So, pretty dead lately....

[Ortamus]

Then people bitch that it's "not real content" because there's no rewards.

They can't win for losing.

There is no greater reward than fun.

[Glasya]

Out of curiosity, but what content could they possibly make that will make people "not bored"?

To reiterate,

"FFXI" might be a dirty word around here but the developers could stand to take a few leaves from its book. Notorious Monsters, dungeons you explore within a time limit, dungeons in the overworld, frontier work helping out NPCs and defending caravans/fortifications from legitimately dangerous mobs, enemy raids on towns like XIV used to have with the Atomos events in 1.0.
I say all that and I've never actually played XI. But I wish I had. Because it sounds awesome.

You've also got stuff like the Gold Saucer.
Here's another idea: Add combat GATEs to the Event Square rotation. Then add Battle Square as a sort of roguelike Light Party dungeon with dynamic iLv scaling and increasingly difficult waves of enemies with RNG-handicaps. Make the final boss harder than Savage Coil/Alexander even without handicaps and award like 1 million MGP for clearing it all (with the assumption people wont for a long time). Then add slightly sub-raid level gear to the MGP vendor so it's a viable method of obtaining gear. Any worse than the equivalent of i200 in the current patch cycle, or without auxiliary effects/procs, and it's pointless though.
The reason people love FFVII's GS is because the rewards are good and the minigames are fun in their own right. XIV's is an embarassment, and all the protracted RNG/grind bullshit does is alienate people. Yoshi is deathly afraid of people having fun, but if Chocobo racing were more like Mario Kart I'd be playing it right now.

[Erdgeist]

University classes started up again.
That's pretty much my reason for being dead this past week.

[SkizzleofRagnarok]

Erdgeist: so everyone that plays FFXIV is a student :P?

[Obysuca]

The thread was then hijacked by Nadirah, Obysuca and now SkizzleofRagnarok,

Gives reasons on why people feel the game is dead lately. Get told that we "hijacked" the thread >_>

People talked about how it feels dead on their server. We told them why it does. That's not hijacking, that's giving them examples of why's it dead, rather than people going "It's dead here. Why's it dead? No clue."

Erdgeist: so everyone that plays FFXIV is a student :P?

I enjoy how people use the "school" excuse for people not being on :P

Since the dawn of mmos, people have still gone to work and school and still played mmos just as much lol Maybe if its dying down because of school/work, its because they realize XIV has no staying power / much of anything fun, so they actually enjoy being off the game. Which again, defeats the purpose of a MMO.

The point of a mmo is to keep people coming back every day, whenever they can, even if its is getting out of school/work and coming home and getting on. Imo, if a mmo makes people feel like they should unsub for months or only play for 2-3 days a week, then it's failing it's purpose as a mmo. I remember when older mmos had the goal in mind "let's make worthwhile content to keep people playing as much as possible and make it fun, so they don't get burnt out within a week or two" and guess what, those mmos still continue to this day.

If XIV continues the current trend, I really don't see it lasting another 2 years and it'll just be added to the pile of "big waste of money/development" that a majority of the mmos in the last 10 years have gone to within 1-2 years or less of their release. Reading interviews and everything from SE, you can tell it's heading toward this already, seeing as how before 2.2, Yoshi said they'd rather pull the plug than go f2p, then shortly after, did a 180 on that statement saying he'd consider f2p.

[TheUltimate3]

To reiterate,
Here's another idea: Add combat GATEs. Add a Battle Arena as a roguelike Light Party dungeon with dynamic iLv scaling and increasingly difficult waves of enemies with RNG-handicaps. Make the final boss harder than Savage Coil/Alexander even without handicaps and award like 1 million MGP for clearing it all. Then add slightly sub-raid level gear to the MGP vendor.

And how does any of that equate to fun and will last x amount of months between patches?

Just bouncing from these ideas. Combat GATEs will just go the same as normal GATEs, big for a month then forgotten.

A battle arena wouldn't be bad, except I honestly cant see them getting dynamic ilvl scaling to work (it will either be really hard or braindead easy. No in between), but it'll still be hot for a month then fall off. A final boss harder than Savage Alexander but the end rewards being sub-raid level gear? Yeah that'll never happen (Like really. It can't.)

The idea of putting gear for MGP is an interesting one, I'll give it that. But these ideas (at least to me) don't seem to fix whatever the problem people have is. They can add this, and people would still get bored and complain there isn't anything to do.

[Glasya]

And how does any of that equate to fun and will last x amount of months between patches?

The onus is on SE to create and implement ideas to keep people amused. I'm just spitballing here. Ultimately people are looking for something to work towards that isn't a horrific grind of stuff they've already run a million times (see: the relic, which didn't have a single unique fight/dungeon aside from Chimera/Hydra).

A smorgasbord of different content should be available when one logs in; "Do I want to do X? Or do I want to do Y? Or Z? They're all viable forms of progression."
I know it's a pain in the ass to implement/balance, but we really need auxiliary effects and procs on gear. It's the only way to inject any kind of variety into endgame gear. And when you have diverse gear you can create different ways of handing it for individuals to gear up in-tandem over the long-term.

[Xatsh]

University classes started up again.
That's pretty much my reason for being dead this past week.

I wish I had the playtime I did in College.

18hrs a week of classes. 20hrs a week to study.

Less 8hrs a day of sleep.

= 74 hours a week of playtime. (Spent about 40 of those actually playing mmos back in the day)

[Intaki]

I say all that and I've never actually played XI. But I wish I had. Because it sounds awesome.

Then go play it. Right now. You can buy the all-inclusive edition with every expansion for super cheap on Steam. Go, go get it! Stop reading this post and go start playing FFXI! It's right there waiting for you.

I'll be here in two hours when you come back to tell everyone how horrifically outdated and poorly designed the game is.

"Do I want to do X? Or do I want to do Y? Or Z? They're all viable forms of progression."

This already exists. Your problem is that you don't like the variety that has been offered.

[Xatsh]

The onus is on SE to create and implement ideas to keep people amused. I'm just spitballing here. Ultimately people are looking for something to work towards that isn't a horrific grind of stuff I've already run a million times (see: the relic, which didn't have a single unique fight/dungeon aside from Chimera/Hydra).

A smorgasbord of different content should be available when one logs in; "Do I want to do X? Or do I want to do Y? Or Z? They're all viable forms of progression."
I know it's a pain in the ass to implement/balance, but we really need auxiliary effects and procs on gear. It's the only way to inject any kind of variety into endgame gear. And when you have diverse gear you can create different ways of handing it for individuals to gear up in-tandem over the long-term.

The issue with gear is the devs need to try to perfectly balance everything.

It is a trade off in the end. Do you want perfect balance between all jobs within a role or do you want uniqueness and the ability to add more variety.

Yoshida has made it known his views are balance is extremely important more so then variety. For me I would rather have imbalance to a degree if it removes the restrictions.

Atm our stats on gear you can literately figure you by taking a excel spread sheet and dragging columns down. That is poor game design in my eye. IS it balanced yea, but it is a bad thing in the end the loss is just too great.

Honestly in the end Balance only matters in PvP. If you try to balance everything in PvE you remove something from the game. Not only should we have a large variety of stats. Why is there no elemental weaknesses, dmg type weaknesses (We have the resistances in the stat menu already so it is built into the game), Why does the environment and weather not effect the spells/attacks. Older mmos did this, why is a state of the art mmo so stripped down of features? It all comes down to over worrying about balance. Perfect Balance for PvE is a bad thing.