The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

[Belhi]

Here is where the sad thing lies in relic weapons. If the developers intend to make it for people who want to go the easy yet long route to getting the weapon, then whatever. However, their team who are suppose to be making fun content believes that only mindless grinds should be in it. I remember they used interesting content back then like puzzles that couldn't simply be looked up on a guide since people's quest were different from one another. It was very interesting and fun, and also did not require much out of the player besides working your brain. Why can't there be steps like this between the grind? Why can't developers put something fun in between the grinds. Use methods that goes strongly into the lore, keeping things interesting. You don't have to use battle content, it doesn't have to be 100% mindless grind the way through. Just give people some time to breath and not hitting the same mob for days/weeks.

As much as I disagree with SE's approach to relics, they have to at least attempt to be creative in doing these quests. Not simply slap old content together and tell people to bang their heads on the keyboard till they receive a prize. All they care about right now is taking the easy route out, not actually caring about being creative.

They never put puzzles into the Zodiak questline though, and though they did that once in 2.x, when they did anything similar in 3.0 with the Broom quests people complained.

I'd also add that 'fun' is often relative. I tend to find PvP style games lose my interest very quickly as competitive gameplay holds lasting interest for me. However PvP is clearly a very fun pastime for a lot of people.

One of SE's challenges is to create content that will be playable and consumed by the largest portion of their playerbase possible. Things that will only appeal to a smaller portion then to get relegated to the occasional extras. This is one of the reasons you see a lot more casual gameplay than challenging. Simply put there are a lot more people playing casual gameplay than is playing challenging. I wouldn't be surprised to find the number of players who have actually downed Thordian EX to be well under 10%.

SE tries to mitigate this somewhat by adding story or trying to add a little diversity or even just giving interesting rewards. However this is bound to be a constant issue SE has as they try to balance what content they deliver. From their perspective the people who really would get value out of the relic are people who wouldn't be getting it other ways like doing the EX primals. Regardless, due to the power of the end relic they were always going to gate it behind a lot of time consuming effort regardless. Running Ravana EX 30 times wasn't going to get a player a weapon on par with the weapon drop from savage Alex.

[Velhart]

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I cannot agree to any of this. You are basically saying that SE should not do anything to shake things up even at casual level game play. People are not asking for them to make the relic quest where you need to beat bosses harder than Thordan or Savage. What people are asking is to at least put some breathing room in the relic quest line. It doesn't have to be difficult content, but it should be fun content. Something to get you out of that grind mind set, even if it is just for a little while. I think you have failed as a company when you have tons of people dreading on how not creative the quests is and they are not fun at all, then you make an excuse on why it has to be not fun. The very same people who preach that if people are not having fun with it, you did something wrong.

Seriously, wouldn't of it been great instead of running old dungeons from ARR again which in itself took no time at all, you instead offer an interesting puzzle that has you going around the world finding clues, then working together with the community to put the pieces together, figure it out, then finish the quest and continue on your new grind. It is called breathing room where you don't go from a painful grind to another painful grind. It just blows a fuse in a lot of people.

You are not going to make any content without shaking up the community a bit, its going to happen no matter what. Why not attempt to give them something they didn't know they wanted? SE lost it's creativity and is now just putting mindless grinds in and poor attempts to bring FFXI like content into this game. All they can accomplish is getting people back in the game for a short while before they head off again. They barely do anything now to influence people to stay in. Playing too much into the safe route and catering too heavily on the casual audience, they are going to learn the hard way that it is not a good idea. Again, they think only short term, not long.

It feels like at this point that FFXIV doesn't know what it wants to be anymore and we all suffer for it.