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There is a common joke in one of my Final Fantasy 14 Discords with Friends. Whenever I watch a cutscene, a few of the group laugh and demand to see proof that I have some knowledge of the game. It’s a joke that started shortly after Shadowbringers launched. , and I found myself in a dungeon with two new players and a dragon that needed to go back a bit. After our two newbies – or shoots, as they are called in FF14 – asked us to slow down and have a little patience, our angry DPS took this as a sign of losing our mind altogether. While I don’t think it’s iconic for the FF14 community, it’s an annoying risk to team up with strangers. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that all of you veterans need to suck up and let the FF14 shoots enjoy their cutscenes.
To explain my meeting a bit more, after this rather polite tank pleaded for things to slow down, our unruly Dragoon demanded that he go through the dungeon as fast as possible to collect all the monsters. While I was comfortable doing it, our new players weren’t, and I wasn’t going to dwell on it. Instead, I just let our fiery Dragoon die a few times when he ran past. If he was going to ruin the experience of a new duo trying to enjoy the game, I certainly wasn’t eager to save them.
As we reached the end of the dungeon, it immediately started sending a flurry of angry messages about how people should watch cutscenes at their own pace and you should enter a prepared dungeon. These are all points I’ll come back to later, but anyway, he shot the boss on his own, so I let him die. We waited for him to return, but he supported his entire return to the arena. When I told him to calm down and let the new players enjoy the game for the first time, he lost it and asked me to prove I was good at the game, making a messy rant about FFLogs – the site FF14 players use to download and compare analytics in the toughest fights – and share their raid experiences. It was a weird exchange, and our newbies didn’t even know how to kick someone out of the party, so I did. He lost his place in a DPS queue right at the last boss.
As I said before, I don’t think this is an iconic meeting of the FF14 community. As someone who spends a lot of time raiding, I don’t think I would describe him as the cheerful image of positivity and warmth that some of his most ardent advocates would make, but casually lining up for a dungeon doesn’t usually mean you have to prepare for someone’s wild wanderings. There is, however, an annoying issue with some of my veteran colleagues who keep complaining about waiting two extra minutes at the start of each dungeon so new players can watch a cutscene, and that’s honestly infuriating.
So here’s my take: if you’re going to queue up in the game’s Duty Finder and enter with strangers, then you should be ready to welcome those strangers. Duty Finder means you have the chance of the raffle – you could enter with a bunch of people who have completed each Ultimate try, or you could enter someone’s first round of Aurum Vale. No matter which one it is, you should be accommodating. Let them watch their cutscenes and experience new fights.
Duty Finder is a community space. I think if you are not ready to play with cabbages and people of different skill levels you should find three friends who can put up with someone with a horrible attitude and go with them. When I’m looking to speed up something, I bring in members of my group for Savage content. Of course, I was irritated by a new person who couldn’t quite grasp something, but it’s a personal issue. It’s mine. Newcomers to the game shouldn’t have to deal with temper tantrums from other adults, and I don’t think everyone should show up to a Duty Finder dungeon ready to clean it up like a world first race. .
Either way, Sprouts, enjoy your dungeons. Hope you have fun in these silly short cutscenes at the start and end of new encounters. You shouldn’t have to break the rhythms of the story by going back to a hostel to watch old cutscenes or go to YouTube, you should be able to enjoy them the first time around the way they were meant to be enjoyed. And no, you shouldn’t have to study boss fights ahead of time, if it’s your first encounter it should come as a surprise – that’s part of the thrill. If you come across another weird and elitist Dragoon, you should also give him the boot. FF14 is awesome, and you’re in for a treat, not everyone is like that, and I hope your travels through Eorzea are as painless as they can be.
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