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

[FoxyAreku]

Why does everyone seem to forget the entire 51 to 60 leveling process?
I mean, that was the core of the expansion, and the leveling phase is always the core of any expansion until the first major patch introduces a raid. It's like everyone forgot about the million quests and epic story they did for a week.

[Daralii]

>_> And 3.0 is Ex primals, Neverreap, Fractal and Alex. See a change? I sure don't. Same things, different names.

2.1 added CT. 3.1 adds void ark. Still no difference and hasn't been for 2 years.

That's my point. You could have said the exact same thing of ARR when it went live. HW could and probably should have had more content at launch, but I wouldn't be surprised if the release timeframe was decided by Square's higherups or the shareholders.

3.1's also bringing the airship stuff, which is supposed to be pretty extensive.

[Colorful]

Why does everyone seem to forget the entire 51 to 60 leveling process?
I mean, that was the core of the expansion, and the leveling phase is always the core of any expansion until the first major patch introduces a raid. It's like everyone forgot about the million quests and epic story they did for a week.

The story was amazing, I'll give you that. But the side quests? I found to be nothing more than a grind, I tried reading some instead of just skipping past them, but they never managed to get me hooked in. Having me travel back and forth without the ability to fly yet, again and again for what seems like no reason wasn't fun to me. Side quests can be done right, but does FFXIV do them right? No. If we're talking about the story specifically, I picked up the Witcher 3 for about $80 AUD, that's $2 more than the price of Heavensward + a month of subscription. The Witcher 3 gave me interesting combat, an incredibly interesting and well done story, with very little to no filler, side quests that kept me entertained and weren't just boring "find my art piece that I lost" type of quests, even one where I had to find a pan (or was it a pot?) in a house was interesting! That's how well done the "leveling experience" is in some single player games.

If an expansion's only good part is story, and that on its own is subpar that's a bad sign. An MMO has to keep you paying, it has to keep people subscribed and put out interesting and varied high-quality content, a lot of it too. FFXIV is currently not doing that, telling people to unsubscribe until the next expansion isn't a good idea unless you either want the game to die, or never release patches but expansions very few months instead.

[Khalithar]

Sorry you feel that way OP, I think it might be time for you to take a little break and come back when they add some new content.

[Dagda]

Something tells me you all just like to complain.

[raela]

The story was amazing, I'll give you that. But the side quests? I found to be nothing more than a grind, I tried reading some instead of just skipping past them, but they never managed to get me hooked in. Having me travel back and forth without the ability to fly yet, again and again for what seems like no reason wasn't fun to me.

I've waited to do side quests until after I got flying... And I actually did find they had a cohesive story. Several storylines were actually kinda depressing. But I still enjoyed them.

[Aeliott]

There is a lack of medium-core content....extreme primals fill that role well, but we only got 2 - one of which is merely a gatekeeper you'll rarely do again - and will likely not get more than one for subsequent patches. Alexander normal mode doesn't really cut it either, because it's an essential gear stepping stone it's more or less something you barely think about doing - not really taxing. Before, Coil was definitely hardcore content but it didn't really feel inaccessible for medium-core players to chip away at either - I successfully led a static through it despite limited availability, but Alex savage upped that ante significantly, especially with A3 and A4. 24-man content is generally easy...the middle-ground is a hard place to be in. Apart from 2 extremes, everything else is faceroll and savage is even more exclusive than coil was. I'm not the kind of player who gets bored then comes back on new patches - I do enjoy the odd bit of PVP, Triple Triad and leveling other battle classes - but at the moment I still feel in this limbo where it feels like only the extreme wings of the casual/hardcore content spectrum are catered for.

To be fair Alex normal was _almost_ there, but at the same time if it was any more difficult people would rant about how they couldn't get their loot but they kept wiping.

In terms of actual gameplay content Heavensward added nothing really. There is nothing new to do - dungeons, extremes, a raid, all the old saucer stuff. That said, the team for this game DO throw out patches faster than other MMOs. I have faith that a lot of good things are coming - 2.55 compared to 2.0 are significantly different after all. I just hope they're not another brain-dead part of a daily/weekly grind you do out of habit.

[Wildsprite]

The issue we have here is that this game is catering toward the casual player and incase you haven't noticed quite alot of the casuals don't want things like EX Primals(I did these entirely with my FC or wouldn't have them done otherwise) and Alex Savage or Coil Savage( don't want anything to do with these raids). Heck some of them don't even want Alex(myself I'm only going to do it to complete the quest or quests) normal or Coil with Echo.

