I guess it's time

[Istaru]

Honestly, there's so many things that need to be addressed imo it's just not one thing. But the big thing I'd say is not cutting corners/rushing with content/expansion release, and to have plans for longterm. That means not scrapping initial ideas because it "didn't work out" (like multiple MCH attachments, Diadem, PvP) and not throw-away content.

I will agree with you. They have a very good foundation and they could build a masterpiece of a game. It just seems that they can't pull it off for one reason or another. I think that is what frustrates me the most.

[Zojha]

Knowing the exact second when shit is happening, on every single fight, is in my opinion the worst game design.

The alternative is randomizing encounters - in which case, you need to ensure every possible combination is still clearable which in turn means the mechanics themselves need to be much more lenient. Basically, a tank buster can't require cooldowns to be used to make it through it if the cooldowns might not be available for the next. A telegraphed AoE needs to give you enough time to dodge it even if another ability just forced you to the far end of it and you need to run the full distance. And on the flipside, what is meant to be a challenging fight might become very easy because you got a lucky combination. You can't really make bosses do something they're not programmed to do either. And the trinity further works against more chaotic fights with its natural tank&spank design.

So...I could see some practical issues with that.

[Istaru]

The alternative is randomizing encounters - in which case, you need to ensure every possible combination is still clearable which in turn means the mechanics themselves need to be much more lenient. Basically, a tank buster can't require cooldowns to be used to make it through it if the cooldowns might not be available for the next. A telegraphed AoE needs to give you enough time to dodge it even if another ability just forced you to the far end of it and you need to run the full distance. And on the flipside, what is meant to be a challenging fight might become very easy because you got a lucky combination. You can't really make bosses do something they're not programmed to do either. And the trinity further works against more chaotic fights with its natural tank&spank design.

So...I could see some practical issues with that.

Step 1 could be no more tank and spank snoozes. Make it exciting to run that dungeon for run #50, entering the dungeon you know that you could get burned and that makes it fun. There is so little challenge to most things. Many of us could run these dungeons and fights in our sleep. That isn't fun.

[KitingGenbu]

I doubt Legion or 4.0. will be any different.

Funny thing is that the WoW devs already admitted that the artifact system they are releasing in Legion will just be thrown away in the following expansion.

The main issue is that many devs in general dont believe in persistent content other than your levels, probably because building upon something continuously requires quite a lot of fore thought like it did in XI. People can QQ about the content in XI and how it wasn't as replace-ish as it is with say XIV but if you think about most of the expansions, they worked in harmony. Even the newer stuff added to a degree works the same way even though they seem to have gone a bit overboard with it more and more.

The alternative is randomizing encounters - in which case, you need to ensure every possible combination is still clearable which in turn means the mechanics themselves need to be much more lenient. Basically, a tank buster can't require cooldowns to be used to make it through it if the cooldowns might not be available for the next. A telegraphed AoE needs to give you enough time to dodge it even if another ability just forced you to the far end of it and you need to run the full distance. And on the flipside, what is meant to be a challenging fight might become very easy because you got a lucky combination. You can't really make bosses do something they're not programmed to do either. And the trinity further works against more chaotic fights with its natural tank&spank design.

So...I could see some practical issues with that.

As for a response to this, that alternative does fall within the confines of how the devs have currently set up the systems in the game. TP in XIV is nothing more than a resource that players spend, whereas in XI it was a resource both you and the monster built which could greatly affect fights that lasted a long period of time. Then you have the enfeeblement system in place with XI which is not present in this game which is a big shame imo. It made it easier for XI devs to just release crazy mobs that had to be controlled by the player through paralyze/slow/etc if they wanted to stand a chance. Then you had to monitor how many dps were on the monster otherwise it would go ape depending on the mob. Of course there were patterns but the TP system could add things if people weren't paying attention to their roles. Which of course is another thing that this game honestly lacks, roles. Everyone is a one man army and barely synergizes with each other unless you count on a drg giving piercing resistance down to a mob for brds/mchs. There's no true skill synergy that can greatly influence the outcome of the battle. The only thing that determines that in this game is your rotation and how well you can handle disconnects.

[Iromi]

I will agree with you. They have a very good foundation and they could build a masterpiece of a game. It just seems that they can't pull it off for one reason or another. I think that is what frustrates me the most.

I feel the same way as well. It has felt this way for a long long time now. I had convinced myself from all their hype and interviews foreshadowing 3.0 that since they claimed that this time its all "them" and no fixing 1.x or focusing on the past mistakes..that they would really turn the game around. I remember reading in an interview where the producer said that this expansion will be their original work, new envision and so forth. Then lo and behold it was 2.0 repeat. Really a big let down. Maybe I expect too much...is just such a shame because the potential is there for this game to be memorable and a masterpiece, yet they just continue to release dead on arrival content and nothing with longevity.

