Things wanted for next expansion?

[Cidel]

More character customization options. By which I mean more faces, hair types, and extra accents on a playable race-basis would be lovely.

We don't need a new race, and I don't want one if they are going to give us something like another hyur with a couple animal accents. Especially not Viera; they can keep that in XII and FFTA with the rest of the Ivalice races that they won't be bringing over XIV to be playable and just let them make a cameo appearance in SB's 24-man raid like the rest of them. If the feet/heels are an issue, I can totally foresee the devs cutting back on even more new gear and designs just to focus on feet armor for the new race. No thank you. At least new features for existing races aren't going to require nearly as much (or any) redesigning.


And they need to be smarter about content-releasing. I'd like a variety of content that is reasonably updated, not something new every other patch to run ad nauseum because it practically invalidates everything else that came before it; narrowing options for character progression. On top of that it ends up being something we've been doing since ARR with a different coat of paint.

[KisaiTenshi]

If I remember correctly the GCD is about 2-2.5 seconds. Lowering this to about 1.5-2 seconds would help greatly in getting more skills off cool down and meaning more actions per minute.

Allowing us to create our own combo's (such as what they give us in PvP) would be appreciated or working on the macro system so those who want to make our own macros to copy what is given in PvP do not have to worry about the extra .5-1 second wait per action in the macro for it to off.

This will never happen:

1) It updates movement every half second. So at most you can be 500ms behind and still operate

2) Combat status is updated every 3 seconds (also known as the server ticks), so your hp, status effects, and so forth are aligned against this.

Because the game is global, the maximum theoretical latency is about 266ms given no routing or bufferbloat.

The reason "regional" servers exist at all, for any game, is because 266ms is too much when the population center of places like Japan and Korea allows for latency of 15ms, and no routing nonsense by intermediate ISP's. Any game that was designed for Korea or Japan, tends to perform horribly in North America.

You only get to pick 1:

a) Tiny regional servers, low latency. Enjoy having servers of 32 players glued together by lobbies/hub worlds and finding out that everyone lives within 3 miles of each other, because the game is otherwise unplayable.

b) Large global servers, high latency. Enjoy exploring large worlds with thousands of players, but in order for all players to not get an unfair advantage over each other, all commands are time synced to 3 seconds to allow even players in Russia, Brazil and Australia to play on servers in Japan and California.

If unmetered, high-speed, low-latency internet access were available to all, you'd still see MMO games regionalized because game developers would, in the interest of security and availability, put all the "rendering" clients in their own data centers and stream it as video to the players. But until such time everyone has usable gigabit internet at home, this is a pipedream.

The "GCD" is 2.5 seconds because that is simply how it's represented. Skill Speed/Spell Speed can move this bar, thus it's not actually aligned with the server's time step, but actually against the game clock measured in microseconds. So when your command arrives at 5:01:05.825, and it sends a update command at 5:01:08.000, it is still processed in order that it arrives. Players are not locked against the exact same GCD. The server simply updates everything every 3 seconds with what it knows right now. That's why casters are able to land casts after a baddie is dead, because the command arrived after it was dead, but the game client animated it as though it was still alive.

It's not unreasonable for the game developers to improve the macro system so that it actually sends commands as a "package" of commands to be executed one after the other when CDG/oGCD is ready, however this largely takes a lot of skill out of playing the game, which is why you'll likely never see it as anything but single-second aligned for the player. Now... allowing us to "program" the AI companions (eg the Chocobo, the Squadron, maybe even the Retainers) combat would be a welcome thing, as they could actually be fine-tuned to be less stupid. However at present they basically trade off raw hp sponging for stupid. Like in Stone Vigil, they chase Isgebind around and thus eat every single AOE. In Halitali they all run straight into the fire at Tangata, and into the lightning water at Thunderclap Guivre (but are immune to this one.) These are things that would normally straight up kill bad players.

