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And what hardcore players who dismiss these environments don't realize is they're now the minority. This is why I've said repeatedly that developers really need to think about either parting ways with hardcore raiding or, at the very least, always have alternative paths of endgame that are far more dominant in the game's meta. Most people who play MMOs don't have the scheduling freedom to join statics and practice to memorize/clear these raids. Also, being mature adults, many of us simply don't want to deal with the kids who can make this stuff unbearable.

The problem with LFR exposes a much larger reaching problem within the community itself...

Players want to press a button, endure a brief wait and then be whisked off to contentland. If they can't join a group for content with literally 0 commitment on their own part, said content is deemed 'inaccessible'.

Old school players of games leading up to and including WoW always talk about 'vanilla' like it was the golden age, but it kinda was. That was a time when we were adventurers. Players these days don't want a gigantic new world to explore, at least not unless it comes with a cozy RV to drive them around so they can dress up and take pictures.

I couldn't even find people to do the Anti Tower and Lost City of Ampador (Hard) this weekend. I did the 4 day welcome back thing, queued up the Duty Finder, waited 30 mins and said forget it. It's what, a month old content and people are already not bothering with it unless it's through roulette. So I was already back where I was in November, kind of sitting around waiting for things to happen. PF had nothing of interest (that's Balmung for ya), short of a couple Sephirot farm parties, which I'm sure would go swimmingly.

Indeed there is a huge difference, however, people seem to feel "zero commitment" is the way you should treat and design MMOs these days. The genre would have phased to nothingness if that were true back when MMOs weren't mainstream. However now that everything mainstream has to essentially "give you whatever you want for as little work as possible" you can kind of see why it doesn't matter if there's a large gap, it's either/or with gamers these days. "Part time job" is stretching it, but it's to be expected.

I mean, look at how any argument boils down to "Oh, but people like you are just in the minority! You don't matter to this game! Developers need to stop designing content that few people will see even though it was never a problem before because if I can't do that content, **** it I have tons of other content I can do!" So instead of telling devs to ignore their players, it's better for them to go back to a content formula that works. Unlike Horizontal progression, vertical is heavily double edged. You never dwell on a set of content too long, but your game also runs dry fairly quickly. "But XIV is successful so it clearly works and nothing needs to change", yet to this day you have people still say XI was never popular nor successful, despite being one of the single products that made that SE earned the most money of their entire run as a company.




First point: You don't need a static ever, that's been proven by the Japanese player base time and time again and they're playing the exact same game as the rest of the world, despite being called out for generalization..let's be real about this: It's no secret if you've played online games for any stretch of time how particular player bases tend to be. The only reason on NA/EU datacenters you "need" a static, is because the overall playerbase is...bad honestly. More people = far more likely to run into bad players and largely, it seems to be more of a cultural difference when it comes to playing with people online.

Second Point: that's the problem with this game's content structure and should tell you off the bat: The people capable of clearing content will get content cleared quickly and thus are only left with content that, if poorly designed (Alexander Gordias Savage) will be the only thing left to do. If properly designed (Binding Coil, 1.0-2.3 Extreme Primals) there's a proper content rotation and even when people "blow through the initial wave", you're still going to have people getting into said rotation without issue and not have to worry about "Oh no new player bonus a week after? Pft what the hell is this?" compared to people that worked up towards the actual 2.x content so you had far more people always reaching that point compared to people who CHOOSE not to progress then decide to load up duty finder and well..constantly wipe everyone because of the OTHER reason of; "I play my way, I don't have to research a fight. Don't use Duty Finder if you don't like it."

However and despite how much venom was tossed at me for saying this: The 3.0 > 3,1 five month gap did absolutely NOTHING beneficial to this game, only for them to toss out the same exact formula for 3.1 then 3.2 and even wasted development resources on content no one asked for (Lords of Verminion.) Like I also said, LoV would have been fine, but for a good chunk of players (including the 300k they lost by november) people were starved for content and suffice to say, it has nothing to do with being hardcore or not. This game isn't a hardcore game, meaning anyone who chooses to progress, can and will quickly, with very little time and effort outside of Savage content, which Yoshi later admitted wasn't properly tested. If you're purposefully not trying to progress or you have no time or drive to, that will skew your perception of how the game actually is. You don't have to be hardcore to progress in a game that holds your hand through content and continually nerfed in order to catch people up quickly. for example Ravana Ex is the easiest primal to ever come out. Sephirot and Thordan tie for 2nd place simply because the latter are mechanic driven more than DPS race (you still can't slack), but the sad fact is, a lot of people simply don't know how to play and will almost always blame lag or "my computer locked up" (I've yet to see a PS3 player complain about these fights ironically) whenever they keep messing up easy mechanics or refuse to not tunnel-vision.

This is generally where I meant content may wind up seeming "easier" in the end. If we're being honest, Sky content in XI didn't really need an alliance until Kirin, and that's only because of the god spawns. Sky was just a bunch of little busy work where you chased some smaller NMs to eventually do the big ones. Odds are the more hardcore players in a shell were doing that while the minions showed up for the gods. Sometimes they helped in the earlier phases, but you can't much fault someone for not wanting to wait 8 hours for an Ulli spawn prior to it going poppable. But as far as the reward scheme for Sky went, it sucked. None of the loot on the fodder NMs was really desired. A lot of the cursed gear was garbage even if HQed. Osode might've been the pinnacle of the event's rewards, but if you didn't fall into SE's eastern job fetish, there's a good chance you were playing one who couldn't use it anyway. Heck, never got cuisses for my RDM because people kept playing the, "PLDs need it more!" card even if the recipient wasn't a PLD main.

