The Raid that Fractured the FFXIV Community

So my group killed this pretty quickly and I still think it was one of the least-enjoyable fights I have ever done in any game, ever. I have so many complaints about it, but my biggest is that doing monitors on a controller is a freaking nightmare. You need to be exactly parallel to the arena edge in order to execute the prevailing strats, but the radial nature of controller joysticks makes doing this consistently impossible; I literally needed to plug in a keyboard for this mechanic.

It was the first time I actually felt severely disadvantaged in this game as a controller player, and this really scares me when thinking about the future of this game.

*that fractured the hardcore raiding community. Whis is just one part of it, my friend.

Unnamed is the true world first group. End of story. Every single other group had 3rd party as well, they just were not caught. Xeno said this as well. It's so eaey to make ACT and all the other plugins that come with it invisible on stream and you can also have someone else upload the logs. Plugins are a fixed part of ffxiv hc raiding and that will only change if they add anti cheat which the devs dont want to do. I am not for the use of plugins, but Ive accepted that they will always exist.

I enjoy a good challenge, but how the heck do they find people with that level of time commitment available to them? I'm lucky to get 6 people to consistently show up at a Magic tournament for a few hours a week or a DnD session for 3-8 hours once every other week.

Note: Apparently Neverland cleared it after 1032 pulls which took them 7 days 21 hours from time of release. That's an average of 10 minutes per pull.

imagining going into this only to have everyone have to reset for longer and longer pulls each time for over a week straight...

Best ultimate, yet. Aside from initial bugs best ultimate ever made.
Eden will TOP it, though.
Light's relativity, Icelit Lionsing, Yellow clock Deception and alike it will surely be a banger.

Bro your videos are so great and give me all the goosebumps and memories of prog, i freaking love it ♥

Still remember the three months my bf spent doing this raid and finally clearing it. (I got him a pin for Christmas that says "I cleared TOP" and it's beautiful. He loves it)

The fact that the GMs did not delete the items themselves, but made the members of UNNAMED_ throw their TOP weapons away with their own hands is a level of salty malice I can only aspire to.

Watching this made my head hurt. No thanks!

I could do that 😏

I don't think I'll ever touch one of these ultimates but even as someone on the outside, I really like the sentiment of the community coming together in anticipation of a clear. I'll go to work in the morning and basically check in on discord, asking what prog is looking like, etc etc. As an aside, I love that these ultimates have a bit of a story to them, which, I mean, DOES make sense since they're supposed to be "retellings/speculation", but the devs really could have just made the fights harder and added no flavor to them, which is why I'm glad they went the extra malm with that.

"Avoids backloading encounters" Have we played the game game since P7S?

Yoooo Martin Blackwood in FFXIV???

DSR was my first ultimate ever cleared and TOP was my first ultimate on patch release.

These fights both pushed me to different new limits, DSR with overwhelming mechanical skill checks and TOP with needing to be absolutely dialed for DPS rotations. Both fights were the hypest moments in my gaming history.

Last tier of Eden was the first raid I ever did (cleared e12s fifteen minutes before servers went down for Endwalker) so I too am absolutely looking forward to Futures Rewritren Ultimate!

Was there to watch most of the world first race and the way this is packaged is truly amazing. In a way, a Minstrel's retelling of all the drama, highs and lows of the race, poetic.

I remember the kindred chat wars between red defamation and blue defamation. there were channel point bets every pull. anytime a pull wiped after going past hello world chat would be filled with like "typical blue pull". seriously those hello world callouts are imbued in my mind at all times after watching this WF race

This is such a fantastic video.

The raid that I hard passed on.

this fight was cancer.

worth every second.

SE had a real hard on for priority based mechanics this entire expansion. RNG and PRIO, TOP wasn't the only fight suffering from it. They just took it to another level. When even seasoned early ultimate clearers say, I cleared it once I'm never going back in... You know it's just a bad fight!

UNNAMED_ still cleared first whether the community likes it or not kekw

the unnamed zoomhack video is still so funny. it starts a bit past max zoom distance and youre like "hmm yeah i can see how thatd give an advantage" and then the camera leaves the solar system

I dont care about world first races anymore, too many cheaters to even get into it

Blue screen pisses me off to this day, teh HP buffer so clearly felt like a signal that you weren't beating this through brute force, and the lroe implicationsof omega trying to push itself and rejecting its defeat, some puzzle mechanic such as healer lb3ing omega or having some less insane way to do hello world to reprogram omega to understand dynamis would ahve been so cool, instead its all a gotcha red herring I felt so dissapointed as a spectator, as much as I love the lore and story around TOP otherwise, this exact moment was what killed my enthusiasm to want to do the fight myself.

