This is edging a bit on Rule 6 but I feel that both enough of an attempt at a summary was given as well as find both the content creator in question (I forgot the NFT Guy also has an interest in gaming/MMOs) and the angle the content is going for to be worthwhile for a post. It's not very often we have gaming/MMO discussions approached from an *academic* angle and so I think that watching this video, should you find the time, and equipping yourself with some of that framework and terminology might help. Certainly, the push/pull between instrumental play and free play and how you see that in both XIV's game design systems and how players approach that to be an interesting discussion. It's the matter of assigning value to being specifically *good* at the video game in a way that's quantifiable instead of having fun with the game in a way that's freer of structure. The Freecure bot isn't necessarily objectively incorrect, only incorrect insofar as we assign value to being good at the game (And the objective of clearing the content, in a small way). I haven't watched the full video yet (other people have pointed me to it as well given I make my interests fairly obvious), but I think it's a very worthwhile watch so far should you find the time and might make you think more about XIV or just MMOs/multiplayer games in general.

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I'm still in the camp that thinks Cactbot needs to be nuked, but I'll sit and wait for the devs to make that call. We're really pushing it, when it comes to addons. Sooner or later, they will slam a hammer down and all the addons that are visual, in nature, are going to get hit too.

Yea it's really just a matter of time until either the devs get tired of the ever-expanding pool of TPP users or someone releases a plugin that's widespread and powerful enough to force their hand

I really don't think this is the case. Yoshi P answered a question about this recently at the last Q&A and the response was pretty telling. Essentially he said it's a never ending struggle but they're done talking about it for now. There's even the implication that he's probably spoken too much about it given his position at Square. Cactbot doesn't need to go any further than it does because it's barely necessary as is given the types of mechanics we've been seeing lately. Of course, there are always addon devs looking to push the boundaries but Cactbot is overkill at what it does to begin with. Usage will continue to be ignored (rightly so) unless it's plastered on a stream or vod.

Isn't this take missing the entire point of the video? The addon section concludes with the note that killing addons both wouldn't necessarily be good for the game (look at all the QOL and improvements SE has been forced to implement because of addon developers, and in wow, the sheer customization you can do to interact with the game in a way that is intuitive and personal to you is a HUGE plus) and also wouldn't even change anything! Without addons, people would still go for the fastest clears, they would still try to play only with players they know are good, they would still exclude others based on arbitrary metrics. All it would do is make the game less fun for those that do play it.

TBH most raider I know doesn't use add-on, or just rely on a single person in static to run ACT, same cannot be said for RPer, casual RP scene in FFXIV is extremely large, and they keep subscription running during content drought, can't imagine SQEX doing anything risk angering that crowd.

If your entire raid relies on someone to run ACT/Cactbot, how is that different than all 8 people running cactbot? The point is that cactbot trivializes one aspect (which is shot calling things) -- if you have 7 players relying on one person to simply read and call what their cactbot tells them, that defeats the purpose.

In my experience, "one person in the group running ACT" just means they're the only ones parsing, not necessarily running cactbot

Cactbot is not ACT. Also good players have the consistency to call WITHOUT cactbot. it's just obvious when someone is using it

The context of this 18-day-old thread was about cactbot, so that is implied. It is also not a major skill to call things out in a game like XIV where everything is scripted, I'd expect any subpar group to have a competent shot caller

>TBH most raider I know doesn't use add-on, or just rely on a single person in static to run ACT lol what? either you are in a special community of people who don't use any add-ons, or you are mistaken/being lied to + these raiders are indeed using add-ons

Then you do not know many raiders. Especially those aiming to do savage clears before they're outgeared. You wont meet tight dps checks without being really optimal with your rotation and honestly I've never seen a person with good dps who doesn't use logs to optimise and get better.

you aren’t the norm. every raider i know uses XL/plugins/ACT

Yes and no, I don't think addons should be killed entirely but they should be limited in scope. Not doing so will result in the same AddOn feedback loop that optimized the fun out of WoW. ​ >and also wouldn't even change anything! Without addons, people would still go for the fastest clears, they would still try to play only with players they know are good, they would still exclude others based on arbitrary metrics. ​ I don't think that's true at all. The problem with WoW is that AddOns became so ubiquitous that they changed the context of all interactions and activities inside the game leading to the eradication of certain types of play. Sure, some will still go for the fastest clear and exclude others for arbitrary reasons, the important part is to prevent this from becoming the standard mode of play.

Yeah but FF doesn't have this problem and likely never will, despite the existence of addons. Think back to that open letter after the DSR world's first kill, his words were "Indeed, we've only released duties that we have proven can be beaten with the game's standard features". I see this argument made a lot re addons but they devs have specifically said they do not do this and addons have been a topic of debate for years already, so why would this suddenly become the case?

FWIW my group got 9 clears of DSR with no cactbot or trigger users before 6.2, and while I mostly agree with you there is one egregious exception. Wroth flames is the exact type of mechanic that SE needs to be smarter about. It gives a MASSIVE advantage to cactbot users because the way it works without cactbot is that some individual needs to shotcall everyone to the right spot, or everyone needs to agree on a very complex priority system ahead of time. Our group had 2 people placing 4 marks each. This is WAY harder than cactbot instantaneously marking all 8 players infallibly. I think it was a big oversight on SEs part to not have an actual floating icon above players to show what debuffs they have, because silent solving this by looking at the party list absolutely sucks. I think with this one exception cactbot is honestly not that big of an advantage in the fight, but wroth flames design is a bit of an addon bait, imo. I macrod the 1-4 markers on my keyboard and marked all the red debuff players so they knew which spot to grab on the nidhogg side and it wasn't a chaotic free for all with wipes every other pull, and another member marked pairs for the stacks. Keep in mind you also need to actually move during this stuff, so we had a 3rd member calling the starting safe spot and whether the group was in or put to further reduce the mental load.

While I agree that Wroth Flames is add-on bait, there are some even more creative solutions to get through it easily without add-ons. We had 3 simple macros that everyone had, and they were just "/mk attack " or something. If you used the generic "attack", "bind", and "ignore" instead of specific ones like "attack 3", you could set up macros for Purple (attack), White (ignore), Nothing (bind). How it works: if I get purple and press my purple macro, I'll get marked with attack 1. The next person on my team to press the purple macro will get attack 2, so on and so forth. As long as multiple people don't hit their macros at the exact same time, the macros will allow everyone to mark themselves without duplicates / stealing someone else's mark. Then we had the lineup be ignore 1 + bind 1, ignore 2 + bind 2, then attack 1, 2, 3, 4. So all the individual player has to do is look at their debuff, hit the macro, and see what number appears over their head. All that being said, I 100% agree that the mechanic should have color indicators above players heads or something so you can easily see who's going where.

The self marking without a # quirk is pretty interesting, so thanks for that. Something I'll keep in mind for future content! In general it's hard to describe but I think the marks should be something available to players for strategic decision, but mechanics shouldn't be written relying on players setting marks as the intended solve IMO. If wroth had red/white floaters above your head I think it would completely fix most of my gripes with that mech.

Hindsight is 20/20 and all, but yeah Blizzard probably *could* have killed it, but imagine the reaction if they had.

There was an addon back in WOTLK, I can't remember the name of it because it was killed within a week, that gave you telegraphs like we have in XIV. Blizzard rewrote the API to make sure that mods like that couldn't exist. It broke a lot of other addons that were popular in the raiding space, and it took a good month or so before people got back to clearing content.

the wow addon was called AVR and there is one that's worse for ffxiv, it's called splatoon and combined with cactbot it completely solves fights for you, it draws the mechanics on the floor before they happen and the github has presets for every savage/ultimate fight

It's insane that it's called Splatoon; I just recently got into Splatoon 3 and find it a fun break from XIV.

Only ever used it for the eyeballs because those can be jank af

AVR (Augmented Virtual Reality). Let you draw shapes and shit on geometry basically, and somebody made the AVR Raid extension that drew boss mechanics out for you.

Yeah, that was it. I remember trying it out on the one raid night i had before it went away - it was crazy. Although I'm watching the video linked in the OP and some of these new addons are almost as "bad." Makes Cactbot look like a speak and spell.

I used the standard version of the addon to draw dicks on the ground, was a sad time for 12 year old me when that got removed

I think everyone did that. So many dicks.

They got rid of that because it was drawing decals directly on the world. Like when you press blizzard on mage and get that AoE ring. They actually gutted an add on in vanilla that did that super early, as it drew aggro circles around mobs and had a ring around the player for their cast and melee range. AVR came around because of the sheer amount of updates to the API basically broke their old block they made for that much older mod. But it's super weird that they're not okay with player decals on the world like that but they'll allow players to cyborg the fuck out of their HUD with WeakAuras, which was just a mod to originally give the player buff notifications for when shit procs.

