The difficulty of Normal Content in this game needs to increase.

[Amarande]

I'm curious, do people actually have a problem with not finding enough people playing with you in high level content, or people just simply pissed at other being bad for no reason?

Much has to do with RL here, I expect. People that are unemployed, collegiate, or are fortunate to work a 9-5 office job and thus can regularly play with the peak herd find it easy.

People that work, say, retail? Not so much. Second shift where I work has you getting home after 10 PM, first shift would mean being at work at 5 (or is it 4?) AM. The former you miss the rush and the latter you have to go to bed as it picks up. Also if you are not Eastern Time things get pushed around too because you have to consider the ET folks' bedtimes.

Add in the extreme (much more than WoW) antipathy XIV raiders have at losing even one scheduled static night and things like Comcast (and SE) maintenance habits and night owls have a bit of an issue. Something in early Stormblood seems to have caused a shift as well because I remember the night life on Aether being very abuzz in 4.0-4.1, then around 4.2 or so people started going to bed early, and if you couldn't shift your schedule you mostly just got to watch your temporally privileged friends one by one happily join statics while you were stuck with late-tier PF.

I'm not asking for Dark Souls level of crazyness, but definitely something needs to be done before it gets even worse.

Funnily I've wondered if Dark Souls was actually a catalyst for this decline.

It was just that popular, and not only forced that many people to get unusually good at action RPG gameplay compared to the past, but also presumably attracted a lot of people who weren't into "traditional" RPGs but had hitherto mainly played things like Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry.

These people then came to dominate the genre, meanwhile most of us that feel the pinch of modern MMO culture seem to be the ones that arrived here from a gaming career of mainly traditional RPGs. We're dinosaurs, I guess, though, since we barely get anything anymore besides remasters, other than a bunch of cheap RPG Maker stuff and "adult" RPGs on Steam ...

The issue is any time normal content is made that requires pressing more than 1 button you get the same group of 4 ppl and their alts on here claiming they have every disability in the world on top of having no arms and legs demanding it be nerfed.

In solo duties some phases can get pretty frantic (think 4.1, or the Level 86 EW story duty last phases). I can imagine a motor disability making them really hard (especially when the benefit from Easy or Very Easy is minimal, such as in these cases), and really frustrating because there's no (TOS-acceptable, anyway) way to get a leg up (another casualty of modern gaming, back in those days you used to hand your friend the keyboard and have them do it for you, now you'll possibly get banned for the equivalent online) so what can you do? Just shelve the game and wait for the paid story boost to be available past that point? That's pretty disheartening.

There's also the unexpected gameplay shifts that can be fun sometimes but also easily frustrating, especially if you're in a RPG mindset instead of the "Gaming Decathlon" mindset MMOs seem to ask for now - or if, as sometimes (hi azure haired boy) it requires developing a play skill to a degree that you will use just the once and then is of little or no use thereafter.

In group content, the fear is presumably getting stuck because you're good enough but mechanics mean you can't carry and you get paired with people that can't hack it you get stuck as well (thus fueling even more of a "rush it at release" mindset - do we really want 7.0 to be a repeat of Queue Savage?).

If you wanna go back to ShB, maybe they could have done a bit more with the dungeon wardens, like thrice-come ruin to make them feel more like a active threat.

The trouble is this makes the healer situation even more stark. Healers feel like green DPS enough as it is, if you push individual responsibility any further you essentially might as well just phase out the Healer role altogether, as some of the newer Korean MMOs have done ...

I get annoyed when someone tells me to schedule my life around a video game.

This is 2023 not 1980.

The age disparity between then and now is huge, the average gamer is now in their mid to late 30's or older,

So yes, people do have lives, they have kids and jobs that take more than enough of their time, by end of the day they are ALREADY worn out and dont want to have to deal with yet more stress and hassle and schedules. This..surprises you?

WFH will be the norm across a swathe of industries.

Yep. And if there's one group that I see ROUTINELY get the short end of the stick in MMO communities, it's the working adult. Especially the working adult who does not have the privilege of working at home.

Instead of being the backbone of the customer base, we're apparently just a bunch of inexperienced gamers dragging everyone down with our lack of time and energy that's treated as laziness by the "terminally online" crowd who dominate the community watering holes.

And barely anyone seems to be interested in fixing this. You mostly see people wanting to push content to entertain the folks who have put aside everything else in life to perfect themselves at the game, and anyone else should ... apparently just be there to boost their Twitch views, I guess?

The issue with expressing anything is too difficult for oneself is that you get the same group of elite "Ultimate raiders but only in their mind" people on here claiming that anyone who can't play on their level is stupid and/or faking disability.

Yep. "Savage is easy, you're just bad." I can't count how many times I've caught that canard from elite players.

I partly blame it on the Discord ecosystem, but due to the extreme popularity and the terms of service of Discord, I'm not entirely sure what the way back from this brink is ...