I need to vent about FFXIV as a whole at this point.

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Originally Posted by Havenchild

Well because it's the players complaining that apparently struggle to unite two brain cells to work in conjunction with each other that causes alot of classic instances to be dumbed down to rather insulting levels and then the devs keep this flow.

Devs should have never listened as much as they did to the whiners. It's part of this reason alot of this game has suffered over time. And its not only casual players but raiders too.

Raiders complained about difficulties lining up raid buffs and boom everything is two minute windows. Raiders also complained about hp pushes and randomize mechs which gave us a cool fight like T7 savage (or the regular version too) and instead we moved to predictable dances that cycle similar mechanics every fight for now like 7 years. Raiders are now doing the same with Picto in FRU. Trying to rob another job of an identity it has by utilizing downtime and wishing for it to be nerfed.

SE did better for job design to encounter design when they just did what they wanted instead of trying to appease whiners.

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I’m all for more interesting fight design but T7S is literally the worst fight this game has ever given birth to

Giving a boss 4 total health then making it so if you don’t push to the microsecond you make mechanics unsolvable is absolutely god awful, especially in a game that crit has such an effect on

As sad as it is, the whole main story part could as well be a movie with few instanced battles inbetween since overworld and most dungeon enemies are so pointlessly watered down that it feels more like chore to fight them.

Doesn't help that each expansion keeps stretching the levels at which skills are aquired so they keep upping the potencies of the early skills to compensate which leads to like 2 button gameplay way too deep into the game.

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Originally Posted by Havenchild

Well because it's the players complaining that apparently struggle to unite two brain cells to work in conjunction with each other that causes alot of classic instances to be dumbed down to rather insulting levels and then the devs keep this flow.

Devs should have never listened as much as they did to the whiners. It's part of this reason alot of this game has suffered over time. And its not only casual players but raiders too.

Raiders complained about difficulties lining up raid buffs and boom everything is two minute windows. Raiders also complained about hp pushes and randomize mechs which gave us a cool fight like T7 savage (or the regular version too) and instead we moved to predictable dances that cycle similar mechanics every fight for now like 7 years. Raiders are now doing the same with Picto in FRU. Trying to rob another job of an identity it has by utilizing downtime and wishing for it to be nerfed.

SE did better for job design to encounter design when they just did what they wanted instead of trying to appease whiners.

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None of that has anything to do with the fact that the players aren't the ones coding and designing and maintaining the game. They give their feedback. SE decides if they listen to it or not.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

None of that has anything to do with the fact that the players aren't the ones coding and designing and maintaining the game. They give their feedback. SE decides if they listen to it or not.

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The "don't trust the players" mantra didn't come out of nowehere you know.
I bet you that given the tools to actually design dungeons and stories in-game beside TTRPG style 90% would be trash or some sort of scam. Or Both.

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

Games are at their best when they appeal to a demographic.

Unfortunately, XIV committed the cardinal sin: appealing to demographics that the game wasn't made for.

And now it's made for them, but at what cost?

Gameplay so milquetoast and idiot-proof that there's no substance or engagement, to the point where when the funny MSQ (read: the only thing I see praised about this game outside of circles specifically for XIV) takes a miss-step, it seems like the entire game has fallen apart.

Kinda sucks, unless you're playing Final Fashion XIV instead of Final Fantasy XIV (or worse, Final Housing XIV). Then I guess nothing has changed for you.

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You are delusional if you don't think from jump the goal of xiv wasn't to allow people to dress their blorbo like the warrior of light and look cool while doing stuff. Nothing changed, they just got more efficient at achieving that goal. Its a theme park mmo. From jump its " Hey remember that from ff, your character is doing that now".

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Originally Posted by Kaliesto

almost every MMORPG out there has been following this trend as of late

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I'm going to be honest with you. When I started playing FFXIV, I knew the history of the genre - that it eventually casualizes itself as its developers seek to make optimizations and conveniences for its players. Throughout this process, there is typically not enough regard for keeping it "hard" or "reasonably challenging", or they see it as more challenging than it is due to spending so much time developing it that they don't play it the way players do.