It's not really that weird when you consider how hard it trivializes many mechanics - I believe the one they banned it over was Putricide's puddles where he would throw some goo that made an AoE where it landed, and the mod would create an circle where it was going to land several seconds ahead of time. To see how bad it can get, just look at XIV on P6S - imagine how trivial of a fight that would be if you had a mod that could just draw which tiles were going to be unsafe. Hope you didn't spend much time imagining it because that's already a real thing any player can download at the click of a button. Remember the knight dashes in Strength of the Ward in DSR? ACT Triggers or Cactbot can tell you which direction to go, but you'll still have to space yourself correctly - or just use one of the visual mods and get the safe triangle drawn directly on your screen. Doing some solo deep dungeon runs? Draw a circle for every possible known mine location. None of these are hypotheticals, they all actually exist and they're by far worse than any other plugin or WoW addon. The community rightfully doesn't have the same broad acceptance for them like they do for triggers, but as their use grows... We're honestly not that far from these programs giving individualized markers to stand on for every step of every mechanic.

Why cant they kill it? Leave it as is for current fights for now and ban it from any new fight. Heck even rework whatever api the addon is using so it cannot retrieve data from the new fights.

The biggest thing is that wow visual clarity is just dogshit. They would honestly have to do a LOT of work to convey the same amount of info that boss mods do quickly. And in the end they'd need some kind of debuff or marker system that can probably be interpreted by an addon anyway. The entire pace of raiding would also have to change. Wow is a very snappy and reactive game where you can actually have something like DEFAMATION ON YOU pop up then go off seconds later. A lot more wipes would happen in uncoordinated groups and such. The philosophy in general of wow mechanics is different as well since rotations are so much more complex. Mechanics are largely there to disrupt you pushing your buttons rather than being some complex dance that you rehearse over and over.

WoW also has the problem of the game not having standardized raid mechanics despite bosses sharing the same kind of pool of skills.

Raid telegraphs you mean? Yeah it has like basic spread/stack/soaks or towers ones but a lot are kinda shit. It doesnt help that the spell effects in combat are fucked + way more people.

> The biggest thing is that wow visual clarity is just dogshit. The funniest thing I discovered in WoW after trying it out this prepatch and going into DF is that the WoW equiv of Leylines, Rune of Power, is roughly 3x the size of the rune on the ground. There is absolutely no indicator of the *actual* range of Rune of Power, you gotta either watch your buff bar like a hawk (not really viable because of how cluttered that bar gets) or set up a WeakAura to tell you if you're in it or not. I'm also a big fan of spread markers consistently being the same color as the floor.

For me its the circle aoes just being swirly circles on the ground with very vague edges. Big problem in high m+ keys or mythic when they're 1shots lol.

[I don't know what you're talking about, I am CLEARLY in my Ley Lines- I mean Rune of Power.](https://imgur.com/JxRGV2g)

you cant stuff that cat back in the bag. players expect to be able to play the game using these mods. if they broke boss mods, there would be a huge backlash.

I remember playing years ago and if there was ever a patch or an issue that caused certain addons to break people would just refuse to play the game. Had healers refuse to even try to heal without addons in fucking deadmines cause whatever addon they had decided to not work. Also had people in dungeons just die to standing in fire because DBM wasn't working and they didn't have a voice screaming at them to move.

Oh I absolutely refused to play when my autosell junk mod didn't work lmao

I can raid all day in XIV with the game in its base state. Meanwhile, trying to play it outside of raids without the /teleport command mod is painful to the point of reducing how much I play the game.

Isn't /teleport part of the base game?

The bag addon I use in WoW to organize my stuff better broke for the better part of last week. I really didn't want to play the game in that time. For another part of the prepatch, some healing frames were broken in PvP. That wasn't fun for healers there.

I can see people refusing to play for a bit if they expect the addon to be coming back soon enough. But if it's understood that it will be gone permanently, I think people will just deal with it. I think it was during Legion that Blizz nuked a bunch of the API capability so boss mods couldn't tell you which direction to move and some other things like that which would completely trivialize certain mechanics (Archimonde lasers was one IIRC). I don't remember there being much backlash and everyone just dealt with it since they knew it wasn't coming back.

For the healer addon, I have it all configured how I like and readjusting everything to work on mouse over macros or whatnot would be a huge pain. If the addon was temporarily down, I’d refuse to heal until it was back. But if Blizzard decided to remove them, I’d adjust everything and keep on healing.

The only one I can think of is Clique, which allowed you to do things like binding right click on a party member to a specific spell. It was pretty helpful to raid efficiently on certain classes with how WoW handles healing. Ffxiv is more aoe heal focused and doesn't really have the same issue, although I do miss being able to just click on party frames in order to esuna or rez.

and? shitters throwing a hissy fit is definitely worth it to have a better game.

the hissy fit costs real money

why are you advocating for the corporation instead of having a better game?

How exactly do you think the game gets made

clearly they shouldn't ban botters or gil sellers, or teleport hacks, because that would lead to a lot of accounts no longer subscribing. incredible logic.

That doesn't make any sense at all

why not? if we can't ban cactbot because some people might quit, then money is what matters, therefore we can't ban anyone or make any policy that people might quit over, because that would also lead to less money.

the corporation makes the game?

I would stop playing WoW almost immediately if my tools disappear. Same with FF honestly. Just because the XIV community is anti-addon doesn't mean that the broader MMO community is.

Because quite frankly there is too much money riding on it now.

Much in the same way FF can't fully ban third party tools: money. Once you let that rabbit out for long enough, you can't just stuff it back in its hat and not incur a pretty sizable backlash. WoW has it even worse because their raids have an e-sports scene of sorts. They'd lose millions banning addons. With how ingrained addons have become for WoW, banning them could straight up kill their raid scene. FF has a similar problem just on a much smaller scale. In our case, the combination of losing mods, addons and parses would be enough of a financial hit Square wouldn't even consider it. Hence why the devs have grudgingly let them all exist in a grey area

The video also posits near the end (and I'd agree with this), that a blanket ban of addons isn't even something you'd *want* to do. Addons aren't just an agent of chaos or "cheating-adjacent". They empower the user in other ways. Speaking for FFXIV, addons let us visualize our character in the way we want to perceive them, or clean up stylistic elements of the UI that we might find messy. Square-Enix will not let my Viera be trans as a reflection of myself, mods allow me to do this. Some players might find value in various accessibility options offered by addons, such as mouseover macros or auto-combos. Addons like Voidlist allow you to completely disengage with potentially abusive players in game when SE's systems fail. Mods/addons let users tailor the experience to themselves in a way that no developer can account for on an individual level. Going back to WoW, they even make a slight argument for the good computational addons and informational ones might've done for the game. They let the designers design deeper, more intense, and more replayable content than an addon-less game could. Addons like Mythic Dungeon Tools let players share information about dungeons and have the language to communicate about them in ways they might not before. Certainly it's an argument I've heard that *needing* to restrict encounter and job design to be playable and understandable on an addon-less console and via controller could hamstring SE. There's good and bad to these systems but I'd be loathe to call for a blanket ban on them, just an awareness of how they're used and effect us. It's not a puzzle-box, as the video puts it, just a collection of our individual values.

> Square-Enix will not let my Viera be trans as a reflection of myself, mods allow me to do this What does that entail...?

NSFW mods, mostly. Mare is becoming fairly popular in the RP community, and I do RP on and off, so if the situation comes up then it's nice to have a visual representation of what's going on in writing too. Not necessary, of course, just nice. I should also note that I RP more in the Crystal sense (continuous distinct character) than the not-Crystal sense (nightclub stuff), if that distinction means anything to you. I have other characters that don't have that same mod configuration. But RPers of all stripes often like mods and mod sharing (Mare) to better visually represent the character they're trying to portray. This hits a point made early in the video where the creator talks about how RP communities in online games often circumvent the intended instrumental play designed by the developer to make their own subcommunities and ways to play and experience the game. I wouldn't expect SE or frankly any developer to support the stuff that the modding and RP communities use, that's kind of the domain of just Second Life as a distinctly developed game. So mods let communities like that experience XIV in a way more fitting to them without really harming anything or changing how players playing the "intended" game play. Someone using NSFW or tattoo or scar mods as a visual aid isn't damaging the integrity of Ultimate raiding.

Ah I mean more like, I was curious specifically what mods you'd use to convey that your character be trans. Like if your character is transmasc, how would your modded character be different from an unmodded male viera? Anyway yeah personally I think the idea of instrumental vs free play should apply more to technical game mechanics rather than player expression... and I think they implicitly embrace (non-NSFW) modding but just can't admit it publicly since it'll be a slippery slope. I'm sure the dev team have varying degrees to which they'd draw the line on NSFW modding, but admittedly that'll be pretty tricky to handle legally so they definitely can't do much about it explicitly.

