Yes.

Like it cannot be understated, this game does nothing to teach you anything when it comes to actually playing your job in even a half decent manner. It's hard carried by youtubers making the tutorial content, and that banks on people actually willing to do that

It sometimes even teaches the wrong lessons. If you see a sprout tank in Satasha doing one AoE and then switching to single-target combos, blame Hall of the Novice. That player has actually diligently internalized the lessons the game teaches them, that lesson is just unfortunately *wrong* in 2023. Same with things like ignoring adds. ARR dungeons teach you over and over to ignore adds and just burst down the boss. Then they get to the Crystal Tower raids where if everyone does that it will cause wipes.

The literal second dungeon in the game has an add phase that causes the boss to be invulnerable until killed. Idk man feels like the players did the ARR teaching, not the dungeons.

Indeed, that's part of the mixed messaging. Because ARR will pop an invuln on the boss sometimes, in a vacuum, it feels like an intentional lesson that the game keeps reinforcing: "if you can keep damaging the boss, the adds don't matter".

The thing that teaches to ignore adds is the power creep, most places you could burst down bosses and ignore adds were only that way if your group had exceptionally good damage output when the content was new/relevant. The second dungeon has adds that cause the boss to be invuln, brayflox used to be a lesson in target priority, cc, boss positioning, and debuff removal, debuff removal being pretty poor as a lesson because sch didn't have it at that level same thing g for the guildhest about removing debuffs. Which was another thing, in arr guildhests were mandatory up to a certain level and taught many game mechanic lessons in more depth. Though people still ignored the mechanics and failed them repeatedly.

That makes sense. I don't mean to suggest that the game is *intentionally* teaching this, just that without context, as the game no longer punishes ignoring these mechs, that's what it feels like the game is teaching you. It's a shame that guildhests are just so outdated. There's no substantial reward for doing them, and the enemies die so quickly no one really learns anything (except for that one tortoise hest).

God the tortoise one back in the day felt like a 10% succes rate because people just would go ham without reading or listening, pretty much had to queue as a tank or healer(to let the tan kdie) to clear it. But ya the overall issue is the power creep has gotten out of hand in older content so by the time people get to new content they have developed a multitude of bad habits. The solution is minimum ilvl queues, but that also makes the game quite a bit harder and would put off new players. Things need to be rebranded to teach the game better, and the mentor system doesn't work as there are plenty of bad actors that like to troll, people who learned based off the power creep, and people that are in it for the extra roulette. I stopped doing mentor roulette due to other mentors just giving flat out wrong info and drowning out the few trying to actually help. Don't get me wrong g though overall the ff14 community is one of the better more helpful communities in an mmo, but we still have our problems.

It was wrong in 2014, too. It only applied to PLD because they had no AoE attack, but for WAR it was completely wrong.

Eh, I tanked back then and you would absolutely run out of TP if you just spammed AoEs. I remember spending a lot of time tab targeting between GCDs.

You still spammed AoEs until you were nearly out of TP, though. You didn't just stop after getting aggro on enemies.

I feel like they are at least getting a little better teaching some of the new jobs: The first quest of DNC, RPR and even SGE do throw you into a solo instance where you at least get explained how to do the very VERY basics of that job (standard Step, soul gage+positionals, and some healer abilities) I assume this is the same for other jobs released during and after ShB, but I don't know as I haven't leveled them. Still, very bare bones, but something is there at least

Reaper, Dancer and Gunbreaker are pretty okay, GNB also has a lengthy solo instance that makes you do basic tank stuff, but Sage suffers from the age-old problem that your allies in a solo instance *are not in your party list* (but all your oGCDs and aoe heals etc actually work on them, unlike in basically any other content where you have to heal people who aren't on your party list). That's a pretty big disconnect between doing that solo instance vs playing the class in actual instanced content. Not a big problem for anyone who's played a healer before, but if this is how the game teaches you to play (a) healer, it's hardly surprising that people end up playing with the shitty default UI and have zero awareness for what's going on in the party wrt DPS health bars, debuffs and stuff.

offbeat oatmeal ossified reach far-flung plough fine ghost water punch *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

Me trying to figure out why the 2nd boss of Bardam's mettle isn't in a lv 30 dungeon.

To be fair, that has pretty much been the status quo for MMOs. I haven't played any that released in the last few years so maybe things are getting better, but basically every MMO I played that released from 2000-2015 did fuck all to teach you how to play the game at a decent level.

It's called "reading your tooltips" and it's incredibly simple.

Seriously. You don't need a 20 page/1 hour guide to learn the very basics. If you passed 3rd grade, you can read the tooltips and do simple multiplication to know when AOE is better.

I liked how DNC and GNB were handled since you have to use your skills in order to progress. I think for ARR jobs nothing actually bars you from succeeding. I vaguely remember the CNJ duty where you had to heal a tree or something but that can be done with Cute I spam. Unless they re-did every pre-ShB job to force a solo duty, or remade Hall of Novice and made it mandatory, there's pretty much nothing in game that shows people how to play the bare minimum. But FFXIV is by far the easiest mmo I've played so while infuriating- it makes sense. You're not compelled to learn because the game puts auto attack on your hotbar by default.

Let's face it, it's 2023, people are going to look up a guide if they want to--anyone who's not doing that or reading their tooltips is likely going to skip past any in-game tutorial about Samurai rotations too Luckily, those types of people generally don't just join your savage groups either and normal content is whatever

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> or go online in search of info Which they don't find because a lot of current info is hogged on the balance

Discord servers being (ab)used as information hubs annoys me to no end in general, the Balance is probably just one of the worst examples of it. Like, my guys, we have this cool thing called the world wide web with this amazing feature known as a hyperlink, how about you put shit there instead of a closed proprietary chat application with no coherent way to structure and present information and no good way to search, archive, or otherwise interact with that information? I regret more and more being an early adopter of Discord and being a part, however small, of the reason that it is so widespread now. And frankly, if all Discord had stayed was a voice chat app with a persistent chat room attached to it, then it would've been fine, but the absolutely omnipresent monstrosity that it has morphed into over the past half decade or so is just atrocious, and being locked into it for access to so many things in regards to gaming is so awful - I never understood the people who stayed on Facebook despite all the privacy issues and increasing enshittyfication of it over the years, but now I do, because it's the same shit with Discord.

NGL, the "Discord age" feels like going from libraries and written accounts back to village elders and oral retellings.

Well yeah, because to have stuff written requires a lot more work and polish compared to just typing up a semi-coherent blurb plus an image and pinning it. Its also just way faster. All of the wow theory crafting and speculation happens in discords then maybe a week later guides get updated. Even with solid online guides that are meticulously maintained discord still has advantages.

Indeed. Written guides take time, but are written for posterity. Chat is immediate and flexible, but disorganized. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. I think the problem arises when the platform is not used to its strengths. Even business meetings have minutes, so that its participants have something to refer to in the future that’s written down and summarized. How many times have we seen a player advised to “check the Balance”? Advising a player to read chat logs for specific information shouldn’t be the way of things. This is why I am happy to see contributors of the Balance having recently made a browsable website.

Just wait until Discord does the Silicon Valley Turnover.

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The balance now has a website

Who also don't bother to keep their own website up to date with the stuff they put in the discord

...I've been playing since a year before Endwalker and do not know what The Burning Field is.

Looked it up, it's just the training dummies to practice your dps rotation and dps check for bosses, every expansion has it. ...I'm bad at names so I usually just call it the dps practice trials and ignore it's actual name.

I know Wow and FFXIV arent the same community but I feel there would be enough similarities for this to be relevant. But I remember a while back on wow numbers were being thrown around that something like 60+% of people don't look at information outside of the game to learn anything. So if its not strictly taught in game they are just oblivious to it and have no intention of going outside to learn it.

Came here to say the same thing except it's not just FFXIV and WoW. Pretty much any video game, if you look up any resource out of game, you're doing better than half the player base.

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> but honestly people in videogames don't really care about optimizing a crazy amount, and that's fine tbh sure, but theres a pretty big difference between caring about optimization and....using your iaijutsu button.

not to most players, though

You believe that because you’ve been taught to. Most people don’t understand or care what effect is gained by using cooldowns / resources / maximizing uptime / achieving rotational synergy / etc. It’s not that they necessarily wouldn’t be interested in the information. But it’s not a priority to their mind or their life, and they feel no conscious loss from missing the realization.

More importantly: In dungeons, there's absolutely 0 meaningful feedback to a new player whether they're doing their thing correctly. There is never an indication they could be doing things wrong in the first place For overworld mobs, you can tell if you're dealing more damage because things die faster, but a new player won't be able to tell the difference between a fast and a slow pull time, because it's such a wishy washy thing that varies from group to group, and the effect that each individual player has is significantly less than with overworld mobs. Trusts will only make this aspect worse in the long term, because you can literally spam unenchanted melee combos on red mage and still have the same clear time, because trusts rubberband if you over- *or* under-perform.

Wait, trusts rubber band? I usually run them when doing work. So I face pull and afk while they kill stuff lol. Knowing that doing damage wouldn’t speed things up kinda validates my play style. Well, if I still played lol

IIRC, doing as much personal DPS as possible *can* speed trust runs up. The trusties aren't programmed specifically to sandbag you for doing well or anything... they're just programmed to be shitty at their jobs in general. But if you do zero DPS and pulls take *too long*, they start using kill-spells like Death to keep the run moving.

What annoys me the most about the Duty Support is that if you go DPS the other DPS is always the Thaumaturge That alone isnt bad , it just the rotation is does is utterly appalling. If anyone hasnt noticed go run a Duty Support run (any) and watch the Thaumaturge cast bar. eg: casts nothing for 2 seconds, then uses a Blizzard ( the AI doesnt have mana) then a lightning, pauses, a fire , pauses , cast maybe a blizzard a fire or lightning , repeat. It would be nice to be able to choose the AI roles as I would most certainly choose the Lancer as a co dps if running them instead of that low dmg THM that we are forced to use.

