Don't do chaotic raid again

[AllenThyl]

If there were a version of the fight designed to cater to a broader majority of players, it would be a different story.

There is, it's called "Cloud of Darkness" in the duty "World of Darkness" as well as "Eden's Promise: Umbra". Let's cut to the chase here, it's not about the fight. It's never about the fight. It's only ever about the rewards.

The issue is that they don’t provide content with a medium level of challenge.

This fight IS the medium challenge. It has a handful of mechanics, the mechanics need to be respected for the most part, there are quite a few opportunities to recover when only some people fail a mechanic, a portion of the mechanics can be solved by following a danger dorito, and the mechanics are repeating after half the fight and not escalating further. If the "medium level of challenge" doesn't involve at least semi-properly doing damage, semi-properly doing mitigations, semi-properly doing healing, and semi-properly doing positions / mechanics, what about it would even be the "medium challenge"?

[DynnDiablos]

I do find the casuals vs. hardcore player debate interesting because the hardcore player base hates that us "filthy casuals" are even in the game, when XIV's success was built on the casual player base. If we all quit and leave because they start to only cater to the 1% of the player base that likes this content - good luck. The chaos raid is just not accessible. It's already difficult to get groups together, PF is already gatekeeping hard on who can join and if you go into Raid Finder you could wait 8+ hours and never get included in a party. Then locking the cosmetics behind it, at the end of the day, this raid (which let's get real, is a 24 man TRIAL) will be dead within a week or so.

[Infindox]

If PF gatekeeping is already happening then the content is a bust. I thought this was going to be something akin to a BA/DRS where people were rewarded for helping each other clear and you could queue whenever you wanted. Harder content but doable. Instead it's a 24 man trial that forces you to use PF (I tried DF and was waiting for longer then was feasible, though some of that is probably due to this being released using the holiday week), and while the game wants you help newbies out, I expect the "only join if you've cleared" PFs and something that rhymes with farce runs. And then I already see a lot of the people who normally raid in Savage not even bothering to get on, because not only is it again the holidays but there's literally nothing else in this patch they are interested in. And don't even get me started on having to use Discord to find parties, you shouldn't even have to do that.
Somewhat nice to me that I see the Japanese side agrees with some comments over here.

[Daralii]

SE refuse the answer "people don't engage with harder content because they don't want to" and are trying their hardest to make people do harder content, which is doomed to fail.

Which you'd think they'd know given how many MMOs have tried this approach, with some of them hitting EoS because of it.

[Kaurhz]

I do find the casuals vs. hardcore player debate interesting because the hardcore player base hates that us "filthy casuals" are even in the game, when XIV's success was built on the casual player base. If we all quit and leave because they start to only cater to the 1% of the player base that likes this content - good luck. The chaos raid is just not accessible. It's already difficult to get groups together, PF is already gatekeeping hard on who can join and if you go into Raid Finder you could wait 8+ hours and never get included in a party. Then locking the cosmetics behind it, at the end of the day, this raid (which let's get real, is a 24 man TRIAL) will be dead within a week or so.

I honestly actually find this quite inaccurate, most of the hate from hardcore just stems from people that don't bother -- and by don't bother I mean make no effort whatsoever, e.g., not using half of your toolkit, or just outright auto attacking.

A lot of the hate for casuals generally comes from a minority of people with an ego complex, regardless of whether they are hardcore or not, and are more often than not just looking for people or a group to target. Most hardcore players I've met, either through FCs, social activity or crafting on patch days have been quite encouraging, to be honest.

[remiff]

There is, it's called "Cloud of Darkness" in the duty "World of Darkness" as well as "Eden's Promise: Umbra". Let's cut to the chase here, it's not about the fight. It's never about the fight. It's only ever about the rewards.



This fight IS the medium challenge. It has a handful of mechanics, the mechanics need to be respected for the most part, there are quite a few opportunities to recover when only some people fail a mechanic, a portion of the mechanics can be solved by following a danger dorito, and the mechanics are repeating after half the fight and not escalating further. If the "medium level of challenge" doesn't involve at least semi-properly doing damage, semi-properly doing mitigations, semi-properly doing healing, and semi-properly doing positions / mechanics, what about it would even be the "medium challenge"?

No, this fight is not a medium-level challenge.

Even the devs admitted it is savage-level content.
Furthermore, only players who regularly engage in savage or ultimate content would consider it a medium challenge because they already have enough skill and knowledge of the mechanics—mechanics that are often reused in FFXIV—to say it feels midcore to them.

However, for people who primarily play normal content, this will be far more than a challenge.
Simply finding 24 people in the future will be an even greater challenge, as this content is bound to become a wasteland.

I never said they shouldn't create difficult 24-player content, just that this is far too difficult to motivate enough players to engage with it.
Even in the future, it will end up like Criterion dungeons: completely dead.

[AllenThyl]

I do find the casuals vs. hardcore player debate interesting because the hardcore player base hates that us "filthy casuals" are even in the game, when XIV's success was built on the casual player base. If we all quit and leave because they start to only cater to the 1% of the player base that likes this content - good luck. The chaos raid is just not accessible. It's already difficult to get groups together, PF is already gatekeeping hard on who can join and if you go into Raid Finder you could wait 8+ hours and never get included in a party. Then locking the cosmetics behind it, at the end of the day, this raid (which let's get real, is a 24 man TRIAL) will be dead within a week or so.

