Endgame should be challenging - that's the point (from a casual player)

[SamRF]

I cannot help but laugh, seeing people go at each others throat, based on some artificial term which everybody defines differently.
I identify as a semi-hardcore player with a casual interest in the more lo-core parts of the game, so please let me know what FF14 problem I am responsible for now?

If you don't complain, you are not responsible for any problem. Good principle of life. But maybe I'm a hypocrite in creating this thread.

[Kandraxx]

The problem is that no content in this game is challenging. It's all about perseverance, throwing ungodly amounts of time at it and the pain of forcibly interacting with 7 other people in a superficial way in what is a silent single player game with other players around. Hell, I'd argue not even the Necromancer title is hard because you can just keep going as a tank until you get that like 5-6 free rages from 181-199 IF you just throw the hundreds of hours at it that are required. The raids are artificial difficulty all the way, because it's so cheap and low effort to do for them and it essentially allows them to stretch even the most braindead garbage for weeks/months.

It's like...imagine Elden Ring, you play through the game all alone but now you're at Malenia and there's this glowing gate that tells you to now go online and group with 7 other players so you can fight her, her HP are x8 and if any of them fucks up you're also dead and going back and that's FFXIV in a nutshell.

The other question is, why are they even still doing 'high-end duties"? For the ~10% of the playerbase that participates in it? Should we now subtract all the plugin cheats and run buyers from that number and arrive at maybe ~3% fully legit players?

[Ephremjlm]

This is insanely stupid to me...

I feel like this post basically sums up the watering down of the MMO and I agree with you.

In the past there was never a need for the term "midcore" because MOST content was that. People who only crafted and gathered, who barley scraped by but didn't care and were just there for only the story, those who just RP'ed, or those who just to use the game as a chatroom (remember those things?) were called "casuals". Hardcore players were the ones who did everything, or who simply "rushed to endgame" (oh look THAT term) and did the hardest content likely optimizing their gameplay to create a meta.

To confuse midcore players with casual players is literally what devs have been pushing for so long to get the weight of players wanting more off their back. It is so much easier to make braindead content across the board for casuals, and then single instanced fights that require little to no conditions to get into with little to no consequences on death, in a circular arena, with dodge mechanics and a rotation of a simplified job that must be done perfectly for hardcore players as opposed to making content that meets players in the middle (oh that term "midcore"), creates multiple uses for open world, has combat that makes you think, adds variability, has gear that makes you choose, makes you customize your character to your own liking but while having to figure out how to make it work, and most importantly, that feels fulfilling. FFXI used to be the embodiment of that, and those aspect are still there, they just choose to not take the good things and instead label it all bad so they don't have to do extra work. (Yoshi P partially admitted this when he explained their process for making dungeons). Now a days, you can 100% tell they don't even know how to execute it anymore. Occult Crescent should have been the easiest slam dunk of a content win, but instead it has turned into a big L in a streak of L's that they have been accumulation since the post patches of Endwalker, except for those who have been wanting midcore and have been holding out hope for the past 4+ years that this would be good, it's a heavy and low blow that tells us that even when content is geared towards us, it still has to be geared towards the casuals. And forked tower, idk what happened there, it seems like they didn't even play test it properly lol. Hardcore players even got screwed. But the message is still there the once again the midcore players matter less than the hardcores in that instance. Its 80/20 with casuals and hardcore players. Midcore players simply get left out.

Its so beyond annoying

[Raikai]

These teach you your job

Absolutely not.

The casual content in this game is so easy that it doesn't teach you how to play a proper dps-maximized rotation at all. The solo duties, quest enemies, all die too fast. Nowhere in the game teaches you what the recurring encounter markers mean, beyond the very basic ones.

There's a number of new players who hit all 4-5 oGCDs back to back because nothing in the game teaches them what weaving means. Do they know that an "ability" is not considered magic like a "spell" is, thus not affected by some modifiers? Tooltips aren't clear enough. Even though said abilities look like magic visually? Do players know the importance of cooldown alignment in the 2 minute marks? How you're supposed to learn all of this so you can even have a chance if you want to do High End content?

[SamRF]

Absolutely not.

The casual content in this game is so easy that it doesn't teach you how to play a proper dps-maximized rotation at all. The solo duties, quest enemies, all die too fast. Nowhere in the game teaches you what the recurring encounter markers mean, beyond the very basic ones.

There's a number of new players who hit all 4-5 oGCDs back to back because nothing in the game teaches them what weaving means. Do they know that an "ability" is not considered magic like a "spell" is, thus not affected by some modifiers? Tooltips aren't clear enough. Even though said abilities look like magic visually? Do players know the importance of cooldown alignment in the 2 minute marks? How you're supposed to learn all of this so you can even have a chance if you want to do High End content?

