Too many gameplay restrictions

[Voltyblast]

I think at least SE's original intention with this was to stop people crowding around like say a quest npc or npc's who trigger cutscenes while on a mount and force people to get off so at least the NPC can most likely still be interacted with.

Press X -> Removes names from players -> makes you unable to target them -> now you can click the NPC with ease.

Not sure for ps4 users, but the button is quite handy. And to be very honest, even without mounts nearby it's still insanely crowded.

[bass9020]

Honestly, I don't agree with that, because they actually made some neat mechanics for 24 man raids: the recent weeping city has Ozma with very well made mechanics, then we had cerberus in WoD which is still an amazing boss in my opinion. Then we have other bosses like Bone dragon in CT which was very intuitive, because it required less of "OMG DPS HARDER!" and instead needed more team work and actual "crowd control". There is barely any real CC or kiting required in this game: the last fight I recall something like that was T7 and even then it all boiled down to "OMG DPS HARDER OR WE WIPE".

The excuse of "Well it's harder to balance" it's old: if anything making a 24 man raid more common would actually be more open to new strategies and would actually encourage more people to raid, as 8 man doesn't allow more than 1 class/job/whatever per group, heavily decreasing the chance for someone to find a raid. Although there's one other major trouble with that: the alliance system is broken as hell and, for example, it won't allow group A to heal group B with aoes and whatnot, making each Alliance separated and on their own. If they ever fix that (they won't), then we would have some nice raiding possibilities.

All I'm saying, there is potential and a lot of ideas, a lot more if you just consider that the 24 raids, while much easier, have some of the best mechanics ever created.
Strangely, the 8 man raids feel lacking in comparison, as it it boils down to "do this 100% correctly or you wipe". But that's just me.

I think Weeping is probably one of the best raids to date. You can't just ZERG down any boss, you have to actually do the mechanics correctly and rely on everyone in the raid to follow along as well. I hope we see more of these mechanics in all forms of content. Clearly big groups can handle interesting and slightly more involved mechanics so I hope this is a big wake up call to Yoshi and team.

I hope with the add on support or whatever we end up getting there will be a better alliance party menu. Currently I have mine as small as possible and only use it when someone either dies or my groups tank isn't the main and I focus the main tank from another group. Right now its not very functional.

[Lan_Mantear]

I think Weeping is probably one of the best raids to date. You can't just ZERG down any boss, you have to actually do the mechanics correctly and rely on everyone in the raid to follow along as well. I hope we see more of these mechanics in all forms of content. Clearly big groups can handle interesting and slightly more involved mechanics so I hope this is a big wake up call to Yoshi and team.

I think the only reason why people can't zerg the bosses in Weeping City is due to item level. Once everyone has ilevel 240+, alliances will be able to push phases and ignore mechanics. It was the same with the previous 24-man raids.

[eternalstar01]

Thanks for your contribute, I think everyone knows that you can sit and even go underwater in a hot tub (depending on the race). You can even do that in (some) small rivers.
Still you can't swim in them or in the sea, which point 9 was about.

Actually, it WOULD be really nice if they let us sit deeper into the hottubs (kinda like the oriental tub, with levels)... my miqo is very tiny, yet the water just covers her knees (glade tub). I feel like she'd enjoy a bath much more if it came up to her shoulders.

[LunaFaye]

Prior to 3.0 release they stated that they was either bringing in flying or swimming, in the end they went with flying. I think I remember them stating 4.0 we will see swimming.

It better be light speed swimming. I do not look forward to explore a whole new area/map and even collection currents while swimming (regular speed). I think that's the day I gonna quit for good, I have no time for that lol

[Sentinillia]

snip

I should have been more specific, I have no quarrels with having one or two tiers for raid size, I was critiquing the idea of a flexible party size system.

[Voltyblast]

I should have been more specific, I have no quarrels with having one or two tiers for raid size, I was critiquing the idea of a flexible party size system.

If you mean flex raids like the ones in wow, then yes they weren't a good idea I admit, but we've already saw that 24 man raids are a possibility: I just wished that proper 24 man raids would become the real deal. It would definitely attract more people into the raiding scene (we don't have 24 jobs yet so people could stack on more than one job for the raid, like one team made of casters or one team made of melee and so on), and maybe they'd become less about "pure dps" and more about "tactics" (and we've seen some good examples). As of now, it's all about min maxing your dps output and it's just not fun.

On the other hand, I think a lot of people really like 24 man raids mechanics due to how it promotes teamwork.

