Chaotic Alliance Raid is a fun fight, but awful content

[Lilapop]

Because it feels like you misunderstood the point I was making, making the MSQ be a tad harder addresses the very point you were arguing against in my post. Either you misunderstood or you were severely overestimating what I meant by better preparing players and creating a smoother transition.

If players aren't confident or feel like they aren't prepared (which many don't), then they are going to be less inclined to try, similarly if those in the community actively doing that content don't feel like they are prepared for it. I'm not saying it's the only issue, but it's a massive part of an issue that has festered for very long and keeps creeping up from time to time whenever they try content like this.

The point was that fun only really comes for many players when they are prepared for it, and not overwhelmed, and the MSQ experience alone creates the situation where players are overwhelmed fairly easily. If they are less overwhelmed then they will be more inclined to try and have fun. It's not really about treating it as the situation where... "Oh you did MSQ, therefore you must do raiding content, and therefore more content must be designed around that", which is how I am understanding your interpretation of what I said, based on your last paragraph.

That is how I interpreted it, I see and agree with your point for the most part. While I would never personally advocate for MSQ to be brought up to either the difficulty level or gear level (gearing up passively is easy in and of itself and the gearing up treadmill is a whole other discussion), the game does do a terrible job at teaching the player anything other than face-mash keyboard and you can get through the main content, every other bit of combat in the game takes some actual braincells to do and as the chaotic raid has shown us, the average player who only does MSQ is definitely way under prepared.

[MisterNublet]

And then you get more rewards proportionally to the amount of first timers which is a good idea on its own, but instead of rewarding you for helping other players, since you can't actually help them much for starters, it rewards you for putting up with them instead.

Thought I'd help get other players their clears and joined a dozen "enrage/clear" parties over the last 5 hours and not a single time did the alliance make it past swap.

I could have used that time to join farm parties and gotten half of the demi I would have gotten if one of these parties actually cleared the fight. The bonus is a trap while the limsa rpers wipe the instance repeatedly hoping the 23 other players will carry them to a new haircut.

[Voidmage]

Thought I'd help get other players their clears and joined a dozen "enrage/clear" parties over the last 5 hours and not a single time did the alliance make it past swap.

I could have used that time to join farm parties and gotten half of the demi I would have gotten if one of these parties actually cleared the fight. The bonus is a trap while the limsa rpers wipe the instance repeatedly hoping the 23 other players will carry them to a new haircut.

If they got to swap then they are not Limsa afkers anymore because they cleared the mechanics beforehand.
Swap is just a stupid mechanic in a 24 man.
You have:
Proximity based swapping so if one person stands slightly wrong or is dead the big confusion begins.
Parties are literally broken apart.
People needing to adjust with different directions (A-C) or entirely different mechanics (A-B-C).
You have pairs / spread with other players NOT in your party chat or as your focus target.
You have B side where several people can die if others don’t move normal.

All that can lead too easy to a wipe.
There is a reason why the guide even mentions using tank lb there.
I even see players with legend titles and savage gear screw up there.

So no it has nothing to do with limsa afkers or people wanting to get carried so late in a fight.
It’s just people failing a stupid mechanic for a 24 man by either overestimating themself and joining clear parties or just making simple mistakes.
With 24 people everyone can easily screw up and the mechanics there punish it extremely hard.

I agree that there are far too many wipes for clear parties but that just shows how unforgiving the mechanics actually are because so late in the fight the people who wanted to get carried or 08/15 the raid got already filtered out.

[Gurgeh]

If they got to swap then they are not Limsa afkers anymore because they cleared the mechanics beforehand.
Swap is just a stupid mechanic in a 24 man.
You have:
Proximity based swapping so if one person stands slightly wrong or is dead the big confusion begins.
Parties are literally broken apart.
People needing to adjust with different directions (A-C) or entirely different mechanics (A-B-C).
You have pairs / spread with other players NOT in your party chat or as your focus target.
You have B side where several people can die if others don’t move normal.

All that can lead too easy to a wipe.
There is a reason why the guide even mentions using tank lb there.
I even see players with legend titles and savage gear screw up there.

So no it has nothing to do with limsa afkers or people wanting to get carried so late in a fight.
It’s just people failing a stupid mechanic for a 24 man by either overestimating themself and joining clear parties or just making simple mistakes.
With 24 people everyone can easily screw up and the mechanics there punish it extremely hard.

I agree that there are far too many wipes for clear parties but that just shows how unforgiving the mechanics actually are because so late in the fight the people who wanted to get carried or 08/15 the raid got already filtered out.

I hadn't realised that there were still problems. Your right probably. Non savage Ex noobs like me probably have been filtered.
I'm starting to wonder if they did want this to fail publicly.
Or if they always wanted to make it too hard, to sell easier chaotics later.
If this is the last Chaotic well know it's the former.

