The game is more dead than it was pre-3.1

[Mature]

If you aren't crafting , the game will be dead for you. Have u got all your classes/ jobs to 60? If not, there ia nothing to complain about game being dead

crafting is eating all my spare time but the funny thing is I am enjoying it.

I still need to level all my clases to 60 (apart from smn) so still got lots to do.

I wonder what is it that people do apart from AFK or rubber banding the controller against a wall all day long.....

[Alexftw]

As for those who say clear a4s before you go talk... I've got just one issue. Been trying to find a static for 2 months together with my gf and making one since one month ago and we are at 5/8 still... Can't find 2 good dps(either 2 melee or melee + smn, ye we got a good bard) and a decent sch or really good ast.

Why we had no chance at clearing it?

Maybe because some people such as me been recruiting for 3 weeks in a row having spent over 20 hours now advertising in pf, asking people, checking forums, and still can't get a full static for savage.. Yeah everyone seems to already have a static or not interested.

Meanwhile we been clearing a1s, a2s and thordan in party finder but.. A3s in party finder.. If a1s takes 3 hours to fill a party, a3s doesn't even get one lol.

Before anyone says Shiva is dead. It is full many times and pf often has 20+ posts, plus there's parties that cleared a4s and thordan gets cleared in pf there all the time. Also my friend list itself has 25+ out of 60 ppl on all the time.(they all have statics buhhhh).

[Rynia]

What is it, that the complainers really want out of an MMORPG

Some people want the gear just to have the gear. Doesn't have to be for anything, could be for glamour or similar.

But what most people complaining really want is content that is actually fun - LoV and Diadem aren't really fun for most people and they were the big draws of the last patch, which was five months after the last content patch. When you make people wait five months (for genuine reason, but still) for content, making it two variations on "zerg the thing" and only adding a very short MSQ is lackluster to say the least and not condusive to keeping people playing.
What we want is content that isn't faceroll easy, but isn't so hard it becomes a chore rather than fun. Alexander Savage is not fun. Hell, my raid group had more fun running random fc people through old coil and primals than we ever have in Alexander. Thordan probably hit closest to the mark in terms of difficulty for the general raiding playerbase, I think. I'm hoping the dev team has learned from their disastrous decision to directly attack the world-firsters by making Alexander so difficult, and the second iteration of Alexander will be closer to Coil in difficulty.

Hopefully, relic and the new sidequests tomorrow will revitalise things a bit. But with all the strange design decisions being made lately, and the fact that they really need to expand their team but for whatever reason can't/won't, overall faith in the developers is definitely going down. Which is not good for the game. And I'm sad about that, because I do still love this game and want it to do well ...

/snip

Ugh I hate that argument. CLEAR EVERYTHING would be a fine argument if that was actually possible for more than a very small portion of the playerbase. And Shiva isn't dead, can confirm =P

[Alexftw]

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.

Tbh the only fun part about diadem and void arc is competing to stay top1 dps out of 24 people all the time lol which sadly is rarely ever a competition as most people slack, suck or lack gear. Nothing else. Really simple mechanisms <..< and repetitive. As for diadem I don't even do it for gear but money. Some materias sell for 1m. (That's like 200k per hour seeing the amt of runs it takes to get 50 tokems).

[Ayuhra]

I wonder sometimes if people (like myself) would dig into Heavensward more if it were more fun to play at the most basic, physical level. I love the expansion. I love the music, scenery, story, dungeons are more interesting, quests are more interesting, but the ability bloat and drastic changes in how some classes operate (hiya, Bards) is a bit of a turn off. WoW might be a disaster content-wise these days but if there is one thing it's always gotten right it's that it's always felt good to play. I think 2.0 handled fine (long global cool down takes getting used to but I don't think it's a problem) it's HW's spill of yet more abilities that need to be used in rotation that gets me.

[Theodric]

-snip

WoW is still there though if you want to play it on the side. I agree that ability bloat is an issue...but I'm content that they didn't completely change how the classes work with the expansion. WoW began to bore me when they gutted my favourite class and changed it every major patch/expansion to the point where what I liked originally no longer existed.

[RukiaFae]

snip

I would craft more if I didn't need a billion mats for everything. By the time gather all the mats I'm like screw it. I loved making things pre 3.0. Daily provisions take forever so I never finish them now.
There are plenty of things to do in the game but once they feel like a chore it gets boring. The expansion was fun but the end game is seriously lacking.