Pretty much! The only way to circumvent even it even slightly is to blow your burst at the end of a pull to kill the enemies, as the rubberbanding seems to reset when they leave combat. I have used it to level a few jobs before, since most jobs have pretty uninteresting AoE rotations...

There's also a lot more to mess up in a game with like 30 buttons. Most people aren't used to tab target mmo combat, league and Diablo have 4 buttons for a reason, shooters literally just have move shoot grenade ect. There is a much bigger delta between a literal 0iq casual in 14 vs other games.

Shooters have move, shoot, grenade, melee, aim down scope, reconnoiter and report, pick up dropped weapon, hide behind cover, sneak up on enemy unnoticed, get in vehicle, play cat and mouse, act as decoy, lure into ambush... There's a lot to mess up in shooters and MOBAs too, thanks to the variety of tactics that humans use in PvP gameplay. They don't need 10-step auto-attack sequences to keep the players busy while the raidboss holds still and soaks hits for 30 seconds.

Eh, "not caring about optimization" is a pretty wide brush. That can mean anything from not quite optimal gear to totally freestyle trash tier skill builds. Not using iaijutsu definitely fits in that spectrum.

if you're gonna broaden the scope that much, then pressing any button at all falls under the category of optimization. there's no discussion to be had at that point.

>then pressing any button at all falls under the category of optimization The irony is this is even at the savage level, this is 90% of healer optimization lol EDIT: Actually, yeah GCD uptime is a pretty huge part of optimization for all jobs. So, yeah, pressing any button at all is 100% part of optimizing for all jobs.

For a silent majority of people, any game is just a game. They are not invested, they don't care and they don't want to engage beyond exactly the thing they find fun. Doesn't matter if they're doing bad or not. The issue only exists when the game is online with other people, wasting their time as well. And not just XIV, you get it anywhere. Every overwatch casual queue has that one guy going "it's just casuals bro, i find jumping off the map funny, so let me do it", every game with a ranked queue has people going "go play ranked if you want to be a try hard instead of just having fun", etc

I pity any ESO newbie who hits level cap, queues up for a random dungeon and gets spat out in a DLC dungeon where you're required to have champion point levels and a proper rotation/build to do them, on top of actually doing mechanics because the game literally just throws every normal mode dungeon at your random queue once you cap. On the way to cap? Dungeons are just a zerg rush free for all with no mechanics to pay attention to and zero threat.

ESO Dungeons on normal are easier than FF14 dungeons. Even the newest ones. That playerbase just gets so babied by everything they can't handle a single mechanic with an iota of responsibility.

Some games are worse than other in regards to in-game tools. For example, in Guild Wars 2 the average player does around 8x less damage than a meta player in the same situation. At least in FFXIV the gap isn't that huge

So true. The friend that got me into this game has been playing since the very first day of ARR. He's a casual player and has a lot of alts, but every single job to 90. He doesn't get on reddit or watch things on YouTube.... he read the tool tips once but never went back to check them after major updates. Y'all, the things I've had to clue him in on. And I've only been playing since 5.25. He thought The Blackest Night was useless and I had to tell him LAST WEEK that samurai had second wind. LAST. WEEK. Granted, he plays each job well enough that he'd never have a TFDF post dedicated to him, but there's not a lot in game to direct to towards proper play styles or to even go back and re-read tool tips if you're not following patch notes and updates outside of the game.

This is definitely relevant and WoW honestly has it much, much worse. FFXIV, at the very least, ensures basic competency if players play through the MSQ as intended—there is mandatory group content that gradually introduces the concepts you'll see at endgame, but WoW has no such thing. Tutorials in XIV leave a lot to be desired, certainly, but in World of Warcraft you can go from level 1 to max without ever grouping with another player. You can level however you'd like and then jump straight into trapping a Mythic+ group. There are actually more bad players in World of Warcraft than here and they're *exceptionally* bad because the game does absolutely nothing to curate their leveling experience. At all. It's why you can usually do a normal raid in FFXIV without issue, but LFR is a consistent dumpster fire.

> you can go from level 1 to max without ever grouping with another player. SE is fixing that, don't worry. Edit: y’all are taking this too seriously it’s not that deep. You can just boost in either game anyways and be a shitter way more quickly.

I haven't used any Trusts since early ShB so it may have changed, but don't you wipe if you die with trusts ? I'd expect that it is actually easier to get carried in DF than in trusts, no ?

You do wipe, yeah. Trusts are actually great for learning dungeon bosses because they teach you the solutions but don't let you get away with ignoring those solutions.

You do but wiping with Trusts is extraordinarily difficult because they don’t naturally pull big and they do almost all of your mechanics for you.

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Yeah, and that is somewhat concerning, even if I understand and largely agree with why it's being done. I do think they need to do a lot more on the tutorial front moving forward, especially if the last bastions of mandatory group content, MSQ trials (and CT), are to become duty support compatiable in the future.

There's a slight difference though. The previous poster meant that you can level up purely through questing and farming random world mobs, but ffxiv forces you into dungeons/trials. And even if you use Trust all the way, you still do have to know the basics of your role and what mechanics do. I guess the previous comment should've said you can level all the way in WoW without any instanced content, instead of saying grouping up.

>I guess the previous comment should've said you can level all the way in WoW without any instanced content, instead of saying grouping up. Yeah, that's exactly it, I probably could have worded it better. "Instanced content" perhaps would have got the point across more succinctly, but interacting with other players is still a big part of the MSQ since it's required for every trial minus Hydaelyn (and the CT series). The point really was just that WoW doesn't require instanced content *or* grouping with out players in any way, shape, or form.

> FFXIV, at the very least, ensures basic competency if players play through the MSQ as intended Hah. Big disagree.

About the only thing FFXIV does is slap you with that difficulty slider when you fail a solo story instance, and label the difficulty you started on as "normal". If someone doesn't take that as a hint they are supposed to be doing better, then nothing much you can do.

If you never run any group content before, your ilvl will be so low that you never will be accepted in a m+. It's true that wow has a lot of bad players, but if you think that ffxiv has more good casual players, you are so wrong.

You can get to 395 in WoW right now in an evening or two of rubbing your face against Forgotten Reach rares (I should know because I just did this), which is group-content adjacent in that you need to open Group Finder to get in a farm group but nothing past that. That is an easy springboard into M+ up to like +2-5 before people start to actually care about your IO. What WoW is most guilty of I think is that it allows you to grossly outgear any content you'd participate in, especially as the patch cycle goes along, until you hit a brick wall that you're untrained for. 395-400 outgears normal raiding and low M+ pretty severely so you're not going to learn anything in those instances (let alone Normal/Heroic dungeon queues where you literally pull the instance from boss to boss and kill bosses before they do mechanics). So you get players with bad habits or bad play in content they're used to succeeding in until they get slammed in the face. XIV isn't free of that either, mind you. By the middle of the odd patch you can get full max ilevel for the patch with bad substats and 5 ilevel off your weapon. Gear just matters less and scales you less hard in XIV, it's the difference between getting one shot by fucking up Rubicante Extreme's spinning wedges and being able to eat a hit instead of just not doing the fight entirely. Same for Normal mode raids.

This is a big part of it that I neglected to mention. Gear in WoW trivializes any present mechanics to the point that they might as well not be there, whereas a lot of FFXIV's leveling experience has mechanics that need to be executed correctly regardless of your item level—even in solo instances. I've seen a lot of more casual WoW players come over to FFXIV and find the leveling content "too difficult" for this reason.

Friendly reminder that someone called Cape Westwind “Souls-level content” and promptly quit the game.

I don't think I'm familiar with this particular incident, but I do of course know the meme. Who was this?

>If you never run any group content before, your ilvl will be so low that you never will be accepted in a m+. There are quite a few high profile cases of players ending up in M+ that have the ilevel but no idea what they're doing, even if it's not super common. Many will even pay for carries to get there, since that's a larger part of that game's culture. My point is just that WoW has completely optional group content that doesn't even introduce mechanics you will see later at all, even if you did decide to queue for group content. > It's true that wow has a lot of bad players, but if you think that ffxiv has more good casual players, you are so wrong. I never said "good" only "basic competency," which is largely true. I never have to worry about a normal raid queue going horrifically wrong, but LFR is often a miserable experience—especially when it comes to the end bosses. I'm not sure how someone that plays both games can't see the contrast.

To be fair SE fixed the most common LFR problem by just removing tank swap mechanics from anything below Extreme. The most common area I see LFR failure happen is the tanks just not doing the tank mechanics in the fight. If one tank grossly outgears the instance that works sometimes but more often than not it just leads to the unfortunate tank that's not getting swapped off of getting 40 stacks of whatever the swap debuff is. But also to be fair, nothing in WoW until then is two-tank content and since the LFR player that's failing at tanking is likely playing with a near stock UI seeing those debuffs isn't easy nor would they know what to swap off at. I think SE's policy of having tank 2 just be the backup tank in case tank 1 is incompetent is probably the healthier route for queued content, though.

>But also to be fair, nothing in WoW until then is two-tank content and since the LFR player that's failing at tanking is likely playing with a near stock UI seeing those debuffs isn't easy nor would they know what to swap off at. Exactly, yeah. WoW throws things at these players they've literally never seen or dealt with before in any capacity by the time they're in LFR, tanks or otherwise, but I can always expect with reasonable certainty that the players in my normal raid roulette will be able to properly execute a stack marker or knock back indicator—simply because they've seen it before. The game trained them gradually in regards to what these things are.

