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

[SailorCeti]

Average players aren't bad. They're average. It's in the name. Bad players are bad, however, for many reasons, including physical and mental hinderances. But I can forgive that if announced at the beginning of a run. What gets me the most are the boosts! People end up not knowing their job or the mechanics.

[Vandso]

Average players aren't bad. They're average. It's in the name. Bad players are bad, however, for many reasons, including physical and mental hinderances. But I can forgive that if announced at the beginning of a run. What gets me the most are the boosts! People end up not knowing their job or the mechanics.

Nah, average players are bad, they have no idea what they're doing. Throw them in an EX trial and see for yourself. Midcore content should be the actual level of average.

[Gemina]

Nah, average players are bad, they have no idea what they're doing. Throw them in an EX trial and see for yourself. Midcore content should be the actual level of average.

No. Average players are average. When you take words out of context, I can just as easily say average players are good. Do you see how that works now?

Players who have no idea what they are doing aren't necessarily bad either. What they really are is inexperienced, and the range of skill and experience of players who go into unreal/EX content is wide. You'll find everything in there. If you are of the mindset that there is 'good', and everything below that is 'bad', then there is no such thing as "midcore." There is only hard mode (content you suck at), and easy mode (content you're good at).

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

No. Average players are average. When you take words out of context, I can just as easily say average players are good. Do you see how that works now

a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number.

When the majority of players are bad at the game, by definition, the average player will also be bad, as the mean will be heavily skewed towards the 'bad' end. The only time the average player can be contextually 'good' is when the vast majority of players are 'good', which isn't the case here.

You don't even need something as drastic as Extremes to showcase this, just go do all the harder alliance raid out there over and over (and hilariously enough, even easier stuff like Thalaeia/Euphrosyne (Tetrapagos in particular is a fun mechanic to watch people eat it in droves on)) and watch in abject horror the sheer amount of players who die to mechanics that would be so utterly trivial to anyone who was actually of "average" skill in a game with a more smoother skill curve.

Even back in the day, Deluburum/Dalriada/Castrum were full of people dropping like flies to trivially easy mechanics, and those fights I would consider closer to a true 'midcore' level. The elemental boss of Castrum in particular would see bodies piling up if he used any elemental combo that wasn't the easiest one (Earth + Fire in particular would rack up a killstreak)

[Saraide]

Even back in the day, Deluburum/Dalriada/Castrum were full of people dropping like flies to trivially easy mechanics, and those fights I would consider closer to a true 'midcore' level. The elemental boss of Castrum in particular would see bodies piling up if he used any elemental combo that wasn't the easiest one (Earth + Fire in particular would rack up a killstreak)

I farmed those people for the rez title.

[strawberrycake]

I think you are missing the point the devs have tried to hammer home. You going into an instanced trial is you agreeing to do the thing for up to an hour. You have the option to leave the instance if the play style of others isn’t to your liking. They’re being bad at the game is not against the rules put out by the devs.

It's not about being against the rules, you're missing the point, Look specifically at what I said The average player is bad because they do not know the fundamentals the game itself expects you to know. There are no "Play Styles". The game expects you to know the difference between a Stack and a Multi Stack, It expects you to infer based on what you see to understand and adapt. We learn this in School, jobs even teach you like this, It's literally, being shown an example, and then being shown the answer, from there you can infer so much. At this point, it's the player, not the game, because the game has shown you the needed information through out the lvling process, and other high content.

At this point any inability to keep up is a lack of willingness to learn on the players part, this would happen if the game was harder, but the fact that it's easier, makes it so much more of an exacerbated issue. If XIV was more complex, which it has been, people would get so much more grace with such basic issues. But now that it's so much more ...manageable for lack of better words and people still struggle, it's telling of the player, not the game. I'm speaking on the basics ofc, because thats how black and white this playerbase is in NA, theres not much room for nuance, they're either someone who understands and or someone who doesn't. And like it's been said above me, the Majority of average players in XIV are, bad, and there no real exception for that.

If you are so hard up that you need to play with “good” players, you have the option to make a linkshell/community with like minded people. You are encouraged to do so! But when you play with randos, you get what you get.Until the game or the devs want players to improve, they won’t. Nor will they need to.

Making your own groups is definitely a choice, but it's not one always available. I'm also assuming you're saying the whole hard up on playing with good players thing as a general statement as I'm not, simply stating the facts that people in XIV, are pretty bad at learning what this game teaches. But when I play with randos I expect people to be bad, hence why I heal, the facts that I can carry runs by myself is a testament to how much Yoshida has over simplified this game and needs to rethink how things are going. Because I should be able to hold a basic standard to other humans, the devs making the game like this isn't an excuse for that and it shows in both EU and JP, do Your part we're not here to carry and baby you. I can't wait for the day we get back to that mindset in NA.

[Merrigan]

Nah, average players are bad, they have no idea what they're doing. Throw them in an EX trial and see for yourself. Midcore content should be the actual level of average.

If the average content is to become more complex (and it needs to), we need to look beyond midcore as it's currently conceived IMO. Because no, reducing everything to an extreme level would be neither desirable nor pleasant. Let me remind you that in the extremes, it's common to wipe when a player makes a mistake, and that you have to farm memos via the roulette wheel. Without even tackling difficulty as such, i.e. boss pv, strat and the like, there are plenty of ways to make content interesting.

- Tanks are under-exploited to a miserable level. I've rarely seen a game with so much tanking potential, and so little understanding of the role. I'll pass over the absolute necessity of doing away with that bullshit "stance" idea that makes aggro automatic, whatever the dps / healers do: I don't think they'll do it. But even without tackling this problem, we need to exploit all the facets of this role, including placement, which is, in general, non-existent; and force people to think about pulls. What's worse, instances with these problems exist (Damzel, the old version; Aurum Val). We need to make these problems more common, and a little more advanced, and we'll already have a spike in interest.

- Healers... I'm not going to dwell on them. There's a whole thread on current healer problems. So I'll settle for bitching about two things: our heals are too powerful, our mana management nonexistent; and stop abusive rez. We need a rez gauge or something that prevents us from raising an entire raid if something goes wrong (lb3 excluded). As things stand, most people don't seem to give a damn about dying... And rightly so. A debuff, a rez that comes within 10 seconds? It has almost no impact in most content. Smn and rdm should also be limited.

- For dps, give them targets to prioritize (once again: abnormal, completely abnormal that this mechanic, which is nonetheless a basic on MMORPG, isn't a thing on FF) and control possibilities. Example : doton could be the equivalent of wow chaman's earth shattering, and have a chance of interrupting ennemies (oc : we would need more deadly casts for that... And the suppression of Whm miracle's stun).

So, instead of doing a strict equivalent of Extrems, the game should exploit all facets of each roles by changing the instances design. Make things interesting, more demanding in terms of exploiting your jobs abilities.

Edit : funny how the whm miracle's stun is the perfect example of the subexploitation of crowd control in this game.