Should FF14 take a new route? Discussion

[Alleo]

I dont think that FF14 will be gone soon but I fear that it may never live up to its great potential.

My problems:

SE tries to invent the wheel again and makes things far too complicated:
People wanted something similiar to Pokemon, yet they decided to introduce LoV in that overly complicated way.

People wanted to be able to give their chocobos different colors. Instead of simply using the way we can color our clothes they invent a whole system where you first need a house or apartment to use it and fruits from gardening. On top of that its RNG too. Why does something simply like that need such a complicated annoying system?

People wanted a way to store their glamour so that they could get it all. Instead of an limitless glamour catalogue we got a dresser with a 200 item limit, that destroys our stuff and that need plates (which are way too less) which can only be changed at certain places and dont work that easily too.

TT was overly complicated with all its limits and its still a huge RNG factor when you want to get every card. Instead of having a nice game that you can play for a bit you have another minigames that needs far too much time if you want them all..Great for those that have nothing else to do, bad for those that still need lots of other stuff.

SE should put more money into research and the opinion of the playerbase instead of marketing:

Less traveling all around the world for someone that already has to do three jobs..where should those new ideas come from, if the person in charge has to go around the world constantly? If you still want to do that use an PR team or give us a new face that will do that but give Yoshida a bit of a break. Someone that is stressed out that much might just simply have not the time to come up with something new and simple.

More communication with the rest of the playbase. Nobody truly knows if they still mostly listen to their japanese fanbase but its already bad that people get the feeling that their opinion is worth less because they are from NA or EU. Especially since we have more players in those two than in the japanese playerbase. Have a translator with you in these liveletter because those still feel like JP only shows. Also if you ask us for our question then please take the ones with the most likes even if they are not comfortable. Otherwise you can just stop with these liveletters..

Give people a way to tell them their opinion other than the forum. If someone cancel their sub give them the chance to write their reasons down. If you release a new patch with new content, give us ingame surveys which will ask the players how they liked it and what they would have made different. Sent all of those directly to SE JP and have them be translated there by professional translators so that stuff wont be missing..This way you will truly get the view of the whole playerbase. If you fear that people wont take their time to answer that give us Crysta or stuff like that as a thank you if you participate and answer each question. This way people might finally feel like their opinion is worth something.

Communication is the key! How can it be that there is such a huge silence for a lot of problems and only a very late apology (if there is any)? Dont change stuff up without telling us about it..its really leaving a bad taste in my mouth when you just changed the merchandise stuff from account wide to single character only without any warnings before that and without any true reasons..the same with the price increase for some countries. Something like that can really damage the reputatin of your company. If you are worldwide you cant just stick with the culture of your own country..you have to understand how the other cultures function and step over your shadow.

If you are planning for something that the community wanted for a longer time, why not give us a bit of the basics ideas behind it and see how we will take it? As soon as I played stuff like LoV or Diadem 1+2 (+3..) I kinda wondered how they believed that this would be something great. It starts to feel like they are out of touch. Maybe if you have posted what you have planned with LoV people could have still given their opinion about this before you released it..maybe we would have a better LoV now that a lot of people still play out of fun and not something that was nearly death on arrival.

Sometimes I really get the feeling that we are playing a game that is completely just the vision of one person..but thats not how it should be..Yes the developers should have a vision and things like story are onto them but an MMO can only be successful and a money maker if you have the playerbase on your side. So you should create things that most of them will like and not something that you just like..

Go and get a team of people that only goes around and plays other MMOs and give them the time to try them out, to research what is great and how people like it and then take ideas from such systems. Make them so that they can function within FF14 and that they are also not needlessly complicated or something people did not want. Make something that does not need constant changes because that means just less time and budget for other stuff.

This game could be so great but right now its just alright. It will never be able to get better than WoW if they are fine with medicore content.

I dont want them to change the whole game up, but I am also getting tired of the „serverlimitation“ as a reason why we wont get stuff. Change that otherwise we will never truly see it rise above its own position. It will be a fine and nice MMO but nothing great.

[Theodric]

FFXIV needs to look at WoW. That isn't me saying it needs to be WoW, though.

For better or for worse, WoW shakes things up with each new expansion. It isn't afraid to try new things. Despite limitations, it has also added a bunch of new playable races in the form of 'Allied Races'. Now, I'm not saying that FFXIV needs to embrace the same route but increased character customisation has been requested for years now and all we seem to get is new hairstyles with each patch. Worse yet, many of these hairstyles are clearly designed to be feminine/androgynous so those of us who play male characters with a masculine aesthetic miss out.

