Want me to stop playing your MMO?

Crank the difficulty way up so to do even the basic main story quest, you eat shit and die and spend a full day clearing a single dungeon.

There's no faster way to kill -every- single bit of momentum and joy i had for your game other than seeing the developer's active.

"Fuck you and go the fuck away" Signage.

I swear every time I'm like "yeah I'm genuinely enjoying this" There's always some huge difficulty spikes that feels like square enix's solution to "Our servers are too clogged, we could buy more, but maybe we should just, shed a lot of the playerbase"

It really sucks when the game is pushed as a super story heavy mmo.

But you know all the story is ...behind things that can just gatekeep you away from the story.

You gotta get through all the action first!

And so much of the community going

"It's too easy! Make it harder! Get out scrubs" Is like... ok wasn't expecting dark souls 3 to be the baseline here jesus.

Anyways, Endwalker's difficulty spikes

"it's not that hard, it doesn't actually get hard until dawntrail"

is what killed it for me.

I'm looking at the main scenario dungeons and trials and going "Uuuuuuuuuugh, I have to do more fights to get to more story, and they're going to be even more bullshit than this."

And all joy just flees my heart, and instead I *Dread* them.

If I wanted to get 1 shot and die like NG6+ Radahn i'd eat shit in elden ring instead.

@KelethDragon I don't think the EW/DT comparison is true. Post-EW was harder than DT for vee. I think the unfortunate thing is trusts are a play anti-pattern and if you wanna just go and experience story, you're best suited doing duty signups where if you go down, it's not an instant wipe.

Late FFXIV has this problem where if you're not reading up on every encounter before you do it (and sometimes even then), your first experience with a new callout/mechanic is death, and if you're doing trusts you might not even get to see the whole mechanic that kills you because you instantly reset on death.

If you're already doing group stuff, well, yeah that's just kind of a fact of life annoyingly. You eat shit once or twice before you figure out mechanics in a duty. x.x; I don't think it's good but it's how it's designed. By now people should grok stuff enough to help you through.

I eventually developed a sense for how the designers think somewhat and could sort of fell my way through things the first time, but not always. There was a mechanic in DT I died to 3 times because for some reason the encounter language just didn't click in my head "Yes you dodge this when it lands but you wanna be knocked back into it once it's there". It just... didn't click? idk.

I did all of EW and DT with trusts and it was painful in places because I had no backup/safety net. I definitely feel this, even if a lot of people disagreed with vee too.

@trysdyn I've been playing as a healer though the whole game so far using the duty finder, i only tried the NPC party grouping a small handful of times.

@KelethDragon Ahhhhh, as the healer, okay yeah I understand. The rules are a little different if the healer goes down.

I can derust RDM and go with you on stuff and verraise you if you go down. I could probably even drag 1-2 other people with to fill out the group if you're having trouble somewhere.

@trysdyn It's basically the whole endwalker experience has been like this.

I'm in patch 6.5 and just unlocked what I -feel- is the last trial if I'm ready the wiki page correctly.

And It's just filling me with -dread- Because in the months since I've started playing (2 weeks before dawntrail)

The game's changed from an MMO to "Hey kiddo, wanna play dark souls and get insta wrecked????"

And as someone with various accessibility problems it does feel like

"Fuck you and get out"

@trysdyn And this -changed- greatly after shadowbringers.

Like aside from the story etc/ being great, it's also where the game last stillf elt like recognizeable and something I can -do- with a degree of not floor tanking and eating shit 90% of the time.

The devs and Yoshi-P being "Game's been too stress free up to this point so we're gonna make it harder" in interviews just.. it's killed all that hype momentum i had going into Endwalker.

I now dread the encounters and have to sludge through

@KelethDragon Ah yes. Okay. So for vee this was the hardest the main plot got. Dawntrail is much better at signaling stuff and you have an entire expac to hopefully have a smoother time before the end where it gets a little spicy again.

But also damn the story of post-EW was good.

You're right that EW changes things. Right from the first dungeon I got the feeling that they dialed in just how tight they can rig mechanics, and their new callout signals gave them the confidence to crank the difficulty. The big clusterfuck mechanic at the end of the first dungeon, I enjoy taking newbies through it and just calling out "Good luck!" when it happens because you're gonna die the first time. Period.

You're not wrong about any of this.

@trysdyn Yeah... I just wish I wasn't so disabled so I can have fun like everyone else.

Nerve & tendon damage, brain damage and my reaction/processing times aren't as good as they should be.

Even with a controller, and It just really sucks I'm at the end of my ability. This is all I can do, and the rest of it, is not for me.

@KelethDragon @trysdyn Seconding, I'd be more than happy to come along and help smooth things over. We could voice chat too if you'd like, and help explain what's going on with a mechanic to help you get an edge.

@KelethDragon @trysdyn Because absolutely, sometimes the creep of difficulty goes too far. I think the best feature of DT fights is that they add on-screen messages that alert you to when something is upcoming and what you should be looking for, and its absence in post-EW is pretty seriously felt.

@Facet @trysdyn playing with friends would be good.

There's been a couple of people I've played with. Just feels bad when you're the healer and first to die.

I would like to play with you both, just also very much worried I'll be wasting peoples time and patience.

Its a bit painful when you know you're the weak link always breaking yanno?

@KelethDragon @trysdyn So, this last year I've been playing through with my parents, and they're both in their 70s. Trust me when I say that there's no way you could try my patience as far as they do, and that I have some experience with accommodating needs.

@KelethDragon @trysdyn I might also have some suggestions for settings and such, because there are so many settings and non-obvious applications of them that it's nigh impossible to fully understand the breadth of the tools you have access to.