|
Zetetica posted:I must be exactly the target audience for the solo duties. I find them to be challenging enough to be engaging but still easy enough to clear on the default difficulty with at most one failure. I feel the same way! Sometimes you'll get the odd one that drags a bit too long, and sometimes you'll tunnel vision and miss a prompt and fail, but as the game has gone on things have only ever improved. The option to pick easy or very easy after a failure is a great addition, and when I've been replaying recently, I believe the stat squish/rebalancing has done a little to make some of the ARR and HW duties be less difficult than I remember. (It is also possible that I've improved as a player, but it really does feel to me that we're dealing out more damage than we once were.) The game could do a better job of directly tutorializing important job mechanics or general principles of good play, and I'd be perfectly happy if they added it, but in the meanwhile... this is an MMO, it's a multiplayer game, played with other players, players that in theory you are supposed to talk to and collaborate with. If not in game, then out of game to look up "how to play x class" or "how to run x dungeon" if you're feeling a little wobbly. Not everyone will and not everyone wants to, but the portion of the player base that will take it upon themselves to go "oh ok I'll look up how to do this" when they encounter a challenge has to be somewhat significant? A developer needs to design for a wide variety of users of wide varieties of skill and capacity but I would not be surprised that some of this work is being essentially left to the players and the community because of limited dev hours and how useful the time spent would be. Sure they could put a complex Black Mage tutorial in there to make it clear how to do your main rotation... but two expansions later when they change it entirely, they've made more work for themselves because now that tutorial is woefully out of date. My brain knows that it is good to provide difficulty settings and to accommodate lots of players and playstyles. I genuinely think this is important! Nevertheless there is still a lovely little portion of me that just wants to go "can you please at least TRY to get good? A little? Just a bit? Maybe you'll like it?" Likely because challenges like that are one of the things I value in a game, and my stupid monkey brain thinks that if I like it then surely it's good for other people, too? I will more or less cheerfully carry anyone through any content in this game if they're having a hard time, but they gotta be at least willing to let me hoist them up and lift them through, and some people don't even want that. ANYWAY I am now extremely jazzed for more Kheris fiction, oooh
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 05:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 08:18 |
|
|
FeatherFloat posted:My brain knows that it is good to provide difficulty settings and to accommodate lots of players and playstyles. I genuinely think this is important! Nevertheless there is still a lovely little portion of me that just wants to go "can you please at least TRY to get good? A little? Just a bit? Maybe you'll like it?" Likely because challenges like that are one of the things I value in a game, and my stupid monkey brain thinks that if I like it then surely it's good for other people, too? I will more or less cheerfully carry anyone through any content in this game if they're having a hard time, but they gotta be at least willing to let me hoist them up and lift them through, and some people don't even want that. I think it’s easy to think this way, but it really undersells how wide starting skill gaps can be, and how individual the line can be between fun challenge and frustrating challenge. It only gets more fraught when you’re talking about co-op content with strangers, where people have hugely different reactions to being “the problem” for a PUG (and their teammates do too). Of course you’re always going to have to draw a line that excludes some people in an MMO with forced grouping (which is why I think the trusts are so good - remove the forced grouping and you at least remove the letting-people-down social issue), since you can’t make infinite queues and expect any of them to fire etc. But when you build in a difficulty setting for solo content anyway, there’s no reason to make people lose once to implement it IMO. There’s just such a wide range of how people subjectively experience the exact same content that by far the most reasonable thing to do is let them control their experience as painlessly as possible, and not enabling easier duties without failing first just doesn’t do that. And that’s why I get the temptation to judge but it’s missing the point that there’s a ton of nuance in what kinds of challenges people find satisfying or unsatisfying, how they want to experience consequences of failure, etc. For example, lots of people here describe the difficulty of solo duties for me pretty accurately (0-1 failures), but my reaction inadequately. Given I have limited time to play a game like FFXIV and want to advance the story if I do, and given most duties I fail, I fail right at the end and have to do 5-10 minutes of boring stuff over if I do, I find failing them really annoying, and am at this point likely to turn them to very easy if I do the first time, just because the time efficiency of mindlessly repeating the bulk of a duty to get another go at the single point I might mess up feels really bad. Sure it’s not a lot of time, but it’s all time that feels completely wasted since it doesn’t advance the story I enjoy at all. For me solo duties just aren’t set up to be fun to fail. (Failing dungeons in trusts is much more interesting, since the checkpointing is better, though I wish they set it so the checkpoint was right before the boss rather than right after.)
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 06:41
|
|
|
Sanguinia posted:Lets not go here. Implying that someone dislikes a game because they're not skilled at it and therefore bitter is really crappy gatekeeping behavior. Like Magmar said, even a top tier raider can have grievances against gameplay content if they think it's not doing the job for the player it's supposed to be doing. Just as an example of my own, I wasn't all that into the Ramuh trial on any of its difficulties. I thought it was confusing in its overall design and unclear in its ability to teach the player it's mechanics, which made it hard for me to figure out what I was supposed to do compared to all the other ARR Trials. That doesn't mean the REAL reason I didn't like it is because I was bad at it and pretty much had to be carried by my groups to beat it. its not a skill thing. i'm just realizing that "i have extremely specific terms that a media product must meet me on, and if it doesn't do that its an inherent failure of the media" is both a story and gameplay philosophy for them. a game can't be going for something different then what they are looking for, its either aligned with their tastes or its Bad
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 09:03
|
|
|
Even if the later alliance raids are technically harder I cannot understand wanting to subject yourself to having roughly one third of your roulettes be Labyrinth of the Ancients on purpose. Like I enjoy how breezy Syrcus is and it’s fun to see the fancy skeleton man, and World of Darkness is tricky enough to keep you on your toes, but LotA has so much standing around and waiting and if people get impatient you risk an insta-wipe. Like drat if you’re going to mess with your ilevel to force early raids, at least gear up to Void Ark or something, at least that one’s fun-easy like Syrcus and WoD.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 11:58
|
|
|
Edit: not worth it.
