4.25 and beyond

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Saying "this is bad" and not saying that about another part should be interpreted as the other part being fine, so there's no real need to tell them that it was good.

Also, the devs apparently don't listen anyway. People have been saying for years that they hate FATEs, and what did they do to Diadem? They shoved FATEs into it. How out of touch can you be to do something like that?

Not necessarily. Something can be bad, without the other part being good.

And again, WHY do people hate fates? I understand that they do, but WHY. I don't think I've ever seen someone actually say why. I find them fine personally.

[MomomiMomi]

Not necessarily. Something can be bad, without the other part being good.

And again, WHY do people hate fates? I understand that they do, but WHY. I don't think I've ever seen someone actually say why. I find them fine personally.

This is just my take on it, but the majority of time spent doing FATEs is travel time between them. You spend far more time traveling than you do actually doing the FATEs. This is made worse when the FATEs are forced into something that must be done to accomplish a goal, so you have a LOT of people doing them and it just turns into a zergfest of running from FATE to FATE. It's horrible.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

This is just my take on it, but the majority of time spent doing FATEs is travel time between them. You spend far more time traveling than you do actually doing the FATEs. This is made worse when the FATEs are forced into something that must be done to accomplish a goal, so you have a LOT of people doing them and it just turns into a zergfest of running from FATE to FATE. It's horrible.

Then why do people want overworld mob grinder spots, where you just pull mobs to one spot and sit there for hours? That sounds infinitely more boring tbh.

As for zergfests, anything with more than a few people turns into one. This is why Hunts are bad, and presumably why Eureka will be better, since there will be fewer people in these instances, as it maxes at 144 players.

[Vhailor]

Then why do people want overworld mob grinder spots, where you just pull mobs to one spot and sit there for hours? That sounds infinitely more boring tbh.

I don't think people are clamoring much for this. To be sure, there's some nostalgia for FFXI's leveling system, but I think that's primarily because parties felt more dynamic than FFXIV's system. The party camp was incidental; the critical parts were socializing and varied tactics based on party composition (something entirely missing from FFXIV).

As to why I hate FATEs, it's primarily because they're built to be spammed. Rather than being rarer events with massive rewards, they're constant events that are essentially bonus Levequests. There's rarely a meaningful story, and rarely are they sequential. The ones that are sequential, are screwed up now because SE is too boneheaded to create dynamic NPC spawning based on the number of participant, resulting in fights that cannot be completed by small groups. The net result is that I burn out on them very quickly. This dynamic, incidentally, is repeated across most of FFXIV's content. 24-person Raids, for instance, wouldn't feel so bland if they were built to be done once every few days a la Dynamis in FFXI. It's the downside of removing any sort of meaningful barrier to spamming. There's no items that have to be farmed to enter content, no timers; it burns people out.

if you have already done everything in the game, then maybe you should take a break and maybe go outside

The primary problem with FFXIV is that content cycles are so stale, people increasingly aren't even trying it. Speaking personally, I'll never claim that I have done everything. My complaints are centered around the fact that new content feels so much like old stuff I have done, that I don't even want to bother. Why would I want to run, say, Sigmascape? It's just Deltascape with different mechanics, which itself was just Alexander with different mechanics, which... so on and so forth. Or consider the 24-person Raid being released with 4.3; why should I care? A few new boss mechanics and an iLevel increase is the only difference between it and content we had dating back to ARR with Labyrinth of the Ancients.

Ideally, SE would be offering high-quality, long-lived content that would stay entertaining for years (FFXI's end-game is a great example of this). However, at the very least, they should aim to meet the exceptionally low bar of releasing content that at least gets people excited to try it for the first couple of weeks. Thus far, there has been nothing since Stormblood released roughly nine months ago that has compelled me, personally, to try it more than once or twice - if I try it at all. Based on various opinions around the forums, I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way. SE desperately needs to start taking a few more risks, and pushing out some fresh ideas. Eureka is a good first step, assuming it's not Diadem 3.0. Keep them coming.

