Are the developers of XIV out of touch?

[Remedi]

You mean that patches and/Or ilvl increases should be more spread out or you mean like last tier raid gear should matter for the new one?

Because I honestly can see the problems you are talking about but aside spreading patch release or making raid gear matter more I don't really see much more solutions

[Vhailor]

You mean that patches and/Or ilvl increases should be more spread out or you mean like last tier raid gear should matter for the new one?

Because I honestly can see the problems you are talking about but aside spreading patch release or making raid gear matter more I don't really see much more solutions

They need to branch into horizontal gearing, where new content drops situationally-useful gear that doesn't flat-out overpower what came before it.

XI offers a good example of this. At the end of ToAU, which was about the five-year mark, end-game content over from Zilart and CoP - the previous two expansions - was still perfectly relevant and routinely run. The items they dropped were still BiS - in some situations. ToAU offered other items that were better in other situations. Not every job would benefit from every piece of content, but end-game communities generally did a good job making sure everyone got their critical items (which itself served as an incentive to run a variety of content).

In XIV, we literally have a scenario in which the hardest content in the game - currently Ultima Weapon Ultimate - drops rewards that will struggle to even place in the 'top 10 most powerful weapons' list six months after its release. That is insane. It means all you're chasing is the Glamour, and very temporary bragging rights. Worse still, both of those also deteriorate over time, because iLevel scaling dictates that in a year or so, the content won't be half as hard to clear, much as Coil is a lot easier now than it was. Once people can low-man the thing, you've literally done the fight only for the experience. Which, I should say, is very worthwhile - or at least I imagine it is - but still.

Alternately, they could slow down the rate of iLevel progression, or stretch out the content releases and increase the grind accordingly. I think I'd rather see horizontal progression, though.

[Maeka]

They need to branch into horizontal gearing, where new content drops situationally-useful gear that doesn't flat-out overpower what came before it.

No, no, and HECK NO.

"Side-grade gear" that is situational would NOT work in this game.

1). You can't switch gear in combat.
2). Requiring "____ resistant" gear forces people to go farm it before they can even do the content (WoW tried this and quickly abandoned the idea for good reason).
3). People will still min/max and go whatever is best for all situations, and the side-grades will be looked at as useless.

It. Will. Not. Work. so please just give it a rest. This game was *NOT* built on Side-grades. This game is a vertical progression game and TBH I don't want to have to stop and grind an extra suit of gear that's the same I-level as what I'm already wearing because of some stupid gimmick in a dungeon/trial/whatever.

It was retarded in XI and it would be 1000% more retarded here in XIV to do such a thing. Side-grade gear in XI was stuff you only wore for 2 seconds at a time to boost your next WS/spell/whatever by 2% or what-not. It felt like a complete waste of time, it was a waste of inventory space, and there's a reason why the game struggled to maintain more than a hundred K subscribers at a time, while vertical progression games rake in millions of subs.

Vertical progression feels better when you get a new piece, it is substantially better, than this side-grade that is only better in one thing otherwise about as good as what you already had kinda deal that just ruins the joy of getting a new piece of gear.

There's nothing wrong with old gear being obsolete as new gear comes out. Not seeing what the problem is, when you have glamours and such.

[Remedi]

If they need to rebuild the game from the ground up to accomodate horizzontal progression they might aswell make a new game imho.
As of right now horizzontal progression is kinda meaningless, however I would admit that Ultimate challenges does kinda provide a sense of horizzontal progression if you think about it

[DarkDedede]

Pardon me as a shake my head, while looking at the Fish Guide. Seriously, 750+ fish, each with it's own description, that I'm sure only a fraction of the player base deals with, and even a smaller percentage bothers to complete, and I can't get a proper Glamour Log.

Also, I also don't understand why there's all this effort going into Squadron improvements, when retainers, the content that I actually pay extra for, haven't had a decent UI improvement in ages. I can't be bothered to keep the eight I have stocked, because the UI is such a chore/bore, especially after dealing with it for 4+ years.

Of course it's not as if they don't make the occasional improvement. However, the issue I have is that these improvements are just so few and far between.

Edit: Oh, and can't forget about next weeks update, where we discover which areas of the Market board will be completely saturated and worthless, because of the next round of deep dungeon drops.

