Lack of End Game Content

[HyoMinPark]

I mean, it's literally one fight per tier. Not much in actual content but difficulty, for sure.

It’s one fight that is more challenging and carries more weight than the four you are progressing through currently. And it certainly took the best players in the game longer to clear than any Savage tier since Midas (UCoB took about 13 days; UwU took about 6 days—for comparison, Creator took about 36 hours; Deltascape, Sigmascape, and Alphascape took about 18 hours; and Eden took less than that).

Shrugging off Ultimate because “it’s just one fight” isn’t really a decent excuse not to acknowledge the content.

[Fiorinol]

It’s one fight that is more challenging and carries more weight than the four you are progressing through currently. And it certainly took the best players in the game longer to clear than any Savage tier since Midas (UCoB took about 13 days; UwU took about 6 days—for comparison, Creator took about 36 hours; Deltascape, Sigmascape, and Alphascape took about 18 hours; and Eden took less than that).

Shrugging off Ultimate because “it’s just one fight” isn’t really a decent excuse not to acknowledge the content.

IDK about Ultimate. Many of my friends just "raid log" nowadays. For those who don't know what that is, it's when you only login to do your raids for the week. The game just has nothing else to offer them when they're done with MSQ.

There are many things I find lacking about this game's endgame. In North America, you're required (we can argue of course) to play on a schedule with a static to do the harder content, Party Finder is bad and party leaders don't have much control over their parties, for instance, there's no way for me to ensure that players have seen up to a certain phase, or that they're able to put out a certain amount of dps for a given fight. I can't say I enjoy Party Finder, I don't know whether it got worst or if my patience is growing thinner this expansion. I also don't find the rewards from ultimate to be incredibly interesting either especially given the prevalence of RMT groups selling the content. "Legend" players are a dime a dozen on my server, and I've seen more people getting harassed over using the title than people being wooed over it.

As for other content:

- Gathering and Crafting has a bot problem on Gilgamesh, many marketboard listings are dominated by players who bot and the updates to Shadowbringers just made crafting even more reliant on macros than before. I'm looking forward as to how that factors into the restoration of Ishgard.
- Extreme trials only last so long
- The post MSQ dungeon experience is very lacking. The fastest roulette by far to gear up is Expert, and there all you do is play the same 3 dungeons over and over for 6 months. When 5.1 rolls around, you will have an extra dungeon and will still be playing the other two dungeons that you've played for months prior to that.
- Eureka and diadem-type content feels like busywork with rewards that aren't exactly riveting. If I wanted to do busywork, I'd go play Oldschool Runescape. The relic was behind other weapons for ages in Stormblood.
- Housing doesn't get that many updates with each patch. It gets a few items here and there, yet you're expected to keep paying for a sub to keep a house. To add insult to injury, one player on my server owns an entire ward, and wrote a dissertation about it on his personal blog, bragging about how he's doing a good service for our server. Many players are completely locked out of housing outside of owning an apartment.
- Maps feel like an interesting concept, but a majority of the time, you're awarded with trash.
- I genuinely don't understand how people enjoy PvP in this game. It feels like a very lacking game mode.

[HyoMinPark]

snip

I guess what keeps me constantly subbed is that I tend to not limit my activities to endgame or raiding. I have a lot of alts that I enjoy “escaping” to and just doing baby stuff on because it’s relaxing—I have one alt ready for ShB whenever I finish leveling GNB on her, and 3 going through the early MSQ at various stages of ARR; another is in HW that I’m doing MSQ over again with a friend. I’ve considered asking my sister or my fiancé if they would like to play FFXIV. I’d go through the story with them again on an alt whenever I’m not raiding; but the ARR slog tends to make people pause, and I’m not sure how they’ll take to it (besides, sister is heading back to school in two weeks, so she’ll be pretty busy anyways). I also have in-game friends that I do things with, be it Roulettes, random dungeons, maps, whatever. One night, a couple of us went to different areas in-game and shared “baby stories” from back when we were new players. It was a fun thing to do.

I’m also fairly busy when school starts up, so a lot of evenings are either just dedicated to raid, or I can only get on and do stuff like capping or whatnot during the weekend (last semester I was super busy the last month or so, so I was barely online outside of raid nights). The only notable time I found myself bored was during 4.1 until I started doing UCoB, and that kept me entertained—I had a static that was on break until Sigmascape, I wasn’t interested in doing Shinryu because PF was a mixed bag, and there were no relics or anything to really work on. End of SB was particularly slow, but I passed the time on alts instead of my main. I think non-Eureka relics would have eased that a bit, because I spent a lot of time during the last months of HW just working on relics because I wanted them for glamour.

I understand people don’t always care to do alts or relive the MSQ or do any of the things I particularly enjoy doing. But I do think a lot of the limiting oneself to “endgame only” is something that can cause fast boredom with this game. I can’t make people do non-endgame things; however, the reason I hardly ever grow tired or bored of FFXIV is simply because I do a lot of different stuff and not just endgame raiding/dungeons/primals/etc..


As for the Ultimate and the selling thing—well, selling content has existed in this game since Titan HM. It’s fairly easy to tell who legitimate “Legends” are, and which ones aren’t. I don’t really see the “people can sell this” as a reason to not do the content. But I do it to prove to myself that I can do it—not for lording the weapon or the title over other people. And the fights are just fun. Wiping to Twin and Garuda can get tedious sometimes, but I’d go in for more reclears of UwU any day. Plus, I’d like to beat my current best of the fight. Like with Savage: the content stays alive longer for me because I want to beat my last personal best. People hate on The Website That Shall Not Be Named a lot; but, for raiders like myself, it keeps the content alive because we have something we push for and go back into the content for after we’ve secured our BiS.