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

[Talraen]

So, based on what you're saying it's "fun", but lacks the well designed/scalability marks.

I won't argue against your definition of fun, but what I think Chocobo racing should have been is basically FF14's iteration of Mario Kart or Crash Team Racing. A side activity that is simply fun to play with friends during downtime. It didn't need all the progression systems and stuff that drove it further to a solo adventure.

In order to be well designed it'd need good modes for solo matching, team matching, as well as allowing people to grab people out of PF/FC/LS's to to go up against. Allow people to spectate and bet and set up their own prizes. As far as rewards go, this REALLY should have been the system where you unlocked new colors, some bardings, etc, rather than the menu content it was placed in.

Lastly, scalability is important. I would have liked to have seen a crisply made level editor UI so people could craft their own tracks and a means to share them among the community. Not only that, but time trials or battles could work.

I can't agree with you here. I don't think it's fair to expect a side activity to be on par with the best kart racing series of all time, or the best kart racing game outside of that series. (Side note, I appreciate the CTR love! Great game.) What you're describing sounds pretty awesome, but it also sounds like a completely different game they should sell on its own. Particularly the level editor part.

For an MMO side activity, I expect something which is fun to do, doesn't demand constant attention, and can be played for a very long time. (Note that I wish MMO stuff wasn't all designed to last forever, because who has time for that? But it is what I've come to expect and it seems like everyone else wants it.) I think chocobo racing hits all of those notes.

Based on your response, I don't see "fun" mentioned, it's definitely not scalable, and well designed is up for debate.

For me, LoV could have gone 2 different routes. The route I care significantly less about would have been a pokemon styled approach.

The better approach I would have liked to have seen is SE to leverage some of their existing IPs. Namely FFT. I envisioned a system that was basically like editing FFT teams and battling out in scenarios and against other players, almost like a really neat version of FF chess.

I have some of the same arguments here, especially since you're literally comparing Verminion to a different game the same company made (FF Tactics). I would love to see a Tactics-style side game in FFXIV, and I don't think the existence of Lords of Verminion prevents that. It's a totally different thing. They were looking for something relatively quick and action-oriented, and they did an OK job. Not great by any means, but not terrible. I do think the game lacks any compelling reason to play it, though I think that's largely a symptom of its unpopularity. Why invest in something most people don't care about? I hope they try more stuff like this in the future, hopefully with better results.

Like many mentioned, the only reason it's "fun" is because it's an activity that is so trivial it allows downtime to socialize. So does AFKing in town, but that's hardly what I would considered well designed fun content.

The Magia board being nothing but a binary if/then statement doesn't lend well to it being well designed either, and it certainly isn't scalable as we've seen now that people have moved past the content.

That's a fair analysis, but so what? If there's one thing I learned from Eureka, it's how much difference the downtime in a game like FFXI actually made to its enjoyment. FFXI was extremely obtuse and anti-player, yet people still loved it, and Eureka taps into a lot of the reason why that was the case. Why is that a bad thing? If it's designed to be fun, and it is fun, doesn't that make it well-designed?

The Magia board is a bit extraneous, but I don't know what design for that sort of thing would have actually worked well. The only thing I can think of would be to more heavily restrict how often you can change it, and I think that would have just made people mad. It doesn't really add anything to the content (except justifying a few quests), but I don't think it detracts either.

So you are saying that the process of overmelding is fun? The ridiculously prohibitive cost and tedium and low % success rates on binary/boring stats was fun to you?

It definitely isn't well designed with how many clicks it takes to get through the process, and with how basic materia itself is, it's certainly not fun putting in bland +stats that do absolutely nothing to your gameplay either.

In terms of crafting, I do enjoy the materia system. I generally don't do a lot of penta-melding because I craft for fun and not to make money, and I can't afford it. But I'll do a lot of +1 melding or +2 on accessories to gain some slight advantage. The fact that it has a prohibitive cost is what makes it interesting. If it was trivial to max-meld everything, you'd just do that and move on. On the other hand, while I was crafting my two-star crafting gear, I had to decide how much to rely on grade 5 materia (which has a chance of loss upon removal), how much to overmeld, and which pieces were better off as yellow scrip gear compared to the previous crafted set. That's interesting because it requires real choice and there are real risks. Because I craft fairly conservatively, I waited a long time to do this and spent very little (probably lost a few dozen grade IV materia and little else). But if you wanted to be on the bleeding edge of crafting, that was an option as well. That's the epitome of good design to me.

For all other purposes than crafting, I can take or leave materia melding. I find the requirements a bit annoying for gathering, and I don't do any combat content that's hard enough for it to matter whether I melded my gear or not, honestly.

I just kind of gave up after the first few. It's clear you didn't understand the exercise. You label these things as "cool", but the gameplay forms you list are either zerg content (i.e. not engaging) or menu content (aka click this, get that), and that getting stuff for minimal effort makes you feel efficient, even when you're not really doing anything.

I appreciate the time you took to respond though regardless, as I suspect the person I originally did won't.

I'm sure it's coincidental that the four you skipped were the ones I unabashedly loved.

If the "exercise" was to justify content you don't like in terms you've defined, then I would say I "understood" it but made no attempt to actually do it, because that's silly. My point is just that content you find terrible is enjoyed by other people. This game is well-designed for me, perhaps it is not so well-designed for you. And perhaps if they changed the design to your tastes, people like me would like it less. Would that be better or worse? That's a complicated question and I have no idea. But it's not as simple as "this is not engaging, therefore it is bad" because both halves of that premise are in question.

I do appreciate your response as well though, because it's always good to see things from multiple perspectives. And your original question helped me appreciate the game more by thinking about it in the first place. And because now I want a chocobo-based Mario Kart clone really bad!