[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[Granyala]

I assume it's a product of being exposed to a lot of crappy community elements. The ones that say things like, "If you're not maxed out, you're not dedicated, not pulling your weight, whatever." while their guild is 7/12 Heroic.

(assuming Blizzard truly went overboard, no first hand Shadowlands experience here)

It's just a natural byproduct of content being difficult and there being more players than raid-spots.
People hate wiping, after all, so most take every little crutch the can get their grubby hands on.

Since you will always find no-lifers that do not mind the grind and if the game rewards such behavior too much normal folks won't stand much of a chance.

I'd say it's 50/50. A game DEV should know his community and predict how they would react. As such it is up to him to set the barrier of entry with the known player behavior in mind. Of course, many tryhards will ask for everything regardless whether the actual game demands it or not. ESPECIALLY in the PuG environment.

Needless to say:
I vastly prefer the deterministic and relaxed way of FF-XIV. No RNG drops to grind, no: "need to do X daily to gather some arbitrary currency" etc.
Just the good old tome gear you can farm at your leisure + crafting to give you a temporary leg-up.

[-aiko-]

I know I'm super behind but I only just started Endwalker and just.....wow.....

I've only reached the first trial but this is wild. I don't know what to think. This is so fucking wild.

[MsSideEye]

Yoshi's gone on record stating that he has the budget and desire to hire more people, but that the pool for talented MMO developers in JP or that speak fluent JP is not very large. It's very true that throwing bodies at a problem isn't always a viable solution, but there's definitely room for it to work in some capacity for sure.

I'd like to think that budget has increased for them, considering all the new servers they're paying top of the line for and the like, limited only be scarcity. But yeah, MMO developers that are skilled AND speak Japanese is probably the weak point here, and not everyone can be Koji Fox when it comes to Language. I was just personally wanting to stress how insanely stupid some sets of coding can be, especially if it was designed for something specific in mind (Like armors) that was changed later.

They aren't slow rolling out content because the Dev's playtest it. No idea where you got that from. It's standard practice in the industry. Not only that, but they've botched raid balance before because when they do this, they have god mode on and didn't realize something wasn't tuned well. I can't remember which tier it was if anyone does remember.

They've nerfed and walked back tons of things over the years lol. Raids, casual content, job design decisions, etc.

Well, when I said the 'walk back/nerf things', I was more talking about overall raid design, not so much anything else. The biggest nerf I remember in my own personal history of the game was when they nerfed the Evilice Raids, and that was because they were going to be bringing those in as a requirement for the Shadowbringers Relic weapons. And even then that wasn't as huge as a nerf as what we've seen in WoW almost consistently when it comes to their raiding content.

From my personal experience in the industry, it's standard practice to have other people play through the content, not usually the people who develop it. Honestly, I was shocked as all heck to hear that Yoshi was ensuring that they were actually able to do it themselves before letting it out into the game itself, which is one reason Dragon Song's Reprise took so long (The other being covid, of course).

I'm not saying they NEVER do it, but it's a lot rarer to see them release a boss for a fight and realize they screwed up and made it too strong and have to nerf it in a hot fix.

[StrawberryZebra]

No, the average joe does not need to do that and he does not "fall behind". Mythic is there to stay for 6 months.

Except the average player doesn't do Mythic at all. Given the difficulty of some of the fights, its entirely possible that you might get stuck on a couple for a month or more at a time. You may need all of that 6 months or so of time to complete the full raid in Mythic and you need to be, at the very least, keeping up with the power spikes throughout the patch.

It's basically demanding more and more time investment from the players who are already skilled and dedicated. Its why I like the term Mythic Tax - The better you are, the more time the game takes up. It accurately sums up my feelings on the matter.

Raid logging your way through an expansion is no longer possible. For a group like mine, where we had the skill and experience to tackle that content, the time commitments forced a lot of people to either burn out or drop out. BFA was responsible for a lot of that too - We had people logging in during their lunch breaks at work to do Islands for AP.

We've been forced called it quits on Anduin. We simply couldn't get the people we needed consistently to make carrying on worthwhile.

We could have easilly made a group like that work in FF14 by virtue of the fact that once you've reached max level, the requirements for Savage raiding you can meet within minutes. You can raid log with no strings attached if like. And that's a good thing. People play MMOs for all kinds of reasons and killing dragons with your friends is one of those.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Thanks for spamming my inbox with tumblr videos SE. Holy crap that artstyle looks hideous

If you are making out-of-game videos to explain how to play your game, then perhaps your game's tutorials suck and need a revamp

[Ghost of Cow]

Thanks for spamming my inbox with tumblr videos SE. Holy crap that artstyle looks hideous

If you are making out-of-game videos to explain how to play your game, then perhaps your game's tutorials suck and need a revamp

Eh, that kind of stuff is really as much marketing as anything else.

