Insanely flawed features that still aren't improved.

[Ferocious]

The amount of inconveniences in this game bother me everyday and it's quite surprising that people don't speak up about them. Not only these features are flawed, I'd say they are probably the worst I have seen handled in any MMO. I will explain -

1. Inventory System - The game highly encourages you to level all classes on one character, but yet we're still stuck with the same inventory storage we have had since day one. I know they released additional retainer services and it has been discussed, but why are we paying a price when other MMO's (even F2P MMO's) give more storage for free? This is usually done by craftable bags. They increase their amount of slots as the game ages with more content and many MMO's also have a separate tab for crafting mats storage. Here in FFXIV, new items/gear are being thrown at us every patch and yet not even a single attempt at storage increase.

This also brings me to my second point...

2. Glamour System - Again, the worst I have seen handled in any MMO. Want to keep those hard earned pieces from raids/crafting for glamour? Well, throw them all in the same inventory which is already hurting for space. Other MMO's handle this by giving you costume slots, extra storage or the transmog system by Blizzard in WoW/Diablo games. All I gotta say, good luck when the Heavensward expansion comes out! Hundreds of new glamour and crafting mats with your same old storage. I have an extra retainer and even that's already filled to its teeth.

On a related note, it's also incredibly inconvenient how we manually have to pull out items from retainer for crafting. Get on with the times already and just let the crafting system automatically use items from all your storage.

3. Housing System - Another poorly handled feature. Even F2P MMO's nowadays give you *free* housing with no server capacity issues. Here in FFXIV, first you have to save insane amount of gil and then good luck finding a house to see if they're still available. Why?! Let everyone enjoy housing, at least a small plot should be free and available to all characters. See games like Wildstar or Rift, you reach a certain level and a quest pops up "here's the key to your house!". It becomes part of the replay value for the games, so why keep it away from majority of players?

4. Beast Tribe Quests - The most worthless reputation grinds. You grind daily quests for a month straight just to get a silly mount. After the first beast tribe, many people didn't even bother with the next ones. Now all of them are dead zones. Reputation grinds have always been known to be part of "endgame", but here they are so butchered, this is one endgame that's best be avoided.

5. Party / Chat System - Where to even begin with this? I'll keep it short - still no private messaging inside dungeons or cross-server, no parties cross-server and an absolutely non-existent raid system. Alliance system is a joke and there's no true raid that you can experience in this game. Only 8 player parties that even some indie developer next door could support in his two dollar budget title. Not to mention the solo questing, prepare to go through it all over again in the expansion... on your own.

6. Deteriorating Raid content - Three of the new Coil bosses are re-skins, same old circular boss arenas and rehashed mechanics with no attempts at any originality. Are they even trying anymore? I mean it's only 4 bosses every six months to begin with, so some efforts would be nice? The new relic questlines also feel tacky and not well thought out. Original questline was much better.

All I can say, I hope the expansion changes directions for this game -big time-. It's getting stale, inconvenient and not enjoyable anymore. I want to like the game again, it has so much potential but only if they decide to listen.

[Razzle]

I agree with 1, 2, 3 and 5. I enjoyed "grinding" beast tribes quests and the end quest of them all. I was waiting for the next story of the beasttribe whenever I advanced a rank lol
As for coil bosses - I only just finished up to t5, so can't comment on that. But up to t5 the bosses were intresting and fun in my opinion.

You are right though, I really hope SE will listen to this... (but somehow doubt it hehe)

[Eirwen]

Sure, some of these are inconvenient, But have you tried to see it from the opposite side of the coin? We get real neighbourhoods and are forced to /s or /p in dungeons to connect more with the players we currently have around us. I'm sure if you were in a conversation through /tell before entering a dungeon, it wasn't all that important otherwise it's easy to withdraw, right? I'm sure they will do something about the inventory space, but do remember that SE is slow with releasing more capacity. It took a long time to get more space in FFXI and even after 10 years, it wasn't enough. I had enough space to carry four fully equipped jobs out of the 8 I loved to play.