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Nov 27, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 13:42
|
|
|
Re: duties, I rarely fail duties now that I've switched to maining not a class that is both very squishy and low-mobility (especially early on when your damage isn't quite there to compensate, or when you're still learning basic functionality), but they still drag on notably. It's especially bad with the forced-loss ones, they universally just take too long in one way or another.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 13:42
|
|
|
Basically I learned that I should do any duty that doesn't force me onto a job on Warrior, because that is easy mode for solo content
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 16:04
|
|
|
FuturePastNow posted:Basically I learned that I should do any duty that doesn't force me onto a job on Warrior, because that is easy mode for
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 16:31
|
|
|
Farg posted:its not a skill thing. i'm just realizing that "i have extremely specific terms that a media product must meet me on, and if it doesn't do that its an inherent failure of the media" is both a story and gameplay philosophy for them. a game can't be going for something different then what they are looking for, its either aligned with their tastes or its Bad As frustrated as I get with Cyth personally, finding perspective is an extremely difficult thing to do and to act as if you or me or anyone is particularly good at it is pretty arrogant. Quite frankly, everyone does this for one thing or another. The reactions different people have for running into something distasteful is where differences lie and where frustrations boil over, but don't use the fact that it's thrown in your face to gatekeep because it's way more frustrating to see than it is to see the original reactions. Of course there's some perspectives Cyth have that both annoy me and I can't explain and I wish they didn't poo poo up the thread with, but there's also opinions that they have that are also extremely understandable, given that they were clearly a mostly solo, casual player that didn't engage in side content and tried to find things organically without much socializing, and who is clearly not that experienced in traditional JRPGs. And not only is there nothing wrong with that, there's even attempts to support those kinds of players in FFXIV in systems and finding where FFXIV sometimes fails or succeeds at that is sometimes worthwhile in engaging in. AncientSpark fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Nov 27, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 17:22
|
|
|
AncientSpark posted:that didn't engage in side content One thing I would like to point out: I am happy to engage in side content, if the side content seems appealing to me. I did get multiple crafting classes up to 80, among other things, and was working on another when I quit (I'd planned to bring them up to 90 when Endwalker added its crafting tribe, which are my favorite way to level crafters). I found crafting in general pretty fun, outside of high-end stuff, and I appreciated having stories where you're never called upon to kill anything. I did all the tribal quests I could, among other things. I suspect that one of the big things separating me from the majority of the FF14 player base is that I do not enjoy feeling challenged in video games. I play video games primarily for relaxation and escapism. When a game stops feeling relaxing and starts feeling like work, to me, my general response is to look for cheat codes or stop playing. I do not, as a general rule, find any satisfaction in overcoming challenging gameplay. I'm game to try more challenging content than I normally would if the story premise intrigues me or there are other factors that pique my interest, and indeed I completed the Shadowbringers trial series, and 8-man and 24-man raids (on normal, not EX for the former) because I was interested to see where they would go. At the time, I praised FF14 loudly for making me interested in doing these types of content that I normally would not. Two caveats to that, however, are that I did them as the class that I found the easiest and most mindless to play rather than the class whose gameplay I strictly enjoy the most, because I found them very taxing on my nerves, attention, and reflexes. The other being that my praise vanished when I finished them, and the story hook that intrigued me failed to deliver a conclusion that I found satisfying. I felt that I had been tricked into playing content I did not enjoy, and I resented the game and its developers for that. Fair of me? Perhaps not, but to me the most important criteria when evaluating any media is simply the question: was I having fun? And that is a deeply personal and subjective question. There are quite a lot of products that I recognize as extremely well-crafted labors of love that I simply do not enjoy or indeed am actively hostile to. FF14 ultimately became one of them. Do I fault the developers for not making a game specifically calibrated to appeal to me? To some degree, yes I do. I am also, however, well aware that FF14 is the most popular MMO in the world. Clearly they're doing quite a lot that is both objectively and, in the eyes of the majority of players, subjectively good. This LP, across its incarnations to date, has given me quite a lot of food for thought, mainly in helping me understand exactly why I found some parts of the game distasteful and why I nevertheless went along with the game more or less happily for years. I don't think my view of the game has ever been a simplistic "Game bad." I'm critical of it, yes, because I want it to be better in my eyes. There's clearly a lot that I do still like about the game, and the existence of A Realm Reborn proves that the developers can and will - and have - make dramatic changes to the game when they believe such changes warranted. For all the faults I have with FF14 and the people who make it, I can at least say with complete sincerity that I think the game might turn around in my eyes and become a game I want to play again in the future, perhaps it's just going through a rough patch right now with me. Whether that's at all likely or reasonable to expect, time will tell.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 17:57
