I finally won't have to raid to endgame!Follow

On the matter of punishment mechanics for small Free Companies, I don't think it's necessary. I think smaller Free Companies that understand that there is limitations due to their size are ok to have and to keep around. I personally won't join too large of a group because honestly I'm not one to involve myself in the psudopolitics that crop up in such. I left my group from Excalibur when 2.0 started because I had no desire to stay with such a large group (That and I wanted to RP and condense my hobby venues.)

Dark Embers breaks out of it's "small FC" (I say small but we're 24 people, and for Roleplayers, that's a huge load of chaos because of limitations of keeping RPers entertained in larger numbers.) by having a greater alliance linkshell. And that's fine by us. Honestly, there's not too much incentive these days to worry about Free Companies as the benefits aren't all that significant. This business with the Hard Mode Exploration missions is new, but still not too hampering. Statics will find a way one way or another.

In fact, I think smaller FCs have a better advantage in this case, FC limit on Airships is 4, with a 20 minute cooldown. Kind of limits how many people in a Large FC will be able to do runs in similar timeframes.

Edited, Nov 3rd 2015 4:14pm by Hyrist

This is the only thing I don't get - Most of my Coil clears and even Alex Savage clears were with pick ups, not statics - Granted Japanese players tend to have a higher caliber of "working together" compared to NA gamers, but just being honest - You don't need a static really, which is why I never found Coil hardcore content at all, because Alex 3 for example, has the same amount of "mechanic management" even on story mode that coil has. Some that can even be instant death if you're not careful. The only difference between Coil and Alex story is you can power through Alex Story Mode turns (except 4, you WILL kill yourself trying) but coil you simply can't power through certain turn mechanics because its designed as a tank swap (if SE designs the game around 2 tanks this is expected) or an instant death mechanic if you mess up, which even the 'casual raids' have.



My point is more:

if you can clear Bismarck Ex, content designed with a much higher DPS check and tank management than T9, you can definitely clear T9's DPS checks.

Beating Bismarck Ex means you can access Ravana Ex (till 3.1) - Beating Ravana Ex means you (and most likely your friends/FC members) can handle T9's mechanics, as Ravana Ex is nothing but a mechanic fight with only 1 DPS check (if done correctly) - That's why my point is, if you can clear the content with a much higher check, T9 at this point in the game should definitely be no problem, which means the problem tends to come down with people panicking more than anything.



A. You don't NEED a static - All this says to me is there's actually not that many players actually playing the game capable of clearing content. Not saying it to be mean but as said, most of my clears have been pugs, but I guess Japanese servers truly are that much different.

B. Usually...you would stay out of raid content and content released on day 1/week 1 till you watch a video or read a guide. It's an MMO...if you don't enjoy dying to challenging content..you expect handouts no matter how you slice it. Dying is usually part of the learning process in video games, especially when the content difficulty is kind of higher just like I can promise if you play offline RPGs, you died plenty of times on hard fights you had no knowledge of unless the game allows you a cheap out mechanic. Why would MMOs be any different just because other players are involved? It just translates differently.



I'm talking about both - I'm pretty sure it would work in this game because it works in every other MMORPG currently out because the rewards are scaled based on difficulty, type of content and performance in said content - a system found in nearly every modern MMO in which said gear is normally used to help you through next set of challenging content.



You are, technically. A less optimized version of WoW and GW2.



Not really, because XI's challenge came more from certain content than NMs. No one found NM camping challenging nor did they find any of the NMs challenging except for Nidhogg, Jourm, Hydra, Chimera and some of the Nakuaals. This is ignoring how powerful we've become. When Sea was the fresh set of content, for example, the jailers weren't the challenge largely (they can get rough though) nor the NMs to pop them, people found challenge in the actual sea content like certain limbus content. It got easier over time, but you got rewarded which helped you out down the line. That's why I said having a high ilvl with no content to support it makes no sense, but that's why offering a path of least resistance for the best gear is attractive to ANYONE, well, anyone who classifies themselves as human. No matter how much you like challenging content, if you can get the same or better rewards doing less work, wouldn't you?

