Should FF14 take a new route? Discussion

[AxlStream]

In my opinion they should at least try. Let's use it's #1 competitor as a baseline.

In WoW raids mattered. You actually feel like you have a purpose going in that instance and that every raid is unique. I remember going to fight Elegon, the celestial dragon and being amazed by his arena, mechanics and the extra lil achievement to boot. In FFXIV it's more like, oh this thing is here, guess you have to fight it... We are literally murder hobos. Something arrives, we kill it. Sure we do it to protect but we never actually get above that. Coils were the only decent raids that could be compared to WoW's. It felt alive and part of something bigger. Not disjointed like Alexander and Omega feel.

The PvP in WoW is actively supported. Open world PvP might be dead but the BattleGround (our equivalent of frontlines) and Arenas (our equivalent of the feast) are still really active and diversified. You can play capture the flag one game then play oddball the next swinging by escorting payloads. In FFXIV the PvP is.... suffering. Now before the PvP fans jump on me. I have played plenty of XIV's PvP, before and after the rework. It's not that I never did well into it, just that doing so felt painful. The combat system of XIV just isn't suited to it and PvP feels more like they had a checklist and PvP was on it. No actual passion for it in the development of it at all.

The side activities. That point is hit or miss obviously but the greatest contrast is Lord of Verminion. Imo LoV should of been what Pet Battles are for WoW. A Pokemon like minigame. It's silly to say but Pet Battles are extremely fun even through their simplicity. LoV tried to be complex and strategic and it blew up in it's face... Even though FFXIV has side activities like Triple Triad and PotD, it's just not enough and not updated enough through the patches. WoW has the Brawlers Guild where players have solo encounters against multiple bosses testing their awareness and their skills to take them down and get as far as possible through the gauntlet and there's probably other stuff I haven't seen yet as I rerolled on a differnet server. Tl;dr, side content is fun and varried while being supported.

Community mentality. Oh boy that's a touchy subject... You could say WoW is the polar opposite of XIV. Often seen as the bastard child full of toxicity while XIV's is a little angel making sure everyone got a chance. Well this sucks. Not everything is for everyone and content should not catter to the lowest common denominator. Not everyone can do savage raids, so why make the first 2 fights a borderline joke and just make the challenge on the 3rd out of 4? Why are EX primals so easy that a group could clear it blind in 1 hour? This is both an opportunity and a problem. Gets more people into endgame content but alienates those that thirst to push themselves. Sure there's Ultimate for the latter but it's more a matter of how much time are you willing to invest I feel. Also the community coddles the bad performers and SE encourages that! No feedback on bad DPS play. Healer and tanks getting away with only doing their basic jobs instead of pushing their DPS whenever possible. It gets so bad, that it's the players who actually push themselves that are the bad guys. I lost count of how many times I was called a tryhard for being MT and in Deliverance on EX primals. While on WoW it's the opposite but not as bad as people imagine. Sure you get the tirades that you always get of "l2p scrub", "trash tier damage" etc etc. but it's only the reverse that you seen on XIV. Except of complaining about the good and tryhard, you complain about the bad and lazy.

All in all, maybe WoW seems to have so many upsides because the team has over a decade of experience behind them by now but you see that they are not afraid of innovating and improving what is there. SE being once burned twice shy are very hesitant to step out of the tried and true method but that is slowly poisoning them. I'm not saying FFXIV will die befor elong and being a doomsayer here. I'm saying that it will start losing appeal. It can fall back on having great story and gorgeous boss fights for sure but once that initial wow factor is gone, what is there left? SE just has to take the game in a new direction, doesn't matter which and it'll show it's players that they are willing to work on the problem. That would quiet down alot of worries and bring satisfaction to most players. Until it does that though, content like Eureka (which is just a repackaged Diadem and a failed Timeless Isle clone) will just keep driving people away.

[MagiusNecros]

When people suggest stuff like "change the genre of the game", there is nothing to discuss. That's totally unrealistic. There's been lots of discussion on what can happen, including netcode improvements, lowering the size, adding other things to do in there, etc.

