the normal content is too easy

[OdinelStarrei]

Count me as one of those players who played for the story above all else. And yeah, I found it hard. And that's difficult to admit in a thread full of forumites implying that bad players shouldn't be bad and don't deserve to play the game.
Partly due to my lacking performance at least, I have no intention of going anywhere near anything above 'Normal' level content.

Why are you so self-defeating? Why is there a need to denigrate people and put words in their mouth? There is no need to strawman and reduce down some fairly valid opinions to "wow basement dwellers trying to gatekeep lmao" No one is saying bad players don't deserve to play the game, many people are blaming SQUARE ENIX for not instating proper tutorials, for having completely lopsided difficulty curves, no incentive for improvement, an atrocious leveling experience in both content and the jobs themselves, the total dissolution of the midcore, and for design decisions that don't seem to benefit ANYONE. If you want to draw the ire of anyone around here or in XIV in general, you have to have a selfish, overinflated ego combined with irrelevant or incorrect information, not "I'm just not very good at pressing buttons." Or be a "toxic raider elitist forumite", I guess.

You know what I'm here for? FFXIV, in it's entirety. I will consume any amount of content this game has to offer, because I love it, and believe most of it has value, even if some of it isn't exactly perfect, because I think the point of a theme park MMO is to have multiple types of content for multiple types of people. There was no problem with having dungeon/MSQ content be tuned the way it is in Heavensward/Stormblood, because every job had a skill ceiling that was actually worth something that gave opportunity for player growth. Every expansion since, they keep removing actions, they remove designs and systems, they dumb down the things that brought identity and uniqueness to each and every job to the point of irrelevance, and now, instead of participating in unengaging content with a engaging job that gives me the opportunity to have fun in even the most casual of content, Square Enix has dropped the ceiling of the entire game on the heads of playerbase, regardless of where you stood on the spectrum. I used to play jobs with mid-40 casts per minute, with variable timers. Now I'm lucky to reach high 30s as I mash my head into the same builder spender, 2 min burst window with zero variations that comprises the entire combat suite. Won't even go into the total lobotomy that has happened to the support role.

I can only play a fleshed-out, long term story experience ONE time every two years, over the course of maybe two weeks. The experience of actually playing XIV long-term compromises of much more of the overall play experience, and that long-term runway of gameplay, with a suitable skill ceiling, should be accommodated for.

This is probably why I've lost almost all my XIV friends from Heavensward. The game is boring to play. I have never played XIV LESS than I do right now.

You can keep your easy dungeons, and your easy MSQ, and your lack of consequences for any mistake or shortcoming or disability you may have, while also having significant developer resources allocated to the expansion of the Trust system. That's the correct way to develop, and I support that 100%. It doesn't affect me, we have different lanes. But I'd like my skill ceiling to return, because proper skill expression makes even the most braindead content fun, and prevents a spiraling dead end in your most dedicated players, the ones who champion the game the most. As long as the floor remains low for accessibility, it gives a solid middle ground for everyone, like it was on the path to becoming in Stormblood before Shadowbringers gutted the entire game. At this rate, every job is going to devolve into the same grey, tasteless mush.

If people being bad is accepted, people should also accept that people are allowed to be good and want more from their play experience even in mandatory content. We don't need to be in permanent conflict 24/7, those are not conflicting ideals, but SE seems determined to make the gameplay experience for one side totally miserable, just like they did in Heavensward.