So, I was playing some other MMOs that I haven't in awhile...

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Something I really value in MMOs is a sense of progression...but in FFXIV, that tends to dry up quickly at endgame outside of exploratory zones like Eureka/Bozja.

Once I finish leveling all of the jobs for a given expansion, I suddenly feel considerably more...lost on what to do if I've already finished the latest savage tier.

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True but thats also a plus on some people, including me. Having progression is fine, but not seeing the end of that tunnel is the worst imo. I like having my progression goals met and then go back on focusing on other things.

Ive currently finished up on my arbitrary self impose ilv gearing for all my jobs, including bis crafter/gatherers pentameld. Now I can focus back on my island progression that Ive been slacking. Its really how well you approach things in this game.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

But why? It is pure optional content. If you do not like it, then don't do it. :)


Cheers

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You're missing the point. Flying cuts down on time wasted for travel in WoW. Unless you're a mage, you have no teleports outside of your single Hearthstone location. Even if you are a mage, the number of locations you can teleport to are far less than the number of zones in the game.

Travel in WOW is designed to waste player time intentionally. Flying offers a way to reduce that travel time but only by investing dozens of hours into doing the content needed to complete Pathfinder for some expansions.

It's going to be a really awkward experience for a player used to the quick travel times we have here if they later try to play WoW because of that time waste.

So you are right in that it is optional content. Don't do it if you don't enjoy it.

Many of us took it one step further. Not only did we choose to stop doing Pathfinder, we chose to stop playing WoW. Why play a game that intentionally forces to waste a lot of the time you have available to play doing absolutely nothing at all just to get to where you want to be?

I feel like XIV doesn't have a great deal of personality because of the conveniences in it. I know this will earn me the fury of all but the world just doesn't feel very alive because it is just there to serve the purpose of the story, it has no existence outside of whatever current plot development is taking place there. While teleporting all over without real cost is certainly convenient, it makes the world feel more like a disconnected series of set pieces and not an actual place that we are a part of.

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Originally Posted by AnnRam

Video games in general are time waster.

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If you enjoy it...it's time well spent if you ask me. I enjoy what I do and when I'm not having fun I put it down for a bit and do something else.

Theirs a limit to everything and those conveniences start to water down the game. The jobs themselves being sanded down is a debate for “ff14 doesn’t waste my time” and I’ve seen many arguments using this sentence and it’s as contrive as it sounds

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I feel like XIV doesn't have a great deal of personality because of the conveniences in it. I know this will earn me the fury of all but the world just doesn't feel very alive because it is just there to serve the purpose of the story, it has no existence outside of whatever current plot development is taking place there. While teleporting all over without real cost is certainly convenient, it makes the world feel more like a disconnected series of set pieces and not an actual place that we are a part of.

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No.

I like the no travel time penalties. I've played too many games and mmos that waste a massive amount of time on travel.

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Originally Posted by Tanis_Ebonhart

Like take flying. I can unlock flying on zones before I even finish them (and they made it easier in older expansions) and being able to just teleport nearly anywhere you want without a timer is amazing.

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Definitely this, even with one of Endwalker's aether current quests being cursed up to eleven, LOL.

WoW meanwhile basically just party pooped on the whole thing, they went from "just be max level and pay gold" - a couple weeks' worth of dailies and farming, mind you, but that made it feel like an achievement rather than a box to tick off, and back then gold didn't have any legitimate RL value so what else would you do with it? :) - to "oh, by the time we let you have flying, you won't have any use of it but on an alt" combined with some of the most alt-hostile expansions we've had. (I don't even know how their actual focus audience, i.e. hardcore raiders stay sane, given this plus the whole "bring the class" crap combined - at the top anyway - with needing enough alts of the anointed class to get lucky enough on RNG on one to be on the dream team ...)

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Originally Posted by VelKallor

..which confirms my point about raiding...people dont work 9-5 anymore, time is at a premium and people cant..and wont... schedule their lives around a video game. The gaming population is ageing, and with it the priorities and necessities change, they HAVE to. MMO's that learn this have to accept one very basic rule:

Adapt..or perish

The demographics now include a SIGNIFICANT percentage of gamers over 65, both male and female. Times change, and industry will need to accept that, or lose people as their gaming playerbase says "I dont have time for this rubbish anymore"., They are happy to spend money, sure, but on games that meet THEIR expectations and their needs.

