What are the largest issues plaguing XIV currently?

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Originally Posted by Yeol

Better severs for NA/EU.
JP has far better servers. Which is why we see JP openers, JP strategies that we cannot do on NA/EU becuase it is very risky with our severs.
A little more about this here.

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Will you give me an example? Not even trying to be an asshole here.

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Originally Posted by Sabrenn

Lack of communication with the EU/NA playerbase.

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I am completely used to this from my time in WoW. Despite the fact that the USA shares a language that most EU players speak, it was very rare for Blizzard representatives to make forum post statements in the EU forums. It was almost always in NA.

What sucked about this is in WoW server regions are segregated. You can't play on NA with an EU account and you can't post on the NA forums with an EU account. At least here if you do speak Japanese you can post on the language forum where feedback is more likely to be read directly by SE's dev team without needing to purchase a second account.

All that being said it's been a long time since I posted in the WoW forums given that I quit the game a long time ago, so maybe the forum segregation has since been removed. I hope so. It was quite frustrating to almost always have to go to the NA forums to read blue posts and be utterly unable to directly respond to them. Or at the very least I hope Blizzard now have more presence in the EU forums so that EU players can respond to their posts.

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As for what I consider are the big issues in the game:

I have seen numerous examples of players being disciplined by SE for their behaviour and when they ask the GM exactly what they did wrong, the GM responds with something along the lines of "we cannot discuss this with players" which is baffling. How are players supposed to improve their behaviour if they have to guess what they did wrong? This is so unbelievably ridiculous.

Blacklisting is pretty bad. You cannot blacklist someone unless they say or emote something in the chatbox. Which means you have to hang around and wait for that person you don't like to say or do something in your presence. This is terrible because in some cases this means players end up being exposed to more abuse instead of being able to blacklist whenever they want and entirely prevent it from happening again.

Housing availability and acquisition methods are in an abysmal state. Far better than before but still nowhere near good. The housing content itself is really good but getting a house can be such a frustrating experience that it renders many players feeling hopeless about their chances to experience that content. Some players have been trying to get their first house for literally years. It's awful.

The mentor system is a wonderful idea that is often being ruined by trash mentors. The requirements need to be higher and there should be an advanced version of the novice hall required to achieve the mentor tag (that tests more advanced mechanics like stacking, proximity aoes, passing a buff/debuff to others in the team, surviving tank busters with cds, using role actions to stun, etc). Any idiot can get classes to 80 and eventually get enough commendations. Furthermore mentors should not have so much control over the NN chat. Some are abusing their "mod" privileges to remove players who disagree with them using the chat channel as a general chat room while ignoring new players seeking help.

The game is in dire need of a fc recruitment system. Right now all that players can do in game is use the shout channel in various hubs and advertise on party finder. The fact that party finder is so often used for this just shows that the game is lacking a very useful feature.

Viera and hrothgar are absolutely shafted for head options. No hats, which means most headgear is invisible on them, and they have the lowest amount of hairstyles in the game. Especially hrothgar. And the fact that hrothgar need to fantasia to get a completely new hairstyle is beyond absurd. It's been over a year since they came to the game and ZERO updates. Not even a sneak peek of what they're working on. At this point I'm not expecting anything before 6.0 :(

Still getting genderlocked gear. It's 2020. Let people wear what they want. So much of the genderlocked gear looks unisex which makes it even more silly.

For the love of god can we please get a way to preview mog station outfits on our characters without having to find a player who already bought the outfit so we can try it on?

• More ambient sound. When I walk past a line of vendors I should hear their chatter. When I interact with a NPC there should be sound for them saying hello and goodbye (or something along those lines). If I walk in a wilderness with animals nearby I should hear them. The game feels like a silent movie most of the time.
  
• Voice acting for my own character. Its absolutely stupid that everyone else talks but all my guy can is nod.
  
• Instead of freezing our character in place and forcing me to repeatedly click through a chain of dialogue, allow me to just step away from the NPC, canceling all remaining dialogue.
  
