Anyone else concerned by the extremely low skill ceiling?

[Wegente]

The players who beat all savage content within a month are not average players. They are usually very noticeably more skilled than most raiders, and they often put in far more time in a single lockout. Competitive and/or hardcore statics often raid 12+ hours a week, whereas a more laid back team often raid 8 or less. Both types of teams could finish the content in the same amount of hours played, but of course the team that puts in more hours each week will finish it sooner.

I've raided since 2.0 and back in the Coil days I used to play with what I'd call an average midcore static back then, we used to play 9 hours a week. We cleared First and Second Coil about 1 month before echo release, so we took around 5 months to clear.
The top groups back then on my server (Ragnarok) got their kill around 1 month after the content was released.

Nowadays I know a lot of midcore statics that play around the same amount of hours as I did back then, and even though their skill is average and I wouldn't call them good players, all of them got their clear in around a month at most.

If you want to check how high the clear rates are nowadays compared to pre-Creator days, just look at FFlogs.
Gordias for example was cleared by 44 people on Ragnarok before 3.1 was released.
Midas was cleared by 88 people on Ragnarok before 3.3 was released.
Eden Savage has been cleared by 2119 people on Ragnarok and 5.1 is coming out next week. Numbers speak for themselves.

[monk-dps]

I've raided since 2.0 and back in the Coil days I used to play with what I'd call an average midcore static back then, we used to play 9 hours a week. We cleared First and Second Coil about 1 month before echo release, so we took around 5 months to clear.
The top groups back then on my server (Ragnarok) got their kill around 1 month after the content was released.

Nowadays I know a lot of midcore statics that play around the same amount of hours as I did back then, and even though their skill is average and I wouldn't call them good players, all of them got their clear in around a month at most.

If you want to check how high the clear rates are nowadays compared to pre-Creator days, just look at FFlogs.
Gordias for example was cleared by 44 people on Ragnarok before 3.1 was released.
Midas was cleared by 88 people on Ragnarok before 3.3 was released.
Eden Savage has been cleared by 2119 people on Ragnarok and 5.1 is coming out next week. Numbers speak for themselves.

Those raiders also have gotten better since then too so just comparing those results won't tell you the whole story. Point being that I don't think the game has gotten THAT easier since then, yeah we have a bunch of QOL things now but peoiple still wipe in dungeons, people still don't know how to hold hate, people still can't heal. And this is at a time where we have quite afew QOL skills now and people still fail.

[Wegente]

Those raiders also have gotten better since then too so just comparing those results won't tell you the whole story. Point being that I don't think the game has gotten THAT easier since then, yeah we have a bunch of QOL things now but peoiple still wipe in dungeons, people still don't know how to hold hate, people still can't heal. And this is at a time where we have quite afew QOL skills now and people still fail.

There will always be bad players in any game, but if we had harder content that forced people to learn how to play their class at an average level, they would strive to improve instead of facerolling the content.
Otherwise we will never have players that actually care about the gameplay of FFXIV, but rather just the story or the glamours.

[monk-dps]

There will always be bad players in any game, but if we had harder content that forced people to learn how to play their class at an average level, they would strive to improve instead of facerolling the content.
Otherwise we will never have players that actually care about the gameplay of FFXIV, but rather just the story or the glamours.

I don't think it would honestly. I just see them making fights harder and people quitting over being hard locked out. Maybe I'm that jaded but right now I can't even get into the best raids in the game - the lastest 24 mans- because people cheese them so they don't have to fight thundergod. Who isn't even that hard. But he's hard enough that people instant quit or cheese their ilvls so they never get it. Because of things like that it's hard for me to see the playerbase getting better when actual hard content gets drops. Maybe that 1% of the playerbase will but chances are the 99% will cry for nerfs like they always have and continue to do. Hell we got people saying the one extra combo on gunbreaker is too hard. Pressing buttons has gotten too hard.. we have reached THAT low now. So I guess I'm jaded, I wish I could go - the playerbase will improve with harder content- But I can't.

[Wegente]

So I guess I'm jaded, I wish I could go - the playerbase will improve with harder content- But I can't.

That's what happens when people get spoiled after years of being able to faceroll the content without putting effort into it.
Imagine if you could get away with only putting 10% of effort into your real life job. It would be really annoying to have to start committing to it eventually. Yet sacrifices must be made.

