4.25 and beyond

[Darrcyphfeid]

Replying to this in a separate post as it was edited in while responding:

why do you think it's ok to make ff14 different but not 11? you may not believe that but i am asking what you think the general idea about the casual change to 11 is that it was terrible and that it completely ruined the game but then says if 14 was changed into 11 it would make the game better and awesome.

I am absolutely not among the group that took offense to the quality of life adjustments XI received with Abyssea and especially Adoulin, though. Being able to teleport between Home Points/crystals, between the various books that were added to the game over the last 7-ish years, the Geomagnetic Founts, the more accessible mount system - all very good stuff. There's no novelty in spending 15 minutes on an airship or a boat traveling around when you're the only one there because the community was allowed to wither and die by bullheaded developers (or more likely, stingy executives that like the game providing the company money but whom don't see a good enough reason in supporting it).

The only thing I took offense to was the Trust system, because the moment that was added to the game the concept of working together for leveling was killed off. Why would I have a human-controlled character in my party that will cut my EXP yield when I can have a party of overpowered NPCs buffing/healing me instead? It was probably a decent QoL thing, sure, but... I'm sure you can understand why I don't like it. Why you won't like it if and/or when Squadrons expand enough that people no longer queue for lower level dungeons/things like PotD and instead sit in their anti-social little boxes and toil away.

and you said here is break the status qou do something different ok but why is it ok for 14 but not a game that you may like?

But you've never seen some of the stuff I said about XI and Square while playing that game! Trust me, it didn't get off the hook any more than XIV is right now. And I've long since stopped playing XI because - shockingly! - Square couldn't be bothered to listen to me/us. One of the final straws was a massive cheating/exploitation of Salvage (no not that one, a more recent one) that saw a combination of position hacking and being able to use BLU magic spells without being BLU or /BLU (think the Pomander exploit here - and yes, history repeats itself far too often with Square's spaghetti coding) lead to obscene numbers of Alexandrites, used in creating the immensely powerful Mythic weapons, being farmed up. Square decided to not permanently ban a large number of the people doing it, with some posters on BG receiving a 3-day ban at worst, and it was at that point that I realized nothing mattered anymore.

And then because of pushback from the JP playerbase a couple of my friends copped bans for nonsensical things like powerleveling themselves using second characters and I just ragequit entirely. ...Thinking back on it, I'm not even sure why I thought playing XIV would've been a good idea. There are so many parallels, my god. lol

from what i am getting is it comes down to the idea that people like the way one game is and all games have to follow that formula or at least FF because FF can't deviate from what they like and when it does it's uncreative and uninspired.

I mean, yeah? No? I'm not sure.

XIV doing the exact same thing over and over again is just as bad as XI relying too heavily on melee-destroying AoE spam and utterly crippling status ailments. I grew to despise both. Both sill did things that I liked, and that I thought should be focused on more (or less) while shoring up the glaring issues.

There's an enormous chasm in between XI and XIV that I think, if Square worked hard enough, could be bridged to create a truly remarkable game. Diadem, for example, will never not be compared to XI's Skirmish in my mind - except Diadem's gearing system was trash (both times) and XIV in general invalidates gear too quickly for randomized stats to ever be worth it.

so what i am saying is if no game is allowed to do the same thing over and over that means the games you like their current design and direction also has to change to the opposite because it continuing to do what it does is uncreative and uninspired. double standards in all.

No double standard. The sheer amount of variety in XI was staggering, in large part because doing maximum DPS was almost never a good idea in XI. You could do it, sure, but... having, say, 5 DPS smacking an enemy would feed it TP like nobody's business and it would get pretty dangerous with it using named attacks more frequently. Or you'd kill it too quickly instead of hitting "weakness triggers" and get significantly fewer, less rare rewards. Or you'd kill yourself against its shield/counters. Or something along those lines.

Which is still not to say that I want XIV to be XI-2. 'Cause I don't really want that. I do want XIV to slow the hell down (in multiple senses) and maybe start plucking ideas from XI and refining them instead of, I guess (never played it and never will), eyeing World of Warcraft and following/copying it instead.

We're getting a whole special area for relic and people don't even give it a try before complaining we get nothing new that is worth while. I suppose SE should have just recycled the relic in the same way they did for the last couple go arounds given they never can seem to make some people happy.

I don't recall a single person in this thread saying they weren't giving Eureka a try, rather that they're bored from nothing in SB to this point being a breath of fresh air and varying levels of disappointment that Eureka has been delayed this long. Oh, and the part where we can't shake the feeling that this is maybe Diadem 3.0 because they've really told us almost nothing about what Eureka's going to be. Which is a valid concern.

If we're on the subject though, I liked when the Zodiac got Hydra and Chimera as trials. I didn't so much like when the Anima was 80% farming Tomestones.

[SaitoHikari]

Even when 3/4ths of the active players are non-JP? (I'd believe its more like 4/5)

It's pretty obvious by now that whether or not the JP staff is actually interested in hearing from the EN communities, it's clear that someone responsible for communicating things to the JP staff from the NA playerbase is dropping the ball hardcore. There's even recent proof of this - EN players trying to warn the staff that Ungarmax was a thing for 4 months and the JP staff not knowing about it until literal days before it was patched out.