• Quests with more emphasis on fighting and combine chained talking-only quests. What I mean by "chained talking-only quests" are: I meet up with Alphy and he talks (not "we", just "he"), 1-on-1. Next quest, go to a different town and meet with him again, 1-on-1, more talking. Repeat. If someone treated me like this in RL I would cut them off because there's no reason for that and its just wasting my time. After the 1st meet, have the next quest be "kill x enemies to get items" or "recon this area" or something. Then the next meeting with Alphy is discussing what I found with an action step after.

There's a lot I like about this game but the MSQ is just not one of them. The repeated "talk, talk, talk" chain of quests is tedious. Every quest should move the story forward somehow and having 3+ quests in a row where only someone talks at me doesn't do that. It creates a very tedious play.

IN my opinion there are a lot of things that could be improved the biggest 4 are as followed

1) Complete lack of Guild Related Content. In almost all successful mmos guilds are a center point and focus for the community. IN FFXIV the only thing they guilds are is a glorified chat channel and some minor buffs which really are insignificant. There need to be content added to encourage the formation of guilds and stuff for guilds to do together at all levels of the game begining, mid-game, and both casual/hardcore endgame. All endgame content in ffxiv is currently revolving around duty finder pug groups or static groups, this is anti-guild and needs to change.

2) Economy. FFXIV has one of the best crafting and gathering system mechanic wise in the genre... but outside of food/pots...vanity gear and making stuff for other crafters is the only thing worthwhile for crafters. The supply exceeds demand by several hundred times over. And the everyone can level everything has made it where prices fluctuate by nearly 50% on some days. In my opinion crafting gear should be equivalent to top tier raid gear. Should include crafting with really rare drops. And Gil should mean something outside houses and glamour. This would need a full overhaul though to address. I would give the crafting/gather systems in this game a 9/10. I would give the economy design a 1/10.

3) Content Life Span. It is horribly low. Major Patch cycles tend to be 4-5 months and outside some relic step content last at most 2-3 months. And all content is replaced every expansion. Simply causes a lack of stuff to do at the top end unless you are going for glamour and mounts. People running out of content that quickly is bad for retention of players.

4) Gear. It is boring. basically someone on a spread sheet dragged down to get all the main and secondary stats for each class. This is one of the worst gear systems stat wise I have ever seen in a mmo.

With all that said. these are so core ingrained in ffxiv at this point I know nothing will change about any of these.

Itemization.

Near obsolescence of the dungeon system.

Severe simplification / dumbing down of healers and crafters.

Incoherent glam system.

MSQ-locking every piece of content.

Lifespan of patch cycles (last couple expansions have shown we really need the first two grindy relic / alt advancement steps of the expansion in the .5 and .25 patches)

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Originally Posted by Hugowulf

Having to go to an inn room to change glamour plates is annoying.

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As I've finally bothered to get more involved in the True End Game lately, this statement resonates with me.

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Originally Posted by EmmetOtter

[*]Voice acting for my own character. Its absolutely stupid that everyone else talks but all my guy can is nod.

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Maybe incorporate the emote sounds that come with your chosen voice pack into scenes, but actual voice acting? No. Not unless they can offer options and you can choose it, and even then, it'll be divisive. There's no way that the majority of players will be happy with their characters suddenly having audible dialogue unless they started like that.

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Originally Posted by EmmetOtter

[*]Instead of freezing our character in place and forcing me to repeatedly click through a chain of dialogue, allow me to just step away from the NPC, canceling all remaining dialogue.

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I only noticed this recently, but you actually CAN sometimes now. Not with every, or even most, NPCs, though. Also, no idea how long that functionality has been in the game. I just found it on accident.

I’d like to see better job balancing. No more ranged tax. Bring back mch ammo.

The mentor system is a joke.

Item level sync content is dumb, make content that is balanced around the current tier gear. The excuse that “it’s to allow new people to join” is dumb.

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Originally Posted by Yeol

Better severs for NA/EU.
JP has far better servers. Which is why we see JP openers, JP strategies that we cannot do on NA/EU becuase it is very risky with our severs.
A little more about this here.

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The google doc you reference was written two years before the NA/EU data centers were moved/updated in 2019. The words 'Europe', 'Japan', 'America' and 'data center' do not appear in the document, nor is there anything talking about 'better servers'.

Your observation does not appear to be true, at least from the evidence provided.