[MsSideEye]

I know I'm super behind but I only just started Endwalker and just.....wow.....

I've only reached the first trial but this is wild. I don't know what to think. This is so fucking wild.

Yeah, that first trial is something a LOT of people didn't see coming and is, imo, one of the best bits of story that Endwalker gives us. Let's just say you're on for a wild ride for the rest of it.

[Granyala]

I know I'm super behind but I only just started Endwalker and just.....wow.....

I've only reached the first trial but this is wild. I don't know what to think. This is so fucking wild.

You're in for a treat. I really like the story.

- - - Updated - - -

We've been forced called it quits on Anduin. We simply couldn't get the people we needed consistently to make carrying on worthwhile.

I know that feeling. My guilds always struggled with that part. Eventually it fell apart and died.

[KrayZ33]

Except the average player doesn't do Mythic at all. Given the difficulty of some of the fights, its entirely possible that you might get stuck on a couple for a month or more at a time. You may need all of that 6 months or so of time to complete the full raid in Mythic and you need to be, at the very least, keeping up with the power spikes throughout the patch.

It's basically demanding more and more time investment from the players who are already skilled and dedicated. Its why I like the term Mythic Tax - The better you are, the more time the game takes up. It accurately sums up my feelings on the matter.

I just don't see that part.
Where and when or how.

The "more and more" time is what I don't get.
It seems to be more like a steady line the way I see it.
It's not like you invest hours into grinding (especially if you are better than the others, except when you are SO far up there that you are racing it)... for hecks sake, for what???? *ON* what?

Gear is limited outside the raid itself. Consumables aren't worth talking about for people with a normal raid schedule.

You prep for mythic raiding the same way most people prep their savage stuff.
Tomestone farming vs Mythic+ weeklies + some mat grinding in both games (or get the guildmate to do that for you)
The only difference is that you have less performance leeway in Mythic WoW....

But that just means FFXIV raiding is WoW's Heroic Raiding... and since WoW mythic raiding is hard, people leave mythic it.
It's not fun to wipe hours after hours. I don't think prepping kills mythic guilds, I think it's people not being good enough and not realizing it (which isn't something to be ashamed or feel offended about)

[Cthulhu 2020]

And this is what people were clamoring for: meaningful (let's not kid ourselves, that means player power only to most folks) content to do with your raiding main instead of logging off when it isn't raid night.

When I suggested that there should be more casual content and horizontal progression in both the Dragonflight forums and on reddit, I got massive amounts of hate. Apparently the remaining population of WoW thinks that development should only go into raids, M+ and PvP and that more casual content like darkmoon faire, gold saucer, etc should be eschewed. I heartily disagree. But if they don't want me or a plethora of other players to return, I guess they can keep the raid or die mentality?




In on topic news, Yoshi P has hinted in an interview with famitsu that the cycle of X.3 patch wrapping up current expansion MSQ, and X4 and X.5 setting up the new story is not going to happen for 7.0. We're not going to be seeing the true reveal for 7.0 until the 6.55 or 6.58 pre patch for the expansion.

So all of the people thinking we'll ALMOST DEFINITELY headed into the thirteenth might be disappointed. But I also see that as something of a misstep. FFXIV has so many edgelords that only using the thirteenth as patch content might be a big mistake. But who knows, the meaning might have gotten lost in translation, and it just means we won't see the major story beats until the expansion prepatch.

But it definitely hints that there's going to be another huge event that changes the story as we know it, on the level of Dalamud.

- - - Updated - - -

Thanks for spamming my inbox with tumblr videos SE. Holy crap that artstyle looks hideous

If you are making out-of-game videos to explain how to play your game, then perhaps your game's tutorials suck and need a revamp

6 episodes in all 4 languages. Makes sense to me. Taking steps to teach new players the mechanics of the game is great, considering the in-game tutorials are fine but people still skip them because they can't be assed unless it's presented to them in visual format? As I've learned over the years, reading is hard for most people.

"But the tutorial pop ups are annoying and spam you!" Yes, there is a lot of stuff to learn about this game. Seems rather stupid that people would choose not to read 4-5 sentences about a mechanic they just had presented to them, but people are lazy and need things presented to them in easy to digest form.

I think SE's biggest mistake about in-game tutorials is assuming people are more diligent and capable of reading than they actually are.

