Please grow the MMO part of the game. End game is lousy.

[Izar_Chillen]

“take a break do something else, but don’t be gone for more than 45 days otherwise you lose your hard earned house and now to get it back you need to play with rng.” Y.

The housing situation is a scam . The fact that people go to such lengths and put themselves through misery and great gil cost just to get their own house , and then buy goodies to make it look "nice" and then be blackmailed into keeping a subscription going or you loose it all , tells me there are simply quite a unfortunate amount number of players that are absolutely gullible and are so easily coerced into giving over real money for an insignificant piece of virtual property , so blind by it that they fail to see and to pressure the developers for the only true solution to stop this ponzi scheme from happening.


No lists, no anti-bot this lottery pick that will fix the scheme because they dont want it fixed:


The housing system , designed to be virtual neighbourhoods and not solo instances , requires the server hardware and space to facilitate anyone that wants a home , yet they created artificial scarcity by not providing the server space, intentionally creating the caveat of holding you hostage tying the land lease to a subscription , and the gullible fall for it year after year.


Sunk Cost Fallacy

[LittleImp]

This is the prime example of confirmation bias.
There are of course lots and lots of people whose mental picture of an MMO is 14 year-olds furiously typing "your mum" in chat and they wouldn't touch this genre with the barge pole. Tapping into that market is a smart business strategy.

The world doesn't work this way. You can't just decide you want to tap into a demographic, stick a bendy-straw into it and start magically sucking out all the money.

You have to create a product that appeals to that demographic, and partially retrofitting a subscription MMO into an extremely suboptimal feature-incomplete singleplayer experience absolutely isn't going to do that. Do you really think someone who's primary interests are games like God of War, Horizon, or The Last of Us is going to come pay upwards of $90 usd ($60 usd for the complete edition, and a few months of subscription to complete the msq) to play through this games story? You'd be paying an insane amount of money for what is essentially half of a game. At most, you're going to appeal to an incredibly small demographic (which Yoshida himself defined) of Final Fantasy holdouts who don't want to play the game because it's an online game. Amusingly, many of these supposed holdouts already play the game, further shrinking the supposed target demographic.

[Garnix]

I think it is a decent approach to increase the player base.
Maybe it will be worth it, maybe not. But it's a one-time investment that they need to do to "clean-up" old content, just like when they invested time to implement flying in ARR and cutting it's story really....

Me personally, I would take more varied activities over more bosses.
Island sanctuary, criterion dungeons, etc. while they may not be huge (and while we don't know anything about either of those), are a good things to appeal to a wider audience IMO.

However, I certainly agree that the subscription cost is what ultimately makes it so that people wouldn't want to commit.
IMO, they should find a way to make it so that, as long as you paid the game/expansion you can still log on without paying your sub, but basically cannot do anything other than the MSQ and what is available to free trial players. Actually, expanding the trust system to the whole MSQ is a needed step for this of course.

[ForteNightshade]

The world doesn't work this way. You can't just decide you want to tap into a demographic, stick a bendy-straw into it and start magically sucking out all the money.

You have to create a product that appeals to that demographic, and partially retrofitting a subscription MMO into an extremely suboptimal feature-incomplete singleplayer experience absolutely isn't going to do that. Do you really think someone who's primary interests are games like God of War, Horizon, or The Last of Us is going to come pay upwards of $90 usd ($60 usd for the complete edition, and a few months of subscription to complete the msq) to play through this games story? You'd be paying an insane amount of money for what is essentially half of a game. At most, you're going to appeal to an incredibly small demographic (which Yoshida himself defined) of Final Fantasy holdouts who don't want to play the game because it's an online game. Amusingly, many of these supposed holdouts already play the game, further shrinking the supposed target demographic.

A further addendum to this is the lack of long term retention. These story centric hold outs are likely going to quit once they've completed the MSQ, which calls into question if the investment will actually pay dividends when the pool is already extremely shallow to begin with. They're clearly banking on these players becoming hooked enough to stay subscripted far beyond the MSQ and possibly dive into other content. Which could happen but does seem like an odd choice to focus on over the existing playerbase. Granted, FFXIV has always put a lot more investment in attracting new players than retaining old ones.

The devs have the retention numbers, and I believe they understand what the majority of players actually do and what tends to retain customers the best. The devs have also made it clear that making, tweaking and balancing fights are incredibly time consuming when compared to other things they could make. The fact they don’t spend more on such things tells me that endgame stuff likely just isn’t as popular as many make it out to be, or the development time doesn’t give as big a return on investment when compared to some other things. Indeed, they opted to cut deep dungeon and an ultimate entirely from 5.0’s cycle in favor of something like the Ishgard restoration.

Just my humble opinion.

Both of those assessments are untrue. They opted to cut out Deep Dungeon before Shadowbringers even launched, and have repeatedly said they were surprised how much demand there was for it to return. Which kinda throws out the whole retention argument since the numbers would have shown player interest yet they never realized it. As for Ultimate, Yoshida openly admitted it was due to poor management more than anything else. Not only was putting it in the .5 patch cycle incredibly shortsighted as it put a major encounter design up against the expansion development but they were only using eight people to play test it. If anything happened to them, be it the odd sick day; other projects, and etc., they literally couldn't test the fight.

Neither content being cut had anything to do with them focusing more on side activities like Ocean Fishing or treasure maps. The people designing that content aren't playtesting Ultimate, or likely any battle content. And Yoshida has acknowledged their mistakes last expansion.

