Release 8.0 faster. And bring back 3 months between patches.

I dont think its healthy for the game to have 9 months or more between the last patch and a new expansion. Putting a second ultimate in the last patch will help but for the survival of the game i think its a bad idea to have long content drought. Step up now pls.

Anything else you'd like?

Yes. Better msq. Fun healing and unique classes. Add anticheat. Ingame dps meter. Fun Dungeons that can scale. What do you want?

they should stretch out the content more to fill the gap

we can release a-raids two weeks later
we can release relic tools and weapons in two different patches
and ex could also be later

a lot of potential there

I was wondering why they would release the second Occult Crescent map so late, in 7.55. Diadem 2.0 was released late as well and was soon dead content.

But when we really have to wait such a long time for 8.0, it may makes sense.

There likely also will be 6 new legendary fish to catch! So if there won't be another ultimate raid, this may keep you busy...

>.>

This wont help much in my opinion. They need to add content that lasts longer or more of it. And faster.

Yes. The actual over 4 month is much too long. And many people forget that this also means a whole major patch less in a year. The content is much too thin.

The main reason they do not have 3.5 month intervals anymore is because they don't want to overwork their staff anymore. Preventing burnout and keeping them passionate is quite important and along with this, they enforce holidays on people overworking themselves, rotate roles and allow people to transfer to a different role.

The gap is really quite fine for people who do all of the content; the problem is that most people do not do all of the content so they finish MSQ and then they are done for the rest of the 19-20 weeks until the next patch. Raiders might just do the raids then say they are done. But a smaller minority do all the content for achievements or mounts and are pretty satisfied.

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Originally Posted by Zoreth

I dont think its healthy for the game to have 9 months or more between the last patch and a new expansion.

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I mean, the gap before the expansion isn't good. But there's always been a massive patch lull before an expansion release. It is a problem they have tried to solve by splitting the .5 MSQ in half, doing most of the collab event re-runs, and the mog tome system they added. They also once told us "we can finish off all the relics" in that time. And it's proven not to be a problem by the fact that, despite the huge gap before Dawntrail, people returned to the game and the population almost reached what it did when the game went viral in 2021 before Endwalker launch.

Obviously the population reduced since Dawntrail, but the fact it increased the amount it did at its actual launch shows most people can wait and just resubscribe later.

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Putting a second ultimate in the last patch will help

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I mean, it will help for Ultimate raiders, yes. But plenty of people don't do that. That's why they said about finishing off relic weapons (I think that was in Heavensward), but given we now also have Field Operations in the last patch it also helps.

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Add anticheat.

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They seem to cause more problems than they solve. Plus I heard of a cheat system that was implement within a monitor itself, technically independent from the computer, making it impossible to detect. People will always find a way around it and all it ends up doing is making it annoying to login or false positives. In any case, they see it as going against privacy laws in various countries.

I agree with their approach of trying to implement a lot of third-party features into the game. The problem is mainly that they are too slow at doing it and do not prioritize it at all.

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Ingame dps meter.

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They don't do it because most people wouldn't want it since it would create toxicity in the game. There is no point in it when DPS doesn't matter unless you wipe to enrage, and if you wipe to enrage then you know you need to try and increase the DPS of your party - such as by getting foods, pots, asking or observing if others are using core rotation abilities.

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Fun Dungeons that can scale.

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Maybe they will do that. They at least plan to for the next Variant dungeons.

The current pacing would be fine if they:

a) Reorganized the schedule of the known things: Why we have to wait almost a year in to get a Field Operation and the relic weapon grind? The first half of the expansions is literally void of side stuff to do.

b) Find ways to add longevity and replayability to the content they release, especially normal modes.

c) It's not worth to invest resources making High End fights for 24 or more people. See what happened to the Chaotic mode, or even worse in the Forked Tower. The logistic nightmare that is to set up a competent group of that size is just not worth the trouble. I think 8-man is more than fine for High End fights... Or if you want to get creative, why not make a new party size of 12 people?

Can we complain about not getting 7.31 today?
That we have to wait 4 instead of the usual 2 weeks for the x.x1 patch in the past.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

The current pacing would be fine if they:

a) Reorganized the schedule of the known things: Why we have to wait almost a year in to get a Field Operation and the relic weapon grind? The first half of the expansions is literally void of side stuff to do.

b) Find ways to add longevity and replayability to the content they release, especially normal modes.

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I agree with those things, particularly the 2nd one since the content is extremely scripted and ends up going exactly the same too often. I do personally find lots to do in the first half of the expansion, but it wouldn't bother me if they rearrange things either.

