What does Heavensward actually bring to the table as an expansion?

[Ryel]

I'm going to have to agree with everything the OP posted here, as many of these points are indeed ones that keep being brought up with very little response or acknowledgement.

I think your criticisms are off base and parrot things you've read on this forum or reddit.

Even if the author's criticisms were taken from other sources (they weren't by author admission) it in no way devalues the points being put forth, if anything it supplies evidence that these issues are in fact felt by and are being voiced by other players as well.

At the end of the day, in my opinion, the biggest problem that this game suffers from is player behavior. I'm not talking about trolling or abusing others, I'm talking about the content locust mentality that has people playing 8 hour shifts and ticking things of their to do list as they go. Farm this, cap that, etc.

When the expansion came out these were the people capping their characters at 60 within days and complaining about a lack of content at 60 thereafter. If players focus solely on completing things as quickly as possible and avoiding anything that slows them down, then of course the game is boring. My god, if they were to go for a 1200 mile road trip, players with that mentality would hit the interstate and drive in shifts to their destination getting there in 18 hours flat. About halfway there, they'd complain about the boring drive, and by the time they get to the destination, they'd be tired, burned out and cranky. Sound familiar?

Many others would take the same road trip in multiple legs with an overnight stop with each leg of the journey, they might plan on visiting places of interest on the way, and even get side tracked and visit other places they didn't originally plan on. By the time they get to the destination, a week might have passed, but they are fresh, happy and not bored because they saw the sights, stayed in different places, ate different things and experienced the journey. They have things to talk about and stories to tell, and probably a couple hundred pictures to share.

Imagine those two groups starting off at the same time and meeting up after their journey. The ones who drove straight through on the interstate would probably be pissed off with the others for making them wait for so long, and be itching to get home (again by the fastest route possible). The other group would have their stories to tell and pictures to share, but a very unreceptive audience.

I feel like we are at that point with FFXIV. There is a relatively large group of players who play the game in such a focused manner that they complete the content much faster than intended, and get bored and annoyed, or disillusioned. They complain about the game, about having nothing to do, or about everything being the same, cookie cutter content, or copied from WoW.

Since I'm still mid way on the journey and enjoying the ride, I really can't say I understand or agree with the criticisms being leveled at the game or SE. There is so much to do I can't do it all, and I've been playing since ARR Beta phase 3.

This implies that the content being provided is substantial enough on it's own merit that it requires a significant amount of time to complete, sadly however it does not.

Lets look at the 50-60 grind:

At first glance it looks like a daunting amount of exp to acquire and a lot of ground to cover until you realize that the game quite literally throws exp at you at every turn.

Rested exp bonus is huge when it comes to just getting battle exp for killing mobs, which is coupled with the extreme amount of exp that dungeon mobs already reward on their own and first time bonus exp every time you get a new player in queue, add to this that during the entire journey through the main story scenario every single main quest, side quest, map exploration point, Challenge log entry, FATE, leve quest, and hunt mark unlocked is not only providing you with large bulks of exp as you progress but simultaneously throwing gear at you so that you never have to stop to craft your own equipment or gather gil to buy it off the market board.

It's specifically designed in a way that if you go from one point to the other you virtually have zero breaks in content while leveling and enjoying the story.

This means that anyone with 30 minutes to an hour a day (queues provided when doing dungeons) can easily make their way up from 50 to 60 over a period of a few weeks if their main form of enjoyment is battle content (which btw is required to unlock the crafting / gathering content).

If your pace is faster or slower than that then obviously your personal play experience will be very different, but this game isn't like a lot of other games where leveling to cap often took extended periods of time.

This brings us to what happens when you actually reach level cap:

When players hit 60 they start flooding you with Law tomes to gear out your first job ASAP via Hunt marks and daily Roulettes ensuring that you are able to attain starting content ilvls as quickly as possible. (bonus points now because you can get Esoterics tomes while farming law tomes)

Additionally while it would be easy to try and blame players for the content locust mentality, with the exception of Savage Alexander almost all content is designed to be completed both quickly (because of the duty finder) and repeatedly (because of weekly caps).

It isn't players who designed and implemented the weekly resets, lockouts, and limits concerning Esoterics, Red Scrips, and Alexander drops. In fact many players have come on these very forums suggesting things like larger currency caps or rollover credit because they don't want to feel forced to log in every week and grind the same things over and over for fear of permanently falling behind other players. these comments are often met with community (as in the other players who post on these forums) responses that it's not all that hard and to just log in and do it.