But of course, there is an opposite direction the genre sometimes goes - making itself way too hard and grindy, such that an increasingly tiny amount of people actually complete or participate in its content. The natural result of such is that MMO having a tiny playerbase.

It's a balance that needs not stray too far to either side (casual vs hardcore) and I knew FFXIV would go in one of these directions, because that's just how it goes.

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What the hell even is this? Tutorial after Tutorial all the way up to Dawntrail now? Why even bother adding monsters? They hit for nothing, their skills are not even threatening. The Tutorial style approach to this should had debatingly ended after you leave the ARR content.

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I think it's just because they don't see the open world as where they put seriously developed content beside hunts. They put that in places like Eureka and Bozja. They are probably also just concerned about making sure even returning players (who played through the prior expansions years ago) don't have trouble navigating the world.

Here is 12 minutes of Yoshi-P talking about how great FATEs are 11 years ago if you want to understand his original mindset https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQuGz7O34xc

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Have people forgot about teamwork Synergy?

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Well teamwork is good but I think the argument is a lot of people want to play an MMORPG solo but have social interaction alongside it ie. FC chat, linkshells, NN. In any case, the FATEs do scale up although it's poorly done (scales up for the next time it's fought...)

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The only time people need to party up is when special FATES are up, but even then there is nothing to these bosses. There is no bite to them, no strategy, their monster skills are so worthless it just tickles the party, its just "hit the target".

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True for many FATE bosses, but not all of them. Odin, Archaeotania, Formidable, Chi, Daivadipa, Mu and Ttokrrone (mostly the more recent ones) are a lot better than the boring older bosses we got like Foxy Lady and Ixion. Why? Because I actually would see bodies. Many of the special bosses in each zone that are meant for 8 players are also extremely simple, with just a conal or something like that. But there are exceptions here as well. Special Tarasque Force I remember as an example where we had to figure out how to get away, stun or survive (this was before BLU).

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These Hunts have long since lost their bite since ARR and or possibly after Heavensward and never really regained any real monster threat level

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Not true at all. They've only got better. As someone that hunts a lot for many years, I can say the mechanics have only got better. I really enjoy seeing hunts like Heshuala decimate everyone, the S ranks leave bodies everywhere still. It's great! Hunt mechanics always did this even when they were simpler (for example Okina's donut AoE decimated everyone), but the mechanics themselves have just got more sophisticated over time as well to where people don't get the magnetic mechanics of Urna, the head mechanics of Atticus or the weather mechanics of Forecaster.

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when everyone across the server can just gang up on these monsters and end them in seconds.

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Keyword: can. Doesn't always happen. Sometimes there are low turnouts due to a patch lull, sometimes it's not evening hours for the region, sometimes it's on a less populated world. And guess what, when this happens, the hunts can take anywhere between 2 minutes and 30 minutes to kill, which is enough time to see bodies everywhere and see people begin doing mechanic callouts.

Yet this is the exact problem with the open world. You can have too many or too few people. This problem is solved with instances that require an exact number of people and can recruit from across worlds ie. Eureka, Bozja, PvP.

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There is very very FEW particular S-Ranks that can even stand a chance, but they very rarely ever turn the tables on the players.

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Bias perspective from someone hunting on an overpopulated DC (yes Crystal's pop rivals Aether's)? Not my experience as someone that fought 1,000 of them on Dynamis and Materia. Even when I go to some of them on Aether now I see bodies quite often.

Overall, hunts are one of the few genuinely threatening pieces of casual content capable of leaving bodies everywhere, and that is why it's one of my favorite pieces of content I look forward to every expansion.

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except during the Ivalice Raids where I fondly remembered Thunder God Cid actually forcing alliances to cooperate with eachother which was a thing of beauty because he was actually decently hard until..."the playerbase complained again" and nerfed him.

