Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Gserpent]

You really have things wrong. 2 min window design was made for both sides of the player base

I don't know if I agree with that. I could agree with asserting that it was done to simplify raid design and management, and thus save the dev team work-hours over the course of a patch or expansion - that seems very plausible. But to make the game more accessible to casuals? I think that's incorrect.

And it's pretty simple to understand why - if you are designing the game such that all DPS and enrage checks are tuned around *absolutely everything* being pumped into a 15-20 second window every 120 seconds, missing that window absolutely *guts* your raid's DPS. If someone is dead, has weakness, or just plain screws up and fat fingers their buttons... or literally doesn't know which button to hit and when, which is far more likely to describe "casual" players than more skilled ones... when that 2 minute timer comes up, your raid just lost a huge portion of its total rDPS.

And not only that, it's lost that damage *PERMANENTLY*. The only way you fix that loss of rDPS is by literally delaying the next window by 60 or more seconds to allow for that person's cooldowns to be available, and for Weakness to have fallen off. And knowing whether or not you can afford to do that requires coordination and understanding of the encounter you simply are not going to find in a typical PF group or, frankly, even in most statics I've seen. Let alone players playing at the "casual" level.

No... if anything, shifting everything into a very rigid 2 minute paradigm makes DPS considerably *harder* for players the lower their personal skill level is, and especially for raid groups the more disorganized they are (so, most PF groups.) This is a significant element in why Abyssos clear rates have been and continue to be lower than previous clear rates - I think they're lower than Eden's Verse was, too, even accounting for P8 being overtuned on launch?

With the amount of extra balancing headaches this is going to cause them, I'm not even sure it will have ended up saving them work-hours. But I don't know how many work-hours actually go into determining who needs +10 potency and where - probably substantially less than designing and tuning encounters around "personal DPS"?

Accessibility is fine yes, but I've seen people, with regard to some instances like In from the Cold getting nerfed, proudly saying 'good, f*** forced solo instances, i purposely fail them asap so i can put it on very easy mode', which... yeh it's within their right to play the game how they want I guess? I guess some people don't want to have any modicum of challenge or barrier to entry stand in their way, because that would potentially tell them they're actually not good at the game, and that'd upset them. On the flip side of 'accessibility' though, I've also seen physically handicapped people not only play this game, but play certain aspects of it better than most of the able playerbase. Saw a gamer with no hands (played with their feet) nail the HW MCH opener better than most players at the time (including myself), seen tweets from a physically disabled player who has cleared Ultimates despite their supposed 'limitations'. So it's just odd to me that able people would choose the path of least resistance, but I guess, as the old saying goes, 'I dont pay their sub'

Yeah. The friction only comes from when these two disparate groups of players (the players who tend to bite into their games and try to master them, the "hardcore" types; and the kind of players who want minimal challenges or even gameplay, and who mostly want to participate in a story... they aren't "casual," but something even farther down the line... "story" players?) interact. And the way XIV is designed, it's guaranteed to happen. Duty Finder is a core part of the PvE gameplay loop, it's *required* to complete some MSQ tasks still, and Yoshida himself has said in interviews that they design the game such that... "more skilled players can assist (read: carry) less skilled players through content." It's a setup that is *GUARANTEED* to result in sour grapes all around, and it's maybe a credit to the typical player of this game that this toxicity only ever really seems to leak out in places that are outside of the game. I've been playing for several years and I can still count on fingers and toes the number of times I've seen genuine toxic behavior out of people in Duty Finder... unless you count Frontlines, but that's a different can of worms...

But it's grating, the idea that some people will effectively just freeload while effectively demanding others carry them to the same rewards. I don't think it's a good setup. But I guess it's functional enough that trying to explore alternatives wouldn't be worth the trouble.

Incidentally, it's one issue that *other* game largely avoids, as the "hardcore" players and the "story" players tend to self-segregate themselves by nature of its gameplay content and setup. The "hardcore" players are off in their own regulated area that has its own separate ratings and trackers and tend to only interact and play with others of that same mindset. There, of course, is plenty of toxicity within that area... as anyone who has participated in that content can probably attest to... but I've found it interesting that you don't usually see the different groups of players quipping at each other. It seems like that other development team tripped over the solution to that particular problem.