4.5 month patch release is NOT a problem

The problem isn't the patch cycle.
It's that there's barely anything to do *in* the patch cycle.

In 7.1 I found myself in what I call "break mode" (I get on to do a few things then leave, usually a few times a week) longer then I ever have in recent memory. There's just nothing to sink my teeth into. Chaotic didn't solve the problem because it's not really grindable (it is kinda, but not like a pick up and play type). Maps can be fun, but I already have 20 wins from them. The society questline was done quickly and the custom delivery takes no more then 10 mins a week.

If they actually would have released something (either battle job related or crafting and gathering, kinda like the Ishgard Restoration) to tide us over, you would have far fewer people on here complaining.

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Originally Posted by CNitsah

Lately, I've seen a lot of people claiming that the 4.5 month between patches is was the reason it feels so barren and we should go back to shorter patches. I've seen that argument repeated so much, but truthfully, this argument is sooo bad. This a perfect exemple of the community being very bad with analysing the problems.

4.5 month scheldule is not a problem. At worst, it's an aggravating factor to the real problem, the lack of content with shelf life. Give us content supposed to last for 4.5 month in your 4.5 month patch, and there won't be any problems.

Heck they could go to 3 month patches, if the patches content is the same as the 7.1 content, we'd still have the exact same problems. I mean, 7.1 was released 2 month ago, and look how happy we are. We'd feel so much better if this was 3.5 month scheldule.

No wonder SE does bad choice with the entire community seem to singlemindedly focus on a non problem instead of the actual problem.

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yeah you're basically just saying the same thing everyone else is saying, the long patch cycles are the problem because there's no long lasting content, and people are finally getting tired of the sorry state of said cycles that lack said content, nobody is arguing that fact lmao

I agree because it used to be 3.5 and is now 4.38 to 4.6 months. There were always long gaps between patches and there were always people who complained about it, even in Stormblood.

It always hinges on if said people have content that they are personally interested in, and if they burned through it faster than the majority of players or not. What affects it a lot is that SE makes content for different types of players in different patches, so that many players actually have to wait multiple patches for the content they like.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I agree because it used to be 3.5 and is now 4.38 to 4.6 months. There were always long gaps between patches and there were always people who complained about it, even in Stormblood.

It always hinges on if said people have content that they are personally interested in, and if they burned through it faster than the majority of players or not. What affects it a lot is that SE makes content for different types of players in different patches, so that many players actually have to wait multiple patches for the content they like.

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Even in Heavensward. And what's enough content can often be subjective. Look at Chaotic. There are some people who could be kept busy for months with content like that. But others who want to run it and get all the rewards and be "done" with that content and then expect another new thing that they prefer to do to be available to them. Everyone praises Eureka but I noped out in Pagos because I was bored out of my mind with that place and if I didn't have my own gaming goals I set for myself I would have been bored as hell in Stormblood because my long-term content at that point was relics. And then they put out content trying to experiment like Island Sanctuary or Variant/Criterion but players want to be "done" so they eat through it in no time. I'm not saying there can't be something new and interesting here and there, but we've always gotten to a point where we needed to either find our own goals or decide not to play as much, and for some of us that's sooner than with others. And it happens sooner the more we limit the content we engage with.

I do believe OP is what we would call 'toxic positivity'.

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Originally Posted by Zelda206

I do believe OP is what we would call 'toxic positivity'.

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I don't think it is, as it isn't wrong to say that the deeper issue is in fact the lack of content with shelf life, and that a 4.5 month patch cycle should indeed contain that much substance and not a regression.

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Originally Posted by Zelda206

I do believe OP is what we would call 'toxic positivity'.

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"we disagree, therefore you are toxic"

my problem is we get what will take time to day after a savage tiers and ultimate and now chaotic and when they will add it it will also help LV things up I am sure of it and of it is wouldn't it be a simple well wrongs schedule? like give us the content to do before ultimates

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Originally Posted by Teno

Bro wtf ? It's SE's fault for delivering scraps on a 4.5 months basis, not the community giving feedback and SE acting wrongly on it or whatever.

Other games manage to deliver on a weekly to monthly basis with simple content that can last (ie some form of grinding usually), but this game gives you the bare minimum with little replayability. Farming mounts can only go so far, should you even care about that.

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Ok maybe I could have phrased that better, this is not one of my strongest moments. My point wasn't to shift the blame from SE to the players, far from it. SE is the only culprit in the circus that is DT.

But yeah, I also feel that, as a community, we take forever to point at the underlying problems instead of its symptoms/consequences. When they removed the exploratory zone, it took month, if not a year before the shelf life argument began to become popular. There was a whole lot of argument about needing things to do in larges group, and other few argument I forgot, but the shelf life problem was overlooked by most : which lead to SE communicating on those point : when they annouced 7.0 and chatic, it's the large group argument that came first. When they talked about the fact there would be another exploratory zone, it's also the large group argument that they presented. To this day, the only time they even talked about the shelf life problem is that interview in Australia a couple of month ago. I kinda feel that, if it didn't took the community nearly a whole year to point at the problem, maybe 7.0 and 7.1 might not have been such a drought. Part of me think that "content for large group" was one of the reason they focused on Chaotic, because they thought it would give us what we want. And we saw how it went : despite the content being good, it's not really what the game needed right now. Now sure, SE should do a better job at collecting the feedback and interpret it, but they've been bad at it for so long (I've litterally spend the last 20 years watching SE make questionnable decisions and wonder why), it could certainly help if the community could stop pointing as consequence of the real problem as if they were the actual problem.

This last sentence was not supposed to defend SE and shift the blame on the players, but rather pointing at the fact that the community is not always really good at pointing at the problems, and we don't really need SE to spend time tackling problems that are not there. And the 4.5 month patch is not the problem, yet in every community thread, it's repeated as a mantra, that the 4.5 month cycle is one of the biggest problem. It's not, it's only an aggravating factor of the real problem.

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Originally Posted by IvoryHawk

yeah you're basically just saying the same thing everyone else is saying, the long patch cycles are the problem because there's no long lasting content, and people are finally getting tired of the sorry state of said cycles that lack said content, nobody is arguing that fact lmao

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Am I? Everywhere I look, being the forums, reddit, YouTube, I see this argument that the problem is the 4.5 month patch is the problem. Every discussion about FFXIV problems has this argument repeated again and again. There is a big semantic difference between saying "there is not enough content for a 4.5 month patch" and "4.5 month is too long". Yet I always stumble on the later one, and rarely on the former.

Honestly, I agree.

I don't think the 4.5 month release schedule is necessarily a problem but it absolutely exacerbates the issue of the lack of content. If 7.1 had included the first step of relic weapons/tools and the exploration zone or cosmic exploration zone, I would be fine with waiting 4.5 months for 7.2.

We either need for more meaningful to be included in each patch, especially early on in an expansion, or we need to massively increase the frequency of patches. I don't really care which but something needs to change.