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EXACTLY. You can hardly afford to schedule after work, because you don't know how much energy you might have left after a bad day.

You can't really reserve energy because then you'll be underperforming at work. We're getting to the point where people are even expected to min max LIFE, now I'm not even so surprised P2W is getting to be such a big thing because it allows players to leverage the thing they're being forced to max anyways, while traditional games expect you to be able to max a side pursuit in life (what work expects you to "min" so you can be "competitive and performant").

You only get a couple nights off of work. Do you want to be a complete hermit away from anyone? At least I can hang and talk with the housemates while I'm in Radz-at-Han bamming out the 50+ intermediate crafts it takes to make the next batch of collectables I'm using to level DoH.

Savage raiding? You need as much focus it might as well be a VR game at this point (and that focus matter is, I'm pretty sure, one of the main reasons why VR has failed to go mainstream as some expected!), especially when you can never be sure anymore if something is just pretty decor or the little cue you're expected to need for that mechanic that doesn't flash AoE until too late to respond (and sometimes this happens on Normal for that matter now, even).

Although, in the middle it can be both the devs and the community at fault. (Perhaps this is another reason the middle is rotting out?)

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Originally Posted by seerstone

i will never go back to WOW. sometimes i get struck with nostalgia and think about it but i never will.

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Yeah, I think I'm at least pretty near done with WoW, even though I do usually end up going back to it for a time every now and then when I run out of stuff to do in XIV besides endlessly grumping about raid culture, lol.

I'd have to buy another expansion pack, and then at least a month's sub (or use up my gold on a token, but I know in retail I'd certainly need that gold). I'd get to endgame, and then hit the usual point where it isn't fun to proceed - most annoyingly, not because of the actual difficulty (unlike XIV, where the cliff really is a little too steep) but because of all the endless "scoring" garbage.

Apparently, what we used to consider an annoying virtual male organ size comparison party is now to be seen as "it's like your resume, don't you understand?" and an important part of proving yourself and respecting people's time, so if you don't want to get into the measuring contest, you eventually just don't even get to play (and they'll tell US to "adapt or perish" into the bargain).

I'm not sure what can be done about this though, or if this is simply the youth generation finally successfully kicking us off the field, between the ridiculous hatred that what seems most of the young have for anyone over 30 or so these days (I'm barely old enough to be Gen X, and I've been unironically called a Boomer when I bring these topics up in WoW, for Twelve's sake), and the fact that the young increasingly don't grow up with the same spectrum of seriousness in team events that we did (as the traditional Little Leagues are increasingly becoming extinct due to financial asphyxia and replaced with a choice of ultra-casual "everyone gets a trophy" or of joining the super serious travel tournament circuit - which ... is pretty much what you see in MMOs lately too, even XIV).

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

That's right and there are several reasons for this actually.

• In Stormblood, it seems like they began to notice how the majority of people are just casual players and don't have time for grindy content like Eureka, so it shifted even more to "you can do the new patch in a day" then work on goals. The developers can relate - they don't exactly have too much time because they are busy developing.

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Ironically, most of the casual players I've played with adored Eureka, as the NM train provided rewards at a reasonable rate while the downtime in between spawns provided lots of "hangout" time. The later expansions have not really provided much of a substitute (the closest gameplay wise maybe being hunt trains, but the pace is too frantic there to do any hanging out), while the "standard" endgame content divide has only become even more glaring.

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Originally Posted by AnnRam

Video games in general are time waster.

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Yep. This is why I usually laugh at least a little at tales about "people not respecting my time."

I can get some of the sentiment but - maybe it's a generational difference here too? - aren't video games literally something you play to essentially enjoy wasting your free time?

I say this without sarcasm or irony: I love comparing FF14 to other MMOs I've played in the past. I could talk an ear off about this.

