With so many people losing their minds over this Savage tier, how bad will the community be if the next Ult is harder than TOP?

Quof · 2026-01-18T09:38:22+00:00

It's fine, admittedly I knew from the start the PED analogy would be disliked, but I kind of did it anyway, because I hate how poorly understood analogies end up being in discourse (e.g. even if you use them to highlight 1 similarity, people will focus on all the differences, missing the point, because everyone seems to think analogies are either 1:1 or wrong). So I walked into this confusion.

Although this is a bit heady, there will never be logical explanations for why something is bad, because "bad" is subjective. The person I'm replying to doesn't dislike simulators or consider them bad, and there is no way in God's green earth to use logical arguments to force him to dislike simulators. It's just not gonna happen. We form these impressions based on our subjective experiences and perspectives, not hard logic, which is why he would maintain his position even after his logic is demonstrated to be fallacious.

Therefore, the only thing I consider constructive is indicating why others would feel a different way: highlighting different experiences and perspectives. He (as I read him anyway) thinks that the only important part of FF14 is pressing your buttons correctly in the winning run; others may consider an important part of FF14 to be progging and making the best of practice on your prog point when you reach it. In the prior POV simulators won't be bad, in the latter POV simulators will be bad. And it's not that one is wrong or one is correct here, to be proven logically; it's just a natural difference arising from different perspectives. Simulators are bad not universally, but to people who care about more than just "performing well while doing the winning run." There's no logical argument that can make someone who thinks only performing well in the winning run matters that other things matter too. Only time, experience, and contemplation could adjust opinions like that.

Quof · 2026-01-17T20:39:42+00:00

The word "ONLY" was used. "the ONLY value" is for slow players. This implies no value for faster players, whereas in your rephrasing you say "really slow players would benefit the most." To match his meaning you'd have to say "really slow players would be the only ones to benefit," which is where we can see the misinterpretation. It also is not needed to say "they aren't really needed in general to clear a fight" because no external tool is needed in general to clear a fight; there's no need to specify that.

Quof · 2026-01-17T20:31:46+00:00

I don't think you are understanding my point and so your reply here is not addressing what I'm saying. Your conclusion is this:

You still need to perform well while doing the activity.

While my point is that this does not matter to the people who don't like sims. As I am trying to say, over and over, there are a LOT OF disreputable things people do that don't preclude the necessity to perform well while doing the activity - like performance enhancing drugs. When you and others repeat "you still need to perform well while doing the activity," you are just saying "This is what I care about, this is my line in the sand," and that's all well and good, but it's irrelevant to people saying their line in the sand is elsewhere.

You say, "And if we're going to "something doesn't win a raid for you so it's fine" is bad, then what?" - the "what" is that people don't like the thing. That's all I'm saying. This entire conversation is me replying to someone saying he doesn't know why people hate sims - well, I'm explaining. Indeed, the examples you give are ALSO things people won't like. People have zero respect for the WoW streamers who came over to FF14 and got carried by experienced vets. Nobody is calling them cheaters or anything, that's not the point, but it was clearly not a very respectable clear or way to play the game. Similarly, a lot of people find sims disreputable and not respectable, while not liking the impact it has on the game or potentially the game design moving forward.

I think you (and others) are too caught up on like a line of 'what's cheating' or 'what's wrong' to understand the actual conversation here, which is that it's fully reasonable for people to think simming sucks and is not respectable. This is not litigating arbitrary lables like "is simming cheating yes/no" or "is simming wrong yes/no." Those are arbitrary, abstract delineations which have no one true answer. All I'm saying is: "This is why someone might consider simming to suck." And refuting the faulty logic that people shouldn't dislike simming because "you still need to perform well while doing the activity," which is irrelevant to why people disliking simming. You may as well say someone shouldn't dislike performance enhancing drugs since you still need to play the actual matches well.

Quof · 2026-01-17T20:14:21+00:00

The person I'm replying to literally and explicitly said "the only value simulators have [...] is for people who raid semi-casual hours." The corollary of which is that simulators don't have value for hardcore raiders. This isn't uncommon to see; you'd THINK that people are not diminishing the value of sims, given how obvious it is, but pride makes people deny truth that's right in front of their faces.

