4.25 and beyond

[SavageCipher]

A new area and gear....what are people really expecting? This isn't an expansion, its a minor patch.

[Ayer2015]

A new area and gear....what are people really expecting? This isn't an expansion, its a minor patch.

Content with independent progression from the main game, that is slow and maintains long term progression goals. I think "most" which are bored would be happy with that.

[Molic]

This is the type of content SE thinks is ok unfortunately. Itemization and gear progression is one of the larger issues in this game honestly.

Going from 1.0 Character based to 2.0 Item based in terms of gaining "Power" the gear treadmill was pretty foreseeable. I don't think this is a huge issue, i think it could be improved upon though. They could add what destiny does, where say if you have a higher level piece of gear, you can have the lower level piece absorb that one to raise its lower level gear ilvl and stats.

Then they could actually add interesting stats to the gear or traits like "double attack", "5% chance of gaining triple cast", "chance to proc a fire dot", "chance to regain mana on spell cast" "Chance to quadruple your crits" random shit like that combined with the destiny style gear system, would actually make a lot of gear releavent again or at least fun to get gear.

Right now, they might as well just remove stats and have the Item level, cause its all pretty pointless and the % difference from having the best stats to just w/e at the same ilvl is insignificant.

[Alleo]

I am just annoyed that we lost more content (a whole dungeon in certain patches) with the promise of getting new stuff. And what did we truly get? A new PVP map, Ultimate and perform? If we lose something that is normally available for the mass than I want something back that is for the mass and not for the minority of the player base. Also I would say that a new pvp map and reusing the assets of older raids for one hard fight does not truly count as new content. (And perform is nothing but side flavor imo)

So if we look at it like that we lost another dungeon and got nothing in return..Eureka was already shown to us as an idea at the end of HW so that surely is not the new content we lost the dungeon for..but where is it?

It is also kinda telling how many people on this forum and reddit are kinda skeptic about Eureka and how we barely have any posts about people being hyped for it. We also have barely any advertisement for that.

[Sekkei]

Eh. I'm just looking forward to finally get my Amatera- I mean Lakshmi mount. Because, you know, having 150 or so blissful totems and only seeing the whistle drop twice is totally working as intended...

[Sindele]

I hate to be the local skeptic toeing the company line in this thread, but damn. Taking a break sometimes is okay! That's what they *want*, it's not a game that's really designed to have indefinitely gratifying content for people who have been playing 10 hours a day since release. Nor, frankly, should it; as that's an easy road to alienating more casual players (ie. 95%+ of the game's subscription base).

Also, being second-highest compared to WoW really shouldn't be viewed as successful in the year 2018. World of Warcraft dwarfs the number of subscribers for FFXIV, and it does so despite being roughly a decade-and-a-half old. That's sad, and it's a massive indictment of any company in the MMO space that isn't creating an intentionally niche title - SE first and foremost, given their shameless efforts to ape WoW early and often.

THIS, though, I have to call out as specious. Unless you have a magic line to both Blizzard and SE's real data, all you can go off of is the same inferential data everyone has access to.. which doesn't particularly agree with any estimates of 'dwarfing'.

Publisher numbers are, as a rule, complete and absolute nonsense. FFXIV claimed to hit 5 million subscribers in 2015, which is about as transparently unrealistic as Blizzard's old eternally optimistic subscriber numbers - there are a lot of real questions that have never been answered about how these numbers are reached, what really counts as an 'active' subscriber (there's a lot of reasons to suspect Blizzard's CN numbers in particular were always inflated), and how those numbers reflect in the real world. The observed estimates suggested a number of active player accounts somewhere in the 1.5m-2.5m range for WoW in mid-late 2017 - a pretty wide sweep, but getting there requires a lot of assumptions based on revising backwards from numbers of players seen online and Blizzard's own quotes about percentages of the player base that have completed content. A fun extra question is 'how many of those are propped up by tokens and would dissolve without paying players supporting them', but that's outside the scope of this discussion.

Now to FFXIV. The NA/EU/JP 'active characters' count from the censuses tends to hover around the 400k-600k mark - the high end for characters who are at least >50% through Stormblood, the low for characters who are caught up on the MSQ, based on different indicators. Alts are a thing in this game but much less of a thing than in WoW - so it's much more reasonable to draw an inference from that number. Let's assume - again conservatively, I suspect - that 75-80% of these active accounts are single-character. That gives us a baseline somewhere between 300k-500k, realistically somewhere around 1/6th to 1/4th the population. Smaller, yes, that was always a given, but 'dwarfing'? And that's certainly not a full count - how many non-RMT accounts are slowly chipping through the game, or roleplayers who don't put a priority on topping out? Hard to say. CN and KR are also operated by third party providers and I'm not sure if there are any unofficial censuses that include their data (please let me know if there are!).