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Originally Posted by Yeol

Better severs for NA/EU.
JP has far better servers. Which is why we see JP openers, JP strategies that we cannot do on NA/EU becuase it is very risky with our severs.
A little more about this here.

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It's not that JP servers are better. Japan is a relatively smaller country, acting as a whole region for a datacenter while other regions are basically continents. If you're living in Japan, it doesn't matter in what province/prefecture you live, you'll always be close to the servers location and have low ping. Same thing happens with South Korean games because SK is a small country and mostly based on Seoul, most Korean players have 9-10 ping. For other regions you can get differences of hundreds of ping depending on where you live, even if you're from that region.

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Originally Posted by Gothicshark

Housing, needs to be unlimited, with no 30day deconstruction. [/SIZE]

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We already tried that before. That's how we got house flipping that was bloody terrible. This is why we cannot have nice things.

The fact that we have 17 jobs but only one role (DPS) is a pretty big issue for the game if you ask me

edit: 18 if you count Blue Mage

Boring job design that focuses solely on DPS > everything.

Boring gear that only makes a number go bigger. What even is the point?

Fast travel.

Not enough Glamour plates.

Don’t want to edit previous post for a separate point but god yes the gear system is so boring they may as well just remove all equipment stats entirely and just leave item level as the one and only player stat in the game.

Like I’m not saying we should have FFXI levels of horizontal progression because it can definitely go too far lol. But at least make the experience more exciting than literally just slapping on whichever equipment is higher item level than what you have and that’s it.

Though that also brings me on to substats where everything not called ‘Critical/Direct Hit Rate’ doesn’t exist lol. Piety? Tenacity? Determination? What’s the point of flooding us with all these pointless stats that we all have to actively avoid putting on our gear because they’re worth so little. And then there’s the speed stats. I honestly forget they exist most of the time

Tomes decreasing the value of raid gear and overall content. The lack of situational gear and the meaninglessness of stats.

Lack of long term goals.

Combat being flat due to lack of buffs, debuffs and strengths/weaknesses.

The lack of need to really socialize, make friends and cooperate.

The sheer speed in which content becomes irrelevant or just another thing you may get in a roulette.

Lack of creativity in and the underutilization of dungeons.

Yoshida's sheer refusal to answer tough questions and the wall of silence between the players and the devs. The community teams in this game are a joke tbh.

The fact that after 10 years we are still fighting ascians and garlemald

Absolutely zero danger in the overworld.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

If you just want buttons for the sake of having buttons thats dumb.

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This. The sad thing is it's possible to have far deeper and exciting kits with 8 buttons than we manage presently with our 24 or so average.

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As for the big general issues (On-topic):

• Lack of foresight or connective ambition.

  The devs ought to look at content and systems with a larger plan for its purpose and cumulative usability, rather than merely filling a space to generate time-played metrics or providing advertisable feature labels that are ultimately unpurposed, soon obsolete, or painfully incomplete.

• Lack of insight sold as necessary compromise.

  It seems like if you tell the devs that 10 is too high and 1 is too low, they'd throw their hands up crying "Then whAt dO yoU wAnt?!" only to then go deaf to the sensible responses along the lines of "Something between 3 and 7." Such is often the case for, say, parity vs. identity, which the devs will too often conflate to wanting to do the exact same things rather than reaching near enough value in context for one's job to be a competitive choice. (Much of this, sadly, just seems to stem from a poor understanding of the in-practice consequences of their own designs.)
  
  There are places where things fit and where they don't. That a fire in a fire pit is a good thing on a cold night and your house being on fire is a bad thing on any sort of a night doesn't mean you can't have a fire in your house; it just needs a fireplace. Things need their proper context. It's the same for, say, RNG systems, or open world grinds. It too often seems like they'll either release something half-assed and use it as proof that the idea was fundamentally flawed, or throw enough rewards atop a dung heap and call it gold because people played it.
  
  Much of what at first appears mutually exclusive or demanding of direct compromise is really just poorly understood; find what actually generates each set of preferences and you can generally mostly appease both sides seemingly in immitigable conflict. It just requires that one look deeper than the surface-level echo chambers or us-versus-them arguments. I wish the devs would at least try to understand their community, rather than only skimming or cherrypicking the reactions that make the community, in effect, appear either sheeple or unappeasables.

