Development Team Downsizing and Justification Makes no Sense

[Pixela]

The difficulty in XIV is mainly in positioning to avoid telegraphs, and because content is insanely predictable you're going to beat it with repetition with guarantee across the board. You don't really feel massive pride in beating something, because you can feel it's designed for you to win with a high %.

The difficulty in XI is mainly linked to progression to withstand the strength of the enemies and in the randomness of encounters, you feel more pride in beating something becasue you feel they actively try to make you fail with mechanics such as <20% fu modes, unable to calls trusts in combat (for solo players) and randomness such as back to back charms, aggro resets, sleepga, silence/ga if mage was too close etc.

Being a good tank or healer on XI means you put a lot of work to engage with progression, understand mechanics and practiced a lot.
Being a good tank or healer on XIV just means you queued as tank or healer and do some dps.

[Alhanelem]

The difficulty in XIV is mainly in positioning to avoid telegraphs, and because content is insanely predictable you're going to beat it with repetition with guarantee across the board. You don't really feel massive pride in beating something, because you can feel it's designed for you to win with a high %.

The extent to which this is true varies greatly with the content, and the only thing you're really making a case for here is that FFXI has more RNG. Which is certainly true, but FFXIV has it as well, the boss isn't going to attack the same people with the same skills every time, everyone has different capability with positioning and timing and DPS performance and a bunch of other factors,s so you're drastically oversimplifying. The reality is, both games have their own challenges and both games have content that is predictable and content that is unpredictable.

The difficulty in XIV is mainly in positioning to avoid telegraphs, and because content is insanely predictable you're going to beat it with repetition with guarantee across the board. You don't really feel massive pride in beating something, because you can feel it's designed for you to win with a high %.

Being a good tank or healer on XI means you put a lot of work to engage with progression, understand mechanics and practiced a lot.
Being a good tank or healer on XIV just means you queued as tank or healer and do some dps.

These statements just say how uneducated you are in BOTH cases. You drastically overstate how involved being a healer or tank in FFXI is, and you drastically understate how involved being a good tank or healer is in FFXIV.

And again, it all depends on the content. FFXIV has plenty of dynamic content that won't play out exactly the same every time, and FFXI has plenty of straightforward, predictable content. Especially with FFXI, more than you would care to admit.

And all of this barely has anything to do whatsoever with progression style. FFXIV having less vertical progression wouldn't change how battles play out or the strategies employed. FFXIV having less horizontal progression likewise wouldn't either. Really all it changes is how much gear you have to keep on your person.

You keep pretending to act like an expert on a game you don't even play.

[Pixela]

If ff14 was a living entity, evolutionary pressure being applied to it are as follows

Making the game easier and easier to appeal to the casual players they have successfully attracted over the years, this includes making tanking and healing faceroll easy.
Trying to take attention away from raiding because it's insanely expensive to develop with the gear reset systems, and promoting other types of things to login for.
Trying to design and release less impressive armors from content to promote cash shop outfits.

[Sp1cyryan]

If ff14 was a living entity, evolutionary pressure being applied to it are as follows

Making the game easier and easier to appeal to the casual players they have successfully attracted over the years, this includes making tanking and healing faceroll easy.
Trying to take attention away from raiding because it's insanely expensive to develop with the gear reset systems, and promoting other types of things to login for.
Trying to design and release less impressive armors from content to promote cash shop outfits.

Lol, just stop with the 14 nonsense. Big F'n deal. Even then, your opinions on the evolution of a different game are neither here nor there, and that is before even evaluating them.

[BobbinT]

The main reason people play XIV is for the modding, erp, dancing in mog hosue basemens, role play, buying cash shop items to show off real life wealth and other second life activities and not the progression system because it's shallow garbage.

Agree to disagree. Have you looked into FF14's achievement list? It's HUGE! Can't even finish in your lifetime, & this is from another achievement hunter here.

[Rinuko]

I used to play it for the story but each time I re-sub I get bored after a few days, and due to the housing demolition timer is disabled for my region I don't even have to worry about losing my personal houses.

[Pixela]

The housing destruction is the single worst thing I've seen in an mmo, they designed the housing system to be limited in a subscription based game and knew full well that if someone ceases their sub they will lose it. This would be annoying enough on its own, but when the lead developer tells you to just go play other games if you're bored with the lack of content, knowing full well your house gets demolished if you ubsub is terrible.

On one hand it's predatory behavior to blackmail players this way, on the other hand I know people who haven't played for years and retain the sub to keep a fake house so it obviously works. Smart buisnessman.

This would be like if the developers made prime weapons have an afterglow, but limited it to 50 per server and to retain it you had to talk to an npc once a month in the game. If you unsub you lose the glow and all the gil / time you spent to get it in the first place.

[Sp1cyryan]

This is not an FF14 forum.

[Rinuko]

This is not an FF14 forum.

You sure? :')

[Alhanelem]

The housing destruction is the single worst thing I've seen in an mmo, they designed the housing system to be limited in a subscription based game and knew full well that if someone ceases their sub they will lose it. This would be annoying enough on its own, but when the lead developer tells you to just go play other games if you're bored with the lack of content, knowing full well your house gets demolished if you ubsub is terrible.

On one hand it's predatory behavior to blackmail players this way, on the other hand I know people who haven't played for years and retain the sub to keep a fake house so it obviously works. Smart buisnessman.

This would be like if the developers made prime weapons have an afterglow, but limited it to 50 per server and to retain it you had to talk to an npc once a month in the game. If you unsub you lose the glow and all the gil / time you spent to get it in the first place.

Actually most games with housing that has a publicly accessible element (i.e. exterior) has limitations like this.

The housing system in FFXIV was originally designed for free companies (guilds) only. During the time that it was like this, there wasn't a major capacity issue. But then they opened it up for individual purchasing and th at's when the system could no longer handle it. The deomolition timer is necessary to ensure that people who want and are actually going to use housing can get access to it when there is limited capacity available. Each ward of housing needs another server machine so it isn't a trivial matter to expand the capacity, which is why it only happens every so often.

Meanwhile in XI, there is no exterior element to mog houses and it's just a zillion copies of the same identical room. The game only needs to load in your personal furniture layout data when you enter, and other people can't enter without invitation. XI's system is simpler and doesn't require anywhere near the same level of resources to operate as XIV's.