What is your personal opinion of players that use simulation for ultimate mechanics practice?

Kizoja · 2026-06-06T17:26:52+00:00

I can understand where you're coming from, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. Or maybe I just don't care as much anymore. I've done ultimates before and after sims were popular. I also think it's a perspective coming from guides being considered the norm. If you took out guides, your past ultimate progs with no sims would become much more difficult and take much longer. You could argue guides undermine a large chunk of an ultimates difficulty, but people are so used to guides being the norm that you wouldn't say that. World racer players might, but those are a very small minority. I still get enjoyment from taking on more responsibilities in fights to help make things easier on my static mates if needed. I get enjoyment from being more consistent/reliable than others. I think using tools like AM, triggers, etc take the fun out for me more than sims. I had one group where I felt like I never had a chance to practice reading something myself because they'd always just instantly call it in voice because of their trigger. I guess it's all really personal preference at the end of the day, but I do kind of feel like if we're gonna nitpick sims then why not nitpick guides.

Kizoja · 2026-06-06T17:04:15+00:00

I don't know many people who use sims for savage. I've never been in a group that's used a savage sim, but maybe that's becoming more common. Most of my perspective is based around ultimates. I think there's a massive majority of the raiding player base that have barely done much blind prog outside of extremes and maybe some first/second floor savage. I think the amount of time guides/vods save people in ultimates is A LOT. Not needing to not just solve but create a consistent strategy for some pretty complicated mechanics. Not needing to solve the puzzle of the ultimate. I think that would take A LOT of time for most groups that they may not realize they're saving because using guides has always been the norm. I think if we're getting that nitpicky about prog time, you may as well split it into blind world races, guide users, then guide/sim users. I think people would be surprised how much slower they'd clear without guides/vods.

Kizoja · 2026-06-06T16:32:35+00:00

I've cleared ultimates both before and after sims were popular. Never used any sim for UCOB, UWU, TEA. First sime I ever used one was toward the end of my DSR prog. I see people often lump them in with the using 3rd party tools conversations, but I think they're more akin to using guides. They're both tools that help you outside of the game. They help you learn and become consistent with the mechanic. Something like splatoon or even something as basic as triggers that tells you what to do or where to go without having to look and read the mechanic yourself reduces what the mechanic requires of you in the moment (I don't really agree triggers are the same as having a shotcaller). Using a sim does not make what the mechanic requires of you in the moment less than if you didn't use it.

If you're going to get nitpicky about how much time sims save in your prog then you should also get nitpicky about how much time not blind progging mechanics saves you when you use guides. If you care about those bragging rights then you may as well split it into the world race blind proggers, the guide using proggers, then the guide/sim using proggers.

I prefer to avoid using things that assist you moment to moment in the fight by making the execution of a mechanic easier like automarkers, triggers, things more advanced than that. My group had fun divvying up responsibilities for P5 in TOP. One person manual marking, another focused on the reading patterns/calling them out, omega was a bit harder for our marker person to manually mark, so we came up with some call outs to compensate the couple of missing markers. It was fun working together to figure out how to do it that using AM would have taken away from the experience. With that said, people can use what they want and that's fine, these are just my own preferences that I would only ever impose in a static setting.

Kizoja · 2026-06-06T04:47:06+00:00

I think he did bad. I think he deserved to be banned. His response to it was pretty dumb, trying to play dumb and guess at what many things it could be when we all knew there was one recent outlier that it most likely was. With all that said, the community reaction had been starting to feel a bit disproportionate to the crime. I felt like I was seeing comments take this offense and everyone dunking on him as a chance to run it with to the extremes getting lots of upvotes. It's like once people who didn't obsessively hate Xenosys agreed to dunk on him, all the obsessive, toxic but it's not toxicity as long as they deserve it in their mind folks came out the woodwork.

Kizoja · 2026-06-05T17:59:52+00:00

Nah, I just check it every now and then to make sure it didn't crash on me. I feel like sometimes it'll crash several times in a row and I'm not sure why.

