Chaotic Alliance Raid: More Content for Professional Gamers

[Hastatus]

The new Chaotic Alliance Raid will again make 1% of players happy but where is the mid-tier content for the rest of us amateur players? For the rest of us this content just highlights the miserable difficulty systems that get neglected. Want to use Duty Finder: wait a few hours for it to not fill. Use the PF: spend hours going through lists trying to mentally filter Duty Completes from Duty Incompletes, blue text from yellow text, weird prog point descriptions, different strategies/plans, different emotional requirements, different skill requirements, trying to fit your job requirements ... all after a long day with real life requirements. Get your high definition displays ready. Have a second monitor with third party sites explaining what to do. Make sure you're on Discord. Have your group of purple(?) parsers ready. Make sure to record everything for post analysis. Have a 25th player doing analysis and commentary live. Make sure you did hours of homework before playing. If you do finally fill up three teams, it is only a matter of time before one person leaves and the alliance goes from 24 to 7. You should have had a difficulty warning like Eureka BA had back in the day, but a lot of your extra content is headed in this direction now it seems. I'm starting to think the developers fixate on the experiences and opinions of youtubers, steamers, and podcasters when it comes to raids. What about the rest of us who have very little voice and no financial interest?

[Hastatus]

If it were difficult to make mid-tier content I wouldn't bother complaining, but it is easy to do: you just don't seem to make many attempts. You used to have normal, hard and extreme ARR trials...but those extreme trials can be completed in one lockout with 7 new players using Duty Finder (I genuinely enjoy when these pop up in Mentor or Trial Roulettes). It is not hard to take easy content and make it a little harder or harder content and make it a little easier. You've done 95% of the work, go back and tweak it. Hire someone whose job it will be to adjust existing challenging content for average gamers: you clearly already have someone who can make content for the top 1%. Find a group who can set their aim slightly lower for a larger majority. Take the normal ARR alliance raids that many complain about getting in roulettes and adjust the numbers, give enemies harder faster hitting attacks, increase the number of enemies, etc. Take this Chaotic raid for example: make a version without the hands overlapping your character model so you don't have to know how to back-strafe when using a controller or give an extra second to dodge the hands (oh...what is that problem called? uhh snapshots!); have a version where the tiles don't break when there's only one person on a tile; make all the towers one person only; take out the swap. There are so many easy things that could be adjusted to make a version for average gamers to play that will still challenge and teach them new things. Very few players can improve when they are only hand-coddled or bombarded with everything at once. There has to be a stimulating middle ground. It's getting harder and harder to find challenging fun.

[Hastatus]

I wish you would spend more time rewarding the journey aspect of fights. This Chaotic was the perfect opportunity to reward players for trying. Why is 100% success after 24-person body checks the only way to reward people? If players come to the realization that they will never be able to get to the end, the drop outs begin. It is also very hard to know what you are doing right or wrong. Why are there no rewards or encouragements? Why not discourage time feeling wasted if you do not succeed? Why can't players be rewarded for things they did right upon reaching the lockout? If you try for 90 minutes (this one should have been 45 minutes) and you are able to reach certain prog points why not grant rewards when so many players are required and when one person can kill everyone? I'm not suggesting you reward afk players but reward players who meet dps/tanking/healing thresholds or do every mechanic properly in phase 1, and tell them they did a good job. Basically the everything perfect or nothing mentality is a time sink many players will not find enjoyable. I tried one of the Criterion Dungeons back in EW and I thought even if it takes a while the chest after the first boss would be worth it...there was no chest. I made it past the second boss eventually and got to Statice but by then I was burned out from the repetitional time sinks and searching for groups. You shouldn't always have to know how to do everything in a fight before attempting it. These three criterion fights could have been added as individual fights with lesser rewards and no trash mobs so average players could practice later stages of difficult content. Repeating phase 1 of this Chaotic to die almost instantly in phase 2 is not going to be bearable for most players. Another thing you can easily do to make mid-tier content is to include checkpoints: remove most rewards if checkpoints are used but allow the option to exist. If you are not going to have mid-tier content for players to be able to learn mechanics at more reasonable paces, at least give players explanations for failures: the game kills the raid when towers are missed or tanks are not available for wild charges, but it will not put up a map and say 'tower 7 and 8 were missed' or a 'tank accumulated too many stacked debuffs'. When a player thinks 'what just happened?' every time they get to the same place because so much is going on at once how are they not supposed to get demoralized and potentially quit?

