What went wrong? Is it the game or the grenre?

[Magis]

I also don't like this quest grind. Most quests are just chores anyway.

I prefer the design where you grind on mobs to level up, and quests are hard and few with real story, that reward significant stuff, which you aim for. The whole focus on end-game is being overdone now in ARR, I think, allowing people to level cap in only few days. The RPG part of the MMORPG got lost in the process. I think the game should strive to provide a journey first, a journey people can enjoy, not a taxi ride where people find the shortest route most efficient way to do everything and skip anything that isn't efficient.

Build a journey people enjoy, and when people get to the end of the jouney, then add the "end-game" content. This way, those who arrive at the end-game pleasantly find more to do at end-game. But the way it is now, people want nothing of the journey, if possible they want to start at the end-game already; and they are not to blame, because that thinking is encouraged by the current game design.

"I wanna quickly level to 50 so I can get started with..." is the problem with this game.

Also, the speed at which people can level decides the speed at which people expect to attain their goals, I think. If it took a good 3 months just to get to level cap, one can be sure people won't be expecting to get their relic in one night. They'd expect the relic quest to be so epic it takes weeks to finish.

Which brings out those who sneer, "I have a life I don't want to waste 40 hours a week on a game". But that is only a problem if that time is really wasted. Does it matter if you're level 50 tackling Binding Coils of Bahamut, or your level 17~20 tackling Halatali that has the same difficulty as Turn 1? So what if it takes 2 months to level up to 50? It is only a problem (a "waste of time") if the game itself is designed to "start at 50".

Imagine those who don't want difficult content can just ignore dungeons and slowly grind their way to 50. Those who love the so-called end-game content, can experience that "end-game experience" all throughout their leveling time. With level sync, they also get to re-experience all these dungeons the way it was, with new friends, or a friend's alt class. Imagine having 12 "end-game dungeons" already at launch, because every dungeon in the game is of "end-game" quality.

The current design makes it very easy for a new player to catch up. Which is exactly the problem. The game itself is treating its own content like throw-away trash.

This is the best post I have seen to why the level grind is important! I'd say it's the game, not the genre. The game has chosen the mainstream route, which has been shown to not retain people, but does give a quick boost in population at launch.

I won't say it's the genre, otherwise games like EVE online wouldn't be as popular as it is.

[DBthaONE]

I'm not sure if it is a game or player issue. My guess is a player issue, since it's generally hard to get people's reasons without a survey. This my just be a life cycle for a game, where old players leave and new prayers join. I'm not an avid MMO player. This is really only my second, with DCUO being the first. I don't have the experience others have about good MMOs and whatnot. For me, this game is good and enjoyable.

The issue with FC members leaving I do empathize with. My FC has 43 members but only about 10-12 play anymore. Maybe the others have real life issues, got bored, gave up (Titan HM was tough for some), picked up another game, or just plain quit.

We can speculate as to the reasoning, but it'll be very hard for us to know the truth.

[Kirosuu]

its the player, im cool with the game though
for now i just login for daily beast tribe and ct
cant join CoB bec no experience in CoB which the only content that i never go yet
as a melee dps, joining coil/EM make it nearly impossible and other player keep told me to train blackmage instead...why i cant play the class/job i wanted and instead why they want me to play class/job they wanted
too many elitist ingame now which include my fc member
too many dbag that non newbies friendly in any dungeon which i see alot when using DR
too many troll in DF + with vote abandon make it worse

[Nadrojj]

Game and genre in general has gone too casual where you barely need to put any effort in to be end game, there is nothing special about having all content cleared currently. All but Twintania are puggable with 100% randoms. I miss the days of EQ1 where getting items or even max level was an accomplishment in itself. You could tell who was good and not by the gear they had, it was okay when not everyone was on the same raid content and people went at their own pace whether that was casual or hardcore, not everyone had to be the same. It gets tiring the mindset that everyone has to clear everything with ease.

Wish I could like this a million times more. In a game where you can get 50 in a few days you see players devour the content and then get tired of it. The only difficulty you see is T5 coil and EX primals. The same 3 primals we've had rehashed and harder, two dungeons we've already had, but harder, and then a raid that has lower gear drops than most of us currently have grinded out seems to have been a huge mistake to me. There is nothing new, fun, engaging that was delivered to us in 2.1. Housing? 90% of the population cannot afford it. The one thing you have been pushing down our throats that really had the community excited is the one thing that is out of the vast majority's grasp, and I think that left the population as a whole with a bad taste in their mouth. I know a few people who have told me they don't log in because there is "nothing to do" they're full i90 on their main job, they don't want to fight ex primals for weapons =/= relics, they don't want to keep dying over and over to twintania, they don't want to deal with hour long queue's for DF/CT only to be trolled and they are tired of crafting something, listing it on the AH then 15 minutes later seeing the same item put up by 15 other people for less than they just put it up. There are plenty of reasons why were not seeing people log in, those are a few of them I was given by the friends who don't log in much anymore.