For example, I used to play Black Desert Online. And that game had a lot of problems. But I will always praise its seamless open world (no "instanced" open world zones, no loading screens), its immersive housing system (your home was in the towns and not in some neighborhood dimension, and people could own multiple homes and the building itself was instanced so that thousands of people could own the same piece of property) its market setup (if someone listed 99 of something and you only wanted 3, you could elect to buy 3 from their stack of 99; prices were also set by the game, so you couldn't just wake up and find your shit undercut by 50% by bots and trolls), the endless amount of things to do with no cap on personal productivity, and its guild system (guild activities increased the amount of money your guild earned, and those profits could then be distributed among your members depending on their personal contribution level and rank, unlike this game where 1 person can hoard an FC's submarine wealth entirely to themselves while the actual FC has nothing going on for its regular members outside of maybe a buff that they don't even get to choose; guilds also provide backup in pvp and there's a very real desire to join a nice guild unlike here where there are 10 reasons to make a solo fc and maybe 1 reason to join a communal fc). Hell, they even had regular content updates and they were all free, lol. I bought the game once, like years ago when it launched, and can just log in right now and play the most up to date version of the game for free. That said, BDO's also... BDO. It has a disgusting cash shop. The glams are almost all cash shop oriented. The RNG progression is nasty. The people running it are lying scumbags. The community's dead. But the things I listed above, were done really well. I wish we'd get similar things in XIV, but it's just impossible and not worth hoping for.

Then there's maplestory, which I played over a decade ago. And that game had a LOT of issues. But one area where I felt like it excelled, were the events. XIV will throw a 10 minute questline with a costume at the end of it and be like "event," but maplestory would have like... doubled EXP events, doubled drop events, just a ton of stuff like that to get people out there and playing the game. Is this capitalizing on the player's "fear of missing out"? I guess. But by that definition, so is a Valentine's event that goes away after 2 weeks. Every event has a certain level of FOMO attached. At least maplestory's events felt ongoing. I did the valentine's event once and never went back because there was no reason to. Imagine if, for a two week period, dungeons had doubled drops. You're farming a glam? Now twice as many glams come from the chests. You want verdant partitions for your house? Now's the time to farm that dungeon for it. etc. etc. It's just an idea, man. Don't gotta reinvent the wheel here; other games are already doing this shit.

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Originally Posted by VelKallor

Ashes is going to be a full loot open pvp game from day one, incl exp penalties along with being looted as well as gear damage. Can anyone spell gank squads?

. I give it six months ( if it ever releases ) before it goes on life support. IF THAT.

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It'll be lucky to make it that long. These PVP auteurs need to come to grips with the fact that 99% of people don't like gank in their PVE.

I wonder if WoW still makes you wait a stupid amount of time into an expansions life to fly..

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Originally Posted by Tanis_Ebonhart

And I can see why FF14 is rising up. It doesn't waste my time.

Like take flying. I can unlock flying on zones before I even finish them (and they made it easier in older expansions) and being able to just teleport nearly anywhere you want without a timer is amazing. It gives me the freedom to go where I want whenever I want which in turn encourages me to do stuff that I normally wouldn't have since getting to those things isn't a huge time waster.

Crafting and Fielding is also not so bad to level in this after the ARR levels. Though I'll never be an Omnicrafter/fieldworker as that takes the dedication I lack. I salute them.

But it's just so crazy that so many MMOs out there don't seem to understand that players don't like time wasters nor seem to want to respect their players time. They just scratch their head at their dropping sub numbers and the worst MMOs are the ones that double down on the grind and time wasters as that's how they've always done things. They all also have horrid free trials that will never get new players into their games at this point as new players can cap the trials in like an hour.

As I get older and have less and less time due to Real life obligations and going to the gym I really do appreciate that I can log in to FF14 and accomplish something without spending a ton of time in game. That is very beneficial to me, especially on my work days as I work 12 hour shifts so have maybe an hour of me time after my obligations and the gym.

Oh, and if anyone is wondering... I had to put this character on pause and made a new one on a friends server (this character will never leave Balmung), so had to go back and unlock all the raids and stuff again... At least it's a lot faster nowadays since I did all the ARR and most of the HW stuff as f2p.