Overall, my message hasn't been to drop raiding, but not to treat it as the be all, end all of MMOing. It can easily remain as singular events where high quality stuff comes out of it. Yet, there still needs that alternative where people can do a number of lesser tasks to come out in the same place, even if more slowly. Again, counter-argument usually boils down to the feeling people either don't need or deserve such an option, neglecting the fact work is still work. I will continue to argue they'd technically make raids more accessible and, in a game like XIV with multiple jobs on a single character, actually would give people things to do between raid times. Unfortunately, this is where that mix of stubbornness from players and devs alike comes into play, particularly from new devs today who were yesteryear's players hoping to relive the good ol' days. There's also the simple fact that how a game is designed influences how we play it. If the takeaway here is that NA players a bunch of lazy tools, then it's our fault for nurturing the environment. That's not an issue of things going mainstream, much as I see hipster rhetoric attached to gaming. It's because we've been rewarding the wrong behaviors for way too long. Maybe even being too lax on punishing those that shouldn't be tolerated (Think rampant sexism, racism, homophobia, harassment, trolling, and other ill behaviors in global chats). Eliminating cross-server functionality, as an argument I've seen employed to bring back "community" in these games, won't fix those issues. Lord knows they didn't in XI.

Raiding demands a certain amount of time. If you want any sort of challenge from the content then it's going to demand more time from you. Simply the nature of the beast. Regardless, that time requirement does nearly nothing when you start to tool with the group so I don't see why you're still trying to link the two. The only numbers worth comparing are the amount of time you'd spend clearing a raid in a pick-up group vs a static. The difference doesn't swing from reasonable to 'part-time job'. Please stahp.

There is no huge area between the two. You either make time to raid or you don't. The only partial commitment is non-commitment of running in pick-ups when you can get them. If you don't like the idea of having a static group I get it, but people are clearing in pick-ups so that point doesn't stand on it's own. Mayhaps there's another reason you don't like statics that you're incorrectly attributing time to?

Either way, the flowchart is rather simple. If you don't have the time then you're out. Doesn't matter what your group is because they're not saving you a significant amount of time short term. If you do have the time then you only have to decide if you're willing to invest it or not. You're drawing connections that aren't really there.

You keep losing me here.. were we playing the same game? FFXI was composed almost entirely of time commitments. It was a primary material used in construction.

Honestly, the only time blackhole in XI for it's prime were ground kings. Everything else end-game wise people had on a time rotation, for example we did maybe Sky/Sea gods > Dynamis/Limbus to end the night or did Einherjar, Nyzul/Savage to round out the night and so on. XI did have its time commitments, especially if you wanted to be good at your job(s).

But I think the main disconnect here is in comparison, XIV has very little time commitment because yes, it does hold your hand through all content but Savage, which is why Midas 4 usually has the saltiest people because you should never hit that enrage because literally nothing exciting is happening in that fight to cause wipes other than poor playstyle. Same with Ravana and so on.

Overall, XIV is much less of a time commitment than XI, which is one of the reasons I enjoy it. But within FFXIV, there's a huge disconnect between the core of the game and its small amount of true endgame, which suddenly requires a much greater time commitment. Newcomers to endgame who want to just raid one night per week are essentially shut out of the system because XIV's endgame is so punishing toward players who haven't memorized entire fight scripts.

And simply finding seven other people to play even one night per week with you can be tremendously difficult. My static is now three weeks old, and not once has EVERYONE shown up. We're all adults, and people have jobs, kids, families, etc... it's just very difficult to make real life unfold around a video game. Because of this, we haven't even been able to attempt the newer, harder extreme primals (let alone anything savage mode). This completely mirrors the trends of other statics I've been in, and it's why XIV's endgame is so heavily flawed.

In FFXI, nobody needed a static to reasonably participate in endgame content. You could just find a linkshell that ran on a night you were likely to be free and show up that night. No need to watch tons of videos, no repetitive dying, no frustration. There was always a spot at the table for the busy, new-to-endgame player.

FFXIV needs that.

I think gear design is part of the reason midas nm doesn't feel like endgame. To me, it seems more like side content that should be to help people gear up their second jobs to prepare for endgame. It's strange that the gear isn't even as good as what you get from grinding super easy dungeons and the pvp roulette.

Hio, if that's the case, then I understand more about where you're coming from. I still don't think that's quite the definition of "hand holding," but that content definitely is more forgiving if one or two people don't know what they're doing.

My deal is that I'm one of the very people you refer to. I personally never set a consistent schedule to play XIV because I knew I could do what i wanted to do in the time i was able to play. If you can't consistently play for a long enough time period to get solid attempts in it's one thing, but none of the excuses you're making here point to that.

I would have no issue with you saying "I can't raid because the longest I can play at any one time is an hour". That would be fine, but I highly doubt that you don't have times where you spend enough time that you could have made it effective in a raid setting if that was what you wanted to do. Sometimes I had 2 hours, sometimes I had 4 hours and sometimes I had to leave raids earlier than expected due to unforseen circumstances. Regardless, I was able to complete the content because I chose to.