[Limecat]

Basically this is all stuff I've already posted over the years, but anyway:
- Full RGB color picker for hair/eye color.
- Add a basement to the apartments.
- Planters for apartments that are equivalent to outdoor plots to allow seed crossing.
- Or better yet just instance housing so everyone can have a permanent house of whatever size they feel like buying, like it should have been from the start.
- Add the other three egis.
- Add more pet glamour systems. More egis, more fairies, additional turret styles, maybe weapon-independent swaps for RDM floaty crystals. Put all this in a normal UI interface.
- Start adding rare and desirable drops to open-world mobs. This would be a good source for those glamours I just mentioned(i.e. 0.1% chance for any node mob in Azys Lla to drop a node glamour for turrets).
- Clean up the 2.0 zones, like making the creeks in Northern Shroud something you can run around in.
- As long as I'm making wishes, rebuild the entire game world to remove hard zones entirely and make it open like most games of this genre.
- Remove the login requirement from the launcher to patch.
- Collapse the secondary stats instead of moving the goalposts for what X amount of one does every new expansion. Have new gear in a new expansion start out giving very little and ramp it up over the course.
- Add gathering crits that do something like give extra items, or upgrade what you gathered(say you're at the iron ore node, crit, and get a cobalt ore instead).
- That "must be in town to glamour plate" thing that was put in place? Get rid of that nonsense. What are you trying to do, nickle and dime me to death by making me warp back to town to change jobs and then warp back to whatever I was going to do? We also need far more glamour plates.
- Don't do a third copy & paste of the content/plot structure.
- Don't be afraid to make all leveling and dungeon(including ongoing level-cap ones) gear recolored or pure cloned versions of stuff we already have. Save your effort on unique sets for endgame content.
- Don't include previous items as ingredients in any new synth. Or alternately, find another way to start reducing item bloat.
- Dial back the numbers of gathered items needed for a secondary mat synth. I'm getting one piece of lumber from four logs, seriously? Have I been chopping down the most worm-eaten garbage logs on the planet and I'm only finding sound wood in the pile by sheer dumb luck?
- Retroactively remove the rubber item from all shoe synths, deleting the rubber item itself optional.
- Remove all grades of dark matter, make self-repairs cost gil directly.
- Restore the Sprint cooldown to 30 seconds.
- We need a kojin body suit like the HW tribes had. The existing armor you can buy isn't turtley enough for me to make a gag out of wearing it while leveling NIN.
- Get us some proper boxing gloves as a PUG/MNK weapon glamour.
- Remove flight from the marid mount. I enjoy silliness as much as anyone, but that's gone quite all the way through and out the other side of ridiculous. It doesn't even look like it's trying to fly, it just sort of works its legs once in a while but otherwise hangs there in a fairly static fashion.
- In whichever expansion the time comes for us to assault Garlemald, really try not to go with the obvious low-effort concept of "oh lol here's the Opposing Ideological Faction that wants to help you, which you will aid in taking over the throne". Do something interesting that really hammers home the point that we're invading a hostile nation and have to overcome resistance the entire way to the capital.
- Or better yet flip everything on its head and do something crazy like find a way to play it that Garlemald has been right all along, occupations aside.
- Don't restrict use of learned abilities while synced.
- Add undersized DF(but not roulette obviously) queuing.
- Remove all glamour restrictions.
- Save yourselves some grief and cut back on the server checks and pointless item data; strip out the block for item signatures for example, and only have us download our item list at login instead of every time we zone(keep a running tally instead). Similarly only do a full retainer data download the first time in a login session, then stick to the barest checks needed to confirm the item we're manipulating exists properly.
- Retain crafting state on disconnect. You already do this with Triple Triad matches to keep people from quitting a failed hand, put this in place so we don't get screwed out of our materials.
- Allow us to fold during Triple Triad matches. Either because something comes up and we need to get moving right now or because you can tell you've already lost a hand by your second or third card, we should be able to bail on the game.
- Highlight minions, mounts, and orchestrion scrolls in the market board or any NPC inventory to indicate that we already have that one.
- Make the "You're not the right job to equip this, buy anyway?" warning popup optional.
- Add UI locks for both your hotbars' and the chat tabs locations. I.e. I don't want to be able to accidentally drag them and have to reposition them(again and again and again).
- Fix UI position memory. There seems to be some degree of grid snap, such that things like where I keep my item window are a few pixels off-screen to the right.
- Allow us to specify permanent map markers for our own reference. 10 would be the minimum, but you could effectively make it infinite and still keep down the number of UI entities to just one by making it a single transparent overlay that we "draw" marker icons onto.
- Give player macros access to all in-game icons. Let us use custom ones too.
- Add the option to disable FATE music. And ideally, one to let it activate but only when you join the FATE. Additionally, include an option to disable FATE auto-joining and always require hitting the sync button.
- Add support for user addons, and we'll fix any UI things anyone doesn't like ourselves.
- Don't auto-boot people that get disconnected during Deep Dungeon content.
- Make timed gathering nodes a respawn, not a limited window.
- Remove three-per-day restriction on old expansion beast tribe quests. I.e. you'd only be able to do three kojin, but could burn all 12 of your dailies on the moogles or sylphs if you wanted.
- There should never be a time when there isn't a GATE active in the Gold Saucer. Try to have them overlapping too(and ideally add several new ones).
- Add traditional casino games to the Gold Saucer, poker, blackjack, roulette, slots, etc.