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i like ff because i can walk away and come back and everything is mostly the same.

back when i played wow it was always "great" logging in and finding out they reworked everything again and all of my previously useful things like gems or that weird thing they did where you could get like... things that changed the appearance of your abilities? (like shaman's ghost wolf or whatever) just out of the blue? like. ugh. i am not interested in learning a brand new system every single major patch nor am i interested in grinding for all that nonsense.

i like that i can run a rou as a class in need and get the thing that'll give me the bare minimum materia i need to do end-game content without having to poopsock. log in, do a few rous, run a few high-end duties and still get to bed before midnight. it's rad.

everyone keeps ripping on the square devs but they really did say "there is one system for upgrading your equipment and there will only ever be one system" and i'm 500% here for it and cheering.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

You're missing the point. Flying cuts down on time wasted for travel in WoW. Unless you're a mage, you have no teleports outside of your single Hearthstone location. Even if you are a mage, the number of locations you can teleport to are far less than the number of zones in the game.

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True. But Pathfinder unlocks flying in older, optional content. So you do old optional content to make other old optional content easier/quicker. And i still think, that if you do not like it then don't do it. It would be different if the content was mandatory.


Cheers

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

True. But Pathfinder unlocks flying in older, optional content. So you do old optional content to make other old optional content easier/quicker. And i still think, that if you do not like it then don't do it. It would be different if the content was mandatory.

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Pathfinder was (not sure how it works in Dragonfight) NOT "older, optional content" considering how hard they tried to keep World Quests relative and at the same time also was account bound so you most definetly wanted it for alts when you were leveling them up. Could you do it without Pathfinder? Sure, but.. why would you want to purposely waste your time traveling from A to B when you could do it in like 100% less time flying?

Helped you get to summon stones quicker for M+ and also raids. Helped you gather faster and keep up with the bots (curse you Druid bots!) and was honestly just punishing if you didn't have it and everyone else did. Gotta love not being able to get a node because oh look, someone else tapped it up the mountain and you don't have flying, awh man, sucks, anyways go find a new node. :P

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Originally Posted by Caddo

I wonder if WoW still makes you wait a stupid amount of time into an expansions life to fly..

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From what I've read, they're trying something different in the current expansion.

You don't get to use your normal mounts to fly in the new zones but you get a dragon buddy that will fly you around and has a sort of skill tree. As you work to level it, it becomes better at flying. I have no idea how slow it is, or how long it's able to fly before the fatigue system sets in and you end up grounded until it recharges. It's supposed to be based off one of the GW2 mount systems (which I know zero about).

I'm sure someone who has actually played the expansion could give a better explanation of the system than that if you really want to know more. Then again, if you're like me with no intention of revisiting WoW then there's really not much reason to know more than it's another system intended to waste time and slow player progress, and will probably be meaningless in the expansion after the current one assuming it doesn't get removed completely.

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Originally Posted by Caddo

Pathfinder was (not sure how it works in Dragonfight) NOT "older, optional content"

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At the time of release it wasn't. But now it is. There's no reason other than curiosity to visit the old zones in the current game because they have no relevance to end game. And with the exception of Cataclysm, we never had access to flying while leveling at the start of an expansion (well, I guess druids had a head start in Burning Crusade because they got their first flight form at 67 or 68 but that was it).

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

At the time of release it wasn't. But now it is. There's no reason other than curiosity to visit the old zones in the current game because they have no relevance to end game. And with the exception of Cataclysm, we never had access to flying while leveling at the start of an expansion (well, I guess druids had a head start in Burning Crusade because they got their first flight form at 67 or 68 but that was it).

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Aye, that is why I said "was" and mentioned I wasn't sure how Dragonflight was handling it since last time I played Pathfinder wasn't optional, it was basically required the moment it dropped/became available for all sorts of QoL from gathering to World Quests to alt leveling, and the works :P WoW kinda went weird in the last two expansions and I like to kinda pretend it doesn't exist anymore lmao.

