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They need to teach people how to play the game first.
I think they should have a full Simulation of past savages and 1 ultimate like ucob, so the players can have a safe place to practice by themselves. Or they can bring along a friend or true mentor to teach them. Everyone keeps emphasising on saving time in a game, so the newbies will find it harder and harder to get better. As a slow learner myself even after clearing DSR I still need time to get better DPS wise.
TBH I don’t understand the survival of the fittest in a game. It felt like people just wana gatekeep. It’s really not a game that needs galaxy brain. You don’t do algebra or derivatives here. All You just need are practice. But the issue is just the time each and everyone needs to get there. Some fast some slow. And at the probability of 8 people over the 5 percentile of players who tried end game , it’s not easy to get all at the same pace plus no drama. People always forget to factor in external human factors.
The game needs to teach your rotations, though they probably won't do it in a guise of "Just play how you want and have fun" I suppose extremes are somewhat of a training wheel, but I think the game needs more mid content to lead you to savage and ultimate. They should tone down criterion and have that be it maybe.
I think FFXIV population has peaked and will never grow again. Bringing focus to a larger market MMORPG like WoW was pretty much to last bastion of untapped potential for the growth of FFXIV. The only option for retaining a larger community outside of expansion launches is to improve the health of all optional content. That said, I've held the belief that since raids were introduced into the game, the biggest problem FFXIV has had with the difficulty curve and why players tend to bounce off of it, is facilitation. There are zero in game resources (Besides SSS) that tell you how to improve, and worse is you get zero feedback for mistakes unless you get hit by red, but that's not really the issue here. The game is tuned around correctly executed rotations and memorization of content but nothing in the game tells you what that looks like, it's feast or famine.
If the game gave you better feedback, and gave you some kind of information on what you SHOULD be doing in a fight rotation wise, more people would be into trying the content. Currently, you might have three people who know how to perform on average in extreme+ content progression groups, and you have to wait for the other five to get where you are. That remains constant, and if your group sheds a few members, you have to start that process over again. Luck of the draw in party finder exists, but that's tedious and I sincerely believe people that don't do "hard" content agree with that. The anxiety and shit you see around attempting "hard" content is entirely based on confidence of action. Nothing inside of the game inspires confidence. All the best resources are on external websites and mods. Not everyone wants to put in that effort, it's a game after all and if something else seems more fun to them at the time, that's what they are going to do.
Most people that don't raid do not give a single fuck about the prestige of clearing content. It's a concept they just shrug at because it doesn't concern them.
You say that the learning curve should to be less steep to bring new players in, but you have also gone into a podcast with mrhappy and claimed that you wanted an Ultimate to be much harder than what the current ones are, that you wanted an ultimate to bring you to absolute "despair" or something I remember vaguely. If they make the fight this hard, isn't that gonna go against your point of complaining about the learning curve being to steep? It will surely at the very least increase the steepness of the curve for that fight. Or is that all just a personal opinion that applies to you and does not take into account the playerbase?
I saw someone talk about FFXIV and how over time, its become less of an "MMO" and theyre 100% correct, and part of the issue with that, is that its stopped players improving for the sake of making the MMO more enjoyable in larger group content.
People who played back in ARR/HW, had to deal with things like Odin, and Alliance Raids thats actually killed you if you fucked around. People pepeW Void Ark raid series, but NAHHH, Void Ark used to be lit, because people were constantly taking massive Ls. The plant room in VA, Ozma, Deathwing, Diablos, all these bosses used to dunk on the playerbase so hard, the only option was to collectively improve.
Now the games focus is on stuff like Duty Support. "Well if your dungeon experience is bad, just use Duty Support". DS is nice for lore, but it should not be a solution for getting told youre bad in an MMO. You should be FORCED to do it with people, because when youre put into that situation, you want to be better, you want to improve yourself as to not be a liability.
FFXIVs design has shifted to give people zero accountability or sense of "collective improvement", and part of that is content now is SO EASY, AND SO BORING.
