I have started playing ESO myself and I’ve actually really, really been enjoying it to the point I find myself playing it over XIV.
The game is growing all the time. The bigger the game gets, the harder it gets to keep everything in line. Keeping jobs balanced, adding all these functions... it's a literal tonnage of hell they have to go through. Just throwing our money at doesn't solve everything. Feasibility is a major factor.
Sad that the combat and combat animations and forced weapon swapping is Horrible in Eso the combat is clunky as hell...
That’s actually the only gripe I currently think I have atm with it tbh though I haven’t played that long, I do love how the overworld stuff is done with things like public dungeons and world bosses etc
While I can't say much about EW launch since I started playing after the initial craze died out then outside of Housing "0 bug" nothing I've seen so far is outside of typical MMO issues. Especially since the World Travel seemed to work out fine just the next day. Bottlenecks in any online game and service exists and in the end none is able to accommodate every single user at the same time. WoW classic launch had players wait in 8+ hours long queues to finally log into the game. Logging into large portion of games straight after patch involves waiting in those too assuming you don't run into issues with server straight up rejecting your attempts to log in due to large number of people doing it at given moment. That's reality and truth is no MMO or online service is prepared for such peaks because it's simply impractical and most of the time being a cost sink. Just like nobody buys a van because there's very small chance that one day they might need to fit more than 5 people into a car.
Just to add, to OP: the updates that might feel like no big deal (adding trusts to older dungeons, redesigning entire fights from older dungeons), is a huge pull on resources, and quite impressive given how they haven’t seemed to work out a universal AI for all dungeons but rather need to custom tweak each one per each dungeon. If the game truly were in lazy-mode, they would not have bothered with this.
allow me to offer another view as well.
every time something even slightly goes wrong these threads pop up screaming about how this is it, *this* is the update that proves that the devs don't care anymore and ff14 is going to start sucking as bad as WoW because obviously they are going to stop communicating, put the cash shop in game, the story is going to shite, etc.
i don't know if they are just suffering from PTSD after having dealt with Blizzard for so long, but it is getting extremely annoying when their kneejerk reaction is to cry that the game is ending because it's *so* obvious that the devs dont care anymore. smh.
All I know is I've been playing this game since the closed beta of 2.0, and the forums have never changed.
Every major patch, every expansion, given a few weeks someone will come along and herald the end.
The game is dying, it's over, FFXIV is finished!
Yet it's grown, and has ever continued to grow.
I honestly don't care how big the game is or isn't. I'm pretty happy with it's current state of affairs, and plan to keep playing.
I imagine the majority of players feel the same way, because it is true people will sooner turn to the forums to complain rather than to give praise. Human nature and all that.
This game has faced far worse before, been at a worse place, and I'm sure many more difficulties lie ahead - but that doesn't mean they have failed us. Because there is no "us".
They've certainly never failed me.
I hope this is the extent of issues this game ever faces - I'll take difficult patch releases, servers going down and delayed updates any day over some of the horrid things other game devs and publishers have (tried to keep) hidden.
If the patch-cycle must be delayed so the people working on the game are entitled a real life, so be it.
the sad part is that it actually drowns out usefull feedback, it isn't like the developers are without errors, or that community input is a bad thing, far from it, but every single good idea someone might have gets washed up in the sea of complaints that are honestly nothing but thinly veiled personal attacks on the developers.
There has been a steady decline in quality ever since ShB released. It was really small things at first but it's gotten worse and worse. It's very obvious FFXVI has been taking up more and more development resources over this time period.
And yes, before someone brings it up, I realize COVID happened and a lot of companies had to figure out how to work through that. The trend started before then though and has persisted through to now.
literally the fourth post in here (the second post of the actual op of this thread) says that the dev's just don't care and have lost all passion. if you put in months of your live into something and than get told that obviously you didn't care than don't tell me that isn't an attack on you. later on on page 9 we have a post upvoted 18 times saying "so what if people are mean to the devs", and that general sentiment just seeps through every part of this thread.
or what about other parts of the forum ? i mean my comment wasn't adressing this thread in particular but more a general aspect of the forum.
we had a thread named something like "lets cut the developers some slack" opening with a sarcastic post about the hamsters powering the servers being tired or something akin to that, another (mis)using google trends to paint the game as basically dead or the thread on the hildibrand relic calling out the devs for forcing people to grind out such an "absurdly long quest chain to start the relic" (its not really any longer than the ivalice questline if you only do it for the relic and dislike hildibrand cause at that point you might aswell skip cutscenes) which includes several people in thread calling the devs lazy, the hildibrand storyline trash (you don't have to like it personally, thats fair, but again someone had to put in the work to create it) and if the devs aren't lazy than they are actively ruining the game. and lets not go into the 600+ page thread of the same 50 or so people basically having a circlejerk about how much the story sucks.
