Dawntrail Normal Content isnt hard & problem with FFXIV’s feedback mechanisms

[Anarcho]

My favourite thing about Dawntrail is that dungeons, alliance raids, and normal trials have been challenging.

They’re not as hard as extreme, savage, or ultimates

But there is friction, and that friction matters. Otherwise, if it’s too easy, it’s boring, and then honestly, I personally get distracted, lose my flow state, and ironically end up playing worse and instead would rather just queue up for PVP or play a different game that isn’t FFXIV

The underlying problem with player feedback mechanisms is that people who have positive experiences will not show up in the forums to complain. As a result, the forum is a poor indicator to glean whether or not aspects of difficulty in gameplay are reflective of the broad player base.

Ideally, you should try to send off surveys instead: maybe have randomized surveys implemented in game so that you can get accurate player feedback (and then give the player a little token item for it). If the content truly is determined to be difficult based on randomized survey, then fine, I’d accept the changes.

Forums on the other hand are not a good feedback mechanism for things like gauging difficulty for the same reason as to why it’s easier to organize around the principle of opposition or “no”, than it is around the principle of support or “yes”. You end up with an inverse form of survivorship bias, where a small minority of people who may not have the same capacity to handle things like failure as the rest of the community show up to express their displeasure.

In essence, if the signal about “difficulty” comes from self-selected opposition on a forum, that’s just not a scientific indicator.

For anyone who may think normal content is too hard:

If you have trouble dealing with failure, that’s OK. One should not feel overwhelmed when dealing with failure in the game—which I know is easier said than done—but unfortunately the only way to ever deal with failure in a video game is through acceptance of failure. Only then can you begin to improve. Failure is a fact of life. It is a teacher.

As a black mage main there are many instances where I just get destroyed due to my decision to cast rather than move in time to resolve a mechanic, but that’s part of the fun. That’s part of the learning. If my party is unhappy with it, that’s on them

All people want is your personal best and to be mindful of your team. Anyone asking you for perfect should be ignored.

I think the way we should accommodate peoples’ fear of failure and any potential aversion to self-improvement is to maybe have easier Trust dungeons for them which act like dungeon tutorials (before they queue up for the real thing). I don’t think the content itself should be made “easier”, since it’s already not hard and mechanics have been scaling appropriately with the levels on the way to 100

[Toraion]

I agree.
Its absurd. I've seen excuses like being an older gamer or issues with playing the game in general, but while Dawntrail content is "harder", if you dumb it down any more than this you will not have a compelling game. We're not asking you to run Savage or Ex, and as someone who has done both I can tell you that normal Dawntrail dungeons aren't even remotely comparable to that difficulty. Like yeah, I died twice in Meso Terminal cause of that weird boss. Know what I did? Learned and adapted, and beat it. Risk Aversion is absurd, we're now at the opposite end of the "Git Gud" mentality and its just as bad for the game as an excessively difficult mandatory challenge would be.

[Grimr]

yeah no thank you all it is doing is making me dungeon adverse. A bloody 4man is harder that the dam trial of 7.3. Unacceptable. When a damm 4 man has more mechanics than a trial that is saying something. This is not a turning point yoshida.

[Supersnow845]

yeah no thank you all it is doing is making me dungeon adverse. A bloody 4man is harder that the dam trial of 7.3. Unacceptable. When a damm 4 man has more mechanics than a trial that is saying something. This is not a turning point yoshida.

Isn’t this more just an argument that necron is relatively underbaked in terms of mechanics

[Thendra]

I completely agree, Necron should be much more challenging.

[Valence]

On surveys: I think most people agree that they should do actual surveys and that a forum isn't representative of the whole population. However, if the idea behind this post is just to show that a majority of players like it in order to smother a minority of players as I suspect it to be, I'm not especially sure it's a better thing to have. It's important for the dev team to take into account as many player profiles as possible (and this probably should indicate a clear need for differing difficulty modes, dev resources be damned).

I am also part of a player population that doesn't have issues dealing with the difficulty whatsoever (I have raided in up to semi hardcore / hardcore statics for a while and have attempt every piece of difficulty content in the game). I'm unironically starting to have way more trouble with some of the newest content like the second Extreme of DT which I find harder than anything I've ever done in the game (including DSR), and I'm not trolling when saying this because it's genuinely one of the modern mechanics that I cannot solve on my own no matter how hard I try. But I don't have actual problems going through casual content, I play my jobs well, the difficulty spike is not a problem for me at that level. But I also do think that the difficulty and complexity has been added in all the wrong places, and therefore this puts me into the side of the players that genuinely struggle with it. Not only I sympathize with them anyway, but I also hate what the pve has been turning into since ShB at the very least.

[ThurinTurambar]

I mean its not hard to come up with solution that you can make a toggle in trusts to get like an echo buff (with 1 raise i guess?) and have the dungeons be at dawntrail level, which is enough to not be snoozefest for all the people without irl debuffs.
Make it not drop loot/gil if preventing afk farming dungeons is a concern.


Also imo the feedback mechanisms are terribly bad in this game. I wish we could have like public test servers where they would present us with some changes to rate. Like the whole pictomancer issue could have been avoided.
I think they rely on the data they gather through the game too much. Good example is machinist and how they keep buffing auto crossbow and flamethrower, presumably because of its low usage, not realising what are the real issues preventing its full use.