Ask yourself this:

If you hold a winning lottery ticket for 89 million after taxes and all you did was spend at best 20 minutes of your time out of the day and spent $3, would you truthfully hand the ticket over and say you don't want the winnings and would rather work 10-40 years to make even an iota of that?

It's the same choice you get between get good gear easily, or get good gear by trial by fire. I'm fairly sure many..if not everyone would take the winnings.

So yes, things come in time - But HW came out 2 years after the launch of XIV ARR, and it's the same pattern and the game feels fairly barren of content due to extreme vertical progression (and no matter how you say "there's content!" queue times as said wouldn't be as bad as they are on obsolete content if people still ran them, nor would people be begging SE to make CT relevant again.) There's 3.1-3.5 before next expansion..but I guess I just come from an era of MMOs where they tend to change with expansion releases. Even XI had changes and with monthly updates the past year or so it still changes and adds a lot more than XIV does in its 3-5 month cycle. So overall, like even others said, they're making money doing what they do now..so why change it? It doesn't "have to change into another game"..but let's be real:

What modern MMO survived by doing very little and never changing at all? Especially that started off as P2P? This is the power the 'Final Fantasy' brand has because as said, Fantasy Earth that was originally SE's didn't last long at all and it was the FFXIV of the early 2000s when SE wanted to try something different. If it was named Final Fantasy: Other Story or something, it would still be alive today under their care.

You seem to have a very skewed perspective of the game that you refuse to let go of, Hio. And it's why other posters keep running into a brick wall when trying to talk to you. That "Savage isn't that hard, you don't even need a static just do it lol" attitude don't fly on most servers. Maybe the JP mentality really does make that much of a difference, I don't know.

You continue to make statements on the game and its playerbase that are completely off point. Maybe it's true for the small hardcore community but not for most, and you talk like it is. It's like you're playing in your own little world and refuse to look outside of it.

And you completely missed Thayos' point about people avoiding hardcore endgame because of the commitments involved.

Edited, Nov 3rd 2015 11:06pm by BrokenFox

Pretty much. I mean, the thought of people coming together from around the globe to accomplish a singular large task sounds awesome on paper, but the moment you start applying longevity to the process, it just goes downhill with scheduling, politics, fair loot distribution, burnout, replenishing ranks, equipment disparities, role preferences, and so on.

Such is why I was a fan of Rift's Zone Invasion premise. You had lots of little goals people could tackle individually or in groups. And when it came time for it all to culminate into a final boss encounter, you had a Quick Join party system where people can unite without hassle of asking for invites or being summarily rejected because they're not X build or Y gear level. No event was programmed to last more than 2 hours. Most got done in under 30 minutes with good participation. Everyone who took part then got a reward, even if individually minimal and sometimes gamed if you really knew the system. This isn't me saying all of Rift's ZEs were good, though, but they're basically XIV's FATEs on a grander scale. Similar has come to exist in other games, too, though maybe not to the same degree.



As for the topic of telling smaller groups to "man up" and merge or accept mediocrity, I'll just never get behind that. Obviously, I wouldn't discourage 2 groups coming together for the sake of better, but that's an idealistic philosophy that almost always tends to fail on some level more than succeed. I'm also a firm believer that there is such a thing as having too big of a guild, where if you don't fall into a clique, you just wind up some faceless body that maybe occasionally gets to help out with things while your own requests for help go unfulfilled (A fate I personally went through in XI when some key members of TG called it quits for one reason or another). Certainly this a facet of the politics aspect I alluded to above, but the inevitable suggestion for someone who falls into a such pit is to quit and find another guild. How many times should a player gracefully endure that process, especially if you have things like probationary periods and conflicting personalities you must "tolerate" for the greater good? When I bump into a lot of these smaller groups, it's not because they're anti-social, but because they've done the whole hokey pokey way too many times and it's ultimately the only way they can hope to find reasonable fun in the game or maybe even the genre overall.