[Voidmage]

I hadn't realised that there were still problems. Your right probably. Non savage Ex noobs like me probably have been filtered.
I'm starting to wonder if they did want this to fail publicly.
Or if they always wanted to make it too hard, to sell easier chaotics later.
If this is the last Chaotic well know it's the former.

No.
What has been filtered is people not trying or similar.
To get to swaps you will have to clear towers, (brambles to an extent) and the stack/spread mechanic.
These are things where you need to know what to do or you and others will probably die.
Your chances to get carried through them is also pretty low because people WILL call out if you do the same mistakes multiple times.
And in PF you can mostly land anywhere as your role position.
Even I mostly look for a specific spot like everyone does in PF.

It’s not newbies who have been filtered. They are still there trying and giving their best.
That’s also why I react so allergic to others here trying to undersell or straight up insult them.
You have players who go out of their comfort zone and really try to get this fight done just to be laughed at as afkers, dead weight or slackers by the arrogant minority.
In Savage almost no one would say to wipes in clear parties that it’s the afkers but that it’s the typical PF gacha.
But here with 24 people it’s of course the fault of those players…

I WANT more people doing harder content because I genuinely think so many players are better at this game than they actually think.
They just don’t give themself a chance or are not given a chance by others.
That’s also why would also help me because then PF wouldn’t take as long to fill in the future.

[Aravell]

I WANT more people doing harder content because I genuinely think so many players are better at this game than they actually think.
They just don’t give themself a chance or are not given a chance by others.
That’s also why would also help me because then PF wouldn’t take as long to fill in the future.

I believe that the current mentality of people bashing those they deem lesser is born from the way the game is designed and the fact that multiple skill levels are clashing in this piece of content.

As the game is designed in such a way where any one player does not have the agency nor the ability to carry a doomed party no matter how good they are due to the way content is designed to wipe everyone unless it's done correctly, a lot of clears tend to come down to doing your personal job correctly and wait for everyone else to stop making mistakes.

The faster you get the mechanics down, the faster you'll find yourself in the "Why are they still wiping to the easy stuff?" state. As players who constantly engage in high-end content tend to learn at a quicker rate, this would naturally cause friction if some in the party are less used to hard content and learn at a slower rate. Perhaps a mechanic may take an ultimate raider 2 tries to decipher while it would take someone who only engages up to extremes 7 tries to decipher.

All this is to say that, if you place wildly varying skill levels in the same place and you give the weakest link the ability to single-handedly wipe the entire team while not giving the stronger players any ability to mitigate the mistakes of the weakest link, you're going to get a lot of anger and frustration, which would lead to namecalling (like the aforementioned 'dead weight', 'afker', etc.).

[Rueby]

Someone in the PF I was in all day uploaded logs...out of 50 pulls 3 of them were clears...this was on a discord with clear call outs.

Honestly, I genuinely think they messed up with the swap mechanic. They wanted people to have C4U parties (I got my first clear in C4U but many times you can't carry too many people), but they design mechanics that punish deaths and it can snowball into a wipe. People want to help/carry others for the clears/bonus but it's really exhausting to keep going. I went from 8:30 AM and stopped at 1:30AM...Got like 8 clears? 8 clears in 17 hours...Let that sink in, this is an organized disc required group so people are hearing call outs and now imagine the regular PF experience.

On release I started from when it unlocked and stayed up till 1:30AM, the second day from 12PM to 1:30AM...I cleared on the third day in the morning...

I found myself wishing that we had the ability to see our roles (r1 r2 m1 m2 etc) beside our name for the entire 3 alliances, it'd make the pairs after swaps manageable because the swaps might get messed up and I tend to sac myself as R2 because people panic/don't want to stack and/or don't understand how the pairs is baited on the closest players to the boss so if 2 people stand in hitbox they'll bait 2 shots, not just 1. If you stand with 3 people you're killing them.

I'm not a regular raider, I don't enjoy raiding because it's exhausting to me (I don't find much fulfillment from suffering in PF and losing rolls just to get a pity book) but I know I'm capable of doing it. I really wanted to earn the hairstyle. I know I could buy it for gil, but I feel for me it would be meaningless...

I'd like to think I'm fairly consistent with maybe some oopsies but that happens to everyone (considering I've been sleep deprived since this alli raid came out...), I don't think I'm an amazing player, something that threw me off was me thinking too far ahead. Deep breaths and focus on the current thing. If it helps, make the boss's castbar to 160 or something and slap it in the middle of your screen and look at your debuffs occasionally and face it out at 3s, it's okay if you take a moment so you make sure you're not committing a genocide (hands middle) or (shrieking onto someone on tiles), you'd be essentially sentencing them to death unless the healers babysit them.