And technically we did have flying at the start of every expansion, you are correct in the sense of the leveling process, until Warlords of Draenor when they introduced the awful Pathfinder requirement. I still enjoyed having it day 1 or 2 of an expansion :D

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Originally Posted by ryouma17

FF14 has always been the best MMO on the market sadly its taken some people 10 years to realize it

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Because it's a solo player campaign with some small lobbies where you aren't even forced to interact with people. You only need the online functionality to clear dungeons/raids ( most of them completely optional)

You have menu / macro to do everything for you.
The content it's so easy / braindead that you can watch Netflix on your second monitor/ TV while keeping an entire raid up in normal.

And that's why its the best MMO right now, even our grandmother's who never played a game before can finish all the expansions , get to level 90 and be happy about it.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

From what I've read, they're trying something different in the current expansion.

You don't get to use your normal mounts to fly in the new zones but you get a dragon buddy that will fly you around and has a sort of skill tree. As you work to level it, it becomes better at flying. I have no idea how slow it is, or how long it's able to fly before the fatigue system sets in and you end up grounded until it recharges. It's supposed to be based off one of the GW2 mount systems (which I know zero about).

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The dragonriding system is something to unlock about 45 minutes into the main questline. The fatigue system with zero skill points is pretty annoying, but it's real easy to get said skill points and you can be maxed out in about 30 minutes to an hour of flying around collecting them. And once you're maxed out, if you know what you are doing you can be flying max speed almost indefinitely without stopping to recover fatigue. And lastly, the dragons are WAY faster then regular flying mounts. Regular flying caps out at 310% speed, dragons cap out at 810% speed.

The only downside is you can't use them in older zones.

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Originally Posted by Tanis_Ebonhart

As I get older and have less and less time due to Real life obligations and going to the gym I really do appreciate that I can log in to FF14 and accomplish something without spending a ton of time in game. That is very beneficial to me, especially on my work days as I work 12 hour shifts so have maybe an hour of me time after my obligations and the gym.

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There is a large contingent of young people who have video games as their primary hobby, particularly social games with their friends. Back in the old days, MMOs used to fill that niche. WoW does too in the modern era. So does Fortnite, Apex, Valorant, Minecraft, etc. Much, much more successful games than ours.

Nowadays, as we all can agree, FFXIV's best strength is the story. It's a single-player game. You beat it and then you shelve it and move on with your life. A lot of people deeply love that feature, as do you.

But remember: your story isn't the only one. And for every one person like you who plays single-player games on occasion, there's a thousand others who enjoy video games as a hobby with their friends. In my opinion, I wished that MMOs had another chance of being in that space. But too many people love the idea of an MMO being single-player, as you will see in the responses below. Until then, it seems that the social and heavy gamer has to stick with WoW and other games.

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so many MMOs out there don't seem to understand that players don't like time wasters

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As other forum-posters will strongly agree with, WoW is far more successful than FFXIV. Plenty of people like continuing grinds because they don't see them as a time waster any more than your 5,000th run of Crystal Tower that somehow still constitutes "respecting your time".

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They just scratch their head at their dropping sub numbers

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There is only one other MMO that requires a subscription, and it's World of Warcraft. It's also 19 years old. The use of "they" is inappropriate in this context. Also, they have more subscribers than we do.

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the worst MMOs are the ones that double down on the grind and time wasters

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No, the worst ones are the ones that sell you progress for real-life money, as many other forum-goers will likely agree with. "P2W" has a heavy stigma and has killed many nascent MMOs, from BDO to Blade & Soul and (most recently) Lost Ark. Bugginess can also kill an MMO, such as New World and FFXIV 1.0. But, as many will agree, WoW is not dead.

Gotta love not being able to get a node because oh look, someone else tapped it up the mountain and you don't have flying, awh man, sucks, anyways go find a new node. :P

FF 14 solved that years ago, all nodes are personal.

the idea was mentioned in WOW ....what was the answer..as always ?

"It cant be done"™

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There is only one other MMO that requires a subscription, and it's World of Warcraft

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No.

FF 11 is sub based, so is Elder Scrolls Online.

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Originally Posted by Caddo

I wonder if WoW still makes you wait a stupid amount of time into an expansions life to fly..

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You get special mounts at lvl 63ish that work similar to gw2 flying mounts that are about twice as fast as epic flying, yet people still bitch.