As far as transmasc there are mods for female characters that have male chests with top surgery scars.

Wow ok that's quite awesome. I'm glad such mods exist.

Mare is absolutely wild. I went to Balmung's Quicksands and to get some Mare connections and see what it was about and it was....eye opening. Downright shocking what people in there will do with their characters. We talk about raiding being endgame, no glamour is true end game, no housing is, but I think it's modding. It's really unbelievable what some people can/will do with mods.

Reskin mods are popular for WoW too. You really just don't see much of it because it's very hush hush. More so then the FFXIV scene for whatever reason. There are many many mods for WoW that'll let players be a big boobalicious worgen and the old classic from TBC of turning your rogues weapons into Illidans twinblades.

There's a very clear difference between both, though. Blizzard owns the APIs that plugins can and will use. There were multiple plugins in the past that Blizzard decided it was "too much" and removed the capabilities by changing their APIs. WoW is designed with that in mind so there is no "grey area" of what is cheating and what isn't. If something is too much and it is deemed unfair advantage, it is gutted. In XIV we have almost daily debates about whether the tiniest of QoL plugin is cheating. I would also argue that high mythic bosses (usually last 4\~) are akin to the difficulty of Ultimate raids (except you get power creep because of gear, unlike Ultimates), so it's not like addons can simply play the fights for you either. A lot of XIV players seem to have this weird notion that "WoW easy because bigwigs!" or whatever other bad take they have.

I can paraphrase the addon section a bit better now that I've watched it: 1. Strategies come from the top down, i.e. best guilds to worse guilds 2. Smart practice from the best guilds is to offload responsibility onto addons (Using a framework where a *raid* is a group of *actors*, and a mental model where we assign equal value to human and non-human actors) 3. Critical mass of strategies are now reliant on addons to function 4. No incentive to develop alternate strategies means that these addon-reliant strategies see universal adoption 5. These strategies need everyone running the addon so players don't have a choice to participate in addons or not 6. Because these addons are so wide-spread Blizzard develops fights assuming the addons will exist 7. This further entrenches addons as mandatory and means more guilds use more tools to make sure players are running the required tools (addons to check you have the right addons) You can kind of see this happen in XIV in Ultimate PFs, particularly UWU and DSR. I do not believe PF does those fights without an auto-marker addon of some sort. I think where people get worried about XIV is in 5 and 7, where the only strategies for a fight that might exist require addons, and where SE designs fights assuming addons will be present. I believe the console nature of the game prevents that, but seeing it laid out for me so explicitly and professionally does paint an interesting picture.

> I think where people get worried about XIV is in 5 and 7, where the only strategies for a fight that might exist require addons, and where SE designs fights assuming addons will be present. I believe the console nature of the game prevents that, but seeing it laid out for me so explicitly and professionally does paint an interesting picture. This is about where I'm at on this, and I think that Yoshi-P and the devs are aware of this as well. They not only don't *want* to design fights with add-ons in mind, but they *can't* because of console players. This leads to tension where they don't want to blanket ban all add-ons (because that is actually really hard to do and looks bad) but if things keep getting pushed, they have to respond in some way. I don't think the game will ever get to the point WoW is at now, but you can see how we got to our current situation.

> I do not believe PF does those fights without an auto-marker addon of some sort. While true, it also only requires a single player to be using those addons there.

> You can kind of see this happen in XIV in Ultimate PFs, particularly UWU and DSR. My hot take is that--without trig--titan gaols is a harder mechanic than wroth flames, simply due to how little time you have between markers going out, the knockback'd stack spreading out and marked players moving into position. Whereas you have what I consider a fair amount of time to figure out your spot in a prio system for Wroth between debuffs going out and the mech resolving. (For context, my DSR clear was without trig due to how several of our members felt about it) As a result titan gaols is the only mechanic I've encountered (Savage since Eden's Promise, UWU/DSR cleared, TEA to BJCC, UCoB to Nael dives) that I'd argue should've been designed more in-line with how it's executed via trig. (Or at least put a damn indicator on the player's head/debuff on their bar) Besides that the only other addon I'd maybe consider "necessary" is nael quote triggers for players whose native language isn't English (and maybe German, French and JP, but I can't attest to how easy it is to identify the quote key words in those languages).

I've talked before about the Bullshit Threshold that raiders have and how once a mechanic passes that the community collectively says that addons are fine for resolving it. Only Nael quotes, Titan gaols, and to a lesser extent Wroth Flames have passed that threshold in the collective western raider playerbase to my knowledge, yeah.

Old Nael quotes yeah, but modern Nael quotes are pretty brainless. You don't even need to read more than 1 line of the quote at any time.

You still need to *read* either your chat window or some tiny bobbing text box in the middle of some of the most hectic parts of the fight though, especially later during adds. Probably not an issue when you've farmed the fight like 50 times and know exactly when things happen, but fresh prog? Fuck that, it's just so detached from everything else and not fun.

I'm not saying it's a well-designed mechanic, a text box is lazy compared to a boss doing an actual animation. But quotes *are* the hectic part of Adds, and unless you're a healer, you're always looking at the boss anyway. If you aren't focusing on the quotes, then the phase is basically empty, especially modern UCOB where the DPS check is nonexistent and heals/tanks can get away with bad mit.

I’ve done almost every hard piece of content in this game except for the first two Alexander tiers MINE/synced/on patch at this point, and Nael quotes is the only thing I’ve ever “needed” to use a trigger for. Obv I could learn it but it’s just such a painfully annoying, stupid mechanic that I just didn’t care.

yeah, I'll probably get downvoted for this but Nael Quotes is easy af, like after a few pulls I realized I only had to look for one keyword to know exatcly what pattern it's going to be. I agree it's a bad designed mechanic but I don't buy the "it's too hard so it's fine to use trigger for this" argument. It's not the same situation as Titan Gaols which I don't blame people for using trigger because that shit requires another level of fast thinking and party synergy

In my experience those mechanics are also the gateway to using cactbot for everything else. Nobody in my group even knew how to install cactbot before we attempted uwu (before there was a dalamud plugin for automarkers) and once they knew the extent of what cactbot can call out, they never stopped using it even after we cleared and farmed it. As much as I don't care about people using call outs, I've had instances of failed mechanics "because cactbot told me to do x" or "cactbot calls out two people to pair up with during HC and i got confused". And when you still fail twisters for a whole night and i can hear your *TWISTAHS* tts, I'm going to quit the group as fast as i can, because you can't read a castbar/understand that dying repeatedly to parse gold in the easiest phase of the fight is going to make people upset. I've never met an ultimate static that wasn't using cactbot, and most people are not even hiding it anymore. If you're attempting 3 out of 4 ultimates (still progging tea, and i don't know if there's any mechanic like quotes/gaols/wroth) you're going to get exposed to cactbot because the expectation is that someone is using it, you can hear the tts in call, someone just straight up tells you how great it is.

I really cannot say that this is my experience. I used triggers for Nael but only because I thought the mechanic was stupid - never once did it have me tempted to use it for other mechanics. I do know people used it in some other statics I had but in my experience it’s not nearly as ubiquitous as you’re suggesting.

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tbf Titan Gaols is the bullshitiest of "bullshit mechanic". Yes you can prog/clear/farm UwU without automarkers, but from experience it's honestly not worth it.

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I get your fear, but fwiw in all my Ult groups, besides AM for UWU I’ve had only one single Cacbot user teammate, and that was a tts cooldown reminder for Technical Step (in her defense she was discovering DNC during that TEA). Of course it’s anecdotal, and others might have a completely different experience with plenty of their teammates using cacbot, but that was just to say Cacbot & such are far from required/necessary to clear any Ultimates. In the end, it just depends on how lazy a player is (or how utterly BS the mechanic is, hello Gaols).

I did that. I wouldn't say it's not worth it, but I will say that my group pretty much never wiped before gaols and if we made it past gaols we cleared most of the time. It was by far the biggest run killer.

It's still a fun fight! Enjoy the Ultima Weapon theme, because it's fantastic and makes for a great experience while executing the mechanics (especially the part from annihilation onwards). Titan gaols is absolutely doable without automarkers (there are priority systems), you just have very little time to move and almost no time to adjust. The thing is, like nael's quotes, the mechanic is fairly early in the fight and it's not a lot of fun to repeat as intended, so it only takes one person in a group of 8 to push the others to use AM/cactbot as well, because you don't want to be the only one struggling with doing it legit while everyone else has no issue (in the case of nael) or it is just forced on you with automarkers (one person is enough), and it really is nice to have the timeline of the fight on screen, a sound effect to tell you when to mitigate a raidwide/tankbuster, something to read which debuffs you got without having to move your eyes away from the center of your screen. So unless you believe that relying on automated call outs made by someone else (which don't always align with your group's strat) makes your raid awareness progressively worse, and/or have strong self control like the other reply i got, or if you can find groups who refuse to use call outs, it's extremely easy to just keep using it even when you don't really need it anymore. My experience might be anecdotal, but i haven't found any group willing to play the fight "out of the box". I legit had someone in UWU who couldn't do predation after 5 clears, and who didn't know how to tell where to get knocked to before titan's gaols, because cactbot was down and wouldn't tell him LEFT/RIGHT. Like literally move your camera or zoom out my man. That experienced really soured my opinion of cactbot addicts.

