So, pretty dead lately....

[Alberel]

Personally I think it's the lack of any actual new content. I myself played pretty hardcore in the 2.X cycle but seeing that we have nothing at all new to do in 3.0 has killed my enthusiasm quite significantly. Sure we have new places to go and new bosses to fight but it's still exactly the same daily routine we had during 2.5 and before. We've been playing this game the exact same way for two years now and it's not sustainable. People are burning out fast because we desperately need a new gameplay system to shake things up and make it interesting again.

I'm hoping this new airship content might give the game what it needs but we'll just have to wait and see I guess.

[Windklinge]

heavensward was WEAK for a mmo expansion that costed money in terms of pure endgame content actually. what was inside it would have been in a free 2.6 patch aswell endgame wise. instead we got to pay for a endgame reset. pretty lackluster imo for a paid expansion.

mmo expansions should stop raising level caps and get devs doing useless leveling content but focus on adding endgame stuff only. since that is what keeps subs running. on HW so much dev time went into developing content which was useless within a 1 week because it was just low level stuff.

face it : we would have gotten a new raid and new weekly tomes anyway with a 2.6 patch for free. its the same now expect we paid for it. and we even got less content since only 2 lvl 60 dungeons now not even 3 anymore.

on next expansion they better focus on endgame content instead of leveling fluff that is basicly nonsense since we had enough of that from 1-50 already. heck daoc and age of conan expansions had more endgame content because : SUPRISE they didnt raise level cap and focused on endgame instead.

feel free to flame me but thats the truth currently. for a paid expansion HW lacks endgame content ALOT compared to other mmos. it was just a overhyped patch i say.

imagine eso tomes and savage would have been released day 1 like other mmos :

ex primals useless from day 1. may aswell not implement. as effort = reward forumula fail here.
normal mode : why do more than once? no point when esos are better anyway. also can be finished within 4 weeks.

whats left?

ex roulette daily with only 1 option which is alwaysreap.
savage mode.

THATS IT. same as before. nothing different at all. nothing new. a 2.6 would have contained the same endgame wise. except we would have gotten 3 dungeons on ex roulette instead of 2.
storyquest could have been adding without cap raise aswell for example. yet they focused way to much on low level stuff for a expansion and the sole reason was the level raise.

[Akiza]

Only people bored are people who say that gear progression is the only form of content and that is just boring. The only Free Companies that are dying are the hardcore raiding focus companies while the large casual free companies have 70 players online during peak hours and a minmum of 30 players on during low points. There is a lot of variety of content in this game its just people choosing not to do it. Casuals are the life blood of an MMO and there the one where most of the developer resources are focused on while hardcore players get the rest of the resources since they represent less than 10% of the game. Anyways for every hard core player that leaves they're replaced by 10 casual players.

[Ronove]

I haven't really played that much lately. I log on for raid stuff, make sure to cap my esoterics, talk to my friends a bit, and mainly either work on the FC airship stuff (I mean I am in charge of that--I gotta do it) or level up a class I feel like leveling. I used to also make sure I capped red scrips for crafting but I've found that's like pulling teeth and don't enjoy it so I stopped. I do think it's a little quieter lately though because as people say, there's nothing entirely NEW. When new beasttribes show up I know I'll be pulled to play more because I like beasttribes but at this current moment I don't really care either way. Still enjoy the game but I think I got burned out early Heavensward. Looking forward to 3.1 nonetheless.

[Duuude007]

I capped red scrips for crafting but I've found that's like pulling teeth and don't enjoy it so I stopped.

Initially I would agree. What has changed?

Having folklore and decent melded 60 gear provides 2-hit access to legendary nodes, resulting in: red scrips time commitment roughly half of what it used to be. Even less time if you fish in between btn/min nodes.

Also, 3.07 made favors take 33% of the time that it used to, for the same rewards.

It is really a whole new game now. A shame that many people look at it through raid colored glasses, or they would find it varied and fulfilling.

[Alberel]

Only people bored are people who say that gear progression is the only form of content and that is just boring. The only Free Companies that are dying are the hardcore raiding focus companies while the large casual free companies have 70 players online during peak hours and a minmum of 30 players on during low points. There is a lot of variety of content in this game its just people choosing not to do it. Casuals are the life blood of an MMO and there the one where most of the developer resources are focused on while hardcore players get the rest of the resources since they represent less than 10% of the game. Anyways for every hard core player that leaves they're replaced by 10 casual players.

