To Square Enix, these are the reasons why I am currently unsubbed from the FF14.

[Kleeya]

Both Aquapolis and The Lost Canals of Uznair are impossible to enter, because there is no way to "roulette" into them.

It seems that yesterday, by going into Uznair just fine in a team of 8 during several hours, i did the impossible without even knowing it was not possible to do it. I feel really special now XD

That or people are exaggerating things. Guess what, if you propose things to do to the people you know ig, they might accept it even if it is so-called "dead content".

[Fawkes]

I'm sorry, but I don't understand that one. You don't have to run any "hardcore" content to have access to anything. And even if you don't actively farm tomestones, the weekly runs you'll need in Omega normal and Rabanastre will give you more than enough tomestones to buy any accessory or weapon to complete your stuff.

I have known people that did dungeons to get gear, but don't do any "raids" including the 24-man and normal modes. I used to think of myself as being as casual as you can be until I met them.

[Vhailor]

While I respect your perspective I do have to disagree to some extend. In a perfect world yes the game would always be motivating enough and would keep it's audience entertained. Now lets comeback to reality, the game itself is appealing and your comment about development team appearing to be allergic to change is a very poor argument. Many things have changed since v1.0 from cross job traits, dungeons, housing, gear, and many more aspects. The reality is that they will never be able to please everyone. We as the consumer determine what we consider to be appealing.

Example; Eureka...many people judged it after day one as terrible. Many liked it, I myself found it entertaining , simple, and bit too easy. Others did not even give it a chance and based on feed back they adjusted it. What happened after it was adjusted? Pleased some not all. This is the nature of this type of business. However putting down a product, giving a reason, and not giving a suggestion is only 50% effective. We programmers love insight about solutions that may help and based on that we can set priorities to our projects. If no suggestions are given we just focus on what needs more priority.

I love a good challenge when it comes to gaming so my entertainment values may be different than others, so while many like certain changes some of us find them unnecessary to an extend. Some like the frustration of using our skills and common sense to complete content while others just want a trophy for trying. The product it self is made to try and entertain as many people as possible. What some find appealing others may not. True some of the repetitiveness and grinds can get on peoples nerves....however it does not take a college degree to realize the concept and nature of the game. Their business module for this product is actually very friendly compare to other games I've played. Do I agree with everything? No, can I live with it? sure I choose to pay to play. Have they implemented changes that have been suggested? Compare to other companies yes more than I expected in fact for as long as I've played this game. ( Beta ) Can we cut them some slack? It would be nice, however there are too many spoiled people who want things for just trying and skip some of the work. Hence rage quitting over content is more of a good riddance in my eyes. We all have choices, I still play FFXI while I wait for queues at times and how old is that game? It's repetitive also, yet I choose to play it. In conclusion people have find entertainment values based on different factors, how we see things vary and while certain aspects may not appeal to some they do to others. Just depends on a persons value and satisfaction of what they achieve in their own way. Relics for me is a nice time killer and love the achievement score. FFXIV and FFXI have been two of the best games I've ever played and have helped me relax during stressful times in my life. From this perspective I understand how MMO's work and lets face it in any game there is some kind of grind.

Hopefully this character that your posting with is your alternate, there is much more content that is more appealing once you hit 70. Judging with out even knowing full content just lowers your credibility.

Firstly, yes, this character is an alternate. Actually, it's not even an alternate - I quit for a period of time from late 2.x to late 3.x. When I returned, I created a new character on a new server, as many of my friends had migrated. I didn't update my Forum avatar, however.

Secondly, from my perspective, there actually hasn't been much that changed since 2.0. Let me run through the list of examples you brought up, because I think it's a decent case study.

• Cross Job Stuff: These really didn't change in a way that enriched the game experience. We no longer had to level other jobs to access cross-job abilities, but that actually removed content rather than added anything. The abilities added, with few exceptions, were not functionally different from anything else that existed before. Rescue is one counter-example, though due to how the game is balanced, it certainly doesn't have any real use outside of maybe Savage / Ultimate content where AoE can actually kill you in a hurry. Beyond being irritated that most of my 'role' abilities were yanked from what I used to have natively (I play WHM), it didn't change the experience of the game in any way that I noticed even half an hour later.
  