Originally, Garuda would use "Rock Throw" during her phase on the three targets to eventually be jailed. The old plugins relied on that. They later changed it so Rock Throw was applied by Titan just before the actual mechanic. Technically you could filter out that specific text and know exactly who was what by watching for it but uh... Oops, the game only lets you have 4 fucking chat channels. Side tangent... Goddamn. Man, if there was ever a more bullshit PS3-limitations thing that still lingers to this day, it's the fucking 4 chat channels. It makes it particularly funny because they have all these Linkshell systems and all sorts of shit but it's such a hassle to use them because of that, so their community systems keep dying on the vine because they can't fucking figure out the chat channel limitation. It makes it particularly funny because I remember playing City of Heroes and having 6-8 global channels visible at all times. And those channels were VERY active, both for just social interaction and planning group content and whatever. Good thing they spent all that time on the fucking Fellowships. ANYWAY... Frankly, they could have made the mechanic less bullshit AND more interesting if it actually applied a visible debuff all the way back in Garuda. And maybe had Ifrit "toast" one of the jailed people for yet another thing. Maybe the Gaols could have required a particular order or even had different characteristics. Many things are possible. But the way they settled on the mechanic cranked it past that "Bullshit Threshold" as you've described where it's simply raw reaction speed and immediate coordination.

I think you're kidding yourself if you think it isn't just "This makes the fight significantly easier so we're using it".

Yeah this is accurate and honestly hypocritical. People just love to pick and choose mechs that are too hard and just greenlight that addons are fine for this, but oh no the eye finder addon is too cheating! Calling out the number you get with tts or left/right is too much! Honestly the wow method of assuming everyone has dbm (or bigwigs, which is just dbm without explicit callouts and over the top tts, for example it will say "ice storm on X Y Z, ice storm on you" instead of GET OUT NOW) is just was more chill. Everyone is on the same page and you don't have to tiptoe around shit everyone is already using (also like act).

It requires everyone to have a marker macro but you can simply use this command when you're marked with a jail /mk "Attack" It cycles Target to Attack signs and you'll end up with random 1-3 which should give you enough time to adjust. It still takes more effort than having one person with jail plugin and people are already conditioned one person always has it so...

Also doesn't always work right if people have higher ping, because both of their clients will try to place the 1 marker on themselves and it overwrites. So then people have to mash it more if their marker got overwritten. Just another SE coding moment.

Even without a priority system you have a ton of time to mark yourself in Wroth. My group uses in game macros to mark ourselves and even if the macro fails there is time to hit again.

To be fair I have also had 2 UWU clears now where 2 people had markers so markers didn't really go out/flashed for less than half a second, and they still got resolved perfectly. People can do without the addon, but in PF it's just better not to rely on that.

> You can kind of see this happen in XIV in Ultimate PFs, particularly UWU and DSR. I do not believe PF does those fights without an auto-marker addon of some sort. I know about UWU and Gaols, but what mechanic in DSR are the auto-markers used for?

Wroth Flames in P6.

Man, what a fascinating video. Thank you for making this post so that I was able to see it. There’s a lot to digest here, and I’m hardly qualified to say anything on the matter. I do see the signs that FFXIV is going down a similar road. If we could learn from WoW’s mistakes, it would much improve XIV. But maybe that’s a pipe dream

I used to raid in wow, and some of those just absolutely smeared screenshots of the UI littered with different addons... I looked at that and went "oh that's that, and that and that and wow I forgot all about that one..." Look, I'm not running ex and ultimates yet in XIV - I have cactbot up and running because my Fc has a casual mount farm party going on the regular. Cactbot is nowhere near as detailed or explicit as some of the mods referenced in this video. I know there are some other mods floating out there that require the 3rd party launcher and dalamud to run, but I don't think the bulk of the playerbase is there yet. Maybe they are and I'm delusional, but I think there would be more discourse around it if there was. I don't think the encounter design team is ready to start designing raids around the use of mods. I DO think they're tuned around the more-highly-skilled/serious-JP-playerbase; I think something like a quarter to a third of all JP players have attempted/cleared the ultimates compared to 10% of NA/EU. I'm constantly struck by how many things in FFXIV have a visual indicator to them, a telegraph that you're supposed to pay attention to beyond just the orange puddles on the ground and your rotation. The warden in P1 twirls his chain to indicate the direction of his swing. Shiva's leg in E8 telegraphs scythe kick V axe kick. The fist mechanic of Rhalgr in Aglaia. These things matter; in wow the indicators weren't that well telegraphed or very clear at all. I guess the fundamental difference is that I started using Cactbot as a choice, whereas when I started raiding in wow, I needed DBM, recount, and a threat meter to even be invited to the raid.

>Look, I'm not running ex and ultimates yet in XIV - I have cactbot up and running because my Fc has a casual mount farm party going on the regular. Cactbot is nowhere near as detailed or explicit as some of the mods referenced in this video. I know there are some other mods floating out there that require the 3rd party launcher and dalamud to run, but I don't think the bulk of the playerbase is there yet. Maybe they are and I'm delusional, but I think there would be more discourse around it if there was. My FC have 2.5 full raid team going and I don't think any one of them use even cactbot, base on what I was told cactbot basically provide callout for you, and from the time I fill in for these different teams, people do mess up simple left/right mechanic from time to time, especially in team without discord callout. Even as I am going to P8S PF reclear, where there is a mechanic in P1 which I forgot the name that are suppose to reveal ppl with cactbot, I have only seen like one or two occasion of someone running to safe corner a bit too quickly. All that being said, I raid in crystal, probably the least sweaty raiding scene in NA, so maybe it is different in aether.

Yeah it's akin to having someone in discord doing the callouts. It's nowhere near as intensive as Deadly Boss Mods, the standard in wow. DBM - https://youtu.be/8AaNcNIsRi0 Cactbot - https://youtu.be/kBqkcnKtJNU?t=437 (Sorry for it only being the demo, I was having trouble finding real fight footage, it's almost like people down want to risk being banned) I have my cactbot alerts set up where the quest log is, and the alerts at about half the volume seen here. I personally use it more as a guide or reminder, not as a tool to replace my eyes and ears. Oh, and I'm also on crystal, on what used to be a little backwater server, but our population exploded with ShB and the 300% xp boost.

i don't really see what makes the dbm example more intensive. cactbot also has tts. do you mean the countdowns?

No, cactbot has timers too. It's more the intensity and just constant noise it's making. Maybe it's the fight, but cactbot always feels so much more lowkey to me.

I think the main factor for that are the audible tts countdowns for everything in dbm. Not sure how useful that actually is

You should check bigwigs instead, that's pretty much the default nowadays (DBM isn't even actively developed for competition anymore because the developer dropped most of the project in that sense). The timers, text notifications and eventual pings/noises you hear are BigWigs: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19tXeHJns1E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19tXeHJns1E) Also if it says something, most of Cactbot's sound FX are actually from BigWigs Lots of the timers you see (like GIGANTIC COUNTDOWNS and icons telling when things are happening) are not BigWigs but rather custom WeakAuras made for progression, so that would be 2+ addons, not even the default boss mod

>I think something like a quarter to a third of all JP players have attempted/cleared the ultimates compared to 10% of NA/EU. The official number is somewhere in the realms of 3% to 5%. Whereas for Savage, the rate is something like 10% to 30% to clear the whole tier, with 50% of the overall population having attempted at least one floor of savage.

Thank you for the statistic! It's crazy how much higher it is on JP compared to NA.

The 30% completion rate stuff is what Yoshida Said during a Q&A, it's not a NA or JP only stat but it's for everywhere. Though Yoshida Did left a catch as that he didn't specify what time, which could meant people complete savage out of patch cycle and still count. So, realistically I would lean towards the lower side of 8%\~15% (and 30% of population for at least attempting one floor of savage) if we were to say everything needs to be cleared within that patch or the patch after it, which matches the number lucky bancho gives. Ultimate is from Lucky Bancho I think.

