Maybe its Time for Fresh Blood

Dear Yoshida-San,

maybe its time to step down from the Producer Role of FF14. We are in dire need of fresh blood. And we need somebody who is going to care for FF14 again and is not doing a half baked job split between FF16, FFT or whatever else is going on in CBU3 / Square.

Even the below listed things arent such a ground shaking thing. They are such little things to improve the overall experience of the game.

1. Gearing

• Hrothgar / Viera Hats - its just so laughable at this point

• Glamour Plates doesnt even match the current number of Jobs / Crafters - pathetic would be the appropriate term

• Glamour Dresser Capacity - its just so sad, there arent even words anymore for that

• Hiding Ears / Tails of the other Races - Did somebody ask for that?

• Tomestone Cap needs to be at least 900 to begin with. We are at a point of too many Jobs to counteract the "play what you want". Or let us unlock gear slots (for fucks sake at least per Scouting, Magic Set etc.) via tomes and then buy them with the second Tomestones or Gil (would be a nice gil sink too).

2. Combat

• God please get rid of this 2 Minute BS. I want to play an engaging Job and not having to wait for whatever buffs my co players are providing to feel somehow engaged with my full Job kit.

• Those blatantly bankrupt combat styles of Bodychecks need to go too.
  I mean just look at the Chaotic Alliance Raid and Forked Tower as recent example or did we forgot already the "Don't worry it will be clearable with 12 man" but where i lied to those idiots is that it will be not unsyncable and still having full tower bodychecks. Or even recently "Dont worry you can queue with only 16 people into it" Ooops I did it again to not mention that you need at least 24 to not wipe or need certain Phantom Jobs" My bad. They are sucking it up anyway.

• Combat itself in DT is just eyestraining and got even worse on the visual clarity and is now just a clusterfuck of effects which might be looking nice on the streamer screens for people to watch but are tiring after a long day of work.

• Not to mention those stupid matching colors on color telegraphs within the arena. Or even the bare minimum of considering colorblind users with similar looking colors etc.

• And why do we have still only 2 dungeons in Expert? Put all max level dungeons into it. Just prioritise the latest one if somebody queues it for the story. But for the sake of the players' sanity let them at least have the chance to not only get the latest 2 dungeons.

• And if you need things like Discord to organize and raidplan.io to begin with cause the fight isnt intuitive to solve with the onboard tools of your game then your design fails miserably on every aspect.

3. Criterion

• At least you somehow acknowledged the lack of replayability due to missing rewards. But you acknowledged a lot in the past, lied and did nothing.
  
  Where the additional challenge in taken damage, dps checks etc. were welcoming, why was there any need to restrict resurrections for example? If I want to play a healer for this kind of content then fucking let me use my complete kit for it. And if I want to carry a "not so good gamer friend" through the content for rewards, because you know its fun to play together with friends then let me carry them too if they arent the perfect player and die occasionally. There is no need to punish people who wants to help their friends getting into somewhat harder content or wanting them to help clearing with bullshit design decisions like rez restrictions or start from the beginning like Criterion Savage cause some Streamers cant barely make a living without fancy new hardcore content.

4. Update Policy and Hotfixes

• What did the team learn from Eureka/Bozja? Seeing OC after nearly 12 Months into DT it cant be much. Mistakes were repeated. Good things got lost. Sidenote - it cant be lost in translation because nobody seems to be caring about NA/EU feedback anyway.

• Relic (first step) and or Field Operations (if tied to the Relic) needs to be released latest with 7.1. Postpone an Ultimate for that to x.2.5 or even x.3. Lets be honest we wont get 3 Ultimates per Expansion anyway so there is no need to frontload "Hardcore" Stuff so heavily into the expansion.

• the drip feeding of content need to stop as well

• Urgent / major design issues like Forked Tower as an example (there are more then enough examples in the past as well) etc. have to be addressed at last 2 weeks into the content and changed 2 weeks after adressing it and not months or years later when its to late.

5. Interface

• Why does it take so long to release even the bare minimum of new color templates for the UI?

• And dont get me started with the "You need 3 confirmation prompts (exaggerated)" for every UI interaction.

