[Poll] Are you happy with the current state of FFXIV?

Hey there,

I'm just curious to see how FFXIV's player base feels about the game as it is, before Stormblood.
There's many threads on what people want all the time with heated discussions, but it's hard to pin point how many people resonate with which side of the argument, even worse, there's more than just 2 sides most of the time.

http://www.strawpoll.me/12897746

Some may say this is a bad timing for a poll, as we're before an expansion, some may say it's a good timing. shrug who knows :D
I actually quite enjoyed SE's official polls from 1.0 and i wish they did something similar again, but it seems i'm hoping for that in vain.
In fact, can we still see the resulst of those polls anywhere? If anyone knows, link them for me please?

As for me personally, i do enjoy FFXIV and i will most likely always be playing it.
Yet i feel moving from XI (ye, damn right boi, go ahead and hate on me, idc :D) to 1.0 to FFXIV: ARR, there is a void inside me that yearns to be filled.
Somehow to me most content feels meaningless. I guess on a grand scale MMOs or games in themselves are meaningless besides the player interaction we get out of them, but since FFXIV 3.0 especially, it feels as if it doesn't even matter if i actually play the game or just stand around the whole time and do my 2 hours of weekly raids while they're relevant.
This is pretty much what it seems to boil down to for me.
I don't really enjoy dungeons, i am not keen on running the same primal fight 99 times for a subpar weapon or a bird mount.
Even the daily roulette, i don't even do extreme roulette usually. Only during maybe the first 3-4 weeks of progression.

How do you feel? Are you content? Do you want change?
I wonder how everyone else feels.
Thank you, if you participate in the strawpoll!

(i hope i didn't break any rules with this post lol)

For me, right now there are a couple things I dislike about FFXIV.

1) The raiding community. It saddens me to hear people berate other players for any reason and it has just made participating in that content unfun for me.
2) The grind of anima weapons. Don't get me wrong, they should be somewhat grindy, but the sheer level of it this time around and even in the later stages of the first were just ridiculous. Furthermore, please don't punish those who don't raid for mistakes in making raids "too difficult".
3) The upcoming content distribution in Stormblood. Yes, I know I can freely change classes and I can play RDM/SAM if I want and I will level both to 70 along with every other job; but if my love is really into healing which, for the most part it is, there's no content that I can get for playing a healer and that upsets me especially since Yoshi P said in his interview with DualShockers that content to "encourage people who like playing tanks and healers" would be introduced. Tank goodies have been shown and discussed but no healer stuff.
4) The balance issue. 5/20 is a very scary day for me right now. I have seen WHM get stripped of any uniqueness its had because its abilities were "necessary" for all healers. With the new role system coming up, I'm afraid that all the Conj/Whm abilites that are currently "requried" for healers: protect, stoneskin, cleric stance, etc. are going to be taken from the Conj/Whm job and we're not going to get the raid utility we need to help us stand up to SCH and AST in terms of utility. I am very anxious for these changes. They may be fantastic, but considering the changes made when HW came out, I'm not really holding my breath there. The past shows that they're *not* going to be good.

I know that seems like a lot of complaints, but technically it's about a small deal of the content.

I don't know. I want to play (I just bought the PS4 version and will pre order Stormblood soon), but the core content has been disappointing and not much of what I liked in ARR is present anymore.

- Zones are too big and empty, and flying kills the open world.
- PotD and dungeons as the best way to level, further killing the open world.
- Too much grinding for basic things, back then uncapped tomes left you ready to raid the latest tier.
- Level cap increases making it so I have to grind jobs again if I want some variation in endgame.
- Tome rewards from content outside of dungeons are too low, making me burnt out on dungeons.
- Alexander normal loot system is really bad.
- Still no token system for 24-person raids.
- Extreme primals and Savage raids are filled with mechanics making them a chore to learn and not that fun. This is creeping into 24-person raids too, making them frustrating.
- Jobs are becoming more and more homogenized, removing little cool tricks such as using Manawall so you can stand in AoEs and cast more or being able to cast Lustrate in Cleric Stance
- Lots of real money items

I mostly play for quests, beast tribes, crafting, events, lore and will try to learn LoV soon. However, I don't think I'll stay subbed for all of Stormblood like I did in ARR, because again, a lot of things that I liked from ARR aren't present anymore.

This isn't a complaint post, just a bit sad that the game changed things that I liked. It lost its "magic" if that makes sense, I was always a casual (even though I was always raiding), I appreciated how little the game expected of me so I could just focus on having fun.

