A Culture Shock - Returning Player Perspective from FFXIV

Community General Discussion
1

I noticed something within the first hour of trying to level my shaman through a WoW legion dungeon… something that’s almost taboo in FFXIV, probably in Classic as well?

TL;DR - One wipe disbands on normal dungeons are depressing af.

I’m a late BC player, played on/off til early BfA where I quit, just for background. Came back this holiday season to maaaybe prep for Shadowlands and decided to try a dungeon for exp.

Our random group got Eye of Azshara - tank, 3 melee, and I was playing my resto shaman. We managed our way through to Serpentrix without incident despite accidentally pulling a lot of extra trash along the way, but this is one fight where things can go very wrong very fast.

All the red adds stayed alive the entire fight (completely untouched besides my one DoT paired with a Wind Shear) and we managed to pull trash mobs as well… We wipe at 25%.

In my head I’m thinking, ‘No big deal, we’ll just get back and do the fight right,’ and start running. A dps made a joke about a hunter pulling adds, which I replied, “just need to do pve basics and kill adds.” It was mildly passive aggressive, but not attacking anyone specific. As the healer I felt justified after healing my butt off - particularly following the joke about our non-existent hunter.

But maybe I offended someone because the tank leaves. Meh, okay. Then everyone else leaves. One by one without a word, until I’m alone at the boss. It had been maybe 30 seconds.

I was actually surprised, until I remember I was playing Retail WoW.

Short of the most difficult fights in the game, I’ve never seen this happen after years of FFXIV where the group fell apart on a leveling dungeon following one wipe. A normal dungeon. The most casual group content in the game. Literally all we needed to do was clear out more trash mobs and kill adds - we would have been golden.

I can think of one mid-level specific leveling dungeon everyone loathes in FFXIV, and even then my groups have never abandoned it regardless of how painful progression was. Maybe one person quit, but not the whole group. Hell, even in my month of Classic, people were a lot more persistent after wipes to try again.

What the hell happened? Does everyone hate playing with each other? Are mistakes/wipes/criticism unacceptable? When did the community get so fragile to petty mishaps?

Then I remember, this was probably normal for retail WoW, and had been for a long time. And it makes me sad. Very sad indeed.

Maybe I’ll try classic again.

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This happens to me too I was doing a LFR and on the first pull it wiped the group and literally everyone left. It was eternal palace LFR 3rd wing. A tank pulled all the trash in the beginning and the group wiped. Then both tanks left and everyone else left until the whole group disbanded it was insane but to be expected with how current players subbed to BFA feel (apathy) and the gameplay systems put in place.

Blizzard has conditoned us to this easy “give me rewards now” mentality since WOD with the garrison starting basically giving us rewards for doing nothing. So now if anything requires any effort, most players quit/give up. If anything requires you to preservere and maybe sacrifice your precious time for a reward for SOMEONE ELSE ( helping someone else??! in 2019/2020?!) … they quit…

It’s not all the players fault its blizzard fault for creating this type of behavior with the game systems they have in place. People want to avoid all the grind and by doing that don’t care to put in any serious effort anymore and give up at the first sign of resistance.

I’ve had people quit BGs 5 minutes in because horde caps 1 flag. It’s gotten worse this expansion only in my experience. I started playing in 2006 and played on and off so I know how it was in TBC as well much different. Groups were dedicated and people generally would help you out. Nowadays people can’t be bothered or help unless they get a reward for it due to the way blizzard created this current game systems… it’s all around fcked. Goodnight sweet prince…

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In FFXIV it’s abit understandable because class rotation is more complex than WOW.

In WOW if you can’t press 3 button i think i’d rather eat deserter than continuing the run.

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4

Sadly it’s like this in mythic+ too ;(.

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5

It’s just a bad experience my dude.

When I do LFG and Heroic/Mythic I most intentionally take on the tank role as we control the direction and are generally the party leaders.

I can say those runs are in the minority of runs I’ve done with people.

However I have seen plenty of idiots during the many pugs I’ve done (sorry but hunters have the worst record) and most of the time the situation is recoverable.

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Why would you stay when you can just quit and regroup? The biggest negative retail has is that there is no real consequence to your actions.

In classic disbanding means you spend another hour surfing LFG for a new group and waiting for players to arrive. I assume there is a similar cpst involved in FF (unless in FF it’s purely a mentality difference)

In retail at most you wait out your deserter debuff requeue and go about your business. Normal and heroic dungeons don’t offer rewards any greater than you already can get for world content amyway, so if there is hassle why would they stay?

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It’s because in FFXIV they have a much more relaxed atmosphere, and the players can upvote people who are positive, helpful and friendly in a dungeon. As you get Social Points, you can unlock Transmogs and other nifty things.

Thus it’s in the player’s best interest to be nice and engage in team-building rather than treat their fellows as disposable tools. Also it helps that the GMs will discipline people who engage in repeated behavior like a Tank bailing again and again. I would be very happy with something similar being added to WoW.

Remove the consequences for otherwise reprehensible behavior, and this is what you get. Humans need consequences to exist for bad faith acts, otherwise you get what we have now. By tolerating people’s behavior, we’ve created a entire group of players don’t care about anything or anyone except themselves; and who have nothing but contempt, intolerance and hatred for any view save their own.

The worst part of it all however is that in what should be a social game, many of these players are unable to function among anyone who might think differently. Crack a joke that makes them uncomfortable? They try to kick you from group.