I can't remember where it was exactly but it's been shown that whilst the hardcore playerbase isn't directly worth much money to the developers they have a massive influence on the more casual players. If you think about it, the hardcore players are the ones that spend the most time on these forums and go on about the game constantly to friends. The entire perception of this game's community is based on its more hardcore members. If they get bored and leave lots of more casual players often follow suit. A game with no hardcore players has no central 'rock' in its community and the entire social side of the game falls apart. There is a reason developers still cater to hardcore players with raids and it's not just because they think it's a nice thing to do. Casuals are the lifeblood of the game, perhaps, but the hardcore players are its beating heart. It's a balancing act for sure but dismissing hardcore players' value to the game in purely monetary terms isn't quite fair.

I no longer consider myself a hardcore player anyway and most of my FC is quite casual about the game now. Most of us are bored to some degree and this is a very different kind of boredom to what we felt prior to the expansion. Between 2.X patches we were bored because we'd exhausted the content. Now we're bored because all the content just feels like more of the same and that is a much more worrying trend...

[Ronove]

Initially I would agree. What has changed?

Having folklore and decent melded 60 gear provides 2-hit access to legendary nodes, resulting in: red scrips time commitment roughly half of what it used to be. Even less time if you fish in between btn/min nodes.

Also, 3.07 made favors take 33% of the time that it used to, for the same rewards.

It is really a whole new game now. A shame that many people look at it through raid colored glasses, or they would find it varied and fulfilling.

I haven't touched the gathering red scrips. I meant the crafting ones. Should have clarified. I'm sure if I wasn't behind on my gatherers I would enjoy the gathering red scrips. The crafting ones bore me a great deal and I dislike the grind. I know it's meant to give you something to do in regards to crafting but when I have to sit there x amount of time making all the premats (or spending gil) before I can even start the collectible I'll be spamming I just get so bored and tired of it and want to do something else. To be fair though, I never enjoyed the crafting red scrip grind. I just did it and now I realize it really doesn't matter to my playstyle. Gathering red scrips however sound fun and I'm a bit mad at myself for not keeping up with that.

EDIT: Lol wait I did say Crafting in my original post. Dunno why you thought I was talking about Gathering. Also just because I mention raiding doesn't mean I just look at everything through raid colored glasses. I enjoy raiding. Is that the only reason I play the game? Hell no. If that was it I would have stopped a long time ago.

[Felis]

You completely missed what I said >_> I said two dungeons for eso. No one in their right mind is going to grind alex for eso

In 3.1 it will be 4 dungeons for eso, in 3.2 6 dungeons for the newer tome and so on. It will build up until 4.0

[Kaurie]

Pretty much, or at least that's what a tiny few would have you believe. This thread was started by somebody suggesting that the game was dead, a statement/question refuted by a string of people giving details about their respective servers and the activities going on therein.


The thread was then hijacked by Nadirah, Obysuca and now SkizzleofRagnarok, three very well-known long-term doomsaying whiners who pop up repeatedly and think shouting down all opposition at ever-increasing levels of volume and hostility makes whatever nonsense they're claiming this time suddenly become true. When you're dealing with people who think that anything that isn't continually giving them higher ilvl gear doesn't actually count as content and shouldn't have development time "wasted" on it, there's no productive discussion to be had.

Cutting almost everything to do in the game except raiding while simultaneously invalidating everything from the previous expansion(s) was a huge part of why WoW lost half its playerbase within six months of the launch of the Warlords of Draenor expansion, and it would be a mistake for FFXIV to follow suit. The wide range of stuff available for people to do that doesn't just revolve around acquiring player gear is one of the major draws of this particular game; the fact that not every single facet is going to be attractive to every single player isn't actually a problem.

What you can't do is claim that you like content A, but not B through Z, therefore B-Z don't exist and don't count as content. It seems like it frequently needs to be repeated that gear is possibly the least important element in persistent player progression, because it's the one thing that players generally don't keep, and instead delete/convert/sell on a regular basis. You can collect all the savage gear you like, but just be aware that you're going to be on the same footing as non-savage players again in a couple of months.

If anything, there needs to be even more of a focus on non-gear forms of development and progression that persist between expansions (e.g. things in the vein of minion or mount collections, housing additions, titles, cosmetic gear, alternate progression through Gold Saucer activities, expanded rep factions, etc.), and less on simply pushing up disposable gear ilvls by 10/20/30/40 every few weeks or months.