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c) It's not worth to invest resources making High End fights for 24 or more people. See what happened to the Chaotic mode, or even worse in the Forked Tower.

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I don't agree with this one however, because there are plenty of examples of 24 people being fine. Alliance Raids are one example, and Occult Crescent CEs, Bozja CEs, CLL, Dalriada and DR are examples of where it succeeded. Arguably, hunts and large boss FATEs are other examples of large scale fights that work.

The problem isn't the scale of the fight but that they have a mechanic that requires every single person to get it right. 24 people will not universally get a mechanic right, because a certain percentage of them (pretty large percentage in FFXIV) will not be good at them. They should just make 8 people need to get it right. This worked so well for CLL and was a proof of concept. Find 8 competent players then let the others be so bad at the game they wipe 50 times if they want, and it strikes the perfect balance for what FFXIV is.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The main reason they do not have 3.5 month intervals anymore is because they don't want to overwork their staff anymore. Preventing burnout and keeping them passionate is quite important and along with this, they enforce holidays on people overworking themselves, rotate roles and allow people to transfer to a different role.

The gap is really quite fine for people who do all of the content; the problem is that most people do not do all of the content so they finish MSQ and then they are done for the rest of the 19-20 weeks until the next patch. Raiders might just do the raids then say they are done. But a smaller minority do all the content for achievements or mounts and are pretty satisfied.

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I somewhat disagree here. The content on demand per patch simply isn't enough even if you do everything. 7.3 is only two weeks old and even if you're playing at a snail's pace you will have everything done unless you've deliberately put it off. The sole exception to this is if you play at an incredibly sparse pace, e.g., 1-2 hours a week max. While that definitely is the allotted time some players have, it's a comparable extreme to those putting in 30+ hours.

It should also be noted that it isn't necessarily the amount of content which is the problem, but rather the lack of longevity. Case in point, treasure maps and such are cool, but expecting that to carry you for 4-5 weeks is pushing it. Especially if Cosmic Exploration isn't to your flavour. Which, considering the drop off rate a mere week later was enormous. I'd hazard a guess in saying most people didn't vibe with it. So treasure maps are now carrying the load for over two months. Yes, there's the EX and Unreal, but for non raiders those aren't content. Even if you do dabble, the Unreal is two kills per week while the EX is 50 runs or however long your sanity lasts trying to farm beyond that for a sub 5% drop rate.

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They seem to cause more problems than they solve. Plus I heard of a cheat system that was implement within a monitor itself, technically independent from the computer, making it impossible to detect. People will always find a way around it and all it ends up doing is making it annoying to login or false positives. In any case, they see it as going against privacy laws in various countries.

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To be blunt, we've long since moved past the point of no return regarding third party stuff. The sheer number of downloads has far exceeding it being worth the risk for SE. Just to put this into perspective, one brought up recently on the discussion reddit has 5 million downloads. And that's only the third most popular one; fourth if you count parsers. What they're doing now is the only solution they will ever implement.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The main reason they do not have 3.5 month intervals anymore is because they don't want to overwork their staff anymore. Preventing burnout and keeping them passionate is quite important and along with this, they enforce holidays on people overworking themselves, rotate roles and allow people to transfer to a different role.

The gap is really quite fine for people who do all of the content; the problem is that most people do not do all of the content so they finish MSQ and then they are done for the rest of the 19-20 weeks until the next patch. Raiders might just do the raids then say they are done. But a smaller minority do all the content for achievements or mounts and are pretty satisfied.

I mean, the gap before the expansion isn't good. But there's always been a massive patch lull before an expansion release. It is a problem they have tried to solve by splitting the .5 MSQ in half, doing most of the collab event re-runs, and the mog tome system they added. They also once told us "we can finish off all the relics" in that time. And it's proven not to be a problem by the fact that, despite the huge gap before Dawntrail, people returned to the game and the population almost reached what it did when the game went viral in 2021 before Endwalker launch.

Obviously the population reduced since Dawntrail, but the fact it increased the amount it did at its actual launch shows most people can wait and just resubscribe later.
I mean, it will help for Ultimate raiders, yes. But plenty of people don't do that. That's why they said about finishing off relic weapons (I think that was in Heavensward), but given we now also have Field Operations in the last patch it also helps.
They seem to cause more problems than they solve. Plus I heard of a cheat system that was implement within a monitor itself, technically independent from the computer, making it impossible to detect. People will always find a way around it and all it ends up doing is making it annoying to login or false positives. In any case, they see it as going against privacy laws in various countries.