Along the lines Sub's point that I quoted there really doesn't seem to be a sense of accomplishment in this game. You can level your job to max level in a matter of days, you can level all crafting jobs with super easy leves in the matter of days, hell everything takes a matter of days. You can get a relic in a day if you were so inclined. Just yesterday I went from Hydra to titan in the matter of an hour, once the rest of my FC actually logs on we'll down titan and I'll have my third relic. The intended best weapon for your job achievable in a day. If you don't have grindy engaging content there will be no reason for a lot of players to log in. In this day and age most people who play MMO's are casual, and that's ok, but a game that caters to the casual crowd will always see these type of population spikes. The hardcores will log in, do all the content get bored and stop logging in until the next patch, the casuals will log in play their 8 hours a week and say how much they really enjoy the game until life gets busy, they don't have the time and they stop playing.

Going back to the dreaded OMG GIVE ME FFXI arguments we always see here, that game had a notoriously low drop rate when it came to items that players wanted, but hated how rare they were. This kept their playerbase logging in, everyone who wanted an E Body was in a HNMLS camping faf/nidd or doing Ein. Yeah the grind sucked, yes the low drop rates were miserable but that feeling you got when you finally got your hands on an item you've been working toward, that was the feeling that got me hooked on MMOs. I'm sad to say I haven't experienced that feeling once in ARR. Finally beating titan and getting my relic, yeah that was cool but it still didn't compare to seeing

Nadrojj obtains a pair of strider boots.
Nadrojj obtains a Eurytos' Bow.
Nadrojj obtains a Kirin's Osode.
Nadrojj obtains a pair of Leaping Boots.
Nadrojj obtains a Emperor's Hairpin.

Not a single time in ARR have I had a feeling I could relate as strongly as to those achievements listed above. ARR is a game that works well for the masses but it doesn't really instill within you the feelings that other games have. Sorry for the long post that was somewhat all over the place. I had high hopes and continue to still have high hopes for this game, I really want to call this game my home for the next 8-10 years. Please deliver Yoshi.

[Lumiin]

All my friends I brought over are gone, and the ones that I met here and stayed here for are leaving as well. The game is boring and extremely easy. The dungeons are horribly boring and that's pretty much all you do in this game stand in one map and que up for everything. No open world bosses, no actual hard content. Lagging+dodging =/= hard content. The combat system is slow and boring, mostly all the animations look the same.

The list goes on.

[zdub303]

I won't say it's the genre, otherwise games like EVE online wouldn't be as popular as it is.

I think we need to change our perception of 'popular' as well. Both as a playerbase and as an industry. EVE, after 10 years, is JUST now breaking 500k players. FFXIV after its first month had 600k players. (with active subs that is) - yet which one would you say is the more popular game? (I would say EVE is much more well known imo)

The biggest problem in the industry today is that these games are so expensive to make that unless they have 1 mil+ subs the game is considered a flop. So they cater it to the widest audience possible by watering down their game.

There is still a crowd of players who reminisce of the old FFXI/EQ1 days where MMOs were about the multiplayer aspect of the game. Its a niche crowd though, and a developer is gonna have to be happy with 100-200k subs for years until a game like that can get real traction, something most investors I suspect will not want to back. I do think a game like that has more staying power than these quick fix wow model games that have almost always flopped after 1-2 years.

I'm with you, even with my limited play schedule I would take a revamped EQ1 PoP era style game over anything i've seen in the last 4 years any day. I think someone will eventually make a game like that, and it will be like EVE, starts small and grows each year. It's a game I would sub for long term for sure.

[Kaiser_Rage]

the game has no content.

[Dreamer]

It's the genre and game - They took the "safe route" which has been done to death and back and quite frankly..leaves much to be desired. MMOs and gaming in general have stagnated because if a developer tries anything out of the box or unique the game fails because it's not "the same crap as every other game". For example people would refuse ARR if it wasn't a generic Quest Grind and nothing but Dungeon Instances type of MMO because that's "industry standard" now.

Of course you'll have people state the game is highly successful and the most popular MMO to ever exist and there's absolutely no problems with it, but those people tend to be the ones who love this style of MMO to begin with.

This x100. It costs so much to make a MMORPG that has any chance of making a dent in the currently oversaturated market that publishers are scared witless to do anything outside the tried and true Everquest/Warcraft formula. Even with the popularity of Eve Online, Star Citizen still had to be crowdfunded.

Players who have been playing this genre for several years now are utterly sick of this formula, hence the the high turnover rates you see in pretty much every MMORPG released in the past 5-6 years.

[Linadae]

While the game has plenty of content, we are unfortunately living in the ADD generation. They do things as fast as humanly possible, complain about having nothing to do, quit, and then return for the next major patch where the whole process repeats. Everyone rushes to be the world first at endgame bosses even though FFXIV doesn't even keep track of it.

This is part of the reason why so many games end up going F2P. And while I don't miss the year(s) it took to level up in FFXI, I do miss the staying power of the people playing. We would have people who had been playing for so long that everyone knew them. Now...well only the trolls are remembered.

[Pence]

I believe ARR attempts to replicate the success of other games, but is limited by its own simplicity and design. You see often 'its new' and 'give it time' but...c'mon! Yoshi said he was a fan of other games and using them as inspiration. Suddenly /tell in dungeons is stressful? NMs are bad? Team work, community and economy are bad?