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

[Kaurie]

I suspect the number that do is larger than you realize. People play and pay for this game primarily because it provides them with entertainment, and there are numerous reports of servers that are experiencing more active PF participation lately, much of which can be attributed to the Anima questline. While there are players who will indeed do things they don't like to in order to achieve a goal, I'd be willing to bet even those players at least find the goal for its own sake fun.

The wealth of criticism on the forums is slowly dying down when nothing has really swelled up to replace it, which suggests that there's not really a continued disappointment with the quest from the larger playerbase to me.

I guess I just don't see a point in posting the same argument over and over and over, when clearly Square Enix doesn't care. I complained a lot until they posted their response to criticism, and showed that they just don't give an F.

I completed my relic, grind wasn't so bad, but it was still beyond horribly implemented. Release timing was off, glamours suck, pre-glamorus are copy pastes, quest line is lack luster, stats on most are subpar, and duties to make you get it are uninspired and obnoxious (crafting/gil hole?).

Ultimately though, what I hated most, was that for the past 2-3 weeks, i wasn't able to do anything I wanted in the game. I mean outside of the desire to have my weapon before my raid met up this week (succeeded!). I had just started to do a bunch of 2ndary stuff, such as leveling my BLM, and quickly it was all tossed to the side. I'd even regret queuing for roulettes, because the second I got in an S rank would spawn and I'd leave to go kill it. I began to just stop doing most roulettes. When FC mates asked for help 'nop, must hunts'. I was just encouraged to do everything I could to be as unsocial to my FC, unhelpful to my friends and have the least amount of fun for the past 3 weeks. It's now over, and I can continue to enjoy this game.

[KaitlanKela]

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Hey girl, congrats!

I agree with your complaints about the grind but most of them are minor to me except the 1.stats issue (seriously, they better fix that with the materia/customization step) and the 2.crafting issue (I know they want to encourage crafting, but they should have made it faster or easier for crafters, not a gate for everyone). Hopefully they will respond to that criticism, but I'm not holding my breath.

You make a good point about having to postpone other things you like to do in game to focus on it. That is actually really sad and I bet you're thrilled that it's over (I would be)! BUT, at the same time you sacrificed those other things to meet your self-imposed time goal for raiding. It's not like everyone is forced to sacrifice things they love by DESIGN; they will just get the relic a little slower. Throwing your face against it (while I'm glad that's an option and it's not time-gated like eso) kinda is against the grain so-to-speak and there will be consequences for choosing to do it that way. Just a thought.

[Kaurie]

Hey girl, congrats!

I agree with your complaints about the grind but most of them are minor to me except the 1.stats issue (seriously, they better fix that with the materia/customization step) and the 2.crafting issue (I know they want to encourage crafting, but they should have made it faster or easier for crafters, not a gate for everyone). Hopefully they will respond to that criticism, but I'm not holding my breath.
You make a good point about having to postpone other things you like to do in game to focus on it. That is actually really sad and I bet you're thrilled that it's over (I would be)! BUT, at the same time you sacrificed those other things to meet your self-imposed time goal for raiding. It's not like everyone is forced to sacrifice things they love by DESIGN; they will just get the relic a little slower. Throwing your face against it (while I'm glad that's an option and it's not time-gated like eso) kinda is against the grain so-to-speak and there will be consequences for choosing to do it that way. Just a thought.

Thanks It's very true, the goal was self inflicted. That said, it was also strongly encouraged by the design of the game. They've made weapons be the most important factor in your DPS with weapon damage being value so much more than everything else. They then implemented a huge jump in difficulty on A3S and gated the weapons equivalent to the relic behind it. So, by their design, they made this a huge priority item.