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Do I fault the developers for not making a game specifically calibrated to appeal to me? To some degree, yes I do. The first time I've been tempted to buy anyone some red text
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 18:38
|
|
|
I think the lack of escapism actually goes to the heart of why FFXIV is successful. Because you're right in the sense that FFXIV is not particularly amazing at being an escapist fantasy for casual players. MMOs have their own restrictions inherently on that front (MMO stories often have to be inflexible, for example), but FFXIV also eschews a lot of what MMOs are good at being escapist being in; for example, the world might be large, but lacks some of the "lose yourself in the world" mechanics some other MMOs have (*cough*, GW2, *cough*). On the flipside, FFXIV is also not particularly amazing at being a hardcore, super-challenging game, in my opinion. It tries to reduce a lot of the achievement that a lot of those hardcore MMOs try to have, and skill expression is often limited to an extremely small, specific set of skills that you don't experience for a wide part of the game. While challenges exist and do come out with reasonable frequency (and there are some amazing challenges such as Ultimates), they don't try to blow it up as the aspiration of the game (compare to, say, WoW race to world first or the Mythic system). What I think FFXIV tries to do, and does so to the most success (although not entirely), is try to reduce the friction between the two ends of the spectrum. Because these two ends of the spectrum have always competed for development priority in MMOs. It's a big reason why FFXIV tries to so hard to incorporate strong social design or why it concentrates so much on spectacle, as ways to allow the other end of the spectrum to at least appreciate, even when a hardcore raider engages in so-called "casual content", for example. But to engage in that, the players need to have some flexibility in determining what kind of player they are. Not to the full extent that "Oh, I haven't raided before, but now I want to do Savage" (although sometimes, that does happen), but maybe "I usually don't like to be challenged, but I want to see what happens next in the story, so I'm gonna try to improve a little". Or "I want to do the biggest balls to the wall challenge, but oh my god, this emote is silly and look at this house this player built". And the fact of the matter is that not everyone is going to be like that. Maybe, despite all odds, they miss hooks that let them move laterally in their preferences. Or maybe they just lack the ability to move their preferences around personally (such as not finding a community to jive with). But the dev tries their best to compromise in offering that laterality, and the player needs to understand that they can also contribute to that laterality. When you are like "I fault the dev for not catering specifically to you", well, the dev doesn't want to cater specifically to you forever. They can't. What the dev wants is to cater you to the extent that they can then get you interested in other aspects of their vision, and then start to lead you to those other aspects. The player owes some responsibility in expanding their preferences, just as much as the devs do. It's not "tricking you into engaging content you don't enjoy" (in fact, FFXIV is probably one of the least egregious MMOs with regards to that; there's a reason the vast majority of content is optional and doesn't offer mechanical rewards), but trying to cultivate that mindset of being a bit more open-minded about what kind of player you are. In that manner, the FFXIV community does not "like to be challenged". The vast majority of the FFXIV community stays casual and raiding is a pretty heavy minority in the game, especially compared to stuff like WoW. What the FFXIV community tends to be is open-minded and trusting and positive of their game, and that helps cultivate the resilience to accept that maybe, the game doesn't have to be entirely about their own experiences as the only experience. And that optimism helps blunt the occasional dissonance. The game, when encountering a seemingly impossible and required challenge, is trying to make you say "Oops, I died, I guess I'll try to figure out what went wrong" or "Haha, I died in a stupid manner, lets go again", rather than "I died, this game sucks". Again, not perfectly (see complaints about solo duty length), but enough so that the community geeeeeennerally gets it. But while the game does it best to make you take that attitude, it's not some foolproof thing; again, the player has to understand and process that mentality if it's not intuitive to them. AncientSpark fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Nov 27, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 18:38
|
|
|
FuturePastNow posted:Basically I learned that I should do any duty that doesn't force me onto a job on Warrior, because that is easy mode for solo content Warrior: Too Unga Bunga To Die
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 18:42
|
|
|
I'll find a way to die on warrior and you can't stop me!
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 18:47
|
|
|
hazardousmouse posted:I'll find a way to die on warrior and you can't stop me! I can die on any Job, because at heart, I'm DPS - Deaths Per Second!