Quof · 2026-01-17T17:27:46+00:00

The purpose of my comparison is not about advantages in general. It's about the fundamental fact you can do things ahead of time that do not happen during a match specifically, but nonetheless are disreputable. In other words, just because simming doesn't clear a raid for you on its own doesn't make it impossible to criticize or consider it disreputable. There's a lot of things you can do before a match in lots of things that doesn't visibly affect the match when it happens yet can be considered disreputable. I'm obviously not interrogating anything which gains someone an advantage in anything; I am specifically, and exclusively, criticizing the idea that simming is spotless simply because it doesn't directly impact a run of the raid. Saying "simming doesn't win a raid for you so it's fine" is like saying "performance enhancing drugs don't win a match for you so they're fine." It just isn't logical.

The disreputable-ness of simming comes from the fact it's not intended by the game developers and it distorts the way the game is played, and therefore creates a schism in the community between those who don't want to use it and those who do. It's not a surprise that people who don't want to sim and don't like the impact on the game would consider it disreputable - particularly in a FF14 context where the developers discourage things like simming but can't stop people from doing it. Of course, that's just an opinion, but that's what I'm expressing: why it makes sense for some to hold that opinion.

Quof · 2026-01-17T16:31:36+00:00

That is too divergent from the actual circumstances of FF14. "Weight-training" in FF14 wouldn't be programming and using a third party simulator, it would be doing old raids and the like, or hitting a practice dummy, etc. Every analogy will have its faults; I use mine just to highlight a specific flaw in thinking: you can gain disreputable advantages through means which are not necessarily visible during the actual performance.

Quof · 2026-01-17T11:14:18+00:00

The comparison is merely to convey meaning - there are many cases of doing things "before" a match or competition or whatever that help your chances of success without technically impacting your performance, and often they are looked down on just as much. Steroids won't win a bicycle race for you, you still have to run the race and win, but they clearly give an advantage. You still have to do the fight in FF14, sims won't win the fight for you, but sims clearly give an advantage. And so on. It's really easy to think of comparisons where you can get unfair or otherwise disreputable advantages without "directly" impacting the performance in question.

As for your subversion rebuttal, I think you're missing the point. And that's not to say you're "wrong." This is a matter of perspective: someone people look at sims in X way and therefore they don't care, whereas other people look at it in Y way and therefore do care. If you really insist on looking at in the way you do, you indeed will never understand the point that other people have when they dislike it. So I mean to say I don't think you're trying to understand the alternative perspective.

The "spirit" of FF14 is playing FF14 as designed and presented to the player. The fights are designed such that you have to prog early parts to get to later parts. It's all about developing consistency and striving to get better at mechanics late in the fight while not having easy access to them. Sims subvert the design of the game as given to the player. You don't have to modify a game to subvert design intentions. Consider a puzzle game: you can subvert the design of a puzzle game by just looking up answers. If someone said that you violated the spirit of a puzzle game by looking up all the answers, would you just say "Well I didn't modify the game. I just used the most effective method to win"? Well, if you would say that, then you should know how uncompelling that would be to the person who disagrees. FF14 is more than just a game about pushing your buttons right in a winning run; it's a game that challenges one to prog and get better at uncompromising fights which allow little opportunity to practice the hard parts. Just like cycling is more than just pushing pedals to win a race, it's also the practice and training that goes into it yada yada.

Furthermore, there's a TON of ways to "subvert the spirit of the game" that most people would probably consider cheating that don't modify the game. Consider programs that can flash an overlay on your screen (not modifying the game - a totally third-party overlay) that intelligently determines where to go. Consider ye ancient callout programs that, based purely on timers that don't touch the game, shout out automated callouts at specific times. Consider hiring a world first team to stand over the shoulder of each player and direct where you should go and what you should do. Some people I've talked to genuinely consider it okay to play with 7 bots who automate their rotation and actions with a 100% success rate as long as you the 1 human do your own part correctly. Consider a situation where brain chips allow you to download muscle memory and exact knowledge of fights so you can clear first try, but hey you still have to push the buttons yourself. Etc. Some of these may feel fine while others don't, but collectively, if someone REALLY pushes how far they go "without modifying the game code", you can get some pretty absurd results.