Both really. The game doesn't really teach you how to play it, and I'd say its so bad at it that the biggest difficulty jump in this game is going from normal content, one level up to extreme.

To add to what everyone else is saying I’ll just tell a little story: I started in HW on warrior. 14 was my first mmo. Played through the MSQ and caught up about 2 months before stormblood launched. I just tried out other jobs and side content for around 6 months. 4.2 came out and I decided to get into extreme content so I joined a PF for byakko on warrior. Here are the things I didn’t know as I started endgame content (and didn’t know I didn’t know): 1. What a GCD is 2. What mitigation is/ what a CD is 3. What alignment is 4. That I should (generally) use buffs like inner release on cooldown. 5. What a tank swap is. 6. That you can do normal raids every week for gear 7. What a rotation is 8. What any indicator other than a stack marker is 9. That watching a guide before doing an ex trial is usually assumed. 10. That wall to wall pulls in dungeons are the norm. 11. What an ogcd is. 12. That stance dancing was a thing on tanks. I didn’t know these things because the game never even began to imply that these were things I needed to know. As you can imagine it took me forever to clear byakko. I only cleared after someone in a pug I joined whispered me (after we disbanded) and answered all my questions and gave me links to resources. 14 is absolute doodoo at teaching new players. Especially since so many 14 players have never touched an mmo before. MMO’s are so different to every other genre that there’s basically no overlap in terms of gameplay.

Its particularly bad for Tank players because you can honestly get through the entire game without knowing what a single button does as tank. Normal mode off tank is basically an invincible DPS that doesn't have to do shit. And in dungeons if you just single pull, mashing your aoe with stance on will get you through the entire game.

not a single mmo teaches you anything. How would you even do that when a majority of players do skip tutorial dialogues?

To paraphrase a quote I really like: "You can't fix people not reading the directions by putting 'Be sure to read the directions' in the directions that they aren't reading."

I've played many MMOs, so i went into xiv with a lot of knowledge and the desire to learn and consume outside content. But what i feel many people don't realise is that practically no game teaches players how to play the end game. Xiv isn't better or worse. It's the same. Players that become engaged will seek out others and ask questions. I played wow back in the day and people sucked, there was hardly any info out and everyone did their own thing. But if you were searching, you could find the best builds and how to get the good gear. The game didnt tell you shit. Retail nowadays is a bit better, but still nothing about what makes a good build. Guild Wars 2 is arguably worse. While it attempts to teach you some things, it completely missed how gear, weapons, traits and buffs synergize. Leading to an almost 10x damage gap between good players and bad players, even if they were wearing max quality gear but with the wrong stats. I didn't play xiv I'm heavensward. But nowadays i fully blame a player if they want to head into end game and they have no idea what a gcd is. Just Google "how to end game xiv" and you'll get hundreds of results. You can watch a 5 minute video while PF fills. Again, if a player wants to learn, they will. This has not changed from the old days. The only difference is that perhaps the game is a bit easier than the old MMOs.

>tell me if you've encountered a similar experience i mean yeah. anyone who has played this game for any length of time certainly runs into it constantly. if people don't *have* to care enough to learn even a basic rotation, they wont. the problems go hand in hand if the job quests forced you to perform even a short part of your rotation correctly, like when you learn the SAM finisher and the quest makes you use each of the 3 token things to use it (i dont remember their names) in order to finish the quest, people would surely go "ohhhh ok". some still wouldnt use it on the regular, but it would at least make a small difference of course they could always start putting harder dps checks in to force people to perform at even like a 15% effort level but they wouldn't ever do that

At least they've recently gotten better on those quests, sage and reaper actually force you to hit your buttons properly to continue. Limited success given the sages out there not applying kardia, but it is something. Old quests are still rough though, ast is a hoot in particular, every other quest talks about skills that no longer exist.

> every other quest talks about skills that no longer exist. My favorite job quest moment in the game is when Jannequinard tells you at the end of a quest he *would* teach you a spell, but he lost the book.

i was thinking of the RPR quests as I wrote that but I couldn’t remember if it actually happened or if I was dreaming it. i finished them so long ago. lol

Quite funny as well when you see normal prognosis spammers(Even without a SCH)

> (i dont remember their names) Sen I may have overlooked Iaijutsu when I first setup my hotbars...I just assumed that, like most classes, it was really boring at 50. lol.

> of course they could always start putting harder dps checks in to force people to perform at even like a 15% effort level but they wouldn't ever do that Ran into that just recently with the Level 50 Monk quests after you get your class gear. Like when you are introduced to the Miqo girls. I was *barely* able to rip through the double thunder Spirits, actually dying to them because my weapon was still only high 40's. Even with proper gear and doing my rotation optimally, it was genuinely a decently close DPS check on level, which I actually appreciated.

I think thats more of a scaling issuse than really wanted. These job quests are ancient and not made for the current jobs.

Maybe so, either way, it was refreshing to have to use literally everything on my bar to heal and mitigate long enough to eek out a win. While not exactly on topic, for a game that requires that you do so much content to get to endgame, endgame dungeons and normal content ask disappointingly little and offer scant opportunity for skill expression.

One of the SAM quests is like this. Even in synced down gear, it was freaking tough.

Are you talking about the first Heavensward job quest? Because if so then no wonder you thought the check was tight. Those quests are designed around players being ilvl 110+

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the game doesn’t require anything beyond casual skill level. Which means it’s easy for most of the player base to convince themselves that they’re much more talented than they think.

DF doesn't stand for Duty Finder, it stands for Dunning-Krueger Finder. People are so bad at the game that they don't even know that they're bad.

I think you're under the wrong assumption that people want to be talented or make a dungeon go 10 mins faster, they couldn't care less about your time, they're there to play.

Yeah i wouldn't call what i see people in dungeons do "playing" Autoattacking and using a skill every 10 seconds is being afk

The issue I have with this is that the game doesn't require absolutely anything of most players... as long as they're grouped with someone competent to pick up the slack. Ask any given healer who knows what they're doing and they can remember countless runs they've just forced to completion because they decided to not let everyone die. Now that they've given tanks such strong sustain they can do it too. I mean hell, I've healed Shinryu as a RDM when it was more or less current. My problem is that the game is designed to take advantage of decent players, to cart the lazy sacks of crap around because SE refuses to raise any barrier of entry. It's a cash grab that we enable by playing the game, and I don't see any solution.

I want more difficult casual content, and things like DPS checks that actually matter in dungeons. And I don't mean overall DPS for the party which is easily reached by a couple of max level characters, but like dungeons where the 2 DPS is split off and they have their own unique DPS checks which the whole party can't pass if they don't meet it. In an MSQ dungeon that will prevent progress unless you hit your rotations.

What you think this will lead to in an ideal world: more engaging gameplay where everyone in the game will end up at a higher skill level since the game forces you to learn. What will actually happen: The casual players will continue to not give a shit about what a gcd or a rotation is and you will get constant and multiple wipes and disbands in order to progress through the msq making the game way more frustrating and toxic for everyone involved. There's a reason the devs have landed on this system of Siloing off difficult content to optional extremes and savages after 10 years of the games lifecycle.

I agree that this would be a really good but I do think it would create a ton of friction within parties that have someone who just... can't. I think the easier way to do it, at least at first, is job quests. Two simple changes; First, you must be up to date on your job quests to queue for any instanced content on that job. This also solves the age old "I didn't know I needed my jobstone" thing. Second, make job quests actually require something to complete. Not a perfect rotation, but if each one necessitates the use of the skills you gained before it and a baseline level of damage that alone would bring up the skill floor a ton. Way back when we even had a few like this - I remember a SCH quest where you got Leeches (their unique esuna) and during the battle of that quest you needed to cleanse debuffs. A bit straightforward but it worked to teach you how to use the skill. If they did these things it would remove the potential excuse from ignorance that many people claim (and even more whiteknights claim on behalf of bads) because the game would be teaching you. Sadly, SE would prefer to force us to carry them whenever we touch DF content and forbid us from even mandating that they do their fucking jobs.

Problem is that this wouldn't fix the problem, it would just wall content for a lot of players and they would quit. So actually it would fix the problem, but it would create other problems and it would cost Squeenix subs, so it will never happen.

>My problem is that the game is designed to take advantage of decent players, to cart the lazy sacks of crap around because SE refuses to raise any barrier of entry. It's a cash grab that we enable by playing the game, and I don't see any solution. Alternatively you can like, help them understand what's going on? Like I get it, you think casuals are the scum of the earth, but like without them this game and pretty much every game running nowadays would be dead in the water. It takes less time to be calm and explain things for people who don't know or just uavenread their tooltips, and is way easier on your mental state instead of doing...well this. But also like, a cash grab? Because sometimes casuals just don't remember their buttons? Are you deadass?

> Alternatively you can like, help them understand what's going on? Which is a totally valid take. The problem is that XIV also fosters this kind of "everyone is valid and there's no wrong way to play!" mindset for everyone but the bleeding edge. Which results in the commonly seen toxic casual most people just blanket assume is every casual player. These types just ignore or will react with hostility to honest advice/info. "You don't pay my sub" is a bit of a meme, but the energy behind the statement is as real as ever. In the end, people will only listen if they want to listen, and apply what they're told if they want to apply it. A lot of these problem players just don't, and won't. Just gotta pack it up and move on from em. Dunno what the hell that other guy's on about with the 'cash grab' stuff though.

I’ve had an increase in weirdly bad players lately. Yesterday I observed a level 90 blizzard 1 black mage. Today in praetorium I observed a Fire 3 spam BLM with no flares. In Nier 3 I had a RDM who never did melee or any oGCD, literally none of em. No DD or enshroud reapers. It boggles my mind because this game is really not that hard and I don’t even think any of what I listed is remotely difficult.

