SE enough of the treadmill, please make the game more interesting!

[Avarghaladion]

In general, I haven't seen most people wanting things to be made that complex... just any sort of change to give the gameplay even the slightest bit more depth. The game has potential and there's a good foundation but there's just not enough here to run a decade of status quo additions. I can't think of a more simplistic MMO in regards to virtually every aspect of the game. The areas where they do try to add complexity are silly (ie. colouring your choco, changing the appearance of your equipped gear, dying certain gear). It plays kinda like a last-gen, single-player hack 'n slash only with every fight being completely identical every time you run it and with less than half the content. Of course people aren't going to have ongoing appreciation for that, especially not when they're paying a minimum of ~$144/yr for it (forcibly so if they own housing and don't want to lose it). We pay way more for this than any number of big budget titles and SE's quality control is quasi-existent, at best.

Also, I believe your statement here is very inaccurate:

Now lets jump to FFXIV, while its not perfect in it's own right, it does go out of it's way to explain and teach a new player what you are, what your role is, and not throw you out there with a sword and be like "Okay do something!". Having no sense of direction is just as bad as too much direction. People even complained in 1.xx that the sense of direction was near non-existent, and a beginning tutorial would of helped.

If SE did such a fantastic job of teaching people their roles in XIV there wouldn't be i110 players with no idea how to fulfill their roles' basic requirements, let alone how to optimize those roles in a very simplistic game. I feel your perspective here is coloured by the fact that you're personally a more experienced gamer in the MMO realm now, so you can catch onto things faster. XIV does provide "direction" in the form of the extensive hand-holding quest chains, but it certainly doesn't provide any more guidance than XI or any other MMO. Even the class/job quests that are designed to test one's ability to apply what they've learned just pump players full of echo until they clear them.

Finally, the "here's a sword, enjoy your adventure" approach is a bit of RPG flavour whereas XIV is very very much an extreme case of a traditionally scripted JRPG to the point where there is zero customization and the path is essentially linear. I suspect the reason they chose to follow a more western RPG model in the past has been due to its ability to grant longevity and diversity to a long-running title. XIV is almost 100% pure JRPG. Pretty bold move but as everyone and the dev's are gradually realizing, making content in a totally linear system you're trying to draw out for years and years and years and years is a real whore. They're utterly dependent on every cheesy method under the sun to stall the playerbase as much as possible and as frequently as possible in pretty much every facet of gameplay.

[LunaHoshino]

If SE did such a fantastic job of teaching people their roles in XIV there wouldn't be i110 players with no idea how to fulfill their roles' basic requirements, let alone how to optimize those roles in a very simplistic game.

I'm pretty sure there would be, considering there will always be people who just plain suck at learning and remembering things no matter how many times others try to teach them. All they need is a couple of friends who can carry them through things or enough gil to pay their way through.

[Avarghaladion]

I'm pretty sure there would be, considering there will always be people who just plain suck at learning and remembering things no matter how many times others try to teach them. All they need is a couple of friends who can carry them through things or enough gil to pay their way through.

There will definitely always be those people but it still stands that there's no more job-performance guidance in this than in any other MMOs. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that's a bad thing. I feel any RPG or really any game in general should let players learn and discover on their own as much as possible or at most through the use of conveyance.

[Shurrikhan]

If SE did such a fantastic job of teaching people their roles in XIV there wouldn't be i110 players with no idea how to fulfill their roles' basic requirements, let alone how to optimize those roles in a very simplistic game. I feel your perspective here is coloured by the fact that you're personally a more experienced gamer in the MMO realm now, so you can catch onto things faster. XIV does provide "direction" in the form of the extensive hand-holding quest chains, but it certainly doesn't provide any more guidance than XI or any other MMO. Even the class/job quests that are designed to test one's ability to apply what they've learned just pump players full of echo until they clear them.

This. If anything, the hand-holding we're given seems misplaced or even truncated, teaching little more than how to work quest triggers while ideas of skill and gear optimization, fulfilling one's own role, and thereby supporting other's roles, are all left without any in-game instruction outside of mentor players (who are great, and irreplaceable, but probably not desiring to teach every person who pops into tab-target combat MMO or its raid settings for the first time).

[Avarghaladion]

This. If anything, the hand-holding we're given seems misplaced or even truncated, teaching little more than how to work quest triggers while ideas of skill and gear optimization, fulfilling one's own role, and thereby supporting other's roles, are all left without any in-game instruction outside of mentor players (who are great, and irreplaceable, but probably not desiring to teach every person who pops into tab-target combat MMO or its raid settings for the first time).