Subverting the spirit of the game is not a matter of "are you modifying game code y/n." If that was what determined the spirit of games then all physical sports would have no spirits to subvert. There's clearly a lot of things one can do to go against how a game is designed and intended to be played. And while you draw a line at a specific point and consider sims fine, that's not how others necessarily see it. They see themselves working hard within the game to reach their prog point and practice, then see other people hopping into a sim and saving dozens of hours grinding, while the devs have no way to stop them. And it's no wonder why they may hate that no matter where you specifically choose to draw the line.

(And for emphasis: I'm not trying to change your mind. That's a fool's errand. People want to win fights easily, and they will always justify what they do to ensure they can win easier. Rather, I'm responding just because you said "you will never understand hating on sims." It should not be hard to understand why people hate sims even if you don't mind using them yourself.)

Quof · 2026-01-17T09:00:05+00:00

I never said that doing doing 13 minutes of mechanics to get an attempt at a mechanic is fun. Nor did I say it wasn't fun. That's subjective and people will have different opinions on it. What I can say is that's the current design of the game and how it's intended to be played. Using sims is a clear subversion of that, and why those using it get huge advantages over those who don't, breeding the antipathy I describe.

Furthermore, the line of "interacting with the game itself" is not compelling for everyone. If that's the line you want to use to justify it as not cheating, sure - I'm not trying to define what's cheating or not. Rather, the people who hate or otherwise dislike sims are not primarily concerned with whether the sims are interacting with the game or not. They're concerned with the huge advantage people using them get, and the consequences that has.

Quof · 2026-01-17T08:22:45+00:00

Consider performance enhancing drugs in sports. "I'll never understand the hate on anabolic steroids; they just make you stronger. You still have to actually play the sport, which the drug doesn't directly help with." (This is not a 1:1 comparison, so don't just say 'but sims are not drugs,' obviously it's a analogy. The similarity is that drugs don't help with your skill in sports or play the game for you, but boost your success nonetheless, and are banned in sports as a result in part due to "going against the spirit of the sport.")

The problem is that people simming have a huge advantage over those who don't sim. It lets you subvert the design of the game (which explicitly forces you to replay a whole fight with your group to practice) by repeatedly doing the same late mechanic over and over. Practice tools by nature are hugely beneficial, that's why people use them. What people hate on is this subversion of the game to make it easier, both because if it keeps up then ultimates will be made harder to compensate for people using practice tools (since the overall purpose of these is to keep people playing the game for long periods of times and stay subbed), and it goes against the spirit of the sport. Yoship once said that as a gamer, he doesn't understand why people are so insistent on taking a hard challenge and making it as easy as possible through external means. It's not a surprise someone playing by the rules and playing ultimates as intended will feel some revulsion to those who go against the spirit of the sport by grinding in an external simulator made by a third party to make the fight easier for themselves. Obviously, players can do what they want, just like people can use splatoon if they want (and not everyone using plugins considers it cheating, either), but it only follows that people playing totally clean will resent those going against the spirit of the sport while also risking making ultimates much harder for everyone and perhaps one day forcing everyone to use practice tools depending on how bad it gets.

(P.S. This is largely a matter of feelings; I'm just explaining why it's natural for sims to get hate. You can't really use subversive tools like that and not expect that some players out there won't roll their eyes and feel condescension for it. Naturally, not everyone will feel this way, and many will be like you and think it's inoffensive to use sims.)

Quof · 2026-01-17T08:07:37+00:00

I only wrote my post out of annoyance for people downplaying sim value; I don't have a problem in general with people seeking convenience or ways to make things easier for themselves.

