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

[Alahra]

True, GW2 not having a sub fee increases it's appeal to people I am sure. Though, it's definitely successful and shouldn't be ignored is all

Certainly, it shouldn't be. It's just harder to use it as a metric for how popular horizontal progression would be for a game like FFXIV when it's not really the same sort of game. They have some things in common, but the nature of a subscription game is just going to end up very different. It's not as big of a deal if a free to play game releases content that isn't popular, but just look at the frustration we've got over content like LoV and Diadem here. Players that are paying money every month want meaningful content and that puts a lot of pressure on the developers to "keep it vertical," so to speak, because players will usually see "bigger numbers" as valuable in a way that they won't necessarily see more nebulous additions (like the ones in FFXI, for instance).

Personally, I played about 1k hours in GW2 and am at 2.5k hours in FFXIV. I think FFXIV, overall, is way better. GW2 ignoring vertical progression was a big reason I didn't like it, and I think they failed horribly on their implementation of balancing horizontal progression.

I made it about 2 hours into GW2. I found the class abilities to be lacking in depth (though it's my understanding that they've since expanded on things) and the aesthetics to be far too generic for my tastes.

I wouldn't want FFXIV to fully move to horizontal, I just want some horizontal progression. In 3.x they made secondary stats even more useless than before, heck even primary stats are becomming less useful. I upgraded my Eso 200 weapon to Relic 210, which has 3 weapon damage and 8 INT. The secondary stats are slightly worse, but 3 WD should overshadow them pretty substantially. My DPS went from 1333 to 1343 on a dummy parse. It's a good thing I slaved for hours to get that increase.

On this I can definitely agree with you. I've been wanting more interesting stats for most of the game's life, and I want more "fiddly bits" to consider when making my gearing choices. As it is now, I can map out my preferred gear progression for each job in about 10 minutes without a great deal of thought, just looking at the stuff available on the gear vendors, and that's just not interesting enough for me.

I want to see a third (or fourth!) set of max item level gear per raid tier (which, we might be getting a third if they keep their promise of making crafted gear better) and I'd like to see gear differentiated with more unique characteristics like set bonuses and job-specific modifications. All of that can work in a vertical game (they worked in WoW after all, which is the penultimate vertical game), and although they're harder to balance, it's actually somewhat easier for a vertical game to deal with that imbalance because a problematic set bonus or characteristic can just be phased out in the next raid tier.

Requests I hear are just a full scale change to horizontal which is not realistic in both a sense of the game and business.

I'm aware of requests like that as well, and if you've been reading my posts you'll know that I think they're unrealistic, too. The game does have a little horizontal flavor to its progression, though a lot of it isn't particularly relevant to more active players (I almost never need Void Ark/24-man gear on my main job for instance, as it's long ago been kitted out in tomestone gear), and I'd like to see more horizontal aspects at the highest item level.

But the vertical treadmill's gonna have to stay either way.