"hardcore player base hates us" ... overdramatic much? The friction in the playerbase isn't along "casual" and "hardcore" lines, these are just meaningless essentialist labels. The friction occurs between the people who play for fun, and the people who play because the game is fun. It's an attitude divide, not a skill based one. The first group of players includes people who join Frontline matches because they want the series rewards, but are not actually interested in playing it and often just directly feed to make the match go quicker or are apathetically just present, trying to fly under the radar. This will of course clash with the 2nd group, who actually wants to have a fun and engaging PvP match. The first group also includes people who are more visceral and vocal about players who call for afkers to be kicked, than they are about the afkers.

We have the same arguments at display right here: The rewards are "fun", and so people who play "for fun" want them, in fact, feel entitled to them. To the point where "the others" should "have to help" them through it, or to put it more precisely, carry them through it all. Yes, it's a bit more difficult combat than the MSQ. Where's the problem? This is an action combat MMORPG after all. Combat is design wise the main activity. It's not a dress up game, it's not a farming simulator, or a city builder, or a first person shooter. You can do other activities to a certain degree, yes. But access to all of the non-combat content is gated behind combat content, from the very moment a character is created. So why exactly are you so disappointed that a combat oriented game has rewards for successfully completing combat content?

[Hallarem]

I do find the casuals vs. hardcore player debate interesting because the hardcore player base hates that us "filthy casuals" are even in the game, when XIV's success was built on the casual player base. If we all quit and leave because they start to only cater to the 1% of the player base that likes this content - good luck. The chaos raid is just not accessible. It's already difficult to get groups together, PF is already gatekeeping hard on who can join and if you go into Raid Finder you could wait 8+ hours and never get included in a party. Then locking the cosmetics behind it, at the end of the day, this raid (which let's get real, is a 24 man TRIAL) will be dead within a week or so.

Can I introduce you to the tragedy of Wildstar MMO that had the best housing system ever created but drove everyone away with how hard to access the endgame content was? Not saying that FFXIV is at that point yet, but not catering to your casual crowd is how you KILL MMO's. But I reckon they rely on new players to be hard stuck in the 1000000 hour MSQ story rather than creating more casual and approachable or innovative content. As crap and a bloated system as WoW is today, its initial success was made because it was approachable for the casuals and at least TRYING to innovate along the years.

It's why I rarely watch any FFXIV creators, all they go on about is parsing and how some potency changes affect their clear times in this immensely boring system of a dodge dance fight system where you spam a singular rotation. As a tank I'd love to kite a boss to locations, Line of sight a boss, have something mechanical as a tank to do in raids and dungeons aside from dodging mechanics and spamming damage, waiting for the boss to reset to a middle location. Think about itemization more than spamming the same materia in slots, the gearing seems immensely boring without any excitement of discovery or rng drops to it too.

Look I'm not a endgame player, but I don't NEED to play it to see that the system is BORING and UNINNOVATIVE. ANything can be made fun if you do it in a crowd of people you like, sure, theres' that. But I think they need to start shifting the systems to be more interesting. Or at least make the casual content more prominent.

[LibitIncarne]

This fight IS the medium challenge. It has a handful of mechanics, the mechanics need to be respected for the most part, there are quite a few opportunities to recover when only some people fail a mechanic, a portion of the mechanics can be solved by following a danger dorito, and the mechanics are repeating after half the fight and not escalating further. If the "medium level of challenge" doesn't involve at least semi-properly doing damage, semi-properly doing mitigations, semi-properly doing healing, and semi-properly doing positions / mechanics, what about it would even be the "medium challenge"?

No, you're a masochist. The Baldesion Arsenal, Castrum Lacus Litore, Delubrum Reginae, and The Dalriada are medium-challenging content and actually scale down if you go with the half the max that they allow you to do. Delubrum Reginae (Savage) is a bit below Savage in terms of difficulty with escalating mechanics, but you can be carried if you aren't completely incompetent and the Zadnor lost actions make it bearable.

This is savage-tier difficulty, it has body checks and personal responsibility mechanics that hurt other players with damage downs and doom if you mess them up, something that's worse in 24-man content than 4 or 8-man.

[FuturePastNow]

No, you're a masochist. The Baldesion Arsenal, Castrum Lacus Litore, Delubrum Reginae, and The Dalriada are medium-challenging content and actually scale down if you go with the half the max that they allow you to do. Delubrum Reginae (Savage) is a bit below Savage in terms of difficulty with escalating mechanics, but you can be carried if you aren't completely incompetent and the Zadnor lost actions make it bearable.

This is savage-tier difficulty, it has body checks and personal responsibility mechanics that hurt other players with damage downs and doom if you mess them up, something that's worse in 24-man content than 4 or 8-man.

assuming you have 5 people with good essences and actions, CLL, DRN, and DAL are MUCH easier with fewer people than with more. The echo scaling is absurd, you can have 250k hp and do 40k dps in those CEs