Why is it so common to join extremes without watching a guide first?

[SturmChurro]

If you want to do a blind run then join and say that. Don’t join and ask for the full written guide when that is accessible literally everywhere online.

A lot of players are probably used to someone literally typing paragraphs and explaining fights. Others are likely afraid to admit it's their first time, or speak up in general.

Next thing you know, they show up in Duty Complete Farm parties STILL making mistakes like they never did it before.

That's exactly what happens! It's why I get burn out trying to do extremes every expansion. So much wasted time just trying to find a party that can clear in something literally labelled "farm"! Even inside the instance, someone can ask whether anybody needs some help or a refresher with anything, and nobody will speak up, then we wipe, constantly..

[Eien713]

Ok people dont seem to understand what I mean.

Why join and ask for the strat written in party chat when you can easily read the strat on google?

Offering guidance is one thing, rewriting the mechanics for you as soon as you join the party makes no sense when you can just go to google to read before that and save everybody some time.

Some mechanics are so lengthy to explain (Thordan?) that more often than not nobody gets to finish and they maybe would if you would have read beforehand. And I can understand you can’t remember everything, but you will remember at least SOMETHING that in the end will make the whole run smoother for everybody.

If you want to do a blind run then join and say that. Don’t join and ask for the full written guide when that is accessible literally everywhere online.

It makes NO difference.

If you learn by doing then congratulations, everyone learns that way, thats not even the point, but don’t join asking people to write down for you something you can find in ten seconds to begin with.

This pretty much sums up how I felt when I got extreme fights in Mentor Roulette. It's not that I didn't want to help or mentor (I was there to do just that, after all); it just made no sense whatsoever to ask for the strat and not make an effort to look for it yourself. This just reeks of laziness (or maybe ignorance, in which case the mentor has the right to tell the person the proper way these fights should be approached without being accused of not wanting to "do their job"). If we all go into the fight prepared, we spend the 60 minutes learning and trying to beat the fight instead of wasting time explaining. If you want to prog blind, I respect that and am willing to stick around for it if you really try your best to learn the mechanics. But before queuing, can you guarantee that everyone else in the random DF party you get also wants the same thing? I think not.

Sigh, all those people in the comments coming at you without even reading or understanding the point you were making shows they just want to have a swing at mentors whenever they see an opportunity (whether the opportunity is actually there or not) -.-

[Packetdancer]

This pretty much sums up how I felt when I got extreme fights in Mentor Roulette. It's not that I didn't want to help or mentor (I was there to do just that, after all); it just made no sense whatsoever to ask for the strat and not make an effort to look for it yourself. This just reeks of laziness (or maybe ignorance, in which case the mentor has the right to tell the person the proper way these fights should be approached without being accused of not wanting to "do their job").

To be fair, in my experience when I get an Extreme in Mentor Roulette, no one has prepared because generally the folks who queued in don't even know what an Extreme is, much less that they might want to read up on mechanics first.

I got Garuda EX a week or two ago in Mentor Roulette, with seven enthusiastic first-time sprouts who had no clue what they'd gotten into. This was the exchange:

Me: Hi! Before we start, do folks know the mechanics to this fight? Because unlike a lot of what you've done so far, you can't easily just brute-force this blindly.
Tank #1: *has already YOLO'd straight across the arena and pulled before I finish typing*
Party: *wipes to adds, unsurprisingly*
Tank #1: Apparently, we do NOT know the mechanics.
Party: *general chorus of agreement with tank #1*

(They hunkered down and we talked about the fight, and got them the clear.)

But once they do understand that, oh, hey, this fight has actual mechanics, it's often tricky to ask them to go look up the fight and read all the instructions, or watch a video guide.

For one, someone may be on a Playstation and not have a laptop handy to go hit up a guide. (And reading some of those guides on a smartphone isn't always easy.) Going "hey, go watch this 8-minute video and remember all of it" isn't necessarily any better. But for another, people in this thread have mentioned before that they learn better from seeing the mechanics; that's true for lots of people.

I tend to figure that once Mentor Roulette drops me into an EX, if the folks there are willing to learn the mechanics, I'm happy to teach them.