[ImDingDing]

Battle system (faster paced):

It has remained the same for the most part since ARR other than the increase in skills but that isn't what I mean. Compared to some other MMO's out on the market, FFXIV feels slower paced which works well for this game but for people who have stuck around long enough, can begin to feel dull and boring. Even when playing numerous classes I find myself start to either become bored or fall asleep during dungeons, raids, primals, etc. If I remember correctly the GCD is about 2-2.5 seconds. Lowering this to about 1.5-2 seconds would help greatly in getting more skills off cool down and meaning more actions per minute.

Nope, we need harder content on progression. If you think those content are boring you can try the end game raid and come back to tell us the gcd is slow.

[Aomine1992]

To beat a dead horse some more: bette4 more in-depth character creator/customizability...

Better male glamour!!

Make gear last longer then a patch

Class balancing not, some classes are awesome and others are good enough to clear -_-

[DracotheDragon]

I would love it if a system is in place that when your in a cross world party you basicly move to there server temporarily so if your helping your friends you can appear to them and help guide them or hang out [and in a way to stop people from hunting or killing rare things such as fates have it to be where only citizens of that world can hurt them / collect rewards]

[Vhailor]

You only get to pick 1:

a) Tiny regional servers, low latency. Enjoy having servers of 32 players glued together by lobbies/hub worlds and finding out that everyone lives within 3 miles of each other, because the game is otherwise unplayable.

b) Large global servers, high latency. Enjoy exploring large worlds with thousands of players, but in order for all players to not get an unfair advantage over each other, all commands are time synced to 3 seconds to allow even players in Russia, Brazil and Australia to play on servers in Japan and California.

Or.... (c) don't excessively rely upon server-side execution of every action. Latency is 'felt' in FFXIV (and FFXI before it) far more than any other title I've ever played. This is something SE can change, and it's of particular importance since a key reason for GCDs in the first place is to minimize the feeling of latency. They're failing in that regard with FFXIV because of their network code. Making this change could also ease the amount of data transmitted between client and server, which could potentially allow SE the ability to reduce the actual GCD.

Also, I should point out: FFXIV is a cooperative game, far more so than FPS titles or most ARPGs. There's absolutely no reason to implement a GCD for the purpose of player parity across a variety of internet connections, let alone a long one. Indeed, it's not even effective at this: players in Russia can't play on NA servers, nor even can people in central Europe, without noticeable latency-related issues arising. The GCD is a requirement because of the huge amount of data transferred; it eases the load on the server to cap the number of commands to be communicated and processed within each GCD time interval. It's the server capacity that really dictates how long the GCD is. SE could likely lower it to 1.5s, or even 1.0s, if they wanted to - but they'd likely need to either upgrade their servers, or diminish the amount of work done server-side. Hence, my suggestion above.

[HyoMinPark]

What would I like to see in 5.0?

—Removal of glamour restrictions (e.g., job AF gear staying locked would be fine, but other things might as well be unlocked at this point...bikini tanks are a thing, so why can’t you have armored healers? This includes removing gender locks).
—An actual revamp of the Glamour system (i.e., an actual Glamour Log, and not a convoluted system like the Glamour Plates...if they are to stay, revamp them: make them functional outside of city-states, add more plates to the 10 we have, and expand on the storage of both the Armoire and the Glamour Dresser...and add a Dresser as a craftable housing item, pls).
—Expand the current character creation system (e.g., more options in terms of faces, hairstyles, body types, face paints, etc.).
—Removal of the resistance down debuffs (i.e., looking at you, piercing).
—D A N C E R.

[Sunako]

Remove gear from normal mode raid or make it same ilvl than previous bis gear and make ilvl jump 20 ilvl instead 30 ilvl every tier. Old bis gear should be entry level gear for next savage tier.

[Leloa]

Character creation, more sliders not just boobs for females... It's time they added more options to beards for men, dated facepaints and aura horns seperated from the faces. This is all very simple but they want to make it sound super complicated. Games aren't as limited as they used to be and SE should keep up.