Point number six, though, doesn't look like an inconvenience, rather a noticable aspect of lazy designing.

Who knows what more the expansion brings...

[Razzle]

I agree there is an opposite side of coin with the neighbourhoods thing, but the lack of communications in instances is redicilous. All games have those and I never saw or thought they bothered me or someone else in a party during a run.

Besides, by that logic why not get rid of FC and LS chat on the way, so you know we can concentrate on the run and not communicate with anyone...

Some of us can communicate and play the game just as good, we're special like that Why should we be punished?

[RiceisNice]

1. I also despise the looting system for this game, especially in open world. I'm over here killing dodo birds in The Flock, and my derp party member thats chilling with the Sahagin gets all the eggs and meat. The shortage of armory space is real when you have all your crafting classes to 50 too, and it doesn't help that everytime you want to change equips, it has to go into the armory slot, even when you have 6 free slots.

4. And suddenly, ixali is now mandatory to do end game crafting >_>

6. I'm currently on T9 with my static, but my input is that I really dislike the heavy emphasis on the mechanics and one-shotting for being unable to perform. Stagnates party formation to statics or luck of the draw to find an extremely competent party in a reasonable timeframe.

The relic quest line is also bleh, in both the lore involvement and the process. Each upgrade (with the exception of building the relic itself and animus) is just one giant tedium rather than consisting of different, multiple objectives. Especially nexus, while I love how they have stepped away from Atma RNG, gets incredibly bland when you're one half done, more-so if you weren't one o the first few who started working on nexus as soon as 2.3 went live....good luck finding other adventurers who are gonna share with you the light bonuses (as the game even suggests you do.)

[Sho86]

For inventory, make those chests in our houses/guild rooms actually do something, kinda like in XI.

Glamour is getting all sorts of messed up as we continue. Pretty soon all craft/gather have to look exactly the same, plus people commenting PLD-DRK sharing. Also, coloring with dyes.... lol yeah.

Housing can stay as it is (though more availability to buy plots), the purchasable FC rooms though need to be made back into mog houses and free. It's not that I don't have the 300k, hell my crafting alt has a house; but its the fact your stuck in that FC with a ton of pain trying to leave, re-buy, re-set up if that FC doesn't work out eventually (or the fact your forced to be in a FC just to have a room).

The rest I don't have much comment on, though my personal gripes are; we still can't send items/money to our own characters (and yeah any credibility for it to 'prevent RMT' is long gone), and also we're still a single focused game, end game raiding. Side content has been pushed off way to long.

[Shneibel]

3. Housing System - Another poorly handled feature. Even F2P MMO's nowadays give you *free* housing with no server capacity issues. Here in FFXIV, first you have to save insane amount of gil and then good luck finding a house to see if they're still available. Why?! Let everyone enjoy housing, at least a small plot should be free and available to all characters. See games like Wildstar or Rift, you reach a certain level and a quest pops up "here's the key to your house!". It becomes part of the replay value for the games, so why keep it away from majority of players?

I will not say 4kk-8kk is insane amount of gil, as it is easy to obtain w/o play crafter or hardcore or play 8h/day. Every player have house for free, their first house : The Inn, per city even.

I Honestly don't know why ppl keep complain about housing since the game has multi ways to obtain a house/room.
1. The Inn, the first free house w/o any function but summon retainer, haircut, armoire & log out. Have a chair and table & a mini game.

2. Personal room, the second "house" (it is nearly as big as a small house top lvl), required 300k and in a FC with house, come with decoration and can do exactly as much as a house, but no gardening

3. The house, the luxury house everyone want but don't want to work for it and keep complain on the forum, a lot of legit reason but complain is still complain, come with well everything the personal room can do, with benefit of gardening & you can call it your own (don't know how often you are in here yourself but most of the time the housing ward are empty).

Out of 6, I am strongly against the 3 and only agree with the 1st and maybe 2nd because of inventory space to keep all those glamour gears

[Seif]

Blah.

