New player feedback (AKA reasons why FFXIV has seems troubled keeping newer players)

[E-Zekiel]

Edit to note to some other posters: despite my avatar, I am 50 and have been 50 for nearly two months, and have been playing FFXIV for two months and some change of a few weeks, give or take. I have experienced all the content except for the latter half of Bahamut coils. When I say the GCD is better "at later levels", I don't mean just solo content, I'm also including group content, dungeons, fates, the whole bag. It is MUCH better at later levels, and everyone who told me so was absolutely right about that. With that said, I still think they need to majorly improve on the early levels. (apparently I needed to visit my char page to update the level).
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Thanks for the well thought out response, Nutz! (this was the kind of response I was looking for! XD) and some of it does help me a little bit in understanding why things are the way they are. A few points to expand on/further comment:

(numbered according to yours)
1. That seems fair to me. Thinking as a ninja, even just moving jugulate from 34 to instead, say 14 or so, would make a significant difference. Short cooldown, doesn't hit very hard at all (potency is only 80! less than an un-comboed combo attack). Just 1-2 short cooldown, low damage attacks like that would make a world of difference.

2. This is more or less what I meant, yeah. It's daunting to new players. My solution is just to structure them like class quests - there's a narrative, even a long narrative with many quests, only that it doesn't gate all the content behind that long narrative. It's okay to do things out of order!

4. Fair enough. This isn't a HUGE thing, I just thought it was silly that in some cases it's just tantamount to losing two skills (like in my own, where I was already using cross-class skills I would get access to again at 40 and 50, so it seemed totally and unnecessarily obligatory).

8. Actually, with that in mind, full commitment or no commitment (since water and not doing swimming is clearly the main reason for most invisible walls) does kind of make sense, especially if they pondered an underwater expansion at some point. That makes me more forgiving of invisible walls in this case since they had been thinking about it like that, even if they don't end up doing it - I see the reasoning.

9. The problem with the reply function for me is it doesn't consistently reply to the person that just sent me a tell. Sometimes I hit reply and it will go to the next person after that person, or before them, meaning I have to scroll around a little to find them in the list. Sometimes it works like a charm. All I can say is it's not consistent.

10. True about accuracy. Skill highlighting is mostly an issue at lower levels, I'm noticing, as I begin leveling a warrior alt. Cause it hasn't mattered on my ninja in forever.

11. You make a good point here, about making it so "unpopular" dungeons still show up on roulette. To this I would say to just make it so in general the dungeons are not gated behind the story, and generally less time consuming/easier to unlock (Though obviously it's still fine to have their narrative in the story). I think most people would take the time to unlock an unfavorable dungeon if it was easy-ish to unlock, even if they didn't particularly want to run said dungeon. This is mostly because people have friends and sometimes your friends want to just get it done, or to see it the one time, etc, so most folks would put forth the effort, I think, to go ahead and unlock it if it's not a huge undertaking - thus making it a contender once again in the roulette pool.

12. Fair point about the crafting - my biggest points of contention come from cross-class crafting in the ixali quests (IE the crafting facilities with the buff). My friends tell me I am insane for completing the storyline as a level 33 alchemist with no other crafting classes leveled. I did, however, finally take it upon myself to get culinarian to 15 for that quality increase skill. I'm interested to see how much less frustrating this makes things.

14. This is great news! Underman and you don't have to scale! I am verily looking forward to this, for fashion most of all.


Thanks again for this post - good points and informative too

[Niwashi]

10- Combo highlights ... Eventually you're so used to the flow (and the easily hit accuracy cap resulting in 0 misses ever) that you never really look at the bar at all.

Depending on the job, you may need to. Not everything procs based just on hit accuracy. Archer/Bard, for instance, has a 20% chance that Heavy Shot will proc their Straight Shot, but also an 80% chance that it won't, even on a successful hit. In that case, you have to watch for when the highlight lights up if you want that guaranteed crit.