Just like everything...it might seem everything is going off all at once and it'd be overwhelming but there's always order to things.

I don't think I'd join this out of organized runs...I know they were trying to go for like 'yes those who cleared will carry others and everyone will be peepohappy with rewards' but that's not what's happening or will happen. Even reclears/farm parties get locked to high ilvls to exclude people who don't have BiS. I could do everything perfectly and still be excluded. I don't see many people doing it once they got everything...

[ovIm]

As the game is designed in such a way where any one player does not have the agency nor the ability to carry a doomed party no matter how good they are due to the way content is designed to wipe everyone unless it's done correctly, a lot of clears tend to come down to doing your personal job correctly and wait for everyone else to stop making mistakes.

...

All this is to say that, if you place wildly varying skill levels in the same place and you give the weakest link the ability to single-handedly wipe the entire team while not giving the stronger players any ability to mitigate the mistakes of the weakest link, you're going to get a lot of anger and frustration, which would lead to namecalling (like the aforementioned 'dead weight', 'afker', etc.).

Honestly, this is where P1 of the new chaotic really shines, its honestly very well designed in that aspect. There are very few ways for a struggling player to negatively impact their group because of how the mechanics work, and a couple of good players can mitigate problems here. (quick healers can dispell doom, for example, aware RDMs battle rise is invaluable here). I'm hoping CS3 can expand on mechanics like these in the future.

[Voidmage]

I believe that the current mentality of people bashing those they deem lesser is born from the way the game is designed and the fact that multiple skill levels are clashing in this piece of content.

I absolutely agree with all you said.
The problem is the game design itself not expecting anything on one side and expecting everything on the other.
Now we have content outside easy dungeons where people clash and like you said can easily cause wipes and frustration.
I can understand the frustration I also get frustrated in PF when people already die before tiles even start again and again and again but I just keep quiet and don’t say anything.

The solution would have been so simple.
Just turn down the body checks in this type of content. It is already annoying even in Ex fights and at this point just uninspiring from Ozmas side.

Outside savage deaths should be recoverable. Too many should lead to a wipe sure but a group slightly screwing up towers or positions before swap and you have no tank with you and just die to autos.
That’s just crappy design.

I still haven’t cleared this fight and honestly I am short of just giving up because it’s just… not fun in PF to prog and I have seen others ingame saying similar things.
At least I see me not helping others out in the future and that is just wrong from a game design perspective.

[Valence]

If they got to swap then they are not Limsa afkers anymore because they cleared the mechanics beforehand.
Swap is just a stupid mechanic in a 24 man.
You have:
Proximity based swapping so if one person stands slightly wrong or is dead the big confusion begins.
Parties are literally broken apart.
People needing to adjust with different directions (A-C) or entirely different mechanics (A-B-C).
You have pairs / spread with other players NOT in your party chat or as your focus target.
You have B side where several people can die if others don’t move normal.

All that can lead too easy to a wipe.
There is a reason why the guide even mentions using tank lb there.
I even see players with legend titles and savage gear screw up there.

So no it has nothing to do with limsa afkers or people wanting to get carried so late in a fight.
It’s just people failing a stupid mechanic for a 24 man by either overestimating themself and joining clear parties or just making simple mistakes.
With 24 people everyone can easily screw up and the mechanics there punish it extremely hard.

I agree that there are far too many wipes for clear parties but that just shows how unforgiving the mechanics actually are because so late in the fight the people who wanted to get carried or 08/15 the raid got already filtered out.

Ironically I wish we had a lot more rng chaotic mechanics like those to completely randomize encounters so that we finally can get out of excel spreadsheet script hell and mindless execution of raidplans.
The problem is that nothing is designed to accommodate for this in this raid and you end up with body checks, insta death, insta wipes, the recovery options are interesting but they don't deliver in results and performance: the atomos mechanic is the only true delight of this fight but it's underused and too long and cumbersome to really make a difference for recovery.
Frankly, even if I think they could be more creative, this CAR could have been a lot more tuned toward the audience it was advertised for had they removed the towers and replaced them by something else, for starters.

Honestly, this is where P1 of the new chaotic really shines, its honestly very well designed in that aspect. There are very few ways for a struggling player to negatively impact their group because of how the mechanics work, and a couple of good players can mitigate problems here. (quick healers can dispell doom, for example, aware RDMs battle rise is invaluable here). I'm hoping CS3 can expand on mechanics like these in the future.

It's also the phase that's incredibly boring and a clone of countless trial fights. Phase 2 could be interesting with a better design team that's less obsessed with body checks and mechanical DDR failure and more open to try out running parties down through attrition rates and party break points to take advantage of more creative fight layouts and rng like Swap.