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

[BluexBird]

The beast tribe quest was infuriating for me because it is time-gated. I felt like it was only designed that way to force player to remain subbed.

This. 1000x this. I feel like this is almost as bad and scummy as having microtransactions heavily influencing the game. It just makes you realize how boring the game has actually become.

I was legit surprised when Eureka came out and you were able to get more than 450 EXP a week. Shocking, to say the least! Not at all consistent with Square-Enix's usual tactics.

[kupokage]

Im still subbed because... what's $12 to me a month. I login maybe once a week, send my retainers out on ventures, que for a daily, run around Goblet for 25 minutes while it ques, get bored waiting and then log off. You know, just a typical play session in FFXIV SB.

In MH World I could've solo'd 4 Tempered Elders in that same time for decorations and stones. In Tera I could've done a handful of solo dailies and get rewarded with mats.

Anything worth doing for my main right now is through the duty finder and Im at the total mercy of the que. I hate that I can't do what I want unless there are 3-7 others who want to too at that exact moment.

Im stil subbed because I don't care enough to unsub. Its just another few bucks deducted along with a handful of other bills I have on autopay.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Like any other game phases / patches are meant to implement changes based on feed back. What your suggesting is for people to give it 100% percent, burn out with great ideas from the start, and then stress out start, implement them so that most can finish within a few days, and then complain that enough content is being released so they go somewhere else and they scrap the game faster.

... what?

This statement makes little, if any, sense. How is giving 100% going to result in burn out? You are arguing in extremes. Most people aren't expecting perfection, but Eureka lacked even standard features any PTR would have highlighted. You can see this throughout much of their design. Even something simple like say, The Glamour Dresser. How they didn't anticipate the sheer number of complaints about destroying items baffles me. Likewise, how is it other games have implemented far superior glamour systems with more dated equipment than XIV? You keep insisting things take time yet SE has had plenty of time. They simply aren't implementing things, especially those which deviate too drastically from their very rigid formula.

Stormblood is essentially a red-coated Heavensward, which itself didn't differ much from A Realm Reborn. While it was understandable previously due to it being their first expansion since the relaunch, we're now approaching year five and what has changed? I certainly cannot fault people for getting a little tired of the same thing hence the OP's complaints.

[BluexBird]

How is giving 100% going to result in burn out?

I mean... if I'm being honest with you, if there were no such thing as 2 chests a week, 450 tome restriction, I would probably log in every day and spend most of my weekend doing raids until I'm ilvl 370 with all 3 of my characters. It might take a bit over a month. After that, I don't think I'd know what to do in the game. But that's exactly what the problem is for me. They time-gate the game to give the impression that there are many things to do, when there actually isn't...

So instead of most of my playtime being concentrated over a very fun month or so, I'm forced to delay that throughout a period of 6 months, by logging in every Tuesday morning...

People are getting tired of that.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I mean... if I'm being honest with you, if there were no such thing as 2 chests a week, 450 tome restriction, I would probably log in every day and spend most of my weekend doing raids until I'm ilvl 370 with all 3 of my characters. It might take a bit over a month. After that, I don't think I'd know what to do in the game. But that's exactly what the problem is for me. They time-gate the game to give the impression that there are many things to do, when there actually isn't...

So instead of most of my playtime being concentrated over a very fun month or so, I'm forced to delay that throughout a period of 6 months, by logging in every Tuesday morning...

People are getting tired of that.

It's ironically how many raiders use a certain website as self-competition just to stretch out the content, isn't it?

Mulling over ideas just now, I wonder if something similar to Legion could be adopted over here. Replace tomestones with a persistent upgrade system spanning the entire expansion. Every piece of content you do offers some degree of progression, though capped to an extent to discourage spamming easy stuff endlessly. Obviously not a perfect idea, but I can't help wonder if something akin to that would be better than simply capping and replacing our gear every six months.

And what I wouldn't give for gear with more thought behind it than "does this have Crit?"

[Neophyte]

Thing is, depending on amount of new players/quitting players, there is almost no point in asking people why they left, if you don't ask the staying and newly subbing people why they do so, too.