Just to be clear the Chaotic is quite beautifully designed for its target audience and I am not suggesting they stop making Savage, Ultimate, Chaotic content for the top 1%, I just want them to make more alternative, more reasonable versions of that same content for everyone else to be challenged in more enjoyable ways. SE has always been good at reskins. Please reskin this content for us mere mortals.

[Duck_]

Chaotic Alliance is mid tier content

[Saraide]

You cleared savage but this is too hard for you?

[Kaurhz]

IMO, the problem isn't that it is for 'professional gamers', the problem is that it only came in that 1 difficulty step.

Wouldn't be much of an issue if it were in fact an alliance raid and not just a trial masquerading as an alliance raid because of the 24-man size.

If it were to be a glorified trial then should've come in 2 stages, with a bit of a grind focus on the 'normal' version.

[Jeeqbit]

I progged through the first two phases within a few hours of release in PF and came to understand most of its mechanics for those phases. So that far is at least possible without looking up guides and so on.

The tile phase is really where you're all relying on eachother and may need raid planners. You don't need a second monitor for that, because you can just tab out, and soon they are adding a raid planner into the game.

Discord isn't normally, actually required. It usually just allows someone to do callouts to make it easier for you, or the direct communication between players can reduce the amount of wipes a bit. I have already seen a number of people say how they cleared via PF in my social circles.

Being flawless with damage also doesn't matter. People have cleared with lots of damage downs, and it's not scaled for 730; it's scaled for 710 (crafted gear) despite that most players doing it probably have 720 or higher.

I think whether it's 1% is subjective. According to Lucky Bancho's latest stats, many JP worlds have 30% of (post-Dawntrail players) who cleared savage, while Aether has around 15% (varies 14-20%).

If we get the number of people with the M4S mount and contrast it with the number of people with the M4 minion (based on data from collectors), it gives us some sort of vague estimate of the number of people who have cleared savage: 24.7%

If you do finally fill up three teams, it is only a matter of time before one person leaves and the alliance goes from 24 to 7.

That is a bit annoying. Would be convenient if we could recruit more without leaving the instance, because we have to get 24 people to leave then re-enter each time it happens.

[Hyperia]

Chaotic Alliance is mid tier content

I accept your opinion but I agree with the OP as anybody with the rewards from the 24 mostly have ultimate titles or full savage gear.

Those with the new hairstyle and are not hardcore raiders are either famous who received it as a gift or wealthy omnicrafters.

They started out to make this as a harder 24, on par with an EX trial but badly overshot and made it a savage 3 raid.

As a former savage raider, this is my personal opinion.

[Saraide]

I accept your opinion but I agree with the OP as anybody with the rewards from the 24 mostly have ultimate titles or full savage gear.

Those with the new hairstyle and are not hardcore raiders are either famous who received it as a gift or wealthy omnicrafters.

They started out to make this as a harder 24, on par with an EX trial but badly overshot and made it a savage 3 raid.

As a former savage raider, this is my personal opinion.

Which savage floor 3 fight would you equate this to in terms of difficulty.

[BigCheez]

IMO, the problem isn't that it is for 'professional gamers', the problem is that it only came in that 1 difficulty step.

Wouldn't be much of an issue if it were in fact an alliance raid and not just a trial masquerading as an alliance raid because of the 24-man size.

If it were to be a glorified trial then should've come in 2 stages, with a bit of a grind focus on the 'normal' version.

The normal version is in World of Darkness. It's a hard mode for a piece of old content.