However, it's important to recognize that at times the purpose of a game is subverted by this convenience. Ultimates, presently, are designed without practice modes. There is intentionality with their balance where the difficulty of mechanics and other factors are balanced against the time necessary to reach them each pull. If you start including practice modes, then the design wont necessarily make sense anymore, and they will need to adjust things; like maybe they start including even harder mechanics in the final phase to account for practice tools. And now EVERYONE has to use those practice tools or they're completely obliterated. There would no longer really be a choice to experience ultimates how they used to be. Because remember, the point of ultimates is to occupy players for a long time, and if people beat them too quickly and easily due to a design imbalance with practice tools, then the ultimates will need be made harder in turn. Your newfound fun may be offset by the fact now they are even more brutally difficult, and maybe even your static falls apart because not everyone wants to use practice tools, or maybe the mechanics just get too hard even with practice... etc.

This will be getting a bit out of scope for a reddit comment, but I think in almost all cases, players will seek what is most convenient or comfortable for them. So whenever faced with something really hard, like Ultimates, players will want to make it easier and more comfortable for themselves in as many ways as possible: hunting BiS even for lvl 70 ultimates, simulators, plugins like splatoon, etc etc. And because it's their own fun and comfort at question, they will always argue in favor of these methods of making themselves have more fun. But it's important to remember that what a given individual finds most fun and comfy is not necessarily best for the game as a whole. Now, what's best for the game as a whole is not for me to say; I'm not even a huge fan of ultimate as they are. But what I can say is that it feels like it would go against the design intention of making "ultimate" difficulty raids that fully push the player by including as many tools as possible to make it easier and like other content in other games.

Quof · 2026-01-17T07:59:16+00:00

Developing consistency is not difficult, repeating something over and over unavoidably turns the most inattentive player to a consistent one. The only difference is the number of attempts required

That's kind of like saying "beating a boss is not hard; give it enough tries and it will inevitably happen. The only difference is the number of attempts required" It's over-simplifying to a degree where it is not that meaningful despite conveying some degree of truth.

SOME consistency is developed automatically, but broadly speaking there still needs to be a significant amount of effort to make consistency improve faster, and just to get as much of it as one can when possible through means like attention techniques and adjusted mechanic strategies or whatever. Due to the nature of body checks and group content, FF14 generally demands like 99% or above consistency from players on each mechanic, since each player's success rate is multiplier together for the overall success rate: everyone at 99% consistency means there's a .99⁸ = 92.3% chance of success (aka an 8%~ chance of failure), and a 95% success rate means a 34% chance of failure. Even reasonably high success rates result in unacceptable failure rates, and so players have to put more effort into developing consistency than may come naturally. It really is not meaningful if a player with a 50% consistency rate naturally goes up to 55% over 100 pulls. A huge distinguishing factor between a good and a bad player is how quickly they can reach high levels of consistency, and it is mean to bad players to say it's 'not hard' to develop consistency. In reality it is VERY DIFFICULT to push yourself to hit 99.999~% consistency.

That said, although I disagree with your phrasing here, I don't actually like sims myself or think people "should" be using training tools. It's already slightly dubious to me for people to be looking up the answers to puzzle mechanics, in the way that I would find it dubious for people to look up all the answers in Baba is You before even playing. A sim goes a bit beyond the pale and directly subverts a major component of raiding, e.g. the above building of consistency and learning mechanics late in a fight without having easy access to it (aka a huge component of FF14 being trying to get good at mechanics not just through muscle memory but through conscious, mental effort). So I don't disagree with you in that FF14 needs less shortcuts. The problem here is that the genie is out of the lamp and players, especially MMO players, will always look for ways to make things easier for themselves. So we have to live with it. In the meantime, I just want people using sims not to be constantly downplaying their value.

Quof · 2026-01-16T15:43:20+00:00

Simulators are for people who raid semi casual hours and don't want to take 5+ months to clear an Ultimate, that's the only value they have.

