Lack of content on patch release

[Asiragan]

They could release all the content that will ever be in Stormblood, at the expansions release, and in a week people will complain about nothing to do.

If this is the case, either the complainants are trolls or the developers have to seriously rethink the design of the game as this would not be appropriate for an MMO.

Don't take offense, but you are simply setting up yourself for disappointement

You are most certainly right. But one can dream.

If people like it this way, good for them. As for me, I don't think I could go on doing the exact same thing for another expansion.

[LalafellDown]

Wish they would stop focusing on house Barbie dress up. We get the same dungeons every patch. How about they make smaller dungeons with a lot more creativity. It doesn’t have to be the same thing every dungeon SE. let us transform into monsters or something in a dungeon. Let us kill things with one hit with random power ups like deep dungeon. Give us items to use that make the dungeons quirky. Time trial within dungeons that give more rewards. Individual loot chest for each player. Random chest drops from monster kills. Random chest appearing out of nowhere. A nemesis system where an assassin or random monster boss appears to targets one player due to their constant monster killing level or something. Killing this nemesis would drop tons of personnal items for each person in the group. Like the loot sack in diadem 2.

[Cidel]

On the topic of staggered content between patches; I think it's necessary for them to stagger content. But only because they have to. Most of their (battle) content isn't designed to hold the attention of most of the playerbase for very long. They all feel designed as novelties at best. It's why things like EX primals really only see activity the first few weeks before the active players have either totally farmed or were lucky enough to quickly collect what they wanted from it and shelf the primal for the foreseeable future. People get their tokens from Normal/Savage and Alliance raids and stop doing it for the week (especially with this new Greed-only raid). Content like Eureka and PotD that don't fall victim to the "memorize the dance, beat, repeat" model tend to live longer and I get the feeling that's why they are "saving" that content so that it doesn't compete with participation of what they do release that has an incredibly brief shelf life.


Unfortunately, 4.3 just so happens to not contain any enduring battle content. Unless you count PvP, which for some reason the devs don't care what's going on with their new PvE content- they'll throw a start of a new Feast season on the 1st day of an expansion if they want to (chill, mostly hyperbolic) and Frontlines usually lasts for a while until another one comes along to kill it.

[LeoLupinos]

Go play something else then.
Maybe this isn't a game for you.

[Maeka]

Go play something else then.
Maybe this isn't a game for you.

Hate to say it, but this does hold some truth.

This game was designed to be casual-friendly unlike most MMOs that want to gobble up all of your free time. Yoshi-P himself has said that he wants you to be able to play FFXIV and other games too.

A gamer that hangs in one game and just that one game is going to get bored, burn out, or just become miserable. He wants people to have fun playing the game, and a part of any gamer's healthy fun is variety. Play FFXIV for awhile, get all the content, take a break and play something else for awhile and come back when the next major patch comes out.

That's what Yoshi-P wants you to do.

He wants the more casual people with lots of IRL job hours, etc to be able to keep up. Can't do that if the game asks for 5, 6+ hours a day from you.

[SorrowsEnd]

The main issue I have with the devs spreading out content is it just makes for unnecessary down time in which players can't play. You have 24hours to add in all the content theirs no real reason to spread it out.Like this 4.3 that just happened felt like their was not much to add and it nearly took them 24 hours to add? Just add in everything come 4.4 and onward. These 4.x.1 or whatever is getting abit out of hand. It's especially annoying when they advertised the new POTD and it's something so many players wanna play and then Yoshi-P peeks his head out of the corner and smiles and goes "It won't be released until like 2 months later" then slowly moves his head off screen(This didn't actually happen but it damn well is close enough). For someone who saved this game from death he does some of the dumbest choices in my opinion.

[CorbinDallas]

If you weren't here for 3.1 then you have absolutely no idea what a true zero content patch looks like, just saying.

More serious answer, it's a catch up patch, they've always been thin on content. Yeah they might be spacing out releases, but why is it such a big deal? You'll only be done with it in a matter of days then sit and complain about nothing to do. Take up crafting and gathering, we have lots to do this patch. That might not be "content" in your eyes but it is something to do. Worst case scenario, just stop playing the game for a while until the content you like doing comes out.

[Vhailor]

For me this latest patch has been the most lacklustre patch to date, after farming the new trial, getting the weekly drop from the new 24-man raid and doing what feels like the exact same Namazu quest 3 times per day there isn't much left to do within the patch.

Yeah, agreed. Like normal with Stormblood thus far, though. There's a lot of content in some sense: a new dungeon, new 24-man Raid, new Trial, new Beast Tribe, and of course the attendant QoL changes, MSQ additions, etc.

The problem is that it's all shallow as hell. There's a bit of a learning curve with Ridorana, which is fun. There's a learning curve with the EX Trial, also fun. The MSQ is fun. Annnnd once that 20 or so hours (tops) of content is done, there's nothing appreciably distinct from the equivalent content tier we had before 4.3. Same old shit, different coat of paint.