In the MMO market, 'less than WoW' is not a failure - WoW is a colossal, unprecedented outlier that was guaranteed to live forever off of sheer inertia. Its like will - and I feel pretty confident saying this - never be seen again, barring some kind of equally completely unprecedented shift in MMO technology. Maybe the first real AAA brainjack-VR MMO. Maybe.

[Dzian]

There's a lot they could do on even the most basic levels.
Gear for example is meant to be the motivating driver for most content. Yet is incredibly bland and pointless. The only stat that matters is I level. The rest mean nothing.

Let's take a historical look at my bard for example.
in ARR my bard was rocking something like 350 crit and had a crit rate of 17-18% if I recall
In heavensward it was rocking over 1000 crit. My crit rate was still 17-18%
In stormblood I'm currently rocking just over 2000 crit and my crit rate is.....
Yes you guessed it 17-18%

So the crit stat does nothing. You might turn around and say it's because your fighting level 70 mobs but the reality is you'd be wrong to say that.

If you go and unsync ifrit ex with your 2000 crit, your crit rate is still only 17-18%!!!
Hell if you run around central thanalan shooting level 1 bugs with 2000 crit your crit rate is still 17-18%!!!

Spell / Skill speed are much the same my blm has like 5 times the spell speed it had in ARR yet flare is still a long assed cast time. My ninja has like 1400 skill speed and it's gcds are still the same as they were way back in ARR.

Essentially none of these stats ever matter because nothing ever changes. 2000 crit has me landing the same amount of Crits 350 crit did in coils so what is the point of the stat at all if nothing changes.

Thus the only stat that matters is I level.

It's no wonder gear is so boring.... If it doesn't look good as glamour no point even getting it....

[Ayer2015]

I hate to be the local skeptic toeing the company line in this thread, but damn. Taking a break sometimes is okay! That's what they *want*, it's not a game that's really designed to have indefinitely gratifying content for people who have been playing 10 hours a day since release. Nor, frankly, should it; as that's an easy road to alienating more casual players (ie. 95%+ of the game's subscription base).

No, taking a break isn't a bad thing. Keep in mind that if you unsub for an extended period you lose your house however. What I do think is an issue is being able to sub for 1-2 months out of a 2year patch cycle between expansions and really miss nothing. I mean, its great for those that are happy with the game as is... all the power to those people. The progression systems in this game a very weak in comparison to other games. The narrative is the strongest part of this game imo.

[Sindele]

Are they, though? Like, the oft-vaunted heydays of WoW - vanilla, of course, but certainly also BC and Wrath - definitely provided less in the way of dungeons, narrative content, and.. often other things, honestly, on a per-patch basis. Raids were definitely larger and more cohesive, but equally packed with filler. Heroics and loot in general across the endgame kept you coming back more, but only because it was so consistently unreliable. We were kept occupied with alts, but only because we had to if we wanted more than one class, so here we get more done with less time. That's the theme overall - more done with less time. Is that a weakness? I'm not so sure.

It's true that they WERE closer together, but the reality of AAA content development in the late 2010s has pushed everyone in that direction. Dunno if it'd be worth the losses to ask for bringing patch turnover time down.

[Moomba33]

I like XIV's gear progression itself.
I like that I only need 1 set of gear for each job, can share sets between similar jobs ect. instead of needing to build several sets to be welcome in groups.
3-6 months is long enough for me in terms of longevity as well.

I would just like to see more activities for earning the gear. Heavensward was heavily criticized for playing things too close to ARR but for me it expanded my endgame by adding normal mode raiding which is something I had wished for during the Coil days. Even the failure of Diadem gave me a couple of useful pieces and something different to do with my FC friends.

Stormblood has yet to give me anything new to do. Yes it added new content (Rival Wings, Ultimate, ect.) but those are not appealing activities for me or my friends.
Yes I can't expect everything SE does to cater to my interests but I would like to see at least one new thing that does. My hopes aren't high for Eureka but I'll give it a fair chance.