I agree with their approach of trying to implement a lot of third-party features into the game. The problem is mainly that they are too slow at doing it and do not prioritize it at all.
They don't do it because most people wouldn't want it since it would create toxicity in the game. There is no point in it when DPS doesn't matter unless you wipe to enrage, and if you wipe to enrage then you know you need to try and increase the DPS of your party - such as by getting foods, pots, asking or observing if others are using core rotation abilities.
Maybe they will do that. They at least plan to for the next Variant dungeons.

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Im glad that you respond with your opinions and give me insight to think in a different way tho i dont agree with you on everything.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

7.3 is only two weeks old and even if you're playing at a snail's pace you will have everything done unless you've deliberately put it off. The sole exception to this is if you play at an incredibly sparse pace, e.g., 1-2 hours a week max. While that definitely is the allotted time some players have, it's a comparable extreme to those putting in 30+ hours.

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Well I can give some examples. Extreme trials get learned and often farmed 50-100 times. Personally, I spread that out and do, say, 1-6 clears a day (that is in theory up to an hour but doesn't account for wipes or waiting for fills). If the fight is easy enough, I often just help out enrage parties (which can be traps) and then it can take me a month, because helping people get the clear can be fun.

I am also doing Frontline once a day to progress the Series rank, farming nuts to augment as much tomestone gear and crafted gear as I can or finish relics.

Realistically, I still have old things to do. For example, I just finished capping my last Phantom Job and my last +2 gear. And I really did not even finish Cosmic Exploration, because getting so many points is the sort of thing I'm doing when there's absolutely nothing else left. I think that is SE's intention as well, that there are probably things you didn't do yet to catch up on.

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treasure maps and such are cool, but expecting that to carry you for 4-5 weeks is pushing it.

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Treasure maps are another thing. While the content itself is pretty boring, working towards the mount tokens can take a long time due to the rarity of getting to the final stage. And during that time it can be a social event you do every few days with a friend (or friends). I did this a lot through Endwalker.

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Especially if Cosmic Exploration isn't to your flavour. Which, considering the drop off rate a mere week later was enormous. I'd hazard a guess in saying most people didn't vibe with it. So treasure maps are now carrying the load for over two months. Yes, there's the EX and Unreal, but for non raiders those aren't content.

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That's really exactly my point though. "Cosmic isn't your flavour". "For non-raiders it's not content". "I'm not interested in getting the mounts". These sorts of reasons are what really result in the majority of people feeling there's no content. They don't engage with it the way SE intended and dismiss it as valid content, leaving the 100,000 - 200,000 ish achievement hunters (a minority, of course) satisfied because they just do everything and are motivated by collecting and doing everything.

On the other hand, if someone does somehow manage to get through everything and get all the mounts and rank everything up really quickly including Cosmic and Phantom Jobs etc, then the question becomes that maybe they don't prioritize their health, eating and sleeping properly and that this isn't SE's fault.

I do think that SE needs to try to make the content interesting and replayable to more people, since it seems they make different content for different types of players, but they at least seem to have accepted that is an issue because they are trying to make a lot of content have dynamic difficulty going forward.

I think the biggest problem I have is that people say there's nothing to do in the game, and when you point out things that there's to do they just say that it isn't their flavor... Or it's too hard, or it's too grindy, or there's always an excuse.

Yoshi p literally went on record last LL saying that their strategy of “over 5 patches release 6 different types of content and hope everyone does every piece of content otherwise you are going to come up short on content” is decidedly not working and is the foundation of why they pivoted with quantum

Most people aren’t that excessive with their content exclusions, usually it amounts to not wanting to do high end content or not wanting to do what is seen as grindy content. If you can only give people with said mild exclusions content in 2-3 out of 5 patches in a 2 year expansion cycle then yes you aren’t releasing enough content. I mean hell outside of OC’s content design discussions peoples biggest complaint with it was simply that it had nothing in the middle. Forked is annoyingly difficult for a 48 man and everything else can be cleared dead on the floor for 95% of it

The current games party cycle relies on the idea everyone does every content and that just isn’t true and acting like that’s a player problem isn’t going to fix the issue

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The main reason they do not have 3.5 month intervals anymore is because they don't want to overwork their staff anymore. Preventing burnout and keeping them passionate is quite important and along with this, they enforce holidays on people overworking themselves, rotate roles and allow people to transfer to a different role.

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Lol please. Keeping a sane work environment is one fundamental thing, not doing the job right is another, entirely different one. And it's the second thing here...

Warcraft just announced their next expansion (Midnight) for 2026. Both the current WoW expansion (War Within) and Dawntrail released around the same timeframe in 2024.
If Square pushes 8.0 to 2027, they'll lose by default to Warcraft.

