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When I was still doing savage, the social aspect of doing it with 7 other idiots I am vibing with was very important to me. This 'join a group of randoms, everyone does their job and leave' kind of gameplay is absolutely not attractive to me.
This is me, the nier raids have bloated as fuck HP pools and it's not fun to be stuck fighting the same boss for 10 minutes cuz some retard decided to add an extra 0 to everythings HP.
Japan's gimmick is that they settle on one (1) strategy, make a macro for it, and spread it around. The strat is usually extremely conservative and designed for consistent clears rather than pumping DPS. People also use the raid finder properly and practice specific phases.
Their entire raider community settles on one fight strat with a macro they spread around, everyone practices it in PF, and when people are clear ready they go into RF to shoot for a clear. They disband if they wipe more than a couple times, and everyone queues up to try again.
My problem with coming back for 8.0 at this point is that I'd have to play the 7.x patches and after the 7.0 ending I am actively dreading having to deal with more gay not!america and evil sadgirl computer princess.
This and the infestation of players that turned the game into Second Life 2.0 pretty much guarantees I'll never come back. I spent 10 years playing the game and there's definitely some regret towards the second half of that decade.
It's going to be like 2 more years of Dawntrail before 8.0 (between their obsession with summer releases, and the extended patch cycle dragging things out, we're not getting it before summer of 2027) and I suspect by the time that rolls around, I will be far enough off the hook for more than long enough to not be tempted into coming back. I might, but it'd take a basically complete 180 on gameplay design and jobs that I don't think CBU3 has it in them to pull off. Maybe if enough people bail and they actually start sensing danger to the cash cow that basically singlehandedly carries SE's yearly earnings calls, but I suspect even that is unlikely.
It's because they increased the difficulty and mechanical complexity and bloat of Extremes to the point that they're now on par with a Savage. Started with Barbariccia, since then you can't reliably pug EXs anymore because there's just too much rote memorization and DDR bullshit, plus body-checks. Goblez EX is where I just gave up.
As a new player who joined last year just before Dawntrail, I can't agree more. It's really kind of impressive how fast husband and I went from loving the game in 2.0 - 6.0 to complete ambivalence in 6.1+, to absolute disdain in 7.0. This game had us hooked. We were 100% onboard and ready to make this our main game. We were the perfect audience for the product they were selling. And somehow they still managed to fuck it all up in a little more than a single expansion and undo all the attachment we'd felt for the cast and world they've spent so long building.
I would wager that there's a substantial number of the FFXIV team that isn't aware that Rival Wings still exists.
Remember how they took out that one mode, Astralagos, because the map was imbalanced in order to "fix" it, and they still haven't actually fixed it, the better-half of a decade later? It's actually been unplayable for far longer than it was ever playable. Pretty sure it still shows up in the que as "unnavailable".
There's been people speedhacking in Rival Wings using the Oppressors for years with nothing done to them:
and despite all this, ranked CC is going to be a better time for casual solos next patch because of the change to casual CC being able to queue with 2 players so you can guarantee 2 jobs that will be perfect synergy for each other on your team.
Your post made me rewatch all the game's older trailers and it made me really miss my early days where I didn't know what the fuck I was doing but the game's world was big and colorful and really tickled the ole high fantasy bone. Now I've known that I can't go back and replay any of it without being reminded that it all goes to shit. I don't like EW, but I'd rather play through Elpis again than be told I'm gonna go through Tural and Section 9 and all that.