I want to say, probably the biggest irony with FFXIV right now is that if you raid, by default half of the content released in the same patch is invalidated after the first month or so of a new gearing cycle, and invalidated right out of the gate during odd-numbered patches, by virtue of the vertical progression system currently put into place. I already had mostly best in slot Bard gear for the previous gearing tier by the time 4.1 hit, after all, which meant that gearing wise, Shinryu EX did nothing for me.

[Ayer2015]

I want to say, probably the biggest irony with FFXIV right now is that if you raid, by default half of the content released in the same patch is invalidated after the first month or so of a new gearing cycle, and invalidated right out of the gate during odd-numbered patches, by virtue of the vertical progression system currently put into place. I already had mostly best in slot Bard gear for the previous gearing tier by the time 4.1 hit, after all, which meant that gearing wise, Shinryu EX did nothing for me.

You don't even have to raid to encounter this which is only compounded by ilv barely being relevant in non-raid content . Simply re-working how increasing ilv is deployed would have a massive difference, even absent new types of content being added. Relying on people wanting to gear up multiple jobs in order to stay occupied for 6 months is a bit ridiculous imo

[Remedi]

You will never know, since they lose forum access.

He implies that some have been threatening that for years however

[Ayer2015]

He implies that some have been threatening that for years however

I was unsubbed for most of 3.x. People go and come back. I mean if Yoshi really thinks subbing for 2 months every 2 years is sufficient to keep the game going.... who am I to argue.

The whole point of this thread is that the content we get provides no real reason to stay subbed. I can enjoy 2 years worth of content pre-expansion and not bother with unrewarding tomestone gear treadmills. Apparently that is good design to some, but clearly from all the replies it is not to many.

[Remedi]

I wouldn't go as far to say that forum really has any value in determining the how many ppl really like or not something, most of the times this threads degenerate in an echo chamber of same-minded individuals that really wall themselves off calling anyone who doesn't agree a white knight or an apologist, tell me if that is a way to get a conversation or even a remote way to sway ppl to your wiews because imho that definitively is not.
I mean according to this thread 1.0 was the best thing ever for the mayority no?

Now you took a long break that's fine but some ppl are threatening each patch that this is the last one if it suck they'll be gone forever, which has become extremely annoying.
When wow became unbearable to me for what the company was deciding of doing in wod I took and left, didn't post on the official forum saying that they should've kept what I liked or else I was leaving.

However take note that I for one would like some long lasting goal and quite frankly in my opinion they got close with the first anima stage (the unidentified items one) because the system was a long goal that you could tackle in many ways and also imho the fact that you required specialist items, meant that you needed help from others making so you would've to interact with others (or just MB if you were rich)
However ppl complained and honestly ppl always complained about any lenghty relic/anima steps and imho if we want to have a discussion about long-term goals in the game we cannot really whitewash the recent of the community about ANYTHING that requires a tiny little bit of extra effort.
Sometimes we are also responsible for what comes to us and I can assure you that once Eureka comes out you can expect ppl complaining about relic requiring the spawn of timed monsters but no1 will actually remember why we have come to this point.

[Mchappy]

OP and anyone else in thread who puts a lot of hope and expectations into any sort of content are going to be sorely disappointed. You're just sitting yourself up to fail if you give one specific piece of content (in an MMO with so much to do) as the pinnacle of you keeping your sub or not. See how Eureka is tomorrow, if you're not feeling it then take a break for a while. If it's everything you had wished for- enjoy!

[Laerad3993]

We're getting a whole special area for relic and people don't even give it a try before complaining we get nothing new that is worth while. I suppose SE should have just recycled the relic in the same way they did for the last couple go arounds given they never can seem to make some people happy.

Id have preferred both methods being in game (grind like old or Eureka for those that wanted a change) for people to have a choice if they ended up not liking Eureka(or if it just ends up being Diadem), but that would never happen.

[Evogolist]

It's pretty obvious by now that whether or not the JP staff is actually interested in hearing from the EN communities, it's clear that someone responsible for communicating things to the JP staff from the NA playerbase is dropping the ball hardcore. There's even recent proof of this - EN players trying to warn the staff that Ungarmax was a thing for 4 months and the JP staff not knowing about it until literal days before it was patched out..

I've been saying this for months...MONTHS. You can look at the dev tracker and see that the responses to the NA threads aren't no where near what they where at the beginning of ARR and some of HW.

Another issue is that you can search the forum and see that there have been several content or QoL proposals that failed to catch any track, simply because of either the tired ol' song of server limitations or the lore enthusiasts come out of the woodwork to preach about how it wouldn't work.

[Molic]

I've been saying this for months...MONTHS. You can look at the dev tracker and see that the responses to the NA threads aren't no where near what they where at the beginning of ARR and some of HW.

Another issue is that you can search the forum and see that there have been several content or QoL proposals that failed to catch any track, simply because of either the tired ol' song of server limitations or the lore enthusiasts come out of the woodwork to preach about how it wouldn't work.

Yea, really feels like the NA community team is non-existent nowadays. Makes you wonder if all the content proposals and QoL stuff that people have been suggesting over the years was even seen by anyone, doubt the JP staff look at the NA board much either.