Problem with toxic casual players on this forum

[AddictedToWitches]

Have you ever stopped to consider that what you consider "frustrating and unfun" encounters plenty of other people find them engaging and fun? This just sounds like people who hate Souls games and so go "THIS IS OBJECTIVELY BAD AND UNFUN AND PEOPLE ONLY FORCE THEMSELVES TO PLAY IT SO THEY CAN BRAG ABOUT BEATING IT".

Like seriously if you don't like something that's fine, but stop trying to morally justify your position by convincing yourself everybody else is just lying to spite you. I promise you it's not that deep lol

Being a masochist doesn't automatically mean suffering pain should be widely considered as fun

What are your examples of "frustrating and unfun encounters"? I'm curious to know.

I ran through TEA when it was on content, as well as E8S and those were two of the most fun raid experiences I've had in the game, despite them allegedly being brutal.

Shadowbringers was overall pretty good for the most part. I cannot recall any actual fight I would classify as frustrating or explicitly unfun, except maybe light rampant. but you could definitely see the escalation of things to being how they were in Endwalker.
Endwalker in particular is where things have gotten out of hand.
Of pandaemonium, P1-2S are great. 1s is a little boring though. 2S should be recognized as a gold standard of content.
3S was complete and utter dogshit raid design. Visual clutter and obnoxiously bright, unforgiving mechanics and the fight itself drug on way too long, but that's par for the course for a phoenix fight.
4S also kind of cringe, 1st half of 4S honestly sucks but second half is alright.
second tier was all abysmal dogshit, overly complicated garbage and obnoxious encounter design, I think only P6S had remotely entertaining mechanics
third tier was more of the same, I honestly skipped third tier and never did it when it was relevant because I was done at that point, and I knew from just watching videos and streams about it that my decision was right.
I have not done DSR or TOP, and have no desire to. I have a general disdain for ultimates because they go on too long so they are all more trials of attrition. (also the ultimate weapons are all awful glow vomit and unappealing but that's just me)
Dawntrail, at the very least so far, has been very good. the normal arcadion raids are already very fun and just hard enough I feel to satisfy everyone, I have high hopes for savage but to be completely honest I have no static and no desire to prog savage anymore.
The biggest problem with "hardcore players" in XIV is honestly the elitist mentality, and unfortunately this mentality is just enabled by almost everyone and the devs turn a blind eye. No one is willing to own up to their own mistakes, everyone wants CLEAR NOW and don't realize wiping is part of learning. The "upper echelons" of raiders in this game are filled with epeen strokers.

[Zakuyia]

Besides the terrible va directions and glue wuk lamat simulator the story is bad for allot of reasons.... game difficulty is chief kiss plus I want the arcadia raids to be difficult the first tier are easy come back and complain when the mid tier and last tier are released XD. All jokes I agree the rampant complaints are getting outta hand.

[Zakuyia]

The same thing goes with those that are hardcore players and forgetting about those that are not and then calls them toxic.

I don't blame them for being toxic. Sometimes you gotta gate keep. Yeah it may not be liked but surprise if your defending the game difficulty some may view that as gate keeping. So yeah were kinda toxic as well when basically telling casuals to get better at the game and to not make the game easy.

[Darkrai4014]

snip

Thank you. I appreciate your reply and thoughts.

I can see there is a lot here we do not agree with, I can gather that you find fights that drag on too long as unfun which I can agree with to a certain degree. (I personally think door bosses when overused feel incredibly long and tedious). But if a fight is too short I feel like it can be a little wasted.

I see Shadowbringers as a good standard for raid design (E8S especially) but that expansion was my first raiding experience, so I am somewhat biased.

Endwalker was a let down in different ways, But I agree the first tier was very good. The overuse of jank tether mechanics in tier 1, and an abundance body checks in tier 2 and tier 3 dull the experience a lot. I don't mind a body check in moderation, but Endwalker felt like it was becoming artificial difficulty. There was also P7S, which is by far the most boring savage I have ever done. there is nothing happening for so many stretches of that fight. The third tier I saw a lot of people skip, which was interesting to me because when I did it, I genuinely thought it was one of the easiest tiers. Bordering on first tier level of difficulty. P11S is almost a copy paste of mechanics from E11S, and P12S copies P8S where the second half is significantly easier than the first and most of the mechanics are visual based and generally leave quite a lot of room for error.

I did 5 phases of DSR, and I have not gone into TOP because ive heard it was bad. But I think ultimate fights have a lot of creativity options and can generally be very fun and engaging experiences (UCOB in current day is very enjoyable). But they are, at the end of the day, an endurance run. And I can tell from your reply that you don't favor these kind of fights, which is fine.

I am in agreeance with Dawntrail. So far the Normal and Extreme content is enjoyable, far more than Endwalker.

As for hardcore players, I feel like what you mentioned does not speak for everyone in that group as there is always going to be a bunch of bad eggs. I would classify what you are complaining about as "Parse Brain" which from my experience are the people who are so caught up on their logs and funny numbers that complain when they cant get full uptime etc so yoship has to change their job to make it easier. Hardcore players are a mindset, not necessarily a group of people. There is definitely a toxic elitism in this game, but it can largely depend on how things are conveyed to other players. I will agree if a guy joins my PF and leaves in a fit after 3 wipes that he needs to get off his high chair, but I cant tell him what he should do with his time.

Edit: I forgot to mention, but I couldnt quite figure out what you found frustrating with the encounters you mentioned. but I assume it is a long the same line of being too dragged out and things looking overly complicated?