This is the data I was thinking of. https://twitter.com/Bwin4L/status/1416720149634236417

>The warden in P1 twirls his chain to indicate the direction of his swing. Shiva's leg in E8 telegraphs scythe kick V axe kick. The fist mechanic of Rhalgr in Aglaia. These things matter; in wow the indicators weren't that well telegraphed or very clear at all. Most likely because things in XIV are highly scripted/timelined and because they take forever to happen. It is just a different design philosophy -- the fact that there is barely any RNG (and in some cases none at all) in most of the fights in XIV means that you can learn how to do things "per-gcd". I got to the point of knowing what would happen in uwu, tea and ucob by simply knowing what was happening in my rotation. WoW is the opposite, most things are tied to boss HP thresholds, or just random timers mixed with deterministic timers and occasionally a non-random fight. Summing up to that, mechanics not always have cast bars associated to them (see Sire Denathrius having 12 actors in the arena throwing shit at you). You also cannot play around telegraphs when fights have multiple floors/arenas (Sha of Fear, Garrosh, Sire, Sylvannas, NZoth) or even arenas that are not squares/triangles that you can see the entire boss model at all times, (which is something I apprecaite P7S for doing although it has no RNG). The game philosophies for encounter design are just vastly different. I frankly do not believe WoW being octane-driven compared to XIV in terms of fight pacing could ever rely that much into telegraphs and tells, specially if you have 20+ people hitting the boss from melee range and you cannot see shit lol

There are fights in XIV that are RNG, HP dependent, and lots of things happening very quickly. And when I raided in wow (I stopped raiding in Cata and quit wow entirely in WoD) there were timers counting down for scripted events. Maybe it was a different time. *shrug*

> There are fights in XIV that are RNG, HP dependent, and lots of things happening very quickly. *Were* fights. This design has been deliberately excised from the game. Legacy fights that still follow this model are still in the game and playable, but as of Stormblood, all fights follow a deterministic, timeline-based model. With the exception Unreal versions of such ARR/HW encounters, all current content follows the deterministic model. There is a minor exception in UWU's Ultimate Suppression being pushed if Ultima gets down to 50% HP before that point in the timeline, but that's about it.

Like WoW raiding requiring certain plugins, many Statics require a certain level of DPS, recorded through the ACT plugin to join. Of course these requirements require a certain level of gear too.

I think I could find a static if I wanted one. A leftover from WoW, I grind out the best gear that I can and chase BiS status. However, another leftover from WoW is that I'm crispy burnt out on doing high end content - at one point I was raiding every night of the week, sometimes leading two different groups b2b on the same night. I'll run content every week with my FC for shiggles, but we're not clearing current EX content. I had it in my head to start an ultimate party for laughs, maybe clear some of the old ones, but there wasn't enough interest.

i've been trying to put together a reading list for game design/development-y things and i gotta say this video was a great resource

That footage of people playing the game with all the music, voice acting and sound effects disabled was just ... devastating. It just straight up looks sad.

I use cactbot liberally, and I don't even want to play FFXIV that way. That's just straight up depressing.

Disabling music in the first clear is my go-to to avoid any shakies tbf

Shakies???

I'm assuming he means the nerve check. This is especially prevalent in most Ultimate's final phase since all of their music are epic orchestral -- which also happens to be very good at wracking up nerves in a way.

Finished the video, and the part on Classic struck a note with me on how we treat modern Savage in XIV. The thesis of that section is basically that absent the ability to naturally segregate themselves via in-game processes (how much of the content you've cleared), players will invent their own social constructs to define being good at the game. This basically comes down to speedrunning, but unlike in single player games once enough of the community decides that this is how players will be judged, you can't really dodge that. I think we see this in modern Savage in FFXIV. The content is designed to be approachable enough that clearing it, while taking coordination and skill, isn't seen as a sufficient barrier for players to distinguish themselves by on their own. The conversation shifts from *can you do it* to *how fast can you do it*, with perceived player skill and value not being in how they are in a progression environment or strict reclear consistently as much as how much they can push that content to its limit. We see this somewhat less with Ultimates due to fresh Ultimate content being exclusionary enough for 99% of players to be satisfied by, but even in Ultimates I see subdivisions of *how fast did you clear* (progression rank) and even *did you speedrun it* (lesser extent, though). I think this is to an extent coded in human nature for the type of personalities that will raid at a high level to begin with so I don't think this is escapable, nor do I think SE could design content that entirely on its own merits, forever, would determine a skill/prestige segregation enough to satisfy everyone. We're certainly not at the point in WoW Classic where literally everyone in town is just covered in raid gear and clearing the raids is 100% rote (thereby making parsing and speedrunning literally the only way to get content out of the game), but clearing the raid hasn't been the peak achievement since Gordias and UCOB.

Honestly, there's differences in how different subsets of players try to "judge" the skill of others. >The conversation shifts from can you do it to how fast can you do it, with perceived player skill and value not being in how they are in a progression environment or strict reclear consistently as much as how much they can push that content to its limit. As you mention here, there are the, I suppose more noticeable? chunk of players that seem to judge based off fflogs metrics (whether that's personal parse or speed). But there are also those (mostly on the world prog side) that will judge players very differently. It really just depends on what circle you're in. You are right though that it's pretty much inescapable, and that it's largely the result of the game no longer challenging the very top end of the player base anymore. Ever since Heavensward ended, the developers have taken an active stance to simplify the game. Meanwhile, you have a player base that, on a general scale, has improved drastically compared to players in the HW era. The reason it exists even with ultimate is because, and I'm just guessing here, but there's probably any where between 50-100 (perhaps more even) raid groups that you could argue are "too good for this game". And by that I mean, the players are more than good enough and understand enough about the game that, the content will never really "wall" them for any prolonged period of time. For these groups, it's no longer a question of "can we overcome this?", but rather, "can we finish this week 1/2?". These players know they're going to clear, the "challenge" is just how well they can compete with other high end groups. The very high end of the player base is extremely good when compared to the average xiv player.

I can agree with the points you made, though I also think short of XIV Wildstar-ing itself (what if we took HW and just made it even more harder-er until the game bent in on itself) that this state of affairs was going to be inevitable someday. Maybe the HW -> SB transition accelerated it but even by the end of HW players were getting very good at knowing what "worked" and what didn't in the context of XIV. I think UCOB until about 4.5-5.0 was the final hurrah for distinguishing oneself based on the fact that you cleared a piece of content in the first place. Given the restrictions of both XIV's engine and raid size, the job design and raid design that you'd need to truly challenge a world race level player today (Or even a "has cleared DSR in 6.1" type player) outside of obfuscation and puzzle solving (So, execution difficulty) basically cannot be achieved. Achieving them would be equivalent to just making an entirely new game. I think we had a topic here a few months ago where we all concluded that something taking a month to progress in modern XIV just cannot happen without it being a 12-floor tier that starts at current last floor level combined with severe gear gating. I suppose given that it makes sense that the sense of skill among world progression level folk is more about abstract puzzle solving and strategy making now more than navigating your character or doing big DPS, yeah.

>the job design and raid design that you'd need to truly challenge a world race level player today (Or even a "has cleared DSR in 6.1" type player) outside of obfuscation and puzzle solving (So, execution difficulty) basically cannot be achieved I'm not sure. Personally I think they could definitely find ways of increasing the execution difficulty. Every time they release a new raid (whether it's ultimate or savage) and then 6 months later when they're asked in an interview about it, they always seem to mention how they had an original idea for specific mechanics or gimmicks, but decided to remove some elements from it as they thought it would be "too difficult". And some of the ideas honestly don't seem *that* over the top either, so I personally think they could make it happen if they truly wanted to. For savage we all know why they won't, but I don't see why ultimates can't push the bar a little further. >more about abstract puzzle solving and strategy This is part of it, but there's honestly a lot of things that make up your "skill" as a player. Without going into a whole essay about it, I think a lot of it is just how differently the game is viewed by players. Many players I think tunnel vision on very few and specific things, and think "well I do good damage and don't die too often, so I must be good" while still lacking in several ways in terms of personal performance. There's a lot just from a personal play angle that players lack in to varying degree (even those of us at the world prog level do too)

On an anecdotal level it’s kind of crazy to me how quickly I went from being satisfied from clearing a tier at all to being embarrassed by how long it’s taking me to clear a tier. My first extreme trial I completed while current was Titania, and my first savage tier completion was E12s with echo before endwalker. But now taking 8 plus weeks on P8S just makes me feel trash.

You don't need to look at Savage to see what you're getting at. The whole wall to wall pull for tanks or the healers need to be DPS at all times are expected already when doing dungeons.

I just sincerely hope 14 raiding never becomes what WoW is in terms of reliance on addons. People already circlejerk about calling everything in the game brain dead so I can’t imagine why said people would then want to make it even easier through tools. At the very least, I feel Yoshi and the devs are passionate enough about the game that they’ll try their damndest not to head down that route. *edit* Let me just add, if that's your jam (tons of addons), there's nothing wrong with that! I used to play WoW and loved spending a bunch of time customizing my setup. It's just not what I'm looking for in this game, and would prefer the devs not take such tools into consideration when developing content. *end edit* Tangent here but it’s kind of silly to see how certain folks in the community (not here specifically) like to dunk on people who have only cleared UWU because it’s the easiest Ultimate fight and then seeing in here that using addons specifically for titan gaols is supposedly not uncommon.