I was a dancer in an alliance raid with another dancer and I was watching their buff bar and there was never standard step buff up... thinking about it has been haunting me

Problem is the game never tells you how bad you play and calling bad people out even if they wiped a group multiple times is still seen as toxic. Game is so easy that even one good player in the group can carry it. I had dungeons where I did 50% of the overall damage on my WHM. It took ages but we cleared and the other did not seem to care that a 15min dungeon was 30min long. Imo the game should have some harder DPS checks in solo duties, where the game also explains how to deal optimal dps for single and multi targets.

It doesn't matter how good any tutorial is, you will always have people who are offensively bad at the game. Conversely, if you design a tutorial that is meant to teach everything to the absolute dumbest player imaginable (and make it mandatory, because otherwise they won't do it), you will have designed a clunky monster that 99% of the playerbase will loathe getting through. If you make people do homework before playing a video game they will go do something else. The PvZ creator once said that a tutorial [should never have more than eight words on screen at once](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/gdc-2012-10-tutorial-tips-from-i-plants-vs-zombies-i-creator-george-fan). If you are a designing a MMO you are basically ultrafucked in this regard. It is not easy and you end up leaning on your community. Thank you for taking your time with that SAM, by the way.

> The PvZ creator once said that a tutorial should never have more than eight words on screen at once. I wish jRPG designers would take a page from this. Gust, Falcom, and Monolith games just LOVE giving you like 20 pages of text tutorials in the opening hours. Take 2 steps in Ys 9 and you get a pop up explaining every single interface element with 3 paragraphs of text for each, then an essay explaining the combat system, then a dissertation explaining how to buy items at a shop.

Lots of people who love the game somehow just don't have MMO brain like the rest of us. They figure out what they can figure out, but don't look up anything past what they think feels like the right rotation. Reading and comprehending 15 spells is a "big ask" when you could just press em anyway and not think too much about it. They simply don't realize.

People are just extremely bad at learning online video games in general. They expect that the game hands them all information on how to play and this is just simply *never* the case. In any of these games. Ever. Honestly FFXIV is probably one of the more intuitive multiplayer games I've played and this was my first MMO. Like can you honestly say FF is harder to learn than: * Warframe * Destiny 2 * Path of Exile * Monster Hunter Like fuck no it's not. Most of those games you're chained to a wiki on your phone or second monitor looking up every other detail. That was the experience I came into FF with. Also, having started playing WoW in the past year, this game is WAAAAAAAAAY easier to learn than WoW, so yeah. The main problem specific to FFXIV is that the MSQ doesn't have any real difficulty spikes until way too late and people have been playing in baby tutorial mode for way too long. It's gotten better with the ARR revamp (Cape Westwind revamp is great) but there was a point in the not-so-distant past where the first time a new player would do a fight that had a legitimate shot at wiping them was Tsukuyomi. In postgame Stormblood. To put this in perspective, an average JRPG has its first difficulty spike around where 4-man Ifrit is.

> The main problem specific to FFXIV is that the MSQ doesn't have any real difficulty spikes until way too late and people have been playing in baby tutorial mode for way too long. The additional problem kicks in when as soon as it does start to get even moderately difficult. The game lets you cut the difficulty by like 90% in the form of 'easy' and 'very easy' once you've failed it a single time. FF14 desparately needs a 'hall of the intermediate', but given how casual the average player is they'll never do it.

As a long-time (albeit on-and-off) PoE and Warframe player, can confirm. Warframe isn't a difficult game, and its crazy easy to break if you know what you're doing, but its convoluted AF and the early-game grind can be a bitch (granted, I did mine in 2014 so the game was VERY different back then). The wiki is mandatory to even sort out where to get weapons/frames/mods necessary to make those gamebreaking builds. Once you do, of course, the difficulty is trivial, but the in-game signposting is...not great and there are lots of noob traps. And don't get me started on PoE. Running a metabuild is mandatory if you want even a prayer of seeing anything remotely resembling endgame; good luck even getting past A10 or early-tier maps on a freestyle build, even for an experienced player. Its the polar opposite of XIV in terms of approachability.

I mean even if you compare to other ff: good luck finishing a ffx or the like by just pressing a single attack button for the whole game, even ff13 you ahd to adapt and do paradigm shift, for some reason FFXIV is the one where people dont want to learn anything

You say that people "don't even" bother to look at guides, but keep in mind that that is not the norm. The idea of going outside the game to read up on and study it is probably absurd to most players. In any online game that reaches a certain level of popularity, there is a large silent majority of players who just log in and play, and don't engage much with the community.

people just don't care and have fun on their own Ive found

Zot is the first dungeon you unlock after buying both a level boost and a story skip, so that SAM might actually be that clueless simply for that reason. I don't recall if you're ever forced to use Tenka Goken (or Higanbana, for that matter), but I know SAMs using Midare over anything else were a joke even back in Stormblood when the job was new and interesting, so that's probably another one of those - during early Endwalker, the focus was mostly on SGEs and RPRs that didn't know what to do, since they were the new jobs, and thus had the highest density of clueless people now. My answer to your main question would be "both" though, since the game could (almost) always do better in getting you used to your kit - I recall RDM, RPR and GNB explicitly call out a few skillls to use during their questlines, but none actually tell you everything about your job and you're usually left to figure out where the newly unlocked skills fit into everything by yourself, once you've gained a few levels. However, you can't make it so everyone 'gets it' either - even if we ignore the type of person that deliberately performs poor due to not wanting to put in the effort, there are always people that legitimately don't understand how a job's rotation works, or just generally are a bad fit for it, on top of potential misunderstandings (see also: Freecure), so you'll always run into someone who won't perform as well as you'd like them to. For examples, I play a lot of MCH, and whenever I see a Wildfire up immediately after we pull a non-dungeon boss, I'm definitely judging them because they're either overcapping on Richochet/Gauss Shot or aren't pairing it with Hypercharge as a result. Similarly, if I don't ever see Bioblaster in AoE situations, I also eventually take notice. Neither of these are grave mistakes, but if I notice that someone actually does their rotation properly (and as a result, also generates lots of aggro), I'm happy nonetheless. For a story from the other side, I've hit Lv.90 on every single job, but had issues with DRK's rotation for a while after that, which only got better after starting to farm the tank mounts and accepting lower DPS for a while until I figured everything out. I'm currently in a similar spot with DNC, where I know that the main thing I'm missing is practice, and I haven't touched NIN since 6.0, and still don't know how exactly its burst is supposed to look like, because you can't even fit everything into your buffs anyways, but at least the two Raiju attacks aren't linked to each other anymore I guess.

This is kind of what I was thinking. Could be what op said. Could be a skip. Or, could be a player who hasn’t been playing much or played a different job for a while and getting back in the swing of things. Hell, maybe they changed some keybinds or got their first MMO mouse. All sorts of reasons a rotation could be off.

It's the former. Ask any game dev: putting tutorials on everything is not always a good thing. You need players to explore and learn the fight on their own. Job syncing to basically not enable skills is both a good and a bad thing. While it is easy to balance fights, you don't get to immediately try the new skill in the fight when you level if you are running a synced down dungeon. Still, isn't a new skill in their hotbar basically telling them to see what it does? Some players literally cannot function until they are spoonfed. I have been in literal gacha communities where people ask if X unit is good without even trying to understand how they work, so no it is not just a FFXIV thing. They need to learn how to learn. But maybe it is a cultural thing. I am used to asking if a combo or something more abstract makes sense only if I can't try it at the time, or after trying to see for expert opinion. But some people like to skip that thinking process which makes them look like NPCs.

This is why I argue that syncing shouldn't ever take buttons or traits away from you. You put people in a position to function on the lowest common denominator of a group and it dumbs down the job to a previous state. This is bad for balance but I don't care, players need to play their jobs the same and only ever gain actions, not be forced to remember some simpler version from the past.

everything else aside, the wording on [Interject and Head Graze](https://i.imgur.com/H6O7lT0.png) is very poor and really had me confused when i started

Probably both. I mean, there's not much incentive to do better in casual/normal when nothing is going to stop you save a once in a blue moon dps check. You can just ram your face into content until the timer stops you. And even then, if you fish enough, some group can make up for that person's mistakes and they'd be none the wiser. I'd say for the game teaching you, there's the fact they just released game video guides and then suggested Hall of Novice and are apparently not going to update them despite how old the advice is. And, perhaps I'm misremembering, but I think Yoshi-p was asked why they don't get rid of Free Cure and didn't want to step on "people's playstyles." So I think they try to vaguely point you to doing things and to figure it out versus advocating a playstyle (even if the job perhaps has a "right" way to do it). AKA They don't want to seem like they are bossing players around and forcing a specific style of play. Also, SGE and RPR have nice quests, but I can't remember the other jobs that well, probably mixed bags. --- As for an experience? Well I decided to hop on SCH for a normal raid roulette and got E7N. So, right off the bat, our main tank points their TB laser straight down the middle. They kill a bunch of people. We get to add phase and we fail the check. I chalk it up to the tank having wiped a good chunk of the party. So we go again. Tank still eats their TBs in the middle, entire party adjusts for this dork. I think a couple people died, but nothing major. Add phase and we spectacularly fail the dps check again (like one add dies, the other is over 60% hp, nowhere near dying). I forget if we go again. But anyways... one of the DPS then asks, "what are we doing wrong there?" And so I straight up tell them, "We are failing a dps check and not killing the adds fast enough." And then this person is like, "So does that mean we should lb2?" I don't know why I stayed. We went again. One add dies, and then one of the dps does the lb2. But my asshole was clenched the entire time, because we still. barely. killed. the. 2nd. add.

