What is one aspect of MMO design past or present that wish was added or taken away.

[Gabadabs]

I'm tired of being the focus of the story. These games were at their best (not FFXIV, of course) when we were treated as bit players who contributed, but could never claim to be solely responsible for any triumph. Games like this needs to do more to acknowledge the cooperative reality that we're all just little pieces of a whole.

I can understand that perspective, but not all players play for the same reasons. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I really enjoy the focus on an epic story that I'm involved in, since I play FFXIV almost exclusively as a solo affair.

[ViolaLance]

Would like to see some form additional subclass options get added, similar to FFXI, but only the introductory classes, not the advanced one. Would love to be a SMN/THM for example - have a few hard hitting spells to mix up the play style go through rotation and have the option to use say fire II on a pack of mobs while other spells/abilities are on CD or drop a fire III just before popping a RUIN III. Or a SAM/LNC - NIN/LNC to have a fast paced dive melee comp play style of fast in an out combination attacks. Also, even a DRG/ARC(her) dot up from afar to dive in with big hits and dive out during ogcd sets to replace dots and dive in for heavy melee finishers.

To even SCH/CON to have more healing and dps utility.

Nothing fancy, just a bit ol'nostalgia poking through.

[VelKallor]

Dungeons as a leveling mechanism.

Why?

Teleporting everywhere.

Travel is not gameplay and FF 14 doesnt live on MAU's / DAU's. Aetheryte crystals are part of the lore. im curious....without a crystal how does one get from say Limsa to Porta Pretoria?

Walk?

Flying mounts.

A flat NO. I am curious as to why you think they should be taken away. Not that they ever will.

Lets see you navigate the Sea of Clouds without flight.

[Gabadabs]

While this isn't how I personally feel, I believe the idea is that by being able to completely skip terrain via a mount, you make the actual design and layouts of the zones less important. You don't have to navigate - and that means you don't have to *interact* with the game very much during travel, which means the game is less engaging and more boring.

Personally I think that excessive travel times makes a game a lot more boring, since I can't get to what I want to do in a timely manner like I can with teleportation as an option.

[VelKallor]

While this isn't how I personally feel, I believe the idea is that by being able to completely skip terrain via a mount, you make the actual design and layouts of the zones less important.

We have already explored it all on the ground via MSQ, remember?

Its artificially gating time and gameplay by delaying or lengthening travel time to an insane degree. All it does is making anything you want to do take a hell of a lot longer. Tedium isnt gameplay. And its an instant turnoff. Any game that doesnt or wont respect a players time tends to lose players.

i dont want to have to spend an hour ingame to do something that takes me fifteen minutes. .

Try a hunt that starts in say Lakeland and ends in the Tempest. No flight = no hunts

All it will do is make everything take a hell of a lot longer which is the WOW concept that has utterly FAILED.

[Vyrerus]

Take a helluva lot longer

That's only because we were given flying in the first place, and then only because flying made everything expedient. Basically we were spoiled by its addition. Moving along the ground doesn't take all that much longer, but we feel that it does because we're used to high speed, low effort travel.

Now, I don't think there would be much of a point, given the state of FFXIV's overworld, in taking away flight or teleports. I will say though, that because we're used to speed we try to do more. There is now an expectation that you can get to all of the gathering nodes that are on timers in time, and all of the other things along the way. They were spaced far enough apart time wise in the past that you could still hit multiple different items, but not having as high of a speed with as low effort as we do now drove the artificial scarcity up. Sometimes tedium is a good deterrent from over extending oneself.

The natural endpoint for easy travel is to eventually do away with flight and walking almost entirely. Teleport points directly to the heart of areas, laid right beside crucial gathering points etc. It's only respecting everyone's time, right? Totally not diminishing the overworld at all. Nope.

Also, Hunts have existed since ARR, since before flight. It was the same as now, only in smaller zones and with everyone on the ground on their mounts instead of taking to the air. As laid out by the MSQ, every zone may be navigated over ground, with special mechanisms to overcome topography in certain locations. The path from Lakeland to the Tempest is to go from Lakeland to The Crystarium to Kholusia by Amaro Launch to the docks to the boat guy at the ships to lumber place on the coast. You drop in roughly north of where the MSQ put you, your first time there.

