FFXIV tries really hard to teach players group mechanics, but a lot of players ignore guildhests and don't read help text. You need to bake a certain amount of 'expected behavior' helpers into the UI/game mechanics.
I think the worst offender is enmity/hate in general - its just not an obvious concept for new players. Why wouldn't you nuke multiple targets repeatedly as a black mage. That's why you're there right?
Thank you for this post; I agree entirely. If you've never played an MMO and are coming into this game as a Final Fantasy / RPG fan, everything is so confusing.
While the game mentioned enmity, it never occurred to me that enmity could apply to
individual members of a party. In FFXII, for example, there were aggressive monsters that had "enmity" for your party, and others that would just ignore you, and the indifferent ones would only develop enmity if you tried to fight with them. And it was an on-off kind of thing; not something measurable. And while there were enemies that focused on certain party members (Ultros went after females, IIRC), I don't
think that in that game there was any action you could take to manage an enemy's enmity for specific members of your party.
So if you're coming into FFXIV with that experience, it would never occur to you that enmity might be handled differently. It's bad enough that this game springs the damage dealer / healer / tank concept onto you and expects you to grasp it and then let it permeate the entire experience when it's never been required before.
Add to this the differing UI (everything seems to take two or three presses of the button now), and the bewildering array of acronyms and inside lingo that MMOs have developed over the past decade or so, and a veteral RPGer really is at sea with this game. I'm still having a tough time adjusting to the fact that unlike in every RPG I've ever played, you
first decide who the target of your action is going to be, and
then decide the action. That's literally backwards compared to what we're used to. (And I have no problem switching between the real world analogue: speaking two languages, one where the object comes before the verb and one where the verb comes before the object!)
I found this game much more comprehensible when I stopped thinking of it as a Final Fantasy game that was an MMO and started thinking of it as an MMO with FF elements included. I had a lot of fun with the beta and early access, and am looking forward to the "real game", but it
can be a little dismaying not to see many people acknowledging how different this game is compared to previous non-XI entries in the series.