Here we go again

[Mawlzy]

And yet, OSRS and WoW are significantly harder gamers and have far more active players.

I'd suggest difficulty is somewhat subjective. And WoW has difficulty levels one can choose.

More to the point, perhaps, FFXIV is failing on multiple fronts, thereby driving down player numbers. When there are simple solutions to retain less-skilled players, it seems odd not to implement them.

[Altina_Orion]

I'd suggest difficulty is somewhat subjective. And WoW has difficulty levels one can choose.

More to the point, perhaps, FFXIV is failing on multiple fronts, thereby driving down player numbers. When there are simple solutions to retain less-skilled players, it seems odd not to implement them.

True, but normal mode on ffxiv is equivilant to normal on wow. I would argue that Normal on WoW is often times harder than normal on ffxiv. Wow has Heroic and Mythic+ as well. It really only goes up from here.

[Chasingstars]

I just realized it very early on for what it was, an obstacle course with a training dummy, and completed it. Though I did it as a dps. I really should've gone with warrior or scholar as they seem like natural fits.

[Mawlzy]

True, but normal mode on ffxiv is equivilant to normal on wow. I would argue that Normal on WoW is often times harder than normal on ffxiv. Wow has Heroic and Mythic+ as well. It really only goes up from here.

Probably depends on whether one is more comfortable with predictive vs reactive combat.

And I still don't understand why driving players from FFXIV is a good thing.

[Altina_Orion]

Probably depends on whether one is more comfortable with predictive vs reactive combat.

And I still don't understand why driving players from FFXIV is a good thing.

Because there are other issues driving players away as well, and a lot of it is a lack of engaging replayable content at endgame. People aren't quitting in droves during dry patches because they are too challenged. I would argue that the lack of difficulty drives more people away than the presence of it, even if that isnt your personal experience.

[Mawlzy]

Because there are other issues driving players away as well, and a lot of it is a lack of engaging replayable content at endgame. People aren't quitting in droves during dry patches because they are too challenged. I would argue that the lack of difficulty drives more people away than the presence of it, even if that isnt your personal experience.

Right. We have diametrically opposed personal experience of this issue that doubtless colors our conclusions. For example, your FC probably still exists.

If SE would simply ask me and others why we're quitting, we'd be happy to tell them.

[AlienDiplomat]

From Software has led the charge in pushing cheap, heat-seeking physics-defying fake difficulty and easy to design 1-shot "mechanics" that force people to pound encounters into muscle memory like a robot rather than actually using their intuition or imagination like a human being. Such things are far easier to design and require much less dev time or skill, and there is a huge community of people chasing that formula, believing masochism and muscle memory to be the ultimate bragging badge of "skill."

Now we see RPG games that use to be about story instead embracing the robot paradigm. We now get intelligence-insulting smile songs and hello kitty island adventure characters where once there was plot and character development, and instead of interesting story encounters you get increasingly easy to design formula content that panders to the Elden Ring robot model of unimaginative difficulty and hoping the ego of the git gud elitists will keep people from noticing how much less we are getting in exchange for beating our basal ganglia against lazy encounter design.

[zarahleo]

Being an older gamer, been playing since ff14 came out, Meso Terminal is unplayable for me on the 4 bosses that chain to you encounter due to the dodge mechanics firing to quickly.It would be nice to have a easier mode choice when doing it with the npc's to "progress thru the story" as I feel it's better to npc it first so people aren't upset if i die as a healer. I am not asking for an easier mode for que'ing just for doing it with npc's heck i don't need any loot in an easy mode option either but i do feel that we all should have content we can get thru if its mandatory for the story.

Just have fun practicing, if you die, everyone has phoenix downs now so it doesnt matter. Don't worry about attacking your boss just focus on the mechs. Then when other players kill theirs, they will help you. Yes, other players can attack yours once they kill theirs.

[Metaknigh]

Right. We have diametrically opposed personal experience of this issue that doubtless colors our conclusions. For example, your FC probably still exists.

If SE would simply ask me and others why we're quitting, we'd be happy to tell them.

Genuinely, your FC does not make the majority of players, if they could not get through content in Dawntrail it's incredibly questionable how they did anything like Stormblood or Shadowbringers content as those were harder expansions. People quitting is not due to difficult content, it's other things entirely like job homogenization, I'm sorry but this isn't a difficult dungeon by most standards. If it uniquely challenges you then the best you can do is not do so in trusts and use other players to help as trusts are more difficult in general due to them being slower damage dealers and less reactive healing.

Also wrt to why no battle rez from Trusts, the simple answer is there's no failure state then if you can be picked up by trusts it becomes trivial to bot dungeons as all they need is to move forward and not care about doing mechanics. There's also simply no incentive for players to become better if they need to take the smallest amount of personal responsibility to stay alive. SE does want players to learn and understand mechanics, not simply face tank everything as that is frankly, boring.

[Metaknigh]

...

Did you miss what this thread is about? There's nothing about what you're talking about here.

1) There's no 1-shot mechanics in this place.
2) What are you talking about with masochism, the game is expecting the player to know how to play it after 100 levels.
3) Memorization and understanding what tells/mechanics are has always been a staple of ffxiv.
4) If you have grievances with the MSQ story, wrong thread.
5) What is any of your second paragraph, the thread is about a dungeon boss being "hard", even if it's not.