Discussing your 'unpopular' opinions

[Vhailor]

My unpopular opinions are as follows... I'm plucking more or less my top five, because I have a lot. Keep in mind all of these are my opinions about how to make FFXIV better, not how to make it more popular / how best to pad SE's bottom line.

(1) Streamlining combat and jobs is boring. So is allowing people to access all abilities without leveling other classes / jobs. Give me more abilities, not less, and give me something at least vaguely strategic, a la the subjob system from FFXIV. Stop building the f***ing game around the massive limitations inherent in a gamepad.

(2) Elemental resistances shouldn't have been removed; they should have been worked into every corner of the game. Not only does combat suffer, but immersion does, too - casting a fire-based spell to damage, for instance, a Fire Sprite, just shreds immersion.

(3) The overworld should be a hell of a lot more dangerous. Bring back multiple types of aggro, monsters that don't abandon chase after a few feet, and enemies that are an actual threat at worst, and a significant time sink at best.

(4) Glamours are the bane of FFXIV's existence. Not their mere presence; there's nothing wrong with letting people dress up in different outfits (albeit I wish there were more restrictions than there are now; tanks in bikinis really kill off immersion). But the fact is, a huge amount of content and a huge amount of FFXIV's economy revolves around the latest dress or pair of pants or what have you. That's absurd, and it's given SE a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card in regards to poorly-designed content. Build something lazy like Aquapolis or Lost Canals of Uznair? Throw some Glamour crafting materials into it that you can't get anywhere else! People will spam it, RNG-mania be damned! Oooh, and even better, let's charge players extra money - large amounts of it no less - just to get shiny mounts or expansion-themed outfits! Who needs deep content motivating people to keep playing?

Finally... this is probably the most unpopular if I had to guess...

(5) The Duty Finder is a huge mistake. It destroys server cohesion, and gives all range of unpleasant players the ability to avoid any sort of consequence for their behaviour. In principle, it's not a bad idea, but there should have been much sharper restrictions on it, queue times be damned. Don't allow cross-server pairings (so as to encourage socializing), and don't allow people to be paired with those who have blacklisted them. I love the convenience as much as the next person, but I'm quite convinced that abandoning it / scaling it back would be a worthwhile trade.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

(5) The Duty Finder is a huge mistake. It destroys server cohesion, and gives all range of unpleasant players the ability to avoid any sort of consequence for their behaviour. In principle, it's not a bad idea, but there should have been much sharper restrictions on it, queue times be damned. Don't allow cross-server pairings (so as to encourage socializing), and don't allow people to be paired with those who have blacklisted them. I love the convenience as much as the next person, but I'm quite convinced that abandoning it / scaling it back would be a worthwhile trade.

We have proof it wouldn't. One of the contributing factors to the raid community's demise back during Gordias and Midas was the lack of cross-world PF. Depending on your server, you had a substantially smaller pool to recruit from compared to others. Gilgamesh rose to almost rival Balmung solely because raiders were trying to maximize their potential options. Likewise, servers such as Zalera, Lamia and Coeurl were on life support. Why stay on a server where you'll likely have no more than 20-40 raiders? They were saved entirely by the implementation of cross world PF. Putting that aside, the convenience cannot be overstated. I can log in and queue at practically any hour of the day without a hitch. Remove DF and there will be times where progression is all but impossible as not enough people are online.

It also means we as veterans will be funneled back into this moldy content via roulettes and relic chains forever because the devs can't risk new players getting blocked by a queue stonewall. It's lose-lose for everyone, really. I've wanted them to uncouple story requirements from all leveling content at least for a while now. Roulettes that give some exp for alt jobs aren't bad but when every relic chain involves boosting some newbies through their dungeon queues or CT raids or whatever repeatedly it gets tiring.

Amen.

Even for someone who only started shortly following Heavensward's release, it gets increasingly tiring how they cling to every little piece of content; made all the more frustrating since you can wind up spending more time without your new toys to play with and dealing with broken 50-60 rotations. It's among the main reasons I want Eureka to succeed since they're supposedly keeping the relic contained there.

[RiyahArp]

We have proof it wouldn't. One of the contributing factors to the raid community's demise back during Gordias and Midas was the lack of cross-world PF. .

No, the issue that this was there to address is that people simply do not like to raid in this game, at all. Cross world is a bandaid. Even with this easy tier, if you look at PF, at best you find maybe 5 learning parties at a time for the raids, and it's rarely more than 20 sigma raids on primal at all, counting farms and clears. This is across a data center that is rapidly approaching 8k players a server over a dozen or more servers.

Gordias set the absolute low end floor for that, but niche content in this game struggles to draw people. PvP from HW to now alternated between 72 man matches popping at 5 min intervals to 8 man matches at 30. Even primal farm parties for ponies are relatively underused, and they seem totally dead now; you see old ex primals more for WT.

I think they are going to need to start working on endgame and make it more of a long term, tiered approach.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

No, the issue that this was there to address is that people simply do not like to raid in this game, at all. Cross world is a bandaid. Even with this easy tier, if you look at PF, at best you find maybe 5 learning parties at a time for the raids, and it's rarely more than 20 sigma raids on primal at all, counting farms and clears. This is across a data center that is rapidly approaching 8k players a server over a dozen or more servers.

Gordias set the absolute low end floor for that, but niche content in this game struggles to draw people. PvP from HW to now alternated between 72 man matches popping at 5 min intervals to 8 man matches at 30. Even primal farm parties for ponies are relatively underused, and they seem totally dead now; you see old ex primals more for WT.

I think they are going to need to start working on endgame and make it more of a long term, tiered approach.

No, it wasn't. Cross World PF was implemented for the precise reasons I said. Many small pop servers were basically at a point where merging them needed strong consideration. Cross world largely alleviated that issue. Raiding is no less popular than crafting, gathering, PvP and the host of other niche activity the game provides. The entire purpose behind a theme park MMO is "something for everyone." Nothing except the basic progression will ever stand out because it isn't designed to. You cannot take one piece of the proverbial pie and compare it to everything else.

I cannot speak about Primal as I lack a character there, but Aether "High-End Duty_ tab frequently ranges from 40-70 parties, especially at prime hours. Of course pony farms will be less common. Not only is it four year old content, it's incredibly easy to solo. I saw plenty back in Heavensward and now see a fair few Birb farms.

Now I do agree longer lasting content may be something they needs considering going forward, but chances are if it's progression related. The highest level, in this hypothetical scenario, would be locked behind Savage.

[Nora_of_Mira]

My unpopular opinions are as follows...
1-5

are upvotes for agreeing with you? or for agreeing they're unpopular?

anyway, 1 and 2 were redundant systems bc FFxiv isn't the "complicated MMO" of this genre, its meant to be majorly casual, mass appeal, for people with just an hour a week, etc. anything else is just a bonus to us people who play semi- to regularly- hardcore.

I kind of agree to 3, but I wouldnt be surprised if the Yoshi P thought overworld mobs were useless and secretly wants to abandon the idea altogether. I imagine he thinks "he cant" because people would be so off-put by an mmo w/o overworld mobs that dont serve much purpose.

Glam is a hot mess. Raising queue times for duty finder just cant be a good idea despite any lack of server cohesion, I think they needed to do this to keep everyone playing.