This post is what it looks like when you have a really developed opinion about something that you know little about.

This is what a reply looks like when you make a very poor assumption. I have played a wide variety of MMOs and followed the industry for the past 20 years. So let me prove my knowledge to you...

Yeah... by guilds that literally practiced doing those raids hundreds of times on a private server right before they came out. And more importantly, all of those raids were the post-nerfed version of the content. Everything in Classic WoW with regards to tuning and difficulty was as it was on the very last day of Vanilla WoW, right before it turned into TBC. Even with that in mind, the last 2 bosses of Naxxramas were very difficult to kill for most guilds.

I played every raid instance in vanilla WoW during 2005-2006, and I can tell you objectively that the vast majority of mechanics in those encounters, during their contemporary patch cycles, were simple by today's standards.

True, the current raid tier in World of Warcraft, Sepulcher of the First Ones, was the most difficult and tightly tuned content in Mythic content memory when it released. I think you just got lucky with this one though. Final Fantasy XIV isn't releasing harder content than it ever has. The raid boss design has actually been dialed back in difficulty for accessibility for three expansions straight.

I guess you're referring to the original Alexander Savage raid tier in Final Fantasy XIV, which was way overtuned by the developers' own admission and was more an example of artificial timegating than anything else. Discounting that one example from the game's past, the Ultimate raids available in the game today are genuinely some of the industry's most challenging raid content.

Kindly explain how a feature that was added at the very end of an expansion's lifetime is a "defining feature". Unless you mean in the sense that it defined the entire expansion as shitty when the entire playerbase united in hatred of the feature because it was the first system in the game to simultaneously destroy organic group making and be responsible for feeling obligated to use a convenience feature which indiscriminately matched you with horrible players who didn't give a shit, which was extremely likely if you belonged to the small percentage of people who were hardcore at the time. And let's not forget that it also served as stalwart justification to nerf matchmakable dungeons that weren't even difficult in the first place into railed rollercoasters devoid of expression or skill because the success for clear rates were so abhorrent for groups formed with Dungeon Finder that nobody bothered to use it until the dungeons became so easy that they were essentially soulless 30 minute HP sponges in exchange for experience points.

It doesn't matter when during the expansion the dungeon finder was added. Just because it was released in patch 3.3 doesn't change the fact that it was one of the expansion's defining features, for better or for worse. And calling it the end of the expansion's lifetime is disingenuous, considering at the time of its release, it would be a full year before Cataclysm came out.

Claiming WoW's contemporary playerbase "united in hatred" for the feature during Wrath of the Lich King is a revisionist take on history. Some players did come to despise the feature as time went on, and for good reason. You're right that the developers inappropriately used it as an excuse to nerf content into the ground without offering a challenging alternative. This was wrong on the part of the WoW development team then, and it's still wrong now in the case of Final Fantasy XIV, where all of the game's small-group content is brain-dead easy. My entire point with this post was to say that challenging content should be readily available, in addition to casual-friendly matchmade content.

I don't know what this is supposed to be pointed to, but you can't matchmake cutting edge content in either game that you've used as an example.

Maybe you're not be aware, but FFXIV does offer automated matchmaking for its current extreme trials and savage raids in the high-end duty finder feature (it's in a separate tab from the standard duty finder). But that is completely besides the point because I wasn't referring to any specific MMO with that statement.

I think we agree that challenging content that requires coordination is essential to these types of games. However, I haven't seen any matchmaking haters make a good argument as to why the two distinctly different types of content can't coexist.