A letter to Yoshida and the development staff of ARR

[Nutz]

I know they've claimed harassment for the no /tells in dungeons 'feature', however, I think that is mostly just an excuse of convenience. I'd imagine that given the way the DF works (nevermind the way it used to work before data centers) coding for /tells was a bit difficult since party members in the instance could have the same name as other players on your server. Rather than implement a means of differentiating them it's obviously simpler to just disallow /tells. Clearly it's not just to prevent harassment because you can't send /tells even to people on your friend list while in a dungeon whether they're there with you or not.

As to the group content, I seriously hope they add something less rigid in the future. My currently defunct static was formed essentially of the first 8 people in our group to get to 50 and finish our relic weapons (thus unlocking Coil). Shortly after, a couple of other friends got to the same point and we had to politely tell them to find other people to play with (for that content at least -- this was 2.0 so basically other level 50 content was CM/WP/AK spam). Before long one person left so we needed to pick 1 person of the 3 available to join the static. It wasn't made any easier by the fact that we needed a DPS and they were all 3 DPS.

That kind of rigidity works the other way too, unfortunately. The group broke apart when 1 person was absent a couple of weeks (grabbed a pick up in PF) which led to resentment and other members loosening their commitment to play at the agreed upon time. Eventually only half of the team was reliably there and eventually nobody even expected each other to log on.

It's nice how tightly balanced the content is, but it sometimes becomes absurd to have to schedule around 8 people's schedules with very little leeway for substitutions (because of experience, class and gear) and no leeway for additions.

Lastly, for changing classes/ jobs in a dungeon, while it might create drama you could at least prevent some trolling by requiring a unanimous vote in favor of the change, with the specifics of the change being determined before the vote (ie. Player A wants to change from Monk lvl 88 to WAR lvl 92. Approve?). You'd need to be careful not to unintentionally deny someone though as again, to prevent trolling, you'd need to restrict job change requests to only outside of battle (obviously) and by time like they had to do with 'ready check'.

[Hiruke]

I disagreed with a lot of stuff the OP said, but the last bullet point, the one about lockouts and content, I couldn't possibly agree more.

The way content is designed in this game (as well as many other things), is excessively toxic, and will end up having a net negative effect on the game, even if its effects aren't obvious to the dev team just yet.

It will absolutely kill the longevity of the game.

[juniglee]

Edit: Apologies for multi post text limitations. :P

You can edit your post to get past the 1000 character limitation. Creating a new post has that restriction, but editing does not

On topic, I'm mainly going to say I largely agree with the last point. However, to prevent my static from breaking up (it's a one-of-a-kind static, we're not the most progression focused static, but I'm really lucky to have them), I've decided to make a second character so I can learn a new role, and help out people with Second Coil, as a sort of free agent on free nights.

[Amarathval]

I agree with the OP about the lockouts and content as well. I work a retail job with a random schedule(I have no control over what hours/days I will have to work) this more or less prevents me from being in any kind of weekly based static group, which in turn(haha get it? turn!) prevented me from doing coil.

So when I unlocked the first set of coil I couldn't ever find a group for it because everyone was either already locked out or they had their own group which hadn't run yet but had no room. I joined an awesome FC and everyone was super helpful, got Garuda EX down and then was going to do Titan EX... well Titan EX was super hard and we didn't end up killing him that time, and I just never got around to trying again because I didn't see the point... I didn't really care about his loot and after him I'd do Ifrit then what? Levi/Mog and Coil2? but then I would just end up in the same situation that I was in before, looking for a group that I wouldn't be able to join because scheduling.

so what do I have left to do in FFXIV that I can actually do? Crafting, Running X dungeon for the Y time for tomes, leveling/gearing other classes, grinding PvP, making vanity sets(CT), Relic quest, Daily beast tribe rep grind. Sure this is a decent chunk of content, but after a while it gets boring. Frontlines will help a little bit assuming the queues aren't insanely long like wolves den is (waited 1hr+ for a pvp match). I would love some challenging/fun PvE content that didn't have a lockout... I honestly don't see why Coil cant follow a similar loot system to CT, then someone who has already done/looted Coil could party with their other friends and do coil with them.

Hopefully something changes soon, more and more people are leaving to go play other games, new MMOs and Expansions for existing ones are coming out and I really don't want to see FFXIV die out

[Silvanoshi]

I think the lock-out timers would be a little more forgiven if there were other alternatives for the same gear.

Why not have Crystal Tower drop the same level gear as Coil? Or, even different stat gear? (See WHM vs SCH gear as an example). Release Coil first, then CT later (as it is now). This gives the playerbase more content to play together for the same gear without excluding some of thier friends. When the next tier of content hits, continue to have "Completed T9 to enter" and "Completed CT2" as prerequisites... This gives people more content to do and they can swap people out as needed since (at this point) the lock-out timers should no longer be in place as its obsolete content.

[Brainberry]

I read this as "Gear is more important than people interacting. If I can't feel special then there's no point to playing".

You know, there are other options... such as larger scale encounters. Who cares if someone gets carried? It happens now. People are so deathly afraid of others getting their precious... Newflash, that wasn't a problem in EQ... and there were much more elite players there.

I would love large scale encounters. I'm for that, never did I say I was against it. I was just replying to the SCOB whine in OP's post. Having the weekly lockout for SCOB removed this early before the next tier would be a terrible idea for various reasons, just be patient and after next patch people can start farming with echo it like you can with 1-5. Let the premier raid content stay as is, its not difficult if you're not lazy.

The reason why people want to have the weekly lockout removed from SCOB is because they want help getting loot, lets be serious, and you can actually already do this with alts. Its already bad enough they're starting to nerf past encounters with echo and making new encounters easier to down(like Levi Ex). This community just wants everything handed to them and its pretty pathetic. But as for more large scale encounters I would love to see that also, but they wont be as challenging as 8 man content due to balancing issues.

[Goodberry]

Which they will likely never read.

Obviously. Apart from that, I agree 100% with the OP, both the praises and the questions/suggestions. Very good points.

[Ginga_K]

Basically I would suggest lockout on raids which drops weapons like t5 and t9.
Others shd be available on df or
with a weekly lockout on loot like CT.

With Novus weapon system, perhaps we shd hv a novus armor system
where we can customize gear's secondary stats, maybe?

[OranKells]

all the things mentioned are conscious design choices. SE does not want you to send /tells in dungeons nor change classes. they fear abuse/misuse for a lot of reasons listed above

I do agree though that we could use a little more endgame variety. I don't know if lockouts for the top tier gear should be dropped but give us more to do than just coil & CT? Hamlet was one of the quirkiest things I've ever seen but it was really interesting. Something open world we could do with our FC with a dynamic number of people that is a little more complicated than the oversimplified fate system would be nice

[Kerrigen]

I don't necessarily agree with the other points, but Coil lockouts absolutely need to go. They're encouraging seclusion. They make no sense with the FC system. They're discouraging, when not outright preventing, people who'd like to participate to the content to do so because they can't commit to a static, don't have one, or because theirs disbanded with 2.2. They're promoting that unfriendly mentality that is prevalent in all sorts of content now. They're slowly but surely killing the community. Please dump the lockouts, it's terrible design.