am i saying that nothing constructive ever gets unnecessarely put as "an attack" ? no, no i'm not, it happens. but at least 2/3 of the threads in this forum could ask for exactly the same things with a quarter of the "the devs are lazy/just don't care/have no idea what they are doing/even some random modder can do a better job" and you than wouldn't need "white knights" protecting square, which is another of these things while where at it, people aren't automatically white knights (no that weren't your words but they did get used in this very thread) because they disagree with things you take issue with, the fact of the matter is that the ffxiv forums are full of personal attacks.
It's almost like when you open yourself to such a vast amount of people you get responses across the board. They COULD look at if there is a pattern being spoken across the chatter but i'm not a dev employed by SE so I couldn't tell you how they handle feedback, if at all, lol.
The usual rhetoric is that what they don't give us in quantity (since FF14 has had content drought issues for years), they give us in quality and spend their time polishing what they have. This is now quickly shown to be a complete falsehood. We are getting neither quantity nor quality.
Has anyone actually lost their character to DC/World Travel? I know it's a threat I see rolled around, but I have never had it verified personally. Granted, I have never truly looked.
As is anything else, yeah I'll beat the dead horse about declining quantity. The quality of core features are still good where subjectivity isn't involved (while I loathe the last half of the MSQ, that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the mechanics of it all the way through!) It's just.. not much. We're used to that, though, so eh.
ETA because I'm sleepy: My favourite mini-game in Endwalker is to find all the major assets that aren't aligned properly. At least they fixed bench half phased into the wall in Sharlayan!
Harrrrdddd disagree. People were complaining about SHB not that long ago. That PvP was terrible, that it had unbalanced Bozja which people complained about for the entire expansion, a relic grind that pleased neither the ones who wanted a grind or the ones who didn’t want one, Delubrim, the Nier raids and storyline which barely anyone finished, the delay of DSU, release of Viera and Hrothgar which everyone complained about, no male viera, dungeon per patch reduction, the problems with voice acting in 5.4, job homogenization, complaints about the cash shop, no deep dungeon or equivalent, complaints about trusts making the game single player, etc. etc.
I don’t see the quality drop.
People are spinning honeyed words about SB now, even though that was the most blasted expansion to date.
There's a lot to complain about - and we should! because we all want our game to be good, and squeaky wheels get grease - but there's no feedback less helpful than "it's bad, fam." I see the general core systems getting their due attention and care, but more side activities get bungled left and right. Which is just historically how things have always gone.
Other than Bozja and related content (in my opinion), you listed most of the more legitimate complaints that were made and continue to be made, which sort of indicates the complete opposite of the point you are trying to make. Unless your post was sarcasm, then carry on.
I'd say it's little things like the lack of Miqo'te ears in headgear that happened at the very start of ShB. They used to do that. There are some pretty good examples of similar headgear in ARR that have them to ShB and EW sets that don't. Now they just sell cash shop gear that cuts them off too.
Stuff like that by itself isn't a huge deal, but it adds up along with other things that you handily listed to show a trend downward. They're removing or reducing things we've typically gotten left and right. Even the things we do get have been pretty messed up lately, which would understandable for a studio who wasn't used to MMOs, but this game has been going on for a while. If they don't have systems to reliably test for failures under stress now, then they never will.
ShB is generally praised for it's MSQ (which I think it deserves) but with their clearly dwindling available resources, it's obvious that's where most of the focus on the game goes. The main issue with EW is the MSQ had the same level of attention at the expense of everything else, but the MSQ just didn't land for a lot of people. So I think that's why you're seeing an uptick in complaints.
Also, yeah. I wasn't sure if the one above post is sarcasm either. It pretty clearly lists objective quality issues (along with some subjective ones.)
Someone had made a graphic a while ago showing how much they have cut from unique assets. I wish I could remember the thread so I could plop it here.
Not really. Most of these problems still exist, regardless of whether they were present an expansion ago or not. As far as the state of the game is concerned, things are probably considered fine by a lot of people, but that doesn't mean it is all sunshine and rainbows and magical unicorns.
I don't recall ShB being nearly as divisive as EW. Especially when accounting for opinions voiced by players who have been invested in the game for a decent amount of time.
https://clips.twitch.tv/LitigiousGia...Ub-OZ7BJXP7Un7
LMAO add the ranged LB bug to the list
Lag lag everywhere.
2 hotfixes already for 6.4 lmaooo and still more to come because so many bugs remain unaddressed