Lack of 'server community' in FFXIV - a nostalgic perspective

[KisaiTenshi]

I think that having a cross server (datacenter) duty finder and party finder is what makes FF14 less of a community based game than FFXI. In FFXI, I remember forming parties at the dunes outpost or gate to Selbina, finding a potential party member who maybe needed help getting to us at our camp spot, and then perhaps even having to jump on a higher level job after changing in Selbina to help run them through La Thiene or something, past trains of gobs at the Dunes entrance and such (back before they got rid of training of mobs).

I do not miss the hanging around places with party requests in other games, and I certainly wouldn't want that curse on this or any future MMO.

The problem is the DF/PF are not connected in a way that encourages people to join a party that is -just there- already. At 2.0 release, I queued for the first dungeon and thought the thing was broken because it was just there for hours. So I partied with the next person who came by. That was repeated up until Haukke.

The problem is that other games (eg PSO2 and Wizardry were terrible for this) are just "hub" cities, there's no actual overworld. The entire focus of those games are specific content, and thus everyone hangs out on certain channels of the hub city. Vindictus (Mabinogi Heroes) also did this.

WoW, Star Trek Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Tera, Blade and Soul, and a few other K/JRPG's I tried with the exception of Archeage don't have "hub cities" that people hang out in. You keep moving from an area to another area, eg the level 10 world to the level 20 world, to the level 30 world, etc. Thus you find the people you need to party with along the way to do the progression content. Some older games I played like Everquest, RedMoon Online, Ragnarok Online and NexusTK, has heavily congested "city" areas around the shop areas where you progress your character's role.

FFXIV has none of these, as the areas require significant backtracking to complete. You go from whatever place you start in, visit all 5 regions of the ARR storyline, and unless you do all your jobs at the same time, you will backtrack through these areas every time you level from 1-50 in a new job. Thus there is no reason for people to hang around an area. Mor Dhona was the "end game" area because that's where the entrance to the ARR Raids were. So it made sense to stick around there.

With HW and SB, you don't spend all your time in these areas, you backtrack and go into places you've been to before.

If all the game had was raids, then none of the overworld would need to exist. Thus everyone would just be in the same city, and you'd have your "server community".

But the reality is that the Duty finder was a vast improvement over previous games methods of party finding which required hours of begging people to help. That is why other games wound up making so much content solo for their storylines, it's literately impossible to have people interested in doing content they've already done, and players just don't want to help do easy content.

In Mabinogi, I became known as the person who could get people past all the "Ideal Types" quests back in G2, and someone who could transport people back to Tir Na Nog. This was back when the game was still on G6 before they streamlined the quests chain. This was the largest obstacle in the game because, it required people to actually help, and people just didn't want to help. I kept all the gear to do the ideal types at the expense of not changing my character's appearance for quite a while. When they released the Royal Alchemist stuff, that was a lot like the Novice Network Roulette for that game. Except you had to actually earn it. Constantly.

This is a lesson that all MMORPG developers had to learn the hard way. You can not make storyline content party-mandatory, because players will get MSQ-locked waiting for people who are willing to do it. And we see this variation in the MSQ roulette with the cutscene lock.

The largest obstacle to having any kind of server community is actually how the linkshells and FC's work. If you want everyone to hang out in one or two areas, you have to make it so that the linkshells and FC's have a reason to not be used for regular conversations, and even in other games, that just isn't a thing. Usually the central hangout in a game is where the bank is. There is no bank in FFXIV, there's the FC chest and there's the retainer bells. The mailbox is often the place where RMT hang out.

FFXIV would have to remove all of these things and place them where they want players to go, and then it would be a RMT target hell. Perhaps in 5.0 they will realize the folly of this and remove the FC chests from all of the 2.x areas, and all the retainer bells, and make it so that the retainer bells are only in the housing areas central hub or in the house, and the FC chests are only inside the Squadron barracks and inside houses. A mistake that was caught between Rapture and 1.0 beta was that the Aetherytes were originally going to be in the middle of the adventurer guilds, but that would make those places super-congested. So they moved them. You can see the remains of these in how Ul'dah and Limsa Lominsa adventurer's guilds are designed with a large space in the middle.

There were the areas originally intended for players to gather, and yet... they're basically abandoned. Nobody hangs them. Rather people hang around the Marketboards if they're crafting, otherwise they're off in their house or AFK inside the inn room or squadron barracks.

Like perhaps the ideal thing would be to remove the "servers" entirely as a thing, and rather let players toggle which "instance" of that zone they want to go to, and for underpopulated areas, there would be no need for more than one instance channel. It would essentially self-balance, and in congested zones it would spin up additional instances. Housing areas would still be defined by the server they are on, so one server couldn't buy housing on another without moving there. The retainers and marketboard would likewise be held to only their server. Players would not be permitted to trade items between players on other servers except through specific escrow npc's that would impose limits on the number of transactions and would not permit trading items or gil to players that if the item is available on their own marketboard.

[Teiren]

Like perhaps the ideal thing would be to remove the "servers" entirely as a thing, and rather let players toggle which "instance" of that zone they want to go to, and for underpopulated areas, there would be no need for more than one instance channel. It would essentially self-balance, and in congested zones it would spin up additional instances.

All of this is exactly how Guild Wars 2 works. I didn't play it a lot, but it was a somewhat strange and fantastic thing to experience. The real issue is that basically every single thing is instanced in FFXIV. Of course The Hunt communities are the only "real" community. That's the only real thing to do out in the world that takes any real amount of time! That is, after the first few months of the expansion when people are levelling jobs on FATEs. Also, it's ridiculous that they removed having to go out in the world to enter raids. It's like they decided to completely give up on server community/game world for some reason.