The skill difference between ARR/HW content like Odin, Titan Extreme, Ravana/Bismark to Savage content, definitely had a big jump, but people still had to try to clear.
People will never know, why Thunder God Cidolfus is feared in the game, because now hes easy. Hes not a threat anymore, because people are little piss boys, and cant stand in a circle, then out the circle.
Oh but if you pull an Alliance boss when ONE guy is new? Wow, what an asshole, they were watching a CUTSCENE. Oh well the cutscene is usually trash, go onto youtube. Meanwhile look up a Black Mage guide, so you arent embarassing yourself using Fire 1, Bliz 1 and nothing else in Level 90 content, oh nvm now im banned for telling you how to play.
This laissez faire approach works on other MMO games including FF11 but FF14 is not a game for such approach. A lot of new players miss out on other encounters. As for rotation, this game doesn't teach on buffs and AoE buttons. I watched a top JP streamer, Hendy, playing ff14 and he didn't press either buttons at all.
He is so right, I've been playing since launch, but i've introduced people to the game, and people who even think they're being "helpful" but telling the new player they're not doing their rotation right – scares them away from wanting to play. I usually will only tell people they're doing something wrong if its causing multiple wipes/cant carry them through it – or they ask. If its not affecting me, or if i can compensate for them learning/bad play – then i will not say anything and go about my business and people are usually grateful.
I've heard people say a lot "trusts" are for those people – they're really not. Trusts do not actually explain the game to you, sure if you've played for a while you can work things out for yourself, and trusts are for those of us who want to take a scenic stroll, learn mechanics ourselves without spoilers. But new players learning the game who don't understand what the markers etc mean – trusts do not work for them, they wipe over and over and get frustrated and quit. So if I'm taking a sprout though thats my friend, I usually get on call with them and coach them through it if they need it.
I can't stress this enough, if you're introducing a friend to the game – do not throw them into the deep end and abandon them expecting them to learn to swim. Be willing to do that shitty levelling dungeon with them and teach them through it – then you're more likely to get someone who will keep playing other them to leave them to fend for themselves, them going "this sucks – my friend is doing cool shit while im stuck here" and quit.
Game does an absolutely horrible job at explaining how a job works fully, I started the game as a tank (still am) and if I didn't have a casual friend leveling with me i don't doubt i would've been one of those sprouts getting dragged through the mud in reddit posts for "not doing the obvious" because a lot of people in this game don't realize that it isn't really "obvious" if the game gives you no inclination of doing so, an example? mitigation between pulls, any person who has played basic MMO's, will see the cooldown lengths of their buttons and think "man, i need to save these for the boss" and we all know how that ends up, the tank at a lvl 90 dungeon doing a w2w pressing MAYBE their short mit and just telling the healer "good luck" and using a 30% while the boss casts a raid-wide. And also, rotation is something I basically only learned when i was 90, don't get me wrong i pressed my buttons, but I only found out what "gcd" even meant when i was getting ready for my first time in an extreme (I had 120+ hours at this point), and it was only after many videos and many tries that i started "getting good" but even then i was faced with the issue of actually getting into pf. It's daunting as a new player, especially because the community overall shits on it so much, don't get me wrong pf does some dumb stuff, but for a new player who doesn't know anyone who raids at that time, you're not gonna shout in limsa for a static, that's the only thing you got, so the playerbase actively discourages you from starting endgame as it is.
Then there's the raid difficulty themselves which in a vaccum are good, but if you compare a savage turn (depends on the fight) to an extreme you are insane if you expect a newbie like me (who had no dea of cooldown planning, no idea what "gcd" was let alone an "opener") to go off as a tank, when people in pf also use terms like "Oldbin, BPOG, playstation, THNDPSS", to have any idea what i'm doing, what guide to watch, who should i go to for help, not knowing what the word "prog" even means because the MMO's i used to play were basically "get in fight, press button, win" and you have yourself a recipe for disaster getting ready to be called a bunch of shit, accused of a whole more stuff meanwhile you're just using the tools the game itself gave you.
