4.1 - The emptiest patch yet.

[Elfidan]

The devs say lots of things Lamb , but the record shows that they don't exactly deliver. You want to count hardcore content that a small percentage of the base will even be able to do as important? sure. As I said we'll see , but getting hyped for anything in ffxiv is a fools errand these days.

A fair view except there is a trend which can be observed to delivery versus what is claimed. I personally find it silly that there needs to be 15+ modes to everything to keep every player happy. If there were better content for regular daily players then there wouldn't need to be more than two. Bad design is bad. Also if we follow your logic then we are following the assumption you make that ultimates are going to make some impactful change to the status quo , and that would be doing the very thing you warn against. After all weren't Ex modes proclaimed to be the answer to this problem previously. I'm going to full cheese now and close on a quote from a square game "But time flows like a river... and history repeats...".

[Lambdafish]

The devs say lots of things Lamb , but the record shows that they don't exactly deliver. You want to count hardcore content that a small percentage of the base will even be able to do as important? sure. As I said we'll see , but getting hyped for anything in ffxiv is a fools errand these days.

The devs do say a lot of things, and considering what they have said is all we have to go on then I'm going to take that over player assumption. As for Ultimate, it is important content, the raiding scene is important for all players, not just those that participate in the content. This fight allows the devs unrestricted creativity with mechanics, while providing a long-term goal for even the most hardcore players. While Ultimate exists, very few players can say they are done with the content and they will always have something more to do. Whether they choose to do it or not is up to them. People complain about content life span in this game, but Ultimate is a long term investment that will keep people busy far longer than any other piece of content in this patch.

[Yonanja]

The devs do say a lot of things, and considering what they have said is all we have to go on then I'm going to take that over player assumption. As for Ultimate, it is important content, the raiding scene is important for all players, not just those that participate in the content. This fight allows the devs unrestricted creativity with mechanics, while providing a long-term goal for even themost hardcore players. While Ultimate exists, very few players can say they are done with the content and they will always have something more to do. Whether they choose to do it or not is up to them. People complain about content life span in this game, but Ultimate is a long term investment that will keep people busy far longer than any other piece of content in this patch.

How exactly will this content last longer than any other content? I'm sorry, but I don't think that one (re-hached even) encounter is going to keep anyone playing. What about the people that don't enjoy raiding? Where is the content that would keep them playing until the next patch? Correct me if I'm wrong, but why would anyone who doesn't care about O1 Savage be motivated by an encounter that they have no interest in and that is locked behind several encounters they have no interest in. As for the devs having "unresticted creativity with mechanics", what have stopped them from that in any of the other encounters and dungeons? Also, one can say that they're done with the content whenever the content that they're interested in runs dry. I've never done LoV, but I still consider myself having played through this games content.

This "ultimate" difficulty level is a gimmicky response to try and satisfy less than 1% of the playerbase that was complaining about a lack of content that was hard enough.

[Voltyblast]

People complain about content life span in this game, but Ultimate is a long-term investment that will keep people busy far longer than any other piece of content in this patch.

1% of 600k players is barely a good number, but there is actually a reason why content in this game runs dry really quick and the answer is very simple. There's nothing to work for.

Think about it for a second: dungeons have no other reason to stay than giving quicker tomes and that's it. Tomestone gear is objectively better than dungeon loot and don't you dare say "b-but it's for catch up on my alt" because it's far quicker to just spend tomes on your secondary classes and the job's done. Also, dungeons give absolutely no incentives to rerun them: there's no achievement, no special items, no unique glamour thingies, absolutely freaking nothing that would incentivize someone to do it again. In fact, Ala Mhigo might be the only dungeon in the entire game where there's some replayability since it drops a mount - the same reason why extreme primals are still alive to this day because if they hadn't those mounts, they'd do the same end of those countless dungeons rotting in your DF.

What about raid gear then? It's something to work for sure...except you can upgrade it once a week with relative ease (at least that's how it always worked). Do your weekly raid and boom, raid-tier gear for your main class with no drawbacks (unless you're into BnS). The only reason people raid it's because...I suppose people like raiding, but most of the time you can get just as good gear without even touching endgame. They even solved the issue coil had, with people wanting to play it for the story (uh?) by adding normal mode: this means the story reason is long gone too.

Which brings us to the main issue again: there's nothing to work for AND everything is too easy to obtain. Need better gear? Grind tomes and get tomestome gear - heck you can fully gear up yourself in a day. Then do the weekly lockout for even better gear. Then do the weekly 24 man raid for even better gear - and if you happen to also raid the savage one, you get even more loot with ease. It's all straightforward and not exciting because everything is gained via currency rather than actual work - heck even in wow with its rng looting, while sucky, it gives some incentives to redo dungeons, especially mythic ones.

I can assure you that if FFXIV had some sort of progression where dungeon loot is better than tomestome ( that's how it should be imo, at least for the easy gear), there were just more rewards in those dungeons besides tomes (achievements, timed runs, unique glamour, ANYTHING really), you'd see fewer people complaining about how little content there is.

And instead complain of how rng is bad but hey, at least they're busy doing something am I right?