[Amon-ster]

I think people are looking at the current Trust system as a system that cannot and will not be improved upon for some reason. The prevailing idea is that Trusts won't kill group play because they haven't so far and that real people will "always" be the faster and more efficient route.

I agree that for the most part, real people are the more efficient way to run dungeons. For now. That is not an all to say that there isn't a future where the Trust system could become far more efficient than running with real people. For better or worse, Yoshida and the gang bend over backwards to appease the fanbase. Is it farfetched to believe that this influx of "traditional FF fans" won't call for improved Trust performance, and that request would be met by the development team?

[xenahawk]

Depends really on what you look at as efficiency when it comes to trust dungeons. If your your dps and have to spend a long time in queu to get into a dungeon for the msq the extra time it might take to run a dungeon might be more efficient. Trusts are actually pretty good teaching tools for dungeons, i have actually learned certain mechanics quite well from shadowbringers and endwalker from them it can be a bit frustrating though while learning the fights if you dont do it perfect having to restart everytime. Plus trusts can actually give you the opertunity of practicing with new classes you might be interested in.

[Shiro--Tsubasa]

I don't understand the arguement about solo players not willing to pay a sub. How is it any different than paying for dlc pack? Play the main story and do extra stuff you want, wait for the next major patch then pay 15 dollars to do the new "dlc".
Not that different from paying 60 dollars for a game and extra 10-15 dollars for extra story and content dlc packs. ie Nioh 2 and its three DLC, or even Dark Souls 3.

This behavior is what Yoshi even encourages. Pay to play what you want, then drop your sub until more content you want comes out. He doesn't want to foster mono-gamers.

[Amon-ster]

I don't understand the arguement about solo players not willing to pay a sub. How is it any different than paying for dlc pack? Play the main story and do extra stuff you want, wait for the next major patch then pay 15 dollars to do the new "dlc".
Not that different from paying 60 dollars for a game and extra 10-15 dollars for extra story and content dlc packs. ie Nioh 2 and its three DLC, or even Dark Souls 3.

This behavior is what Yoshi even encourages. Pay to play what you want, then drop your sub until more content you want comes out. He doesn't want to foster mono-gamers.

If only the playerbase at large agreed with Yoshi P then things would be good. Can't tell you how much grief I got from my 100+ member FC when I decided to take a break from XIV to play BFA.
But more to the point, a game with too much DLC is often looked down upon, and it isn't even like...a little bit of DLC. You have to buy the base $60 game, buy $75 of "DLC" (X.1-X.5), then buy another $60 expansion pack to purchase more DLC afterwards. That's a LOT of DLC, and most single player games only have like...2-3 pieces of $15-$20 DLC?

What's more, proper DLC is just additional content to continue enjoying the game with, and the base game without the DLC is SUPPOSED to be a complete package. I wouldn't say that any one part of XIV's storyline is a complete package. You have to do it all to get the whole story.

[Imoen]

I don't understand the comments. Back filling content that doesn't have trusts is simply finishing the job that was started, this is not wasted resources, we already have these in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. I'm quite frankly shocked it took them this long to start working on it. This is a good thing for multiple reasons. I honestly don't see a downside. Some of the comments make it seem like it's the death of multiplayer and other content or something.

Some of the nays seem to think monthly sub will stop new players. While that is partially true, lets not forget there is a very generous free trial period that will most likely get expanded to include Stormblood at some point. With trusts, that leaves no reason to not try, and it can be advertised as such. Will all of them stick around after the trial? Prob not, but some will. There are tons of people I know that only play this game for the MSQ then unsub already and it's not because of a lack of endgame content. This also helps future proof the game a bit for when the population does eventually and inevitably die off.

I personally look forward to running through again with these long over due additions. I want to see if it helps preserve some of the older content in a way that is more enjoyable than joining bots via duty finder. I say bots because half these groups don't talk, nor wait or explain things. Playing with these people blazing through the encounters isn't exactly exciting. I mean you spend huge swaths of time talking to NPC's finally get to a dungeon, wait 10-20 min and a bunch of 90s join your group and just steam roll the thing while you are in a CS still like "oh, ok" Then they complain later that you don't know a mechanic that appeared in an earlier fight or that you don't know your job, like "Ya, well I didn't get to hit much on the ride up." This is how imagine a lot of new players feel.

Anyway, this contributes to retention. You spend all your time reading, then the battle content you do finally get to do gets steamrolled and you are right back to more reading. The amount of people I know that have quit the game because of this is actually staggering. It's one part filler quests and one part high levels blasting through too easily. I'm hoping Trusts fix some of this, meaning the dungeons play out more how they were originally intended, mechanics and all. People that want to rush endgame still have the option of being carried by DF parties, getting a skip potion or having a friend low man speed run them through.

As far as OP is concerned. What activities are you looking for at endgame and how many do you deem appropriate? I personally find it hard to keep up with everything I want to do in a week as it is.

[KizuyaKatogami]

I don't understand the arguement about solo players not willing to pay a sub. How is it any different than paying for dlc pack? Play the main story and do extra stuff you want, wait for the next major patch then pay 15 dollars to do the new "dlc".
Not that different from paying 60 dollars for a game and extra 10-15 dollars for extra story and content dlc packs. ie Nioh 2 and its three DLC, or even Dark Souls 3.

This behavior is what Yoshi even encourages. Pay to play what you want, then drop your sub until more content you want comes out. He doesn't want to foster mono-gamers.

We already do pay for dlc though. Every expansion we pay, plus an added sub. So not only do you have to pay for the actual “single player game” but you need to pay an extra $15 per month to play it.