• Dungeons: I'd argue these haven't been changed at all since 2.0. There are new coats of paint and a handful of new mechanics, but Hells' Lid and Fractal (Hard) don't play any differently than Amdapor Keep and Wanderer's Palace did back in 2.0 (beyond being significantly easier). Similar conclusions are reached if we extend this study to Trials, or Raids. The primary issue here is that new mechanics simply don't alter much beyond one's movement patterns, which is a very trivial change. If new mechanics dramatically altered how one played their job throughout the fight - Abyssea's proc system is a good example - this would be a non-issue. Alas, though, this isn't the case.
• Housing: This one's new, I'll give you that. And it's a fantastic addition, even taking into account all of the numerous implementation issues. We need more broad expansions of content like Housing.
• Gear: I really don't think gear has changed at all. It changes nothing but the damage we can output and take. Where are the items like the AF sets in FFXI, which actually altered the behaviour of some abilities? What about items like Scorpion Harness, that noticeably alter your ability to perform certain party roles like shadow-tanking? There are none, and that's a missed opportunity.

To dive further into your Eureka example, I agree that a lot of people pre-judged the content. That said, so did SE: they pre-judged it so badly, in fact, that they didn't appear to have anticipated the formation of FATE trains (the content is clearly not balanced or designed around them), which is almost an unforgivably bad fuck-up. It's largely what killed off the potential Eureka had to alter a different experience, actually: the key difference between Eureka and non-Eureka was XPing via party camps. Between the FATE train imbalance and the lack of a Level Sync, however, it's almost impossible to experience the content as intended, and get a truly different feel from what FFXIV typically offers. That's a shame. I'm hoping they rectify it in the 4.3x Eureka content, but it's hard to say.

----------

As a wrap-up point, and I speak further on this below, the fundamental issue I have is that FFXIV naturally demotivates people to play it. Nobody can repeat the same tasks, indefinitely, without eventually getting bored. In single-player games this isn't a problem, but in MMOs (and in sequels, actually), it's incumbent upon developers to continually change and refine the product so as to offer a continually-engaging experience. I think SE has done well at this around the edges of FFXIV; they've done a great job designing difficult, creative end-game fights, and they've done a great job expanding the non-Job content for more casual players (Gold Saucer, Housing, Triple Triad, etc.). Core elements of the game, however - crafting, gathering, non-extreme combat, the tools available for socializing - really haven't changed much since 2.0. That means players like myself are finding it harder and harder to find the motivation to re-sub. It's nothing to do with not enjoying FFXIV, and everything to do with having enjoyed essentially the same formula for multiple years running. It's getting stale.

And I still think the development team is allergic to change. It wasn't intended to be an argument, so much as an observation. When it's possible to predict 95% of an update cycle a year in advance, you aren't being creative enough, in my opinion.

when you say "they", what games are you talking about exactly? list like 3.

FFXI with the ToAU XP camp changes and Abyssea content; Guild Wars 2 with their well-thought-out Mount design; World of Warcraft with Cataclysm and large-scale skill tree changes; EVE Online with the Phoebe update. Each of these things mentioned more dramatically altered how everyday activities played out in the world than anything FFXIV has introduced since the reboot.

Getting more in-depth, let's just study FFXI, which is the title I have the most experience with. Zilart increased the level cap dramatically, and greatly expanded the variety of activities available at cap. CoP didn't massively shake things up, but ToAU did, completely altering the established XP camp dynamic and introduced Nyzul Isle, Salvage, and Assault, all of which offered distinctly fresh styles of play. Abyssea a few years later again completely shook everything up, with a massive level cap increase and indirect impact on how XP was gained, along with very unique play and capabilities within Abyssea itself.