- - - Updated - - -

Also just gonna add, these youtubes feel like both, yes marketing, but also for people who have yet to pick up the game, and feel intimidated about starting to play because of all the things they'll need to learn. Anyone who quit the game because they chose not to read the tutorials and were overwhelmed aren't going to turn around and learn more from these youtubes. That's not the target audience. It's more for prospective players on the fence than anything else. All of the information is SUPER BASIC shit that you learn in your first few hours of playing the game normally.

[StrawberryZebra]

It seems to be more like a steady line the way I see it.
-snip-

Gear is limited outside the raid itself. Consumables aren't worth talking about for people with a normal raid schedule.

You prep for mythic raiding the same way most people prep their savage stuff.
Tomestone farming vs Mythic+ weeklies + some mat grinding in both games (or get the guildmate to do that for you)

The consumables are mostly a none issue. The Shadestones for cauldrons are the most awkward of those and they're buyable from the AH now anyway.

For Sepulcher you needed to complete the story quests, those were about an hour or so every week. You also needed to keep up to date with it in order to access the teleporter to get you to the raid. At the end you'd get the legendary belt which was a potentially massive powerspike for some classes. Further to this you also had to grind out rep to get the max rank for your second legendary. That meant doing daily quests and spending time hunting for rare mobs.

You also needed to do Torghast to actually craft new legendaries - Cosmic Flux wasn't anything like as abundant at the start of the patch so it was a needed source. Obviously you needed to either craft or buy the base components for the legendary too, which may or may not need extra time investment. For me it was a none issue, but that may not be the case for everyone.

Then there was getting rank 80 with all 4 covenants.

And 8 M+ at +15 or higher each week to match out your vault. This gives you the best chance at getting something useful from it. You also needed to go all the way to +20 for some max rank Conduits too. If you're having to pug these it can be a huge time sink and there's no promise of rewards. This is a huge pain point for some classes who desperately need weapons to keep them relevent and the Vault keeps screwing them.

Given the power of the tier sets, depending on class and spec you may have also needed to complete Sepulcher on Normal and Heroic too in order to maximise your chances at getting the bonuses. Some of the people I raided with even had to do LFR as well - Some of them are just that good.

These are all big time investments before you even consider the time you spend raiding. The group I raided with is what is usually called a "Dad Guild" these days. Almost everyone has work, family, kids and RL comitments that come first. There simply wasn't enough hours in the day to fit everything in and still keep up with WoW too.

Given the way patches work, it's not a straight line as much as its a curve that drops off in stages before eventually flatlining. It's the opening stages where you're putting in another 8-10 or so hours a week in game for 2-3 months to keep on top of everything outside of raiding that burned people out. When you consider we'd only raid for 6 hours a week the question of if its worth the effort is going to keep coming up. Sepulcher was an extremely mild content patch in this regard too. 9.1 was far worse.

These requirements ease off over time. You were able to convert any piece of S3 gear to Tier once they opened the forge. You were swimming in Cosmic Flux in less than a month they upped the drop amount that much. Competition for rares in ZM dropped off as people started hitting exalted. Unlocks were one and done. To somebody coming in at the end of the patch you'd get a much smoother and faster experience if you wanted to get involved in Mythic raiding, but that is in no way representative of how it plays out at the start of the patch. Nerfs to the content make it less punishing to those who aren't fully prepared.

For FF14 it's a case of doing the pre-quests, maybe buying a set of gear from the Market Board depending on circumstances, and thats it. You're good to go. You may also need to top up your Tomestones from some Roulettes depending on how well you're performing, but assuming worst case and you just end up wiping over and over...You can do just the Expert roulettes you're looking at 20 minutes or so for 5 days a week. Or under 90 minutes extra apart from raiding

Tomestones are also less risky than M+. You can just buy the item you want with them, they're easier to get and come from multiple different sources. If you're in a group that falls apart you can queue up again without any trouble.

[Ghost of Cow]

Yeah, that first trial is something a LOT of people didn't see coming and is, imo, one of the best bits of story that Endwalker gives us. Let's just say you're on for a wild ride for the rest of it.

Trial 1 was definitely the high point of the MSQ for me.

Afterwards I kinda felt like Zenos, though.

[KrayZ33]

I mean... all of what you just said is if you want to race the thing instead of just playing the thing.
What's the goal here, just playing and clearing it, or doing it for the e-peening.
Some stuff doesn't even apply, such as having to do the story quest... 2 people need to do it, not everyone. And you'll most certainly have 2 people doing it simply because just like in FFXIV, people do the MSQ no matter what. (and it's not like it took an hour a week like you said...)
And are we now talking about someone who has never touched WoW this expansion or talking about someone who is *actually* playing the game sometimes so that he could potentially have a group and interest for Mythic raids in the first place?