I'd rather they fix things like the character post limit on their poor excuse of a forum website. Baby steps.

[KaivaC]

Good comments so far. I can't say I disagree with a lot of the points made here so far. I'm still stuck on my phone, so let me limit this comment to the combat system. Honestly, I think it's fine. I'd like to see some areas of combat that utilize more usage of role actions. For example.... Every instance, a protect is thrown up. Maybe include deprotect on enemies, and unprotected allies start getting targeted with tankbusters? Just trying to think outside the box here. Obviously, my thoughts extend beyond combat, but til I get to a computer, what do you guys think of most this example for a start?

[AkashiXI]

I feel like I’m in the minority by saying that I like the direction Eureka is going with this game. Monsters don’t feel toothless anymore, FATEs(NMs) aren’t a face roll anymore and require a community effort to down, the items received are plentiful and worthwhile, and they set a pretty big boundary of what can come from the Eureka instance. They can bring dailies, weeklies to Eureka, or even more side content. Having a completely separate leveling system also gives this instance more life. And most importantly: you don’t have to do the same thing over and over in Eureka to reap rewards. Want to chain monsters to gain exp? Sure. Want to chase NMs in a giant group? Go for it. You’re never in one area, the entire time grinding. You’re constantly running around, always in a fight or flight situation with the strong monsters. I hope Square continues down this route.

[Keridwyn]

I think we might also be a small part of the problem folks.

It's fairly clear that FFXIV is in desperate need of some netcode updates and programming updates if it wants to continue forward and provide stronger content that deviates from the current formula (how often have we asked for something and been met with 'but limitations' after all?) Doing this though, they'd have to focus their time and energy on it meaning we really wouldn't be seeing anything content wise for us to do. Worse, we would start seeing an awful lot of bugs pop up and worm their way into our everyday activities as things went live and broke in ways the devs didn't plan for.

Just look at one of the biggest arguments around Eureka, there are people absolutely livid that they took all this time, thinned out all this content, and only delivered Diadem 3.0. So how do you think those same players would react when the only new content coming out is maybe a new glam or minion? Something that takes virtually no time or effort to toss in because they're focused on major overhauls. Sure, plenty of us would be patient because we know it NEEDS done and we'd be willing to wait and see what changes came of it. But you can bet there would be plenty of folks leaving over it.

That says nothing about if they do it, they update it, and they don't produce something stunning in the very next content patch afterward. It might honestly break the back of FFXIV if that happened.

[F_Maximillian]

I think we might also be a small part of the problem folks.

It's fairly clear that FFXIV is in desperate need of some netcode updates and programming updates if it wants to continue forward and provide stronger content that deviates from the current formula (how often have we asked for something and been met with 'but limitations' after all?) Doing this though, they'd have to focus their time and energy on it meaning we really wouldn't be seeing anything content wise for us to do. Worse, we would start seeing an awful lot of bugs pop up and worm their way into our everyday activities as things went live and broke in ways the devs didn't plan for.

Just look at one of the biggest arguments around Eureka, there are people absolutely livid that they took all this time, thinned out all this content, and only delivered Diadem 3.0. So how do you think those same players would react when the only new content coming out is maybe a new glam or minion? Something that takes virtually no time or effort to toss in because they're focused on major overhauls. Sure, plenty of us would be patient because we know it NEEDS done and we'd be willing to wait and see what changes came of it. But you can bet there would be plenty of folks leaving over it.

That says nothing about if they do it, they update it, and they don't produce something stunning in the very next content patch afterward. It might honestly break the back of FFXIV if that happened.

If they make it very clear that they're going to do a hard overhaul that will benefit the game infinitely going forward I think most reasonable people will understand. Especially if it leads to much requested things like increased character customization/less inventory issues/higher textures etc;. The problem with eureka is that it was hyped up to be something totally different that people would enjoy over the standard relic grind and for alot of people that promise was not delivered on despite months of delay.