Again, FFXIV has none of these things. There is nothing in FFXIV that meaningfully alters how I play my job except PvP or being in capped content. Group size doesn't really impact it; fight mechanics don't really impact it; type of content doesn't really impact it. Rotations retain much of the same feel they had in 2.x, even, albeit maybe with different abilities swapped in. There is one job-specific exception to this - Bard - but SE hasn't been similarly creative with anything else.

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense when it comes to MMOs.

Lack of motivation to play an MMO is not generally caused by the game play itself.

Motivation to play an MMO appears to vary with the player themselves.

This is of course true, but the game is still the appropriate source of blame here. You're conflating the motivating factors behind why someone plays in the first place (which vary tremendously), and why someone loses motivation to continue playing. I'll admit I wasn't very clear on this distinction myself, but I felt it was implied in the context of the OP.

If someone loses motivation to continue playing, then unless there was some ground-breaking life event that altered their motivating factors significantly, the game effectively failed to retain a customer. As with all areas of commerce, the blame for this should fall upon the product. After all, an existing player has already demonstrated a motivating factor to play in the first place: they might be advancement focused, or motivated by discovery, or enjoying socializing, but there's something that caused them to play and enjoy themselves in the first place.

Your articles actually do more to prove my point than yours (and thank you for them, by the way - interesting reads, both). Consider, for example, someone interested in advancement, which the OP implied is one of their motivating factors: FFXIV fails spectacularly at offering a real sense of advancement in terms of character power. It is too visibly a hamster wheel, running constantly just to keep pace. One's achievements in this realm are short-lived. This was a design decision, made by the FFXIV team, that actively impedes their ability to motivate players who are advancement-focused in the long term.

Similarly, let's look at players who are motivated by the social aspect of MMOs. SE has done nothing - absolutely nothing - to foster or encourage lasting relationships between players. Combat is fast enough that it's difficult to form connections in dungeons, and even if you do, there's still - to this day - no ability to maintain a connection to them unless they happen to be on your server (although this is changing in the near future). There's nothing at all in terms of content that has any sort of social objective. There's no ability to search server-wide for Linkshells based on desired criteria. The net result of this? When the community a player is in slowly starts to decay, it can be very daunting to find a new one. If these players become unmotivated to continue playing, it is again, squarely SE's fault: they've done nothing to help out.

Again, I agree with your underlying point about players changing. But the OP, and many, many players criticizing SE on the forums - myself among them - have not gone through a life-altering change in the past four years. We've simply gotten bored. And that is not something that should happen, particularly in such large numbers, if the development team is doing its job right.

[Ceallach]

-.-; for one it was not meant to ridicule anything, it was to say that it has been like any other thread, how people perceive it varies. Second ,to keep this brief I give people too much credit and believe that they can comprehend certain things and at a minimum have common sense to realize that it is a perspective. I would think the majority of readers can piece certain things without a endless amount of time explaining each point. If it seemed rude is probably do to the fact that you can relate on it to some emotional level, my perspective is more of a logical level. Once again, sorry if it feels rude to you.. I don't sugar coat things it's a matter of respect to the individual.

Fair enough, no worries. It also doesn't help that there's only text here, which is less than half of human language (we're lacking voice tone and body language here), so it's hard for me to tell if someone's being a jerk or if someone's just being logical a lot of the time. My apologies for that.

[Rufalus]

For item lv complaints, the flip side is you can take break and catch up again really fast. Things you didn't have time for before, you can just skip over entirely next patch and get the newer stuff instead. The gear progression is meant to be casual-friendly. Just don't get attached to items you worked hard to obtain, enjoy the process instead. If you don't enjoy the process of earning stuff then do something else instead. Not important to have max item level or uber dps if you're not a hardcore raider.

[KisaiTenshi]

It seems that yesterday, by going into Uznair just fine in a team of 8 during several hours, i did the impossible without even knowing it was not possible to do it. I feel really special now XD

That or people are exaggerating things. Guess what, if you propose things to do to the people you know ig, they might accept it even if it is so-called "dead content".