[RiyahArp]

Pardon me as a shake my head, while looking at the Fish Guide. Seriously, 750+ fish, each with it's own description, that I'm sure only a fraction of the player base deals with, and even a smaller percentage bothers to complete, and I can't get a proper Glamour Log.

Also, I also don't understand why there's all this effort going into Squadron improvements, when retainers, the content that I actually pay extra for, haven't had a decent UI improvement in ages. I can't be bothered to keep the eight I have stocked, because the UI is such a chore/bore, especially after dealing with it for 4+ years.

Oh, do I agree with you. The squadron thing especially. Its virtually useless for me, since i was all 60s when it came out. I mean, they are literally pointless runs for me; i don't need the ai helpers in any dungeon. They were just us beta testing AI for SE to use in story mode later on.

They had to repeat the most boring fc ability imaginable, airship runs, with sub runs. They jsut keep wasting time on minor things.

[Shurrikhan]

What I would like to see moving forward, is a narrower scope in the way to types of content, but significantly more depth and longevity of the types they are creating. If you are developing an MMO with an update schedule of 3-4 months rewards should take roughly that long to achieve... Eureka took 2-3 weeks to get all weapons.

Mind giving any more concrete examples? At a glance, I'm inclined to agree, and yet we could be imagining polar opposites given the ambiguity of that description.

[Alleo]

They watch streamers, that's how they take their infos.
Consider that Frosty's podcast on eureka had more or less a positive outlook, so kinda mrhappy and arthars too, If as I suspect they use streamers as an aggregator of ppl for infos it might be possible that idd they are the sources,

Also they clearly read reddit considering the time it took for that post regarding RMT to appear and a reminder from SE to not do that to be posted on the lodestone. They have a problem in telling you about what they are listening but they do listen

But a view streamers do not make a whole playerbase. And reddit itself was pretty negative about it too. There was a thread with over 1000 upvotes and it was really negative. If thats how they get their informations, then no wonder that we got Diadem 2.0..

[Sebazy]

I actually think horizontal progression of sorts could be achieved without drastic sweeping changes, and it's also worth noting that in combat gear switching is *not* part and parcel of this.

Rather than get blinded by how FFXI handled things, let's look a bit further back to the days of Everquest. The game was primarily horizontal progression with mild levels of verticality between expansions and tiers. The overall quality of gear was noticeably better in late tier raids such as Vex Thal when compared to old endgame content such as VP or recent but entry level content such as the first planes in PoP.

However, most endgame zones had a few pieces of 'Halo' gear, items that were unique enough or good enough to stand above other options even 4 or 5 expansions down the line. As a Shaman raiding up until the mid point of PoP, I was still utterly inseparable from my VP Robe and Snare spear and overall wore a variety of bits of gear from a content right across the game ( https://eq.magelo.com/profile/9093 ).

So, how can FFXIV pull this off? I'd go with a variant on Kisa's approach but roll it into a form of set bonuses. Let's say I have a full set of Sigma gear, consider having a set bonus that can be unlocked by wearing 2 pieces of gear depending on where the gear is from. PvP gear could unlock something like a cast time reduction on Stone. Crafted could unlock some extra VIT. Hunt gear could unlock a movement speed bonus. There's plenty of ways to add in flavour to this and it's simple enough to roll extra bonus stats in with the set bonus so that you're not destroying your main stats for the sake of these sorts of bonuses. When odd numbered patches come along with new gear, it's easy enough to bump up the bonuses slightly on the new stuff to give the raiders and min maxers a fresh carrot to chase.

Simple no?

[Remedi]

But a view streamers do not make a whole playerbase. And reddit itself was pretty negative about it too. There was a thread with over 1000 upvotes and it was really negative. If thats how they get their informations, then no wonder that we got Diadem 2.0..

I was not impliying it's the correct way to do, perhaps it's the lazyest one and frankly I've some bias against doing it. I'd rather not tell my feelings on this since I'd rather not cause drama over something I don't have proof off
However take note that a streamer can hold up to 500 wiewers (well much more but I haven't seen them having that many wiews outside ultimate) each as such the 1k upvotes are quite a small numbers when many streamers are stacked up

Unraleted but regarding horizzonal progress:

From how I see it, we lack inventory space, stats and content for it to be a thing, if you don't change any of these you'll jave ppl just getting whatever gear that has the highest crit that is the avaible on them.