Wow Shurrikhan,

you have a way with words. Very well articulated. ^^b Love it.

Well, I would like to hear more about this proable far deeper and exciting kit with just 8 buttons which was left pretty much vague. So not really well articulated imo

Connection lagging.

It's extremely annoying when this happens, and for some reason it happened to me semi regularly recently, probably because influx of new players due to free versions and veterans coming back with new patch but Square is sodding off with their servers.

Probably already been said, but bots.

After reading up a bit on it, it sounds like most servers have what I've been seeing on my server: a collection of bot accounts (conveniently in the same FC) where one just sits in an apartment 24/7 crafting, and the others, who are leveled only as high as they need to be to use retainers, rotate in and out to constantly undercut on the MB. They have dozens of retainers and are selling pretty much every possible high priced craftable item you can think of. If you want to sell one of those items, you are out of luck, because you are competing with a script that will undercut you every time you drop the price.

I know that selling stuff on the MB is a minor aspect of the game, but it's one that always used to be fun. That's over now. Between the bots owning the market for anything profitable, and the housing demolition hold virtually ending the market for housing items, there's very little of value one can sell on the MB anymore.

And it's true that these factors have cratered prices for everything in general, meaning you don't need much gil anymore to get what you want, but it's still an aspect of the game that's been destroyed.

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Originally Posted by Ajani

Well, I would like to hear more about this proable far deeper and exciting kit with just 8 buttons which was left pretty much vague. So not really well articulated imo

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A comprehensive explanation would probably take well over 1000 words, so let's start from a simple illustrative example:

At present, DRG has 9 single-target weaponskills. Since, in content, they will never be used in any order except True Thrust, Disembowel, Chaos Thrust, Wheeling Thrust, Fang & Claw, True Thrust, Vorpal Thrust, Full Thrust, Fang & Claw, Wheeling Thrust and that order will repeat infinitely, they amount to a single decision, to be made once every 5-10 GCDs. And is a single choice even really... a choice?

Not that I'd recommend it, but all 9 off those keys could be handled with equal depth... by, effectively, "auto-battle", with you just weaving in Life Surge before Full Thrust, all other oGCDs as needed, and so forth.

So at present you have 9 keys that do no better a job than 0 keys except in that the finger-dance aspect of hitting a different key per GCD helps keep your timing grounded (while punishing those with manual disabilities, but that's besides the point).

But let's say we instead use... 1 key, but this time allowing for a decision in every possible GCD rather than only once per 5-10 GCDs, with accordant changes in the toolkit. Your "auto-battle" (term used only to avoid confusion with "auto-attacks") would sequence down one line or the other of combos, but now those combos have been opened up. You can now swap between combos at any point along the combo, choicefully favoring either long-term damage or direct burst. You've only one key, swapping between "Finesse Mode" and "Power Mode", for instance, but it'd already allow me more control over my combos than you had with 9 keys previously.

Let's add in the AoE weapon skills to be comprehensive. Presently, we have 3 of them. They all amount to a single decision. The system that binds these 3 actions into that decision acts merely to increase the punishment for having less than 3 GCDs to spend in that particular line of action, making the points of decisions between AoE and ST less modular or fluid. It adds only one manner of restriction-as-optimization -- that Life Surge should be held for Coerthan Tempest.

Let's convert those 3 buttons, for a total of 12 buttons, into our a single button for a total of 2. We now have "Power Mode", "Finesse Mode", and "Piercing Mode", where one is the default and then swapping into either other would make the previous mode take that key's former place. I.e. if Finesse is the default, Power and Pierce are my alternatives across buttons 1 and 2, respectively, and if I swap to Power then Finesse takes the place of button 1, and if I swap to Pierce then Finesse takes the place of button 2.

Voila, I can now charge up -- at whatever varying efficiency we see fit by which to add further constraints, or hopefully thereby add depth to the system -- a Coerthan Tempest of an Impulse Driver -> Disembowel.

I've more available timings at which to swap things around, and thereby gameplay concerns and optimizations, yet I'm using a sixth of the previous number of keys.