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 18:53
|
|
|
AncientSpark posted:I think the lack of escapism actually goes to the heart of why FFXIV is successful. Because you're right in the sense that FFXIV is not particularly amazing at being an escapist fantasy for casual players. MMOs have their own restrictions inherently on that front (MMO stories often have to be inflexible, for example), but FFXIV also eschews a lot of what MMOs are good at being escapist being in; for example, the world might be large, but lacks some of the "lose yourself in the world" mechanics some other MMOs have (*cough*, GW2, *cough*). This is a fantastic post. One of the things that has most consistently made me love FF14 is the game feels like it rolls out the red carpet to invite the player into every kind of content. I was raised on games with percentage completion bars and mountains of collectibles. When I play a game I feel compelled to see all it has to offer. One of the things that's done the most to push me away from WoW in the last 5+ years is the feeling that the game's design started punishing me for doing that. Collectibles on once-per-day rarespawns with low drop rates or long respawn timers or elaborate spawning conditions or all three of those things, many of them impossible to defeat as a solo player to boot. Raid design which demanded longer time and resource investments, progression systems that were more randomized or more drip-feed expansion-long-grind oriented than ever, PVP becoming worthless outside the ranked ladder and the ranked ladder becoming more closed off to casual progression than ever, the brain-breaking mental stress machine that is the Mythic Plus Dungeon system and the fact that in Shadowlands they introduced a new point based ranking system which both made it easier for a new player to be frozen out of the system and doubled the amount of work one needed to do to get the seasonal rewards. 14 is just the opposite. Every game system is not only easy to sample, but rewards casual engagement in a way that makes trying them all a worthwhile endeavor. There is an upward curve that rewards mastery, but in most cases a dedicated casual player doesn't need to improve all that much to get everything. There is a sliding scale between patience and skill evolution that feels almost perfect when it comes to feeling like you've "fully" experienced those systems, and while there is a bleeding edge in almost everything, the peak of the mountain is almost always "The mastery is its own reward," rather than anything concrete, allowing the players that are really passionate about one piece to continue ad ifinitum and everyone to reach the "ending," and move on. Not EVERY system is like this, but the vast majority are, which is why it's been both easy and natural for me to be so exhaustive in how I've covered all the things in this game even though its an MMORPG.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 19:13
|
|
|
One thing I've loved about XIV is that when I play MMOs I've always been more interested in the journey than the destination. I've never gotten the appeal of trying to blitz to level cap and grind grind grind the endgame raids to gear up to the next raid to gear up to so on and so forth. I like being able to leisurely play around with leveling different classes and enjoy the leveling process of getting shiny new abilities to play with. The sense of growth from gaining abilities in addition to gear has always held more appeal to me. And any time I want to experience something different I can just swap out my gear to a different job and level that for a bit instead! I'm still ultimately running the same dungeons and dailies, sure, but the jobs by and large play differently enough that I still enjoy the experience. The fact that I can freely do this on a single character and not have to make an alt and drag my feet through the same story content makes it all the more appealing!
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 19:27
|
|
|
The shorthand is that FFXIV respects the players time in a way that most MMOs don’t. I think there’s things they could do to improve it, admittedly — it’d be very nice if there were more affordances for catch-up on outdated content, for example.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2022 19:36
|
|
|
Man I need to get back to playing, I haven't logged in since 6.1 and when I did I didn't even do the patch story.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 03:07
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:I suspect that one of the big things separating me from the majority of the FF14 player base is that I do not enjoy feeling challenged in video games. This is probably going to sound flippant, because I know you like a wide variety of games but goddamn sometimes it feels like you should just stick to visual novels. On a level, I can totally understand "I don't like to be challenged" mindset. I played the recent God of War game on the easiest difficulty because I'm bad at action games. And there were still enemies that I had to attempt multiple times. I don't play Souls-like games because I find the incredibly anxiety-provoking. At the same time, I think there need to be some flexibility. AncientSpark posted:In that manner, the FFXIV community does not "like to be challenged". The vast majority of the FFXIV community stays casual and raiding is a pretty heavy minority in the game, especially compared to stuff like WoW. What the FFXIV community tends to be is open-minded and trusting and positive of their game, and that helps cultivate the resilience to accept that maybe, the game doesn't have to be entirely about their own experiences as the only experience. And that optimism helps blunt the occasional dissonance. This section (and the entire post) is incredibly good. No game can perfect cater to everyone's difficulty. And, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like games as a whole expect you to fail, learn, and retry. Failure isn't and end, it's an opportunity to learn. Kwyndig posted:Man I need to get back to playing, I haven't logged in since 6.1 and when I did I didn't even do the patch story. This is something that is more for the main FFXIV thread, but I think patch 6.2, as a whole, is the best patch they've ever done.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 06:30
|
|
|
The idea of 'I don't like to be challenged' is kind of fascinating to me. I'm an ult raider and I've gotten Crystal in multiple PvP seasons since Crystalline Conflict dropped and I go for high end parses and even have played Marketboard (Ultimate) to see if I could rack up a massive high score of money on raid launch windows multiple times before. I don't think anyone is worse or lesser for not doing these things, and I don't think I am worse or lesser than anyone else for not having the World-Class Troller title or The Luckiest of Lords. What I do think though is that XIV in particular contributed a lot to my mental health, inner peace and stability by letting me become this good at the parts of the game I really cared about, and the reason that I found all that solace is because it provided me with a fairly tangible reassurance that I was good at the game (in the form of giving me aspirational content to try for, a gil cap to try to reach, etc. etc. etc.). And being good at the game, to me, means that I have mastery over my surroundings. It means I don't feel adrift or lost for the most part, and when things go wrong, I have enduring conviction that I did the best I could, so I can dust myself off and keep on trucking. It's about having fun, but it's also about feeling calm, in control of my surroundings, and safe in the knowledge that for all my imperfections, there's at least one little part of me that is beyond reasonable reproach. And none that would be possible if I didn't seek to prove my mettle. If you're looking for escapism, isn't challenge in games precisely the kind of thing to look for, since you get to set the parameters of how difficult the challenge is? I think all of us in this thread have precious little control over reality...but in videogames we are absolutely masters of our own fates. We can win whatever we value, and keep it with us forever, and use that to buoy ourselves onwards towards trying to do the same with our lives. Isn't that extremely valuable and worth cherishing?