Ultimately, this is how I can see the whole relic process being better, now that I've had a chance to complete it fully:
1. Provide more options to obtain items (GC Seals, WolfMarks etc etc)
2. Allow pre-items to interchange (i.e. allow one to make 1 item from maybe Alex 1 5 runs + roulettes or seals if they want etc) - this will help alleviate burnout on doing the same thing over and over.
3. Make the crafting an option to help speed up the process, but allow for you to grind out more items in it's stead.
4. More adequately balance the time investment for each alternative method. Alex was far faster than any other method. This will allow people to move around and do various things, again alleviate burnout.
5. Release the relic in a more appropriate time. 170 should have been 180 and released on 3.0. 200 should have been released on 3.05. 210 should have been released with 3.1.
6. Allow customized stats, but not with Materia. This just makes CRIT materia cost an arm and a leg.
7. Incorporate more of a story of how you are building your weapon. This could include part 6, i.e. in order to add crit you need to complete X objective, or DET complete y objective etc - and have the objectives make logical lore sense to the stat.
8. Just... make a better story. I know you can do it (see 2.4, 2.5, 2.55, 3.0, Hildebrand etc).
9. Being as we are building a weapon, it would actually be neat if we build it's design (at least in part) too. Allow us to modify it's appearance in size/color, addons etc.
10 (maybe?). Time gate it. If you want it to be a time investment, instead of making us run 620 runs of Alex - maybe make it that you run 100, but you can only do 25 max per week (or whatever). This will help alleviate burnout, make it a long term goal, and allow you to have time for other game interests.

EDIT: Just adding that I think the above would be modifications to the current system that would work; however, i think a completely different and more fun and engaging system would be better.

[Dzian]

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.

[Alahra]

It is a ilvl210 weapon, it is an upgrade, especially to people who are still trying to tackle Savage.

Folks working on Savage are probably more than capable of getting the Thordan EX weapons, a number of which are pretty close to the Anima weapons in effectiveness, though, especially given the work to reward ratio. I really doubt getting a leg up on Savage is a reason a significant number of players are doing the Anima grind.

But regarding fun factor—how would you actually make the grind more fun? Keep in mind that you can't rely on harder content to do that. What kinds of grinds are fun to you and why are they more fun than the current Anima grind?

[Kiara]

Here is where the sad thing lies in relic weapons. However, their team who are suppose to be making fun content believes that only mindless grinds should be in it... Why can't developers put something fun in between the grinds. Use methods that goes strongly into the lore, keeping things interesting.

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.

Great post Velhart. I totally agree.

While we may disagree about the potential for a Long-Term Goal-type Relic (FFXI Style), your post summarizes a fundamental flaw with the current Relic Quest, even as is (short-term, eclipsed every other patch).

It's the most lazy, uninspired, boring quest we have in FF XIV, easily. It's sad: Just replay old dungeons, old content, and grind mindlessly until you achieve the target number.

I would still like Yoshi P to consider a Long-Term, Always Viable version of the Relic (where it's Alternative Content with its own unique challenges), but if it had to be kept as is (for casual only), at least make it more interesting.

Heck, they could RE-USE pre-existing 3D Models of various Monsters in the world, and rename them to be special "NMs", throw in some ambushes, or script some battles (that *don't* have to be super hard), and take you across various parts of the world and it'd be infinitely better than the garbage that is the current Anima Weapon Quest.

[Alahra]

I would still like Yoshi P to consider a Long-Term, Always Viable version of the Relic (where it's Alternative Content with its own unique challenges), but if it had to be kept as is (for casual only), at least make it more interesting.

I would be willing to bet that they have considered it, but also that they don't have the resources to really produce that content specifically for the weapon questlines. In a perfect world, I think everyone would love to have a questline full of nothing but new content through each expansion, including the developers themselves, but the necessities of making that happen are probably not within the realm of possibility for the team as it currently stands.

So since that's not something that's likely to happen, let's take your other thought: how do you make the relic questlines "more interesting" while keeping in mind certain fundamentals that the content should address: 1) it needs to focus on time investment as opposed to clearing difficult content; and 2) it should serve as a means by which older content can be made relevant again for the benefit of newer and returning players (or, if you would rather they not do this, you have to understand that development time would thereby need to be spent on finding a way to keep that content relevant so that they game doesn't stop attracting new players entirely).

I rather like the idea of NMs (I was always fond of them in FFXI), but the game already sort of has a model for this in Hunts, which would mean revisiting old content again, which you consider problematic. Whether they used NMs or Hunts (which are, essentially, NMs without unique loot drops and currency drops instead), over-reliance on them would also introduce elements of randomness and competition (hooray spawn-camping) that might not sit well with some players.

Doing some spawned monsters could be interesting (not unlike the NMs in FFXI's Abyssea), though. They did something like that to a certain degree with the Novus stage—some of those maps were actually a bit risky to complete solo. I wouldn't mind seeing a stage similar to that again (dress it up differently, though, in my opinion—don't just do maps again).