I didn't say it was impossible to -do- I said it was impossible to get a party in that 10 minute window the map is good for.

[ManuelBravo]

Fair enough, no worries. It also doesn't help that there's only text here, which is less than half of human language (we're lacking voice tone and body language here), so it's hard for me to tell if someone's being a jerk or if someone's just being logical a lot of the time. My apologies for that.

Perception and reality, it's all good it happens.

[ManuelBravo]

Firstly, yes, this character is an alternate. Actually, it's not even an alternate - I quit for a period of time from late 2.x to late 3.x. When I returned, I created a new character on a new server, as many of my friends had migrated. I didn't update my Forum avatar...

Secondly, from my perspective, there actually hasn't been much that changed since 2.0. Let me run through the list of examples you brought up, because I think it's a decent case study.

First nice , just out of curiosity what is your main character and how far you into the game?

Cross Job Stuff: These really didn't change in a way that enriched the game experience. We no longer had to level other jobs to access cross-job abilities, but that actually removed content rather than added anything. The abilities added, with few exceptions, were not functionally different from anything else that existed before. Rescue is one counter-example, though due to how the game is balanced, it certainly doesn't have any real use outside of maybe Savage / Ultimate content where AoE can actually kill you in a hurry. Beyond being irritated that most of my 'role' abilities were yanked from what I used to have natively (I play WHM), it didn't change the experience of the game in any way that I noticed even half an hour later.
Dungeons: I'd argue these haven't been changed at all since 2.0. There are new coats of paint and a handful of new mechanics, but Hells' Lid and Fractal (Hard) don't play any differently than Amdapor Keep and Wanderer's Palace did back in 2.0 (beyond being significantly easier). Similar conclusions are reached if we extend this study to Trials, or Raids. The primary issue here is that new mechanics simply don't alter much beyond one's movement patterns, which is a very trivial change. If new mechanics dramatically altered how one played their job throughout the fight - Abyssea's proc system is a good example - this would be a non-issue. Alas, though, this isn't the case.
Housing: This one's new, I'll give you that. And it's a fantastic addition, even taking into account all of the numerous implementation issues. We need more broad expansions of content like Housing.
Gear: I really don't think gear has changed at all. It changes nothing but the damage we can output and take. Where are the items like the AF sets in FFXI, which actually altered the behaviour of some abilities? What about items like Scorpion Harness, that noticeably alter your ability to perform certain party roles like shadow-tanking? There are none, and that's a missed opportunity.

Cross Job Stuff; those were a few things they did, based on usage certain actions were removed and only key elements were kept, also they did both add and made adjustments based on Feed back. I could pull every article and patch and suggest you take the time to read some of those to see how it has improved.

Dungeons: They have made them more appealing and less of a grind to an extend. Before people use to take almost an hour with the exception of main dungeons which cant take over 60 min to complete. How did it change? Dungeons should not take more than 20 min, if anything they can be done in 10 min with proper set up and if well gear. Do to feed back they made it so one of the main dungeons CS can't be skipped. ( The Praetorium ) use to be able to run it and clear it in under 20 minutes, now can take 60+, what did SE do raised the xp and tomes to compensate. Keep in mind this is old content. While I understand everyone pays, most should not suffer. Again people are not satisfied which is my point. Some new dungeons also helped test mechanics, included voices, made to make people learn mechanics which to my surprise many still can't learn the basic. Either do to ignorance, they expect to be carried, or blinded by having over gear thinking they can by pass by pure zerg methods. Yes some can be but not all. People are still ignorant.

Housing: While it is considered to be optional content SE has made it's best effort to please people keeping in mind the stability of servers. The biggest issue was that people were flipping housing to make large amounts of gil. It was not against terms of use like many claimed, it was not unfair, people were just smarted and were able to corner the market. So what did SE do? Made restrictions to try and be fair, added districts, apartments , demolition times for accounts not active ( people complained regardless being their own fault and blamed the product for their negligence ), all based on FEED BACK. It surprises me that people compare FFXIV to other games knowing fully well that this is not a F2P game, and SE does several things to remind players of demolition. What are players excuses? I have better things to do than check my email, I had RL issues, I could not afford to log back in. These are some excuses I have read. I look back and think really? What is SE your guardian or something? They did their part IT IS NOT THE PRODUCTS FAULT that issues come up. It is our responsibility to accept their terms IF we want to play. Blaming a product for our short comings is just being childish.