I just want to chime in and say this. I don't find any content worth doing in this game outside of raids/capping esos. I don't think this due to the fact that only ilvl gear progression can be counted as content, but because (in my opinion) FFXIV has done a horrid job of implementing other types of content.

Crafting: This is the first MMO where I can't stomach leveling a crafter. Heck, I had a hard time getting my one to level 24 and that was through leve quests cheating by buying the crafted items. I actually had fun crafting in my downtime in Wildstar, WoW and Guild Wars 2.

Hunts are an amazing idea with horrible implementation. This is akin to Guild Wars 2 world bosses. I believe they fixed the problem so they are much more epic now, but I haven't played since then. What GW2 did wrong originally, and FFXIV continues to do wrong, is to have these hunts be faceroll zerg fests. To further that, the reward is pretty useless by after about a week. There are many ideas of how to address this, but that's for another thread.

Gathering is worse than crafting. I love the way in GW2 you can just equip any type of tool and gather stuff on the go while you're questing etc. I hate that you not only have to level up your gatherer, but you're prevented from being your battle class while you gather.

PvP is chaotic and unorganized. They've built a system that excels from team coordination, but it's difficult to actually get coordination, due to being queued with randoms via roulette and having 3 teams per. The jobs are then balanced around PvE making certain jobs ridiculous in PvP.

Treasure maps: I've done a few of these before while helping people. I never really saw the point. The reward seemed meh and the mobs died easy. As I understand these rewards may be more useful for crafting?

Farming: There is no reason to take your battle class out to the depths of Azys La and farm difficult mobs. Reasons? There are no difficult mobs and nothing drops anything worthwhile.

Dungeons: The many many dungeons and raids sub 60? The only reason to do this is for glamour. I personally don't, but I guess many people do.

Gold Saucer: This was a neat idea, but I was bored of it within about 20 minutes of arriving there. Now whenever i go to sell my triad cards, the place is empty. I feel it wasn't really worth the development time.

Housing: This could be fun if getting a house was actually possible. Wildstar, conversely, did an amazing job with housing.

TL: DR Anyway, I am all for alternate types of content, but I feel that the implementation is lacking. FFXIV could do with checking out Guild Wars 2 and Wildstar for some tips on open world content, crafting and housing, vs just copying WoW for everything.

NOTE: Don't tell me to play GW2, it was a great game, but I left it due to lack of trinity, raids and any sort of mechanics.

EDIT: Fates: Again, I hate to point to GW2, but I'd recommend emulating their Dynamic Events a bit more. There are 3 main things that make the Dynamic Events much more fun than FFXIV fates. 1. tangible changes due to success/failure (i.e. if you fail to save the bridge, it collapses and the next event is rebuilding the bridge) 2. NPC's that actually talk (voiced) and breath a bit of life and story into the events. - Yes I realize 2. would cost a lot of money, but I find that 99% of the time I have no idea *why* I am doing a fate. 3. Add in max-level rewards and more max level fates (maybe even just like 5 esoterics per fate)?

[Lexia]

I can't remember where it was exactly but it's been shown that whilst the hardcore playerbase isn't directly worth much money to the developers they have a massive influence on the more casual players. If you think about it, the hardcore players are the ones that spend the most time on these forums and go on about the game constantly to friends. The entire perception of this game's community is based on its more hardcore members. If they get bored and leave lots of more casual players often follow suit. A game with no hardcore players has no central 'rock' in its community and the entire social side of the game falls apart. There is a reason developers still cater to hardcore players with raids and it's not just because they think it's a nice thing to do. Casuals are the lifeblood of the game, perhaps, but the hardcore players are its beating heart. It's a balancing act for sure but dismissing hardcore players' value to the game in purely monetary terms isn't quite fair.

I no longer consider myself a hardcore player anyway and most of my FC is quite casual about the game now. Most of us are bored to some degree and this is a very different kind of boredom to what we felt prior to the expansion. Between 2.X patches we were bored because we'd exhausted the content. Now we're bored because all the content just feels like more of the same and that is a much more worrying trend...

There are different versions of Hardcore players, There the raiders and people that need to be best at everything in the game as soon as it comes out (the ones that get bored) and then there is the players that log in everyday regardless of what going on and still get done what first group does just in longer time frame. The second group of people usually just dump them into the casual group.