Is it any wonder that those same players soon get tired of running Fractal Ad Nauseum and Neverhate for the dozenth time?

Which brings us to Ex Primals and Alexander:

Like it or hate it Bismark Ex was dead on release as far as content goes (I personally enjoy the fight mind you), the ilvl of the weapons were eclipsed by law upgrades (ilvl 175 really?) and it was used as just a stepping stone for Ravana Ex.

Depending on your player skill these fights took you anywhere from a few hours (not always consecutive) to a few weeks to complete, and the same party you often cleared it with the first time, usually just went back and did it again until everyone got what they wanted, making the fight irrelevant to a large number of players now as they just get their Esoterics weapon and don't even bother.

As for Alexander (normal) there are tons of posts about it's difficulty level being too low (it was cleared not even 2 hours after it's release if i recall) and most players casually farm it over the course of an hour or so in the duty finder because it's designed to be done that way.

So what does this all mean?

It means you can't sit there and blame the content locust mentality on the players when the game is constantly providing content with no real staying power. The majority of content is not only designed to be run quickly and repeatedly on a weekly basis but also punishes you in the form of unobtainable upgrades (until later patches) if you don't keep up with the pace that it sets, or becomes completely invalidated when something else is added.

You mentioned hard mode dungeons as recycled, I don't think that's really fair. If they were simply recycled it would be the same dungeon with boosted versions of he same trash and Bosses in the same map, but the hard mode dungeons are not that at all, so I find your criticism completely off base. You call the relic quests an abomination, but why? That is what the community asked for. An alternate way to obtain a high ilvl weapon that is upgradeable and can be earned through long term play rather than clearing turns in the Coil so that players who lack the skill or time availability to complete coil, had an upgrade path for their weapon. If that isn't a grindy way of obtaining something, I don't know what is, and that is what people asked for.

Dungeons (Hard mode ones specifically) are essentially recycled, often having similar mobs and using the same assets and designs (obviously) there's a large difference in seeing something new like say... Hullbreaker Isle and going back to run Sastasha (Hard). While in a lot of cases this is acceptable because they tell different stories or continue off of previous ones it doesn't change the fact that from a development standpoint they're still mostly recycled.

As for relic most players took issues with the grind versus reward, but this is once again an issue with the staying power of content in general.

In the end, the problem you are talking about, OP, is self inflicted.

See large text above.

What I can't quite get my head around is that people approach the game like it's supposed to provide them with completely new content every time they log in, but don't want to do anything for it. It's an MMORPG, some of the novelty in content is playing with others and reacting to how they handle things. There is no way that the developers can keep up with player appetite for content, nor their ability to consume it. But, if people login to cap tomes and do their dailies, and that's all, they have no room for complaint. You're not making use of the framework that is in place, nor are you making use of all the rides in the theme park. Instead you're using a very restricted subset of the theme park, and complaining that more isn't done for you.

It's not a matter of finding brand new content when you log in all the time, but rather keeping enough content relevant that you aren't doing the exact same things all the time, for example there are only a handful of ways to get Eso for your weekly cap and it's really as easy as running one dungeon for 15 minutes a day over 5 days. Or once you have weapons from Ravana you no longer have any need to do the content again, same goes for Alexander (normal) depending on how many jobs you play. Players already complain that there's tons of content that just sits there undone because there's simply no non-excessively grindy reasons (I'm looking at you relic dungeon drops) to do them.

Why run Ramuh or Leviathan Ex these days? Ponies? Glamour? both are subjective reasons.

How about Coil? For the story? people clamored about nerfing coil for the story or about adding coil storymode etc for the entire 2.0 life cycle, and yet i almost never see anyone doing it these days. Additionally there are a large number of players who actually complain about various non battle systems not being worth it on their own merits (the impacts of crafting / gathering).

Other MMO's (like one previously made by this same company with a 13 year lifecycle) found various ways to keep some forms of content relevant for literally years (not all of them were RNG).

TL;DR: While FFXIV has a solid base of systems it does a poor job of taking advantage of or keeping many of those systems relevant, leaving many players at certain levels of content completion only doing a handful of activities on a repeat weekly basis that encourages content locust mentality and burnout. Many players (especially those who have seen what Yoshida and his team are capable of in the 1.19-1.23 patches) are wondering when we're actually going to see more substantial content (and core system design) additions to the game considering this is supposed to be an MMO expansion.

EDIT: It's possible that Airship content will alleviate some of the issues mentioned but it's highly unlikely if they want to keep raids where they are in the hierarchy of content, I'd love to be proven wrong though.