Should FF14 take a new route? Discussion

[Vstarstruck]

FFXIV is 4 years old with most players being at level cap, but has two major issues:

• Equipment stats are too basic. It all boils down to 2 iLv identical pieces per endgame tier and all you need to do is choose the one with the sub stats you like more.
  I'm not counting crafted gear as its rarely a viable choice.
• Endgame content boils down to just 4 Savage floors, 1 extreme primal, 1 24man raid, 4 normal raid floors.
  Raid and normal raid ilv is always too low but it serves as a gateway to endgame and provides 1 weekly upgrade items for tome gear.

Expert dungeons, older expert primals, maps, hunts, fates, leves, hests etc are in fact content but not endgame content in any way other than that some help you get tomes and upgrade tome gear.

In other words, we need more meaningful loot, and more ways to obtain it.

I am confused whu "crafted" does not count, it is even the same ilevel as "relics" and can be overmelded.
Your post is a bit in the deep end. No where at any time Applejinx suggested they wanted something perfect.

Every time someone drops "decent coding" or "poorly optimized" in a comment or discussion about a game, is revealing of how little they actually know about coding.

There is not some "make game suck less" tick box. There is not a "bugs=0" line.

The difference between North America and Japan/Korea is that zero-latency programming can not be done. The only way to get the M for Massive in a MMO in North America is either by having shards that serve the surrounding 500km area, and can not talk to each other, or by having worlds that can talk to each other (which appears to be exclusive to FFXIV) but trading off command latency (eg no "action RPG" elements are possible.) The entire reason we can avoid AOE's at all is because there is a long window. No single player game would ever be this forgiving.

A game with better netcode would have to be written with the intent of being a MMO, from both the client and server, and that is just not the current development model. The current development model is to retro-fit single-player game engines like Unreal, CryEngine, Unity and so forth, and make every "level" or "zone" maps as small as possible (really run any of the 2.0 dungeons unsynced, solo and notice that all of them except for the V1.0 holdovers are actually very small. The V1.0 hold overs are actually larger, but they cut off some parts to make them less of a maze.) Those engines I mentioned above all share the same issues that FFXIV doesn't have when they're used as MMO's. FFXIV actually works out pretty well considering I've never seen any crashes or GPU-related garbage that these other engines have when running for long periods of time.

A game that is "better optimized" means cutting everything in half. Textures are cut in half, model sizes go back to 2004-era sizes. Like every time Square puts out a PC game, "it needs better optimization" comes up, and some good-natured modder basically disables everything that makes the PC version superior to the PS3/PS4 version.

To be fair, not every game published by SE is done in-house, and some of these third parties (like the mobile/android/ios ports of FF6/Chrono Trigger) appear not care about the finished product, creating a "SquareEnix PC ports are buggy and sloppy" reputation that may hurt PC game sales in much the same way that we all avoid licensed titles by EA due to Electronic Art's obsession with microtransactions and general IP raiding of studios they acquire and then shut down. Some people don't care and will take any dogfood they are fed.

Which is to circle back to the topic, a new MMO will not be "better" at anything. FFXIV is already using the best available technology that is also used in FFXV. Unless you want the requirements for an Action MMO to be "move to NYC, LA or Tokyo", one is not going to happen. The current allowance for lag in internet mmo games, is also what allows cheating to be prolific because the closer the cheater is to the data center, the larger advantage they will have over players that aren't local.

FFXI, does not have these coding problems, there is less lag with response then there is with ffxiv, and ffxi is only in japan. You are not still damaging stuff in wow or ffxi that is dead, ffxiv is the frst time I seen that lets you keep damaing things for about two seconds or so after it died. There is a difference with someone asking for a game to be more playable vs someone asking for everything to be perfect. I never heard of "server tics" before till this game, and it still hurts BLM' DPS. Why should a job be weaker then it should be because of bad netcode?

This also means stop with the AAR=HW=SB
same 3- 24 man raids, same progression, sae get a good weapon though trial, same menu mazes with upgrading weapons, same 450 tomestones a week limit, same limit of 1 drop per week from the current 24 man, same limits for each time savage is current.

The only thing we got that was really different is palace of the dead, and diadem, but unlike the diadem trio, palace of the dead finds means to still be successful and used

I mean while I do understand what you're saying, but can't it be said that they did try things that were completely different? Lords of V sticks to mind as something that was different and it failed, same thing with chocogo racing. Those are two things in my mind that aren't - go kill a thing- but both failed pretty bad.. same with the card game. Sadly the thing that sells content and works is the standard that has ben here since day one. Looking at it from SE point of view.. why keep trying different systems that fail? That's a huge waste of money and time that could be spent doing things that produce known and flat out results. ala go here and kill the boss/raid/dungeon/mob etc. All I can see them doing to change that up is changing the dance which they have been doing to a point. I might be missing context but from what I've seen already i nthe game totally different content doesn't produce results no matter how bored a bit of the player base is.

I have an issue with "kill a thing = people think it is the same" you keep stating. it is false and no one thinks that. It is the overall feel and what you do overall to finish something. In such light Eureka = diadem, fate trains, all it is. Chocobo racing and lords simply did not capture interest and racing has insane inconsistent input delays.

For other concepts, it is something I explained to you already, as for why in specific, I gave you a quote by yoshi -p that I will restate here:

Yoshida: It is the second expansion pack, and if we were to do the same thing all over again, a lot of people would get tired of it.

Even he is self aware in knowing people will get tired of it. If we keep going on the route of reskining content, some point in the future it is gonna snap and have a massive exodus. Everyone has a breaking point and yoshi-p knows the general mass of the player population is getting close to that point.