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Originally Posted by Volgia

I think the biggest problem I have is that people say there's nothing to do in the game, and when you point out things that there's to do they just say that it isn't their flavor... Or it's too hard, or it's too grindy, or there's always an excuse.

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imagine wanting to learn a fight by dying 500 times, when i can just stand inlimsa and be mad at the toxic raider community for gatekeeping and getting an entire expansion catered to them /s

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Originally Posted by theunhappypotato

imagine wanting to learn a fight by dying 500 times, when i can just stand inlimsa and be mad at the toxic raider community for gatekeeping and getting an entire expansion catered to them /s

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Sarcasm aside... the only thing I've had to listen is the "toxic casual community" cry that the AoE they have seen 500 times in a dungeon still gets them, over and over again.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

I somewhat disagree here. The content on demand per patch simply isn't enough even if you do everything. 7.3 is only two weeks old and even if you're playing at a snail's pace you will have everything done unless you've deliberately put it off. The sole exception to this is if you play at an incredibly sparse pace, e.g., 1-2 hours a week max. While that definitely is the allotted time some players have, it's a comparable extreme to those putting in 30+ hours.

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I don't know anyone in my friend's group that can do 30+ hours any more. I could when I was in my 20s, sure, but I'm in my 40s now and 10-15 hours a week is more like it. (Granted, right now a lot of my time is getting sucked up by a cosplay, but most folks my age are dealing with some combination of jobs, spouses, and kids.)

So yeah, I'm one of the ones that feels like the content cadence is fine.

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Originally Posted by Volgia

I think the biggest problem I have is that people say there's nothing to do in the game, and when you point out things that there's to do they just say that it isn't their flavor... Or it's too hard, or it's too grindy, or there's always an excuse.

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Right? One of the things I've been picking away at has been stuff like soloing the old Deep Dungeons for the titles. Bout to go attempt another 10 levels of PoTD. That's evergreen content as far as I'm concerned, considering how prestigious people consider the Necromancer title.

There has to be a balance if they drop too much content you'll be overwhelmed and not do it all and still say it is old content in a month's time.

Square just needs to write better quality story and drop more content like the coming deep dungeon rewards need to be better also more rewarding gameplay will save the game

How about let them cook stop crying like a baby. more time they take better expensions gonna be lord have mercy if we have another Wok cause YOU wanted them to rush it out

We have two patches to get rid of Asahi-face 2.0 kid scientist. Maybe all the new Ascians have asahi-faces too. It's the winterer asahi faction. Let them cook more asahi-anime villains please.

It takes time to make games. Be realistic.

The solution to the lack of content is to make better use of what they already have - e.g. long term gameplay utilizing the six existing zones, rather than making entirely new maps just to use them for a 15 minute dungeon every patch.

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Originally Posted by HanakoTheGoth

How about let them cook stop crying like a baby. more time they take better expensions gonna be lord have mercy if we have another Wok cause YOU wanted them to rush it out

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So if we try to rush them we get another wuk but we also got Wuk because………we had the longest patch gap in history between 6.5 and 7.0

Sound logic

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Originally Posted by HanakoTheGoth

How about let them cook stop crying like a baby. more time they take better expensions gonna be lord have mercy if we have another Wok cause YOU wanted them to rush it out

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This is the only community where people will blame the players instead of the developers for the games shortcomings.

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Originally Posted by AlucaDragonheart

This is the only community where people will blame the players instead of the developers for the games shortcomings.

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Because some parts of this community have insane expectations. It's a video game and a virtual world.

It's valid to complain about bugs that should have been caught in QA (but there will always be bugs.) It's valid to complain about crashing issues. It's valid to complain about localization errors. Hell, it's even valid to complain about MSQ pacing issues and story quality.

It's not really valid to complain that there isn't enough content to do in the game, because every time new content is added, a subsection of the community responds to it with, "that's not what we meant." An MMO is not intended to be a substitute for an entire life, but a vocal minority wants nonstop 24/7 entertainment of a specific kind. No one video game can supply that, and I'd argue it's not healthy.

What we have left till 8.0

- Blue Mage some new Spells and 10 extra Levels
- Beast Master?
- Housing- / Apartment Changes / Limit Increases
- 3th and last Part of The Arcadion Raid
- 3th and last Part of Echoes of Vana'diel Raid
- 1 or 2 more PVP Seasons
- 7.4 Additional Phantom Jobs for Occult Crescent / 7.5 Second Field Instance, second Raid, additional Phantom Jobs + 2 more Cosmic Exploration Maps till 7.5
- 1 or 2 more tiny Side Stories after The Promise of Tomorrow is finished
- 1 or 2 new Dungeons, 1 more Trial and 1 more Savage
- Pilgrim's Traverse (Deep Dungeon)
- 3-4 Moogle Treasure Troves
- the normal 0815 Events we get around the Year.

