Your thoughts on the direction of this game?

[PinkDeadly]

And as for the gear... it has nothing to do with feeling special. Think about it, would you want to go to work and bust your butt for 40 hrs a week and get the same paycheck as the person who works maybe 10?

Your analogy doesn't work. They still have to do the same content as you to get your gear. By the time it becomes easier there should be new content and better gear for you to obtain. Isn't this what each patch of ARR has done?

If the highest lvl gear is that easy to obtain you shouldn't feel all that special about it anyway.

[UltimateAoe2]

Yeah...
This is what I do daily...:

Craft some stuff.
Spirit Bind.
Spend a lot of gil because of how the economy is right now.
Do SCoB 6-9 in 1 hour.
Craft, AGAIN.
Sit and talk.
Log out.


Rinse and repeat per day, and on my other 2 accounts.
It's massively boring now, sadly.

[WeiShan]

The meaning of MMORPG is not "For massive"

It's:
There are a lot of people in this virtual world, (world is too small in ARR)
You do things with some people. (Many quests are solo only,and roulette/DF kill the community)
Adventure or do some stupid/funny things with someone (nothing in open world other than faceroll zerg)
Player interaction (crafting is worthless,no need to help someone or ask for help,oh and where is my bazaar?and player repair system?)
Meet new friends. (hard to make friends because of above)
Have good memories with them. (so little good memories in ARR)

Yoshi-p picked an easy route, to hook subscription,he uses these methods:
1.Boring gear treadmill
2.New gears every 3-6months,so you have to do it again.
3.Fancy minions/ mounts / new armors and weapons with glow

[OPneedNerfs]

The game is going for longevity while minimizing the amount of content required to be punped out frequently.

By focusing on the casual market, that are known to take it slower and do things at their own pace, theirs subs will continue longer than the beaters who seek to complete everything as fast as possible.

Production costs have shifted to developing elements for casual gamers which is the logical thing to do for their revenue.

[hyperhelios]

I feel like I've still been beta testing ARR for a year while they try to figure out how to make an economy work and appease their fans with gear. While they've given me a few decent reasons to spend gil lately, the hunt system for gear just makes me laugh.

Basically what SE has said to its players is that if you can't do coil to gear out a job, here's something even a five-year old can do...have fun. I think I've done like 5 hunts for that reason; it's mindless fluff for mindless players. I'm all for giving players a lot of options for gearing out their jobs with various content, but good lord someone should film kindergarteners doing hunts and send it to Yoshida for a FFXIV skill meme.

FFXIV's end game content is based around one weekly lockout raid and then random mindless time/gil sinks for the other option. Not doing that great atm, but I'll save my Yoshi bashing for at least one expansion.

P.S. If you haven't watched this week's Jimquisition about what's wrong with SE, I think it's brilliant...

[Amberyl]

P.S. If you haven't watched this week's Jimquisition about what's wrong with SE, I think it's brilliant...

Jim's been spot on so often lately. Really love him for telling it how it is, the melodramatic persona and ridiculousness be damned.

[Mikita]

The game is going for longevity while minimizing the amount of content required to be punped out frequently.

By focusing on the casual market, that are known to take it slower and do things at their own pace, theirs subs will continue longer than the beaters who seek to complete everything as fast as possible.

Production costs have shifted to developing elements for casual gamers which is the logical thing to do for their revenue.

I can only speak for myself, of course.

I am casual in the sense that I take my time and do things at my own pace (still haven't beaten Turn 5, Ex Leviathan, and many other things left to do). FFXIV v1.0 was pretty much my first game ever.

But I was also very dedicated in that I played practically every single day from v1.0 ~ 1.23 and then again when ARR started... until about a month ago. It's just really boring now. I mostly sit in town and hope one of my close friends logs in... because that's the only time I feel like doing anything. Now I'm thinking about cancelling my subscription and I've started looking for something else, or may just go back to a no-game lifestyle.

Similar to WeiShan above, I think that Duty Finder killed the community -- and the community we had is what really kept me playing all along. There are a few other things that have sent ARR downhill for me, like making most non-endgame solo-able/solo-only, and sidelining crafting while taking the social side out of it. Tying Lodestone "Likes" to Facebook and severely limiting photo storage space basically killed the out-of-game community (on the JP side anyway).

In their quest to make it accessible, convenient and solo-friendly, they have basically thrown out everything that kept me playing.

And I'm not a hardcore, nor very skilled gamer... Just a dedicated casual who enjoyed making friends and sharing experiences with them.

[Kosmos992k]

I agree, the game is so easy. People are face rolling Savage Coils now. Its hard to find people who don't have the Savage titles now. Everyone running around with High Allagan weapons and all.

Um, OK, no offense intended, but I have to ask what in hell you are talking about? "face rolling Savage Coils"? Really? And how many players in all of Eorzea do you think have even cleared turn 5 in 'normal' mode yet? I'll hand you a clue, it's not a majority - not by a long chalk. "hard to find people who don't have the Savage titles now" - Look, I know you are on a legacy server, but that's simply not true. Perhaps in the circle you keep it's true, perhaps even in the locations you hang around in at the times you are there, but with a minority of players even having completed turn 5, there is no way in hell that it's "hard to find people" without the Savage titles. I'm not even going to comment about High Allagan weapons.