[Imakun]

The core mechanics of the game need to be reworked if we want to see some changes. The game structure is extremely simple and this transfers onto every other aspect of the damn thing.

When you have only 3 forced roles there's only so much variety and flavor you can add to Jobs before they start looking the same. We have already reached the point where the only "difficulty" is a DPS check that forces everyone to basically play a DPS with tanking or healing capabilities.
There is no customization when it comes to the Jobs themselves, we are forced to pick the same cross-class skills because there is NO CHOICE.
We've been farming tomestones and getting 1 piece of gear each week since basically the beginning, and now that we're well into the game's first expansion we're still doing just that.
The community suffers from the absence of things to do together when you can use the Duty Finder to do basically everything alone but the very top-tier fights. Which you do because it's the only thing left to do since every other thing has been rendered useless thanks to the vertical progression of gear. Which brings me back to the no customization part.
What do we do now? Level up a job, farm 210 gear to farm 200 gear for a secondary job which you'll never use for anything because it's not 210. Wait for the next tier of tomestones, repeat. And this has been going on since the beginning.

And the "everyone should be able to get everything and be on equal ground" thing.. this is not how a successful and long lasting MMO works. Why am I being put behind weekly walls if I had the time and will to farm more? Why the need of nerfing old content so people can "catch up"?
Catch up on what, glamour? If I reach the top tier, what am I supposed to do? Savage mode of things just for the heck of it? What can I use the Savage drops for other than having an easier time with dungeons in a couple of patches? This needs to stop. Expand endgame and let people progress and go through difficult content that's not a DPS check.

I don't want this to be Final Fashion Fantasy Farm XIV for god's sake.

It's like the developers decided to put the game on a very narrow path that can't go anywhere else unless they tear down some walls. Some things should have been done from the very beginning and I guess now it would be too late (expand Roles, get rid of classes and expand Jobs capabilities, grant more freedom with party makeups, etc.) The balance of the game doesn't know what to do with itself.

Is this really just a cash grab game to sustain SE's other games? There's so much potential here, please don't waste it.
Be more daring, Yoshida. This is not a single player FF with co-op missions and chats, because that's what it looks like to me most of the time. Make XIV the MMO YOU want, not what the community of the OF wants.

[Stanelis]

The other side of things is their homogenized game design means they are pretty much out of new mechanics options.

Yeah this exactly. The battle system of FFXIV needs a massive overhaul to add depth to it, else the game won't last (unless some people really do play it mainly for glamours).

[Airget]

There is an aspect of growing pains currently, they tried to do something different with the "raid" content Alexander but I feel it fell short of their expectations. While it was nice to open a wider audience to enjoy the story, I imagine it took away from producing content that could of replaced "story mode alexander".

Honestly, maybe the trick behind making harder content is just a "hard cap" on syncing. I mean honestly I'm certain people remember entering Amdapor Keep for the first time in 2.0 IL 45 dungeons, dropped IL 55 gear, other than that you could obtain tomes to get i70(Unlimited) and i90(weekly) then later on i80(Crystal Tower)

So we started off at i45, recall how tough it was to beat that dungeon, because you weren't as strong and yet once you fully geared yourself you were double the strength and now it was a cakewalk.

This is where I feel content is falling flat atm, there is no incentive to do something synced/challenging yourself because it's just there for fun, so it's not really done if you get nothing out of it, and yet it could be used as a way to liven up content without making new content that easily becomes obsolete.

When it comes to Story mode Alexander, I think they could produce content for another challenge rather than duplicating it on top of one another.

Like let's take Alexander Savage for a moment, it's 190 to enter any of them I think(honestly speaking haven't done them) so why not this for a grand idea.

You create alexander savage i190, and say it caps at i230 aka (easy mode)

Then rather than make a "hard" and "easy" mode for that content the difficulty could be based on the IL cap.

So say
IL 230=Easy (1 chest, 1 item)
IL210=Hard (2 chest, 2 item2)
IL190=Very Hard (3 chest, 4 items) * unique items drop (2 new items)
IL180=Insane (4 chest, 5 items) *additional unique items drop (3 new items total)

Why not try difficulty curve with that mentality for one patch and see how it turns out create rare loot, that's hard to get, and heck, be evil, have the IL180 drop something that gives IL240 accessory and then when the next patch roles around those competitive raiders who took the challenge would have an additional edge to being a world first.

There are ways to increase the depth of the game they just need to take the time to look back at old content and play around with how difficult content feels under certain IL.