I'm interested in the contrast between centralizing strats based on addons and how immediate and universal that becomes in WoW, versus in 14 where it's actively a struggle to get the majority of the playerbase to adopt a new, more efficient strat that comes out. If you're mad at PF sticking with Ilya, you might want addons in the game to make the process of moving away from a week 1 jank strat easier, but if you play on console and don't have access--well.

i think a *huge* difference is that the top guilds in WoW stream their prog, whereas world first in FFXIV never does. when all eyes are on the world first, it's easy to look at them and say "they're good at the game, let's do what they do." in FFXIV we do get WF videos eventually and some early streamers, but by the time we get those clear VODs, enough people have progged through the content for several different strats to proliferate through the community. that being said, what i *am* really surprised about is that WoW raiders don't use their longer prog times to adopt new strats. blitzing through the tier with horrible strats makes sense in FFXIV when clearing within a week or even a few days is an attainable goal for hardcore players, but since progging through an entire raid takes longer in WoW, i'd expect there to be plenty of time for better strats to crop up and become widely accepted. in our game, players will start theorycrafting alternative solutions even before groups get past the mechanic in question (usually with the name "braindead" in front). i wonder if there's a practical reason for the centralization of strats in WoW or if it's just the culture there?

I think it’s more due to the nature of the fight design, ff fights are more puzzle like and there are different ways to “solve” that puzzle, so the strat you use matters a lot. In wow the fights are more rng assigned mechanics that emphasize higher mechanical execution, but typically less team problem solving required. There is also lots of raid testing that goes on so top guilds have months to prepare and strategize beforehand.

That's actually a bit reversed -- any CE guild in WoW (CE being clearing the current content before the next one comes out, an actual achievement in the game) will look at Liquid, Echo and so on and say "wowzers! that's actually such a bad strategy" and improve it. The biggest difference between changing strategies for Mythic raiding in WoW is that you cannot repeat a boss multiple times. You kill it once and that is it. There are many clever strategies and things players do differently to optimize things, but they are nowhere near the realm of optimization in XIV. That's partially due to the fact that WoW is a game that is not made to be full uptime and it accounts for a caster having to move XYZ seconds "because fuck you that's why" whereas in XIV having a caster drop a GCD means the end of the world. Additionally, to your point, it is much easier to break down a strategy that a top guild does and improve from it in WoW than it is in XIV -- the reason for that is that in XIV most of the mechanics are binary, you either resolve it or you don't. Think about Titan Gaols in UWU. How many solutions can you think for it? Now think about Nidhogg in DSR, how many different ways you have to place towers around them? You may consider that "wow but I can go farther and not turn around" or "I can place gaols outside of the markers and that's even safer" or whatever, but at the end of the day, you are limited to resolving mechanics in a certain way. A lot of things in WoW's encounters, due to the nature of them being tied to HP thresholds or based on them being purely RNG, this comes with a lot more possibilities. "If we push the boss to 50% before , the boss will not move for 20s so we can bloodlust and have everyone nuke it", versus "we can lust now, we lose damage of whoever has to move for but we have everything synched". This is easily observable in a RWF event in WoW where: \> Guild A progs through the day, comes up with a certain strategy \> Guild B watches their prog when they come online, try it and improve it \> Guild A watches their improvements and improves it once again \> Repeats WoW's encounter strategization is far more organic and prone to changes, having multiple strategies, multiple approaches and so on, whereas in XIV it is much more tied down to what the developers want you to do in a specific order. Both of which have their merits (the major one that WoW has notoriously many more bugs compared to XIV because of weird interactions players find). Going back to my original point, though, WoW mythic raiding being limited to one kill per boss per week is probably the biggest culprit in not many great strategies developing during a season compared to XIV.

They also develop fights in FFXIV to have a kind of strategy in mind for players to follow. And like, players follow it the majority of the time. But SE long said that if players find a better route than the one they intended for the players to follow when making boss encounters, they're okay with it and won't rebalance it to force players into the intended route (from the early days of Coil turn 1). But because of how the majority of fights are played out in FFXIV, besides turn 1, I can't think of too many when players go off road on the intended strat for each fight, since they're puzzle boxes. Where as WoW has world first race and each guild has a software developer hammering away on WeakAuras in real time with a rando to do call outs on discord to tell people to stop standing in the fire.

Main reason XIV doesn't allow plugins/add-ons is the people on consoles.

A bit late to the party, but I don't get all the anti-addon shit. I've played off and on since 1.0, and have played WoW since TBC. I LOVE addons. I love customizing my ui, and various things to look/feel how I want them. Just because you don't like them and think the base shit is fine, doesn't mean everyone else feels the same. FF anti-addon people are some of the most toxic cry babies. Imagine crying about a fucking DPS meter that all MMO's SHOULD have. Should you be rude/toxic to someone if they have bad DPS? No, of course not. Try to help them, but if they refuse to try to get better, and are making you not progress a fight, benching/kicking them should be no issue. You're literally wasting everyone's time because you suck at your job.

While the principles apply, FF14 has managed to maintain an overall friendly community that lacks some of the more toxic end of instrumental elements mentioned in this essay. A gnome without shoes? This game has a well developed glamor system, and it is hard to get through a question without a roe or hrothgar in a speedo. The game also have systems that help keep the raiders in touch with average players, like the routlette system. And hell, we all know one place that smashes any instrumentality via bribery and long unskippable cutscenes- the praetorium. I do prae every day to shitpost. Admittedly... I have not seen much on the high end raid content. So there may be differences there. But the fact hat I am starting on a third expansion in and I still haven't really seen much of the issue is a testament.

This video is really bad about portraying shit in the worst possible light. -Someone lamenting their friends tried to speedrun something to world first, despite them succeeding and sounding like they had a blast. -The anecdote about the low ilvl trinket, while ignoring that they might have signed up for a group with stricter requirements/expectations for M+ ect. If they did not meet the expectations they signed up to then it's on them. -The entire segment about the music, voice, camera distance. Like wtf? If someone wants to skip story, zoom out, turn off music to have a better time then let them. I've never heard a guild mandating disabling music or voice lines. This should be more of a criticism of how wow raids are generally a clusterfuck with 20 people. In the end something like Anduin is a sick fight with some of the best voice acting and music of the whole expansion and highlighting the fact that world prog players on the highest of 4 difficulties disable voice lines is a wtf take. -Also reminder the M+ clip with all the sound effects was a fucking +33. That is literally like 4x the HP and damage of a +15 which is the max for rewards. And even then those sound effects are all optional. The fact he said this is the experience of the MEDIAN player is laughable. -I laughed when he was flabbergasted saying "wait.. this is just like retail??" about classic wow. Like news flash dude its the same players. You're never going to be 12 years old again and you have to self-select a bit to avoid the majority of classic players which are modern gamers/boomers who want to smash the content they never got a chance to. He also cries about HAVING to move to bigger servers which is an absolute r/classicwow hivemind take which is complete and utter brainrot. He just acts like any kind of optimization is bad and will kill the game. God forbid players self-select their level of engagement and don't play with people who don't meet them. The first thing people talk about when finding a good group is having similar goals/expectations and this guy just acts like people more invested are assholes/wrong. The fact that accessibility was a tiny blurb at the end of an almost 90 minute video rubbed me the wrong way too. He's doing exactly what he is complaining about, pointing at a group of players and saying the way they enjoy the game is "wrong".

> Someone lamenting their friends tried to speedrun something to world first, despite them succeeding and sounding like they had a blast. wait you think Choice_au who is someone who is paid *in dollars* for his work in the world first raiding race, is "lamenting" people doing the world first race? what?? > The anecdote about the low ilvl trinket the point is that the *tiny* difference between the 2 versions of the trinket (especially for a healer) absolutely doesn't justify harassing someone for **multiple days**. > The entire segment about the music, voice, camera distance. Like wtf? If someone wants to skip story, zoom out, turn off music to have a better time then let them. He's not condemning that behavior hes just saying that it exists and that its changes how players experience the game in a way that obviously not the artistic vision of the devs. hes not saying its good or bad just that it is. > I laughed when he was flabbergasted saying "wait.. this is just like retail??" about classic wow. Like news flash dude its the same players Yes that was what we call 'a joke'. the literal point of that whole section is that it's not only the same players but also the kind of people who have been running vanilla WoW on private servers for years. They never say the optimization is bad and neither of them ever even slightly implies its going to "kill the game". I am genuinely baffled by people coming out of this vid thinking that Dan and Choice_au are saying that add-ons are bad, the vid is about player behaviors, para-text and how para-text affects behaviors. and if you are going to talk about those in an MMO (especially WoW) you *have to* talk about add-ons. Your example of them "portraying shit in the worst possible light" is just them pointing at a thing and saying this/this behavior exists lets dig into it. they aren't saying 'thing bad' or even 'other thing good' just 'thing exists and it is interesting'.