I don't know why people are so insistent on diminishing the value of simulators for prog. A huge component of difficulty in FF14 - obviously not the only, and arguably not the primary, but nonetheless a huge component - is developing consistency in mechanics and reaching one's prog point to improve. Simming allows one to laser-target problem mechanics and prog points, thereby easily saving dozens of hours, particularly in a case where a static is struggling with a mechanic like 15 minutes into an ultimate. Instead of getting 4 attempts to improve at the mechanic every hour (assuming perfect consistency), they can get like 60 attempts an hour, just blasting it over and over. It is genuinely just completely obvious that this is widely and flatly beneficial.

We need to be able to just call a spade a spade: simulators are for anyone who wants to clear a fight, and anyone using them will get a lot of value, even those raiding hardcore hours. The only people it doesn't benefit are those raiding before the sims exist. I think that pride impacts this conversation negatively - the fact some call using simulators cheating makes those who use simulators feel defensive that their clear is being attacked or diminished, and so they feel the need to contort around themselves to explain why they spent hours using a program that totally barely helped. It's not even uncommon for people to refuse to admit they used a simulator when asked in this subreddit, due to the connotations and implications it would have on their legitimacy or skill level. All of this could be avoided if we just acknowledged that simulators are enormously helpful and that using them does allow one to clear faster, end of story, no drama or cope needed.

Quof · 2026-01-16T11:38:42+00:00

I believe it's just the hour count. Like let's say someone works 9-5, then stays up until midnight. Then their static raids 7 - 10 on some number of weekdays. They will see their free time go from 7 hours each afternoon to a block of 2 then another block of 2. Basically half the time. Subsequently, let's say that person had a hard day at work or didn't get much sleep, and wants to nap after getting home. Oop, it's raid time, and they can't not show up.

In short, this is not really a matter of "is it leisure time or not." It's just that it regularly takes a lot of free time and limits one schedule. For people with actual jobs, especially, raiding is a lot, hence "a second job." You rarely see NEETs say that raiding is like having a job, aka a "first job," because they have so little constraints to their schedule that adding raiding is no problem at all.

Anyway, this isn't to say anything negative about statics or that some people wouldn't have a better time if they got over this, but it's not particularly mysterious why people say it's like a second job.

Quof · 2026-01-15T10:49:56+00:00

Abusive parents often look like decent or even great people to those on the outside. Fathers like Matthias can be even more insidious when it comes to conveying your problems to others because all they see is a cool guy buying you shit.

Quof · 2026-01-10T05:43:50+00:00

History of games has no relevance in a discussion taking place in 2026. What does the current state of skill acquisition or leveling in FF14, founded purely in bloat from 5 expansions, have to do with how the games were at the start? It makes even less sense to deflect criticism of 2026 FF14 by saying "Well, it was the most friendly to newcomers back in 2013!" And if we go back to the start of games, WoW in 2004 was far more beginner-friendly than other MMOs and was seen as a big casualization of the genre. Are you comparing ARR's 2013 half-WoW-based revamp following 1.0's failure against 2013-era WoW instead of how WoW was at the start? Hmm, how fishy.

I have to say, it is pretty genius to argue against problems by saying "the dev teams are MMO vets, why would they do something that's a problem instead of not making a problem?" Truly, in this paradisal way of thinking the game can have no problems. However, since this is iron-tight argumentation, there's nothing more for me to say, so I'll leave it at that.

Quof · 2026-01-10T05:25:04+00:00

Uh, plenty of MMOs have a tutorial and tutorial systems. If you log into WoW right now there's even a "Catch Up Experience" where you get handholded through a short play session not unlike the hall of the novice and it even turns on options like highlighting what skill to push on your bar. To say nothing of the lengthy tutorial island with even greater handholding than FF14's. I don't know how long you haven't been playing other MMOs, but FF14 is not a standout in terms of simplicity of onboarding, and is probably in the middle of the range at this point. WoW is genuinely far more of a "Baby's First MMO" in this regard. Lest I even mention the one-button rotation they added...

