Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[Myotis]

I've seen more people quit or fail to stick with this game because the difficulty is too low, not the other way around. I feel bad for you if this game really is too difficult, but right now we're at a point where a lot of people aren't having fun because it's too simple. There's a lot of content I just don't do because it's boring. I'll grind it out for the rewards, but as soon as I don't need it anymore I drop it. Which is, most of the content in the game right now. I like when games are entertaining, not when YouTube is entertaining because the game itself is too boring to hold my attention.

I wish we had a "story mode" for trusts, where it's almost impossible to die without really trying. Like, everything hits for very little damage, and mechanics are explained by NPCs in case you can't figure out the tells (as many have mentioned, it's not always the orange AoE on the ground). That way people that find the game hard can still do the MSQ, but without making the game bad for everyone else. Same thing for solo instances, make a "story mode" where you can't fail.

I think this way people who want to play without effort can have fun, and people who have fun through effort can also have fun.

I think this discussion should be split in two where people want the easier dungeons - here the issue is that the game doesn't introduce the harder mechanics over the time in each expansion

from quite boring savage where you are forced to restart all the time and your personal skill is not meaningful due to DDR formula what is soooo outdated in modern gaming.

[Burmecia]

I realized doing it isn't FUN [...] fast paced "gotcha" mechs aren't that.

My opinion about EW >> DT "difficulty" bump, too.
I'm casual player too, yadda yadda, can do anything on difficulty level MSQ basically in.
I've quit doing certain things in game because the current difficulty expressio isn't my cup of tea.

[CidHeiral]

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?

Actually the devs listened to feedback like yours almost exclusively for quite some time which resulted in the encounters and jobs being in a horrendously boring state for the vast majority of the player base.

That being said I'm sure most people can empathize with your situation. If you're having more difficulty with the content than the average player you have many options available to you, including recruiting friends or other players to help. Someone in my FC has a partner who is literally blind and they were still able to guide them through the MSQ. If they can accomplish that I would be shocked if you couldn't as well if you put your mind to it. People in this thread would probably help as well if you were more specific about what exactly you're having trouble with.

[Azurarok]

Personally I rather roulettes be relatively smooth most of the time, just not mindnumbingly repetitive. If the game needs to rely on players messing up a bunch for that to happen I feel there's a design problem that needs to be addressed in way that's a little more creative than "make players mess up more often"

[Shistar]

I play games to relax and unwind, but fast paced "gotcha" mechs aren't that. FFXIV was made and billed as an MMORPG, not an action game, and so I think a lot of us who came for an MMORPG experience are sort of losing interest. My class fantasy is being killed off, as we no longer have class quests to explain our new moves, and the fast-paced nature of the fights no longer feel like the game I signed up for.

I agree that it's getting faster and faster. I think it's because they're doing less convoluted mechanics (random example: in Amdapor, there was this zombie gobbue that would eat a party member, but he'd taken his sweet time with it. I think they removed it, but you used to be able to give the tether to someone else to avoid being eaten lol) so they consider you need less time to solve them effectively.
However, pretty much none of these mechanics are actually "gotchas" unless it's the very first time you see one of its type back when you start the MSQ. Like some others on this thread mentioned before, the orange aoe has gone from being the "this is the danger zone" marker to a confirmation on whether you solve it correctly or not, and if not, it will punish you as appropriate. Older content mostly relies on castbars and mechanics that interacts with other things that aren't the boss's model, but nowadays they want you to look at the boss/arena for clues on how to solve a mech, stand where you think you will be safe, and see the confirmation on if you were right or not.


Could you please give me an example of a gotcha mechanic that got you? I know there are some still, but I can't quite remember them off the top of my head and Google isn't doing me any favors right now...

[Supersnow845]

This problem (as with every problem in 14) comes back to the awful job design

Back in the day (meaning pre EW in even including ShB here) difficulty of an encounter was collectively split across the job and the encounter. For some reason in ShB and EW the devs decided that the best way to go forward was to streamline the jobs into nothing which led to EW being notoriously easy. Then when people complained square compensated in DT by making the encounters slightly harder rather than fixing the jobs. This creates hard floors on encounters caused by lack of granular difficulty on the jobs

So in my opinion the easy slop jobs with DT encounters is roughly a decent difficulty (if boring) same as putting HW jobs in HW encounters but jobs allow more granular difficulty which is why they need to be the focus

[LaylaTsarra]

The DT aoe spam meta and oh remember the order in which they go off super fast isn't fun. Many of us clear the content and don't go back. Don't need dungeons to cap tomes. Been here since 2.0 Beta and never felt this way before.

Lots are leaving and lets be sure to push as many casuals out as possible while we are at it.

Seeing lots of plots opening up on many of the DC's and servers I'm on wonder why?

[CCheshire]

The DT aoe spam meta and oh remember the order in which they go off super fast isn't fun. Many of us clear the content and don't go back. Don't need dungeons to cap tomes. Been here since 2.0 Beta and never felt this way before.

Lots are leaving and lets be sure to push as many casuals out as possible while we are at it.

Seeing lots of plots opening up on many of the DC's and servers I'm on wonder why?

Like I said, the NA and EU demo timer started up again after a long break, so the abandoned houses have been freed for a few months now.

tbf apart from EXDR, I don't do the new AR or repeat the Arcadian raids unless I want the tokens after I'm done then I'm fine with ignoring it forever.

[Supersnow845]

The DT aoe spam meta and oh remember the order in which they go off super fast isn't fun. Many of us clear the content and don't go back. Don't need dungeons to cap tomes. Been here since 2.0 Beta and never felt this way before.

Lots are leaving and lets be sure to push as many casuals out as possible while we are at it.

Seeing lots of plots opening up on many of the DC's and servers I'm on wonder why?

The thing is you can argue people are just as much being pushed out in the other direction, a lack of content that somewhat repeatable with interesting mechanics that doesn’t go towards savage.

It’s hard to quantify if EW->DT was a net positive in impact for the playerbase specifically in regards to casual encounter quality

[Exinias]

I don't think many people have unsubbed because DT is too hard, you're more apt to lose people if something is not hard/engaging enough. I know there have been people to bring this up but it's not good to punish 99% of the player-base because 1% is struggling. The easy solution is to allow trust/duty support avatars to revive you or you change the difficulty of the dungeon like how solo duties are for the trust/duty support. No one would be upset that someone cleared the most recent msq dungeon with revives from trust NPC's lol And I see people say there's a lack of content in DT but that's not even remotely true. It kinda comes down to what content you enjoy doing and if you don't enjoy doing extremes, field operations, pvp, deep dungeons, crafter/gatherer roles and alliance raids then there's just genuinely not much for you to play then aside from anything attached to msq lol