I really dislike the following things:

-Complete lack of difficulty in anything outside of Savage / EX. Bosses in dungeons might as well be training dummies if you're playing a DPS because most of them don't have mechanics you have to do.

-Community at endgame is terrible. Look at both types of raids, EX primals, party finder, etc. They demand high DPS (skip soar or disband) but can't even handle the rest of the mechanics. Since the above has taught them that the only thing that matters in the rest of the content is DPS, they're just going to DPS and wing the rest of the mechanics. I've never seen a group of people that lack any sort of interpersonal skills before more than this game's. A large part of this is that the relative lack of any difficulty in the game has set the community up for failure at the endgame where the difficulty is introduced, and no one has ever needed to use party chat before that point so they don't know how to talk to each other in a nice manner. Steps of Faith required some communication at level 50, but that was nerfed so you can be uncoordinated and clear it now.

-Nothing to really do outside of instanced duties. You have crafting / gathering, quests (if you have any left, or beastman dailies), hunts / bills, and some gold saucer stuff. Largely, anything you want to do is locked behind queues, so if you're in a queue, you can't do anything else really.

-Complete lack of creativity and less content: we get one less dungeon per patch in 3.x than we did in 2.x. The new content they've added has been mostly lackluster (Verminion, Diadem *both* times, Palace of the Dead to an extent compared to Nyzul Isle from XI which did everything better). Diadem launched as a mindless grind against mobs. Diadem 2.0 launched as just FATE grinding with a couple of objectives. Maybe an emergency mission spawns, but since the design of the content was so bad, no one does Diadem anymore, and I haven't seen enough players in a Diadem since a couple weeks after it launched when an EM has spawned to even do it. At least Aquapolis is good. But I think the big issue is that there is a creatively bankrupt option with this game when it comes to adding content, and that is to just throw FATEs at it. I've never seen anyone express joy, wonder, or excitement at an event that's just FATE grinding.

I guess I'm just looking for more interesting content, and content that doesn't make me sleepy with how boring it is. Savage / EX is in a good spot. The rest of the game is just too easy. Not even at a "just challenging enough for people to be engaged" level, but a level at which all the bosses are training dummies. If boss A and boss B don't require any input from you as a DPS for mechanics and you just hammer in your rotation, what difference is there between them? What differentiates them from a training dummy? Nothing at all. That's why so much of the game feels so boring. As a DPS, you can literally just fight more than half the bosses in the dungeons without actually needing to do anything than your rotation, and at that point, each boss might as well be a copy of each other. That's extremely boring.

I am happy with some parts of the game and not so happy with others.

- Dungeons: They need to introduce real dungeons and less Corridor ----> Trash mobs -----> Corridor ------> Boss fight, rinse and repeat. I want to explore big dungeons, I want to see less fighting and more puzzles. I want the developers to take a look at main Final Fantasy games and look at what makes the dungeons there fun. I know that some players dislike puzzles, but almost every Final Fantasy games has this in their dungeons and I want them to start introducing these content to FFXIV aswell.

- NolLoading screens: World needs to be more connected. With Stormblood we will get our first complete city, I want see with this all the new zones, I want to be able to fly from A to B and see no loading screen.

- World: The World is boring, FATES have no consequences, the world feels lifeless. I want to see monsters attack the outpost, I want to see the players come and help the NPC. If players dont help the NPC, the monsters in that area become stronger or give less items when they die. Letting the monsters win makes gathering alot harder aswell. I want to see the world affect the players.

- Gathering and Crafting: Just like how weather can affect Fish, I want to see rare ores and plants show up in the world when there is a certain weather or when a strong monster shows up in the world. for example: Odin shows up, since he is draining the aether a special type of Ore can be mined. This afcourse means that players can not farm these materials, but that is the point, they are meant to be rare. I also want to see DoL, DoH, DoW and DoM work toghter. I have not played Hamlet Defense (a content that was in 1.0), but I have seen alot of videos and talked with 1.0 players. From what I have seen and heard, this is a content that I would like to see back in FFXIV.

:)

I voted as a subscriber who is currently only subscribed to wittle time between games. I have pre-ordered stormblood because of a deal on amazon but wasnt planning to. I do not yet see enough new content.

I think the flame would be rekindled if there were more press releases and teasers (in english) that could give me something to look forward to. All we have so far is a much of the same old plus swimming (but would realy want to see more of the swimming).

I'm always kind of torn on questions about this. If I were to be honest, no, I don't really enjoy the game and haven't for some time now. I stay subbed because most of my friends literally WILL NOT try another MMO, no matter how much I try to entice them into one, and just playing other games duo with my boyfriend gets pretty dull when there's a core group of 6-8 friends of ours who are pretty much married to FFXIV.