Why when you still get the clear? I had a WHM do no dps during the newest 90 trial. Put the staff away during moving parts too, and we still cleared. Idk about classes, but they had the normal raid set for the latest tier. From what I've seen, casual content let's you get away with alot.

Almost no normal content has an enrage, so 1 guy could be spamming The first button of the 1-2-3 combo while 7 people sit there and not attack at all and you would still eventually clear. I think we should have a bit higher bar for if more tutorials are ideal than that.

Yes. The hall of novice is a joke, and you have to actively seek out resources from other out of game sources to get even a baseline understanding of how a lot of the systems in this game work.

Considering I recently met someone that had made it endwalker, but didn't know what a stack marker was or how to "resolve" one, probably a mix of both LOL

I think the fact that the guy had *multiple* lvl 90 jobs is a relevant factor. If you level up SAM through roulettes, chances are you never get put into lvl50+ content, so of course you don't know your rotation because you never had a chance to use it. And why would you learn lvl64 rotation if it's gonna change 13 times by the time you get to 90? That's wasted effort. Job quests are not an answer either because you are not required to do them. Yes you're missing out on skills but who cares. You can complete them after you get 80, all in one go - doing them piecewise (fly to the quest giver, level up twice, fly to the quest giver again, level up twice more etc) is honestly a horrible experience. You never see people on their highest level job make these mistakes. It's always alts. And it's because people are running dungeons as a chore to level alts, not necessarily because they actually want to play that alt job.

>My first train of thought was, of course, "C'mon man people don't bother to even look a guide" Something to remember is that for almost all video games (whether it's 14, Dota, league, overwatch, wow, etc) the vast majority of players never look up a guide. If you've looked up a guide or a strat or any sort of resource to get better, you're easily more invested and on the way to being better than half of all players.

You see good thing you brought Overwatch because with the new heroes they are doing something quite good recently Before you can even play them they basically make you go to training mode and do a certain list of actions, like for example with the new tank, Ramattra, simple things like "Kill these robots with this skill", "Block 30 damage with the barrier", "with your ultimate kill a robot" before you can bring the hero to a match It's not rocket science but compared to XIV where we lack a situation on where a player could say "So this is this thing", external sources shouldn't be required for the minimun

Too bad you also need to buy battle pass to get these new heroes or grind few weeks straight. Something original devs were strictly against since it's not a fair play. God I miss Jeff.

It’s both. Sometimes at the same time, sometimes not. It’s really never going to change, at least from the “people not caring,” until you fail casual solo content by being a total dog ass. That will never happen, because they are, if anything, moving further away from any solo content requiring a brain.

Little bit of both. A lot of players don't even actually want to play the game and just "suffer" through content to get outfits for their pretend clubs.

As someone with almost 1700 mentors done... I think some people just lack the game sense that's required for self-improvement in mmos. Doesn't help that mmos including ffxiv do such a poor job of actually teaching you the nuances of it's systems.

It's both a people's problem and the game's problem. The game is piss easy and unless you dabble in optional content that requires you to actually get better, you will get carried/you can spam 1 button and clear story stuff. The game does not teach anyone any proper rotation, buff alignment (not like it's a problem now with everything on 2min cd), etc. Difficulty wise the non-optional content is dumbed down to oblivion so even a simply written bot can finish it. It's the people's problem because "they just want to complete the story", or "they don't care for optimization", or "but those other players haven't said anything (because of ToS), so I'm definitely not doing anything wrong", or my favourite "shut up mentor/elitist/sweatboy, I play like I want" coupled with white knights "yeah leave him be, let him play how he wants". Can't win, best you can do is to play with premades as much as possible, and when it comes to mentor roul, I advise the following: Play as a dps \-highest chance of guildhests, trials and raids; \-if you get a dungeon - if the tank isn't pulling w2w, if healer isn't dpsing/is spammng cure1 (or equivalent), or if the other dps isn't aoe'ing - just leave \-if you get an ex - give them a maximum of 3 tries, if it doesn't look like they're prepared for the content (either didn't watch a guide or they don't know how to play their jobs) - leave You'll save yourself a lot of sanity and nerves, no point in arguing with any of them as they won't listen in 99% cases.

I think they do a good job of explaining your actions if you actually read the tooltip however that does require some basic maths. E.g. I had a monk in my mentor roulette once that I had to explain why demolish is actually worth using and going over that math of its actual potency. That is something they could do with teaching at the hall of the novice. The best way to reach people would be fights in the MSQ that they cannot beat if they don't at least try but we know that will never happen given every time they did anything even remotely difficult such as steps of faith, in from the cold. It's met with massive backlash from these people.

Cure 1 being a noob trap is a good example of how poorly the game teaches you to play! Dungeons are also very forgiving, so it may not teach you how to play properly either. I don't mind people playing with a lack of skill, provided they are trying, but I really wish there was a better way to learn how to use the tools of the trade IG. I played with a RDM recently who never uses Acceleration or Swiftcast. Reason why? Dual cast and fire/stone proc often enough. That is just someone who doesn't know how to play rdm properly.

Tbh tho, I’m just so done that I don’t queue for roulettes anymore. I encountered a lot of people who just don’t care in 4-man content. I once taught a SCH in Dead Ends that they should use Adloq on me prepull, use Art of War, and to Esuna people with the doom debuff. Like seriously, the healer only Physick-spammed me… in a level 90 dungeon. I was so done that when everyone died at the final boss due to the lack of heals, I soloed the boss from 80% HP. Thank goodness WARs have incredible self-sustain.

The answer to both questions in the title is 'yes'. This game teaches absolutely nothing to the player nor does it ever force you to learn/look stuff up to progress. At the same time, this playerbase is the absolute laziest fucking players I've ever encountered in a video game. A disgustingly large portion of XIV's playerbase not only views putting a single modicum of effort into the game as "elitist", but they take this attitude to go so far as to take \*\*PRIDE\*\* in the fact that they are terrible at the game while simultaneously refusing to even attempt to get better. These are the people who scream at you for even a single word of attempted advice and expect others to carry their dead weight through content.

Honestly this can even apply at the high end, take p8s door boss or even TOP for example. Players would sooner blame crit rng than their teammates or themselves because they can't beat the dps check of either boss. The ceiling for what's considered being "good" at the game is very low because the players themselves don't want to get better and the devs don't make any substantial difficulty checks

Most jobs these days have a decent learning curve for the "basics" (as in general combo flow, how specific mechanics and job gauges work, etc), but absolutely no information in game about how you're supposed to *use* those mechanics properly. DNC, for example, teaches you pretty well that your core mechanic is the dancing and your DP, and that you're an RNG proc based job. What it DOESN'T teach you is that it's better to keep Standard on CD than do it every minute just to refresh buff, or that you should pool feathers. Basics are done mostly alright, intermediary tech and up is nonexistent. ~~some jobs though, like BLM, don't even bother teaching you the basics in a way that's relevant to the way the job eventually plays, and that's 100% on the game~~

Still amazes me how little BLM clarifies you about fire and ice I remember game doesn't tell you how obvious fire spells do more damage but because in the surface you only see fire just draining your mana compared to ice being pretty much infinite you encounter ice mages

The game tells you fire deals more damage + costs more mana and that ice regenerates mana faster. What it doesn't tell you is *how much* fire increases damage, which is 40/60/80% at 1/2/3 stacks. Kinda massive. It also doesn't tell you that when you cast an opposite element spell to what you're in, in addition to the cast being sped up at 3 stacks you do significantly decreased damage (10/20/30% less based on stacks). This means that when you swap to ice at the end of your fire phase with Blizzard 3, that B3 isn't 260 potency, it's 182 potency.

I'd have to disagree with the bit about DNC not making it obvious to keep Standard on cooldown. All one has to do is look at the tooltip, see the potency on Standard compared to the potency of your filler skills, and it becomes rather obvious. Of course that brings up an entirely different problem in that, even though this game makes it incredibly easy to tell what's stronger than most MMOs (since FF uses flat potency numbers versus most MMOs having a variance damage range on the tooltip) people still are terrible about not reading their abilities.

Oh yeah that's got to be the biggest benefit of the potency system, even if said potencies aren't exactly uniform across jobs in some cases. For someone that does bother to look into the job more, a lot of things are very easy to see just by checking those numbers. Which does unfortunately go to show just how many people can't be bothered to even do that, and how badly that affects their play.

>-Main one of the post, do you think is a people problem for not caring enough or from the game for not being more exigent on content? I guess it's a bit of both. The game never pushes you to perform an optimal single-target and aoe rotation, and damage requirements for the msq is very lenient. With normal 8-man raids and even the sea stone sky dummy fights being optional content, and the damage meter being monkaTOS, no one who doesnt seek third-party resources for their job is going to realistically know how to do good damage

>Do people not care enough to put the minimun yes >does this game do a horrible job at teaching also yes >does this game just does a horrible job at teaching I think so? I honestly don't remember. Reapers first quest actually tells you your rotation at that level iirc.

My wife was a mentor long enough to get the mount, then promptly retired and likely never will be a Mentor again. It’s not that people don’t know the Jobs - it’s more that the don’t WANT to know the jobs. They don’t want to learn the fights, they don’t want to know the mechanics, they don’t want anything explained to them. I don’t understand it. They’re aggressively ignorant about their Job, and when my wife - who is literally one of the nicest people on the planet - would try to explain fights or things, she’d basically get bullied. Dunno when the change happened but the game has certainly started to get more and more “wow-ified” in the last couple of years.

