This is less edited than my usual video, because I just wanted to have a conversation about this whole debacle, honestly.
Patreon: https://patreon.com/RinonBanana
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rinonbanana
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/rinbanana
Discord: discord.gg/rinon
Forum Thread: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/505739-Difficulty-of-normal-content
Tweet: https://x.com/SerenayaCarrin/status/1813679210835439697
Interview: https://www.finaland.com/?rub=site&page=news&id=6801
0:00 The Issue
3:29 The Posts
10:11 “Both Sides”
12:10 We’ve been here before
14:05 Yoshida’s Goal
16:42 We are being trained
18:46 It’s okay to fail
22:05 Solutions
#ffxiv #dawntrail #ff14
source
Not only can you die once in Trust Trials, if you do wipe, that goes up: you get 2 free deaths. I totally agree that this should be ported over to dungeons too. Maybe even start it at 0 deaths allowed, and bump it up to 1 when you wipe
I'm not surprised, Endwalker dungeons/normal raids/trials/alliance raids were braindead easy. So who was that content for? Obviously for the people who are complaining about difficulty right now. YoshiP as a gamer himself recognized that besides theses "hardcore casuals" everyone was falling a sleep in non extreme+ content. So this is a calculated decision to see how badly these war veterans who lost their arms in a war are going to affect their bottom line and overall enjoyment of the game for the whole player base. From my perspective the new boss fights are carrying the expansion atm, becausae the story sure isn't. But we'll see how savage goes.
youre not casual you just dont wanna put in effort, to the op ofc..
This is just a personal hot take of mine, but I can't imagine sinking hundreds upon hundreds of hours (hell maybe even 1000+, the game is long enough to warrant it) into a game and still being being terrible at it. And not just that, but also to think after all those levels and all those hours, you shouldn't be expected to engage with the game on anything but a superficial level. It's not that hard to press some buttons and do mechs lol
I'm glad you were able to see both perspectives of this. It really means a lot.
As a healer, i dont mind people dying, but when i see people giving up on mechanics and not learning, that's when i start getting upset
Strayborough is actually my favourite dungeon in the game to be honest, will love getting it in expert it's just very fun with how hectic it is. It's not too punishing either, you'd need at least 2 people getting hit by everything to have a chance of wiping really.
They should put every content on ultimate difficulty so only 1% of players can progress the story. Best way to bring new players in and keep the game alive
Thanks for making this video. I just started trying the Extreme content (sync) and I got frustrated for keep dying. And worse, I felt that we couldn't advanced more because of me (I know it's a party of eight but still felt that way). But I started to look at guides to improve in my job and the fight. For the party but mostly for myself. So again, thanks for your words Rinon.
It seems that why things are coming to a head is that the developers wanted to create content that allows players of all skill levels to feel like they overcame a challenge/puzzle. They made dungeons that give people who can't or don't want to prog ex/savage that same feeling of satisfaction when it finally clicks and everything comes together. Most players love it because it introduces a new experience to the main game, but there's a subset of the playerbase that doesn't want there to be a challenge/puzzle at all. I find this extremely hard to sympathize with – if you want a story without being mechanically challenged, that's what the mediums of literature and film are for.
game is easy as fuck and its finally way more fun and rewarding
I don't think Dawntrail is too hard, I think the average player is underskilled for the game now.
I do feel for people who just want sit down, switch their brains off, and have some mindless fun. There have been many games, or activities within games, that I've played purely because of that, and I think that anyone sneering at/belittling people who want that needs to take a step back and understand that people play games for vastly different reasons and get vastly different things out of them.
However, I also think it's long-term death for any mmo's core day-to-day group content to be so brain off. There's gotta be a level of engagement, a level of interest, or the people who are engaged and interested in the game stop being engaged and interested – and that (admittedly broad & loosely defined) group has a much bigger impact on the long term health of the game, because they tend to have a much bigger impact on the game's community, which is vital to an mmo's continued existence.
