5 floors each raid tier in 5.0?

[Rufalus]

Which is exactly what I did?

I directly quoted the parts I was replying to. You said the amount of content into each individual or 'mini' patch is shrinking, so I said that is not meaningful. They just shifted the distribution around; the meaningful comparison is the whole patch cycle.

That's your opinion on it. There's plenty of people (me included) who don't share that same opinion.

I'm not sure it's an opinion. Isn't it just a fact to say the overall amount of content is the meaningful metric here? You can't pinpoint one random day and say the content released on that day is representative of the state of the game. One date might only have hotfixes, another date might have content. So we look at each 3-4 month cycle as a collective and evaluate that. I don't think we disagree with each other on that, just a misunderstanding.

On the other hand, we've also lost 100 floors in the new Deep Dungeon. And while the story of Palace of the Dead wasn't too deep (pun not intended), it was miles better than the 'story' we got with floor 1-30 in HoH.
Also, again, the MHW cross-over isn't specifically developed for 4.36, so it's a bit silly to take that into account. It's not even part of the 4.3 mini-site, which showcases all the content of the entire patch.

The number of floors is just a design choice, somewhat informed by player feedback of wanting to get to the challenging stuff faster. They could generate 700 floors if they wanted, it's mostly just a question of how much repetitive filler should there be before the hard top floors, how long should runs takes. You're right, the story was better in PotD, more developed.

MHW collab content was created by the same FF XIV dev team as the other FF XIV content. I don't see why we should pretend it does not exist when discussing the amount of content being released in a certain timeframe. I'm just trying to give fair credit where it's due and dismiss falsehoods about the devs getting lazier over time. The quality is subjective but if we're discussing quantity of original content, I don't think it's accurate to say it's falling off in a significant way as the cynics suggest.

[Nezerius]

I directly quoted the parts I was replying to. You said the amount of content into each individual or 'mini' patch is shrinking, so I said that is not meaningful. They just shifted the distribution around; the meaningful comparison is the whole patch cycle.

I probably should've been a bit more clear. By each "individual" patch, I meant the initial major patch. (3.3, 4.3 etc.).

I'm not sure it's an opinion. Isn't it just a fact to say the overall amount of content is the meaningful metric here? You can't pinpoint one random day and say the content released on that day is representative of the state of the game. One date might only have hotfixes, another date might have content. So we look at each 3-4 month cycle as a collective and evaluate that. I don't think we disagree with each other on that, just a misunderstanding.

The way you worded it makes it sounds that you find the overall content of the patch to be ''more meaningful", that's an opinion. We've both been looking at an entire patch (3.3x and 4.3x), and both have patches and mini-patches that are just as meaningful as the other.

The number of floors is just a design choice, somewhat informed by player feedback of wanting to get to the challenging stuff faster. They could generate 700 floors if they wanted, it's mostly just a question of how much repetitive filler should there be before the hard top floors, how long should runs takes. You're right, the story was better in PotD, more developed.

Except the first 100 floors progressed the PotD story with (almost) every set of 10 floors. With HoH, that only happened 3 times. That still means that more development time was put into PotD.

MHW collab content was created by the same FF XIV dev team as the other FF XIV content. I don't see why we should pretend it does not exist when discussing the amount of content being released in a certain timeframe. I'm just trying to give fair credit where it's due and dismiss falsehoods about the devs getting lazier over time. The quality is subjective but if we're discussing quantity of original content, I don't think it's accurate to say it's falling off in a significant way as the cynics suggest.

It was developed by the same team, but that still doesn't mean that it's developed specifically for patch 4.36, it just happened to be ready to be released at that time. If it were developed specifically for patch 4.3x, it'd have been shown on the mini-site.

[Rufalus]

Except the first 100 floors progressed the PotD story with (almost) every set of 10 floors. With HoH, that only happened 3 times. That still means that more development time was put into PotD.

It was developed by the same team, but that still doesn't mean that it's developed specifically for patch 4.36, it just happened to be ready to be released at that time. If it were developed specifically for patch 4.3x, it'd have been shown on the mini-site.

Yeah, I think you're right. HoH is less than PotD by those measures. I feel like it had more original enemies too with the floor 50 and 100 bosses appearing as enemies for the first time, whereas HoH's only sort-of-original boss design was floor 30 but is clearly a reskin of Titan. I think the gravedigger type enemies in PotD's higher floors were an original enemy at the time too, which later got reused in the north section of anemos at night, near the monoeye.

Ok yeah I see what you mean about MHW. Yes, it's an anomaly which happened to land here because that's when it was ready. Eureka would have started from earlier patches too if it was ready when they originally projected, so it was delays that caused some recent patches to be unusually well stacked. I think overall though, the team seem to be working about as hard as they ever were, apart from way back in 2.x through 3.0 when they overestimated the challenge and almost killed themselves trying to deliver on promises. They ended up doing unsafe business practices working overtime every night for too many weeks in a row until mental exhaustion. So they were all owed a vacation after that, delaying patch 3.1. Now they have a more optimised workflow and aren't going to promise crazy things like adding jobs in patches between expansions for sanity reasons.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

With the trend of getting less each patch... I expect them to reduce each raid tier to 3 fights instead of 4.

No, no. That wouldn't be the standard SE Touch™. Instead!