[Wilford111]

Taken away:
Dungeons as a leveling mechanism.
Teleporting everywhere.
Flying mounts.
DPS tunnel vision job design.
Hallway simulator dungeon design.

Added back:
Forced party play to survive in the overworld.
Leveling tied to overworld content.
Flexible rotations.
Some gear verticality.
Punishment for getting hit while mounted.
Elemental weakness.
Less job homogenization.

My ideal mmorpg would mix things from Ragnarok Online, FFXI, XIV 1.X and ARR-Heavensward.
I'm sure someone will quote and say how I suck because I want the opposite of what the average current XIV fan likes. I don't care. The topic asked and I answered.

Okay well I'll disagree with you on this. Not because of what you want in the game, but what you want taken out of it. I think most things on both lists can be in the game and I think that'd be cool, but if we're just talking about having the second list then that'd require a fundamental restructuring of the game, and I worry it wouldn't be the game I love anymore.

[VelKallor]

The path from Lakeland to the Tempest is to go from Lakeland to The Crystarium to Kholusia by Amaro Launch to the docks to the boat guy at the ships to lumber place on the coast. You drop in roughly north of where the MSQ put you, your first time there.

Or I can port there via a crystal and save myself twenty minutes of wasted time travelling for the sake of it.

There is now an expectation that you can get to all of the gathering nodes that are on timers in time, and all of the other things along the way.

Yes well, one would want to get there before the timer expires.

Look Ill make this as blunt as i can. The day that FF 14 decides to start stripping things out of the game to artificially increase game login time for no reason other than to expand the amount of time a player has to be logged in to get anything done, I am out.

So will a lot of other people.

WOW made this mistake amongst a host of other disasters, and its cost them a lot of players, and whatever goodwill they have left is evaporating at warp speed.

[LisSquid]

Game changing secondary skill trees. Be it changing your job's rotation to be more ease of access for you (I'm remembering bonuses on casters that preloaded all dots on one key instead of another more complex option was something that slipped into a lot of games) or just shuffling your rotation up.

Would help the debate of "No more skills! We have button bloat!" vs "More skills for more complexity!"

I also just liked the flexibility of having different setups for different situations. I felt more equipped and useful to my team.

They took away cross job skills, but I'd love them back PLUS an expansion on these learned skills. A lot of FFXI.

[Shurrikhan]

Remove

1. Hot take, but, I'd happily drop the majority of vertical gear progression -- i.e., all but the parts that would most inspire / appeal to a given player.

   All it does is add a muddying variable to content difficulty, and because everything else then has to feed into it, often conflating I'll with capacity with achievement, it just takes player and developer attention away from what's actually fun to play.
   
   I can hop into a match of whatever multiplayer game outside of MMOs because the match itself is fun to me. Same, again, for undergeared or undermanned dungeons in Blade & Soul. Heck, in WoW the same is true for Mythic+; though I enjoy the sense of climbing to higher keys, I would be totally satisfied with just having a choice of build and build alone, with no vertical progression attached. I think, especially if not for potency inflation over expansions, that's why I really like the idea of Ultimate, even if I don't much care for rigidly scripted fights in a perfectly circular room.

2. Enmity/threat/aggro modifiers, assuming replacement by less barebone solutions to manipulating enemy behavior.

   Yep, I'd get rid of those, too. In the end, they're basically just a way to artificially represent (though in a horribly oversimplified manner), any and all other axis of mob manipulation. I'd much rather have to actually use aspects of manipulating whom the mob sees as having dealt damage to them or likely to thwart their efforts, how large a threat they are, how vulnerable, atop just however purely pissed they may be at that player, etc. I expect to have to blindside enemies, to cloak attacks as coming from others, and, just as importantly, for my job as a tank to be equal parts manipulation and active prevention, rather than just being a DPS with added mitigation skills who, by virtue of an enmity modifier, passively redirects all attacks to themselves.