The game is more dead than it was pre-3.1

[RadiantRay]

This is why 3.1 sucked in my opnion.
Short version: It's too easy and bores me out of my mind

Long version: Everything is irrelevant

~Pharos Sirius HM and that other dungeon: They drop i185 gear and only i185 gear why do I even care? I spammed Alex normal already in the previous patch and it gave me i190... on to the next piece of content

~Void Ark First Impressions: OMG COOL CUTSCENES. OMG WHAT'S HE DOING HERE. EW THAT BOSS IS DISGUSTING. OMG THIS FINAL BOSS MUSIC IS EPIC.
All over runs after that: I'm so bored why doesn't these bosses hit the raid harder...why does everything not hurt in here. I want to heal something. OMG why does it recruit 2 healers per raid if there's 23 other people here and nothing to heal but the current main tank and derps who actually get hit by the painfully obvious and slow mechanics.
Only good thing that came from this is that it handed out i210 for doing pretty much nothing. Glamour? YAY!!!! owait weekly lockout..../doesn't run VA anymore not even for the glamour

TLDR: Void Ark is



~Diadem: Drops only gear and 98% of the time it's worthless 160 or 180 (why i179 entry requirement I'll never know). 1.98% of the time it's 210 gear and .02% of the time it's 210 gear that's actually good. For content of this magnitude I expected more. Not much exploration if the maps aren't randomly generated. I don't craft. Everything has too much hp, the quest you get can be done in 5~10 mins. The rewards suck (who actually cares about materia if you can put it in nothing relevant). It's just one big dps race to see if you can get credit on star rank mobs. Why not have heals and enmity count towards credit? Not every class is a dps class you know. This is a trinity mmo right? This is an MMO right? If I waste time to help other teams I risk not getting rewards for my team so every raid for itself. I actually wish the other teams would wipe out when killing star mobs lol.

~Lord of Vermillion: Lords of wut?

~Diadem/Void Ark hand-outs: This makes Alexander savage even more irrelevant than it already was with it's insane weekly lockouts 2 random drops per clear. Now you're going to have even less people attempting to do Savage good going guys! Oh wait there's more, diadem is even more face roll than Alex Normal and it gives 210 gear. So even Alex Normal is seeing less love even with it's lockout removed. Great planning guys!.

tl;dr: "catch-up" patches suck and they should stop invalidating their own content before it's even release.

/end post

[Valoiz]

The wait for 3.1 was TOO long and the patch imself weak. Void Ark is boring (PS3 stuck on second boss sometimes) and the gear is ugly and kinda obsolete. Diadem is all bout the zerg and excludes PS3 players (90 min spaming atacks...). New dungeons are just a new way to get esoterics. Small servers are dying cuz the lack of population. SE need to do something fast!!!!!

[Lone-wolfe-02]

I still don't understand why they released Diadem alongside Void ark

[RiceisNice]

What this game desperately needed with 3.0 was a new character progression system. Some form of alternative advancement. Almost every MMO I have ever played introduced something like this with its first expansion as it gives players long-term goals and an overarching sense of progress beyond all the individual repetitive dungeon runs. Some more interesting equipment stats that makes players genuinely excited to get a drop wouldn't hurt either.

This is one of the areas that WoW dropped the ball on big time for WoD. I can at least say FFXIV did it somewhat well with some of the jobs. I can't say the same for BRD, MCH (even though it's a new job, but still) and NIN.

Beyond that though, because of how straight forward the stats are (with no additional affects), being level 60 at the start of 3.0 will still be the same as it was in 3.5 unless they make fundamental/core changes to the job (like they did with DRG in I believe 2.4).

[Strika23]

SE has to figure something out soon. I used to look forward everyday to coming home to play with my friends/fc. I feel burnt out lately and bored. It definitely is a domino effect when you don't have the social aspect of the game. When a mass amount of players leave the game at once, everything declines fairly quickly. Even though content was a bite repetitive before 3.0, doing it with friends was fun and often challenging. Introducing newcomers and helping them with relic quests was also fun due to the social aspect and meeting new people. When you take that out of the equation, it becomes a daily grind of the same content which is NOT FUN.
My FC is a ghost town with 2 other active members, none of my LS are active, queues are horrid to level off classes (especially dps) and only 1/3 of my friends list of 150 people still play as the rest have quit, taken breaks or transferred servers. 3.1 was nothing but a band aid on a weeping wound. I could list a ton of things SE could do to get their playerbase back, but they rarely listen and keep making horrible mistakes.
I will give them credit the two new dungeons are good, but 2 dungeons on repeat in ex roulette is just a HUGE NO NO.

[Heskett]

I'm holding my breath until 3.2 to see if SE doesn't repeat the mistake of over-tuning Alexander part 2. Alex Savage shattered my static group of two years (which consisted of people who had been playing XI for like 4+ years prior). I also am nervous about SE adjusting tanks for 3.2 as well. I love being able to DPS while tanking and if they take that away from me I might be finished with this game.

[Fevelle]

I have to disagree with all of you. Void Park is the most fun I have in the whole week of chores FFXIV delivers me. It's great to see the other alliances falling apart and fighting while your party do all the job trying to control everything and making sure chaos do not ensue in the whole raid.

[DragonSlayer45]

Someone please explain to me why they dont just implement more XI styles of content? 13 years of content right there...

Just going by this forum, FFXI apparently did nothing right, and the fact that it survived and thrived for over a decade was due to the Final Fantasy name alone. We're called out on wanting stuff from FFXI with people saying "Don't make this game FFXI-2." or "If you want FFXI stuff, go back to XI." Yet FFXI didn't make content dead as soon as it was released and even the earliest, low level content wasn't invalidated for years until the major shift when Abyssea came along.

As someone who's played both games, what FFXI did right is what FFXIV is doing wrong.

[Alberel]

Just going by this forum, FFXI apparently did nothing right, and the fact that it survived and thrived for over a decade was due to the Final Fantasy name alone. We're called out on wanting stuff from FFXI with people saying "Don't make this game FFXI-2." or "If you want FFXI stuff, go back to XI." Yet FFXI didn't make content dead as soon as it was released and even the earliest, low level content wasn't invalidated for years until the major shift when Abyssea came along.

As someone who's played both games, what FFXI did right is what FFXIV is doing wrong.

Some people just hear FFXI and think grind and for some reason assume that absolutely anything inspired by FFXI must be inherently grindy. They don't seem to be able to separate mechanics and systems (of which FFXI had many great ones) from incentives (of which FFXI had very few, and thus they were dragged out to keep people playing). It's entirely possible to implement the great systems that FFXI had, or draw some inspiration from them, without making them soul-destroyingly grindy.

[Nicobo]

...As someone who's played both games, what FFXI did right is what FFXIV is doing wrong.

what FFXI did right is what FFXIV is doing wrong:
FFXI still supports PS2 , AAR still supports PS3 ^^;