Why do people avoid getting better at the game?

[Connor]

Quick, someone post the bait meme!

[Krotoan]

Quick, someone post the bait meme!

[Adeacia]

Why do people not realize that they get better at the game after playing it for a long time. Things aren't going to keep getting harder to keep up. That would make the game impossible for new players. It's like you won't be happy until Sastasha has ultimate mechanics in it since you'd say everything else is too easy.

Difficulty is relative. Stop forgetting this.

[R041]

It's like you won't be happy until Sastasha has ultimate mechanics in it since you'd say everything else is too easy.

Why do people keep bringing up Sastasha, when we have a perfectly good Aurum Vale to reference? lol
Or Wanderer's Palace (Hard)

You're all also talking about bosses, but we're not comparing Trials here, we're comparing Dungeons. You're forgetting about half of the whole experience. You know, the walking forward and being mindless?

And past 64, if you have an RDM then your party just never dies. Wiping in a dungeon these days is basically unheard of with the kits we have, and the trash certainly never got harder. They choose your pull count now.

Actually yeah, someone go do Wanderer's Palace (Hard) synced, come back and let me know if it was easy and if you had fun.

[TomsYoungerBro]

Why do people not realize that they get better at the game after playing it for a long time.

Then why is it that in FFXIV you can be max level and have literally no idea what you are doing? This game requires only very very little of the player to progress through the story which is the only true required content of the game since so much is locked behind doing it.


You don't necessarily get better playing a game the longer you play it. You can not improve or even regress in some cases. 14 shows perfectly how you can complete an entire campaign comprised of the base game + 4 expansions of story and still fail basic tutorials on gameplay.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Then why is it that in FFXIV you can be max level and have literally no idea what you are doing? This game requires only very very little of the player to progress through the story which is the only true required content of the game since so much is locked behind doing it.


You don't necessarily get better playing a game the longer you play it. You can not improve or even regress in some cases. 14 shows perfectly how you can complete an entire campaign comprised of the base game + 4 expansions of story and still fail basic tutorials on gameplay.

Every msq dungeon and trial teaches the player of mechanics that they'll encounter in the optional content, where they amp up some of them while still sprinkling new things. But the job of knowing the familiarity of the mechanics is all the game should push you into understanding how harder content works. I dont believe you that you encounter players so bad that they constantly make mistakes. Ive been playing this game for quite a while and its very rare for me to encounter atrocious level of gameplay from your average casual.

[Absimiliard]

I dont believe you that you encounter players so bad that they constantly make mistakes. Ive been playing this game for quite a while and its very rare for me to encounter atrocious level of gameplay from your average casual.

I dunno man. I've got some pretty atrocious luck when it comes to random groups. I only started tanking because of the inordinate amount of people I run into whose brains don't seem to have enough RAM for them to perform combos and breathe at the same time.

[Turnintino]

I try very hard, actually... u_u

[Kaurhz]

I would argue that it isn't that they aren't required to get better - Just that most people are simply too lazy to do such. Or because of disability or just outright hitting their peak sooner than others.

The problem with such measures is that people who don't want to learn - Will never learn regardless of what you try and propose for it, in grouped content, to a certain degree this will just inconvenience the group at large as they will be forced to then pickup the slack.

Further to this though... You need to consider that it is also done with accessibility in mind, e.g., those that may have some form of disability or just something imposed by older age, I don't think people should be relegated to a solo experience with the story just because you don't feel like the game is challenging enough. But one thing to consider though is when you do the upper end of content, e.g., extreme and savage then the remainder of the game on normal level just feels slow by comparison, but if you only do story then to a degree it does actually have progression with difficulty. That said, I do personally think the game has gotten more mechanically challenging, but stuff like gear creeping renders a lot of it moot, similarly, and by this, you just find that things don't hit maybe as hard as they ought to.

I'm not entirely against it by any stretch, but there are implications behind some of the suggestions e.g., why should people who might be bad at the game due to external factors need to be relegated to a solo experience? All this does is goes from punishing one group of players to punishing another group of players, and many of the latter may be of no fault of their own.

Similarly, the next implication is that by enforcing challenging group content that you will force everyone to get better at the game - This is not always the case. Many people hit their peak sooner than others, this is not an appropriate countermeasure for laziness, etc.,

[Rilifane]

I don't even care about "hard/ difficult", I just want things to have replay value because they're still engaging after the first few times.
And the big problem preventing that is the extreme predictability of everything and the big gaps between two big brain mechanics happening. Between them happening you have... nothing. Smileton, Eric and Tapeworm Lady are good examples of this but there's plenty more. You have long gaps of nothing happening, where you just stand still and do your thing. This is especially annoying on tank and healer as the former doesn't have anything to mitigate and the latter nothing to heal. But even on several dps it just gets so repetetive. You have long periods of dummy fight, a short big brain mechanic that makes first timers go "ooooh! aaaahhhh!" and then back to dummy fight.

Practice, getting better at your class and game and all wouldn't be so bad if the focus wasn't so heavily on having that 1-2 big brain mechanics but then nothing else because can't overload poor brains, so better not add anything else.
Instead of making it overall smoother and giving you more smaller things to react to in shorter intervals. That's what often keeps content in other games engaging even for experienced players that ran it many times.
It's a matter of balancing the impact of mechanics (how detrimental is it if you fail?) and the frequency and the predictability so you have a more consistent engagement that doesn't suddenly poof after a couple of runs. And you always have binary positioning. There's a safe spot that's always 100% safe, you either stood in it or not. And since patterns are mostly static and repeat, that leads to being able to position in a safe spot that will cover the next 2-3 mechanics and dozing off for the next 4min because you don't need to anything else.

Things like getting knocked up for a bit or a 2s stun or a short slow or a short damage down when failing something makes it low impact but still gives you a clear incentive to try to avoid it. If you fail, it's alright. Not the end of the world, it's more of a nuisance than a real danger. But you have more to react to instead of having a handful mechanics over 10min that look really complicated and like you need to study for it but ultimately come down to standing in a specific spot and you will eventually know before it happens where to stand. That is how things become stale for experienced players: it's a lot of smoke and mirrors but very little consistent substance.
You can add these mechanics and show creativity, not saying they're bad in general. But when the entire encounter is focussed around them it can get problematic; quality isn't always better than quantity and the lack of quanitity makes it stale for veteran players.