Quote Originally Posted by Amarande View Post
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.