If it's important for you to be at your best at all times, sure... it's more work.
But what's burning people out is exactly that... not the mythic raids themselves and what you "need" to do for them and to succeed in them.
What the fuck is the point of grinding out the rep for example? 1-2 avg itemlevel a few weeks earlier? Who cares.
Like... even if they wouldn't nerf it. You'd just be done later in the same patch.

Again, it's people punching above their weight that they do this shit.
It has nothing to do with being lazy if that is what you might think now... you just need people with the same mindset, the problem is that you need 19-25 others instead of just 7. Not to mention that the "time-management gating" is absolutely abysmal in WoW for mythic raids.
I can hardly get together with my Mythic+ group in a week. We literally have to plan every week when to meet up on what day at what time. Finding at least 19 likeminded people that don't get offended by someone not grinding out 8 M+ each week for some RNG change on something that is going to be a cloak is even less likely


I still think the only actual reason why people think FFXIV isn't working/doing it like that is because FFXIV doesn't have tightly tuned content like WoW Mythic raiding. I mean... savage raiding is rather lenient. Health does almost not matter as long as you survive the ability itself, it's just DPS but DPS is rather easy to actually "master" for the average "high end"-gamer. I mean, optimization is basically all about a few GCDs and less about pressing the right buttons (as that is simply baseline knowledge for someone who even cares a little), before that it's all about learning where to move and not to actually play your class.
It's kinda hard to compare two games when one game doesn't offer the same style of endgame.

[Ghost of Cow]

I mean... all of what you just said is if you want to race the thing instead of just playing the thing.
What's the goal here, just playing and clearing it, or doing it for the e-peening.

If it's important for you to be at your best at all times, sure... it's more work.
But what's burning people out is exactly that... not the mythic raids themselves and what you "need" to do for them.

Yeah, that's what I was saying earlier. Most of this stuff is just a factor of players convincing themselves they have to grind to the bone. That logging more playtime hours makes them a better person or something. That if there's even a 0.1% upgrade that they must chase after it or they're "being carried".

I've seen the same attitudes in XIV, but since the gearing curve tends to be shorter, it's not as obnoxious.

[KrayZ33]

Exactly my point.

It's not untrue that you are done quicker and earlier in FFXIV.
But that's because you just CAN'T do as much to actually improve yourself.

If you could, "everyone" (the same people that do it in WoW) would do it as well, even though they wouldn't need it to clear savage, because savage is basically heroic raiding.
It's not something you have to do, it's just something people decide they have to do.

Even in FFXIV, you would have someone saying "well, if you don't do it, you are holding your team back" - nooo, fuck that. Even more "fuck that" in FFXIV than I'd say in WoW to that. (due to how encounters work in FFXIV)
But that's hypothetical territory I can't prove, because the game just doesn't have the same kind of endgame. It's way simpler, less complex, fewer variables.

And that's not shitting on FFXIV btw. I enjoy raiding in FFXIV more because it's something I can "just learn to do" instead of something I have to perform for. I'm not that kind of good player in WoW that I would say that *I* don't need to outgear the content to have a better chance at beating it. But I know that you don't *have* to outgear it just to complete it and I know that you don't have to break a sweat (grinding shit) to get to that point before the season/patch/tier ends and you had way more than just sufficient time to try beating it at your possible best.

[Granyala]

When I suggested that there should be more casual content and horizontal progression in both the Dragonflight forums and on reddit, I got massive amounts of hate. Apparently the remaining population of WoW thinks that development should only go into raids, M+ and PvP and that more casual content like darkmoon faire, gold saucer, etc should be eschewed. I heartily disagree. But if they don't want me or a plethora of other players to return, I guess they can keep the raid or die mentality?

When I was a raider little else mattered to me as well. I only learned to value more casual stuff once I stepped out of the never ending treadmill.
If Blizzard offers gear rewards that are vastly outclassed by what I already wear, as a raider, it's hard to get excited about grindy side content that wasn't fun by itself.
So, I (and most of my raiding buddies) just ignored it.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah, that's what I was saying earlier. Most of this stuff is just a factor of players convincing themselves they have to grind to the bone.

I think the problem arises in the next step: the players (that's the group I usually call "wannabe hardcore tryhards") that are convinced start leading raid guilds and PuGs. Suddenly their stick becomes a recruiting requirement. That's when a lot of folks that are too timid to form their own groups or guilds get locked out and feel pressured to "keep up" in order to get or maintain their raid spot. So they start grinding too, lose the fun and burn out.