This site could do with a revamp, too. I'm hoping that with Yoshi-P's promotion we'll see more funding and staff thrown FFXIV's way. It's sorely needed.

[Remedi]

Wow gives the impression of shaking things up but at the end of the day it's still the same game, not to mention they have the orrible tendency of creating stuffs for an expansion and removing them the next for arbitrary reasons.

They really had the occasion of shaking things up with the artifact and they decided to make it bland and then toss it away.

[Tridus]

One thing they must fix is the broken healing system. I looked at a few parses at my friends who are farming O8S and the WHM's top heals were Regen and Medica 2, that's it, the rest was DPS activity. The SCH wasn't much different with EOS topping the charts followed by Adalo and the rest was DPS as well. What kind of healing system is this now? Back in ARR, healing used to be... well... healing but now, its medica 2, regen, and DPS.
I've taken a break from XIV for now and I then went back to some of my other favorite games and tried to heal... Oh Em Gee... You have to heal, you have to heal hard or people die, heck people die anyhow, healing is intense and there is a lot of it. Tanks wanting to tank in DPS stance? ROFL... dream on, your tissue paper without your tank stance... or your going to kill the healer or both!

Easiest way to bring me back, bring back ARR difficulty level of healing and ditch this Medica 2 + regen stuff.... I want to heal, not DPS.

Liked it, then unliked it so I could like it again. There's been discussions about it before in the healer forum too, but healing is far too powerful relative to health pools. Give me more stuff to actually heal so I'm not a DPS with the most boring rotation ever and occasionally also some healing spells.

It's the same on the tank end in terms of holding aggro and mitigating damage, hence why those get played as blue DPS. I don't know how they'd even add another healing job right now with how little healing is actually being done in most of the game's content. SE's never really acknowledged this as an issue. I mean, it seems like they barely think about healers at all, given stuff like lilies have remained irrelevant and unmodified since coming out. Cynically, I suppose that's good, since if they start tinkering with WHM they might break it, but still.

A job gauge and it's mechanic that you could delete entirely and have absolutely no impact on how the job plays is a sign of a problem. I'd love to hear from the devs on if healers being played as DPS with occasional healing is what they intend, and if not, what they plan to do about it.

[KisaiTenshi]

The biggest problem in FFXI (if somehow the list I gave didn't make it obvious) was what to do. You couldn't do everything. Then to top it off there was 3 different quest lines for 3 different types of relics (and these relics, all 3 types where way stronger and way more of a grind then ffxiv's ones are, but they last, for example, my relic was 3 years and it stayed relevant for 6 more years till I quit and to this day I could return and continue to upgrade it to make it current once again, about 11 years after making it)

I'll just point out that XI's relic weapon == Mabinogi's spirit weapon. Unlike the latter however, XI lets you keep upgrading it, where as Mabinogi, because of microtransactions, basically you have to pay real money to repair it, thus the spirit weapon pretty much doesn't get used, or is completely ignored by people not willing to fork out money to use it.

(Oh and please SquareEnix, don't take any ideas about putting Relic weapons in the cash shop.)

It would be preferable had SE simply let you "transform" or "glamour" the relic weapon, and gear into new gear, thus not wasting all this work, and then having a new major version patch come along, and all that timesinking is destroyed. This is why I've pretty much didn't use the relic gear. You clearly don't need it, level sync/ilevel sync ensures that there relic gear is useless no matter how OP it is unless you're playing the hardest content only.

. 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?

As I said, "server tics" is the only way you ensure people can't cheat the game by having as faster connection. It doesn't help people on really poor international locations (eg Australia) , where when you see these players play the game, it looks like they are gliding and randomly freezing. If I have a connection with 10ms ping to my server, and you have 100ms. If the tic a server tic is 50ms, that means I can do 5 actions in the same time you can do 1, and this is remarkably unfair in an action game. But in "turn based" mmo's, this is not unreasonable. Damaging things after it's dead is a side-effect of "tied" in a server tic, and as far as I know a "tic" in XIV and XI is 3 seconds for combat stuff. Short of everyone having a direct fiber connection to the server, it's a no-win scenario for anything better. Which means any time you see people complaining about "optimize better", ask them what MMO they work on.

(and for the record, I've seen how the sausage is made for one MMO, we think there's some grand data center and people working around the clock on fixing things, when it's really more like one bank of servers and one guy that has to be called in on his day off when emergency maintenance is required.)