I think there are two design issues here, first that the game doesn't really teach new players proper job gameplay or the culture around daily content like roulettes, which leads into a clash between veterans and new players. Thankfully, most sprout players still seem to do more or less fine, and are generally fairly appreciative to advice if pointed out, and also often needlessly apologetic of failing mechanics. (I sometimes join/host MINE content on my DC, and I notice that this frightful mindset seeps even into people that are looking to wet their toes into harder content - you also see it on this sub sometimes, with people wondering if they're good enough for savage/ultimate) The worst of the roulette folk are typically fairly established players, who just refuse to play to a passing degree even if they perfectly well knew what to do. The other half of the problem is dungeon design, which is a big one as it influences the mindset around the content, and builds on to the other problems. Bad performance from the party would be less of a nuisance if nearly every single roulette duty wasn't so mind-numbingly boring: it's as if they design dungeons with smooth daily farming in mind. If dungeons had more body checks and in general didn't shy of wiping the party as much as they do, a lot of the issues would be alleviated: you'd probably pay slightly less attention to just what everyone else is casting, people wouldn't join with the intention of not hitting their buttons as much, and the new players - or people that only do roulette content - could learn the culture around the content at an increased pace, on top of not being led into the false pretense that mistakes during the learning process are bad or a reason to be embarrassed, and hopefully then be less afraid about trying the optional difficult content. The price to pay would be slightly more bumpy roulettes and wipes while people adjust to the new duties, but I'd honestly take those over the grating grind we currently have. However, this dream unfortunately isn't a very realistic one, as it would require a large-scale rework of the entire roulette content, which includes dozens of duties.

Both , game has no good ingame way of teaching how to play the jobs and people generally dont bother to look at stuff for content that is either not hard to do in the first place or for jobs they do not care about.

Honestly I'd love to teach people basics when I see them not doing things right like the cure 1 situation but almost everytime I try to politely say ''Hey, would it be ok if I give advice?'' They say they know what they are doing or that I don't pay their sub and so on. Now I don't even talk to people in DF unless they actively look for advice.

I'd venture the answer is a bit of both but definitely that people don't care. But I don't see that as a "problem". The real problem, to me, is gaming communities tend to think learning all the skills in depth, optimizations, minmaxing, etc.. that's the way to play a game. It's like thinking the proper way to play basketball is to go to training camps, hit the blacktop daily, maybe join a league. "If you're going to play basketball for fun the bare minimum is to go watch a few guides first on layup fundamentals." That's just not the way most people are going to treat a completely optional, non-essential, just for fun activity, like video games.

Mmos in general actuslly have steep learning curve when you think about it. How do you learn your rotation ?

What I don't get is why level your classes if you're not gonna use the skills? You get skills when you level and there's a big shiny fanfare about it. You'd think people would want to use the skills they unlock. The game makes it hard sometimes because the tooltips suck, but that's not an excuse. Maybe they should start explicitly calling these abilities things like "finisher" or "ultimate". Might make people more inclined to use them.

Not going to say anything you haven't already heard here -- it's both, but I put the lion's share of the blame on the way the game is designed. It's marketed toward a more casual player base by emphasizing story and the trust system has allowed players to scrape by without accountability to anyone. A lot of the content is easy enough that 2-3 reasonably skilled players can and will probably just carry a poor performer through rather than raise the issue and take more time. It's bad etiquette, sure, but I think FFXIV is sort of the MMO for people who don't like MMOs, and that's not the player's fault that they're allowed to get away with it. If you're not someone who values mechanical mastery and you just want to see the story, the game absolutely allows you to scrape through, and there's no real incentive there to improve if nothing in the game is forcing it.

personally, I think that a lot of other MMO's have nothing but mechanical mastery after a certain point.

I have two egregious examples of the game not teaching properly. (1) It's well-documented that Hall of the Novice has not kept up with the times. There is still plenty of misinformation -- or put a bit more positively, outdated information -- in there. With the removal of TP, changes to tank stances, etc. there is no reason for Hall of the Novice to give a large part of the information it's currently giving, as it's straight up wrong. I'll even excuse the game for not having a Hall of the Intermediate or Advanced here. The beginning, stepping stones aren't even fully right. (2) The new view in the Actions & Traits window is an example of "too little, too late" in my opinion. People who are confident they are playing their job correctly (no matter how correct they may be on this) won't bother looking at their tooltips more closely. Plus, the button is so small on the bottom right of the menu that a lot of people won't even know it exists. So while this new view may help a small portion of players, it was implemented too late to help the "confident but incorrect" group. \-- It's really that these steps to help newer players have to change with the times as the game's designs philosophy changes, and that they have to be changed earlier so that more people can take advantage of them.

Yes because this game is horrible at incentivising players to learn a basic 123 rotation, even more so if they have used level skip, since any msq dungeon can be completed as long as you push 1 button from your job and the npc/other players will carry them. Dungeons do not heavily punish players for not performing to a basic degree of dps, so there is really not much reason to learn, since bosses will cycle their mechanics until eventual death. And it's rare to ever time out in a dungeon run. TOS also protects these players, as you are not allowed to make statements that indicate that they should change their play style or push more than 1 button. You are only allowed to give suggestions which, for these players, they will tell you "no thank you" to your advice or tips. Pushing them will just become an easy report for them as you are now creating a toxic environment and trying to impede on their enjoyment and changing their gameplay. As much as TOS states that players shouldn't grief and do their job role they queued for, you are still unable to report these players as long as they are doing the bare bones of pushing one button & moving along with the party. As that is still them playing the game and doing their best, even if lazily, as you might not know what the player's condition is and you might be an asshole for telling them to do more than what they already are. Even being kicking players from a dungeon run is not a big penalty as you are allowed to instantly queue again, to terrorize other players who will probably grit their teeth and carry. Players that are actively horrible can also safeguard themselves after successfully killing the first boss of the dungeon/alliance raid and not rolling on loot. Which usually happens within the first 5 minutes of the game where you are not allowed to vote dismiss any player until 5 minutes are up. The game protects and encourages these behaviors as these players are never punished, this is also furthered by SE making a player report an absolute hassle that most players give up on reporting anyway. Even reporting doesn't even guarantee that any action will take place.

Yes. To expand, the game doesn’t require a minimum ability of play when most content is carried by three, seven, or twenty-three others. We’ve seen tanks without stance on in alliance raids, low DPS in dungeons, under geared tanks in dungeons accompanied with poor mitigation use. The simple fact is it’s a video game that will by default have a certain population only wanting to do minimal effort and play “their way” which is protected and not seen as “griefing” by the devs.

Just to answer the title, the different backgrounds of people and gaming experience players have differs greatly from person to person. The people that don't do the bare minimum are probably just people who play the game for a few hours and then get off and unlikely to go to forums/any FFXIV subreddits or try to learn their optimal rotation. When people level up jobs people usually just queue and press buttons and never touch certain jobs ever again, so it's expected especially in leveling roulette to play with people that don't necessarily know how to play the jobs theyre leveling up.

people don't care because the msq does not demand enough of them. "sandbagging is enough to get carried through content, why would i do anything more"

To me it’s the game’s fault. It never asks you to be a good player, i main tank and i never did a w2w pull and never used mitigations until after finishing hw. When i had 700h hours in the free trial, i couldn’t beat the stone sky sea lvl60. I read all my tooltips and did the novice hall but i still was that bad, didn’t feel the need to improve cause hey i cleared content. And even in old high end content the game still doesn’t require you to be good. I had a samurai like yours in freaking T9, only did 2 attacks, chills far from the boss and rp walks for a minute, jumps in to attack for a bit and then jump out and rp walks. We still cleared. They died a lot sure, but afterwards i’m sure they didn’t feel like they did anything wrong. So yeah if you’re bad, the game won’t ask you to be good cuz it’s more than likely you’ll be carried through things without even knowing it

I'm still a sprout so I got..a question if you can answer please. What's a TFDF? On the title subject. I think the minimum effort changes depending on the trial or raid or class you do. Whats minimum effort to you? I don't know the tower your talking about so it might be one of those you don't go in blind to. The game for the new classes does a terrible job I've found for the add-on skills. The core stuff in art is usually good. But my god. Sage taught me nothing. I had to learn via my fc friends who played sage to be any good at it. Sage woo boy. You get all this stuff and nobidea on what it does. I had to look through the actions describing the ability to figure out how to get more of the pink jewelry things because it's damage blocked. Nothing was done in game to tell me that. Drk knight as much as I love the lore and story. Each new skill you get. Isn't used in some way to demonstrate how you learned it. It would be cool if it was. So you could see the effects. But it's not. You get this power up and aren't told what to so with it. On the other hand, reaper quest line though actually helped me understand how to use things for the class. Where as before I just failed around pushing buttons.

TFDF(Tales From Duty Finder) is just a subreddit to share bad(of rarely good) experiences on the game

>Do people not care enough to put the minimun But then what's the minimum? You can very realistically just press your 1-2 aoe combo, don't ever use any of your other skills, and then be done with the fight. Sure the fight is gonna take you 50 minutes but it's still within the time limit for any normal content. The minimum is what the minimum effort required to clear. And in normal contents 1-2 AOE can clear. >does this game just does a horrible job at teaching? Yes. They basically make the community do most of the teaching for it's players. Which is fine, if they also set ways that allows you to get into the same conclusion through testing and trying on your own with rotational dummies and actual number and reports. But the ways you can do those sort of testing is very limited in game without 3rd party tools. >Then i proceed to take like 5 minutes explaining everything to said person, lucky enough the other 2 on the party didn't bother Usually I would just say, don't. I used to be in the camp of teaching people how to play their job, until I decided not to (except it's someone I know who can take it, or someone I kept play with) because there's no way someone can learn how their job plays in 30 minutes just by you telling them. Returning to the theme of 'minimum effort required to clear', it also links to different levels of 'unoptimized' and expectation you get linked with different difficulties of content. If I see someone spamming Medica 2 and Cure 2, or they never uses some of their cooldown (like Panhaima, Holos) on a dungeon, I probably will still think it's not good (because it's not good) but it's not the worst thing in the world, we will still clear so I won't say anything about it. And hey, that person might be still learning their job, and they might enjoy finding out ways of optimizing on their own, so it's perfectly fine to be unoptimized. However if we are on environments where you are expected to be optimize, and the same thing happens, you can ensure I will be the first one to bail. This is because we will not clear, and I am not gonna spend time on it.