If folks are willing to learn the mechanics but want to try the fight blind, I'm also open to that; there was a fairly fun Ultima Weapon EX I got in late Shadowbringers where folks successfully blind-progged (almost) the entire fight. The only thing I did end up eventually having to point out was the Aetheroplasm debuff the tanks would accumulate; it's the first place I think there's a forced tank swap mechanic, and so they just weren't thinking to look at the slowly-accumulating debuff. When they went "Okay, we give up, what keeps killing the tanks?" that's when I pointed that bit out (and that even debuffs which a healer can't cleanse are worth looking at the tooltips for).

I always do stress to them that in the NA datacenters, extremes are usually done via pre-made parties in PF -- which gives you the freedom to pick how you want to approach the fight, and whether or not you want to try it blind -- and so on, and generally folks are receptive.

But if someone says "Yep, I read up on the mechanics," I admit I'd be shocked, because frankly the game gives them no reason I can think of to believe they should bother doing that before queuing into their first extremes.

[Reinha]

Going "hey, go watch this 8-minute video and remember all of it" isn't necessarily any better. But for another, people in this thread have mentioned before that they learn better from seeing the mechanics; that's true for lots of people.

I'd like to comment on these two things. I've seen many people say they can't remember the whole video after watching it. The point is to remember something, so you don't zone in and ask someone to explain mechanics for the first 5 minutes. At least be ready for a few pulls and have an idea what the tether is for, what damage to share or avoid, which adds to kill first and/or what you need to do for tank busters. You can see, hear and read the mechanics on a good video, so there is something for everyone.

And if seeing the mechanic, hearing about it and reading it's name and cast bar in the video is not your style of learning and you need to die from the mechanic in game to figure it out? Don't ask for someone to type it in a chat box before the first pull since that's not your style of learning.

No one will convince me that "hey, ask for someone to slowly type mechanics for 5 minutes before pull and remember all of it" is the secret sauce for making people learn while graphs, videos and text guides do nothing for them. Please. The best thing a mentor can do for clueless newbies is to point them to useful resources like Party Finder, YouTube and The Balance. This game's etiquette at high levels does not include asking to be spoonfed information that is readily available.

[Packetdancer]

No one will convince me that "hey, ask for someone to slowly type mechanics for 5 minutes before pull and remember all of it" is the secret sauce for making people learn while graphs, videos and text guides do nothing for them. Please. The best thing a mentor can do for clueless newbies is to point them to useful resources like Party Finder, YouTube and The Balance. This game's etiquette at high levels does not include asking to be spoonfed information that is readily available.

I mean, if you get an extreme in Mentor Roulette, it is almost always because the sprouts don't know what an extreme is, so obviously have no idea they should prepare for it. I will always tell them that in the future it'll be smoother if they use Party Finder, and that unless they're specifically organizing a blind run it's generally good etiquette to study the fight.

(Though, keep in mind, free trial users are not allowed to create parties, whether in party finder or otherwise; queuing in directly is one of their only options.)

But once that's been detailed? It is absolutely faster for me to explain the fight in chat than make them all go watch an 8-minute video for a fight from back in ARR. Especially if I break it into bite-size chunks. For instance, to use Garuda EX as an example (since it's recent enough that I can easily remember more or less how I summarized it):

First explanation:
In the first half of the fight, there's only really two things to remember.
First, when those feathers spawn, one of them is a 'Satin Plume' instead of a 'Razor Plume'. We need to kill that one *first*; it's the thing that puts us all to sleep there.
Second, when the adds show up, the tanks will want to each take one and drag the two of them a bit apart from each other; the party can focus on Chirada first, and then go finish off Suparna.
Let's get through the adds, and then I'll cover the rest of the fight. Sound good?

Second explanation, after we'd gotten through adds cleanly:
When we get more Razor Plumes again, the special one this time will be a 'Spiny Plume'; we want to *not* kill that one.
The Spiny Plume will start stacking a debuff called 'Thermal Low' on whoever has aggro on it; if they get three stacks of Thermal Low, they explode and we all die. So we can't let one tank hold aggro the entire time if it takes too long.
Once Garuda leaves the arena again, *then* we want to kill the Spiny Plume; that'll give us a safe spot to stand in for when she comes back and does a ton of damage.
After that, there'll be some whirlwinds that appear and make chunks of the arena unsafe. The adds and the Spiny Plume will come back, and you deal with them the same way as before, just dodging whirlwinds.
(But honestly, we'll probably kill her fairly soon after the whirlwinds land, so you probably won't need to deal with that last part.)

