Why is the game Accessable but not Accessable?

[Amarande]

The people who have no clue where to start are being wilfully ignorant though.

• The game spams in the chat box "of the parties recruiting, 100 match you search conditions", yet there are a lot of people who don't click it even once to discover that party finder exists and that people advertise raids in it.
• If you wanted to raid, you would probably seek out some sort of raid FC.
• Google it and find videos about the game and raiding it it.
• This all assumes that in 90 levels and hundreds of hours of MSQ, you avoided all invites to free companies and didn't get into the novice network where you could ask about it.

• On the contrary, I expect a lot of people forget about Party Finder. When you first unlock it you've just completed Sastasha, and at that point there's basically nothing of note to do with it. There's an Active Help that comes up but that's always been an issue as well (quite a lot of critical features come up in active help long, long before they actually become important in a practical sense, so get forgotten).
• XIV is an anomaly among MMOs. "Raiding FCs" are comparatively rare here vs. virtually every other game that has raids. This has actually been a chronic issue since Coil, apparently to be chalked up to relatively small raid groups with such heavy inflexibility when it comes to progression and member swaps.
• A lot of people try to avoid spoilers, which are hard to avoid when Googling; not to mention search engines becoming steadily less valuable in these days of SEO one-upmanship so you get crap like Game Rant while useful sites are often even actively downgraded by the Googlerithm.
• Most people tend to regard random out of the blue guild invites as an annoyance in MMOs, and on a lot of servers, Mentors tend to be fairly neglectful of inviting sprouts to the NN and sometimes even actively skittish about doing so - largely because of bots, some of which actually are smart enough to spot mentors and send them an articulate looking tell asking if they can join the NN; due to the fact that it's nearly impossible to remove a sprout permanently from NN, on many worlds there are several tens of bots eternally clogging up NN space. Twelve help you if you started as a Thaumaturge, especially.

Part of the game is being social. When you do relics for example, they say "ask other players and share information to figure out how to proceed". Of course, the answer is that the relic materials are on a tomestone vendor or sold at certain beast tribes and grand companies, not very hard to find if you understand the game, but SE does try a bit to make us interact with eachother.

This mostly fails, because most people don't talk to strangers in game, and most questions get brushed off by "just google it" which doesn't build friendships or ties, assuming that people just don't ignore you altogether if you try to converse with them without already knowing them.

Ingame, Eureka was probably the pinnacle of positive socialization in XIV, and it seems like it was a one time flash in the pan, unfortunately. Bozja didn't really seem to capture the same spirit, and this time around, there's no large scale exploratory mission at all.

Unless you count social media activity as "being social" but that has its own problems (having to maintain an account on a major SM platform in a day and age where there's an increasing backlash against the control and data harvesting inherent there, plus the fact that unlike forums that you could mostly browse without an account to get a feel for the culture - and maybe even get the info you need without registration - you usually have to get your hands on a community invite to even get to know if you vibe with. Then the fact that most people will just silently put up with mega communities they don't vibe with for the sake of information rather than even have a choice of atmospheres like in the past ...).

[Jeeqbit]

On the contrary, I expect a lot of people forget about Party Finder. When you first unlock it you've just completed Sastasha, and at that point there's basically nothing of note to do with it.

Once again, it spams the chat with "of the parties recruiting, 78 match your search conditions". This appears every 10 minutes and links to party finder, up until you disable it, which I doubt most people do because the setting to disable it is hidden in party finder itself somewhere.

What is different now than when I was new is that the duties are hidden. Back in ARR, while going through the MSQ, I would literally see parties for coil up. I was aware that it was the thing you use for raiding because of that. Now those duty names are hidden to avoid spoilers. But you can still see that they are parties listed under the raid category.

XIV is an anomaly among MMOs. "Raiding FCs" are comparatively rare here vs. virtually every other game that has raids.

I'm aware that raiding guilds are not much of a thing in this game compared to some MMOs, but it's still logical to look for one if you want to get into raiding. Your search for one will probably lead you to a normal FC that does a variety of things and they will probably explain how it all works and that was my point.

A lot of people try to avoid spoilers, which are hard to avoid when Googling

The spoilers are unlikely to be that significant if you've beat the MSQ though. The worst that would happen is a spoiler of what happens in the raid stories by spoiling the boss names.

Most people tend to regard random out of the blue guild invites as an annoyance in MMOs, and on a lot of servers, Mentors tend to be fairly neglectful of inviting sprouts to the NN and sometimes even actively skittish about doing so - largely because of bots

It's true that mentors can be quite neglectful of inviting sprouts to the NN, but this is because if you go through the list of sprouts and invite them it's like inviting a drop in the ocean. An hour later many of them will have logged off, replaced with a new set of sprouts that you didn't invite yet. It would get exhausting to keep doing it. A large amount of them decline the invitations, either because they are alts or some other reason. Nevertheless, many of them get into the novice network after taking a break from the game and getting returner status, which automatically invites them. Bots get banned long before becoming eligible for returner status.

Bots used to be automatically invited to the novice network and that is why they changed it so that mentors invite them. I don't see them in there anymore so if it's happening on any server, then a mentor is probably trolling and inviting them. From what I can tell, bots decline now anyway because it would make it easier to notice and report them.

Ingame, Eureka was probably the pinnacle of positive socialization in XIV, and it seems like it was a one time flash in the pan, unfortunately. Bozja didn't really seem to capture the same spirit, and this time around, there's no large scale exploratory mission at all.

Bozja didn't have the same spirit because it was quicker. It did have the same spirit but people were done with it in a day. Whereas in Eureka you would be committing a lot more sessions to each area and waiting ages together to spawn each NM together and there was a lot more time to talk and party for different grinds. In Bozja, those grinds are just for things you can buy on the market board for cheap and you don't have all these rare drops to grind for that sell for millions on the market board. Those all come from the raids.