Quote Originally Posted by Musashidon View Post
how do you milk a name? i say this as we watched 1.0 flop and noone want to play it despite being final fantasy.


i am not saying the content in the game are all master pieces but one thing didn't work and another did.

i don't see how content is uninspired in the current ff14 while yes you can 123 through most of it there are always interesting new mechanics and idea all the time from every different primal/raid to sometime just normal dungeons. when people complain about content it's never that the idea lacks its that the idea doesn't easily kill the player. the complaints are the game is easy and the mechs can be pretty much ignored but that is the complaint.

like with the fate hate people love fates they just hate that people can zerg them and they don't screw players over as if that is the only thing that matters.
Difficulty is a component, but the sense I've gotten, and perhaps you've gotten a different one, is that people are bored with the content itself. These two go hand in hand to an extent, though, because literally the only meaningful, differentiating factor between Rabanastre and Labyrinth of the Ancients is boss mechanics. There's no difference in party composition, no difference in objective styling, no difference in ability usage (beyond the level capped abilities), no difference in pace. It's just the mechanics. Which guarantees two things: firstly, that Rabanastre (or any other 24-person fight) becomes quite boring, quite quickly; secondly, that Rabanastre becomes easy quite quickly, because there's nothing new to master beyond a different boss rotation to memorize.

If you look at FATEs, too, the complaint lurking behind 'they're too easy to zerg' is that they're brainless and boring, not that they're easy. Suggestions to make FATEs impact the world if they aren't completed have less to do with difficulty, and more to do with depth of experience, with a desire to feel invested in the content.

And this sort of crap is how a company milks a name. The update cycle for FFXIV looks a lot like Assassin's Creed. Shovel the same old crap on an accelerated release cycle, over and over and over as long as people are willing to keep paying for it. Don't bother with changing things up or expanding the experience in a meaningful way; that's not necessary, and requires too much time and money. Just keep repeating things until profits begin to suffer (which they will at some point, rest assured). And it isn't what XIV 1.0 did, if for no other reason than 1.0 wasn't allowed to exist long enough to fall into this sort of cycle. ARR felt fresh, too. I didn't mind 2.0, nor, I think, did most people. It's everything that's happened since that has people rightly concerned with the future of the title.