[Vyriah]

snip

It's not the game that become easier, it's player getting better at it. Because some are playing for really long, because there's more of them. StormBlood got a lot of new blood that got on top of the alreday accumulated knowledge about the game and with social tools like reddit, FFlogs and such made the game system less of a secret.

But there's something interesting in what you're saying. You're telling me that I'm from a casual crowd, but I'm actually a pretty high performing mid-core raider. You can check, if you want. On the opposite, everytime I say what I'm saying right now, there's always a crowd answering to me the way you do. Exactly what's happening here.
Shouldn't be the other way arround if I follow what you're saying ?

[Kaonis]

snip

The thing is, they are a large company. They could afford to spare a few developers on other projects in the company if not outright hire temporary people to work on only that aspect of the game.

[Tridus]

I think we might also be a small part of the problem folks.

It's fairly clear that FFXIV is in desperate need of some netcode updates and programming updates if it wants to continue forward and provide stronger content that deviates from the current formula (how often have we asked for something and been met with 'but limitations' after all?) Doing this though, they'd have to focus their time and energy on it meaning we really wouldn't be seeing anything content wise for us to do. Worse, we would start seeing an awful lot of bugs pop up and worm their way into our everyday activities as things went live and broke in ways the devs didn't plan for.

Just look at one of the biggest arguments around Eureka, there are people absolutely livid that they took all this time, thinned out all this content, and only delivered Diadem 3.0. So how do you think those same players would react when the only new content coming out is maybe a new glam or minion? Something that takes virtually no time or effort to toss in because they're focused on major overhauls. Sure, plenty of us would be patient because we know it NEEDS done and we'd be willing to wait and see what changes came of it. But you can bet there would be plenty of folks leaving over it.

That says nothing about if they do it, they update it, and they don't produce something stunning in the very next content patch afterward. It might honestly break the back of FFXIV if that happened.

It might. Or it might not. If they're going to stop content updates for a patch cycle or two in order to focus on netcode and infrastructure level stuff that will help us later, their usual method of "tell players nothing until right before it's done" will result in total failure.

Here's the thing. We all know that stuff needs to be done. We openly ask for it. If they were open about what it'd cost us to deliver it, I think most of us would be pretty tolerant because we see the long term benefit. Open communication gives you a ton of benefits when you need to do something hard, as we see from other (usually indie) game developers that need to make hard decisions and openly engage their players about it. That often works better than you might think, and it can absolutely work in a MMO where players are deeply engaged with the game and have played it so long that they care about it. We want cool stuff in the long term, and a lot of us would be okay with some short term pain to get that because we're here for the long haul. Do it right, and you wind up having your most engaged players acting as ambassadors to the rest of the playerbase.

But doing that in secret doesn't give us that. All we see is nothing happening for months and weak updates when they do come out. Without a mindset shift, the only way this works is if we limp along as we are right now and 5.0 surprises us with major fixes to this stuff. But that makes the entire 4.x cycle pretty painful. I mean, honestly I'm not sure how 4.3 is going to go because while 24 person raids are great, one of those alone can't sustain Stormblood for 3 months given the mess that Eureka is. People will get bored, fast. They need something to look forward to. Right now, everyone who dislikes Eureka has a pretty big hole because it was intended to give them content to do for a while and it's not delivering on that.

[KaivaC]

snip

This right here. Here's the thing...as toxic as Overwatch has become in-game, Jeff Kaplan has been pretty open and available to the fans of the game. As wonderful as Yoshi P. is with the Live Letters, I feel like SE themselves could take a page out of Jeff Kaplan's book with communication. I'm sure some of the backlash would fade if SE, not Yoshi because he's doing as much as he can, would be more open about the state of FFXIV. Don't feed us general information - actually communicate with us and show that you're actually taking some of the more popular feedback seriously, and then address it directly. Don't give us PR statements...actually talk to us, your customers.