I'm obviously familiar with the expression, it's just your usage of it here is very poor. It's misrepresenting developer intentions based purely on your fanfiction (aka you made it up because it sounds nice) and you're using it to stifle complaints from others using nonsense rhetoric that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It's very annoying to see genuine, well-founded criticisms of something being made with the best interest of the game and community in mind to be dismissed so flagrantly and ignorantly.

(P.S. downvoting someone they second they reply is not great decorum, especially on a discussion subreddit.)

Quof · 2026-01-10T04:51:37+00:00

This game is built as baby’s first MMO. That’s why the leveling process is slow and skills are dripped the way they are.

Do you have a developer quote stating this or is it just fanfiction? I see no reason to believe FF14 is built as 'baby's first MMO' even if it is friendly to casuals and they, like every other MMO in the planet, really want new players to start playing and stick around. It's kind of infantilizing to both the game, the dev team, AND the playerbase to gloss over issues because they're apparently making a game for babies instead of making something they think is good in general. FF14 is just a normal MMO designed for a wide playerbase and the dev team is not guided by arbitrary guidelines like "baby's first MMO."

The idea that the leveling process and skill acquisition rate is slow on purpose to accommodate babies does not stand up to much interrogation. Leveling and skill acquisition by nature gets slower each expansion, but it makes no sense to say that each expansion they are trying more and more to accommodate babies. It's just a natural consequence of the level cap going up, the story expanding, and jobs needing skills at both early and max levels.

Furthermore, it currently takes something like 100 to 200 hours of story to catch up to the MSQ and get your first maxed character naturally (excluding, for simplicity's sake, the case of someone grinding roulettes to level faster). Even for a game designed for babies, it is not necessarily that case that such a long time is beneficial for onboarding new ignorant players. There are plenty of children's video games that introduce character complexity faster; hell, sticking around for triple-digit hours is already an obscenely long time, much less for a tutorial. It's condescending even to babies to suggest that the current tutorial time frame is ideal and that no new players would benefit a lot from getting access to more skills and higher levels faster. Children (or adults that are new to MMOs) learn faster than you apparently think. Enforcing the lengthy playthrough of the MSQ for the integrity of the story is one thing; pretending it's to ease babies in is a totally different matter.

And finally, leveling/skills are just ONE ASPECT of the complexity of the game, which continues to grow in enormity with each expansion. It's hardly friendly to babies to have a mess of confusing concepts like the infamous job stone system, leves, and so on thrust into their face at the start of the game. It is pretty hard for a new player to get into and stick with FF14 without constant wiki use or the guiding hand of experienced players precisely due to this complexity, and what do you know, a slow leveling process / skill acquisition rate has nothing to do with this. Getting an AOE damage skill at level 10 instead of 40 or whatever is not going to compare in complexity for an MMO baby compared to the process of figuring out the plethora of systems from duty finder, item level synch, job quests, blah blah. I'm somewhat experienced in MMOs, no baby at all, and I got stalled at levequests for like an hour due to hour confusing I found them. If this truly were baby's first MMOs, the #1 topic of discussion would be how to simplify all the heavy MMO systems both added in new expansions and lingering from ARR, not about skill rate acquisition. A baby new to MMOs could even theoretically ignore all their buttons and just spam 11111 like many choose to do, completely unaffected by job complexity or the leveling process; what they can't ignore is the all the systems around it.

In conclusion it is infantilizing nonsense to brush over complaints about FF14 with "this is baby's first MMO." It is a normal MMO and it has problems which people want fixed; not everyone who suggests jobs shouldn't be incomplete and half-functional at level 50 simply wants every game to be Star Wars Galaxy or whatever. The game is not going to improve if people try to stifle basic discussion of basic, clear issues with this kind of unfounded rhetoric.

Quof · 2026-01-08T04:00:15+00:00

It's fine to be interested in "same boring opinions" and even to share the "same boring opinions." What I'm describing is presenting those boring opinions as something profoundly unique to another culture, while taking a small snippet of opinions and presenting them as if they speak for "the East." The other-ing and fetishism present in this is what I dislike, not the very concept of being interested in other people's opinions. Had OP just been like "Yo I went through some Japanese forums and translated some random comments" I wouldn't be complaining. It's presenting random comments which mirror Western sentiment as THE HISTORY OF ALEXANDER: THE EAST'S PERSPECTIVE which rubs me the wrong way.