The fact that you put out such infrequent videos and still have big name sponsors speaks volumes. As always, bravo sir 👏

If people didn't know this fight was cleared without a healer, 3 tanks and 5 dps only

mad props to the people solving this in real time because my brain is melting just watching this

Tbf, now would be the best time to have a discussion about 3rd party tools, we get basically no updates until Dawntrail.

I thought the SB MSQ was garbage, but I maintain that the Alphascape tier is the best raid tier in the game, and O12S is the best raid in FFXIV. Every time I hear Heartless it makes my heart skip a beat. I swore that when the ultimate came out I was going to fully commit to it.

I cleared TEA 12 times in the mean time, and progged DSR P3, and UWU Titan in between savage tiers. I am starting to get the bug for progging TOP, but I don’t think I have time for it now.

Shout out to Kindred. We nabbed Peri in an e8s prog group a few weeks after he started playing (yes, he geared up, unlocked the endgame raids, and was progging the last floor of the tier a few weeks after installing the game). One of my static members noticed he was doing way more dos than everyone else, with crafted gear… so we invited him to our group and he stayed in our static for a while, before forming his own speeds and parse groups, and eventually leading to fully commit to his HC group doing everything he is now known for. It was wild to watch him improve exponentially. I’m convinced he can directly read the spaghetti code. Crazy thing is, Kindred was doing ultimate world races to practice for savage. Like, what.

Anyhow, I think back to those times fondly. Peri is one of the nicest people you’ll meet. Dude even traveled half way across the country to come to my wedding.

I love long videos. the fact you take the time to put these together to explain the basic idea of the mech and then explain how each team worked on it. i love. Keep these up i love them!

This is why I stopped Hard mode content in FFXIV! This shit was just rediculous beyond enjoying the game for some crappy un-unique gear! It was not fun and caused stress! I like to leave the real world stress and not come into the games stress!

God the LB spam in final phase is so peak.

God damn there are people so much better at this game than me lol

halfway through this and i'm just gonna say thank you so much for this vid

I'm pretty sure Gordias was the raid the initially almost killed the game and community

Great documentary! Gotta appreciate the positive outlook at the end.

I feel like this is Chapter 3 or 4 of the real story.

Cp. 1 was Order of Blue Garter trying to beat the original Twintania. I'm pretty sure they did before it got nerfed.

Cp. 2 was Alexander Savage 3. The static killer. It was literally impossible before you farmed savage gear. World 1st took months.

This video is the remix of what Sq. Enix does...

My group managed to clear the first phase before we dropped TOP for the next savage tier, and we haven't done TOP since. It took us a lot of effort to get all the mechanics right, but ultimately our biggest problem was the DPS check. Many times we did everything right, but at the end, our DPS just wasn't enough. Couple of times we got to second phase, until we dropped TOP.

I'm really loving your long-form video essays! You're a great narrator and give a real feel for the events as they were happening. Hopefully we see more in the future!

My only snippet I would add is, yoshi P himself said before the raid was out that it was not harder than DSR. And that DSR would remain the hardest Ultimate raid. And then when it came out it was clearly a league above the previous and so community expectation was literally created to be lower and not expecting the hardest ultimate we ever had.

Thanks for doing these videos! I haven't even touched an extreme trial but I love hearing the stories of these raid groups, what a different world

It always amazes me when I see the third party tools controversy. 'we saw Western fans using external tools so we thought to level the playing field, we should too'

I'm not about to lie and say I don't get it. I do, we've got a whole community around mods and making the game even more accessible. but that's the point.....it's not 'let's send the camera to SPACE' 'show me where the hit boxes will be' etc unless it's some fringe cases where everyone hates them. I'd be lying if I said I don't agree with them, my stance has always been 'as long as you hurt no one, what's the harm?'

but when you're in a race with fame on the line, and a lot of potential fortune (think about it, you're streaming your success. you think XIV fans won't come to the stream of the famous conquerors of these things?) there's a difference between ACT to see how you're doing, quality of life, and 'show me the answers, I'll copy and change a few things'. I think it just shows how little they actually got WHY we use mods when we do.

TOP was great, but I say that as someone who isn't a world-first raider and would never put in the time required for it. But as a "standard' Ultimate raider, TOP has been awesome. And I can't wait for Rampant Relativity in the next Ultimate. :D

Dogsh!t raid and not worth the time. Been raiding almost 20 years and this is such a pathetic piece of garbage to even call a raid.

It's not even hard, it's just simply annoying.

Great video, nice job

fantastic documentary, very enjoyable watch!

The hardcore raiding community wanted content so hard it would make them cry. You reap what you sow raiders.