Okay but that's beside the point. But perhaps interesting topic nonethless. They do teach you in the way that you get more used to your rotation muscle memory, given that you do your research with sources outside of the game, or if you calculate yourelf or are good intuitively. With teaching I mean you basically teach yourself but gradually as you progress.

[Mawlzy]

Okay but that's beside the point. But perhaps interesting topic nonethless. They do teach you in the way that you get more used to your rotation muscle memory, given that you do your research with sources outside of the game, or if you calculate yourelf or are good intuitively. With teaching I mean you basically teach yourself but gradually as you progress.

Somewhat off topic, but I'd suggest a significant sub-population will never develop muscle memory for an optimized 2-minute rotation because there are simply too many damn buttons.

It really is a remarkable achievement from SE to manage to produce horrific button bloat while simultaneously smearing out job identity so that all jobs can handle their miserable fight design.

[Raraka]

3. People which refuses to join discords or statics or anything and complain then "ohhh that content needs again social interaction" bruhh you are playing a MMO if you dont wanna social interactions its YOUR problem, not SE´s problem or the Community´s Problem is one and only YOUR problem, dont play a MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE Game if you dont wanna bother with social interactions

People dismissing this point would hate on Linkshells if they were functional "mimimimi, I don't wanna join a linkshell to do content", but sure, lets keep blaming discord untill the sun blows up

[Jangles]

This is insanely stupid to me...I've been playing mmos for decades, and in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, most of the content could be done on pick up, while still providing some kind of challenge. Only the highest lvl of difficulty asked for organised runs on discords. Pretending the need of a static or a discord server to do anything in a MMO is a blatant proof you have forgotten everything about others MMO than FFXIV. Sure Teamspeak/Mumble/discord always have been there, but it was more "I reunited a team, now let's go there, it'll be more practical to communicate". In FFXIV it's "If you don't have a static, good luck to run the content". It's funny to me that someone with 18 years of mmo experience doesn't seem to see that. I also spend 20 years playing mmo, yet achieved to always have thing to do in each of them despite rarely engaging in high end content. I also did in FFXIV until EW. This whole "you don't understand what a MMO" is so out of touch, especially since the lack of casual content is not compared to other mmo, but to previous iteration of FFXIV. Honestly you just look like an angry little elitist with this post.

It seems you also can't understand what you read. The complaint is not the existence of high end activities, it's the lack of anything else. Check the last weeks of post about Forked Tower : I've seen post saying there should be an easier version, but none that said the hard version should not exists. MMO wise FFXIV content is poor : it's not a problem, because it the proposition of the game, giving a mmo that doesn't ask for every second of your time. But it used to give things to do for people that didn't want to engage into High end content.

Agree with you immensely, challenge doesn't mean discord content. CLL was "challenging" you needed to organize an communicate but didn't need to be premade, Dalriada was the same way. Delubrum Reginae normal was also challenging but didn't need you to take to outside sources to gather people to do it. Yes I know savage can be completed without discord through party finder and I like savage, but if you pretend like you don't understand what people mean by content requiring discord you are just being disingenuous for the sake of arguing.

[angelar_]

The problem is that no content in this game is challenging.

Your definition of challenging is disingenuous.

It's funny that you mention the absurd difficulty spike in Elden Ring's end game. A huge amount of people couldn't solo Malenia after managing through the rest of the game. So comparing it to getting a group of 8 people 'high-end duties' on XIV and acting like it's different is pretty incoherent with everything else you're trying to say. If the point is just to say "you're REQUIRED to do that," then it's a meaningless distinction because it was so unfair on a level the vast majority of the rest of the game isn't that you effectively have to do so anyway.

"No content in this game is challenging. Only 3% of players are legitimately able to do the hardest content." Whatever.

[Valence]

Here we go again but I guess i'll bite:

1) What threshold would constitute challenging enough for you at endgame? NM raid level? Occult Crescent CEs? Extreme trials? Where do you set the bar?

2) What about players that get left behind because they cannot follow yet play for the story? Do they drop out of the game when they reach a wall?

3) Maybe not everybody is playing the game with the same goals than you, maybe some aren't playing the game to turn it into a homework or want to study the blade and improve until they beat something they can't? What makes it rewarding for you may not feel rewarding for others? For example for me, it's not beating challenging content that I feel rewarding, in fact even when I beat my first extreme fights or savage fights long ago I didn't feel especially anything about it. But on the other hand making the proper choices within a battle system that I liked, playing my job well (well, when jobs used to be engaging that is), that was was made me pumped. And ironically this happened a lot more in casual content that has always been less scripted than harder duties.

4) I think you're gravely mistaken if you think that accessibility has nothing to do with usability, personal abilities and ergonomics as well.