Quote Originally Posted by TyrTry View Post
We set times in which we could meet (95% of us are working adults), annnnnnnd people would skip out or had an appointment or fell asleep or grandma died or grandma revived. This happened many times typically with the same people. Grandma must have died at least 16 times.
FFXIV places a tremendous burden upon statics given its combination of 8-person content (as opposed to 6 for most content in FFXI), and its utter inflexibility in terms of group size. It means everyone has to be there, at all meeting times, for eight people, all of whom have to juggle the various demands of life.

This is where 'midcore content' should factor in more heavily: content featuring a moderate grind, moderate challenge, and group size flexibility in that 6-7 people could work in a pinch. Eureka has the potential to provide this if the content is augmented by additional things to do, farmed force-pop NMs a la Abyssea or some such. Maps are good. There's not much else, though, besides catch-up Mount farming from old unsynced EX trials. The relative lack of mid-core, flexible content then pushes people into harder stuff with inflexible party member requirements, and... then it's just done, from what I've seen.

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I'd also point out that running the hardest content with SPs is dicey, especially from the get-go. It takes time to form chemistry, familiarity, trust - from a gameplay perspective. Attempting Savage content before that stage is hit is dicey. Maybe everyone was there already, but given the problems you ran into, I suspect the group cohesion hadn't yet reached an acceptable level. I'd suggest easier content in the future for starting out, like running 24-person Raids as one of the full parties, running current Trials (NM and EX), etc.