[RiceisNice]

The main issue is that many devs in general dont believe in persistent content other than your levels, probably because building upon something continuously requires quite a lot of fore thought like it did in XI. People can QQ about the content in XI and how it wasn't as replace-ish as it is with say XIV but if you think about most of the expansions, they worked in harmony. Even the newer stuff added to a degree works the same way even though they seem to have gone a bit overboard with it more and more..

To an extent. When you do content like this for an entire expansion, it probably won't be thrown away for a few years because it's a persistent design throughout (for better or worst). Legion artifacts and WoD garrisons for example.

In our case...our throw away content is within the patch cycle and honestly feels like they have no direction and a waste of development time; look at our frontline maps, LoV, Diadem (until further notice, we're looking at 3.4 before we finally get new additions to it), and aquapolis.

[Fricca]

Here's a question: if you were given the choice to change only ONE thing about FFXIV, no matter how radical the change would be, what would you decide to alter?

It's kind of hard to say all the the things that I want to change, but this question made me realize that I can put it simply into 1 idea: I want the devs to bring justice to every content they made and actually make them matter (rewarding).

Primals:
✅The first 3 primals had weapons and were necessary to complete the relic quest.
❌The succeeding primals acted like they're a content of their own and focused only on the slightly higher ilvl weapons as reward. (easily discarded, can easily be skipped by anyone new to just do newer content)

Raid Content:
✅You had to finish BCoB to proceed to SCoB and then finish SCoB to enter FCoB. No normal mode.
❌Normal mode. Something about goblins... probably has something to do with cheez... cat... BOOM, BANG... BEAMZ.... (Yea I didn't pay attention to Alex... sry)

Towers:
✅Use to only have items exclusively found in it.
❌Became the tool that helps people catch up by providing upgrade items similar to what the current raid content offers.
Fix: Make it relevant in its own light without ruining other content in the game. Also I would like to have 8-man tower mode, please and thank you.

❌Unsyncing.
✅Reverse sync. Let the content sync to us, not us syncing to the content. (Lvl 60 coil anyone?)

Creatures all over eorzea:
❌Only there for the sake of Hunting Log. Some drop important mats. Harmless.
✅Please add purpose to them. Like make the mobs spawn a boss mob that drops some special material maybe. Make them as challenging as what their supposed level is in the game and give out reasonable experience. Make them more interactive with different aggro triggers. Make them more than just moving pixels around the map.

Gil:
❌Why do I even have Gil?

Zones:
❌Straightforward. Easily explored. Feels like its dead.
✅Utilize ships (yea they exist), have hidden tunnels, make us feel there's danger in the outside world, or something, please.

What else do you guys think the devs aren't utilizing to its fullest? I feel like this way when I log in I'd have something to do, game would be more alive with new people looking into beating old content that they actually need... What's more is that we can revisit them and do them at level 60 with reverse syncing, possibly have fun, and get the new crafting materials.

[Cakekizyy]

I prefer tank and spank to mechanic heavy fights.

[LalafellDown]

Zones
I like the large areas from Heavensward. But I still prefer the 2.X-ones. The new areas have several problems. Their larger size force you to fly. They are looking not as good as the smaller old areas. There is not much variety within each zone. And some zones (Sea of Clouds or Azyz Lla for example) needs more aetheryts. Nevertheless, I would love to have larger areas for 2.X, like having Thanalan as one large zone.

Dungeons
Stop with whatever you re doing right now! Just give us something new.
All dungeons share the same formular: 1 Tank, 1 Heal and 2 DPS are fighting 3 bosses with trash in between. It gets even worse, when it comes to Expert Roulette: Why is it call it "Expert", when you just rush trough 1 of 2 dungeons within 15 minutes? And please stop making "Hard"-versions, when those dungeons arent meant to be hard.

Content
Stop with unneccessary nerfs. Please. FFXIV needs to be hard and challenging. Thats why many players came to FFXIV. Nerfing old content makes it mindless and useless. You killed Coil by extremely nerfing it and because of being able to join it unsync. Coil Unsync was the worst idea ever. On the other hand, crystal tower is not unsync... why?

Tomes
Back then, it was a good idea. But after 2-3 years of grinding tomes for better gear, it gets really boring. No one likes to farm tomes to reach the weekly cap. You can keep them in the game, but maybe change how to obtain/use it.

Zones
to me are zones are just empty hubs were players hang out, nothing more. Nothing worth exploring in any zone. Only reason to go to them is to get something. Sure some of the 2.0 zones have forts, but that's it. 3.0 is the same thing the levels are flat nothing to explore no secret caves or random chest in the wild with a possibility of a random legendary item in it. Compared to the 1.0 maps that had cave systems and caverns to explore, which could of had so much potential for events, puzzles, quest if they kept the maps and added on to them with 2.0. The open world in 1.0 was way better than 2.0-3.0. granted 1.0 was a work in progress MMO. At least the exploration was there and everything was connected. No loading screen required.

