I was so paranoid about getting caught by an icicle then someone in our FC offered to call out the sides of the platforms on which the icicles were coming for and that alleviated a lot of my stress.

Now (and I say now as in like a few weeks ago being the last time I did that fight) I've developed enough of a sense for the icicles to call them out for other people in PUGs.

I would say all the help/offers of help/suggestions on how to better enjoy endgame that are being thrown around are ultimately the best evidence for a healthy raiding community that I've seen. If I needed convincing before reading this thread I wouldn't any more. The idea that it's brought anything but transparency and realism to the ffxiv raiding community just seems a bit silly at this point.

Thank you for starting it Kavia!

[VanilleFang]

I pointed out multiple on the first page...we literally just talked about this as you dismissed it 'as a joke'.

I actually am not an end game raider. Never have been.

My point was that people hate end game for that reason from my perspective. I haven't seen any real reason before this thread besides "I don't want to do end game stuff but I want x, that end game stuff would give me. So give me x for less work".