Don't get me wrong after you get past that initial curve like Arthars mentioned, it's a breeze, but getting over that hurdle requires either help from someone who knows shit or for you to sit through a lot of shit thrown at you for simply existing because every player in the game thinks everything is "obvious", yes the devs can do better, but the playerbase also can.
My problem is communication, why are raids require a communication app to be completed? I don’t want to listen other people and talk to them, but if I don’t use it, how am I able to clear a raid.
Agree with that the game did not teach you how to your rotation or game mechanics, it's all back again to the individual, do they want to learn or not, if yes then search, join raiding servers like aether raiding, lpdu, elemental raid macros, the balance, etc. However i still find people who easily feel attacked when someone just wanna teach them their rotation or simple things as align 2min buff or use feint rep addle as necessary, this kind of people will just stuck and never improve.
I was one of those that started right when Asmon was playing, so from the very start I wanted to eventually do ultimate content. The biggest problem I find is that there simply isn't any external reason to want to do the harder content. Even at the very beginning, the extremes, specifically Ramuh, the people were toxic and uncoordinated/unskilled. Which is to be expected but, why suffer through all of that?
For me, I had all the intrinsic motivation I needed, but that's rarer to come by. The titles are bland, and the mounts are okay, but you can easily get them by doing the fights unsynced. What if Ramuh dropped a beard and you could only get by doing it unsynced? Not only do people get a cool, rare glam, but they learn what it takes to do harder content.
i play for fun i love FFXIV im not the greatest i play this game for lke what 9 years almost and never done 1 savage raids lol … thats ok
The gap from MSQ stuff to extreme is very steep, and the gap from extreme to savage can be very steep too. From ex to savage is more manageable but it's the initial MSQ to ex that I think people struggle the most with. I have a theory that lack of bozja-like content actually added a lot to this problem. Since there were so many people in critical engagements, there wasn't any huge pressure on 1 person to perform and a lot of CEs had extreme trial level of mechanics. Great place for people to jump in and learn the pacing of raids that is more difficult than MSQ level.
bad video did not show feet KEKW
I think the learning curve is a bit exagerrated just because ultimately the game isn't that hard to learn. I was a complete noobie, no idea what I did only, only did MSQ and visited RP houses. My first savage was P1S and I was awful at the game and still cleared the tier relatively quickly, about 6-7 months after starting the game. It's more about how willing you are to look at guides and external stuff but if you are putting in a bit of effort it's not hard. The main issue I think is that you HAVE to do it outside the game. The game demands zero input from you to clear, everything is so braindead and forgiving. And even if it did ask a little more of you, then there still would be no in-game way to learn your job really. There needs to be more of an ask of players in normal trials, dungeons and raids and some basic information on your job's rotation.
Many problems we currently have this Expansion also contribute to making it harder for people to get into endgame hard content.
-The lack of Field Op(aka Eureka/Bozja) creates an even bigger gap between a good and a bad player, since usually, those require more work than what is required in the MSQ solo duties to not die in.
-The order abilities are given during leveling doesn't make sense on many of the jobs and they aren't explained in any way except on the tooltip, so players who don't think about reading what they got will play their Job wrong, despite the rotation at a basic level being easy to do(don't have to get into openers at this level of skill yet).
-Variant and Criterion is also a big gap of skill requirements between dungeon-level and Savage-level, even though it is 4-man content. It would be much better as an introduction to endgame hard content because of the lower player count making coordination easier, yet we only have virtually 1 difficulty in this, and it's way too high for a casual non-Savage raider to go through. The reward incentives' absence don't make this any better.
-Relics being Tomestones instead of your usual grind, just like field Ops being absent, don't incentivize being better than you were before doing it even by a slight margin, because what you're doing is just content that don't actually require much thinking nor reacting(both raid roulettes being the only ones that even remotely place a challenge, albeit a laughably easy one). If there was a way to get Relics faster through harder than dailies content(which Bozja Relics filled that niche, although through a bigger grind than it should've before the end of the expansion) you would have a sizable amount of people being incentivized to actually get better at the game, even if its for a small reward.