But that's not even making full use of these 2 keys or modes. Let's add a further bit to the swaps. Let's say... you can hold down the key to consume MP but generate a further effect on the next attack.

• If I charge up while swapping into Power mode, that will lend the attack further potency on its direct attack (such that there's even more synergetic value in comboing from Impulse to Disembowel to Full Thrust, for instance). You could make this percentile (favoring MP consumption on Full Thrust), or Flat (favoring certain other effects). You could have this bonus linger to some extent into a further attack, synergizing with a quick swap into Pierce thereafter. You could have the charge-up affect different skills differently. There's tons of stuff you could do here, and yet it doesn't cost a single button extra.
• Let's say for now that if I charge up while swapping into Pierce, the previous would-be attack is retained, but will now dash forward and cleave (allowing me to mass-DoT, or mass-vuln, albeit at lesser duration or effectiveness). The cleave range generated per moment of charge depends on the affected skill's potency, so it isn't used for Full Thrust spam constantly. In fact, if I want to maximize it's use for mobility, I'd pop this for True Thrust or Doom Spike only.
• And just to spitball a finish, let's say Finesse gives me some added Attack and Movement Speed, lingering; essentially allowing me to bank the uptime consumed on some fancy spear-flips to really milk a buff window starting as those spear-flips end.

Alright, now I have greater combo complexity than exists in the current build of Dragoon atop, potentially, all the mobility of Elusive Jump, GCD-optimization akin to Life Surge but far more frequently and fluidly available, and window optimization in ways novel to Dragoon. I've still used only... 2 buttons.

And that hasn't even touched on any of the other obvious means of increased depth: skill uniqueness and the undermechanics of combat have yet to be utilized. At present, all but two skills still offer nothing but raw direct potency, and the last two at best provide that potency in slightly less direct ways (DoT damage and potency-as-percent-of-window). They don't have to be that barebone, especially if undermechanics are used in kind.

What if armor were a thing, for instance? Should True Thrust, which appears Dragoon's most straightforward deep-striking attack, really have no advantage in piercing armor over the other skills? What if there was at least a modicum of physics? Should Vorpal do nothing to, as per its appearance, push enemy bodies or blades to each side? Should Full Thrust not toss lighter enemies skyward? Should Disembowel's double-slap, as if parrying, honestly have no effect or its turn, as if ducking under a misdirected blow, not synergize with the first half of its animation? What we had a modicum of AI, rather than merely a CD schedule, a movement speed, and a target-directing table with zero interactions beyond damage-times-modifier in, enmity out? Should the wild, flurried VFX of Chaos Thrust really have no impact on mob behavior or behavior-informing metrics? Should Fang & Claw's dodge component really be only for show?

Naturally, to take advantage of those different skills' unique effects, you want more buttons. Heck, you might even want all 12 of them. But that's only effective design when you let each amount to at least a decision each for every given GCD, rather than a third, fifth, or ninth of a decision as offered every 3, 5, or 10 GCDs. Having a lot of buttons is fine, but it ought to come with commensurate depth, rather than just depth in pretense -- the reality of which, by being separated despite marking no separate decision, is squandered.

There's no freaking moombas.

Content droughts. COVID exasperated this, as seen in 5.3's delay and the unfortunate cancellation of the All Saints' Wake event, but it feels as though there are large gaps between major content updates, with what we get in each update not being quite enough to hold us over until the next. I've been enjoying some roleplaying to compensate, but hope this can be addressed.

The biggest issue as an Aussie I am currently facing is apparently everywhere is somehow out of stock of digital EU game time cards.. I usually buy from Game UK, but have looked around various other reputable sites and its the same story. How do you sell out of digital codes? Seems like I'll have to settle paying maximum $40 this time from the SE store -_-

Catgirls
Tater haters
lack of optional hardcore light party content(Mythic+ equivalent)
Manqo'te being a manlet race that caps out shorter than fem midlander
Elezen men need a cheesy mustache.

I feel like there could be more bosses per raid tier. Each raid tier has 4 bosses and there are 3 tiers in an expansion and you get 12 total for the expansion. Would like to see more bosses per raid for sure.