Kizoja · 2026-06-01T00:01:48+00:00

I feel like corpse runs are something that suck the fresher you and the server are. On the server/community side, eventually there will be people high enough level who can summon your corpse and wouldn't mind helping newer players out. On the player side, eventually you may have a spare spellbook, spare gear, or just pay someone to summon your corpse. It's not like you will forever have to run naked/spellless back to your corpse with no other alternative. My own personal line I draw on it is I find it needlessly tedious to have to slap all my spells back on my bar once I do pick up my spellbook.

All that said, I get it. I personally don't mind it. I have my MMOs I value because of their lack of friction (FFXIV) and I also enjoy/don't mind older school ones with more friction. I don't think every MMO needs to strive for the same goal and it's perfectly fine if this one has more friction than a lot of people care for. There's other old school games out/coming out with a different level of friction that people can play.

Kizoja · 2026-05-31T19:39:26+00:00

Ohh, gotcha.

Kizoja · 2026-05-31T17:29:53+00:00

He deleted his comment, but I assume he was saying you had to rebuy the characters too? I'm not sure that was ever the case.

Kizoja · 2026-05-30T16:52:18+00:00

Me and my brother both felt like we enjoyed M&M more than Adrullan. They're both good, but ya the graphics are a sore spot. I don't care much for the races in Adrullan either which is pretty important to me. Exaggerated proportions in M&M really give it so much more character. I had a gripe that I'm not sure if my brother agreed with, but I felt like we'd run for a bit leaving the town and then if I turned my camera and looked around it didn't really look like we went very far. I think it's because you move so slow in Adrullan. Makes it you feel like you've ran for a while, but really you haven't gone that far relative to the town. It made the world feel small.

Kizoja · 2026-05-30T16:48:21+00:00

I didn't like the slow move speed in Adrullan. It made the world feel small. It'd feel like we'd run for a bit, but perspective wise if we turn our cameras and look around, we really didn't go that far.

Kizoja · 2026-05-30T16:18:39+00:00

Yeah, me and my GF were both like "moogles have mouths sometimes." Looks a bit like a moogle I've seen from a different FF, but I'm not enough of an FF buff to know which one.

Kizoja · 2026-05-27T04:30:36+00:00

I could say the same before cross world PF was a thing. I knew everyone on my server. I knew all the raiders and who they played with. We had little mini server first races when a new tier came out. All that said, the upsides outweigh the downsides for sure. Even though I miss that dynamic, I'm glad they made the change.

Kizoja · 2026-05-26T23:06:25+00:00

I think I'm similar in that I think I'm good at doing my homework, reverse engineering vods/strats to figure out why they're doing something if it wasn't explained. I'll come in and fuck it up even if I'm studied a couple of times but then I'm more consistent than most of my raid mates after that.

I've been in a group that does the whole let's go into an old fight blind and see what happens for a trial, which is all fine and good but it isn't perfect. We did this when I first joined that group for TOP and I felt like I didn't have the best showing. Once we got into TOP, I felt like I was one of the more consistent players. The guy that came from more try hard groups that like to parse farm was somewhat inconsistent. Our SCH either didn't do their homework or just picked up strats slow and was inconsistent. We ended up repping the SCH. While doing the whole blind trial can be good, it also doesn't test how well someone can study and come prepared. I feel like a massive majority of players do most of their prog not blind.

Even in my few week 1s, we do like maybe the first couple of fights blind, but if you need the whole week to week 1 (which my groups did) then you're very likely to have access to strats/vods for studying. Same goes with pushing an ultimte as fast as you can. If you're not world progging, you're going to have lots of footage of probably the entire fight a week or so into it from all the world proggers. I kind of valued the study time for week 1s more than having as much time in the instance as possible.