I was a pretty casual player before Dawntrail. I've been playing since around the end of ARR, when HW was being announced, but I didn't start doing Normal and Alliance raids until ShB. I mainly played by myself and didn't really interact much with other players. But something about DT kicked a switch in me. It may be because of the more difficult dungeon and trial bosses that I thought, "If I can do this, why wouldn't I be able to do an EX trial? Or maybe a savage raid?" I joined a more active FC, I used PF for the first time, I did my first EX. I joined a practice party, and we wiped pretty early on the first run, but everyone was saying just how fun it was, me included. And when I cleared it for the first time, it felt so much better than any of the content I had done before. If it weren't for DT upping the difficulty, I might not have tried. I'll be forever grateful for CB3 realizing normal content was a bit too simple.
nah i just finished erdtree so im chasing the next high is all
I found overall di is more challenging but in a good way.
The answer is no. Just no.
How I see the story is Dawntrail is suppose to be a new beginning in the story. So I was expecting the story to be "Ok" at best. Plus, we have more story in future patches. As for difficult, they did say they would bring up the difficult way before release. So you months in advance to get ready.
I don't play Monster Hunter, Dark Souls, Dragons Dogma or any other game to easily dance through bosses with no friction whatsoever. I want nice, demanding and fun content. And dozing off all daily roulettes and story content is not fun for me, if the enemies don't fight as if their life didn't depend on it. If I wanted to kill something that doesn't fight back, I would just take a fly swatter and gib some random insect in my house and have fireworks and loot pop out of its dead body.
There will always be people at the start, middle and end of the bell curve, and most "bad" players I've met in MMO games like Eve, WoW, GW2 are just very allergic to learning. There are numerous guides and websites that show you the exact rotation and places to "stand and let things resolve", yet those people will still forget ALL the mechanics that were repeated in numerous duties leading up to the current expansion. And from experience, some players would not even listen to advice, if they received it and then still complain afterwards that they didn't receive help (lul).
It's just that some people will always have their game ruined, no matter what you do. It is a very deep rooted problem in the MMO genre. Anyways, good video and take my like! See ya in DT!
Wah wah wah big babies
As a filthy casual, the mechanics are not difficult. The telegraphs are simply new. We just have to get used to them, thats all.
Imagine thinking that normal modes in DT are worth going to the forums and shaking your rattler at the devs for a nerf. xD. How bad are you guys? Don't nerf anything just give the option to skip the content, so the bads don't ruin the fun for everyone else.
We're Lvl 100 here and you expect the dungeons WEREN'T going to get harder? Lol get the fuck outta here crybabies
Honestly i feel its at the right balance of difficulty right now, i don't think i wiped once in msq, and only wiped a few times in optional content, but thats to be expected from optional stuff
Meanwhile the same people spend hours being perverted in the shout chat
Honestly all of this discourse reminds me of how walled people were by the Garlemald solo instance from EW and how it was legitimately one of the best duties in the game but people hated it cause they had to try.
I do think part of the issue is "Failure is a chance for learning" is not universally accepted by some people. I've been in a few parties with jackwagons that get mad at people because they messed up a mechanic. While those people are a minority, it sticks out more, and people remember it. Some people internalize that, and accept that they won't get better.
However, we can't ignore the issue of people who only want the story and rewards, and don't want to put in the effort to learn, or wait until they can unsync. My last time running a Crystal Tower, one of the DPS kept failing every mechanic (and I do mean every mechanic), and when someone tried to tell them how to do it right, they responded "The tank and the healers just need to do their jobs right." That attitude is similar to what I'm seeing with some (not all) of the people calling for content to be easier. Shirking responsibility for learning onto the devs or onto other players to carry them.
I don't think this situation will change for the better unless both sides of the issue get addressed (which in fairness, you did in this video). But again, what do I know? I'm too busy floor tanking as a DRG.