Reward people for coming together, yes. Just don't punish them for not, or at least for not conforming to some nebulous social standard that can easily change as a result of a single game mechanic. On the other hand, there is such a thing as rewarding people too much for partying up where it feels like you'd be stupid not to. That's an issue D3 is going through in this patch cycle with party EXP multipliers, among other group quirks innate or manufactured.

You need to learn the concept of marginal benefit.

You missed my point on "marginal benefit."

To dig back into my college econ years, marginal benefit is essentially the point at which someone considers a task/good/purchase to be worthwhile -- and it varies between customers, based on their circumstances.

For a hardcore raider with tons of time in his/her schedule, marginal benefit may be more a function of in-game rewards.

For folks like myself (older gamers with more RL responsibilities), marginal benefit becomes more a function of what we're getting in return for our limited time.

Hardcore raids in FFXIV do not provide a guaranteed ROI (return on investment) for time spent in these raids. For example, I'm actually a very skilled gamer -- always have been -- and I've never tackled a fight in which I couldn't expertly perform my role. However, there's no way to guarantee that the seven others in my party will be the same way. There's also the widespread problem (personal experience and in the forums) of people dropping out of statics, causing massive setbacks. My second-coil static spent months trying to progress, and in the end we failed to beat T9 because we had so many issues with attrition.

In the end, that's horrible marginal benefit for someone who values his time more than digital pieces of gear, and that's why XIV's endgame scene is so small. That's also why I believe so strongly that installing a NM was a brilliant move by SE... because with minimal effort, they created a whole new avenue of content with an attractive amount of marginal benefit for more of its players -- and this is evidenced by SE's new statement that half of all active players have cleared Alex NM.

Edited, Nov 5th 2015 9:53am by Thayos

Sure if you just ignore the 6-8 weeks of 12+ hour days that hardcore progression groups had to pull to down that content in the first place (AS4 took like 6 weeks for a world first kill) then yeah, hardcore players only play a few hours a week to do their farm content.

Getting that content on farm in the first place took a couple hundred hours compressed into a small time frame... but let's just ignore that because it doesn't support the narrative.

I can't figure out if casuals think this content is too difficult or too easy. In the first breath we hear 'grind hundreds of hours on failed attempts due to difficulty' and in the next breath 'easy, scripted battles'.



There are several casual players in this thread who have stated that they have no trouble with execution, but are held back by someone else dropping the ball. If your execution is really as good as you represent, the only thing holding you back from making quick work of hardcore content is finding other players who can execute. For that reason, it's hard to stomach the 'I don't want to take the time to build a static' excuse because it implies that you find it more difficult to find people as good as you are than actually finding challenge in the content.

You could have just said you don't like scripted encounters and left it at that. Static groups for difficult content have been around about as long as difficult content. It also has 0 impact on why you actually don't enjoy raiding.

And the thing is, the collective we have been complaining about this since day 1. Just look at all the Titan HM/EX related posts going back two years now. Same exact complaints. Not inherently hard, just insanely unforgiving and not fun for 99% of the population.

Memorize these four pages of a phone book and sing them to the tune of the Nigerian national anthem, with seven other people, in unison.

That's about the level of depth, sense and interest of a typical FFXIV Hardcore raid.

Edited, Nov 5th 2015 8:54pm by Hyrist

Not quite a role reversal. You have already given Hio the exact advice you should follow yourself...

If you don't enjoy hardcore raids in XIV, don't raid. The other difference is that we tend to come up with reasons for disliking things that most people echo. Instead, here you've created alternate excuses that don't really have anything to do with why you dislike things about the game. Another difference is that I can agree with you while you would point out that I'm negative... then agree with me

I guess I was just put off by the suggestion to remove hardmode raiding altogether. Doesn't quite line up with the sentiment above of not caring if you're not affected. Does this mean that you're now OK with the players who are bashing their head against the content having slightly better gear than you have?

3/4s of the fights from Coil and Alex Savage took awhile to down simply because they were strict DPS checks. Not enough level appropriate level gear was available making some of the fights pretty much impossible. Alex Savage really suffered from that one towards A3-4. People knew the fight, they just couldn't pump out enough DPS regardless of what they did.

It seems like poor design to me, but many people argue it should be like that.