[AddictedToWitches]

Edit: I forgot to mention, but I couldnt quite figure out what you found frustrating with the encounters you mentioned. but I assume it is a long the same line of being too dragged out and things looking overly complicated?

Precisely. I would also argue that "door" bosses in raids actually help remedy the exhaustion as it helps break up longer fights. Once you get past the door, you're halfway, and instead of slogging through the fight that you already have a pretty good idea of doing just to practice one mechanic again, you can start directly from the middle. I think the problem with door bosses though is it just ends up being two fights that are also kinda long and drawn out that probably should have just been put in separate instances rather than 1.
In terms of overly complicated, yes, that too is a problem. I have found for a while now a lot of savage fights (ultimates included) tend to have phases where you have either a lot of different things going on, or very weird and obtuse mechanics. P8S is a good example of a fight with weird and obtuse mechanics, and you can probably guess the exact mechanic I am talking about. It's these mechanics, combined with very very little room for error, and generally also showing up towards the tail end of a fight as a party is also starting to feel fatigue. I am much more in favor of raids having big difficult mechanics towards the start and middle of a fight, so it's less frustrating to practice and you can get more practice in for it, as well as getting through it without starting to feel exhausted.
The other gripe I have, which I will admit has been getting better, is some strict DPS checks that seem to direct you into doing dangerous uptime strategies to get through certain phases. P2S for example is completely fine because the way the fight is designed, you basically have near 100% uptime with full damage (because no positionals) barring the limit cuts. But as I said, they've been getting better at that. I have always held the mindset of "clear first, bother about optimizing later." As I feel a good deal of skill expression in the game is optimizing a fight so you burn it faster, potentially skip certain mechanics or get through others quickly rather than "this fight requires you to be as optimized as possible and offers little room for extra optimization until you out-scale it with better gear"

I am well aware that my statement doesn't speak for everyone, but the fact of the matter is parse brained and selfish players make up a startlingly large number of people. I can probably count on only one hand the amount of PFs I have joined where the party leader was not like this in my entire tenure of playing endwalker for example. Not to mention that finding proper statics is also a legitimate nightmare, and while many static leaders are well-adjusted people, a large amount of them are not willing to kick party members who fit this mentality.

[Colt47]

The only reason we have toxic anything is because the game itself is a quagmire of not knowing which way it wants to go. Making content super easy is not what defines a game as being casual: it's the amount of time that someone has to spend to access and play the different kinds of content. Elden Ring is 100% more casual friendly then FFXIV in terms of the gameplay systems. Sure, someone can power level something to 100 fairly swiftly, but then that says nothing about getting the gear required to do basic things like make the current tier of food, armor, and weapons, or just participating in the content that is built to be challenging. The only way someone can call an MMO casual is if they are literally only playing up to the point the game begins to throw in the breaks. Otherwise, it's 100% a hobby game.

[KisaiTenshi]

Take the dungeons we already have, and make hard modes of them. Not the ARR/HW/SB hard mode that may as well be a new dungeon, but actual hard modes. Make the rewards better than normal. Think 150 tomestones instead of 90 of the weekly cap. And also add a weekly reward: An item you can trade in for either a tomestone armor upgrade or a 'new' armor set. Stats are identical to savage, but take a little longer to get. If making 'new' armor, take old dungeon sets, make a dyeable version with a reskin. Add some fancy special particle effects. Make a unique-ish weapon (could also be dungeon weapons!) Make them fancy and unique to this midcore content.

Instead of dungeons all the time, take old trials. Instead of unreal mode, reimagine the fight. Similar or even same mechanics but in a different order or with different telegraphing. Hell, take unreal fights and just throw those into their own roulette. Add some sort of gatekeeping mechanic to make sure people are semi-skilled enough to get in, but otherwise can queue in with a roulette. Try to encourage roulettes as well.
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That doesn't work. In games that do this, all that really results in are mobs with higher HP, or normal mobs swapped out with mobs that have more HP and have a more complicated AI.

Eg take sastasha, 4 man. Make a "Savage" version that is now an 8-man, and every trash mob has as much HP as the boss fight, and the boss fight's have insta-wipe level damage. The dungeon is otherwise the same map, and exhausting to do since now instead of a trash mob pack taking 30 seconds, it takes minutes.

The reality is that in other MMORPG's that do this, you end up in this upside down situation where players just want the reward, so they will instead (pay someone to) get carried through it just to get to the reward at the end. Thus back to the problem we've had since 2.x, with very few people actually legitimately "clearing" content when it's new, and instead waiting for it to be de-facto nerfed by the next expansion before trying it to avoid the P2W extortion racket.

Don't underestimate players desire to take shortcuts and want instant-gratification. Ever ask yourself why players would keep finding ways to keep doing Labyrinth of the Ancients from the roulette for tomes/cracked-materia-items rather than any of the harder raids? Because players would find ways to manipulate the roulette, first by wearing lower level gear, and now apparently by having someone who hasn't unlocked anything but Labyrinth to be in their party when they queue for the roulette. That loophole needs to be fixed.

My preference really is that if players really want harder content that is still accessible is to have variations on the "Field operations" applied to dungeons and trials, where you earn mettle by clearing it on a per-player score (eg being carried won't earn you points,) and your gear has specific strengths/weaknesses that need to be rotated on a per-fight basis (so you have to actually pay attention.) But I don't see this happening since the Field operations aren't very popular since they've been designed as time-sinks. All "special weapon" grinds are.

Difficulty != Timesink.

[jadan2000]

Going to have to agree here. Voicing your opinion is one thing, but the amount of whining that's going on lately is just ridiculous