Transient People fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Nov 28, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 08:26
|
|
|
I'm a "put easy modes in Dark Souls" guy who quit playing MMOs because of how un-soloable they are and the sheer amount of IYKYK stuff regarding damage parsers, class balance, fight tactics etc. I wouldn't say every single thing in the game was made for me but it gave me a jagillion hours of stuff to do compared to how MMOs were just six years ago. But it could always be better. For a long time, Destiny gave me the same freedom away from parsers and elitist bullshit, but it also left me consulting Reddit every time I got a new gun to find out whether it was worth keeping, which gets tiresome but apparently the community collaborating data and hashing out a meta that gets sick in three weeks is "part of the game." There's also nothing wrong with playing just for some story stuff and cool transmog and then leaving. Nobody will give you guff for refusing to touch intentionally difficult hardships. Compared to some games I could mention, this one doesn't make catchup a difficult timesucking bother to keep you trapped in their corner. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Nov 28, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 08:53
|
|
|
Transient People posted:isn't challenge in games precisely the kind of thing to look for ? For the record I have cleared the first two fights of the first wing of the current normal raid on savage a few months back, it was a miserable time for me and I hated every minute of it. Clearing these fights did not bring joy or any sense of accomplishment, it just brought relief that it was over and I would never have to to that ever again. It was a combination of the stress of following the fight and not trigger a wipe + maintaining my rotation + hating my friends who for the hundredth time forgot to be at a certain place at a certain time so we wiped. I must say I got way better at doing my rotation though. The current normal difficulty of XIV seems really fine for players like me, maybe yeah sometimes I wish there was a step where they would throw another mecanic on top for the fun of it, but it's super rare. Basically I'm ok with bozja CE type of encounters. re: solo duties: I don't think they're super hard, but they sometimes overstay their welcome, and the lack of checkpoint for some is really bothering, though it's something they made effort on
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 12:39
|
|
|
Transient People posted:The idea of 'I don't like to be challenged' is kind of fascinating to me. I'm an ult raider and I've gotten Crystal in multiple PvP seasons since Crystalline Conflict dropped and I go for high end parses and even have played Marketboard (Ultimate) to see if I could rack up a massive high score of money on raid launch windows multiple times before. I don't think anyone is worse or lesser for not doing these things, and I don't think I am worse or lesser than anyone else for not having the World-Class Troller title or The Luckiest of Lords. What I do think though is that XIV in particular contributed a lot to my mental health, inner peace and stability by letting me become this good at the parts of the game I really cared about, and the reason that I found all that solace is because it provided me with a fairly tangible reassurance that I was good at the game (in the form of giving me aspirational content to try for, a gil cap to try to reach, etc. etc. etc.). And being good at the game, to me, means that I have mastery over my surroundings. It means I don't feel adrift or lost for the most part, and when things go wrong, I have enduring conviction that I did the best I could, so I can dust myself off and keep on trucking. It's about having fun, but it's also about feeling calm, in control of my surroundings, and safe in the knowledge that for all my imperfections, there's at least one little part of me that is beyond reasonable reproach. And none that would be possible if I didn't seek to prove my mettle. If you're looking for escapism, isn't challenge in games precisely the kind of thing to look for, since you get to set the parameters of how difficult the challenge is? I think all of us in this thread have precious little control over reality...but in videogames we are absolutely masters of our own fates. We can win whatever we value, and keep it with us forever, and use that to buoy ourselves onwards towards trying to do the same with our lives. Isn't that extremely valuable and worth cherishing? waving your gaming dick around and crowing about how facing gaming challenges is some utopian ideal sure is a post to make, you complete weirdo some people just don't and never will have the ability to succeed at difficult content i don't play anything harder than normal raids because it just means I'm going to fail at something repeatedly while i get yelled at by internet randos. i can get the same experience by finding the nearest wall and pounding my head against it for a while.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 13:10
|
|
|
I love challenges but I've been playing FF14 for 9 months and I'm thinking of starting EW soon. Admittedly I've been super flakey, doing other things and leveling every class but I think they nailed and have a very clear difference vs something like WoW where not gearing up at level cap within a week is considered a problem.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 13:11
|
|
|
Craptacular! posted:I'm a "put easy modes in Dark Souls" guy If you want something like this, I'd recommend looking into FF Origin: Stranger of Paradise; it has actual difficulty settings that you can freely swap between when entering an area. Felt pretty good! And the regular "hard" difficulty was pretty reasonable in comparison to others in the genre, as far as I could tell.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 13:24
|
|
|
hexwren posted:waving your gaming dick around and crowing about how facing gaming challenges is some utopian ideal sure is a post to make, you complete weirdo You missed the point and you should really stop being passive aggressive for no reason. The whole point is you get to set the difficulty of your own challenges. There is no less value in seeing normal raids as a challenge to surmount and taking pride in beating them than doing so for savage raids, or ultimate raids. Challenges are not community defined, they are personally defined. I've mentored players who were on every point in the spectrum and not one of them's goals and successes were less valid than the other's as long as they chased them with all their heart. Please pay more attention to what other people actually say instead of getting mad at ghosts. Fake edit: Also, I reject the idea that 'some people just don't and never will have the ability to succeed at difficult content' outright as well. Setting aside the matter of how everyone sets their own terms of mastery and can push to achieve goals at any level of skill, be it beating all solo duties without setting the difficulty down to Very Easy or topping parse rankings, there isn't such a thing as a player who is incapable of learning. Some players have very strong emotional hangups that inhibit them (panic attacks, learned