Ok, lets do it, WHAT is wrong with this game?

[Aylis]

The formula: every patch and every dungeon is just a copy of the others with just a change of scenery and mechanics. Nothings new or different and makes the game predictable. There's no real evolution.

Item Bloat: "Oh hey! A thing of vermicelli! Is this worth anything, make anything good or worth keeping? Heck if I know! /vendor" Far too many that range from nearly useless to highly valuable. Hardcore crafters I know have to keep spreadsheets on hand to keep track of drops and what makes what. Coupled with the whole normal quality and high quality thing. So double the everything and double the inventory management and sorting frustrations.

Menu Hell: It feels like even the simplest things take longer then they should due to how un-streamlined the menu systems are and how bulky and cumbersome they are. Like not to long ago I upgraded mining gear and unmelding my older gear and converting it all felt like it took a century. Select each piece, open menu, click unmeld, select materia, click accept, wait for the unmelding animation, repeat a bazillion times. By the time I was done I didn't want to even play anymore for the time.

Focus on aesthetics over content: "Well, we may not see more then two new dungeons each patch, but golly at least now I don't have to worry about having to resit down on a bench after one is done! I sure don't wanna miss the show of the four bards in front of me trying to out perform each other badly!"

*EDIT*
I forgot one thing

Bland gear progression/Unmotivated gear progression: It's really hard to get excited for new gear and things when all it is really is just a small bump in item level and nothing more. I don't remember ever really being excited for an upgrade. With that comes the unmotivated part of things. I went through the nightmare that was making a relic weapon in 2.0...which was fastly replaced through the start of 3.0. It's just become increasingly harder to find the will and urge to push for these things when in the back of my mind is saying "just wait another patch, the same item level thing will nearly be free and won't take months of tearing my hair out to get"

[Ilan]

There is nothing seriously wrong with the game. It is just the few people with issues that are screaming in forums and make things looks worse than they are in reality.

It is the same as judging the healthness of a city visiting only its hospital...

No, nothing is wrong with the game. The issue was, is, and continues to be an entitled player-base that feels a Final Fantasy MMO belongs to them. That is not this game's fault.

Your complaints are not new, nor interesting. They are the same belly aching that plagued these boards 5 years ago when this game as relaunched after the abysmal failure that was Tanaka's hands-off FF XI clone. I know, I was there.

They listen, they give you content that you ask for, but it's not not what many really want. What many want are hard set bars that block others from that content. You wish to be the guardians that control how others play the game. You'll dissemble all your motivations to reach a satisfactory self delusion, but the truth still remains.

Get over yourselves.

No there is nothing wrong, everything is fine. How about you stop wearing your pink sunglasses for once? Everything stated here by others are legit points and if developers don't get feedback the game can't improve.

[Riko_Futatabi]

Stats and gear are boring. Most content we run has very little rewards that feel like they have "worth". Everything we obtain is tossed out after a few months. And the cycle repeats...and my god how long has the SAME cycle been going on? Since 2013 LOL. 5 years of the same old system...my god!

[Luna-M]

Stats and gear are boring. Most content we run has very little rewards that feel like they have "worth". Everything we obtain is tossed out after a few months. And the cycle repeats...and my god how long has the SAME cycle been going on? Since 2013 LOL. 5 years of the same old system...my god!

But it's all great! Nothing is wrong.

[Rymm]

So I have no problem with constructive criticism as long as it's constructive. Demanding the devs "make it better" while giving no specifics (either on what is wrong or what you want to see) really doesn't help. That being said, this thread seems largely to actually being going into detail so I really don't have any beef with it.

However, it's inevitable in these kinds of threads that you see the same re-worded sentiment bemoaning "the same old grind" over and over again. To which I just want to point out that MMOs (at least every one I've ever played) have that same gear grind: you bust your butt killing (either monsters or other players) to drop or craft the best gear in the game, then a patch or two later they release new shinies and you gotta do it all over again. To me at least, that is the engine that drives the endgame in MMOs.

FF14 is wonderful in how story driven it is and they are constantly continuing that story with most of the larger patches, but even extending the MSQ isn't enough to keep most players busy for more than a day or two. I guess my question is, without the above-mentioned endgame gear grind (which is apparently "boring" and "stale" now, regardless of being a genre staple,) what is it exactly that you would like to see as a means of giving players a goal/reason to keep playing once they hit the level cap and finish the MSQ?

[Yzuna]

Repetitive patchs cycle. While it was awasome to have regular update in ARR with new dungeons, trials etc to build the fondation of the game, we now want something different.