How does this prove the average raider beats savage in a month? Do you mean to say you assume that every pug is an average skilled player? I have met everything from the truly horrendous to the mindblowingly outstanding while pugging. It isn't only average skilled or less players who pug.

It's harder to clear stuff in pugs obviously, but i'm using statics as a metric because it's easier to gauge their performance since you have the same 8 people who play together on a regular basis.
What I'm saying is that if the average group took 500 hours to clear the raid back in pre-Creator days, nowadays it takes them 100. And that's proven by the fact that we have thousands more clears than we did back then, meaning the content DID get way easier and more accessible to everyone.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

That's what happens when people get spoiled after years of being able to faceroll the content without putting effort into it.
Imagine if you could get away with only putting 10% of effort into your real life job. It would be really annoying to have to start committing to it eventually. Yet sacrifices must be made.



It's harder to clear stuff in pugs obviously, but i'm using statics as a metric because it's easier to gauge their performance since you have the same 8 people who play together on a regular basis.
What I'm saying is that if the average group took 500 hours to clear the raid back in pre-Creator days, nowadays it takes them 100. And that's proven by the fact that we have thousands more clears than we did back then, meaning the content DID get way easier and more accessible to everyone.

FFLOGS was a lot less used back then.

[Wegente]

FFLOGS was a lot less used back then.

Are you implying there were way more clears back then as well? Are you saying that official data like this one is all false then?

[Penthea]

What I'm saying is that if the average group took 500 hours to clear the raid back in pre-Creator days, nowadays it takes them 100. And that's proven by the fact that we have thousands more clears than we did back then, meaning the content DID get way easier and more accessible to everyone.

You're leaving out some very important points here. Pre-Creator days were totally different to now.

Back then actual raiders were not as common because the game was relatively new so the player population wasn't huge and typically in new games you don't have a wealth of experienced players. I wager most players who raided pre Creator had not raided at that level of difficulty before.

Fast forward to today, more expansions have passed since. Players have had far more time and opportunities to gain raid experience, the player population has risen significantly, and we also have an influx of WoW refugees potentially bringing 5+ years of raid experience with them into the game. On top of that SE have gotten better at making introductory raid content that eases players into the raiding scene, instead of something as overtuned as the first tier of Alex which must have fooled a lot of players into thinking they could never be raid material.

I don't think anyone should be surprised or dismayed that kill rates have increased when there are more players playing, more experienced players playing, and content is balanced in such a way that it draws in more potential raiders. It's a logical progress.

The way you talk reminds me so much of how I have seen many veteran WoW players talk. So many have this idea that the original raiding scene was incredibly difficult, when the fact is it was not compared to now. It was back then because most raiders never raided before WoW, and the idea of playing in such a way was not common in gaming at the time. When WoW's population was growing steadily with each expansion, the kill rate of bosses grew despite the fact that the content became more difficult.

An increase of kill-rate isn't necessarily a sign of content not being difficult enough. Sometimes it's simply a sign that the average skill of the playerbase has risen. Which is a perfectly normal thing to happen if enough time passes.

(and no I'm not saying Vanilla WoW raiding is comparable to Coils, because it is not. I am just pointing out that despite the fact that top-end content became far more difficult in WoW since Vanilla, kill rates increased as time passed)

[Wegente]

I don't think anyone should be surprised or dismayed that kill rates have increased when there are more players playing, more experienced players playing, and content is balanced in such a way that it draws in more potential raiders. It's a logical progress.

Raids in WoW still take a few weeks to complete nowadays. Sure, they're not taking months as they were back in the day and that's because, as you said, people have gotten better over the years, the game mechanics are better understood by the playerbase, etc.

Still, fights can be made harder regardless. Look at UCOB for example, the first group to clear it took 2 weeks, and that fight came out after Creator and Deltascape which both took less than 48 hours to clear.

What I'm asking for is a slight increase in difficulty, so that the more hardcore players can complete the raid in a week or so while the rest of the population can still clear before the release of the next tier.
That way we wouldn't have a huge population of raiders who only log in for their Savage clears on Tuesday and then log out for the rest of the week, or worse, unsub until the new patch get released, making SE lose potential money.