Quote Originally Posted by Adeacia View Post
This right here. It may only be personal, but people WILL demand screenshots. It's not possible for something like this to even exist without causing it to be used to exclude people. Never underestimate the lengths players will go to.
If the conventional XIV solution is for every party to be blinded and just keep rolling the dice until they get a sufficient ratio of carries to leeches, I think we have bigger problems to worry about than some parties excluding those who are unprepared for the given content.

Moreover, there's only one real goalpost for party requirements: enough likely performance to make up for the number of grossly unprepared players likely to slip through the requirements and soon cause the run to disband, wasting everyone's time. At present, this is done through prior clear checks (Oh no! It's so exclusive that players who haven't cleared can be optionally barred from farm runs) and ilvl (which is far less meritocratic, and provides far less climbable barriers to content access, than a more correlative metric like a well-thought, contextualized measure of performance).

The only people who'd be more excluded as a result of switching from tangentials like excessive ilvl requirements to a more meritocratic basis of expectations would be those who (1) can afford to deck out in new crafted gear but (2) lack the skill to put it to use reasonably expectable from that ilvl.

That's not to say that the system suggested here is nearly ideal -- it's not -- but when the status quo is to bloat your ilvl requirements and just keep reforming until you get a party of actually prepared people, for a change... the bar's pretty damn low and more than worth replacing.