Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[RyoXander]

My problem with savage isn't the "difficulty", it's just a memory game at the end of the day, my issue is that it's just a memory game - there is no skill expression

This 100%. The rewards are not worth the tedious process imo; specially when they become obsolete by the next patch or two. If they were necessary for relic weapon progression, I'd be more inclined to do savage content.

[Amarande]

I think that it's not only the lack of content, diffuculty of content or whatever ... I think alot of older and/or disabled players that enjoyed the game and invested a lot of money through subs and/or online store purchases, have now decided it all too much and cancelled their subs. They cannnot progress any further, especially if, as Yoshi has said, it will get even more difficult.

I know my post is coming from only one part of the fandom, but I also know that many other parts are unhappy, so what should they do ... or will they go down the Blizz route and not listen to anyone?

Ironically, Blizz may lead FFXIV even further down this path of phasing us older hands out - Midnight is moving BIGLY to be casual raider friendly (see for instance the complete crackdown on any and all combat addons, which also implies the competitive, nitpicky logging will be gone from the game as well and the only public player records will be ones like Rio that draw from what is openly published on the Blizzard site), which will likely incentivize XIV to curry the hardcore crowd further (plus there will doubtless be "community" astroturf organized by FFLogs as it will literally be the only thing sustaining their business).

I don't trully understand what is there to gain if the hard content is being made by 3% of total ammount of people.
I ain't want to play a dead game where i'am unable to socialise because others just left.

Wasn't XIV made to be for everyone?

Not anymore it seems. There's a lot of content that seems intentionally designed with the expectation of a small clear rate, I guess "everyone else can just watch the stream" is good enough now.

I get a vibe that it wasn't the easiness of Endwalker that led to this, but the disaster that was its launch - I think there is a good chance this led SE to the conclusion that they were going to have to pick an actual target audience as the servers can no longer handle being "for everyone" during the busiest burst periods (and due to systems like housing, dynamically adding and removing worlds really won't work, either).

My problem with savage isn't the "difficulty", it's just a memory game at the end of the day, my issue is that it's just a memory game - there is no skill expression, the mandatory damage is carefully calibrated to not kill you as long as the right buttons are pressed and the fail damage causes a wipe then and there, no room for healers to save the run, no room for tanks to do anything to save the run, no room for good dps players to beat the dps check anyway just "you slipped up, back to the start." From what I'm told Ultimate is the same but longer.

Yep. No agency. Vuln stacks teach you from early on really that "you survived the AoE" isn't enough, they want you to do every mechanic a specific way. (In their defense I'm not sure there is a way to preserve the cinematic experience they have in mind without such railroading: players will cheese and optimize the fun out of everything after all.)

Mind you, maybe we should have expected "it was ever so" since this was basically how they approached the AV fight all the way back in FFXI, though ...

[Myotis]

Ironically, Blizz may lead FFXIV even further down this path of phasing us older hands out - Midnight is moving BIGLY to be casual raider friendly (see for instance the complete crackdown on any and all combat addons, which also implies the competitive, nitpicky logging will be gone from the game as well and the only public player records will be ones like Rio that draw from what is openly published on the Blizzard site), which will likely incentivize XIV to curry the hardcore crowd further (plus there will doubtless be "community" astroturf organized by FFLogs as it will literally be the only thing sustaining their business).



Not anymore it seems. There's a lot of content that seems intentionally designed with the expectation of a small clear rate, I guess "everyone else can just watch the stream" is good enough now.

I get a vibe that it wasn't the easiness of Endwalker that led to this, but the disaster that was its launch - I think there is a good chance this led SE to the conclusion that they were going to have to pick an actual target audience as the servers can no longer handle being "for everyone" during the busiest burst periods (and due to systems like housing, dynamically adding and removing worlds really won't work, either).



Yep. No agency. Vuln stacks teach you from early on really that "you survived the AoE" isn't enough, they want you to do every mechanic a specific way. (In their defense I'm not sure there is a way to preserve the cinematic experience they have in mind without such railroading: players will cheese and optimize the fun out of everything after all.)

Mind you, maybe we should have expected "it was ever so" since this was basically how they approached the AV fight all the way back in FFXI, though ...

Cool so let's hope that 3% of the whole population can keep up the whole XIV then if they are focused only over those people.
The game will be just empty as never before and getting that back on track to be running up it's a quite a challange.

[Miki_L]

When people asked for more engaging dungeons, I don't think people just wanted harder bosses. This is a fault with the FFXIV devs, they only think about boss fights.