- Two fights will release at Alte Roite/Catastrophe difficulty
- Another fight will release six weeks later
- The last fight of the tier will release a month before 5.1

They don't want to overwhelm us with all that content at once, after all.

The overall amount of content across the patch(es) is more meaningful.

If you mean to insinuate content is better spread out, I have to disagree. Speaking only for myself, I find I am less engaged with staggered releases than I would be otherwise. Why? I prefer to set my own pace. Instead, I'm left with an ever frequent feeling of "That's it?" Conversely, in say, 3.3, I had tons of things to keep me occupied, and once everything inevitably winded down, 3.4 wasn't too far off. What irks me about this change in release is two fold; it takes away any agency. The devs are telling me "Now, now. This is too much. We'll let you play with the new toys when we think you're ready." And I, personally, believe it a disingenuous ploy to try keeping people from unsubbing.

[Rufalus]

If you mean to insinuate content is better spread out, I have to disagree.

Nah I just meant the amount of new content that exists is more important than what dates they choose to release stuff on, like it's all still there. To be honest though I do actually prefer this method of bulking up the mid cycle patch instead of blowing everything out the gate and then having a few empty months for people to unsub. If that helps keep people around and the DF more active in the mid cycle then it works out for me, I was never going to unsub anyway.

Their reasoning is pretty legit, like how much stuff would be lost in the shuffle, how many people would skip farming tsukuyomi weapons if you could also get empyrean weapons and pagos weapons starting from that same day. You can imagine people complaining about Trial weapons being obsolete on release even for non-raiders when we can just get the 5-slot Pagos weapon instead. If it's secretly a ploy to keep people subscribed though it's hard for me to be outraged about a company trying to be successful.

Now August is filled with Pagos + MHW + The Rising, and September sees the next major patch with Omega, Suzaku, etc. That's kind of nice having a steady flow of things to do right up to the month preceding the big patch.

edit: eureka benefits from being splintered to its own patch. you don't want to come into eureka late because you were too busy doing MSQ and other content, only to find everyone has outleveled you and it's harder to get a group now. people who have less time to play per week are able to get the other content cleared before eureka is released and then have that window free to start farming at the same time as everyone else. I mean there are many sensible reasons for things to be separated, it's not just they don't want us to have toys...

[Ekimmak]

Honestly wouldn't mind five floors, if it means we don't have the current debacle of a two-phase boss that's depressingly unrewarding.

[Nezerius]

To be honest though I do actually prefer this method of bulking up the mid cycle patch instead of blowing everything out the gate and then having a few empty months for people to unsub. If that helps keep people around and the DF more active in the mid cycle then it works out for me, I was never going to unsub anyway.

Except most of the patches still had spaced out some of the content to mini-patches, they rarely dropped everything in the initial major patch. 4.3 simply took it to the extreme.
Besides, people being subbed doesn't always result in the queues for anything other than the new stuff being more active than they'd normally be, during a content lull.

Their reasoning is pretty legit, like how much stuff would be lost in the shuffle, how many people would skip farming tsukuyomi weapons if you could also get empyrean weapons and pagos weapons starting from that same day. You can imagine people complaining about Trial weapons being obsolete on release even for non-raiders when we can just get the 5-slot Pagos weapon instead. If it's secretly a ploy to keep people subscribed though it's hard for me to be outraged about a company trying to be successful.

A problem with a very easy solution. Don't release them at the same time. You don't even have to look that far into the past to see this solution being used. 4.2 added Byakko to the game, along with a set of i355 weapons. The following 4.25 patch added Eureka: Anemos, along with the first set of i355 relic weapons. This added at least 5-6 weeks where the Byakko weapons were useful to farm for, longer for those who didn't feel like grinding their way to lvl 19-20 in Eureka for a weapon of the same iLvl.

Another solution that'd work with having a patch with both a Primal and Eureka (or HoH) is to just not have weapons dropping off the Primal. There's plenty of ARR primals that dropped accessories.

Now August is filled with Pagos + MHW + The Rising, and September sees the next major patch with Omega, Suzaku, etc. That's kind of nice having a steady flow of things to do right up to the month preceding the big patch.

While I can see Pagos and the MHW cross-over event keeping people busy, The Rising generally doesn't keep people busy for more than a day.

I personally prefer the pre-4.3 method of releasing content, especially for something like Eureka. Releasing Anemos roughly 5-6 weeks after the major patch left players with about 2 months to get what they'd want from it, before the release of the next major patch. Pagos about halves that amount of time, so there's more pressure to go through it before the interest drops with the release of new content.

It also means the relic weapon is only useful for about a month, before it's inevitably replaced by the higher iLvl primal weapon 4.4.

edit: eureka benefits from being splintered to its own patch. you don't want to come into eureka late because you were too busy doing MSQ and other content, only to find everyone has outleveled you and it's harder to get a group now. people who have less time to play per week are able to get the other content cleared before eureka is released and then have that window free to start farming at the same time as everyone else. I mean there are many sensible reasons for things to be separated, it's not just they don't want us to have toys...

The 4.2/4.25 way of releasing Eureka is already a solution to this issue.

[Derio]

I dont think you can compare the Eureka relic grind to the past relic grind in terms of content and replayability. I strongly dislike the Eureka relic questline simply because it doesnt feel like a relic weapon.

Hopefully 4.4 clears the bad taste that 4.3 brought in terms of content.