A lot of those problems are most likely getting fixed next expansion, but it shows how essential they are to get even remotely better than garbage. It won't magically make players that are absolute dogshit better at the game, but it will at least make it easier to get into hard content, and make PF more bearable, because there would be a bigger amount of players who know how the game actually works beyond MSQ.
I think this is not that simple of a matter.
If this game was to make it easier to get into endgame content, it would simultaneously have to also provide more forms of it. Even now, when endgame is supposedly not that accessible, you have plenty of players who are bored out of their minds because they cleared savage and don't have anything else to do. If the learning curve were to flatten down, you'd have even more people like this, and even more complaining. So to even it out, more forms of VALID (so no, savage criterion doesn't count) midcore endgame content would have to follow – and this would most likely take a significant chunk of development resources.
Of course, all of this would be extremely welcome, but we probably shouldn't expect it to realistically happen before 8.0.
I dont think this problem exhists, extremes are difficult even if you teach new players. Its a matter of execution more than knowledge. Execution requires tons of hours that most people don't have
I think most job rotations are not very clear for new players. I played the whole game one way and once reached the end game I looked online for tips and realized the rotations and openers are played very differently, and I was immediately thrown off the loop. Mix that with having to do more complicated mechanics in the fights, and there are all sorts of social rules for doing the end game content which are not very clear for a new player (like using party finder vs duty finder, food buffs etc., being able to read raid macros which are not present at all during the msq playthrough), the transition to end game content is not very intuitive. It’s like playing a whole different game than what you have played the last 300h watching cutscenes and doing normal fights and dungeons.
The DUNGEONS are too easy. They completely fucked it up. If you can't even learn the basics in dungeons, what's the point of even attempting extreme+ content?
I was (and still feel like) the sort of "newest player" in this game. I had never played an MMORPG before so I had no expectations of END GAME CONTENT – I was just doing all of the content. But when I played with people other than the one friend I had who got me into the game, their attitudes were so bad about my rate of progression (time I took for story content) to the extent where I just played by myself as much as possible. Someone would recommend a streamer to me for "improvement" (while I was still probably in Stormblood tbh) and all I would see is the streamer yelling about things that didn't make sense to me, had nothing to do with what I was learning as a sprout with no gaming background, and everyone around me just magically seemed to KNOW. It thoroughly put me off the end game raiding scene.
This was until the one friend who got me into the game sent me the youtube link for one streamer group in particular who just seemed to mess around and have a good time in savage raids. I got to see how excited they were for a "transition" with a SECRET BOSS on the final floor of Eden, and I was so hyped that I taught myself everything to go into savage SPOILER FREE for a new story experience…. and then I had to go find a static, find all the external resources to keep teaching myself the game, and deal with everyone who'd cleared "on content" shitting on new players constantly. I had to keep my mouth shut while everyone around me spewed garbage about "obvious" things that I was fighting to implement, or when people would tell me "yeah you're on easy mode because it was way harder when X" for everything I accomplished, telling me my goals weren't worth it when I was "so far behind".
Now almost all of them have quit raiding because every tier this expansion was too hard for them, because they couldn't clear UWU or TEA or some other fight, and I cleared every savage on content and my first ultimate was Dragonsong. I'm getting better every tier and faster at prog from the accumulation of experience. But I had to fight for that experience because so many people were assholes. If I hadn't been here for the STORY EXPERIENCE and convinced myself that savages and ultimates were just part of the story, I probably would never have bothered with endgame content.
It's still frustrating for me to see the raiding community in general browbeat new players (or players doing any other kind of content). There are also players I see that go from New Raider to Jaded Raider within six months and leap on the hater train with zero self-awareness for how JUST SIX MONTHS AGO they were just as bad as someone they're trash talking.
ps: also because the levels of content difficulty are so obscured, I skipped extreme prog and went straight into E9S. I didn't clear an extreme until I was progging E11S, and I didn't clear an on-content extreme until Zodiark.
This game needs a voice chat. The community is the one that brings people into endgame