[Endeleon]

I don't think the cross server df is the reason for that, there wasn't much of a community feel even before that was created. I think it's just the casual nature of the game. (And most games nowadays)

[Dzian]

People are generally too selfish these days. They pretty much expect to be able to press a button and demand help without earning it.. aka duty finder..

Commitment is another issue as is impatience.. you see examples of these quite frequently as people will often say there statics fall apart as soon as they get a clear when people jump to a new static to clear the next one faster. No loyalty to the people that helped them through. Just
seeya bye and leave them all stuck

When they added potd you also saw it. People wanted to do 51-200 in a single session because no way could they do like 50 floors today and 50 more on friday. Cant possibly rely on those 3 people to turn up on friday so it must all be done nowwwwww.

The duty finder has broken up so many groups over the years. Even in arr. I knew a group of 4 friends who said they'd do relic together. Then overtime one has a day off so he'll work on his atma books or dungeon drops and before long everyones at totally different stages. And leaving there friends behind.

But the game practically encourages anti social behaviour. Right down to a story level.
"You can not progress this quest because your in a party with friends. Please disband to continue.."
we want to do the story together it's a god dam mmo after all.
You know.... Massively multiplayer..

cold steel in storm blood for example a whole group of us at the exact same point standing next to the exact same npc trying to get into that instance. All forced to go separately. And the same thing again at several points in the story...

How much less stress on the server would there have been if we could have gone as group. Then youd havec1 instance running instead of 4 or 6. You cant even say it's because thecdifficultynisvtuned for an individual because there's none..

One off the instances where you take that bridge and minago glamours the flag i honestly put my controller down for about 5 mins to go answer tbe door sign for a package and give a courier something to take back and make the kids a drimk... came back to my ps4 and within seconds of picking up my controller. Duty complete.. I was not even there.... I literally left my character auto attacking something.

Raiding again promotes anti social behaviour. Got your weekly drops. No you can't go and help a friend because you'll take away there loot chests... seriouslyyyy.

It's funny because this is supposed to be the often dubbed internet age of social gaming. But it couldn't be further from the truth.. i mean sure we play with other peoples but very rarely social. Even in duty finder less than 10% of people even say hi. And 10% is probably being incredibly generous at that.

[Ayer2015]

I don't have a solution for it, or have a solid notion of what the cause is even, but yes community in MMOs in general feels lacking. People are not very talkative these days.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I don't have a solution for it, or have a solid notion of what the cause is even, but yes community in MMOs in general feels lacking. People are not very talkative these days.

Combination of Free Companies, Linkshells, and Discord.

I don't think people are less social, I think they are just more social in private chats.

Hunts are probably the biggest server community, and for a very long time, and probably still today, hunt communities are very toxic.

[KisaiTenshi]

All of this is exactly how Guild Wars 2 works. I didn't play it a lot, but it was a somewhat strange and fantastic thing to experience. The real issue is that basically every single thing is instanced in FFXIV. Of course The Hunt communities are the only "real" community. That's the only real thing to do out in the world that takes any real amount of time! That is, after the first few months of the expansion when people are levelling jobs on FATEs. Also, it's ridiculous that they removed having to go out in the world to enter raids. It's like they decided to completely give up on server community/game world for some reason.

Mabinogi and Vinctictus doesn't even disguise the fact there are other instances, but what happens in those games is that everyone crams into the most stable channel and that channel crashes more often, and nobody bothers to check the other channels markets (because it wasn't searchable, only the housing was.)

Like to a certain extent, that *IS* the right thing to do, so you end up with certain communities on certain channels, but it also fails in other ways. In Mabinogi, you could defeat the field boss... on ... every... channel... and get the rewards and experience like 6-10 times if you're the first one there and 50 people show up.

I actually loathe how certain things aren't RNG, and are instead based on time since the server started up/last defeated. This is why I find Eureka offputting. The NM's work in exactly the same way, after it's recently been defeated, may as well try to jump to another instance, cause it's not going to show up again while you're there. The Hunts have a similar issue in regards to how people will basically find the monster people are waiting for and try to take it on themselves. At least in Mabinogi it announced it to the zone when it spawned.

[Enla]

.

Which isn't a bad thing. When the most thought provoking commentary I've seen from the wider community happens to be 'are traps /insert joke here/', it's hard not to gravitate towards the relative comfort of my close group of actual friends for enjoyment of the game. Personally as someone who started MMO's later into the cycle with GW2, which had it's own issues pre-mega server, I cannot find any nostalgia for this 'server community' that people seem upset over. Especially when others point out the sheer hassle of trying to find people to group with. I went back and tried LoTRO and that kind of hassle was precisely the reason I never did group content there. I have limited time to play as it is, and I'd rather not spend it trying to herd cats.

In the end it comes down to gameplay styles and no one is inherently wrong for preferring one over the other. However I would agree that the game is plenty social so long as you know where to look. When I was still active in the RP community here on Balmung it wasn't hard to know someone from almost every FC and or strike up conversations with other RPer's at the drop of the hat over simple things like their glamour. Hells even just checking tumblr there's weekly runs of Ridorana Lighthouse organized exclusively on our server for the fun of it.

[Claviusnex]

Things have changed over the past seven years. The MMO player population has largely grown older and has different demands on their time. As people start full time jobs, get married, have kids they don't have the time nor inclination to worry about developing a game group of friends. Instead the game becomes something to play during down times or for older people like me with family members and our RL friends. FF isn't the only MMO to recognize the change to more casual play and changed their game accordingly. So I posit game functions like DF or cross server linkshells aren't the cause but the result of the changes to player population.

[Canadane]

I find you only get out of it what you put into it. I find the hunt community quite close knit and i often run into the same people all the time doing an A/S rank

/iceheart