6. Housing or how worse can it be at this point?

• Increased Slots are taking forever or the legendary whisper in the wind of larger layouts even for small houses - guess we will see it with the expansion, somehow you are in need of an USP after DT...

• Still no shared Estates / Apartments between Characters of the same account.

• No options to save layouts / decorations etc.

• Third placing axis anyone?

• Why do we have an Autodemolition again? Thats because its being stopped most of the time anyway. How could I not have thought of that. Silly me.

7. others

• Guess the Blacklist issue will be silenced to death as well, huh? That topic needs something better then "lets hope those idiots forget it over time" or "those filthy mod users, please dont do it or i will be sad face again" approach. I mean lets not talk about the sheer incompetence to program such an issue to begin with.

You know whats funny? Half of those problems are already fixed by volunteers who do it for free in their freetime in a few hours without getting paid. So I dont know what CBU3 is doing at the moment. But it cant be much.
Yes and I dont give 2 cents anymore about excuses. I've heard them since 2013. I get you had a tight budget till HW was a semi larger success then you'd expected. But after that? There are no excuses for the lack of QOL and substantial improvement.

So if you want me to argue still for you to stay at the helmet - more Focus on the game is highly appreciated.

The past dozen PLLs are feeling more like a home shopping channel for Merch instead of bringing the game forward because trust in you and the game isnt an unlimited resource.

Yes to all, but sadly it's wholly implausible to expect from SE.
Just fix cross DC-PF, and the blacklist issue. Then move forward from there.
It should be nothing to offer a glamplate for every job because it would all be done client side. But clearly it is too much, so...
SE, that glamplate issue, I would expect you to be able to complete in time for next patch even if you just started working on it only today.
It really is "pathetic".
And if you ever do, don't make a big song and dance about it, just drop it quietly with humility. Because at this late in the day no-one is going to be impressed if you finally do. It would just be embarrassing like with 'mount on the move'.
(Except I dint believe Yoshi should go. Either he has left someone else in charge who is not suited to the creative/directive role, or he has held on to too many reigns when he moved up which means there are now jobs that noone is doing)

Really, the impression that I get is that the dev team are out of control. It's just a bunch of people all doing what they want, and it's not joined up.
When instead it should be,
"No. (!) Make an instance that is accessible. (!) No more of those high count body checks!"
Is it just everyone there is now friends with each other and the person in charge doesn't want to pull rank??

I nominate the hawk tuah girl

I feel I can add something to the OP, and is the fact that the actual MSQ experience needs a big overhaul.

Let's face it. It's not good. Never has been, but before we had good quality storyline so it felt like it was a reward to endure the bland questing experience.

All the issues with the quality of Dawntrail's MSQ just makes this aspect stand out like a sore thumb. Things as:

- The pointless cutscenes that could've been just over-world dialogue - though it feels as if we have way more of those in DT. If I could put a tinfoil hat on myself to think about this, could've been that this is a way to artificially extend the length of the MSQ.

- The sluggish interactability with everything, from clicking stuff with 'cast times', to (as the OP mentions) a lot of confirmation screens, more egregiously to hand over quest items. Why we don't hand everything automatically all at once?

- Don't get me started on the 'Talk to the locals to find nothing of importance' quests. You can't even guess who's the right person to talk to because the game wants you to talk to useless people before you find out who has the good information, which is usually figured out by a NPC anyway.

- The combat challenges. There's a reason why we have Disciples of War/Magic and is to fight. The last time I remember a solo duty in the MSQ remotely challenging was back in Shadowbringers with Ran'jit. The usual enemy we encounter is the 'purple danger pyre' ones that die in something like 3 global cooldowns. Also lack of specific mechanics geared towards tanks or healers.

- The manually going back to places we've been already by the end of a scene. It's too hard to just fade to black to return somewhere, alongside the other NPCs? Doesn't help that there's usually a handful of loading screens to get to the right locations.

- Lack of fun minigame quests. Big example in Dawntrail is the cooking contest that is just... watching a scene? Why the WoL doesn't help even though they might be an accomplished CUL?