I mean, if someone says "Gearing is too quick and gear gets replaced too fast" and someone says "The endgame is too easy/too hard" and another one says "Because I think this game moves in direction of p2w." and another one says "EUREKA!!!!!"...
...that doesn't mean in any way that those are things they should look into or even change.

They also have to make sure, that those are not things making other ppl sub in the first place....
Where is the point when you make endgame harder because 3.000 ppl quitting told you so, but after that change there are 3.000 other quitters because now it's too hard.

That's why they propably don't even ask... they won't change core-systems or game mechanics because of quitters anyway, unless a real huge bunch quits... and then they will just ask us how the next reboot should look like. x)


Edit: Imho it's way better to have Surveys now and then asking every player (and those subbed in the last 3 months or so), what they like and what they dislike.
Only asking quitting players won't tell you which changes are best for the whole community.

[Veliena]

A lot of players tend to do this. They ask for sweeping changes at every patch/expansion. They say we should listen to those leaving as much as those who stay, but mmorpg's are a dangerous endeavor to begin with.

If you make too many changes, at too quick a rate you risk losing your core playerbase trying to appease those who leave. At the same time if nothing changes ever you risk becoming stale and losing a portion of your playerbase. So how much should change and how often? Thats the question most devs ask when trying to decide on a direction of a game.

The only time devs should really look at those leaving is if they are leaving en mass, an example would be WoW's expansion warlords of draenor. Players dropped by the day so they had to make changes, BIG changes. Some say it worked, other say it didn't.

What I got from the OP was, 1. They don't want to devote a ton of time to the game. 2. They don't like long queue times. 3. Someone should fix this.

DPS queue times are always longer than tanks and healers. We can go all day over why but it generally boils down to responsibility. Tanks and healers have to do things, dps can simply kill things. Granted this isn't always true but it is how its seen. If you cannot devote time to a game, don't play it, but don't ask for something to be done to the game that makes it so you can get what you want at the cost of everyone else. A prime example of a developer doing this is blizzard, again with wow.

[Neophyte]

After that, I don't think I'd know what to do in the game. But that's exactly what the problem is for me. They time-gate the game to give the impression that there are many things to do, when there actually isn't...

No, they say they timegate, so people don't burn out on content, leaving them with nothing to do for the rest of the patch. They're pretty honest about that.
And ofc, they aim for a specific playtime-per-dollar.
If there is no lockout people with a lot of time on their hands would be able to experience the x hours of content of a patch for 13$ (within a month), while others would have to pay more depending on how rare they play.
I think it also influences the stability of server populations, average people playing, etc... which is pretty important for an MMORPG.

If there were no timegates/lockouts they'd prop release a patch as a dlc for 40 bucks or something like this and scrap the sub system or lowering the sub to just an "online fee" of 2-3$, while you pay seperatly for the real content.

Imho ppl just need to ask themselves if they have fun for enough hours a month to justify 13$.

[Vstarstruck]

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. Letme 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.



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.


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.

Ty for being more detailed with what I was trying to say, exactly what I was trying to say. You are also correct in how you compared it to other games esp FFXI. In FFXI you actually had to talk and adjust on the fly, esp in some cases in Nyzul Isle. FFXIV in its core is just script memorization and more often then not, "new content" is reskining the old, esp in cases like Eureka that is a glorified fate train running, something we did before like yokai and ARR leveling.

The most this game ever try to evolve was SB's button bloat thing and pvp changes for SB, but overall not a strong impact. Role actions in my view is still a failure, in a shoe horn attempt to keep a dead 1.0 system.

[Okamimaru]

This game is designed this way on purpose... you're supposed to take breaks... you're supposed to do other things... you're supposed to have a real world life... if you take a break and come back you won't be totally lost as to how things work... it's essentially a casual MMORPG made for casual gamers with some content for people who like to play hardcore... they really don't care if you unsub... they expect people to do it... enough people start or comeback it doesn't seem to effect the bottom line...