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Oddly enough, the ARR alliance raids are great Min Ilvl and require teamwork ie. to unfreeze eachother, form hiding rocks, placements, threatening adds and even tank swaps, the damage scaling just didn't age well and the loading screens are dated. The second two HW ones were also great in my opinion but Weeping City didn't age well sadly (it was among the best ones I remember to this day). The Stormblood ones were good too. Oddly enough, I started to see wipes even more after they nerfed and added Echo to Orbonne, because it not being "current" anymore increased the amount of people that didn't know mechanics.

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This crap has been like this since stormblood from my personal memories of this game where every story boss was such a pushover.

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In my honest opinion? Regular content has been a pushover since ARR and trial bosses gave healers 2% HP to heal. They just double downed on that since Stormblood by over-telegraphing everything and that's probably why you noticed it more.

However, I did notice them giving people a harder time with normal trials in Endwalker. I know they're braindead to many of us, but if you ever got them in roulettes you'd probably have seen first timers actually wiping to Golbez normal, Barbaricca normal, The Gilded Araya. I've seen some pretty rough Mothercrystal runs (again, simple stuff but a lot of players dread this trial for some reason). And I still put a mark on myself in the Dark Inside so people can follow me. I remember a few that people still dread in Shadowbringers such as SoS. Again they're easy, but a lot of the players you get matched with think they're hard or dread them which is better than in the past. The worst before that was probably Shinryu (on release).

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I was left feeling nothing, but a hollow victory

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I do agree with this. It's why I felt I had to do extremes at all. The trials were always a joke. I do think they've gradually got better in Endwalker as I explained above, but I'd really be just fine if Extreme was the normal difficulty.

Dungeons and older content got nerfd out of time convenience. I would argue that Dungeons design has been built to cater to the elite wall to wall pullers. You just don't see it as that because the bar has become the standard of how to best maximize your time running a dungeon.

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Originally Posted by Gunz_Zbestest

Dungeons design has been built to cater to the elite wall to wall pullers

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Partially, but as a wall puller, I can tell you that we do that because our parties PRESSURE us to do it.

My life before I did wall-to-wall pulls: people randomly abandoned the dungeon in silence, they ran ahead and pulled for me, they said very rude things at the end of the dungeon before immediately leaving, and occasionally they'd dare say rude things mid-run.

Since doing wall-to-wall pulls, I've had no complaints. After 9 years and far exceeding the 10k dungeon achievement, I had 1 person attack me for it (saying mentors shouldn't do wall pulls) yet they had no trouble healing it and 1 person randomly said a rude thing at the end (I reported them).

2 complaints in 9 years of giant pulls? It's pretty obvious that the majority of people either want wall pulls, or are neutral and won't complain about them. Yet, if you don't do wall pulls, A LOT of people get upset at you. So consider this before blaming tanks for these pulls.

I completely agree with everything you said. Content is beyond Casual.. Holiday events are a joke, Dailies are a joke, Hunts are boring AF. dungeons are boring but pretty to look at. Systems are extremely out dated.

If we dont see BIG changes in 8.0, im afraid the game is done.

If you ask me the biggest problem is that SE thinks it’s entirely appropriate to only ever cater to the absolute extreme ends of the player demographic lol.

That is to say, the most casual ERP screenshotter that wants every dungeon nerfed, who’s only interested in the MMO part of the game, is being given just as much as value as a hardcore raider crying that wants the entirety of job design shaped around savage/ultimate raids, who’s only interested the RPG aspect of the game.

Hence why we have the vast majority of content being either so brain-dead its lifespan is shorter than one of those moths with no mouths, or it’s raid content and you need to either deal with PF drama, find a static, and fight off all the third party programs people want you to use lol (laughs in ps5 player)

They’re basically completely ignoring the massive amounts of players that fit somewhere in-between these two ridiculous extremes lol