There will be only 2 more "large" Patches left till 8.0, which means the next one will be in December 2025, then one in April or May 2026 and that leaves 7-8 Months with zero new Stuff till December 2026. If we get 8.0 in 2027 ... that will be a damn long dry time.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

Because some parts of this community have insane expectations. It's a video game and a virtual world.


It's not really valid to complain that there isn't enough content to do in the game, because every time new content is added, a subsection of the community responds to it with, "that's not what we meant." An MMO is not intended to be a substitute for an entire life, but a vocal minority wants nonstop 24/7 entertainment of a specific kind. No one video game can supply that, and I'd argue it's not healthy.

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That's nonsense. Just look at WoW. They can release one major patch after another with countless new content, events, new maps, gameplay, and so on. Players then consume what they want, and especially how much of it they want, without time pressure, without stress, and without having to do nothing for months. WoW is also an old game and costs less than Final Fantasy, since you don't have to pay for extra storage space with real money every month.

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Originally Posted by Aneshda

That's nonsense. Just look at WoW. They can release one major patch after another with countless new content, events, new maps, gameplay, and so on. Players then consume what they want, and especially how much of it they want, without time pressure, without stress, and without having to do nothing for months. WoW is also an old game and costs less than Final Fantasy, since you don't have to pay for extra storage space with real money every month.

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From my understanding, that's a recent thing. WoW had "9 month content drought" complaints and grind RNG complaints for years until very recently when they bought out a game studio with 100 employees and got them all to work on WoW. Unless SE goes and buys out a local game studio in Tokyo with 100 employees, it's reasonable for SE to be in the boat WoW was before they did that.

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Originally Posted by Heavenchild

Yes. The actual over 4 month is much too long. And many people forget that this also means a whole major patch less in a year. The content is much too thin.

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And never, ever forget:
3 months per patch + whatever till next expac = guaranteed 15 months sub + ???
5 months + whatever = 25 months sub + ???

So you pay at least for 10 more months for nothing new. So depending on your sub it's 120 bucks or more you gotta pay.
And the only way the wait before a new expac can go is up, not down with how they do things.

I don't think it's likely patches will go back to 3 months. That was not a good schedule for the developers. It was leading to overwork and burnout. And while we deal with that in other places like here in the US, I've gathered the culture with it in Japan is much worse. It seems like bringing that back would be detrimental to the game.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

From my understanding, that's a recent thing. WoW had "9 month content drought" complaints and grind RNG complaints for years until very recently when they bought out a game studio with 100 employees and got them all to work on WoW. Unless SE goes and buys out a local game studio in Tokyo with 100 employees, it's reasonable for SE to be in the boat WoW was before they did that.

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Yeah, and while it's true that WoW caught a LOT of flak for that, they learned from their mistake and have never let the game go that long again without any new content.

In FFXIV"s case, It's not like we don't also get the steady drip feed of other stuff throughout the cycle of a patch.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

I don't think it's likely patches will go back to 3 months. That was not a good schedule for the developers. It was leading to overwork and burnout. And while we deal with that in other places like here in the US, I've gathered the culture with it in Japan is much worse. It seems like bringing that back would be detrimental to the game.

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I also do not think they can safely compress the patch cycle any more without reducing scope. QA is already suffering because the game is so big. Fred Brooks said of software development: "A baby will always take 9 months to grow to matter how many women are assigned to the task."

Or maybe people need to have a life outside of FFXIV and only play 12 hours per week instead of 12 hours per day and exhaust all contents before the next patch.

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Originally Posted by Yuella

Or maybe people need to have a life outside of FFXIV and only play 12 hours per week instead of 12 hours per day and exhaust all contents before the next patch.

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You can play 12 hours a month and still exhaust the games content

They should just have a new expansion every year and have patches at 3 months at a time.

The content issue may ease up in 8.0 short of Square making the galaxy brain choice of splitting dev teams again.

Tbh though, I think the larger problem is content replay value. With how much content exists in the game... you'd think the time between patches would be less of a problem in terms of engagement than it presently is. This game is operating on a pretty fierce treadmill rn.

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Originally Posted by XtremePrime

If Square pushes 8.0 to 2027, they'll lose by default to Warcraft.

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They certainly wouldn't lose me. I'm completely done with WoW forever even if they start spewing expac worth of content for free every 6 months. Besides I'm only like halfway through all of the achievements in FFXIV so even if SE completely stops producing new content there will be at least 2-3 years before I start having issues with no content