Some of this has already been said, but maybe collectively it'll help get some changes rolling:

State of healers. I actually just ran The Great Hunt normal earlier and that fight alone sums up healing in general: In 90% of content I'm barely doing anything. To the point where I wish I wasn't there or was an actual DPS. As an AST I have cards to deal with some boredom. I feel sorry for my co-healer WHM and SCH mains.

Can also include State of Tanks and some other DPS jobs in there. Tanks don't feel different other than effects. Some DPS, while not struggling, could use some major quality of life changes. I don't main those classes so I cannot comment on them. We all know who they are.

Lack of communication for western audiences. I get it. Square is based in Japan. That audience is the major focus. But when you have a 73 (and possibly still going) page asking who has quit healing, when you have several various different posts asking for DRK changes on the English forums, I think you should address that. To add onto this, and sorry if its going back to point 1, there was 0 communication about any healer questions, and for the most part that has remained. Why? People feel ignored and its pushing them away from the game.

Content design. Oh boy is this a doozy. Dungeons this expansion aren't hard at all. Maybe I'm old fashioned or maybe it was never this way, but I thought that dungeons were there to teach you how to use your kit in practice for Raids/Trials and Savage content. They do not. And they should. I shouldn't have to go into Savage level content to make the most out of my kit if I'm not a dps. I should be challenged to do so in dungeons so I'm prepared to do it even better by the time I get there. Tankbusters should be more frequent. Raid wide damage should be more frequent. If healers are forced to have so much healing in our kits (cause healers) make the content match.

Since its partly related, older fights while synced (CT raids I'm looking at you) need to be relooked at in the ilvl department. We shouldn't be able to skip phases as we are right now.
I could also extend this to somewhat dead content (like FATEs outside of Yokai event) but word limit.

The Devs do not feel that it is ok for X to be more difficult than Y. Aside from Savage/Extreme vs normal content. It is ok for certain jobs to require more skill than others. If a person wants to get better at a job, they will learn to get better. If they avoid a job because its too high skill for them, that is also fine. You do not have to, and should not, make jobs easier and accessible for all to play. People who want the higher skill will automatically be drawn to it. Not everything is for everyone and it shouldn't be.

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Originally Posted by M0rrigan

It's not that JP servers are better. Japan is a relatively smaller country, acting as a whole region for a datacenter while other regions are basically continents. If you're living in Japan, it doesn't matter in what province/prefecture you live, you'll always be close to the servers location and have low ping. Same thing happens with South Korean games because SK is a small country and mostly based on Seoul, most Korean players have 9-10 ping. For other regions you can get differences of hundreds of ping depending on where you live, even if you're from that region.

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The Japanese servers aren't just for Japan. Players from other countries in the region also use them.

In all honesty the issues plaguing the forums are threads like this. The game's fine.

ff14 has a lot of limitations currently that are really in need of fixing as they are, or starting to become long term issues that are holding it back.
This is the top 10 in no particular order, since some will obviously be more important to different people

Available dev funding and resources: SE is being really stingy with ff14. It absolutely prints money yet SE denied the funding to bring on new severs until they literally started cracking at the seams when 5.0 launched. SE knew it would be popular, but did nothing. Each patch the servers are more overloaded and have queue times to get in. Dev resources too are insufficient- they are getting enough to keep the game ticking, but they aren't getting the time or people needed to fix the spaghetti code in places where its still around.

Cheating, rmt and botting: going hand in hand with dev resources, the devs aren't bothering or are unable to address the masses of bots being used. The rmt taskforce seems to be nonexistant now given they are advertising constantly in PF

Dev communication: It is well known by this point the forums are screaming into the void 99% of the time. The devs need to take on ideas and feedback, especially the feedback they don't want to hear like with healers and tanks

Job kits: Healers in the worst state they've ever been with redunant healing, minimum damage tools. Tanks not far behind with almost useless defensive abilities. Dps are base breaking at best. Ranged and raise taxes need removal, the gap between dps and none dps is too wide this expansion (tanks/healers take forever to do the duties) the kits are designed around balance and not fun. Homogenisation has been excessive and unneccessary. Devs need to stop dumbing down things and instead raise the weaker jobs. Include a proper, mandatory tutorial as well. Buffs and debuffs need to be readded and need to be long and strong enough so a notable difference can be seen and felt without 3rd party tools

