We Really Need To Talk About The State And Path Of FFXIV

[Theodric]

The lack of a trailer is pretty disappointing. It should have been made in advance given that it's the only major part of the Live Letter that the English speaking audience understands. Furthermore, a lot of the things discussed in the Live Letter is stuff we already knew or was very obvious. Why, exactly, do we need a slide to tell us that new MSQ's are being added? We know that. It's obvious.

[24spencer]

my goldfish died this morning

how could raiders do this to my poor goldfish

those damn raiders

[SaitoHikari]

There's really no need for this level of hostility. I don't know what's happened to the official forum lately but it used to be a lot more pleasant. The sheer amount of posters who are unable to agree to disagree and deliberately assume the very worst about the people they claim to be engaging with both on this board and the lore board is baffling.

It's a perfect storm of absolute crap. Frustration of the game's design direction having apparently stagnated since the start of HW (it's really not a good thing when most of the community is able to accurately guess how 90% of the content is going to be laid out for the next patch before the details are actually released, if not the -entire expansion cycle- itself), a lot of good people having been banned from the forums for a variety of reasons, and it all results in the community lashing out at each other.

For being the second most popular MMO right now, there aren't really any major fansites too, just databases. Of the few large organized communities and fansites there are, some have drowned in their own drama because the owners decided they wanted to be disgusting human beings. Of the two or three major discussion venues (this forum, Reddit, and Balance Discord), all of them have major, major problems with elitism, cliques, and general idiocy. The people in-game may be nice, but I wonder how much of that is the in-game community actually being nice, or most sane people are smart enough to avoid engaging with the community outside of the game at large.

I think another problem is, I think we're reaching a point where people in this community take *any* criticism as a personal attack. The 'you don't pay my sub!' statement exists for a reason. We really shouldn't be surprised when people take that concept out of the game and into virtually everywhere else at varying degrees.

(Although I really don't see the hostility you describe on the lore board, unless something has changed in the past month.)

Going back to the topic of the community mentality towards the developers and content release cycle, though... I was an official moderator for a different MMO, once. Some people probably remember me mentioning that too many times before. Thing is, I noticed a gradual shift in that community that I am starting to see within FFXIV, and it worries me greatly. That game ALSO had a content release cycle that was almost entirely predictable, one that gone on for about 5-6 years before the developers made a series of really bad design decisions that basically woke up the community. A lot of people in a short amount of time started to re-evaluate why they were still playing a game where the developers clearly weren't listening to the community. All this, while the community itself descended into madness, resulting in a cycle of frustration - at the developers, people lashing out at anyone who will listen in the belief that the developers aren't, friends leaving the game, players feeling left behind and remaining in the hopes that things will get better enough for said friends to return. Only it didn't, and people just kept calling it quits. And this was a Korean F2P MMO.

I keep telling myself that FFXIV won't go down that path, but... I am honestly becoming less and less confident of that as time goes on. If you were to ask me where the state of FFXIV's 'community relations' is in, compared to the previous MMO I played and moderated for... Considering the reaction to Pagos and the incredible amount of 'hurr raiders/parsers are hurting the design direction of this game' threads, I'd say we're somewhere right before the series of bad decisions that caused most of the community to ask why they are still here.

(What happened to Dragon Nest is quite frankly something that should be required knowledge for any online game developer, but alas, the host transfer of the NA version from Nexon to Eyedentity wiped a lot of records.)

[Derio]

Eureka takes 1 step forward and 10 steps backwards, especially when you make content for casuals only for casuals to abandon it due to it not being worth the time of day.

What the OP stated about raids influencing every other aspect of the game is dead on. Think about it, if there were no mounts in the ex trials there would be no point in doing them.

I hope 5.0 gets a major rework of the system. Especially since it wont come out until late summer 2019.

[Alleo]

Can we all take two steps back and calm a bit down? The last few pages honestly were just attacks from people on both sides. (More or less passive aggressive posts from some people; not all!)

Maybe we can focus on other parts of the game next to raiding? Because seemingly that seems to be a hot topic. Whats your opinion on the over world? What would you change with it? What would you change with glamours or the leveling system?

To start:

I already posted about the over world. I want it to have more details in it like animals, NPCs and things like that and I want more lore that can be found in an way. Maybe even have a solo questline that takes you through the whole map with different challenges that will reward you with lore information, certain pets and other things at the end. This way people can work on this on their own time, they use the map and there are rewards.

I also wish we had more settlements that we can help rebuilt. Doma is nice but still done way too fast per week, so having more of them would be great. Maybe the Doma style for major cities and for settlements they might want to have certain items that you can craft or gather or you have to kill monsters to help them. Just something that you can do when you want and since we have quite some maps this could be a longer investment too. A reputation system for each map would be nice, where you can do zone quests and other stuff for the people in that map and gain reputation for them and you will see changes over time too. I know its already kinda in the game with the tribes but I want this with a larger scale for the whole map.

Glamours: I still hope that we one day get a glamour book. It would help a great way if you have this and see what glamours exist and where to get it. Chasing after a completion of this book would be a great way to keep me busy for quite some time and solve quite some inventory problems. Also this imo celebrates the work that they have put into the gear more because you wont be just throwing them away. Also I do hope that they will lift the restriction on who can wear what. Its utterly frustrating to see NPCs in different restricted gear but somehow our WoL cant do that.

[Kuroka]

Still we cant sweet talk it, the way gear is made, savage always gives us a early limit how high we get... it sucks the even numbered patch limits all following gear >_>

[MoroMurasaki]

Can we not do this anymore? This thing was like 40,000 characters.

If you can stop making suggestions that are detrimental to the content that we enjoy we can stop arguing with you about them.

If you want to keep doing things like blaming Savage for casual gear stagnation and asking for them to start raids later then... no, we probably won't 'not do this anymore' because you are saying things that would make this game significantly less enjoyable.

I'm sure if I was calling for the invalidation/delay/downscaling of your absolute favorite kind of context under what you deeemd to be false or just plain stupid pretexts you would want to argue against it as well.

[Magic-Mal]

The lack of a trailer is pretty disappointing. It should have been made in advance given that it's the only major part of the Live Letter that the English speaking audience understands. Furthermore, a lot of the things discussed in the Live Letter is stuff we already knew or was very obvious. Why, exactly, do we need a slide to tell us that new MSQ's are being added? We know that. It's obvious.

What I'm honestly really curious of is what kind of content could we possibly be getting in 4.4 and 4.5? By 4.3, Heaven-On-High has concluded, the last beast tribe scheduled was Namazu, there won't be any more Ultimates, so where will the content even be? What will it be? Eureka is releasing at 4.45 and not even 4.4. So are we seriously getting just MSQ, 2 dungeons, trial, and raid tier for 4.4 and MSQ, 1 dungeon, trial, and 24man for 4.5 plus Eureka with each of them at 4.x5? Gosh I hope not. The drought would be insane.

I'll laugh if they release the new Rival Wings or some Gold Saucer mini-game as the fill-ins.

[Lorgana]

Hmm that's odd my previous post seems to have gone missing, I wonder what could have possibly happened.Really gets the noggin joggin

[alimdia]

No trailer LL, and (excluding the dev break of 3.1) for the first time since the game launched dev time increased by 1 more week with no extra content being added.