All that being said, I can't really say that my dissatisfaction with the game is any fault of the devs, really. People like playing this game, and a lot of the things I DISLIKE are things that either a.) the community really seems to be into (healer/tank DPS meta), or b.) things that are a fundamental core of the developer's design philosophy (ease of access for pretty much all non-raiding areas of the game), and it doesn't seem right to criticize and endlessly posit new changes that are probably only really things that I want to see done. I admit, if I invested the time and energy into finding new groups of friends in other MMOs that I try, I'd probably be done with this game for good, but I don't think that necessarily means there's anything wrong with FFXIV in particular. It's just too shallow for me as an individual.

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Originally Posted by Laerune

- Dungeons: They need to introduce real dungeons and less Corridor ----> Trash mobs -----> Corridor ------> Boss fight, rinse and repeat. I want to explore big dungeons, I want to see less fighting and more puzzles. I want the developers to take a look at main Final Fantasy games and look at what makes the dungeons there fun. I know that some players dislike puzzles, but almost every Final Fantasy games has this in their dungeons and I want them to start introducing these content to FFXIV aswell.

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Single player dungeons have very different demands than multiplayer dungeons. The simple fact is, if the devs started giving us complex dungeons, people would quickly determine the optimal path and just do that. You see it now with Palace of the Dead speedruns. Giving people options in dungeons is a waste of time. Plus, how do you even do a puzzle in an MMO? Once everyone's run the dungeon a few times, everyone will know the puzzle. And they basically have to be simple to even work. See the color puzzle in Sastasha or the puzzles in Qarn. Or even keys in Haukke Manor. I've repeatedly seen people skip the first key in Haukke or the two important key items in Qarn because they're new and other people have always done the puzzle for them. It isn't fun when this happens, it just requires a lot of backtracking. Puzzles don't play well with speed runs, and whether you or I like it or not, we're going to get speed runs in all content for all time.

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- NolLoading screens: World needs to be more connected. With Stormblood we will get our first complete city, I want see with this all the new zones, I want to be able to fly from A to B and see no loading screen.

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This is nice in theory, but just look at 1.0. It did this with a combination of copy-pasted terrain and long, boring loading corridors. Without either raising the minimum specs through the roof or dropping the graphics quality through the floor, this is not feasible. Having nice zones is much more important than having seamless ones.

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- World: The World is boring, FATES have no consequences, the world feels lifeless. I want to see monsters attack the outpost, I want to see the players come and help the NPC. If players dont help the NPC, the monsters in that area become stronger or give less items when they die. Letting the monsters win makes gathering alot harder aswell. I want to see the world affect the players.

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This kind of content is aggressively bad towards new players. Because the high-level guys can't be bothered to do content, now all the monsters in the zone are too hard for you to progress? Or you can't farm? No thanks. MMOs have moved away from the actions of the many affecting individuals too much, and that's a good thing. I don't want to play a game where whether I can succeed or not entirely depends on people I don't even know. And it will kill any old content because whatever massive support it needs will dry up. What's the upside here? Immersion is not worth making gameplay less fun.

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- Gathering and Crafting: Just like how weather can affect Fish, I want to see rare ores and plants show up in the world when there is a certain weather or when a strong monster shows up in the world. for example: Odin shows up, since he is draining the aether a special type of Ore can be mined. This afcourse means that players can not farm these materials, but that is the point, they are meant to be rare. I also want to see DoL, DoH, DoW and DoM work toghter. I have not played Hamlet Defense (a content that was in 1.0), but I have seen alot of videos and talked with 1.0 players. From what I have seen and heard, this is a content that I would like to see back in FFXIV.

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Same thing here, why do you want the game to be less convenient? How is that a good thing? Why are super rare materials good? What do you want them to do, exactly? From experience I can say that super rare materials and anything they're used for will just remain out of reach of most of the player base forever. Which is bad.

As far as gameplay, I have had problems with it. With each iteration of the gear treadmill I feel less interested in playing it. That this game is a theme park just never sat well with me, and as far as where the story is going, I feel Stormblood is going to make me say the 8 deadly words. This is not because of how dark the game is getting but how shallow it has become, coupled with choices that, through their fault or the players, become invalidated.

I'm Happy with the way the Game is Now. Don't really need fundamental changes. I'm looking forward to what new content they add with each patch instead, and feel comfortable knowing they'll continue to upgrade the core content of the game.