Honestly your comment typifies something that I hear rumbling between the lines in a lot of posts in this thread. It's like there are two worlds in Eorzea, there is this one world populated by supermen who think that the entire game is just one big face roll, and that *everyone* has ilvl 110 with High Allagan and Soldierly gear in every slot. The other world - what I would call reality - has a wide spectrum of players including some who have cleared most of Coil 2, and regularly beat EX primals and Coil 2 turns, as well as many players (perhaps even the majority of the playerbase) who are working on getting their gear to ilvl 90 or so, haven't capped all their classes, found Titan HM annoyingly difficult, and are not looking forward to the frustration that is the difficulty spike going into turn 5.

The difference between your view of the player population and reality is astonishing. Perhaps you should take off your sunglasses and look at reality. The majority of players have not completed Turn 5, don't have High Allagan anything, might have some soldierly or weathered items, and probably have mostly Myth gear and their Relic. This thread seems to have been completely dominated by people who think the game is going on the wrong direction, and I can't honestly agree with that at all. The game is not going in the direction preferred by the so-called 'hardcore' players, so i can see why players in that group would object to the direction. However those players absolutely do not make up the majority of players or paying customers in Eorzea, and they should stop acting as if they are in the majority, when they are demonstrably NOT.

The game has so much to do that it's scarcely possible for me to keep up with it all, and I play almost every day for several hours, and have played since Beta 3. I could list all the different aspects, but people will just complain that they are part of the grind imposed on players, and then demand that somehow more engaging content be magicked up. The truth is that all the dailies, crafting, gathering and the like are optional activities for people to play with - if they want to. No one says that anyone has to farm Atma for 100s of hours, it's simply an option. No one says that ilvl 110 gear will be needed for 2.4, that's an opinion put forth by those who already have it.

This notion that Myth gear and weathered gear is already rendered obsolete is complete stupidity in my view. Fiorst of all the majority of the game can be handled quite adequately in gear ranging from ilvl 80 to ivl 90, most can be done with ilvl 60 or less. It's only the hardest content that has much stricter ilvl requirements. The only context in which Myth or Weathered bear is obsolete, or no longer relevant is the top tier of end-game content.

However Velhart has already made statements that demonstrate that top tier raiding content is in fact the only context he sees, otherwise he would not post such preposterous things such as face rolling savage coils and being unable to find anyone without a savage title.

I hope to hell that Yoshi-P and the rest of the Devs ignore the voices of these hardcore players. The ultimate irony is that the Zodiark weapon 'quest' starting with the insane low RNG rate of Atma was added to give non-hardcore players a way to upgrade their weapon at a steady pace - over the long term. But to appease the hardcore players the drop rate on Atma was set very low to draw out the time. And yet the loudest voices whining about the grind fest of Atma, Animus and Novus are the hardcore players who consider it a pointless grind that requires no skill. Then again, that same group is the majority of the Hunting Horde I see running around in their High Allagan gear Zerging the crap out of hunt marks for easy seals - ultimately allowing them to upgrade their gear swiftly.

So the two items of content that were added for the mainstream audience have both been effectively hijacked by the whining ninnies among the hardcore crowd. The Atma/Animus/Novus grind was lengthened considerably to appease raiders complaints, and then the hunt system added to give mainstream players a way to catch up has been hijacked by the same group of hardcore players who are not using Hunts to gear up for Coil 2. Seems to me that the biggest flaws in the game center around the demands and behaviors of the hardcore gamers. At the end of the day, FFXIV is intended to be an accessible game that offers entertainment value, personally I think it succeeds in that. There are myriad hings I'd like to change to improve various aspects of the game, but the core of the game is solid. What people decry as simplicity, I could easily turn around and call pure. I see people complaining that the simplicity makes the game too easy. On the other hand I think that the purity of the system allows players to learn their jobs and the content and focus on using their job and their team mates to achieve results rather than focusing excessively on combos, special skills and the minutia of the system.

I think that perhaps people would do well to stop and consider what Yoshi is doing with the patches. Each one has added more and more things to do - most of which are optional. Slowly Eorzea and FFXIV are being enriched and filled with things to do - if you wish to do them. As several people have said, if that is not your cup of tea, you should probably find another game because that is the direction of FFXIV. In the end, it is a game, and the direction being taken is that of a game.

[hyperhelios]

Jim's been spot on so often lately. Really love him for telling it how it is, the melodramatic persona and ridiculousness be damned.

Someone should send him a Moogle dildo for this week, since he gets them all the time anyway.

[hyperhelios]

Um, OK, no offense intended, but I have to ask what in hell you are talking about? "face rolling Savage Coils"? Really? And how many players in all of Eorzea do you think have even cleared turn 5 in 'normal' mode yet? I'll hand you a clue, it's not a majority - not by a long chalk. "hard to find people who don't have the Savage titles now" - Look, I know you are on a legacy server, but that's simply not true. Perhaps in the circle you keep it's true, perhaps even in the locations you hang around in at the times you are there, but with a minority of players even having completed turn 5, there is no way in hell that it's "hard to find people" without the Savage titles. I'm not even going to comment about High Allagan weapons.

Holy crap. This is why i rarely come to these forums. You sir, just showed this guy your sarcasm meter is definitely broken with this wall of text above me.