Quote Originally Posted by Zeastria View Post
If players can "skip everything" w/o having to que with other players..
- How are they gonna learn how to play with real players?
This is a legitimate concern in a vacuum, but it is years too late, and one that the developers have clearly moved past worrying about.

FFXIV had a crossroads a long time ago, where SE could have stubbornly just let group content failures gate the MSQ / storytelling, and allowed frustrated players to go elsewhere. This would have made for a more "niche" or "boutique" game, where it was understood that a combination of both heavy story interest and patience (to churn through MSQ) and some amount of gameplay competence / effort (to clear the PvE "quest gates") were expected if you wanted to participate in FFXIV.

Certainly, older MMOs had no hesitation about adopting this more "classic gamer" attitude, and while they became relatively-niche products as a result, they did have a certain dedicated audience that either learned to adapt, or segregated between the "doers" (who organized and quested / raided / etc) and the "fluffers" (for lack of a better word), who just kind of... fluffed around, in whatever content that they could access alone, or without a social network, or etc.

But FFXIV instead chose the path of "We're a game for everyone", and has since then pretty clearly decided that there's a red line — Extreme/Savage/Ultimate/Criterion — where they are "okay" with players just failing and being unable to continue. Anything outside that red line, they want "everyone" to be able to complete it relatively-easily, with "sense of completion and progression on a checklist" being the core focus, rather than "overcoming challenges".

It's not a coincidence, then, that Ex/Sav/Ult/Cri are also the content that has been carefully-segregated to have essentially zero relevant Story content gated behind it, with maybe Deep Dungeon providing a very minor outlier here.

——————————————————————————

The reason I made that digression is to clarify that we've seen, time and time again, that if SE "forces" you to group with other players to progress anything outside Ex/Sav/Ult/Cri in current-day FFXIV, then you can guarantee that said content will either be made relatively-trivial — and, especially, heavily-carryable — or, if they somehow make a mistake and release it "too hard", it will be nerfed with the thoroughness of a police beating until it is trivial/carryable.

In that sense, players basically already do "skip everything" without "learning how to play with real players" — nearly nothing in present-day Dungeons prepares you for actual party gameplay in Extreme+ content... or at least, not any more than doing it with Duty Support does (or doesn't)... and essentially all Story Trials can be completed by being dragged along by the other players, even if you have no idea what's going on.

There's Seat of Sacrifice, I guess, which remains perplexingly-unforgiving to people who can't mash buttons fast enough... but ironically, that failure state would occur just as consistently for someone running Duty Support.