[NaesakiAshwell]

-snip-

Weeping City of Mhach is a step in the right direction, they just really need to stay on this path and keep improving from there. But whether they do is shrouded in maybes and we'll sees for now.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

4.
Can't send stuff to alts: Yes I know what some of you will say, there is no reason to create another character we can do everything on the same character etc. etc.
Only on paper though, in practice it's totally different.
Some reasons to make another character? Fully gear other jobs(we can't do this on 1 character with the lore cap), level specialists that you don't have on your main.
Sometimes you might think it would be fun to create another character and enjoy trying another race/city, so if I got a lot of stuff on my main I should be able to send stuff on my second character to boost him, "obviously" this would be too cool and is not allowed,
to stop gilsellers(?) This reason is getting old, the real reason is probably because it would be harder to sell additional retainers since people would start using alts to store extra stuff, still this is probably the only MMO i encountered that does this. Not to mention that retainers are probably the worst thing ever created, a bank would have been much better, and here comes another issue with retainers.

You do realize you're essentially asking the devs to implement a way around the very limitations they intentionally impose right? Why would they do that? They don't want you being able to gear up multiple jobs all at once because people will inevitably farm that content until they have what they want then stop doing it. As for Specialists, they have outright said they do not like omnicrafters, thus they try to limit them by forcing interaction with other players if you're unwilling to level an alt.

6.
Gil limits

RMT abuse isn't an excuse, but a reality. They limit large gil transactions because it allows GMs to flag suspicious activity. Should someone suddenly receive say, 20 trades in a row. A GM can easily keep an eye on both parties to see whether that was a simple series of trades within the rules or someone having bought gil online. They also don't want people transferring to the larger pop servers. While it certainly won't prevent everyone, this may keep some players from relocating to Greg or Balmung.

7.
Cap on raid members: Not much to say about this, I always thought the 8 man "raid" composition was too small, but this is another problem.
What i would like to see instead is the use of the flex raid system like some other games do, i think it's a great addition to MMOs that use it so the encounter scales with the number of people that you have in party.

This necessitates significantly more work on each individual fight as they now have to balance based on a random party size, which either limits certain mechanics or forces their removal entirely. Simply upping the HP totals would turn bosses into damage sponges instead of interesting fights. This game is designed to be scripted to a certain extent. They aren't going to radically alter these mechanics because that isn't the game they want. You will always see a set number for party composition in synced content, be it 4, 8 or 24.

[Azrael]

You do realize you're essentially asking the devs to implement a way around the very limitations they intentionally impose right? Why would they do that? They don't want you being able to gear up multiple jobs all at once because people will inevitably farm that content until they have what they want then stop doing it. As for Specialists, they have outright said they do not like omnicrafters, thus they try to limit them by forcing interaction with other players if you're unwilling to level an alt.

There is no reason to let us level up all jobs on the same character if we can't fully gear them all up, this is simply bad designed.
You would think that at least they would let us help our alts to play a different class, but no, they do the opposite.
Devs didn't implement any limitation on leveling alts, or they would have made impossible to create secondary characters, or make specialists server locked or something like this.
What they do is simply make our life harder.
You actually would play twice as much if you could boost your alt sending him stuff, instead of forcing people to start from scratch like a new player.

RMT abuse isn't an excuse, but a reality. They limit large gil transactions because it allows GMs to flag suspicious activity. Should someone suddenly receive say, 20 trades in a row. A GM can easily keep an eye on both parties to see whether that was a simple series of trades within the rules or someone having bought gil online.

And in the same way they could easily check any 10/20mil transaction.
We pay, and they get paid, they are the ones that should make our life easier, not the other way around.

They also don't want people transferring to the larger pop servers. While it certainly won't prevent everyone, this may keep some players from relocating to Greg or Balmung.

There is a paid transfer service that gives you the possibility to transfer to ANY server, so if they didn't want people to do it they would have limited it to low population servers.
Funny you say that, since you are from balmung, you look like you are afraid of people transfering there.
Don't worry, i'm EU, i would never transfer there.

This necessitates significantly more work on each individual fight as they now have to balance based on a random party size, which either limits certain mechanics or forces their removal entirely. Simply upping the HP totals would turn bosses into damage sponges instead of interesting fights.

Yeah, the same bosses that people complain that are unbeatable 90% of the time because of huge dps checks, or instant kill mechanics.
Probably flex raids wouldn't work in this game, but as I said in the open post I also think that 8 man raids are way too small to create a real raid strategy.
At the moment we have more jobs than actual "raid" spots.
Making the raids bigger would probably give us more interesting mechanics, if anything, surely not worse than what we have now.