helplessness, even just being taught actively wrong habits that they've drilled in for years and must unlearn) or non-gameplay issues that make improvement too difficult (bad ergonomics is a classic example that makes improvement impossible in spite of not being at all obvious, but you can also have a hostile/busy environment where you can't focus, be in pain, or even simply have sneakily faulty hardware), but these are all things that can be overcome. It just requires a teacher who cares enough about the person trying to learn, and who has the learner's trust such that they can have frank discussions about why they're having certain responses. You don't need to be some kind of god gamer to learn, it's just a matter of being willing to self-examine enough, and trusting in someone who can understand you well enough, that you can find whatever blocks are stopping your improvement and get them out of the way. Zanael posted:Not really, I'm here for the cool story and the cool looking fights where it's ok to die and get rezzed without worries. I can absolutely sympathize with this because I ran a week 1 static that ended up clearing week 8 and when I disbanded it I just felt a strong sense of relief, because I was starting to very much resent the rest of my team for having failed to measure up to my expectations (I went and cleared solo like four weeks before everyone else did after having had to moderate and handle tons of drama, it was very much not a great time). I would play with maybe two of the people in that team again week 1 and the scars of investing so much emotional energy into something I had so much hope for and then seeing all that effort be unrewarded have not healed still. I feel a lot of this is a matter of social expectations moreso than anything else though. For a contrast, I recently started playing in the weekends with some friends I've known for a decade and they only cleared the second fight of the current tier this week, and yet I couldn't be prouder of them because they learned so well and solved everything blind. It's all about what you want/need out of a group vs what you get and not overstaying in a team that doesn't do what you need just because your friends are on it. That's not to say you're wrong for saying Savage isn't for you though because you know better than I to be clear, I'm mostly just discussing how the whole 'I don't like my friends for not keeping up with me' thing that you mentioned can sour absolutely anyone's enjoyment at any level of play. Transient People fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Nov 28, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 14:08
|
|
|
hexwren posted:waving your gaming dick around and crowing about how facing gaming challenges is some utopian ideal sure is a post to make, you complete weirdo A long and thoughtful post about how for this guy, finding and completing challenges gives them satisfaction and contentment isn't dick-waving. They even explicitly say that they don't think they're better than anyone. They're just approaching it differently than you or I might. It is very easy to react to people going "I play games for challenge!" with a knee-jerk worry that because we don't we are somehow less, because there are people out there that say just that. Too much time in multiplayer games with crap communities had left me feeling that exact way! It was FFXIV that gave me that comfortable space to learn that actually I do like to set my own challenges, I do like to do group content when I'm not getting yelled at, that I am capable of improving if the game and community is open to giving me that time to learn. And that doesn't make me better or worse, either. Like, one person's head pounding against the wall is another person's gentle massaging percussion? We all draw our lines somewhere different, and I think those lines give important context when we weigh in on how good or bad we personally think a game is. I'm sure those FPS-y games out there like Destiny or Apex are very good on many objective levels but I am very bad at FPSes so they're not for me. They're not universally bad because I personally have no taste for what they've got on offer, and FFXIV isn't universally bad because it's not to other people's tastes, or their tastes changed over time. FeatherFloat fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Nov 28, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 14:14
|
|
|
FeatherFloat posted:A long and thoughtful post about how for this guy, finding and completing challenges gives them satisfaction and contentment isn't dick-waving. They even explicitly say that they don't think they're better than anyone. They're just approaching it differently than you or I might. I just want to say I really support all the stuff said here and I totally get this worry, because I have played with people who were like this (and even looked down on me too because my own successes weren't up to their standards!). There's all kinds of really loving awful persons out there who desperately seek to attach intrinsic value to things that don't have them just to feel superior to others and they can go pound sand. What I wanted to talk about was mostly how I find surmounting challenges to be therapeutic and healing and how it helps me feel better about my place in the world and equips me with tools to resolve my personal issues, and I felt that was pertinent to Cythereal's comment about how 'I play video games for escapism and relaxation'. Sometimes I share that mood and I just want to vibe and play, idk, a cute rhythm game like Deemo because I just need to hear soothing and gorgeous piano melodies for a while to shake off a bad day at work. Sometimes, though, what makes me feel like things are going to be OK is showing up to raid with my comrades I love like they're my brothers and sisters, watching someone make a misstep and then heroically saving the raid by pulling off a last second adjust, then celebrating that victory we snatched from the jaws of defeat together, y'know? I think they're two sides of the same coin and it's super interesting to hear someone say 'this side of the coin is something that completely doesn't exist to me'. That's all.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 14:31
|
|
|
Mordiceius posted:This is probably going to sound flippant, because I know you like a wide variety of games but goddamn sometimes it feels like you should just stick to visual novels. Funny thing to me is, I've been bitched at recently for using cheats to tone down the difficulty in a single-player game to my liking, too. The fact of the matter is that I am a bad player. I have poor reflexes, godawful situational awareness, and am poor at multitasking. In most MMOs, this isn't really a problem for me as an extremely casual, solo-oriented player who treats guilds as just a group of people to chat with when I feel like it (and a cheap teleport to the guild hall). FF14, however, is fairly unique in outright requiring a certain degree of skill (or a very patient group to carry you) in order to progress through what is arguably the core story. You don't really lose anything in WoW or GW2 or STO if you never do dungeons or raids, and SWTOR includes a helpful solo mode that's borderline impossible to fail for its dungeons that are critical to the story (well, at least it used to). While there are plenty of pros to this design choice, it does mean that compared to other MMOs, FF14 itself as a game does serve to gatekeep people who just aren't good at this type of game. Solo duties have a pity difficulty slider, but dungeons and trials don't. There's one particular trial down the road with a main mechanic that will kill you if you fail it, and it is a mechanic that try as I might I have an extremely difficult time internalizing and reacting to properly. And there just isn't any way around it but to suck it up if you want to proceed through the story. Even if you never intend to do a single optional trial or 8-man. I find it frustrating.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 14:47