SE needs to slow down the pace of iLevel improvements, and introduce content that actually has some meat to it. There is one area of the update that features this, actually: but it's exclusive to crafters. The upgrade path to the new 3-star Crafting gear is suitably meaty. There's a nice mix of items required, there are some reasonable time-gates (unless you want to spend tons of money), and it's not a carbon copy of something we were doing a month ago (though it is more or less a mirror of content we were doing back when the last gearset released - but that was far enough back it feels alright, at least to me). It's worth noting, by the way, the differences between DoH / DoL upgrades introduced in 4.3, and those for combat jobs:

(1) The DoH / DoL gear stays relevant longer; I can count on it being BiS likely through to 4.5, just as the Ala Mhigan gear was BiS through 4.3. Combat gear? Hah. Not only does this make the DoH / DoL gear more desirable, but it also means that the various repeated mechanics required to obtain it don't feel so goddamned dull. I haven't made a push to farm for DoH / DoL gear crafting since 4.1, months and months ago. Combat gear, though? There's always a latest EX Trial; there's always a latest 24-person Raid; there's always an Expert Roulette; for the mid-core player, these activities just get drilled in for weeks or months until we're burnt out on them. Swapping the tilesets and the mechanics does very little to combat this burn-out, because it's still the same sort of content rotation.

(2) I can 'feel' the difference my new DoH / DoL gear makes. I can't feel the difference in combat gear. That exacerbates the feeling that 4.3 didn't really give us anything.

(3) The DoH / DoL gear is a significant time sink. Hundreds of timed node items are required, there's a ton of Yellow Scrip items needed. The Namazu currency puts something of a soft cap on progress. There's rotation planning, especially if you're new to 3-star items. There's long-term Meld planning and materia acquisition to occupy you once the items themselves are made. Combat jobs? Yeah, I'm spending what, maybe 3 hours per week on dungeons? Call it an hour in Ridorana, and three Expert Roulettes which take at most forty minutes each including queue time? We'll be closing in on 4.4's release date before it can compare to the time I spent on my DoH / DoL gear, and that's assuming I didn't decide to make extra copies of the gear for friends or profit. If I did, the DoH / DoL content - a simple couple-dozen recipes or so - just completely outclassed the new, fancy Dungeon / Raid / EX Trial.

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TL;DR - It's not that XIV doesn't have content, or doesn't get enough content added. The problem is that it's the wrong type of content. Ridorana feels fresh for maybe a run or two, at most; then it's just another possible item to get in the Alliance Roulette. The same sort of dynamic exists with the new Trial, and the new dungeon. New content has to be more than a fresh tileset and remixed mechanics, particularly when said content types are built to be repeated steadily for weeks or months on end. Eureka is a great example of what new content can - and should - look like; if SE can manage to release content like that regularly, and without displaying such amazing levels of incompetence in terms of balancing and general supporting systems, XIV will transform into a true AAA experience. Until such time as that, however, it's very much a one-trick pony. The game's great, but we're pretty much playing the same game we had in 2.1 / 2.2 or so, only with expanded Roulettes and a higher iLevel. That'll only entertain people for so long.

Edit / Addition:

This game was designed to be casual-friendly unlike most MMOs that want to gobble up all of your free time. Yoshi-P himself has said that he wants you to be able to play FFXIV and other games too.

Yeah, this gets thrown around a lot. Absolutely brilliant statement, and exceedingly deceptive. Two things I'd point out about it.

Firstly, FFXIV is not very casual-friendly. It's incredibly mechanics-intensive, which is quite punishing for people who are more casual gamers. There's a significant number of abilities available, and mastering them is complex. The 'real' end-game (Glamours and such) are murderously expensive, or insanely time-consuming to acquire. The Relic weapons - supposedly the casual player's path toward end-game level gear - have, prior to Eureka at least, been ridiculous time sinks. The storyline bloat and the sequential nature of the MSQ makes getting started a brutally time-intensive process as well (but, oh, wait, you can pay extra to skip this... what a convenient fix). FFXIV is good about enabling people to catch up to modest gear levels upon hitting level cap. That's really about it, as far as newbie-friendliness goes.

Secondly, aiming to be casual-friendly does not excuse Yoshi-P and the development team from treating shallowness almost as a point of pride. The original statement was a positive one (affirming commitment to a good experience for casual gamers), not a negative one (avoiding a good experience for anyone with more than 10 or so hours a week to play). So can we discard it as an excuse for the sort of bland bullshit SE has been feeding us for well over a year now?

[Ilyrian]

Wish they would stop focusing on house Barbie dress up. We get the same dungeons every patch.

The thing is that a lot - I would anecdotally say the majority - of people play this game for the 'Barbie dress up'.
I don't say this as a negative but it's definitely a thing that needs to be accepted. FFXIV just steers its ship in that direction.

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

People have been complaining about this for YEARS.... the devs simply don't care. Which is sad.

There is a lot of content, but none of it takes very long to complete. So you do everything there is to do in like 2 days.