While I do completely understand people getting turned off by things being too difficult, especially since there is absolutely more to FF14 than its battles and dungeons, I really do feel the most important think to keep in mind that if you're at Dawntrail, you are hundreds if not THOUSANDS of hours into this game. Unless you bought your way through expansions, which is… a different can of worms, but I doubt that has any correlation to whats going on now.
Even on a complete surface level, if you're this deep in, you should genuinely have a fundamental understanding of things that a 14 battle is going to throw at you.
I can understand being thrown off balance a bit at having to definitely pay more attention to what's going on, this is completely fair given how casual content before this has worked, but Endwalker was the literal end of an era. This far in, I feel it's completely fair to expect a tiny bit more out of the player. It's a new world, and that means new challenges, literally and figuratively.
But yes, for the love of God, be nice to people who might be struggling. I can assure you it won't ruin your day to have to run content after a few wipes to help them figure out what might be going on. Stuff like this doesn't always magically click with people, that doesn't mean they deserve the experience any less as long as they aren't being entitled about it.
honestly, my sense of difficulity might be a bit skewed concidering I enjoy ultimates, but what Serenaya said makes sense, nothing should be handed to you for free.
at what Rinon said with "you wipe in a dungeon and try the same thing again, and you wipe again, and again, and again"
there's a quote for that "‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’
how about, instead of going left when the left side is glowing, you go right? like I legit don't get it, I get hit by mechanics in dungeons when they throw new things at me, it happens to EVERYONE, get over yourself and self pity and improve, it's literally that simple.
also "a new expansion drops of your favorite game but you get stuck in a dungeon" (something to that effect)
so? it's called improving and overcoming a challenge, in the story we struggle with things and then work to overcome it, but they expect dungeons to be a cake walk because … they don't want to improve? imagine playing a character who literally saved the entire universe, saying this is your favorite game, but you're unwilling to improve at all.
the person that said "it's not a matter of me not wanting to improve" i'll stop you there, it really is, if you played this game for 6+ years and still can't do basic stack markers, AOE markers or handle overlapping AOE markers, then you were hard carried from start to finish for 6 years straight.
I think the devs did a lot of clever tricks to make things seem harder than they are. Like using kind of familiar looking telegraphs, that if solved "perfectly" based on previous fight knowledge get you hit. Things like boss line aoe being slightly bigger than hitbox, where previously it has been exactly size of hitbox.
This makes it so even experienced players get hit once, and wont just solve the mechanics immediately, making a blind run fairly challenging.
This changes once a critical mass of players have done the fights, and in fact most runs I did later on were already quite clean.
Pile on top of that increasing item level, and the fights feel challenging on launch but quickly fall back to being pretty easy.
This is definitely no steps of faith, they carefully crafted the difficulty of these fights to be just right.
Haven't played ffx since the hydaelyn ex in end walker breezed through the story didn't get Interesting until it turned to cyberpunk. Beat the everkeep ex yesterday in a random pug on my pally after maybe 10 wipes. Not to hard.
I actually like how you covered this, trying to explain that the room of failure just became smaller and imo it makes sense – this is level 100 content and at this point, most players wil have 400+h of content under their belt
this doesn't mean they're not allowed to make mistakes, but they should look and see why those mistakes happen
I saw someone clicking on their abilities – this obviously took away from their reaction time and they thought that they somehow can't beat the content anymore
a solution to this could be to simply adjust your HUD…maybe try the q, w, r, t keys coupled with alt or shift – it's the little things sometimes
Is the dawntrail hard? Nope
Are people generally bad? Yep
The fix? Upgrade hall of novice to current raid standarts and shove it into people’s face
And then if they still cry, it can be completely ignored because listening to them will impact game in negative way
It didn't feel any harder imo. Cleared all the new normals first try with randoms. Extremes weren't bad either. Dungeons are as easy as always. What are these people talking about?
I've done many alliance raids in trivial content like World of Darkness and the like. I will say, if their performance is any indication i 100% believe them when they say the game is too hard for them.
With that being said, get gud scrub.