No actual meat in this OP.

I'm sorry but companions and food are way more broken than any of the things mentioned in the op.

[Haprimac]

I strongly agree with the glamour issues. It was so much simple in LotRO, you had 'cosmetic slots' that you could change whenever you liked, even midfight.

I hate the fact that my healers, tanks and casters share the same glamour. For example my black mage has the PvP gloves glamoured over the soldiery gloves, but they obviously don't work on my summoner. Well, too bad, nothing I can do about it, really.

I've pretty much sold most of my crafting materials in favour of having space for glamour gear. I'm struggling a lot with just two retainers, but I don't really want to pay every month more, I'm already paying more because I have more than one character. I can't exactly make any use of my alts, either, as I don't own a FC where I could just hoard slots from the FC chest to trade items between my characters. And I don't even want to do that, I'd rather be in a social environment than a dead FC that has just me and my alts.

[AdamFyi]

1. Inventory System

This problem can be easily remedied by not hoarding every single item you find. Belts and accessories? Give them to your GC for some seals. Crafting materials should not be hoarded as well. Always buy exact amounts you need to craft X number of stuff. That way you will never end up with extra materials that you chuck at your retainer and tell him to "preserve this popoto" for who knows how long!

2. Glamour System -

Meh, I've seen worse. Most MMOs that have the glamour system almost always seem to couple them with extra purchasable inventory space. Plus having the glamours readily available and just need to be equipped into a seperate slot means that you'd be carrying each and every single piece of armor in your inventory. Switching jobs means that the armor you equipped for glamour will be automatically placed into your inventory.

The developers did a good job with the current glamour system because of the way this game handles armor pieces and multiple jobs. It minimizes the amount of inventory space you would need to carry glamours for all your 10 jobs! Plus they may have made the prisms craftable for one reason only - as a gil sink. There isn't a lot of gil sinks in the game at the moment and that causes massive inflation. I can understand why they went with such a system.

3. Housing System -

This one is a little tricky, but I'll do my best to explain their situation. First I have to agree with you, yes, this could have been implemented better but it isn't right to compare this game to a F2P MMO. Both schemes are quite different. First you have F2P MMO housing that are given to you for free, but in order to decorate, you are given a lot of furniture that could be an insane grind to get, or you'd settle with cheap and basic furniture, or you'd be required to spend cash to get that giant pirate ship swing set for only $5 that you can sit in! Housing is kinda gimmicky in the F2P market because newly created plots of land are at most empty and usually tiny. For some, you'd need to spend some money to expand that land to a bigger size as well. This makes the housing system in many F2P MMOs a huge cash/coin sink - money goes out of the economy.

In the case of FFXIV, we do not have a lot of gil sinks, and the amount of gil we're accumulating as a community is pretty astronomical. With the roulette bonuses, challenge logs and even the daily and weekly hunts, the amount of gil circulating around is pretty damn high! So most likely, housing may have been introduced to be a massive gil sink to take away large portions of gil from circulation. The most we have for gil sinks are actually pretty minimal ranging from Market Board taxes that can be avoided completely, travel costs from teleporting and boat rides that are insanely cheap, and of course personal rooms. This is all I can think of at the top of my head, so apologies if I forgot to mention some. This is just an assumption as to why housing was implemented this way, and there is a good chance that it is.

4. Beast Tribe Quests -

Not necessarily. The daily beast tribe quests are there to get you to invest time into the game to get your shinies. The mounts are the treasure that keeps you working yer arses off day after day just to get. It's mainly an incentive, truth be told. It's very optional and the rewards you get range from rare materials and well.. mounts. Plus the beast tribe quests are a way to see into the lives of said specific beast tribe. Pretty much a must for lore-happy people.

6. Deteriorating Raid content -

I think the new coil bosses look fantastic. Even though some of them are reskins, you do have to admit to how well the mechanics were made. I can see a lot of thinking was put into all those fine mechanics, and it seems like they tried to push away from those OHKO mechanics from the first and second coil. So I commend them for that.