I heard that a few of the devs got promoted to managerial positions as a reward for endwalker and prior years of service. It could be an issue of too much new blood at once. Sticking too much to the script and not having yet acquired a feel for how things work and will be received. I am unsure if this is better or worse as it ultimately amounts to the same outcome.

Would have been better if you had communicated your points without the hostile tone, OP.

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Originally Posted by fulminating

I heard that a few of the devs got promoted to managerial positions as a reward for endwalker and prior years of service. It could be an issue of too much new blood at once. Sticking too much to the script and not having yet acquired a feel for how things work and will be received. I am unsure if this is better or worse as it ultimately amounts to the same outcome.

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A lot of the people that are now the team leads, including the guy that replaced Oda/Ishikawa, have been there for a decade or close to it. They obviously were not prepared for their promotions, and the people that replaced them might be inexperienced, but I haven't cross referenced the credits to check.

Not how I would've phrased it, but valid points.

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Originally Posted by Exmo

Would have been better if you had communicated your points without the hostile tone, OP.

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The hostile tone is justified, and even required at this point

What if this is the fresh blood?

What if all the talented devs have been pulled from 14 to work on the FFT remaster, or a not-yet-announced FF17 project?

If it's not the same people it would at least partially explain why they're making the same mistakes that they publicly apologized for 6 years ago.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

What if this is the fresh blood?

What if all the talented devs have been pulled from 14 to work on the FFT remaster, or a not-yet-announced FF17 project?

If it's not the same people it would at least partially explain why they're making the same mistakes that they publicly apologized for 6 years ago.

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This.

I have had this weird tin foil hat theory that Yoshida probably hasn't interacted with the game as a developer since the near end of Shadowbringers. They keep him around as a figurehead because "Who doesn't love Yoshi-P, amirite?". I could very well be wrong. As time has passed, this doesn't feel like the game I'd been playing since 2.x and I never really felt this kind of burnout hit until mid Endwalker. I took my breaks, did other things, and now find it extremely hard to even want to give this game my time. It's become what a lot of people been saying "safe". Which would make a lot of sense if these were new devs.

I have a feeling too that this IS the fresh blood, but due to the company structure and japanese working culture, they are just doing what they are told and don't deviate or innovate.

But I have a feeling that if 8.0 doesn't land or introduce ANYTHING new or groundbreaking, I think it's time for Yoshida to move on and give some other director a chance to provide the playerbase something new and being excited about, while his legacy is still somewhat unmarred. Its hard to know the truth of his workflow because SE is notoriously bad at transparency. But I have a feeling that Yoshi P is trying to do too many things at once and just letting FFXIV work on it's own weight with minimal new things happening in the woodworks. Maaaaaybe the graphical updates, but the updates in general are dreadfully slow.

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Originally Posted by WeissTuna

This.

I have had this weird tin foil hat theory that Yoshida probably hasn't interacted with the game as a developer since the near end of Shadowbringers. They keep him around as a figurehead because "Who doesn't love Yoshi-P, amirite?". I could very well be wrong. As time has passed, this doesn't feel like the game I'd been playing since 2.x and I never really felt this kind of burnout hit until mid Endwalker. I took my breaks, did other things, and now find it extremely hard to even want to give this game my time. It's what a lot of people been saying "safe". Which would make a lot of sense if these were new devs.

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This reminds me about the question regarding lifting armor restrictions for glamouring and Yoshida said something along the lines of "Would be odd to see a BLM in tank armor".

It really gave the feel that YP didn't know his own game, since we had some (and subsequently more after that) sets that allow a BLM to look like an armored knight already.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Raikai

This reminds me about the question regarding lifting armor restrictions for glamouring and Yoshida said something along the lines of "Would be odd to see a BLM in tank armor".

It really gave the feel that YP didn't know his own game, since we had some (and subsequently more after that) sets that allow a BLM to look like an armored knight already.

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Yoshi-P's own team brings this up to him regularly so they're still torn on the idea.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

What if this is the fresh blood?

What if all the talented devs have been pulled from 14 to work on the FFT remaster, or a not-yet-announced FF17 project?