I could rant about job kits all day and so could many others, so lets continue

Casual-Hardcore gap and difficulty: This expansion is, without a doubt, the easiest expansion by far. On one hand there are people who actively refuse to use their job's full kit (cryo mage, 'pure' healers etc)
and can get away with it. Yet we have savage and ultimate especially in NA more excluding than ever of anybody who doesn't have high parses and prior experience, and full of people who willingly fail mechanics in order to get their parse higher to the detriment of others parses. Not to mention the exclusion of ps4 players who can't parse and pc players who dont want to break the tos.
The msq and normal df content needs the difficulty bar raising and a proper tutorial implemented so there are less clueless starting players and max level players are unable to play without using their full kit. Parsers need to be blocked and an in game recruitment for statics instead of through reddit, discord etc.
You didn't need the parsers and other 3rd party tools in the coil people, and gordias was rushed for HW release and left there due to relic delays.

Also, crafting/gathering accessibility has leaned too far in the other direction, now its too easy to get into, markets have been flooded.

Housing: need I say more?

Glamour and gear: no Long hair, clipping, endless buttcapes and pauldrons, lack of variation for casters/healers so they are sutck with robes and coats constantly, gear/gender restrictions, dye restrictions, out of date models, lack of body variance (flat butt, lack of bust, no muscle on most races), poor customisation especially in the face (clones everywhere!), genderlocked races... is it any wonder the modding community has hit it off so well?

Content and release of it: Limited time content (ishgard), non repeatable content in abundance, relics are starting at 2.5 instead of 5.05 like originally thereby losing portions of the playerbase at a time. The patch cycle has become stale with ilvl being calculated. BLU being advertised as solo and ends up requiring a party and a static in order to gets its achievments, mount and even decent spells. Most of its spells are clones and meh potency and been balanced around party play. Lots of party play content despite the msq being primarily solo and no solo content other than relic. Lots of small content that dies off with no popularity or replayability like verminion, ocean fishing etc Eureka has a whole host of issues, getting older raid glam gear is nigh on impossible sometimes as you need a party still.

Technical faults: Ghosting mudras, Sch myriad issues, data issues in the glamour dresser and retainer summons, semi random lag spikes, effect failures (tank mount explosions don't show up for a lot of people)

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Originally Posted by Bearded

In all honesty the issues plaguing the forums are threads like this. The game's fine.

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Amen brother.

For me the current problems of the game are:

- housing with all the related problems of acquire a house, keep it and lack of buying limits making it like a mafia sometimes.

- Viera and hrotgar addictions in the game with complete lack of full head gear and updates while the rest of the races keep getting new stuff every patch.

- lack of content, less dungeons, less side quest, less long term content, no deep dungeon and overall braindead experience that reduce greatly the experience of the little things we get and all of this for the same price and slightly better MSQ cutscenes, we need more midcore stuff.

- lack of gameplay identity on both tanks and healers with extensive oversimplification on all jobs of those roles and overdone homogenisation, DRK gameplay destroyed and 3 inner release versions on tanks like really? SCH gameplay and AST nightmare.

- lack of feedback acknowledgment from the devs over anything related to tanks and healers, GNB sounds effects nerfed and still ignored the request to turn back, AST cards, DRK delirium, ect ect, need more focus and more interactivity with us specially to get better feedback and care more of blue and green jobs overall.

From my own perspective we paid the same for less but if you are a hrotgar/viera + tank/healer main you are paying the same for less content, less updates for you own race (considering we get none) and literally poor and totally ignore of the problems of you role of preference bcs "balanced" achieved by killing jobs identity's like SCH and DRK but let's get fancy stickers for Gpose and more cash shop.

I feel the current dev team can't really handle the game development properly like they did in the past for whatever internal reason they have and the quality of the expansion it's lower overall compared to the others with the sole exception of the MSQ.

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Originally Posted by Bearded

In all honesty the issues plaguing the forums are threads like this. The game's fine.

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My thoughts exactly.

Coming to this and other MMO forums gives one the impression that MMO players are whiny, entitled babies who, if given an inch, will take a mile. Then complain that you have given them a mile.