Not doing brain dead conga during Zarool Ja is a power move, and I support it. Sincerely a braindead conga player lol
those arent players, those are NPCs.. actually no, thats an insult to NPCs, because NPCs actually still do pretty great and reliable.
these people are probably brainless IRL too with IRL things.
I had more difficultly with the dungeons then the raids. The first level 100 dungeon is a pain.
CASUAL does not mean trash player…
these people are some weird MFs. . . twisting what the word Casual is.
those tards are Ultra Turbo Casuals, idk what other word i could even use for legitimate super trash players that have NO motivation to improve a little or get better or learn their jobs or mechanics that we seen since ARR.
If you have 500h+ in the game (like most people do by the time they hit dt) and you find the content TOO hard, please practice. I SUCK at the game and I still find DT a MASSIVE improvement over ew content.
"they arent agreeing with my dogshit take, the streamers, theyve mobilized"
oh shit castrum the memories of doing that last boss by using range attack and then /sit for the rest of the fight
I genuinely believe people do not read what the boss is casting or really look physically at the boss. They are looking at their rotation constantly even after 100s of hours. You can blow up the boss cast bar and put it above your rotation but people need to look at the boss. Look at them and the floor. Stop your rotation and observe what is happening if you can't do your rotation without your eyes glued to it. In dawntrail I have seen exactly one mechanic I think is bad and I'm pretty sure its a latency issues and its the dolls jumping on you.
It has some odd design choices if we're being honest. Why does the freeze in ex1 last as long as the debuff instead of resolving with the cast?
Why do all the cold color mechanics in solution nine backslide on issues we should have learned from eden6 savage? (Orange everywhere)
Why do we choke skill expression in dungeons by slapping vulns on everything causing new players to die and waste time? Every Time I didn't queue healer, I was held hostage in a dungeon for triple the amount of time by a healer who would always die, and tanks who had to be the main character at every opportunity, even though the skillfloor of tanks is nonexistent.
Why does the multiblast in the 4th floor normal raid punish slide casting by having a weirdly tight timing?
Why does Byakko jumpscare everyone by being the most engaging mechanic so far in dawntrail, but over and over and over again?
What's with the obsession with making me look off the minimap a ton for mechs that have tells way out in Egypt?
No. The expansion isn't hard. But there's probably a subsection of players that are kind of miffed, but don't know why.
I'm visually impaired. I'm blind in one eye, diminished vision in the other, and slow recovery on flashbang style mechanics. I have a rougher time keeping up than a lot of people with the visual tells of the game. That being said… I've made it through each and every piece of content and seen people struggle more than I did. It is 100% a matter of understanding the mechanics of the fight and explaining those who do not what they might be doing wrong. That being said, the underlying problem I've noticed is a lack of want /ability of players to admit they're struggling and asking for information. It's a basic life skill, and you should not be afraid to use it.
When you don't know something take steps to figure it out, if you can't do it yourself, then find out from someone or somewhere else. If you don't, then you're just smashing the wall for no reason.
We're lvl 100 right now. People should had learned their jobs already, 10 years of braindead content made this kind of stuff to happen and its not even that hard tbh.
No it is not.
Empathise with both sides? Sorry can't do. Shitter gotta get better. I'm 100% casual player and I wish they can tune it a little harder
God forbid the optional content be a bit engaging.
The difficulty feels fine, but like no other game I know of asks the player to memorize roughly 30 button functions times 20 or so different "classes". I can admit that it's BEYOND deranged, but I have no trouble with it. I think they have come to a point where people need to just kinda bounce off of the game if that sort of thing is not working for them. The MMO style play bloated itself over the years into this bizarre turbo memory game, and doing literally anything at the same time as trying to play that intense memory game (like doing boss mechanics) is just not gonna jive for some. I'm genuinely surprised that people don't mention this more often, it's like we've all ended up with stockholm syndrome after racking up this much playtime doing 100 specifically organized inputs across 20-30 buttons in 2 minute windows. Definitely a unique player experience.