My point being: As long as the majority is players that don't care about medium and hardcore content don't expect more than a slow trickle of it.

[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.

[Kosmos992k]

>_> And 3.0 is Ex primals, Neverreap, Fractal and Alex. See a change? I sure don't. Same things, different names.

2.1 added CT. 3.1 adds void ark. Still no difference and hasn't been for 2 years.

I see, so, what exactly would you have added that would meet your requirement for "difference"? It's an MMORPG in a fantasy setting. In an expansion you add trials and dungeons, you add new jobs, you add new zones, new modes of travel/play. All these things they did and more. With patch 3.1 the are bringing a new 24-man raid, dungeons and more. I don't honestly see a problem unless you simply hate new content. This is rather like people complaining that new armor is just functionally identical to old armor. Well of course it bloody is, it's armor, what did you expect it to do sprout wings and confer flight? The same is true of the new content added with HW. They expanded the existing story, and added new zones, new dungeons new level caps, new jobs, new trials and a new raid with a story mode for casual players and a Savage mode for raiders. What were you expecting them to do, transform the game into a squad based shooter?

There is no prestige, there might have been within the first month of 2.0 or so, but after that, practically everyone had one. Everyone and their mother got a relic. It's nothing special. It has about the same amount of prestige as going out and buying an i115 white weapon from a npc.

Practically everyone? Good grief, I'd love to see the census stats on that because in my experience it's far from practically everyone who has a fully upgraded relic, and those that do are quite happy and proud of it. I think your reality bubble must be populated with a compeltely different kind of people than the ones I meet every day.

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.

I didn't quite get the same sense from your full post as I do from your TL;DR: version. You described at length how in your opinion it doesn't take long to get to 60. If it takes players weeks to get to 60, then pray tel how are they saying there is not enough content? Any game that takes weeks to complete is more than worth the cost of the HW expansion, but hitting lvl 60 on a job is hardly completing the expansion is it? I'm actually kind of confused by your post because you spend so long describing how you can level up, and then what happens after you level up, but you're not really addressing the point made.

The point being, for players who play in a very focused and time intensive manner, they can cap their level at 60 within a small number of days, and be farming Alex Normal for Alex Savage, then onto Savage before many players have surpassed lvl 52. Playing in such a tightly focused manner skips huge amounts of content in the game, but there are a fair number of players who only desire to raid, and don't bother with anything else in the game. These are the ones speeding to the end-game and then burning out by voluntarily farming content for gear drops to use when raiding. When those same players start complaining about the content in the expansion not being enough, or being copy/paste from ARR (which IMHO is a completely ridiculous assertion to make), they are complaining from a position that they inflicted on themselves.

If people burn through 10-20% of a game, and get bored, then why should we pay any attention to them for their complaints when they haven't touched the remaining 80+% of the game?

I'm really not sure what it is that people expect to see in an expansion. The expansion of FFXIV added;

New race
New jobs
New level cap
New crafting system
New trials
New raid (with two modes)
New Dungeons
New (and much larger) zones
New FC content (Airships)
New mode of travel (Flight)
New monsters
New gear
New side quests
New leve quests
New hunts
...

All those EXPAND the original game significantly. How is that not an expansion? Seems pretty good to me, it definitely expands the game from what we had with ARR 2.55. Especially considering that this development work was done in parallel with the continual schedule of major patches every 3 months and minor patches every 4-6 weeks in between, along with hot fixes.

What is it that you who are complaining would consider extensive enough or different enough, to satisfy your expectations?

There is a lack of medium-core content....extreme primals fill that role well

Unless the world has changed significantly, EX mode primals are not "mid-core" content. When released EX primals are end-game, hardcore content, and only become mid-core once nerfs, echo and overgear puts them within reach of the less elite players. This was how it was with ARR, and I have seen and heard nothing different with regard to HW. I think this idea that EX mode primals are less than hardcore comes from hardcore players who have burned out on existing end-game content and won't play other non-end-game content in the game. Seems like people's expectations rescale dynamically as they overgear content and burnout.

Adding Alex normal wasn't the big mistake. The big mistake was

...expecting hardcore players to do anything other than burnout on farming and start complaining...