Speak up on a mistake they made to try and help them, you can expect more of the same. There is no desire to learn, because they were trained from birth to believe that they are absolutely infallible and unable to do any wrong.

That, rather than Blizzard is the ultimate issue facing the game and the MMO market right now. The Sha of Pride never died, he just decided to respawn in the real world because it was a great source of sustenance for him. :I

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Have you ever done the dungeon before?

I probably did it a thousand times during Legion on all difficulties. Normal dungeons now are full of players who have no clue about the mechanics and may not even know the basics of dungeons.

That boss is a tough boss on normal for players who are seriously undergeared and don’t know the mechanics. It is definitely not intuitive. I can’t tell you how many times I, as the tank, was the only player left standing at the end of the fight. I used to tank normal dungeons on my twinks for fun, and I didn’t always feel like giving a lecture before each boss so dps wouldn’t do something they didn’t know was stupid and wipe the group.

All trash must be cleared first, especially the seagulls. The tank tanks Serpentrix, DPS focuses down the adds. The first adds have to die before the DPS moves to Serpentrix, and the adds in phase 3 must die first, too.

Well-geared players who know the dungeon can bully their way through that boss. When nobody has any idea what needs to be done, that’s what happened in your dungeon.

I blame Blizzard. There are plenty of new and returning players who have never done dungeons before, as well as players who did them once for a quest during Legion and didn’t realize at the time they were getting carried by raiders doing their daily random.

People don’t know what they don’t know. They have no idea what questions they should be asking.

It shouldn’t have been up to me to educate every player who I ever stepped into a normal dungeon with.

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Why don’t people look for guilds to run stuff with.

10

This sounds so good. I feel wow should implement such feature.

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Agreed.
Cross realm and single button queue and forget systems leave no consequence for negative behaviour patterns.

Not exactly sure why many if any players would do guild normal dungeon runs, unless a situation exists where 5 players of the correct roles just happen to be levelling at the same time and all want to grind dungeons.

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Run normal dungeons only with a guild that happens to have 4 other players at the same level and correct role at the time you happen to be playing?

Or do you mean, why don’t people stop doing dungeons as so many have, then reach max while never having run one dungeon?

If you’re going to “crack a joke” that clearly would offend a great many players, you should expect to be kicked. It’s not up to other people to put up with offensive behavior.

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This right here is why I’m terrified of tanking and healing in WoW. One mistake and you’re the scum of the earth, need to take a long walk off a cliff thing.

In FFXIV it took me a bit to come out of my fear but when I did I learned to love tanking (Healing is still stress inducing but at least people won’t tell me to off myself)

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I realize this may not happen all the time, but looks like I’ll be looking for guild group runs pretty hard if I manage to make it back to end game.

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Therein is the problem. One could raise the argument that maybe the joke or perhaps even the statement was not actually offensive to a reasonable person, but rather was used as a cheap justification by an infantile player, to try and punish another player for daring to speak up.

After all I’m sure most people on the forums have dealt with a situation where the issue was something as innocuous as a Tank, DPS or Healer needing to follow a specific mechanic so the group could beat the encounter, and it resulted in the tank, healer or DPS having a mental melt-down and trying to abuse the vote-kick system to sate their own ego.

But rather than learning from the mistake and improving their gameplay? 9/10 players often will nerd-rage about being asked to do something. People get too easily offended about everything these days, and 90% of the problem is that most people click the yes key on a vote-kick like a mindless drone.

I guarantee if using the Vote-Kick was only able to be used in cases of people being AFK, DCs, or if it perhaps made the players ineligible for accruing social points at the end of a successful dungeon, then people would show more restraint before using it.

Instead of a case where people were screaming like big babies having a temper tantrum, and instead of trying to weaponize the vote-kick feature, players would be more apt to say the following: “Hey guys, lets get back to focusing on the Dungeon”.

It also would help if the penalty for leaving a group before it completed was raised to a full day, unless the departure was caused by a disconnect or other events that were completely beyond the control of the player.

None of these things should ‘have’ to exist, and would not be nessecary if people were respectful to their fellow players. Unfortunately more often than not, the current generation of Gamers don’t know what respect is. They’ll show it, but only if you agree completely with everything they say.

For everyone else, they have an extreme and overbearing contempt for anything that dares to challenge them, and will attack any player who’s views don’t completely align with their own.

It’s not enough for them to leave the dungeon. No, like various real world dictators from the 1940s; they have a hungering need to punish any and all players that they identify as a threat to them, and the reason they do this is because they need something to feed their desire for control, dominance, and power.

This something is that needs to be solved in society as well, as it is not native to the MMO Genre, or even the normal way of things in most MMOs. FFXIV proves that quite handily, hence why I propose the inclusion of their Social System into WoW.

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I’m glad most runs led by people like you go fairly smooth. It’s just disheartening when they don’t and end the way mine did. I honestly felt we could have recovered and done it right with ease, but everyone would have rather reque into a fresh group. We didn’t even try to recover.

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That’s the spirit!

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Pretty much everything the OP’s said has summed up the majority of the wow dungeon/raiding community. One wipe people leave rather than sticking through it and learning it. AKA community is pretty much a FFA of mixed personalities. Mostly bad. GMs don’t do jack majority of the time unless you’re hacking or something else. Rather have strict GMs who actually investigate and actually do something about toxicity tbqh.

19

That’s an odd way to spell DH.

20

Yes.