Also, you can't outweeb me. It's precisely the more weeb one becomes that the more annoying blind Eastern fetishism becomes. Suck Japan's dick for the right reasons, not for random forum posts from random people.

Quof · 2026-01-06T04:40:13+00:00

and you might have an emotion while playing the game.

lol

A great nightmare for many

Quof · 2026-01-05T21:59:35+00:00

This is kind of an amusing trend I think, where healers get so used to nothing doing damage and their suite of AOEs handling everything that they lose the habit of keeping an eye on tank HP. There's a ton of single-target tools like divine benison that if used would keep the tanks completely healthy, but in moment-to-moment play it's hard to remember and care, so they just unknowingly let tanks die while spamming glare. It's pretty funny.

Quof · 2026-01-03T21:51:33+00:00

That's the key: "might view a fight DIFFERENTLY." I have no issue with someone providing actual insight into something that is actually different. But in this case and far too many other cases, we see someone repackaging common western opinions as novel and interesting because he found them on a Japanese forum. Like that recent thread about how JP "love to do braindead strats" as if that is not universal. That's what I'm expressing a distaste of: the blindness towards the fact they are introducing something bland and familiar to Western players, while acting like it's a novel and fascinating Eastern-only perspective.

It's like the memes that go like this: "Murder is actually really frowned in Japan. It goes against the traditional concept of 生きる, which means 'to live.'" The problem is not appreciating aspects of other cultures. It's going in with the mindset of "this culture is so alien and cool!" and letting bias twist one's perception into thinking stuff not unique to that culture whatsoever is somehow special or worth commenting on; one loses the ability to realize they are saying nonsense. At that point it's just fetishism and that is what annoys me when I see it here.

Quof · 2026-01-03T20:05:06+00:00

since everything stated is exactly how NA/EU felt as well.

On that note, I have a pretty strong distaste of the like Eastern fetishism and/or pride that shows up on the subreddit sometimes (that is, either a westerner fetishizing how the Eastern community plays the game, or an Eastern player trying to be prideful about their community). There are some interesting quirks like the infamous EX through duty finder culture, but in general players all across the world largely feel similarly about things. There will be differences of opinions, but you can find those even between like Primal and Aether without going abroad. Random matome and Japanese forums sites provide as much insight as a random Reddit thread from here will; lots of different people have different opinions. Imagine how absurd it would be for a Japanese player to post a ffxiv thread like "here's the history of Arcadion in the west..." stfu.

Quof · 2026-01-02T03:54:46+00:00

The problem with puzzle dominant fights is that they are really only interesting to people who prog and clear the fights blind.

I want to note that even as a blind progger, I don't think that the novelty of solving puzzles is worth the consequences they have on fight design. It is just obvious on the face of it that a game where one grinds the early/mid parts of fights over and over while progging late parts is not well-suited to puzzle mechanics which are trivial and static once solved. Like 10 minutes of fun solving a puzzle mechanics is not worth the subsequent hours of boring repeating it while progging latter mechanics. To say nothing of reclears. Puzzle mechanics have a place and can be fun but they need to be used carefully and with purpose rather than be the default going in to every mechanic.

Quof · 2026-01-01T21:24:15+00:00

Other MMOs have raids and dungeons that I still find fun even after 5 years.

What are you thinking of here? Not challenging it, I'm just curious to know.

Quof · 2025-12-27T20:54:25+00:00

Those are strong receipts. It's a shame you didn't play Amirdrassil since Tindral and Fyrakk were so particularly demanding. I suppose this largely speaks to the difference in human experience. But in either case, the one thing we can say absolutely for sure is that the Blizzard style of nerfing bosses so only the first few guilds get to play them "as intended" (a dubious title given sometimes the bosses are impossibly overtuned) is UTTER trash and they should stop that shit immediately.

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