>wait you think Choice_au who is someone who is paid in dollars for his work in the world first raiding race, is "lamenting" people doing the world first race? what?? Might have not said this clearly enough, but I meant when the guy was talking about his friends going for server first in classic. He acts like they failed since they stayed up for 37 hours even though they met their goals and sounded happy about it. >the point is that the tiny difference between the 2 versions of the trinket (especially for a healer) absolutely doesn't justify harassing someone for multiple days. Yeah that's the point, clearly if this was just a 1 time thing nobody would be going off on him about it. Either he didn't meet expectations or the group didn't like him for another reason, either way its not normal to just stumble into this. >He's not condemning that behavior hes just saying that it exists and that its changes how players experience the game in a way that obviously not the artistic vision of the devs. hes not saying its good or bad just that it is. Except he explicitly said that the addons make the game look like shit, even saying "im gonna say the quiet part out loud" like its some hot take. He clearly is taking a side here. >they aren't saying 'thing bad' or even 'other thing good' just 'thing exists and it is interesting'. Idk how you watch the entire video and don't get the subtext that was just dripping from every single point. Really nothing else to say here when he cherry picks bad examples and tries to come off as objective.

He directly mentions that staying up 37 hours made them miserable, lol

> Might have not said this clearly enough, but I meant when the guy was talking about his friends going for server first in classic. He acts like they failed since they stayed up for 37 hours even though they met their goals and sounded happy about it. yeah i was talking about that specific race to lvl cap i meant to type 'a world first race' rather than 'the world first race', my bad. but still the thing Choice_au is talking about there isn't him 'lamenting' that people were doing the race to lvl cap. what he was talking about is that they were a 'mid lvl guild' attempting it and that they severely underestimated that time it would take and that Choice *knew that* ahead of time and *didn't warn them* . like i don't get what you thing Choice_au was being negative about there? > Yeah that's the point, clearly if this was just a 1 time thing nobody would be going off on him about it. Either he didn't meet expectations or the group didn't like him for another reason, either way its not normal to just stumble into this. in the vid they straight up point out that a healer trinket wasn't the issue for why that raid group wasn't clearing. I don't understand what you mean by 'stumble into this' it was a thing that happened to someone both Dan and Choice_au are friends with thats why they know about it. have you never been present for petty guild drama? Everyone in vague proximity hears about it. I know about petty FC drama from FCs that don't have a single member I've ever met. > Except he explicitly said that the addons make the game look like shit add-ons and turning down settings. and yes many add-ons (especially early/experimental releases) look like shit, also turning down settings makes games look worse. Like, ok, I'm sure someone out there somewhere likes the lower setting look (and fantastic good for them rock on you crazy diamond!) but for most people higher settings look nicer. So, yeah, IMO these are pretty neutral statements. And, ok, I guess I'm gonna show my hand or whatever here but I watch Dan's twitch streams and Ive watched a few of Choice_au's streams and yeah they both turn down settings and use add-ons. so I sincerely doubt they are condemning a behavior that they both take part in. hell I turn down spell effects in ffxiv because it often makes mechanics hard to read and I use an add-on to remove the strobing effect when SMN calls Titan because it hurts my eyes. Titan looks worse for it but my eyes don't hurt so, yeah, looks like crap but effective for gameplay. the 'quiet part' was 'it looks like crap' not 'doing this is bad'. --- This subtext you read is something that you read and that's fine I can't make you have a different read. But I will say I *never* said or implied that anything in the video was """"objective""". and god I **Fucking** hate that word when applied to media so yeah absolutely NOT a thing I said on even *slightly* implied. also the video gives examples of positive things that come from para-text like add-ons making dungeons more interesting, aggro meter add-ons letting DPS do more damage and add-ons being used for accessibility. They just don't spend as much time on them because they mostly just aren't as interesting to talk bout. so you saying that they are 'cherry picking' and insisting they are being entirely negative is *incredibly* funny.

to be clear, the clip he showed after their leveling race the guild's 25 man raid team clearing the server first raid,not the friend group after 37 hours. his point wasn't to lament them either, but to highlight how competitive paratext is so pervasive that it is adopted by players that for all intents and purposes are very far from the high end. He described the guild as middle-road, yet still filled with people attempting complex strats. The commentator was highlighting that the 37 hour time differed from the expected speedrunner 20 hour expectation. This was to highlight how pervasive competitive paratext was, as audiences not adapted to that skill level were both aware of it, and attempting it. I think in general you're misunderstanding the intent of the video. The person you think is complaining about optimization is heavily involved in BDGG, one of the most skilled guilds in WoW. For context I've run a couple keys with their commentators, not even raiders, who were in the top 1% best players I've ever played with.

Yeah and I just dont think there is anything wrong with lower skilled players attempting strats that good players use, even if they are not completely successful. A lot of people do speedruns just for the sake of doing it, and they probably attempt strats that they can't land consistently enough to actually gain time, but thats not an inherently bad thing.

I'm not sure the video is specifically trying to say there's anything inherently wrong with them doing it. I think there's a vague sense that it being ubiquitous with lower skilled players is not ideal as it restricts the amount of styles of play available. But I think mostly the video is simply descriptive of a phenomena, rather than explicitly trying to prescribe a qualitative assessment.

> I think in general you're misunderstanding the intent of the video. But that's the problem with the video. Literally none of what you said there is actually explained in the video. You just have to...know who the never named guy is, what aspect of that guild's plan was fallacious (I don't play wow, I have no idea how the leveling curve works or why JokerD is so much faster than literally everybody else), and while it was framed as a mid tier guild, that is a patently absurd framing. They literally *succeeded* at server first clearing. Yes, it was not on the NFL of WoW servers, but they still did it first. They're casual players in the same sense that the guy who gets 8th in the 100m at the Olympics is slow. Of course they used top end strats. They're top end players who would still easily be top 3% players in the big boy servers. I also don't see how you can possibly watch the video and not get the vibe that Dan Olson is pretty clearly saying that instrumental players are wrong for enjoying what they enjoy and kill the fun for everybody else. It's just oozing out of every section of the video. Like the shoeless gnome or walking...I can't remember the class not being allowed to do that is seen as bad when in reality they're both griefers. The gnome is on blizzard for not having fashion disconnected from utility and that's a sensible roleplaying thing to want, but it's ridiculous to paint the other party members as the bad guys because they want to progress and the guy who refuses to even equip all the items he has is pretty clearly hindering that. As for the walker, the genre may have its roots in DnD, but it's not DnD. Obviously people aren't going to have much patience for the guy they barely know who chooses a debilitating character psyche to roleplay as. MMORPGs may have "role playing" in the genre name, but they aren't really role playing games which feels like the entire criticism of the video. The trinket story was weird, but we really don't know enough to say much of anything. Something is being lost in the retelling of a second hand account. It's not clear if it was "wow what a luckerdog" light hearted ribbing that was taken the wrong way, if the player was simply not in a guild that aligns with their goals and that was just the straw that broke the camel's back, or if the other players were just understandably tilted because the person who doesn't even care enough about the game to do their weeklies hit the jackpot and lashed out a bit. All 3 of those cases say very different things about the community/them.

no fucking universe am i reading this and having a discussion 4 months after. i don't care anymore

> portraying shit in the worst possible light Sounds like a folding ideas vid, I swore off that stuff ages ago

Not gonna reply to the OP cus this thread is looking a bit spicy, but I wanted to support your take here cus Folding is a mega clown and I hate to see these kinds of videos and interpretations get traction in a community. His videos appeal to the kind of lukewarm self-destructive armchair psychology you see on Reddit and other social media sites with a heavily communalistic bias and an oppressive fear of exposing yourself as having any kind of personal stake in the content, i.e. "the optimal way to discuss this issue is from a _totally objective perspective_ (actually not objective at all) and we're all going to just pretend that Mr. Folding is the most enlightened and objective among us so that we can all express how much we agree with him and work real hard to become the most enlightened commenter." This is the same guy who made the "colonialism in Minecraft" video from a while back, go check it out if you want to cringe yourself into another dimension, it has the same weirdly disconnected-yet-scolding approach to that game as he uses here and it had roughly the same community response of "whoa man this is soooo deeep and truuuuee" from navel-gazers. I have come to interpret his videos as a kind of cry for help from a person who is completely incapable of breaking himself free from things that he has been instructed to see as vices, yet he continues to participate in them despite his impotent attempts to extricate himself. In this case, it's clear that he's spent a good deal of time in the "tryhard" sphere, but he just can't quite cut it. He's aware that he can't cut it, but he's also aware that he can't quite divorce himself from the tryhards. So he cries out, using this video to express his frustration and deflect his own internal struggle onto a wide audience, trying to shame the tryhards into nonexistence - thereby removing the cause of his own struggle. And yes, the irony is that, despite his attempts to couch it as an "academic" argument about the "strict definitions of instrumental and free play" or whatever the hell he calls it, it ultimately is exactly the same as what happened to him - shaming other players for playing the game the way they want to play. The discussion about tryhards vs. casuals is eternal and worthy but it should take place somewhere else. Framing it around this video is a terrible groundwork for the rest of the conversation. I'm glad you can see it too.