Inventory management and lack of glamour log.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

The Japanese servers aren't just for Japan. Players from other countries in the region also use them.

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That's because they're closer to them than the other datacenters, but it's targeted for Japan mainly. Same way middle east players usually play in European servers, because it's closer for them and they don't have a dedicated region server, and still get higher ping than usual. Or recently I met a couple of players from South America playing on Europe and they said their ping is around the same to EU and NA servers, because they're so far from NA datacenter server that the difference is like 15 ping for them and they prefer EU servers.

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Originally Posted by Bearded

In all honesty the issues plaguing the forums are threads like this. The game's fine.

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Posts like this are definitely an issue.

I'm against posts like "SE sucks, worst devs ever y so incompetent", that doesn't help anything, but constructive negative feedback and suggestions are absolutely vital to any game and this community goes out of its way to resist it. Most of us who complain actually love the game, that's why we play it and that's why we want to see it to continue improving and become even greater. No game developer ever has the opinion "our game is perfect, stop whining and play something else if you don't like it", so posters spouting nonsense like that thinking they're "defending" the game are actually a big thorn in the side.

It's important to be polite and constructive but also worth voicing your opinion when dissatisfied.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Don’t want to edit previous post for a separate point but god yes the gear system is so boring they may as well just remove all equipment stats entirely and just leave item level as the one and only player stat in the game.

Like I’m not saying we should have FFXI levels of horizontal progression because it can definitely go too far lol. But at least make the experience more exciting than literally just slapping on whichever equipment is higher item level than what you have and that’s it.

Though that also brings me on to substats where everything not called ‘Critical/Direct Hit Rate’ doesn’t exist lol. Piety? Tenacity? Determination? What’s the point of flooding us with all these pointless stats that we all have to actively avoid putting on our gear because they’re worth so little. And then there’s the speed stats. I honestly forget they exist most of the time

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Nah, I rather keep this system then go the way of RNG never getting gear again like WoW did. I like knowing what I'm getting all the time. It's only boring because that's how it's always been. Trust me... this is good. You don't want RNG. Go to Tom Clancy's The Division forums and you'll see what I mean.

I think one of the issues is party composition. There are too many DPS jobs and only 2 spot for them in light parties, no wonder there's a congestion on DPS queues if for every tank/healer queues that have more demand, you only get to run 2 DPS that have more supply. Maybe they should experiment with making larger size parties outside of trials and raids for regular dungeons. 6 players maybe, with 1 tank, 1 healer and 4 DPS. I believe it would alleviate the queues by a large margin especially when they keep releasing so many DPS jobs compared to tanks and healers (and I understand why, it's harder to make relevant and engaging new tanking and healing classes while being unique and still being able to do their job on 1-role content while DPS are just balanced rotations and allow for more creativity).

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Originally Posted by Gameovers

Nah, I rather keep this system then go the way of RNG never getting gear again like WoW did. I like knowing what I'm getting all the time. It's only boring because that's how it's always been. Trust me... this is good. You don't want RNG. Go to Tom Clancy's The Division forums and you'll see what I mean.

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That’s fair, I never mentioned rng drops though. I just think the stat/substat feels too superficial to add anything to the game. I also did specify that I don’t believe going the FFXI horizontal progression route would be any better, since that’s too far in the opposite direction.

If they tried to add ‘horizontal progress’ in gear to FFXIV I highly doubt they’d suddenly change everything to 0.01% drop rates. You’d still gather your gear with guaranteed time stones, trade-in items from raids, need/greed on loot. I just mean that it could do something more interesting than just increasing your item level. Why have so many main and sub stats when they’re all irrelevant? Piety? Tenacity? What’s the point of them existing when they don’t add anything to the gameplay at all. I don’t see how more interesting gear mechanics has to equate to super nerfed drop rates.


What if you always knew what you were getting and the gear had interesting stats or functions beyond item level? It doesn’t have to be one or the other

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Originally Posted by Connor

What if you always knew what you were getting and the gear had interesting stats or functions beyond item level? It doesn’t have to be one or the other

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it still wouldn't keep people around any longer once they got what they wanted. RNG would have to be tuned up so that people are "forced" to stay.