Do you know why the average pf player is so bad?

[CelestiCer]

Square gives zero incentives for the XIV player-base to improve. It's that simple.

Nothing in the barebones casual content teaches players any fundamental basics or meaningful concepts, all the way back from Lv1 to Guildhests/Dungeons/Novicehall to the end of Endwalker, it's filled with effortless hurdles and no real increasing difficulty. This instills carelessness as there is no need to improve or learn anything.

That is, until it does... which usually is at the players first real hard wall i.e " Their 1st Extreme ", often through Partyfinder. If the player has no history of raiding in any other game... Then suddenly? all the concepts they didn't knew they needed or wanted to know about gets thrown at them and it goes from relatively " Nothing " mattering to relatively " Everything " mattering.

Coupled with Partyfinder being filled with players who want to reach a certain Goal in a timed fashion, creates an environment that demands players who join Partyfinder? to know at least the fundamentals of raiding or mechanics and Job basics that Square never really directly taught players. So I believe players aren't inherently bad? its just Square having done a terrible Job teaching players anything ever in XIV, mhm.

[Sebazy]

No, people were always as they are now. Even when the game was "harder". I mean, dungeons were never hard in the first place, even in Heavensward. The worst was like... The Vault? But once you got used to it and synced down, it was trivial.

Eh big disagree there.

If the vault was trivialised down the line, why was it still the subject of healer's struggling with it multiple years and expansions after it's release? (eg- https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/383897 )

Even with a decent group, original Vault would swiftly punish a napping healer. With a bad group that was sleeping on chains? It could be legitimately rough even for a experienced and capable healer.

Besides the Vault, dungeons *were* categorically harder than they are now and critically, they absolutely did put more pressure on players to perform to a base level than they do now. Remember when dungeon bosses would routinely have enrages? Remember when they had adds that would merrily wipe the group if they weren't swiftly controlled and taken out? Remember when dieing in certain ways would prevent you from being raised and effectively eject you from the boss room until the rest of the group cleared/wiped?

[Nyarlha]

Eh big disagree there.

If the vault was trivialised down the line, why was it still the subject of healer's struggling with it multiple years and expansions after it's release? (eg- https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/383897 )

Even with a decent group, original Vault would swiftly punish a napping healer. With a bad group that was sleeping on chains? It could be legitimately rough even for a experienced and capable healer.

Besides the Vault, dungeons *were* categorically harder than they are now and critically, they absolutely did put more pressure on players to perform to a base level than they do now. Remember when dungeon bosses would routinely have enrages? Remember when they had adds that would merrily wipe the group if they weren't swiftly controlled and taken out? Remember when dieing in certain ways would prevent you from being raised and effectively eject you from the boss room until the rest of the group cleared/wiped?

I kinda remember 2.0 Amdapor fondly. The bee adds on the Demon Wall boss were just wrecking people.

Overall, I think I had more tolerance for people messing up back then. I didn't mind wiping on a dungeon boss and go again. Now the difficulty floor is so incredibly low that when you get that ice mage or that DPS that keeps dying on dungeon boss mechanics (you don't wipe, it just makes it waaayyy slower), it just feels frustrating.

[Avoidy]

Someone nailed it on the first page. There's like 0 incentive to learn how to do anything early on. You can skate by for a long time doing the bare minimum and getting carried. This doesn't matter much ("oh no! my 13 minute dungeon is taking 18 minutes instead!") until these people want to do anything with a dps check and then all of a sudden your progress is anchored for hours until they either leave the group or everyone else leaves around them. I'll never forget learning Emerald EX in the PF when it came out. That was one of the worst experiences I've ever had in this game. I was healing it and we saw enrage at like 50%. There were people in the group who didn't even know what arm's length was, and it was just so so so bad. We spent over an hour stuck on the first mechanic in the first phase, where all you have to do is run with your partner to a designated spot. Then, through sheer luck, we limped our way to phase 2 only to hit the time limit and go back in again... just to stay stuck in phase 1 again for ages. If you learn content in PF, you have all of my energy. That shit is insane. Before that, I thought "yeah normal content might be bad but I'm sure people know what they're doing in harder content" but noooo haha nope.

People pay way too much attention to what other players do in dungeon runs instead of focusing on their own performance tbh.

