Can we please delay Savage?

[MothKira]

Hi, I don't world race, but do raid week 1 and craft multiple gear sets day 1 for my group, and I absolutely support delaying savage by a week for the x.2 an,d x.4 raid tiers.

This is already the standard for the x.05 first expansion tier and ultimate releases, I fail to see why is there such a resistance to the same idea being applied to the two other raid releases of the expansion. I'm convinced if you polled all raiders this would be an incredibly popular change.

As evidenced by multiple references in social media posts, live letters and interviews, the developpers aknowledge and condone the world race, and take into account world race competition integrity in their update design. If you don't believe that, just one example in 5.4 patch notes, the notice in the items tab, regarding an apology on normal raid gear materia slots. https://fr.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...8c2f1094131070
TLDR you might not care about the world race, and that's fine, but SE does.

The world race isn't just about the 1% raiders. It's also one of the biggest social media event for the game, not in small part thanks to hard work from people like Mogtalk. It attracts new players to the game, it creates visibility, - look at the impact speedruns can have on game popularity for instance, and how much games that supported speedrun scenes like celeste benefitted from that, it's the same idea.
There's no downsides for people who don't raid for it to exist. You can simply ignore it if you don't like the idea of ingame competitions, that's fine.

Even ignoring the world race, for other players, the experience of raid week 1 blind at true minimum min ilvl, and post week 1 is just not the same. Because of the nature of savage gearing and the impact of knowing mechanics, it's the only time window where raids can be reliably be enjoyed at true minimum item level and blind. When you say "just dont raid week 1" you're telling people "i don't believe you should be able to raid this way".

I won't say it's "the way the raids are meant to be played", i don't like that connotation that ranks how people enjoy raids - but i'll say it's close minded to dismiss people who are very invested in raid content who do care about that experience, because you don't.

Edit - damn didn't notice this is a necro. Deffo still a relevant conversation though.