2. This is more or less what I meant, yeah. It's daunting to new players. My solution is just to structure them like class quests - there's a narrative, even a long narrative with many quests, only that it doesn't gate all the content behind that long narrative. It's okay to do things out of order!

Well, it's not like everything is gated behind the main story. Dungeons that are a part of the main story are gated by reaching that part (because the story wouldn't make sense otherwise), but there are also several optional dungeons that can be unlocked as soon as you hit the relevant level for them, regardless of where you are in the story. If you simply mean that a few of the level 50 dungeons that don't interact directly with the storyline anyway should work the way Halatali, The Sunken Temple of Qarn, Cutter's Cry, Dzemael Darkhold, and Aurum Vale do, I could go along with that. I do think the majority of it should be gated by the main scenario, but it wouldn't all need to be.

[Nutz]

Depending on the job, you may need to. Not everything procs based just on hit accuracy. Archer/Bard, for instance, has a 20% chance that Heavy Shot will proc their Straight Shot, but also an 80% chance that it won't, even on a successful hit. In that case, you have to watch for when the highlight lights up if you want that guaranteed crit.

I suppose it depends on where you like to watch. For my BLM I typically look at the status bar at the top (for firestarter and thundercloud) or I notice the icon appear next to my character and scroll down the screen. Of course sometimes the hotbar draws my eyes as well, and I've even seen people who put their bars further up the screen to see them more readily, but there are other places to look as well.

[E-Zekiel]

Well, it's not like everything is gated behind the main story. Dungeons that are a part of the main story are gated by reaching that part (because the story wouldn't make sense otherwise), but there are also several optional dungeons that can be unlocked as soon as you hit the relevant level for them, regardless of where you are in the story. If you simply mean that a few of the level 50 dungeons that don't interact directly with the storyline anyway should work the way Halatali, The Sunken Temple of Qarn, Cutter's Cry, Dzemael Darkhold, and Aurum Vale do, I could go along with that. I do think the majority of it should be gated by the main scenario, but it wouldn't all need to be.

To me that's part of the problem. It shouldn't be everything, of course. It also shouldn't be almost everything, or even the majority, or many. Things gated by solo content that are something other than solo content should be exceptional, uncommon. To have to go to great (and in some cases extremely tedious) lengths solo to accomplish group or raid-oriented things isn't something that contributes to a healthy MMO. That's not to say FFXIV isn't unhealthy, but rather this is a point of improvement.

The ability to relatively easily join up with friends for group content is, to me, fundamental for anything that's multiplayer. I say relatively because it's okay to have a little extra effort, but, the problem with gating content is that it prevents friends who have gone through those gates from playing with friends that have not. This, imo, has no place (or at the very least, a minimal place), in a multiplayer game, otherwise you're just kind of going at it the wrong way.

[Niwashi]

The ability to relatively easily join up with friends for group content is, to me, fundamental for anything that's multiplayer. I say relatively because it's okay to have a little extra effort, but, the problem with gating content is that it prevents friends who have gone through those gates from playing with friends that have not. This, imo, has no place (or at the very least, a minimal place), in a multiplayer game, otherwise you're just kind of going at it the wrong way.

This I would agree with, but I disagree with your idea that FFXIV lacks it. You can start playing together with friends right from level 1 if you want to, and many people do that. The first FATEs are at level 5, the first instanced and exclusively group content is unlocked at level 10. Full scale dungeon runs can be unlocked either by leveling to 20 or by advancing the storyline to level 15. And for the storyline ones, as soon as you start unlocking them, you get several in a row, so you're never stuck with only one unlocked dungeon to choose from. The whole rest of the time you're leveling and going through the story, you can also do group content with your friends any time you want to.

When you talk about needing to complete the storyline, you're only talking about the endgame dungeons. That's not where you get the ability to play together with your friends, as that's something you've been able to do all along. Level sync ensures you can do so regardless of what levels your friends are at. (Plus the game's multi-classing opportunities mean its fairly common for friends to start leveling a new class alongside a friend who's starting the game, so that drastic level sync isn't even necessary.)