To be fair, there's so little going on in dungeons that eventually it's the only thing you can pay attention to. Particularly if you've already run through the place before. Doubly so if you're stuck healing it 'cause your "performance" involves just mashing a single button lmao. I know when I'm on whm in a dungeon for whatever reason, I get so bored that I start looking around and asking questions like "why's there a doton under the boss," or "how is the smn last in enmity when he's got bahamut," or "why's the trash taking so long to die that my presence of mind has come off cd" etc. I don't bother voicing these concerns because honestly who gives a shit, but I'll absolutely notice because it's just obvious when something that usually takes 15 minutes is taking double the amount of time. It'd be like if you wore an obnoxious shirt to work. People could focus on their own job and still be like "damn, what a hideous choice of apparel" lol.

[Nadda]

I agree with this but what I think needs to be done is incremental.

Like turning up a dial for heat ya know. You should progressively face more and more difficult challenges as you continue through normal content.

I don't reckon the game needs to become super sweaty hard. I want a natural progression of things getting more difficult over time so that by the time players are at max level they can enter into higher levels of content without getting hit with this massive skill wall because the game didn't teach them properly.

I don't think we should start very early, I do think overall dungeons should hurt more but the game needs to continuously start asking more from the player but at a pace where players can acclimate to it and adapt gradually.
I think the game used to feel this way back in the days but with many changes has become less so.

I've heard said about the lacking of Midcore content in the game in particular for this expansion. While I agree we should have something to work towards throughout an expansion.
I do not believe their should be such a big divide keeping people from Extremes. Exs and unreals are not difficult content but they can be for newer players because the majority of the game has become so easy we have atrophied their potential growth for the sake of getting them through the story.

Again. I do not want the game to be difficult it is unapproachable. I think the content should be chill but also provide some stimulation of challenges, you should acclimate to it without even noticing. What you do at max level you may not have been able to do at the start but you became better without realizing.

[Shialan]

why was it still the subject of healer's struggling with it multiple years and expansions after it's release?

You answered this question yourself. The healers and or the group were bad and didn´t care about mechanics. But that didn´t make this dungeon hard.

I don´t get how people say that dungeons were harder. People just had to do mechanics.

[LilimoLimomo]

I do agree that FF14 has a teaching problem, in that it doesn't really do much to teach player's mechanics, rotations, etc.

It's easier to teach in single-player games, because you can teach a player a new mechanic and then put them in circumstances where they have to correctly engage with that mechanic to progress. Do this a handful of times and most players will learn the mechanic.

I sometimes watch some of my less-skilled friends play, and often when mechanics appear they can either be soaked or the rest of the group is competent enough that the death of one unskilled player doesn't cause a wipe. So the content gets passed, but the mechanic doesn't get learned.

And over time, there's this cumulative effect where more mechanics are added, and the player still doesn't know the old ones, so there are more opportunities to die. And if you die and it doesn't wipe the party, you stay unskilled, and you know you're unskilled, and that's a crappy place to be.

It's wild to me that the game itself doesn't have anything like training facilities where such players can be taught about mechanics: here's what a stack marker means, here's what two stack markers mean, etc.

[strawberrycake]

A lot of the game is sadly not intuitive, in terms of teaching players how to tank and heal to how and when DPS should use AoE. I wish things were better on what players get and when for spells and weapon skills, but I also wish a lot of the content and mechanics within also was a consistently graduated set of changes and challenges up until vlvl 50 so that sets a base the player can refrrence as well as making it so the max lvl content is always engaging and involved over being braindead.

It would allow players to transition through content better.

[Sebazy]

I don´t get how people say that dungeons were harder. People just had to do mechanics.

When was the last time you saw a legitimate DPS check in a dungeon?

When was the last time you saw a dungeon boss that could genuinely snowball a fight into a full team wipe if someone was caught napping?

When was the last time a healer (Or even DPS) was genuinely at risk of running out of MP/Resources/Cooldowns in a dungeon which would invariably lead to a wipe?

When was the last time you actually had to watch your positioning for fear of agroing more trash mobs than the group had any chance of handling?

When was the last time you went into a DF dungeon knowing full well that a few wipes on some bosses were almost an inevitability?

Granted, some of these you can blame of Job power creep and the current wild abundance of resources, but some aspects of some dungeons were just undeniably so much rougher than the hand held by numbers garbage we get today. We see the occasional gem like Peacekeeper, but those are by far the exception and generally only in tightly synced dungeons.

[Maltothoris]

Also not a big fanin how they nerfed Grinnaux for the trusts. He was prob one of the few bosses who had a unique soft enrage per say (his void portals didn't disappear when he did the knockback.) There was the fact that they nerfed the Vault I think in the 3.x patches so I'll see if I can find that.

Well this was the closest thing that I could find of the time https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post3390943