If it's not the same people it would at least partially explain why they're making the same mistakes that they publicly apologized for 6 years ago.

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They need to hire a gaijin to fix this game. I'm pretty sure that a country that's based on outside ideas and concepts can do it.

We may be in this precise issue simply because we already have too much new blood.

A new directly may certainly shift the direction of this game, but whether this would be a good thing or even worse is very debatable, tbh. Especially seeing as generally speaking they are very risk averse.

How about we get someone from CBU to actually read these forums? Because this might as well be a shitposting simulator at this point because THEY LITERALLY NEVER GIVE ANY INCLINATION THAT THIS ISN'T JUST SCREAMING INTO A GODSDAMNED VOID.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Yoshi-P's own team brings this up to him regularly so they're still torn on the idea.

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Do they also bring up the point often made here that a Roegadyn tanking a dungeon in leopard-spotted speedos might be slightly more discordant?

Slogs into the thread...

In terms of story, the issue is the lack of Ishikawa. Putting her in a supervisory position was a bad idea. I know she wants to give others the chance to write MSQ, but what if she like, didn't, and just got a better salary? LMFAO.

In terms of gameplay, a lot of it is SE's favorite hobby of milking their cash cows dry and being surprised pikachu face at diminishing returns.

Let me elaborate:

FFVII Remake, while controversial, did good numbers for nostalgia reasons. What does SE do? Make the Intergrade PS5 exclusive on release to force people to buy a PS5 (LMAO).

So what did they do for Rebirth? Insert endless open world filler slog content with more minigames than you can physically count, because the fans will buy it anyway.

Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire? Trashy garbage game abusing the FFXV name to make quick buck, lasted until 2024 after releasing in 2017, which, sure.

Brave Exvius global? Crazy predatory garbage, literally made people into gambling addicts to an insane agree because of how awful the gacha was. Went from 2016 to 2024, now only in JP. SENA drop rates are usually worse on gachas btw.

Kingdom Hearts? Sure, why don't we release the same 8 games as collections at full price for every console for all eternity?

In February 2021, SE announced the following four things in one day: KHUX got axed (after endless slog of filler, teeny bits of story and gacha for reused jpgs of Nomura artwork and straight up cutscene screencaps lol), KH Dark Road got axed, and at the same time, they announced t w o titles for FFVII: The First Soldier (died in 2023), and Ever Crisis, which started decently but is bound to head down the same way.

They keep stuff along for much longer than other companies at times, but the price is their utter apathy towards the fanbase they have: they know they have brand loyalty, and they abuse it. And so, FFXIV is left to whoever didn't say no fast enough, lol.

also the steam ports of certain FF games have gamebreaking bugs that havent been fixed in a decade or so!

They don't care. You're paying your sub regardless.

Agree with OP 100%.

The answer is, they dont care anymore.

None of them play the game, none of them have any passion for the game and it shows in everything they create. They want to have the passion but its gone and they cant see it. When its blatantly obvious to 1000s of players who play new content, what should have been implemented in that content but wasn't, its proof that care and attention and passion has been lost.

And they dont care about what we write here either, none of this will be read.

I've reduced my sub cost to the lowest possible with minimal retainers to keep my items and I have not spent in the cash shop for over a year now and will never again. My sub now costs £10 a month whereas for five years I was paying approx £30 a month for everything (10 retainers, companion app) and spending quite a lot in the cash shop too. I have over 14,000 hours in five years but the quality of DT has been so poor I am now down to about 4 hours a week and thats just to play with friends for a short while. I have many friends who were as passionate about the game as me and they have all reduced to the same or even lower levels of play than me and expenditure.

No, its not because we have done all content, its because DT is a failure sucking the life out of you and any passion you have to play its dreary boring content, and I dont mean allllll of DT, but definitely the majority. The lack of all types of investment: monetary, creativity, passion etc is the reason, its obvious to everyone but SE and the devs. The game will die if it doesnt change. Its already dying and just like kidney failure, once it goes past a certain point it will be too late, but up till then it will seem alive with some aches and pains.

Its sad, it sucks but its reality.