[Darrcyphfeid]

Then why do people want overworld mob grinder spots, where you just pull mobs to one spot and sit there for hours? That sounds infinitely more boring tbh.

This is why I want the game to do something - anything! - that doesn't revolve around pushing maximum DPS at all times, in every piece of combat-oriented content, on absolutely every job/role. FFXI, for example, had the overworld leveling system where camping a spot and killing nearby monsters was the norm. The difference was that XI's combat was slower, more methodical, and had tons of jobs that did things that weren't directly offensive in nature. The slower part allowed people to actually have conversations while grinding, and my time spent in leveling and Merit Point parties are easily some of my fonder memories of that game. Contrast that with XIV in general, where I can't type at all while playing because that means I'm not doing my "Always Be Castings," and particularly with the now-dead FATE trains where the only talking could happen while auto-running between them.

FATEs, as noted, are also absolutely braindead. There are only a handful of FATEs in the entire game - out of several hundred - that have enemies or bosses with any kind of mechanic at all. All they do is one or two telegraphed attacks in addition to their auto-attacks, and that's it. There are also almost no unique enemies inside the FATEs, they're all just generic monsters you see in the overworld except sometimes they're scaled up to be larger. This is a complaint I have about most of the dungeon bosses too (them being generic monsters used elsewhere, before or after), though at least there they do have some variance in attacks/patterns/mechanics.



Touching on a subject recently broached, and calling back to my first post in this thread, I was pretty happy messing around with Relics, pre-4.0 PvP and outdated raids/EX Primals/non-stupid achievements from when I started in 2.5 until somewhere around 3.56. I've learned to limit myself in a number of areas over my 3-ish years in this game (like not doing NM Raids, not keeping 2 or more jobs geared, not doing/caring about 24-man gear since Accuracy is no longer a player-controlled stat) while other parts have gotten worse (PvP ) or been abandoned entirely (Eureka Relics now being sectioned off from the rest of the game).

That's where my dissatisfaction really comes from, in addition to them having gone so long without adding in additional medium- and long-term goals to keep filling in for things that I've casually (I cannot stress that point enough - I worked on the Zetas for 3 years and the Luxes for 2) chipped away at. Things like "2,000 Mentor Roulettes to get Astrope," "Kill 3,000 A Ranks and 2,000 S Ranks for Centurio Tiger" or "Win 1,000 Feast matches on a [specified role type] for an awesome Title" are not medium or long term goals, they're obscene mountains that I would never seriously consider - and I have more patience, if not necessarily more time, than most. I really, really don't want to sit in a box (Eureka) and solo (5.0 and beyond realistically, 2 weeks after patch worst-case scenario) to continue doing what I've been doing. I really don't want to play the new PvP because it's been radically changed in ways that aren't appealing to me. I'm one of those weirdos that has leveled every job in the game exclusively through dungeons and FATEs, and I like the dungeons, so HW reducing the number we got and SB dropping that number even more - in addition to their designs getting progressively less interesting and overall worse in terms of balance/scaling - has also had a severe impact on my enjoyment.

I'm exceptionally critical of Square, and have been for well over a decade, but that's because I typically enjoy their games and want them to improve. Not to go back to "the good old days," whatever the hell that means, but to provide new and varied experiences for me. Experiences like Bravely Default, that seemingly blindsided them with how much people enjoyed that game, and less like Bravely Second that were clearly cynically made to earn a quick buck while the iron was hot. Experiences like 3.0 through 3.3 in this game story-wise, where it was cohesive and very much character driven, and less like 4.1 and 4.2 which leave me scratching my head and wondering how this has any continuity from 4.0 and why we're focusing on The Sixth Sense instead of, I don't know, actually rebuilding or facilitating and/or strengthening bonds between nations and characters.

I could probably go at this for ages - positively and negatively - but it's getting late, so I'll leave it at that.
And I'm not deleting that post from the other day so I'm sure the community team will have sent me on a vacation come morning. :P