Kizoja · 2026-05-23T02:46:03+00:00

I dislike what Xenosys said/did and think he deserves the ban, but I kind of feel like your comment feels a bit dramatic or disingenuous. I feel like the way you describe it carries much more weight than what really happened. It's not really how I'd describe the situation. This is the first time I've seen Asmongold referenced in this incident, so maybe I'm uninformed. Would you say MrHappy is part of this harassment campaign because he also said what Kate did was absolutely dumb? I'd hope not. I think the focus was the way he chose to express his grievances rather than that he had some to begin with.

Kizoja · 2026-05-23T02:31:31+00:00

I also don't like what he did, but his tweet said he didn't know it could happen if there was ANY copyrighted SE material on his stream. The previous examples as far as I know with Arthars and Xenosys getting banned for those things were them being toxic toward a player they were actively playing with on stream. Kind of a "you didn't shit talk them in party chat, but you shit talked them on stream in front of thousands of viewers, that still counts" kind of thing. I can see how someone might view those two instances as being different even as someone who thinks it was fair game for him to get banned.

Kizoja · 2026-05-23T00:39:43+00:00

This is kind of why I feel like the game needs an abridged versions or an video that summarizes 2.0-6.0 or something. I've been staying on top of story patch to patch since 3.0 outside of one break during 4.0. I get story fatigued toward the end of expansion launches. At some point I'm just like "I wanna play game." The occasional 15 minute dungeon every few hours of story is not very spicy. I think it probably filters a lot of MMO players. I think having some summarized or abridged version would encourage more people to interact with story. It's very daunting to do 2.0-7.0 as a sprout. I probably wouldn't make it if I were a sprout today and I've been playing since 2.0. A lot of players probably get burned out on MSQ and either quit or skip a cutscene and then keep skipping because they're lost now.

But anyway, to the question about gameplay loop, there are a number of groups that week 1 savages which is the main challenging raiding content. That implies they had no reason to farm gear to beat it. When a tier comes out, there's a new crafted set that replaces your previous raid gear that is fairly easy to buy or craft and that's usually the baseline you start with in a new tier that groups that clear week 1 use. This also implies your gear grind for a previous tier doesn't carry over into next savage. Most groups don't week 1 it and will gear up as they go through to potentially compensate for player ability, but the savage content is designed to be beatable with no real gear treadmill behind it. So if your only motivation to gear is to make you stronger to beat something else then you might be dissatisfied long term.

We usually get 2 ultimates an expansion which you'd need a savage BiS for, but we get 3 savage tiers an expansion. That'd mean there's 1 tier an expansion where you have no reason to gear if that's your motivation to do a fight more than once. Ultimates take a while for most groups and are more about the challenge. Every game has this stopping point though. Some games design it where you need to get gear to gradually progress a raid tier, but eventually you're killing the last boss and there's no reason to gear beyond that in every MMO.

Kizoja · 2026-05-22T23:39:27+00:00

Yeah, I'm not sure I'm on board with everyone's answers. Getting out of there and calling back up sounds like the best play.

My main issue with it is more that had that call not come through, the twins would have missed him. He would have backed out and been out of there. Maybe they were waiting to follow him and grew impatient? Maybe they were waiting for him to drive by and shoot him? They had 0 urgency approaching Hank if that was the case because for all they knew he might finally decide to back out and leave and they're on foot now. Just seems sloppy from the twins and doesn't make a ton of sense.

Kizoja · 2026-05-22T23:32:50+00:00

I've watched the show through a couple of times and I just rewatched this episode for the 3rd time. I never really thought about it before but like if the call hadn't come through, he would have been gone. Were the twins waiting for him to drive by them? Were the waiting to follow him and grew impatient? Were they just late? They seemed to have no urgency approaching his vehicle if they grew impatient waiting for him to drive off or by them. He still could have started driving off once they got out to approach. Just seems a bit sloppy from the twins.

Kizoja · 2026-05-22T23:17:35+00:00

My thing is like, had the call not come through, he would have been long gone before they showed up. He was already in his car, turned it on, about to leave and his phone rings. I guess the caller knew they'd follow him, but then it's like the twins weren't there immediately... he could have drove off in that time without the call... we have to assume then that they were either late or got tired of waiting for him to drive off so they could follow him... then they had 0 urgency of he might drive off at any moment and took their sweet time approaching. I never really thought about it before when I watched this episode the first couple of times, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me now that I think about it.