Gameplay isn't very enticing. I don't mind the GCD, but solo rotation with blinkers aren't fun very long. We need teamplay, we need to react to what the ennemy is doing, and I don't mean avoid this or stack there. I mean using skills depending on what the boss is about to do.

They are afraid of difficulty. Levelling is effortless, open world don't feel dangerous at all. 4 man dungeons are boringly easy. Sure, there is Savage, but nothing in between. It's either super easy, or quite hard.

Stats and Item are almost pointless. They could get rid of stats completely and just say +X to stats it would be the same. Gear is only relevant for glamour.

And in general, beside glamour, you can't really customize your character/job. You don't choose stats, gear progression is irrelevant, everyone has the same skills, no specialisation of any kind.

Those are my major concerns.


And I'm not saying everything is bad with the game. There is plenty of pros, obviously. But they have been too cautious over the years, and it's starting to become weary.

[Canadane]

Not having face and head glamour slots as separate things.
I need a ski hat, my image just isn't complete.

[WhiteArchmage]

I'll paraprhase what I said in another thread since it's more appropriate to this:

SE is TRYING to listen to the fanbase, but whenever they DO, another group pops up saying that's not what they wanted and that they screwed up, or the same group saying that's not what they meant and they screwed up. We wanted FATEs to be relevant again: Diadem; cue whining. We wanted the raid storylines to be accesible to everyone: Normal and Savage; cue whining because "MUH GATING". We wanted harder raids: Midas; cue whining because "TOO HARD". Complaining about the raids being too hard: Omega; now it's "TOO EASY, WE'RE CLEARING ON DAY ONE!!"; harder fight? Ultimate; whining because "TOO HARD! AND WHY DO I HAVE TO CLEAR SAVAGE FIRST?!?!?!" Don't want to level alt jobs? Role skills; "WHY DID THEY TAKE HALF OF MY CLASS SKILLS AND I ONLY HAVE 5 SLOTS!!". Want whole new content and the XI players want open-world NMs? Eureka "BUT IT'S TOO BRAINLESS". New type of content? Rathalos Ex; "IT'S TOO HARD! I HAVE TO LEARN TELLS!". Complaining about the Relic/Anima having too many steps? Eureka, again, just do the crystal farming, the relic was always supposed to be a grind weapon in contrast to the raid weapon.

And nothing comes from free, we've been getting less dungeons per patch because the dev team is too busy trying to tweak and test and create this new content from whole cloth to keep up the ARR routine, and SE doesn't see a big need to add more people (and they ARE hiring! so, you know, maybe learn some Japanese and you can take your complaints straight to them). (As an aside, asking for a game-changer every x-pac is a recipe for madness; complaining it's the same game as ARR is...well, it didn't suddenly turn into FFXVI when HW came out...)

I think it's a testament to how much Yoshi-P actually values the fanbase that he still does Live Letters and answers some questions that are clearly uncomfortable to him 'cause he still has to answer to the SE higher ups, even when he doesn't answer some that the fanbase has because he's answered them before but people didn't like the answer/the questions weren't as "liked" as the other questions that people are complaining should have been higher up.

[SamRF]

Questing

Talking about open world questing (sidequests, main senerio quests, ... )
I'm usually not the type of person who likes to compare games when there are obvious pro and cons to most MMO which makes it hard to compare. But questing is the only thing that really stands out in FFXIV in my opinion. The stories are interesting but the objectives are very linear and boring. Compare this to other MMO's, like WoW for example and you'll be amazed by how much more variety there is in quest objectives and you'll notice how much more interesting it makes them.

FFXIV does still nail the storywriting in both side and main quests but they have to make the objectives more interesting to keep the MMO community (final fantasy fans likely don't care) interested in the game. It always comes down to kill this, gather that, talk to this person. It's always linear, they don't dare to give you some freedom.

I wonder if this might be due to engine or open world scripts limitations, although it's probably just because it isn't their focus.

[Rymm]

WoW for example and you'll be amazed by how much more variety there is

Uh, I'm not sure which WoW you're referring to, but over the dozen years or so that I played it, the vast majority of quests there boiled down to "kill X number of Y mobs," "kill X mobs until you get Y number of Z item," "pick up X number of Y items off the ground," "go to X location and use Y item," or (more rarely) "escort X npc from point Y to Z." FF14 has pretty much all the same quest types (granted, the last one you see more often in fates than actual quests.) The one thing that WoW did have less of than FF14 was the number of back-and-forth "talk to this npc, then that one, then the first one again" quests. But SE seem to be cutting down on those here, so that's actually kinda nice.