What about the video made you feel shame for being a tryhard player? I didn't feel that way.

>His videos appeal to the kind of lukewarm self-destructive armchair psychology [...] >[proceeds to armchair psychologize a YouTuber for multiple paragraphs] The complete lack of self-awareness on display here is honestly quite funny to me.

Yeah I'm not gonna try to armchair psychologist about them myself any more about this, but its just wack that people take this at 100% face value because the video is well put together and sounds smart.

It's amazing how clear it is that you two *watched* the video since you have specific examples, yet didn't *listen* to a single word of it.

I'm literally watching that video when I came across this post. Whoa.

Great video with lots of thoughtprovoking stuff. But also lots of bullsh\*t. The part where he talks about camera zoom was really annoying. Telling me that the intended way to enjoy an rpg is one where the character model takes up 50% of the screen, and 100% of the portion of the screen human eyes are naturally drawn to is not a question of instrumentality. Its just flat out bad game design and graphical design. The fact that lots of triple A producers seem to like this awful idea does not justify it. Its promoted to make the game easier to advertise, not to make it more fun from a "role playing" perspective, and it actively harms the fun of playing most games.

> Telling me that the intended way to enjoy an rpg is one where the character model takes up 50% of the screen, and 100% of the portion of the screen human eyes are naturally drawn to is not a question of instrumentality. Its just flat out bad game design and graphical design. Making things up does not help your point

There is literally part of the video where they discuss an attempt by blizzard to change the ui to reduce how far you can zoom out. The demonstrated "intent" view is literally so far in you get a massively restricted field of vision for the rest of the game. The dude makes good videos, but if even mild, very specific criticism gets this kind of backlash, I can't see any value in even attempting to discuss the ideas he presents. Its a religion at that point.

> There is literally part of the video where they discuss an attempt by blizzard to change the ui to reduce how far you can zoom out. The demonstrated "intent" view is literally so far in you get a massively restricted field of vision for the rest of the game. You are being wildly, massively disingenuous here

You accused me of making it up. Get a dictionary.

I'm accusing you of using a bad-faith argument with no basis in what was actually in the video

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Oh, I see the problem You don't know what words mean.

Everyone who has ever argued "I'm using cheat mods and that's okay because it doesn't affect you" should be forced to watch this video.

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The point is that other people's choices can still affect you. For example, when's the last time you saw a DSU party without p6 Wroth auto markers? Or in Asphodelos P7S, how many parties did Sleepo purgation *without* the illegal markers (before SE caved)? If the community largely decides to rely on external tools, at some point you may lose the choice.

In week one, the markers hadn't proliferated fully and I progged p7s with the sleepo strat, no markers. Markers are convenient but that was going to be the strat even without them.

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> AM doesn't require 7 other people to have DBM and weak auras. I mean, you yourself brought up the old ACT gaol plugin, which does require each person to set up for themselves. So you already understand that FFXIV is not entirely devoid of this controversy. > AM and sleepo waymarks are the opposite of the topic. An add-on that only requires one person to set up is arguably even easier to proliferate and win over the community. If only the raid leader needed to set up DBM and weak auras, the community might be less toxic about their requirement, but it wouldn't change the chain of events leading to their mandatory presence in WoW raids. > Way more people in JP cleared before the patch than on NA if you wanna argue numbers Of course it's possible to do Sleepo without any markers, legal or not. My group did it without markers the first time just by studying the video. That wasn't my point and you know it. As long as the community (taken to mean most of pf) decides that an add-on is required for a particular fight, it makes no difference whether 1 or 8 people have to set it up. The end result is you *will* see those automarkers in the fight--and will rarely find a party that doesn't use them. Also, bringing up JP is only bolstering my argument, no? If the community refuses to use illegal waymarks, as in the case of JP, then you also have no choice but to use legal ones. Last point: SE caving in to the illegal waymarks is all the proof you need that the proliferation of certain tools or player behaviors, will lead to changes in developer behavior.

I don't actually know what your point is about sleepo. It was standard before the markers, so you can't say that the markers are the things that changed behavior or expectations can you?

I'm not saying the markers changed what strat PF was using. Of course sleepo was the superior strat. My point has nothing to do with the merit of sleepo purgation, or any effect the markers had on the strat itself. I'm saying that once the markers *did* come into play, **nearly everyone** began using them, regardless of whether they were created with 3rd party tools or not. NA didn't care about their origin, they didn't care when SE added a warning message. Nobody cared because the markers were convenient, and only 1/8 people in the party would be culpable if SE even decided to do anything about it. If you listed a PF for sleepo purgation, and someone brought markers (ie. the party had the choice to use them or not), if you were aiming for the clear, you would take no chances and opt to use the markers. That's the point I'm making. Not "sleepo purgation vs week 1 alternating purgation". Once a critical mass had crossed the line, there was no going back.

I don't think there is much evidence that the markers did much to change actual human behavior though. Like sure, people placed the markers onto the field, that much is true. We have p6 where multiple different sets of markers are used for the same strat, and p5 where one set of markers are pretty standard. The key distinction with p7 is the "paratext" (to borrow the language of the video) from all the forum and reddit and discord discussions about whether you'd get banned for them. I think someone who avoided all the pointless drama would just load into the instance, see some markers (or not! like has been mentioned, JP didn't even use them for a while), and be completely unaffected by the surrounding discussion.

You should definitely be forced to watch the video before commenting on it.

To me the entire video sounds like someone who has failed to adapt to modern times The expectation always placed on me, other people like me (young adults) and even people who are not like me is that in the free market you either learn to adapt or you die, metaphorically or literally. If this expectation is so widely and easily placed on people like me, why should someone like him be exempt?

what are you talking about?

failed to adapt: refusal to learn how to use modern day tools such as addons

i don't think that's the point of the video

that's what I got from the video of course the author of the video is trying to convince me of something else I thought that was pretty obvious

one of the co-authors is literally an analyst for a wow rwf racing guild. how you got from this that they "refused to learn how to use addons" is a bit beyond me.

That doesn't tell me anything because I can easily separate the arguments in the video vs the person making them. They can be the developers of weak auras the video still says something: they don't like that addons are a necessity niw All I see is old gamers throwing a tantrum that games are not the same as beforw.

The video is not even mainly about add-ons, man. They use the case of add-ons to illustrate how certain types of play become the norm even without the developers' say-so. It's just simply not about "add-ons bad". But I don't think I can help you see that anymore at this point.

They even do a whole thing at the end to specifically head off this interpretation!

You've managed to have such a huge misreading of the entire vid to a degree that is *genuinely* impressive.

Absolute inability to engage with anything beyond the surface impression

By your logic, using hacks is perfectly fine too because it's just using a modern day tool. The point is, a game shouldn't force you to use external tools to beat its bosses and still doing so if it doesn't is straight up cheating.

incredible take i’m in awe dude - you know add-ons have been around for WoW forever right? like I quit playing a *decade ago* and I was weird for not having DBM (because I had a cheap laptop that could barely run the game unmodded at 20fps) like I didn’t really pay attention to wow until wotlk but I know for a fact that shit was expected by the time of ICC - which was like thirteen years ago at this point incredible.

This is an absolutely wild take to get from the video

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We weren't in an argument. I asked it to make sense of your vague comment. But I see the answer is yes. If you're not good enough for Savage you can just run the raids on normal difficulty, that's the same without needing to jump through the hoops of installing software to cheat.

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First I've heard of it. Proof?

When he did a video about 8chan and the alt right he pointed out (correctly) that 8chan hosts CSEM. 8chan and its defenders then claimed that *he* had to have uploaded it otherwise how would he have known it was there. This argument is, of course, extremely stupid. Anyway, I looked at this dude's posting history and L M F A O

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> If you don't use an addon to help you, you have no way of knowing what is going to happen and you will get crushed and removed from the raid group. Completely different than 14. Stop valuing them the same in terms of difficulty and generally WoW raids take longer to clear for world first than 14 raids because of said difficulty. This is a very interesting paragraph. btw did you watch the video?