|
|
|
On the other hand the community is very patient with people outside of the hardcore raider content -- I've spent half of some of those raids as a mashed potato dead on the ground and I will still get a rez, no harm or foul to anything or anyone but my pride. Not to mention the devs actively trying to make the game solo player friendly through trusts and such. Its a far difference from WoW at least, where you would probably get some colorful language thrown your way followed by a kick nowadays if you died to a dungeon boss. Although if we are thinking of the same main mechanic later in a particular fight later on -- yeah, they should probably change that or make it way easier than it is right now.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 15:28
|
|
|
fwiw I absolutely would agree with the sentiment that I don't games for challenge or difficulty. I don't do extreme trials or savage raids except to get stolen valor mounts from unsynced runs. I know there are plenty of people who've quit because the game's normal content was too hard, though the tedium of post-ARR seems to be the greater filter.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 15:31
|
|
|
FeatherFloat posted:A long and thoughtful post about how for this guy, finding and completing challenges gives them satisfaction and contentment isn't dick-waving. They even explicitly say that they don't think they're better than anyone. They're just approaching it differently than you or I might. I think this speaks to my personal view on how people react to challenge. There will always be hurdles that people believe that they cannot get over. There's absolutely nothing wrong with choosing to walk away from that hurdle and deciding it's not for you or that it's not fun to beat your head over the wall or that this particular brand of challenge is not particularly fun. What I think what some people tend to lack when they choose to not engage with challenge is the lack of consciousness behind the decision. They choose to not engage with the decision without proper evaluation because frustration loving sucks and these people around you aren't helping. It doesn't help that people are just not good at understanding how they themselves learn, because our educational figures (no offense to Sanguina) simply do not have the time and ability to give personalized learning to everyone, so people default to rote habits they've picked up that simply don't apply to everyone. There's just a lot of stuff that gets in the way of a good evaluation of the self. And that sometimes makes people misevaluate where they are in terms of their development. Oftentimes, I recommend people look to community when they are having trouble with a game. Not because I think multi-player is inherently superior (I'm actually more of a reclusive, introverted sort). But because evaluating the self when a person is alone on their own guidance is so incredibly difficult. Of course, the hope is that the community is the sort that is inclusive enough to help support newer players. Which is why I personally think FFXIV tends to get away with being a bit more stubborn in its difficulty than a lot of other games (ironic, given that it's well known that JP communities tend to be more insular than NA communities). A funny stat is that, in some of the latest Live Letters, it was mentioned that the vast majority of new players quit at the point of buying the first armor. At first glance, this seems like an incredibly silly point to quit; FFXIV's UI is not THAT bad. But it makes sense if it's a question that is both seemingly embarrassing to ask others or research, but something that is difficult for a game to tutorialize properly because it just seems so simple from the view of the designer. At that point, there are no solutions besides making it even more frictionless. AncientSpark fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Nov 28, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 15:43
|
|
|
AncientSpark posted:What I think what some people tend to lack when they choose to not engage with challenge is the lack of consciousness behind the decision. They choose to not engage with the decision without proper evaluation because frustration loving sucks and these people around you aren't helping. It doesn't help that people are just not good at understanding how they themselves learn, because our educational figures (no offense to Sanguina) simply do not have the time and ability to give personalized learning to everyone, so people default to rote habits they've picked up that simply don't apply to everyone. There's just a lot of stuff that gets in the way of a good evaluation of the self. This is very well said, and I thank you very much for it. It really rings true to me, because I've experienced it in my life, where the things that I was bad at were things that others just naturally excelled at, and no one could or would take the time to properly teach me. To take it IRL, I only learned how to properly run (pace yourself, breathe properly, don't just go as hard as you can until you fall over in a heap) as an adult, as part of a martial arts class I was taking that was instructed by a friend. It was an absolute revelation to me to learn that I was actually capable of something I thought I was not. I'm still a person with limits and there are still some things that I probably can't do... but it helped show me that there are things that I potentially can, if I'm allowed the chance to try and I'm given support from others. FFXIV is another place where I've had that same affirming experience. THAT SAID not everyone is playing video games for precisely that kind of life-affirming self-improvement, sometimes we just wanna gently caress off and do the Manderville or go through the motions of something we find easy and satisfying. Or maybe that's all we wanna do, and all that the game has left is not what we're down for. It's all enormously personal.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 16:00
|
|
|