The trash pulls are still boring and that is the biggest problem, as it is the main way a dungeon can differentiate itself from a raid encounter. Even though the bosses are harder, you still don't need to know how to tank or heal. It's harder to do ARR dungeons as a support than in Dawntrail.

At the same time, Trusts are still stupidly punishing for some reason. You die once and it's a wipe, even though your "Healer" might still be alive. They let you use phoenix down in group content, which was a good change, but trusts are still hard for no reason. Why can't they be the story difficulty on the dungeons? That are nearly impossible to fail while roulette can be left harder.

Even though Dawntrail dungeons are more difficult than Endwalker, I still think they failed in how that difficulty was distributed.

Not to mention one reason why people might not want to do dungeons anymore is because the rewards are crap. Gear with terrible ILVLs (except for the times they happen to be old content bis like Ultimates). And to make matters worse, they are undyeable. I tried using gear from one of the recent dungeons lately in a glam set but gave up because I couldn't get colors to match.

[Valence]

Adding to this - in later/newer content, a lot of the time, if you can see the orange AOE marker, you're already too late to dodge. Most bosses and enemies have other tells and cues before their AOE goes off (using M7 as an example - Brute Abominator has an attack that can either be a point-blank or donut AOE. It's telegraphed beforehand by both the name on the castbar, as well as which of his weapons is glowing), the orange is pretty much there to let you know how far in/out you should be dodging, it's there as something you can remember for the next time the mechanic happens or you're in the fight. While I don't doubt that yes, there are people lazy enough to use plugins to solve mechanics for them, it's far more likely these hypothetical people being accused of cheating are simply paying attention and have learned the fight and its tells. Add that to the fact that pretty much every new fight is on a script these days, and it's not hard to preposition yourself for a good 80-90% of mechanics.

Those cues are garbage. I'm not playing Seikiro, I'm playing a MMORPG.

What the fuck has happened to this game in pve over the years I don't even

[Eastwall]

Actually, gw2 had a dungeon finder beta recently. It is almost impossible to fail. If you die, an npc shows up and revive you. I ignored mechanics in purpose and died 10+ times in kinfall and still got a clear. I think ff14 might need that for the trust system.

[DiaDeem]

professional players

[Infindox]

Actually, gw2 had a dungeon finder beta recently. It is almost impossible to fail. If you die, an npc shows up and revive you. I ignored mechanics in purpose and died 10+ times in kinfall and still got a clear. I think ff14 might need that for the trust system.

I think having infinite revives would be bad, but possible one or two per boss would probably be better in Trusts.

[Yeonhee]

Cool so let's hope that 3% of the whole population can keep up the whole XIV then if they are focused only over those people.
The game will be just empty as never before and getting that back on track to be running up it's a quite a challange.

Harder content pretty much always have rather low clear rate because, well, they're harder and not everyone wants to bother with that. If you want content like savage/ultimate to have a high clear rate you would have to severely reduce the difficulty probably to normal raid level or, at the very most, extreme-level. But then you have to also reduce the actual normal-level difficulty otherwise it makes no sense. So you ends up with the high-end difficulty content to be easy and nothing in the game is remotely hard and challenging to do. You also alienate the majority of the players because all content are a snoozefest and nothing is remotely interesting to do. Overall, you end up with a dead game.

Hardcore raiders only gets 4 savages like every other patch and one ultimate once in a while, they've not remotely become the target audience. I would say that DT's target audience are the average casual people who don't necessarely want savage-level of difficulty but still don't want to fall asleep while doing every single piece of content.

Those cues are garbage. I'm not playing Seikiro, I'm playing a MMORPG.

What the fuck has happened to this game in pve over the years I don't even

And most MMORPGs have visual/audio cues for mechanics and not just a orange danger puddle on the ground for 30 seconds. And with most jobs now being braindead to play, you should be able to focus on something else than your rotation anyway.

[Azurarok]

Now with less time and people who need to concentrate more on rotation. The difficulty scales way harder for them. You probably don't even think of what skill to use next. Some players don't get that muscle memory. So keeping track of rotation and the new less forgiving markers. It should be easy to see how DT has been difficult for some.

Messing up your rotation isn't going to kill you, messing up a boss mechanic can.

Though also like... Most jobs having been reduced to muscle memory rotations is kind of a major problem? They've spent years removing points of friction to the point rotations can be performed with very little interruptions, which just means we're all just repeating that muscle memory rotation while also repeating fights that are also memorization games.