The slow decline of FFXIV, a summary.

This is a very good summary of the current state of the game: by Lucy Pyre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcQfbShd4bM

watch if you don't mind faul language

Honestly just gotta love how vindicated I am. I've been pointing out the numerous issues since 2021, and the WoW swarm was so great that any criticism just gets swept under the rug.

It's just so, so delicious to watch the same criticisms become mainstream. I'll go one step further and say it's already too late for FF14 though!

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Originally Posted by Red-thunder

Honestly just gotta love how vindicated I am. I've been pointing out the numerous issues since 2021, and the WoW swarm was so great that any criticism just gets swept under the rug.

It's just so, so delicious to watch the same criticisms become mainstream. I'll go one step further and say it's already too late for FF14 though!

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Don't worry, as long as SE has your subscription money, they'll be fine. Especially given how much engagement you drive to the forums.

It's not so much a decline, but rather a change: they made the game more intuitive to new and returning players. This has pros and cons.

• The pros are that a new player understands what cast is a tank buster, a cleave, a stack, etc. Without this, these players would, in many cases, never learn what these casts do. It's one thing to not know at first and another to never know, and they just never seemed to know the mechanics. It feels so much cleaner now.
• The cons are that knowing this right away makes it easier and reduces the failure rate. Although they have tried to address that in the newer dungeon designs, the issue has become lack of RNG or lack of dungeon variety overall.

With rotations, there were similar issues. Players would sometimes never figure out how to do their rotation right, and do significantly less damage as a result (easy example could be summoning Titan all the time on SMN). There were good parts and bad parts to their method of simplifying it:

• The good parts were things like making lone GCDs such as ranged attacks not interrupt melee combos, making abilities like Flourish not overwrite all your procs, which were just annoying things more than anything.
• The bad parts were removing the ability to get rewarded for playing well, such as increased damage on abilities for having both DoTs up on BRD, the cones on WAR and SAM, cleric stance, although DRK was admittedly over the top for most players they could have kept a lot of the interaction between abilities on DRK to reward using it situationally, the healer mattering in regular content, etc.

I actually think the Extreme, Criterion, Chaotic and Savage raids they make are good, the problem is really that there are a lot of people that want something between Dungeons and Extremes that can be direct queued for and will be cleared sometime within the timer, or that is similar in difficulty to Eureka NMs and Bozja CEs, and I think SE just doesn't understand that. And without a substantial amount content of that difficulty level, those players feel there is nothing to do because it's the only content they would ever be interested in doing.

I didn't watch the video, but let me guess... if only SquareEnix had listened to Lucy Pyre and done exactly what they think would have made them happy, then the game wouldn't be experiencing a decline. While I respect that they can say whatever they want about the game, I don’t agree that FFXIV is in decline or that it needs 'saving.' Every game has its ups and downs, and FFXIV continues to have a dedicated player base, regular content updates that many people enjoy, and a thriving community.

It’s easy to point fingers and say, 'If only they’d done X, Y, or Z,' but game development is incredibly complex, and what makes one player happy might alienate another. SquareEnix has made plenty of decisions I don’t personally love, but they’ve also done a lot right to keep the game alive and evolving for over a decade.

Instead of framing it as a decline and attacking SquareEnix’s decisions, maybe we should appreciate that FFXIV is still here, still growing, and still bringing people together. Let’s talk about what we love and what we’d like to see more of. Negativity only tears us apart and is self-defeating if we want to communicate effectively with the developers. No game is perfect, but FFXIV’s resilience and community prove it’s doing something right.

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Originally Posted by AllenThyl

Don't worry, as long as SE has your subscription money, they'll be fine. Especially given how much engagement you drive to the forums.

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Gotta love that I now have a personal reply guy

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Originally Posted by Wasselin

I didn't watch the video, but let me guess... if only SquareEnix had listened to Lucy Pyre and done exactly what they think would have made them happy, then the game wouldn't be experiencing a decline. While I respect that they can say whatever they want about the game, I don’t agree that FFXIV is in decline or that it needs 'saving.' Every game has its ups and downs, and FFXIV continues to have a dedicated player base, regular content updates that many people enjoy, and a thriving community.

It’s easy to point fingers and say, 'If only they’d done X, Y, or Z,' but game development is incredibly complex, and what makes one player happy might alienate another. SquareEnix has made plenty of decisions I don’t personally love, but they’ve also done a lot right to keep the game alive and evolving for over a decade.

Instead of framing it as a decline and attacking SquareEnix’s decisions, maybe we should appreciate that FFXIV is still here, still growing, and still bringing people together. Let’s talk about what we love and what we’d like to see more of. Negativity only tears us apart and is self-defeating if we want to communicate effectively with the developers. No game is perfect, but FFXIV’s resilience and community prove it’s doing something right.

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14 isn’t growing that’s the entire point

The game has 1.5 bad expansions and the playerbase cratered and the devs refuse to listen to any suggestions we offer them

The playerbase isn’t resilient, they have either left or created their own content through mods

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

14 isn’t growing that’s the entire point

The game has 1.5 bad expansions and the playerbase cratered and the devs refuse to listen to any suggestions we offer them

The playerbase isn’t resilient, they have either left or created their own content through mods

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Part of my point is that hyperbole makes it hard to take feedback seriously.

I've been playing this game for ten years and plan to continue, I know a lot of people for whom that is the same. That's resilience. There aren't a lot of games that have that kind of staying power.

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Originally Posted by Wasselin

Part of my point is that hyperbole makes it hard to take feedback seriously.

I've been playing this game for ten years and plan to continue, I know a lot of people for whom that is the same. That's resilience. There aren't a lot of games that have that kind of staying power.

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Every MMO has an absolute core playerbase that refuses to leave no matter what happens (I know I suffered through legacy) that isn’t resilience because that playerbase never leaves. Resilience is ability to come back with the wider playerbase which 14 is failing horrendously at

You’ll find analogues to yourself in every MMO that’s even twice as old as 14 (hell RuneScape has capes for players who’ve played for more than TWENTY years, that doesn’t mean RS3 is in a healthy state)

Unlike what some people daydream about, history shows that making veterans leave the game leads to its decline. And considering the downtrend of MMOs, this is probably several times worse than in other genres.