[Remedi]

As much as we give shit for them to adding a cash shop and some promotion I would like to remind that Wow cash shop exist too and for some items is more expensive and let's not forget the TCG promotion (which btw is no longer printed so expect paying a hefty amount on ebay if you fancy those cosmetics)

edit: not implying that is correct either way just saying the fact

[Aerlana]

edit: not implying that is correct either way just saying the fact

Either way it is stupid. Sub MMORPG = no cash shop.
There is many difference between both (WoW got high cost mount, but the FF cash shop is much more expensive if you buy everything... being really younger.

WoW does it = bad
FF doest it = bad. The matter here is we speak about final fantasy XIV, and about a lack of fun in the game...

Aello did show the core matter of the devs for this game. but with so much income (sub + vendor sub + cash shop) we could hope really better. Dont care if any game doest worst.

[Remedi]

Either way it is stupid. Sub MMORPG = no cash shop.
There is many difference between both (WoW got high cost mount, but the FF cash shop is much more expensive if you buy everything... being really younger.

WoW does it = bad
FF doest it = bad. The matter here is we speak about final fantasy XIV, and about a lack of fun in the game...

Aello did show the core matter of the devs for this game. but with so much income (sub + vendor sub + cash shop) we could hope really better. Dont care if any game doest worst.

It's bad either way but you don't have mounts costing 1.5k EU on ebay atm, many items in wow are as I said are locked behind trading cards that are no longer printed and let's not forget that we have a part of our community asking for more and more items in the cash shop especially those that were created for the chinese version of the game, which somewhat baffles me

Frankly it annoys me that both game got a cash shop because a part of the costumers eventually asked them and I know some ppl I used to play would instantly buy those items no matter what.
It's sad if you ask me

[Alleo]

As much as we give shit for them to adding a cash shop and some promotion I would like to remind that Wow cash shop exist too and for some items is more expensive and let's not forget the TCG promotion (which btw is no longer printed so expect paying a hefty amount on ebay if you fancy those cosmetics)

edit: not implying that is correct either way just saying the fact

WoW ist still a much older game with a much smaller cash shop. And lets not forget that you can get the cash shop currency ingame so you could get everything in the WoW cash shop by just playing the game. So FF14 is younger, but has a big amount of more stuff in there (and its getting more and more) with a big price tag which you cant buy ingame. There is imo quite a difference between those two.

I would complain quite less about the cash shop if we would be able to exchange Crysta with Gil or buy tokens from other players.

It's bad either way but you don't have mounts costing 1.5k EU on ebay atm, many items in wow are as I said are locked behind trading cards that are no longer printed and let's not forget that we have a part of our community asking for more and more items in the cash shop especially those that were created for the chinese version of the game, which somewhat baffles me

Frankly it annoys me that both game got a cash shop because a part of the costumers eventually asked them and I know some ppl I used to play would instantly buy those items no matter what.
It's sad if you ask me

It can go the same way since FF14 now likes to sell emotes with statues so who knows how much they will cost on ebay in the future. SE also has items from merchandise that you cant get anymore.

[Remedi]

WoW ist still a much older game with a much smaller cash shop. And lets not forget that you can get the cash shop currency ingame so you could get everything in the WoW cash shop by just playing the game. So FF14 is younger, but has a big amount of more stuff in there (and its getting more and more) with a big price tag which you cant buy ingame. There is imo quite a difference between those two.

I would complain quite less about the cash shop if we would be able to exchange Crysta with Gil or buy tokens from other players.

Most of the items in FFXIV cash shop were old event items which if you have been subbed constantly they are nothing to you.

What are you talking about the tokens in-game for the wow cashshop? There was never such a thing when I played this they really changed it to be a mobile game or what? And frankly since mop start their focus on the cash shop just skyrocket so no if anything ACTIVISION-BLIZZARD has become the greediest scumbag company after EA.

And my point of the TCG was about the emotes with statues, only that you don't spend money for the emote you spend them for the statuette not like WOW Trading cards that are completely useless if not for the loot code.
You can say I'm defending FFXIV here, maybe frankly I don't respect activision-blizzard and their scummy way especially because they could drop tons of dung on ppl and ppl will still buy it.

Just like ppl praises bethesda games while they simply release w/e and then let ppl complete it and they've been doing it for years but still nobody cares. I can garanteed that if WB, EA, Konami where to do this ppl will bitch to no end, but since it's everyone favorite nobody cares, so yeah on this topic I don't like ppl beign partial

Shame on SE, shame on Activision-Blizzard, shame on everyone doing it