I'm playing both, because raiding in FF sucks nuts and I run out of non raid, non pvp content quick.

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Originally Posted by VelKallor

Gotta love not being able to get a node because oh look, someone else tapped it up the mountain and you don't have flying, awh man, sucks, anyways go find a new node. :P

FF 14 solved that years ago, all nodes are personal.

the idea was mentioned in WOW ....what was the answer..as always ?

"It cant be done"™



No.

FF 11 is sub based, so is Elder Scrolls Online.

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ESO has a sub option but it is not sub based.

EQ2 also still has a subscription option.

So I went back to FFXI about five years, albeit on a clone server (shhh, don't tell SE). The server was "locked" at level 75. Content was being added, but at the time they were up to Chains of Promathia. However, they made QoL changes that made the game more playable in today's world. Experience was bumped up by 50% and they added a way to get quest experience that did exist in the retail game, but wasn't added until much later in its lifetime. They also added the ability to port to certain places, but in the original game required certain jobs and spells. Of course, you still can't switch jobs on the fly - so they kept that aspect the same.

Since the server population was so low, there was a sense of community that I hadn't seen in FFXI or really any MMO since EQ1. If we wanted to do end-game content (sky, sea, etc), we needed more people to clear the MSQ. Lots of people that already cleared the MSQ were volunteering to help others get through some of the harder instances. Getting carried in that game really isn't a thing. The instances (battlegrounds) required all 6 players working together and every instance was level capped.

In a pinch, they had the equivalent of GMs (just other players) that would essentially act like party/duty finder. Let's say I did all the requirements needed to get up to some difficult instance in open up the raid zone. You'd shout for help in the worldwide linkshell and people would offer to come help. A "GM" would essentially port them directly to the instance to help you out. Then when you were done, the GM would port them back to what they were doing.

However... in today's world - I'd imagine 2006 "retail" FFXI would not survive. Like the OP said, too many time wasters.

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Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

There is a large contingent of young people who have video games as their primary hobby, particularly social games with their friends. Back in the old days, MMOs used to fill that niche. WoW does too in the modern era. So does Fortnite, Apex, Valorant, Minecraft, etc. Much, much more successful games than ours.

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Battle Royale/First Person Shooter-style games such as Fortnite, Apex and Valorant are social in that they allow players to group up.

The first problem I find with such games is that they are 'social' only if your friends are actually good at the game. Best to choose another game if you expect your team to win with that one friend who cannot seem to get things right. Or expect to lose a friend when they cannot meet your own expectations.

These games generate a lot of revenue, to be sure. They are, for all intents and purpose, the equivalent of football and basketball communities, where sports is the primary "hobby". Sports generate a lot more in revenue than video games.

MMORPGs provide a shared world, complete with shared experiences. Whether they also provided 'social' experiences is dependent on the players. Even World of Warcraft can be played Solo -- in fact the general experience of most players in an MMORPG is solo play, followed by social interactions through social media. I can go to Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram or Facebook or <insert favorite social media site here> and find people to share my enthusiasm for most any game out there. Whether we become friends, or remain mere acquaintances, depends on things outside of the game.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Battle Royale/First Person Shooter-style games such as Fortnite, Apex and Valorant are social in that they allow players to group up.

The first problem I find with such games is that they are 'social' only if your friends are actually good at the game. Best to choose another game if you expect your team to win with that one friend who cannot seem to get things right. Or expect to lose a friend when they cannot meet your own expectations.

These games generate a lot of revenue, to be sure. They are, for all intents and purpose, the equivalent of football and basketball communities, where sports is the primary "hobby". Sports generate a lot more in revenue than video games.

MMORPGs provide a shared world, complete with shared experiences. Whether they also provided 'social' experiences is dependent on the players. Even World of Warcraft can be played Solo -- in fact the general experience of most players in an MMORPG is solo play, followed by social interactions through social media. I can go to Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram or Facebook or <insert favorite social media site here> and find people to share my enthusiasm for most any game out there. Whether we become friends, or remain mere acquaintances, depends on things outside of the game.

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I play wow on a RP server (Argent Dawn). Plenty social. Raid scene sucks tho.