Gear Let see Materia, over melding, and now AF gear with guarantee 5 slot melding, Relic weapons that have come alive ( Anima ), PvP gear, glamour, ...yeah I'm sure nothing has changed. This one of the reasons why I even doubt some of your remarks. To me it seems you have not really explored all of the aspects of this game. Even if FFXI I use to shadow tank with NIN ,however NIN IS NOT A TANK HERE. FFXI is still harder than this game and while it's foundation may be based of FFXI not all of the same rules apply. I miss a lot of the aspects of FFXI and really wish they would implement some of them. Little by little SE has been listening, and have tried to find ways to reach out to those of us that want that. Is it what we want? NO, however they are being creative and trying.

To dive further into your Eureka example, I agree that a lot of people pre-judged the content. That said, so did SE: they pre-judged it so badly, in fact, that they didn't appear to have anticipated the formation of FATE trains (the content is clearly not balanced or designed around them), which is almost an unforgivably bad fuck-up. It's largely what killed off the potential Eureka had to alter a different experience, actually: the key difference between Eureka and non-Eureka was XPing via party camps. Between the FATE train imbalance and the lack of a Level Sync, however, it's almost impossible to experience the content as intended, and get a truly different feel from what FFXIV typically offers. That's a shame. I'm hoping they rectify it in the 4.3x Eureka content, but it's hard to say.

With this comment you have really lost credibility. First of FATE TRAINS have been around long before Eureka, or Diadem. So I doubt that they were blind to the idea of that happening. It's common sense that it would have been used in Eureka. Low exp, yet high xp on fates. Fate Trains are made by players not SE, even now people that afk during FATE Trains, it's not an SE issue. It's the player community decision to keep them in parties. Regardless SE made that inactivity rule and closed instance to try and please people based on feed back. Learned from FFXI about burn parties and for saw this happening. It's nothing new here or in many other games. If you can't piece this together from these sentences there really is no point in even debating.

To finish with this , unless your a programmer, have some knowledge in business, you will only keep a narrow perspective of what you consider to be reality. Your perception, reality, simple. However, the reality is that SE is running a business, it has made many attempts to please everyone on the spectrum running from sprouts to veterans. Will they ever find middle ground, unlikely. Have you ever competed in their contest for designing gear? It's a way that they reach to us to get ideas of what a gamer want to see. Did you happen to see the upcoming video for 4.3? lots of feed back is being answered there. IF you step back and look at the big picture they are working smart not hard.

[Jybril]

It was shallow, unimaginative, and boring in FFX too.
Honestly I'd rather SE not waste their time on minigames here. This game needs actual content, not Lords of Verminion 2.0.

We got actual content and it's crap on ice, live in HD. it's eureka. Not have SE waste their time? again, eureka was a waste. I'm just throwing out idea's here because this games no where close to dying but it's not as fun as it use to be and ppl are finally seeing the same boring pattern and are wanting to leave. what do you purpose then?

[ManuelBravo]

We got actual content and it's crap on ice, live in HD. it's eureka. Not have SE waste their time? again, eureka was a waste. I'm just throwing out idea's here because this games no where close to dying but it's not as fun as it use to be and ppl are finally seeing the same boring pattern and are wanting to leave. what do you purpose then?

Crap because you are terrible at it or because you seem to miss the main points of Eureka? The story does seem interesting, I like the elemental weakness concept, and it's fairly easy to complete IF you understand it. Brought back FFXI memories. As for the same old boring pattern? I would have tough people would have realized this since v1. ( Before the Fall ) Guess common sense is a rare trait now a days.