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

[Akiza]

To be fair when you say most people who say the GCD isn't slow haven't played any other MMOs on the market...
yeah, they haven't. I'm pretty sure a good portion of this game is being played Final Fantasy fans, not MMO fans (like me, but I have played other MMOs.. and almost all to me are "meh" to "not fun").

The 2.5s GCD's are fine considering the animations themselves take 2s to finish. I've played TERA and like most MMO's I found the combat boring and repetative until lvl 50 when it started to get interesting. Then after 6 mo's of the combat in TERA got stale and I no longer cared about the type of combat in MMO's since its superficial.

[E-Zekiel]

I personally think TERA has the best combat out there - the problem with that game was...that's all there was to it. Not to mention, while it had the best combat system, imo, the trash in dungeons was a bit tedious because nobody cares about trash anyway. With that in mind, complex fighting against trash seems tedious rather than interesting. But...admittedly, I could deal with that if the game in general just had more to it.

[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.

[Nafka]

Speaking as a new player I have only found one thing I dont like about this game. I dont like how your main story quest line makes you do Dungeons/boss fights with other people. In any other MMO (Ive played) story quest stuff is solo stuff. That kind of content should be option and not forced, but im trying to deal with it :-)

[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.

[Akiza]

I personally think TERA has the best combat out there - the problem with that game was...that's all there was to it. Not to mention, while it had the best combat system, imo, the trash in dungeons was a bit tedious because nobody cares about trash anyway. With that in mind, complex fighting against trash seems tedious rather than interesting. But...admittedly, I could deal with that if the game in general just had more to it.

TERA combat system was the best combat system for mmos the problem was it was to simplistic. TERA at max level there was a 5 hit auto combo and gcds that can be used as part of a rotation which turned it into a mutated version of tab target except they remove the tab indicator from the screen. Now if an MMO had action combat system with a combo juggling system like Soul Calibur along with quick time events active dodge parry and just guard then I'd be impressed.

[E-Zekiel]

That would be....amazing. O_O

[Shuon]

I (or the community in general) agree with you from point 3 onwards but they have been around and the devs do rectify them as time goes by (as with some of the community's earlier feedbacks/complaints).

Can't agree with points 1 and 2 at all though.

As others have mentioned, if stories don't appeal to you and you just wish to fight/craft like many of the korean MMOs (not an insult - they have amazing fighting mechanics) you should not force yourself to play this. I, among many, are playing *almost only* for the story and would have left the game long ago if the main story quests are not updated every patch.

Re GCD, I do agree at earlier levels combats are boring but the last time I leveled a class 3 weeks ago (and I play casually) I don't really remember being at low level for more than 2 to 3 days. There are enough players at 50 (myself included) that already cannot handle their rotations well especially with the dodging mechanics in fights - reducing GCD only means it will get even tougher and I wonder if you yourself are really up for the challenge yourself? I am going to admit it here that I won't.

And to address Tera, when I first started playing it I absolutely adored the fighting system and found it to be revolutionary. However, it got very exhausting after a while - playing that 4 hours in a row was challenging and if you had bad latency you couldnt even enjoy the nuances of the combat system. In fact, Yoshi P did mention that he team specifically did not consider that option because of the reasons I mentioned. I am not asking you to agree with it but it is for your consideration.