[Belhi]

I had not met anyone who said they hated the broom quest nor do I believe was a big deal here. When we got our last major quest puzzle, we had threads of people joining together to unlock parts of the code and helping people with theirs. It did bring community together and it would again here. You are basically saying that developers should not ever make interesting content for anything and go by the same tropes. The lack of resources is just a convenient excuse to not put the effort into quest. It is sad they constantly give us quests at a half-ass state and then give us the excuse that lack of resources made it this way. They can't even try to come up with something interesting within the budget/time they have. It doesn't hold water, especially with a AAA company.

Firstly while you may have not heard anyone complain about the Broom quests clearly Yoshi P did cause he mentioned people having issues with them in the Live Letter directly after the HW launch. I'm also not saying they shouldn't make content like that but it shouldn't be a pre requisite to something which is very much mainstream content. A lot of people don't want to screw around with puzzles. I personally love them. The investigation missions in The Secret World are one of the most special things about that game.

Secondly, you seem to make the assumption they had more resources that they just didn't use. Considering every indication we have seen has been that this team works its ass off which is match by a very competitive development speed compared to other MMOs, it's likely they didn't have a great deal of additional resources to spend which means either something would have had to be cut from elsewhere or we wouldn't be getting the relic quest here at all.

Belhi, just accepting whatever is thrown at you isn't going to make the relic better. It doesn't take a lot of time to have that shady merchant thrown up some more tokens that will require more if a grind to do, that cuts into the relative worth of the relic to its intended audience.

There have been several suggestions to make questline long, and engaging. SE knows how to do it at least, it showed on the second step, but its missing in the 1st step(RNGsus and lootcifer are fickle companions), and they phoned it all in on the long 3rd step.

It's not that I don't want to see better and I stated several things about the current chain I would have like to see differently. I just recognise there are limitation on what we will likely be getting and would prefer what we have over nothing at all.

Also while I don't like the RNG in quests like this, particularly when this grindy, and I think the final step is too long, though I understand their logic so I'm hopeful they won't repeat the mistake, a questline like this which will be time consuming will be grindy. The second step wasn't grindy or long. It was probably the easiest and shortest relic quest ever. That's probably why it didn't both many people. Most people in my guild had it done in less than 3 hours.

The one thing the second step did have which would be nice to see them replicate was the occations where we had a story interlude. Perhaps a better solution with say the first step would be a cutscene when we delivered a set of Luminous crystals where we see the nodes charging up.

[RiceisNice]

Secondly, you seem to make the assumption they had more resources that they just didn't use. Considering every indication we have seen has been that this team works its ass off which is match by a very competitive development speed compared to other MMOs, it's likely they didn't have a great deal of additional resources to spend which means either something would have had to be cut from elsewhere or we wouldn't be getting the relic quest here at all..

Honestly, we're coming to the point where the "we don't have enough resources" thing isn't going to fly when they fail to deliver (again). They have already cut from regular content (expert dungeons, MSQ and primal fights) to add content like Diadem and LoV, and we see how those turned out. Or really, the lasting power of an expansion launch in general; there shouldn't have been a feeling of a content draught 3 months after an expansion release.

In regards to the bolded part, I honestly don't care for "how fast" they release content, I'm willing to wait if it can tide me reasonably long enough to the next cycle (the quality of the content). Haste makes waste, and sure enough I feel like there's a lot of corners being cut and rushed to meet deadlines or expedited release with the content we're getting. They might be the fastest updating MMO I've played, but its also the fastest one thats taking a nose dive in regards to content quality, esp in relation to their liveletter previews.

It was passable in 2.0, being a relaunch and it still having the novelty of a new mmo hitting the shelfs. But I feel like at this point ,that's he best they could have done because 3.0 in general feels really...bleh, to the point that it's just a content patch that I paid for, and especially so with the anima weapon if I wanted to take a daily approach to it.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

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Well I think it's a catch 22 here; either the devs spreads patches apart and risk losing people from being bored for waiting for so long (in addition to losing more people if the patches aren't up to snuff), or they try to keep people interested in shorter bursts while risking of recycling content to save time. It's clear that the team needs more resources and the higher ups seem to not want to spend a cent on them since they're not FF15 or the FF7 remake.