Not to mention that in anything that matters, as long as they're passably skilled, it's more important to have memorized the mechanics than it is to know your job.

[Velhart]

In general, I haven't seen most people wanting things to be made that complex... just any sort of change to give the gameplay even the slightest bit more depth. The game has potential and there's a good foundation but there's just not enough here to run a decade of status quo additions. I can't think of a more simplistic MMO in regards to virtually every aspect of the game. The areas where they do try to add complexity are silly (ie. colouring your choco, changing the appearance of your equipped gear, dying certain gear). It plays kinda like a last-gen, single-player hack 'n slash only with every fight being completely identical every time you run it and with less than half the content. Of course people aren't going to have ongoing appreciation for that, especially not when they're paying a minimum of ~$144/yr for it (forcibly so if they own housing and don't want to lose it). We pay way more for this than any number of big budget titles and SE's quality control is quasi-existent, at best.

Like I said, you need to get out of the mind set that the backbone of the system is what is needed to be changed. Find depth in content, not what the hell is going on in your UI.

If SE did such a fantastic job of teaching people their roles in XIV there wouldn't be i110 players with no idea how to fulfill their roles' basic requirements, let alone how to optimize those roles in a very simplistic game. I feel your perspective here is coloured by the fact that you're personally a more experienced gamer in the MMO realm now, so you can catch onto things faster. XIV does provide "direction" in the form of the extensive hand-holding quest chains, but it certainly doesn't provide any more guidance than XI or any other MMO. Even the class/job quests that are designed to test one's ability to apply what they've learned just pump players full of echo until they clear them.

Sometimes you can't teach a person no matter how many times you try. There is a difference between a bad explanation of your game vs. someone who just does not want to learn the game. Also your statement is inaccurate. How you feel it was done is your own opinion, but pretty much most quests leading up to 50, especially your class/job quests and guildhests, are teaching you how to play the game in many perspectives. You are taught to play your class, explore crafting/gathering, look into playing other classes, party functions at 15+, and so on. Please don't compare it to FFXI where you are literally given no explanation of how your game works at all. You can criticize how the tutorial is done in FFXIV, but don't compare it to something that didn't even try to give a sense of direction.

If you don't know where you are suppose to go or know what you are doing in the first few minutes of you playing, that is bad game design. Even open sandbox games at least let you know what you should be doing and you find other things to do by exploring.

Finally, the "here's a sword, enjoy your adventure" approach is a bit of RPG flavour whereas XIV is very very much an extreme case of a traditionally scripted JRPG to the point where there is zero customization and the path is essentially linear. I suspect the reason they chose to follow a more western RPG model in the past has been due to its ability to grant longevity and diversity to a long-running title. XIV is almost 100% pure JRPG. Pretty bold move but as everyone and the dev's are gradually realizing, making content in a totally linear system you're trying to draw out for years and years and years and years is a real whore. They're utterly dependent on every cheesy method under the sun to stall the playerbase as much as possible and as frequently as possible in pretty much every facet of gameplay.

MMO developers using methods to stall players until new content comes? I never heard of that before.

As rough as 1.0 was before they started fixing it, I never felt this pigeonholed. The materia system was closer to how you've described and you could make choices with your gear to optimize different things for different situations. People do argue that it's harder to balance, which is true, but this isn't a tiny company. We pay a hefty subscription and their current model requires pretty much zero effort to go into maintaining game balance on account of there being only one "correct" way to play any job at any given time. Every job is pretty much a reskin. They axe murdered any concept of situational gear or abilities. Even killed the elemental wheel, a staple of RPGs and JRPGs alike. Kill Ifrit with Fire! Kill Ramuh with Raiton!

It matters not the size of your company, balance is balance and the most difficult thing to deal with in an MMO. Not exactly people with lab coats figuring this stuff out. I will say this again and a million more times if I have to, you cannot beat people's BiS methods. No matter how many different variations and concepts and options added to your job, there will always be one spec that dominates it all and everyone will do that. You cannot change that. SE already has options for you to build on certain secondary stats instead of others. The elemental wheel is a broken system, both FFXI and XIV 1.xx proved that.

If you want a broken game that has a chaotic form of keeping balance and keep certain jobs out of content, then please, keep making these suggestions. I will however be suggesting ideas that improve on what is already there, like content, because the stat system isn't broken.