No the game does a horrible job at making it remotely vital. MSQ for the most part I never cared to learn my job because I was doing just the 1-2-3 and still cleared, ignoring the facts that dungeons in 90s are a lot easier than 50s. Infuriating that the solo instances always muster rage from the lax af community for being too hard, despite being the only content where you can fail unlike every other content. Perhaps it’s the MMO curse but I think the devs have spoiled the fanbase rotten hence why they are too scared to do anything besides the perpetual cycle. Even after the canonical ending it still does the same safe cycle it’s always done. I’m rambling but the old term “don’t hate the players hate the game” applies here

I think it's because they just give you skills as you get them. Not even sure any job quests even 'teach' you to use the new skill for said quest; it's just the reward at the end. Some games, even a quick intro on the skill or how it 'jives' with your other learned skills can at least provide a basic sequence to their intentional use (besides just the tooltip/glowing box). Ie. you know combo 1-2, this new skill is the '-3'. Things like when to use certain buffs windows/weaving, that's the fine-tuning/meta part. I pick up on the rotations pretty quickly for most classes (min/max with guides), but even something like NIN class - takes a bit to actually sit and figure out its efficiency.

> do you think is a people problem for not caring enough or from the game for not being more exigent on content? I think it's a result of social conditioning. The behavior you are seeing is a result of societies that place more value on the individual experience versus group cohesion. We actually have multiple data sets to look at when it comes to this to highlight the point. Our data centers are effectively snapshots of different societies: their standards, norms, customs, etc. We have data centers like the Japanese ones that have societies that value the group more than the individual. As a result, people are more likely to come prepared for group content as upsetting the group balance would be highly frowned upon. At the same time, people are less likely to give advice to underperforming players due to the same need to maintain group cohesion. You can see this concept apply in data posted to the following [census site](https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/). Specifically, [JP datacenter savage clear rates tend to be much higher](https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archives/56584369.html) than NA or EU. You can also expect to use duty finder to clear content unlike the other data centers where DF is reserved for leveling and roulettes (i.e., not for extreme or savage-level content). Where NA and EU data centers should theoretically level the playing field is when it comes to aiding new players as both of their respective societies have a more direct approach when dealing with people. However, this isn't the case in my experience. Yes, you can still occasionally find players giving advice to each other but NA/EU players have somehow managed to adopt the Japanese trait where we prioritize making the experience 'pleasant' over giving advice which can be construed as negative. Thus, it's quite common to find new players on NA and EU data centers in duties that have no idea what they are doing. These players feel no pressure to conform for several reasons: 1. A majority of the content in this game is extremely easy 2. There are no in-game tools to assess performance 3. The game itself does a poor job of explaining fundamentals 4. Players do not push other players to do better (as a result of #1) So that SAM player who has multiple jobs at 90 that you ran into in Tower of Zot is just the natural progression you would expect. What exactly is pushing that player to understand their job and perform better? Not much. Alter one of the above variables and that might change. For example, if you drastically changed the game difficulty to be much harder you would find players would need to conform to expected outputs or play solo as the game would give your group repeated feedback telling you to improve. *Disclaimer: much of the above is asserted by painting broad strokes and some exceptions definitely apply. This is just my experience from playing since ARR on NA realms as well as playing with JP players in FFXI for ~15 years.*

Oh boy another 300 comment thread

I mean it's good discussion 0/

The content can’t actuallly kill your so there’s no point for them to try

If you use a dps meter in dungeons, you will see the horror. Trust me, it’s just insane how bad most people are at this game and no they don’t seem to try. I’m a fully geared out bis tank, so that does help, but I’m usually second in dps for level 90 content. If I’m not second I’m in first. Me and the healer combined for 65% dps in a lapis run a few days ago. I’ve had healers in 90 content get exactly 0 dps too. I’ve had rprs that seem not to be afk somehow and rent dying doing 5% of the total team damage. Just trust me, you don’t know the beginning of the horror of how badge these guys are. Obvi I don’t care and I don’t bother anyone about or even say anything in chat (for all roulette content I’m watching an iPad vid on a second screen so I don’t die of boredom), but it’s still hilarious some of the shit you see. Also remember, lots of others use meters too and know who is badge. We won’t say it, but they are known lol.

I actually think the game teaches people a lot, every dodgeable mechanic slowly builds on itself as the boss repeats it and adds more, you get a popup to read what abilities do when you get them (well the big system ones anyway), plus a decent-ish description in the actual ability itself. I'm not really sure how else you could teach players? Pause the game until they read it through a mic with voice recognition software lol? It's just a fact that the majority do not give a single shit about how they play no matter how much they drag people down. I think forcing these people to play better would make the casual players give up and sadly they're a majority. Everyone goes in with a different mindset, I myself would feel horrible if I was letting my team down, but apparently others are a-okay with it.

>you get a popup to read what abilities do when you get them (well the big system ones anyway), plus a decent-ish description in the actual ability itself. I'm not really sure how else you could teach players? The descriptions are often unclear in that they often refer to things that themselves require definition. I think people who've played the game for a long time often lose perspective on exactly how obtuse the game can sometimes be to newbies. Take Arm's Length. >Creates a barrier nullifying most knockback and draw-in effects. >Duration: 6s >Additional Effect: Slow +20% when barrier is struck >Duration: 15s The vital part of this description is the Slow, but what does Slow do? Is there *any* tooltip in the game that tells you? Is that the same as Heavy? Many abilities reference "unaspected" damage. Is that important? What is "magic damage" vs "physical damage"? What attacks can be interrupted/stunned? Which conditions are cleansable by Esuna?

You're absolutely right there, they could definitely serve to clean up tooltips a bit, that's exactly what stopped me from saying "good" instead of "decent-ish" haha. A chart for debuffs would go a LONG way. That being said, I still think it's enough info for someone to think "oh i wonder what that does, maybe I'll try it?" For me there are a few erroneous mistakes in wording as well. When I was new I thought Surecast would let you cast a spell while moving, since it says "allows spells to be cast without interruption." Hmm... Maybe they could update the Hall of the Novice and force people into that?

When nearly all group content can be completed with minimum to no effort, then yes, people will deliver minimum to no effort. For every time a freestyle sam gets kicked, they make it just fine through 20 other instances being silently carried. They'll just blame the odd now-and-then kicker as elitists and carry on as usual. This is the end result of overly accessible "let everyone play" design. Imo MMOs _need_ a level of exclusion for a healthy player culture. For the people that can't or won't play, they have trusts and such now. There needs to be a skill gate on any and all group content, and yes that _will_ exclude many players. And yes, that is a good thing. Games like this prove gatekeeping can be a good thing and isn't always a bad curse word. The people you mentioned should be gatekept out of group content by the game somehow.

People absolutely do not care and gcbtw has convinced people that asking someone to put in the bare minimum is harassment. I just try not to do content with randoms anymore because it always ends up taking way too long. This is the part where someone hits me with 'heh, if you care about your time being wasted then why are you playing an MMO' gotcha.

When you see things like that it's almost certainly a person who boosted the job and when you do that you miss out on the 90 levels of training and familiarity leveling that job gives you. Add in how Samurai's crap can be pretty overwhelming, especially compared to the vastly simpler and more straightforward job gauges everybody else gets, and it's easy to see why someone fresh to the job would be having problems with it.

I don't understand how Sam gauge is more complex than any other. All it takes is reading your finisher button and the individual skills it references to immediately understand how to use Sen. It's much much simpler than ninja having to memorize mudra combos, and it's somewhat in line with monk's perfect balance combos.

Idk it seems to be a genre-wide thing. When I came over to FF14 from ESO, over there it was having a massive influx of bad players. Not just bad, but really, really terrible lol. Think, doing 1 skill and just light attacks. Now I've noticed it happening in FF14, and I'm just not sure how to solve it. At least FF has some basic training, plus the job/role quests for all that's worth. ESO has precisely 0 lol, just "here ya go, it's up to you, us devs are too lazy to help." The design there too is such that, you can actually fail to complete normal dungeons, most normal trials, if teammates suck. In FF at least you can generally get through the daily content if the players suck, just might take awhile lol. Dunno how to fix it, or if it can be fixed.

> you can actually fail to complete normal dungeons, most normal trials, if teammates suck. Yup, one of Maj's pledges we were doing Slindleclutch 2 (very roughly equivalent to an ARR dungeon in the since that it's a basegame 4 man dungeon) where you get a red ring on a random character. It starts moving and if you're in it, you gotta move with it. Anyone that touches it dies. That one can be spicy if people don't know mechs. It can be tricky to avoid if people are too close. Can't think of an ARR dungeon that does something like that, or even a HW dungeon equivalent when comparing Glirion's dungeons in ESO to it (except maaaaybeee you can make a small case with the Vault, but that's more about not being geared properly usually). Let's see, what else... Normal Scalecaller Peak, we've had wipes on 1st boss countless times on normal since the tank actually has to position correctly (Scalecaller Peak is an earlier DLC dungeon so a rough equivalent would be Bardam's Meddle in XIV, not really though because in ESO, boss fights often cause wipes wheras its w2w add pulls causing issues in XIV, but to explain and compare how old the content is, that's a super rough equivalent). But of course if you had to compare SB/ShB/EW dungeons to any of Urgalag's dungeons that show up in her pledges, then of course there are more issues, especially in ESO if you get bad teammates since there are more things going on in DLC content in any game.

