Quote Originally Posted by Velhart View Post
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.
I agree with this quite a lot it pretty much sums up the way i play entirely, spending large amounts of time unsubbed and only coming back occassionally to catch up on the story in a netflix style fashion, where i wont watch every episode as it comes out but instead i'll sit there and watch the whole series in a couple of nights whereas in xiv i tend to not play every patch and then burn it all in a month.

There is no reason to stay in the game as everything is so focussed on the short term, nothing lasts so nothing is worth getting. this was a hot topic even back in beta, and when i came back to xiv for a couple of months it didn't seem any different. i blitzed everything in a coupple of months even blitzed coils 1-13 and many of my friends and people in linkshells either gave up on coil or didnt even try it. "whats the point the gears going to be junk in a couple of months?" or "it'll be nerfed in a couple of months so we'll wait" were common opinions. and ones i share the only reason i pushed through it was for story purposes i wanted to be done before heavensward.

haven't played since for much the same reason. all this 200 210 gear that people are mad about is going to be junk in a few months so why waste my time. i'll just wait till 3.3 3.4 maybe even 3.5 and blitz everything in a month or 2 again to catch up on the story.

Going back to the quote above the game design does nothing to entice people to play long term. the focus of most content is gear and yoshi p said back in beta that gear was not something to get attached to as it was disposable. it doesn't really make sense. the focus of the content is disposable junk. and as players don't get attached to disposable junk they lose incentive to play.

gear needs to last and in many cases so do challenges. if you look at final coil i think more people would have stuck with it. if the loot at the end was long term, even without the echo bonuses and nerfs. if the life span of the loot was long enough it would have justified the difficulty, but with the loot being disposable, and the knowledge that the content will be easier in a month, there's no real incentive to try.

if they want players to play long term then rewards them selves also need to be long term and worth getting, this is where horizontal progression comes in. i'd play a lot more if I knew the gear I was going to invest my time in getting was going to last.

item level is the worst thing ever.