FeatherFloat posted:THAT SAID not everyone is playing video games for precisely that kind of life-affirming self-improvement, sometimes we just wanna gently caress off and do the Manderville or go through the motions of something we find easy and satisfying. Or maybe that's all we wanna do, and all that the game has left is not what we're down for. It's all enormously personal. I completely agree. I also think it is important to decide what we want out of a game and, to a degree, engage it how it is. There are many ways to play FFXIV. It is not going to be everything to everyone - nor should it be. I don’t do extremes or savage raids. I had raided in WoW from vanilla-WotLK and I burned out so hard that I decided to never do organized group content again (plus, I’m not 20 years old with a perfectly free and open schedule anymore). Most of my time in FFXIV is spent being social, hunting triple triad cards, going for fishing log completion, running roulettes, or working on other miscellaneous grinds. Sometimes I put off MSQ for weeks/months because I’m not in the mood. My wife is a much more casual, inconsistent player. She plays far far less than I do. She does MSQ when she feels like it. She does very few side quests, rarely runs a dungeon more than once (and does it with trusts). Most of her time in-game is spent decorating houses, working on glamour, or at the gold saucer. Probably less than 5% of her time in-game is spent doing combat activities. Whenever she needs gear upgrades, I just buy her the latest crafted gear. Sometimes she fails MSQ fights/duties. Even with trusts, she’ll often wipe on dungeon bosses the first time she encounters them. But then she just tries again until she gets it. She doesn’t do dungeons unless she’s in the mood and willing to try something multiple times. There is no perfect solution for matching gameplay and player skill. Difficulty options are great, but there will always be those left out. I mentioned how I played the recent God of War game on the easiest difficulty. My mother plays video games and I would love for her to play it, but I know that even the easiest difficulty would be too hard for her. This is not a failing of the game and the developers. We all have strengths and weaknesses. I personally think that, with (almost) any video game, the player should engage it with a willingness to fail and a willingness to learn. I feel like you cannot expect to pick up and play every video game without having to learn and improve (at least a little) along the way.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 16:36
|
|
|
Mordiceius posted:I personally think that, with (almost) any video game, the player should engage it with a willingness to fail and a willingness to learn. I feel like you cannot expect to pick up and play every video game without having to learn and improve (at least a little) along the way. I like this perspective, though I also do think that a player needs to be in the right place to feel ready to learn, and to maybe trust that the game they're approaching playing is willing to meet them there. Could I learn to play FPS games properly? Probably! Do I want to take that time, when there are so many other games I could play, plus real life obligations? Not really right now. FFXIV surprised me by laying out a game that said to me "hey, come learn, we want you to try and get better", and I appreciate it for that.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 17:06
|
|
|
Eh. I'm willing to learn, but I really don't think FFXIV really cares much to teach me. The game either doesn't do a good job of explaining what you should do or straight up lies to you sometimes. Not that it's unique to FFXIV in the MMO space, it's one of those genres that just expects you to read guides, but considering the differences compared to WoW or whatever I do think FFXIV is probably worse than normal.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 17:36
|
|
|
modular difficulty is all well and good, but there's only so much it can do. i can tweak the difficulty of, say, the latest god of war to fit my exact wants and needs and it will have no impact on anyone else playing the game, but ff14 is a multiplayer game. should solo duties let you pick the easiest difficulty right off the bat? sure, why not. but how would that function for dungeons and trials? put it up to a vote? now you have the risk of three or seven players opting for the hardest difficulty anyway and you're overwhelmed, or vice versa and they all pick the easiest and you're bored out of your mind. trying to make this more player-friendly would actually risk increasing toxicity because you're now in constant conflict with other people's preferences. instead the devs have the fairly unenviable task for calibrating a one-size-fits-all difficulty where lower-end players are challenged but not overwhelmed, while higher-end players are engaged instead of bored. this is of course ignoring the fact the game actually does let you pick and choose your difficulty in multiplayer content. you simply have to use the Party Finder to, you know, find a party of like-minded individuals. everyone knows unsynced parties for extreme and savage content, but if you have no desire to engage with msq combat content there's plenty of unsynced parties for those, too, people will join them just for the first-timer bonuses, or you can make your own, or you can ask a friend or two to unsync it with you. conversely i'm part of a couple of challenge communites that turn on the mininum ilvl setting for msq content just for the thrill of it. there's some limits to it, you can't unsync level cap duties for obvious reasons and for whatever reason you can't min-ilvl level cap alliance raids, but the option is there for 95% of the content. duty finder is pick-up-and-play content so by necessity it has to be one-size-fits-all, but there's nothing stopping anyone from trying to find like-minded people or helpers to suit your needs and desires
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 17:48
|
|
|
Eh, it depends on the fight. Some duties do an excellent job of training you on how to do the dance, and some just don't and you either read a guide or faceplant until it clicks. Or you choose not to do the fight at all. The only thing in XIV that's truly impenetrable without help from outside the game is collecting every fish, since in-game information is sparse and bizarrely missing even from the spots that you'd think it should be (all those mouseover tabs in the fishing guide still show only ??? for catch conditions even if you've bought the books for them, and even if you've successfully caught them before. What the gently caress, game.)
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 17:50
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 08:18 |
|
|
I will say that there's one rather glaring issue with FFXIV's difficulty and that's teaching players what all the tells mean. They did eventually provide a tutorial for things like stacking and spreading out, but other mechanics, especially the unique gimmicks that spontaneously occur in the middle of fights, your indication that you did something wrong is being left at critical HP or just outright smacked dead. That can feel incredibly discouraging. Ringout gimmicks in particular just absolutely suck, and I'm sure that almost everyone has taken the fall of shame at least once. Basically I'm saying that, at least for the standard plot versions of dungeons, I wish the damage numbers were more lenient. Like for example, if ringouts just hit you with a big chunk of damage and put you back on the platform. That way, folks could make more mistakes when they're just figuring out fights and not feel like they absolutely screwed up.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2022 18:11
|
|