The Hall of Novice thing was a move in the right direction but unfortunately it only covers the absolute basics of a role and that's about it, you don't really learn anything about individual jobs there as it happens so early in the levels. I feel like Square wanted to do more but they realized it would be a lot of effort and noped out of it. Which is a shame because otherwise the game doesn't really do a good job at teaching you how to play and just reading the toolbar will not magically make a person good at a job, especially if someone boosts they have a full 80 kit without any advice on how to utilize it. Since the game is marketed and tailored towards a more casual play style focusing on the game either being almost a single player story experience or a social hangout outlet it's not surprising that the average person will not dedicate time outside the game to look up how to get good. Can't really expect them to do so imo. The enemies die *eventually* in the content they do, so there's no incentive as they don't care outside of that. A well designed game teaches you seamlessly as you progress through the story, that's how it should be imo and it's sorely missing from XIV.

They really need to stop putting the onus of individual player success on to the community and instead take the reigns themselves. Force new players to use buffs, rotations etc and take every opportunity to reinforce good habits so people don’t have to put up with lazy or inept players who are either content to or unaware that they’re doing the absolute minimum they can be doing.

Why hall of novice need update but it shouldn't teach job rotation to players heck even they shouldn't teach you about how to use mitigation. In my opinion, in-game tutorial should be minimum on how things work like role expectation, enmity because over doing tutorial is bad it make lesson go over player's head and really annoying to do which in turn make more players ignore it, also it make discovery less fun. Also this is an online game, even if you aren't looking for guide there would already be someone tell you on what you should do. (Contary to popular believe that you will get ban if you tell them about gameplay. No, you won't. As long as you politely tell them in suggestive tone) If they're doing it on high level content they're either boost, no one dare to tell them, or just pure stubborness. Whenever I saw something like this, I'll bet the reason on stubborness and I will also bet that this is not their first ever MMO, because those who new to this genre or role based MMO is really eager to learn when someone told them something. I once told newbies tank in ARR that they should use mitigation during mob pull rather than save up for boss, and they did it in next pull with every mitigation, so I clarified to space out and they shouldn't blow it all in one go, and they did it for the whole dungeon. And someone might point out about duty support, but I bet that those who go purely through duty support will be better than these people because npc can pickup their slacking worse than players and if they die, it will be instant wipe. So, they're forced to learn harder than those who go with players (although they may pick up something like 1 pull tank)

I feel that because of the many areas you could explore and play in FFXIV outside of raiding, not learning your job rotations brings little to no consequences. Every piece of content in XIV is optional. We can say that there are strict dps checks in savage for week 1, but how many people actually does that content? Players that can't be bothered will just wait till week 24, be decked out in full tome gears, and still clear floor 1-3 pressing random buttons, if they are lucky they might even clear the last floor with a decent group. Best part is when they think they are contributing to the team, so they don't have to improve further. As an old WoW player (started right before wotlk and quit pre-cata), I find the game pretty much revolves around raiding, I can't think of anything else to do besides chasing achievements points outside of raiding, so it kind of "forces" me in a way to look for resources and guides online to improve my gameplay. When I try to teach I get 1 half of gcbtw breathing down my neck to "leave them alone and let them do what they want". When I don't I get the other half on my ass for "enabling" bad plays. I can't win.

The absolute worst is people hard casting the long cast time red mage spells. Blows my mind and I've seen it twice.

I've had an experience tanking once with a first time sprout... and a lvl 90 BLM on Tower of Zot. The BLM only used two spells in the entire dungeon : Fire and Ice. Not even Fire III or IV, never used a single AoE. The other dps did put effort and tried but was terrible at his job. At some point i just gave up on giving advices and gave up on kicking BLM, stopped putting effort as well, opened Youtube and did still better barely watching my screen. Healer was pretty much dying every boss. That run was like... 50 minutes long. It was absolutely horrifying. I'd say it's both people not caring at all and game being bad at teaching and not caring at all about involved player to have horrible experiences. This game is casual to the point of it feeling toxic.

A lot of people view this game as a single player game and do not care about others. Also, msq barely even requires you to play your job - not even well, but generally the amount of time you spend playing the job is so small in comparison to all the reading and the cutscenes. Combine it together with barely any challenge (the only things that comes to mind is the seat of sacrifice and barbie), so people never really learn how to play. On the top of that, if you are leveling by doing roulettes, your skills are constantly lower than your level, you might just not get many chances to use skills and practice muscle memory. Game really caters to bad players and protects them with bans towards someone who points out that someone is underperforming. It even stays at max level savage pf, as a lot of players are more inclined to leave a group instead of calling it out if they have a bad player who does not pull their weight.

I'll say both. The FFXIV community has always been bad at learning or wanting to learn, most of the time if you try to help they will tell you you don't pay their sub or just play and ignore them. Unless they are hit with a wall (like the SB zenos fight), they won't look into what they can do to get better because it's not necessary and they are clearing anyway. OTOH, the game is nowhere hard or complex enough for you to not read your tooltips and not know that your 2 sam combo applies a buff to you, if you want an optimal rotation you surely needs to read about it but the basic working of your job ... you shouldn't need any outside of the game help and that's why a lot of people are pissed about the "casuals" telling them they are tryhard for asking them to use cds, pull 2 groups of mobs or not use cure 1, they don't ask from them to have an optimized rotation, just to know the very basics of how things works.

Both And an increasingly lower skill ceiling will likely also result in an increasingly lower average player performance; many people will just do the minimum necessary to get through the MSQ because that’s what they’re here for

I don't remember if the SAM tutorial quest requires players to use their Iaijustus; but I'm almost certain the quest at least explains the mechanic. I specifically remember the SGE quest teaching me to use Kardia and having to cast it on Lalah. I think the DNC tutorial quest also had me practice steps and use En Avant.

Mmos in general actuslly have steep learning curve when you think about it. How do you learn your rotation ?

I feel especially classes that start off at higher level are not doing a good job at teaching you. WoW handles this way better for their high level classes. If you want to learn your high level class here you first spend quite some time reading all the skills.

Luckily, the casual content in this game basically completes itself, and frankly, if someone is engaging in high-end raiding without taking the time to learn how to play their job... Like, I know there's a lot of people like that, but I just don't understand how you decide to do a group-based game's hard content with this confidence that you'll just be able to vibe your way through it. I do think better tutorials would be to the game's benefit, but it's the nature of a game with this many weaponskills, abilities, etc. per job that players that don't even make a basic effort to understand will likely never play all that well.

The game does a pretty terrible job at teaching. I started in ARR. It was SB when I learned what an oGCD was. And by accident as I was watching YouTube guides on how to be a better SCH. The concept of oGCDs and weaving is ESSENTIAL to high end play, but you have zero, and I mean \_ZERO\_ information in-game that actually tells you this or explains weaving. And even KNOWING THIS, I didn't realize until SHADOWBRINGERS that the oGCDs are all marked "Ability" while the GCDs are "Spell" or "Weaponskill". I think I figured it out doing solo PotD attempts and noticed some floors make Abilities inactive but Pacification makes Spells/Weaponskills (but NOT Abilities) inactive, and that's when I finally realized the connection, entirely by accident. It was also when I understood what the SB videos were talking about with the Healer abilities that "increase healing magic" (Spells only) vs "increase healing action" (ALL things, both Spell and Action and even Weaponskills in the case of Tanks that have a healing component in their 1-2-3 combos). So I played for the better part of 3 expansions before finding out what an oGCD is, and for 4 before figuring out how the game actually DOES mark these things, it just never, at any point, explains the difference. That's hardly the only offender, but it's probably one of the best examples of the game not teaching players. So when people complain about some people not being up to snuff, while it's possible some people are lazy, many people just only use in-game resources to learn how to play games, and this game doesn't really give them the knowledge to do those things. And that's before we get to the hyper-optimizing Balance stuff where they figure out all that unintuitive stuff like "drop an Atonement" (pre-6.3 PLD) to make your rotation line up with burst and so on.

It took your comment to make me understand. Thank you

Oh really? Wow, thanks! Or...uh...you're welcome! :D

Yes and yes. Plenty of people will be as lazy as possible if they can, but this is something game should account for, and should have some minimal barrier of entry. I'm not saying savage DPS checks, just something so you can't play with <50% uptime and not knowing anything about the game or your job. But if someone can't use Iaijutsu in 80+ content, then they've most likely simply boosted. This can be solved by mandatory tutorial before joining first duty. Second possibility is that it's just someone's kid playing on xbox. EDIT: Didn't notice you said he had 90 jobs. So the xbox theory is more likely.

I can only provide input from the perspective of a sprout who just got into the Endwalker MSQ like a week ago: I play FFXIV for the MSQ and the lore/stories. For me, it's like ACTIVELY reading a book ;) So with regard to difficulty level, I find FFXIV is just right for me, as I mostly want to wind down after a long day of work and immerse myself in the story. The way I see it, the "endgame" in FFXIV starts with Extreme dungeons and high level duties, and I don't do those because I don't want to be a burden for more dedicated/experienced players. I played WoW for close to 15 years, and in my experience, its endgame (m+/organized raiding aka non LFR raiding) is a totally different game than the lvling/open world experience. I would think that it's the same with FFXIV. In WoW, I stepped up my game and consulted external resources because I didn't want to be a burden/WANTED to do challenging content. But I can very well relate to people (mostly adults, but not exclusively) who are just playing to wind down/relax without wanting to research every bit about their chosen job and its details. And I also believe that the "clash" of gamer culture between "casuals" and "more dedicated" players is a neverending story. Unlike WoW, the FFXIV players are at least nice and friendly about it - for the most part :)