Et voila, explanation given. The only stumbling block was that people would kill the Spiny Plume early with AoEs, but the group figured where that was going wrong pretty quickly, cleared out the Razor Plumes near the Spiny Plume individually, and then AoE'd the ones farther away down.

My typing that explanation was almost certainly far faster than trying to find a strat video for an ARR extreme and having them go watch it.

[Eien713]

Snip

I won't mind explaining mechanics if they're simple, but some fights have so much going on that text would probably cause more confusion than help, not to mention how much of a waste of time writing and reading walls of text would be. You also need people who are actually able and willing to learn mechanics and don't just wanna faceroll through the extreme fights out of ignorance. There are also instances where even after you explain stuff, people don't follow the instructions for some reason. And if you get thrown into a party where the other members don't speak the language(s) you do, welp, you're out of luck.

People easily throw around "That's your job as a mentor!" "If you don't want to help, don't become a mentor!" "Earn that mount!" etc., but they don't stop for a second to consider things from other (valid) perspectives. (This last part isn't directed at you, by the way XD)

[SassyAssassin]

If people are joining through Duty Finder, they more than likely are newer players and don't know about how PF works or what to expect from Extremes. That's how I used to run Shiva EX when I was new back in stormblood. Just sit in DF. It worked. Essentially blind ran it w/ people and came really close to winning, but yeah. You're getting people who don't know what's up.

Yes many people do that and it can work for sure if we all work together! I even like doing it!

[Kuroka]

Here. I cant learn shit from watching a vid first, if all, i die even more as i constantly wait for a mechanic or mess it because of not remembering fast enough. I always clear blind and only then watch a guide to get teh idea of how its done generally in PF lol

[Tiramu]

I might be part of your target, so I'll give an answer and try to appeal to you to be more open-minded because some of what you've said has a touch of running people down who don't play the same as you.

I really dislike this "if you haven't read a guide you are unprepared and haven't put the effort in" mentality. When content is created it's supposed to give us a challenge to overcome. The strategy is half of the challenge, executing on that strategy is the other half. If I've read a guide before taking on the content then I've had half of the challenge done for me. It's not about being lazy or not putting the effort in, if anything it takes more effort to learn on the fly than it does to have your hand held by others.

While some people might play games with the game on one screen, walkthrough on the other. Others want to play the content blind and figure stuff out for themselves. We should try to respect each other as much as possible with this stuff and if we are really rigid in expectations, then that's what statics and your FC are for. Heck, you can even create PF duties where players have to have cleared the content to join. You can get your easy run that way.



Talking more broadly, I've had people act inconsiderately in both guided and blind groups. I was in a blind friendly Ex group only last week where one of the players couldn't help but point out the strategy to a bunch of players who were trying to blind the content, then wondered why they got pissed off at him. This happens a lot, with players who have cleared content telling blind friendly groups the strategy.

Also, my first extreme was an experience. I was struggling to get a blind group together for a Ramuh Ex Synched group because everyone wanted a guide. So, I begrudgingly read the basics and entered a group. Informed the leader that I'd read the basics, was that OK? They said yes, and then accused me of lying because I didn't get the mechanics down in 3 runs. It turned out, even reading a guide isn't enough for some guided players, you need to more guide. Long story short, they'd been trying for a few hours and desperately wanted their clear. We went a few more runs, my connection went poor and they kicked me.

It knocked my confidence wholesale. The next day, I put together a blind synced no echo group myself and we cleared Ramuh in a few runs, then went on and did a load more. Turns out, it wasn't me who was the problem, and the guide wasn't helping them. So go figure.


Now, after having done a lot of Ex runs, I'm even more set in my ways. I will create blind friendly groups and we will clear the content that way. It seems to work pretty well and one things for sure, having read a guide or no has little bearing on whether you'll clear; and if anything, I find blind groups have more success than guided ones, and blind players tend to pick up mechanics more quickly than those who need guides. Thats obviously my own personal experience, but it seems pretty consistent.


So, yeah, just... respect that different people play differently to you; that both blind and guided players can be toxic, that both blind and guided players can be good or bad and if the group is good you'll get the clear either way. If you can't do that, then make clear on your PF description or use a static or your FC.

[Ransu]

People like going in blind. The real question here though is why are you using duty finder for extremes? I didn't think anyone ever used that for those fights. Party finder can already be pretty random. I couldn't imagine a DF group.