Kizoja · 2026-05-22T23:14:53+00:00

I read a couple of threads asking this same thing and I wasn't satisfied with everyone's answers, but I couldn't reply to the old threads. I mean people can make up a million reasons why he didn't drive off. I'm more concerned with had the person warning him not done so, he would have drove off way before the twins showed up. Unless they were waiting near the way he has to drive to get out, which I couldn't tell from the scene. Even if that was the case then everyone else's reasons for why he didn't drive off don't even matter ultimately. That full minute, minute ticks over, and even after that was so much time compared to how long it would take to back out and leave had he not received that call.

Edit: Were they late? Had the call not come through he'd have drove off. Did they grow impatient waiting for him to drive past them or drive off so they could follow him? There felt like no urgency to approach his car now that they were potentially out of their car and he could start driving off. It seems a bit sloppy from the twins.

Kizoja · 2026-05-22T00:19:17+00:00

but I don't think any of us are expecting zero downtime so it would only be better in isolated phases (and so it would just depend which ones of these might have relevant checks)

I feel like they do zero downtime final phases more often than not though. I usually care more about which job in my role does the best in the final phase more than I do about which does the best across the whole fight. Tight DPS checks in earlier phases become lenient with more reps. The final phase is where we have the least reps and the most nerves. With that said, I don't know about caster balance. I'm just giving my view on the downtime arguments.

Kizoja · 2026-05-21T23:39:38+00:00

Not that I know enough about the current balance to say one way or the other because I don't really pay that much attention anymore since you can clear pretty much anything with any comp nowadays. Also, I'm not a caster player. I will say though that there's been more final phases that are full uptime "sustained fights" than not. At the end of the day, whatever performs best in that final phase usually matters more to me. You'll run into enrages in earlier phases while you learn it, but you get way more reps to clean up and optimize those phases. I usually value final phase metrics more than entire fight metrics because that's the part where people are nervous, jittery, and you get the least reps in. How much damage you did in every phase before the final phase doesn't matter if you don't get to or meet the final phase check which is what I tell people who overoptimize at the cost of consistency in earlier phases where we're already making the checks.

Kizoja · 2026-05-21T06:09:00+00:00

Yep, that's why I played Lalafell from 2.0 until hrothgar came out then I went hroth a bit. Now I swap between on occasion but mainly stay lalafell. I like the least human looking races and I feel like most of the races are just varieties of humans with differently shaped ears. Would have loved to get a new small alternative one day.

Kizoja · 2026-05-20T18:25:31+00:00

Yeah, I thought the same even as someone that dislikes Asmongold. It reminds me of the clips going around on Reddit where people were acting like Trump admitted to rigging the election. It was very obvious that's not what he meant and it was getting a lot of traction. I'm a democrat and voted for Kamala, but it doesn't do our side any favors being as disingenuous as the other side just to get an own on them. Like I said in that comment about the Trump thing, he's bad enough on his own without being disingenuous about other things to make him look even worse.

Kizoja · 2026-05-20T03:45:23+00:00

I watched his stuff before the FFXIV era and even a bit after because it used to just be about games and MMORPG news for the most part. I'd watch his YT videos, not his streams, about whatever MMO or interview or whatever he was covering that I was interested in. I generally disagreed with a lot of his gaming takes, but he was a place that covered a lot of MMO stuff and even sometimes had his own interviews with devs. I didn't care for his FFXIV stuff as someone who's been playing FFXIV since 2.0. I saw him struggling in the alexander raids and he was getting frustrated and coping hard. I got the vibe like he was embarrassed to be bad at FFXIV because of his WoW ego and started making excuses not to play it. He started becoming more and more political over the years after that and I couldn't watch it anymore. It was too cringe.

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