Quote Originally Posted by Keridwyn View Post
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.