[Ghost of Cow]

I think the problem arises in the next step: the players (that's the group I usually call "wannabe hardcore tryhards") that are convinced start leading raid guilds and PuGs. Suddenly their stick becomes a recruiting requirement. That's when a lot of folks that are too timid to form their own groups or guilds get locked out and feel pressured to "keep up" in order to get or maintain their raid spot. So they start grinding too, lose the fun and burn out.

I also think that a lot of people are just like the annoying small-time manager that everyone has had at some point. They're very small people who get a little taste of what they think is "power" and start trying to abuse people with it.

I've actually left guilds over how they treated applicants. Some people just become absolutely awful when you put them in charge of anything involving other people.

[Cthulhu 2020]

When I was a raider little else mattered to me as well. I only learned to value more casual stuff once I stepped out of the never ending treadmill.
If Blizzard offers gear rewards that are vastly outclassed by what I already wear, as a raider, it's hard to get excited about grindy side content that wasn't fun by itself.
So, I (and most of my raiding buddies) just ignored it.

This is just another symptom of the game's culture unfortunately, that gear was the ultimate reward. Of course they've added more mounts and achievements over time, but so many people seem to just not understand that extrinsic rewards like gear are so temporary, fleeting. Making fun side content where doing it is its own intrinsic reward is far more satisfying ultimately, especially if it's well crafted side content.

But as far as the videos go, Pyromancer brought up a good point. Everyone learns better through different mediums. For some, reading the in game tutorials is enough. For others, doing is the best teacher (but there's a lot you can miss in FFXIV unless you're explicitly told it's there by one of the tutorials or another player). Unfortunately there are many things people can miss if they're not explicitly told about them by the tutorial or another player.

[StrawberryZebra]

If it's important for you to be at your best at all times, sure... it's more work.
But what's burning people out is exactly that... not the mythic raids themselves and what you "need" to do for them and to succeed in them.

You hit the nail on the head.

WoW is a game where gear plays a far more significant part in your players power and not all gear is created equal. As you move through a raid bosses get more difficult and you need to have enough player power across your raid to beat them. On an individual level you can get away poor gear, but you then need someone else to cover your shortfall.

If you fall too far behind the power curve as a group then you're not going to be making any more progress. I don't know if you've ever done Mythic raiding in WoW, but the content is designed for you to have all your legendaries, to have set bonuses and Conduits etc.

There's a whole lot of busy work that goes into keeping your characters power rising in line with the content difficulty and almost all of it happens outside the raids themselves.

Most of this stuff is just a factor of players convincing themselves they have to grind to the bone.

It's 50/50. The content is designed to be more difficult as you progress and you've got to keep up with that rise in difficulty.

There's obviously a huge social component in there too. You're letting everyone else in the raid down if your gear isn't good enough and you could be benched or replaced depending on the type of guild you're in. Both of those are massive motivators for players to knuckle down and force their way through the grind.

Social problems aren't restricted to just WoW of course, but I feel as though expecting game developers to offer us amazing insights into human nature and be able to patch in solutions is asking too much of them.

I think the problem arises in the next step: the players (that's the group I usually call "wannabe hardcore tryhards") that are convinced start leading raid guilds and PuGs. Suddenly their stick becomes a recruiting requirement. That's when a lot of folks that are too timid to form their own groups or guilds get locked out and feel pressured to "keep up" in order to get or maintain their raid spot. So they start grinding too, lose the fun and burn out.

Yep, unfortunately this kind of attitude rolls down hill. Its why you see M+ pugs demanding iLevel 9000 gear and that you've done the dungeon on a +20 in order to join in with their +8 key. If you're DPS you've got to stand out amongst the 20 other DPS who are also asking to join the same group. You're lucky if it's only 20 - I put myself in LFG to do a +15 key at the weekend and in the 60 seconds it took me to get a drink and sit back down at my computer there were 108 people who had applied to join.

Surprisingly, FF14 has actually kind of solved this problem with their party finder. Being able to join a group directly cuts out a lot of this kind of behaviour. I'm not going to pretend that it's anything like an ideal solution but it's an improvement at least. In my experience, there also tends to be less people using it too, which helps keeps the requirements more reasonable.

[Katchii]

I think the problem arises in the next step: the players (that's the group I usually call "wannabe hardcore tryhards") that are convinced start leading raid guilds and PuGs. Suddenly their stick becomes a recruiting requirement. That's when a lot of folks that are too timid to form their own groups or guilds get locked out and feel pressured to "keep up" in order to get or maintain their raid spot. So they start grinding too, lose the fun and burn out.

This is pretty much exactly what happened to me. I wouldn't call myself timid, I just don't care enough to go through all that. Regardless, the result is the same.