Fates... just go see what Guild Wars did with theirs and copy that SE because their fates are fun and people on every map do them. Most of the time I go to a location to gather or finish exploring, but i end up doing events because a huge dragon has spawned or a fort is under attack and there are tons of players doing the event. Our fates are dead only reason to do them is if SE forces you or lvl grinding.

http://www.ffxivinfo.com/maps/eorzea.php

Dungeons
Are the same thing might as well as slap a lvl 60 on Sastasha and call it new. Oh wait they did do that with hard mode. Why not add a open dungeon with different paths and story within the dungeon. It works in Guild wars 2. I was hoping diadem was going to be them bringing back open world dungeons with objectives and exploration... nope just another monster grind. Worst part you can even solo it for fun. Saw they had one cave to explore, but couldn't go there because the over powered adds would kill me and the party just mindlessly grinds all day. I don't think the dungeons can be changed with the way the game is made. I don't see how they can add any thing new mechanic wise except kill some adds and then boss... repeat. Why not have traps that can kill the player or the adds or make a small platform where the adds can push players off. Make it hard not by buffing the monsters, but by adding puzzles to the fight. I'd take 1 dungeon a patch as long as its fun to do over and over rather than 2 or 3 dungeons that i do a few times and dread doing again. Doing dungeons feels like a chore in this game. Add poison arrows shooting down a hall way that kill you in one shot or electric floors that you have to navigate through that turn off and on. If you die on one of the traps you'd have to start over. Something as simple as that makes it fun. Hopefully Deep Dungeon has this and isn't like Diadem were the adds have 1mil HP. I fell asleep one time trying to kill an add in Diadem with my party. How is hitting a few buttons for 5 minutes straight as the add does the same 3 moves every few second fun? Same thing with 24 man raids, the bosses are just sponges that take forever to die (The Weeping City of Mhach the spider boss). Add puzzles that people can die too before we get to a boss. Like moving boulders coming down a wavy hallway, while spiders are shooting webs from the ceiling and if you get stuck on the web you slow down and might get hit by a boulder

Tomes
they should of kept the old tomes and made it so that different tomes could only be gathered from certain dungeons, basically each dungeon has its own currency. [B]Since the dungeons are boring and there's no reason to run the old ones I guess they had no choice but to force players to run them for new tomes. When you force players to run something they have no interest in means you made a boring and mindless dungeon. Why copy and paste the same thing if its not fun.

I feel like this game is more like those dungeon crawler games they have on the Nintendo DS and Vita. Were all you see is the portrait of your party when you go into dungeons. You grind for loot over and over about 100 time in each dungeon and the world is just a big hub where people spend their coins to buy gear. Like Monster Hunter or God Eater. FF14 only lives on because of the patches they consistently put out, if they stopped right now at 3.3 or at any patch it would die right away. As long as you make your game fun people will continue to play it.

[Alaltus]

Here's a question: if you were given the choice to change only ONE thing about FFXIV, no matter how radical the change would be, what would you decide to alter?

For me, it's definitely the dumpstering of old content. If I had my way, the devs would be constantly expanding areas like the old 24-mans (instead of just forcing geared, level-synced players into queuing for it via the relic quest, players would instead run the "original" version simply to access the "new" floors), adding new hunts to each zone every so often (with less predictable respawn timers, please!), adding rare spawns or treasure chests with unique items into the old dungeons, inventing a reason for players to do Verdrfolnir/Metal Gear Revengeance 2/Proto Ultima/Odin/Behe/Coeurlregina again (possibly via zone consequences to teleporting/flying/gathering should they spawn and fail?), etc.

I'm curious to see what other people might change, if they were only given one option.

Well besides what i've mentioned already there is one thing.

Itemization. In this game gear is just an extension of your base stats, the higher the item level the higher the str/vit rating. Gear is uniform which is boring and leads to everyone only being interested in the highest i-level items.

How to reform- I'd like to say strip gear of their uniformity and i-level whilst keeping the average level as a calculation of all of your stats. What would help is situational bonuses and alot of them. +weaponskill hits, +dot potency, + combo dmg, + crit dmg, +emnity, enchant effects (drain, aspir), -dmg% and so on. Point being is so that players have motivation to partake in horizontal content to build multiple sets for different types of encounters. Much more battle content variety for said situational gear to be put to work. Slow down vertical progression some. Spread around the 'best' gear across a variety of content, no more full sets of the best gear for any given job being rewarded from a single piece/type of content. Players with different main jobs will have different priorities encouraging players to branch out. Introduce some 'best' gear via RNG drops into content like Diadem, Aquapolis and Deep dungeons.