Final Fantasy XIV Hot Takes

[kpxmanifesto]

Endwalker is the least enjoyable expansion with the worst story.

Can already hear the mob.

Yep, you're not the only person who thinks that. I posted pretty much the same exact thing on page 2 of this thread.

[Amon-ster]

Endwalker is the least enjoyable expansion with the worst story.

Can already hear the mob.

I'd 100% agree with this if ARR didn't exist.

[Raoabolic]

I'd 100% agree with this if ARR didn't exist.

I would actually take ARR over EW. With ARR the whole thing felt new outside of unanswered questions from 1.0. EW had a lot of baggage 3 expansions and ARR it had to address and I think it fumbled near the goal. It's not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination but some of EW's plot points really felt like they were just phoning it in rather than in ARR where they had to actually try in comparison.

[Aglaica]

I do not get the fascination with Miquote, maybe it is due to not liking cats IRL, but maybe thats not it cause i like Hrothgar.

Stormblood is my favorite expansion, after i got to HW, i seriously thought about if i wanted to get through it or not, but then stormblood sealed me playing this. (note i do not think HW has a bad story, I would still rate it 7/10, I just did not care for the locations or questlines, i had enough dragons and snow in a previous game)

[MisterNublet]

FFXIV is a MMORPG in name only. Game wont survive another 10 years if they keep pushing towards the super casual, single player experience.

[SieyaM]

Here is a hot take. The convenience of being able to change to any job on your character at any time has made it impossible for your character to have any real identity. You are forever just the generic WoL.

[Johners]

Square Enix's hands off approach to third party tools is going to cost them and FFXIV ultimately needs an anti-cheat like any other online game. The ability to model/texture swap your character is fine on paper but it ultimately gives you the ability to change anything. Just because nobody has seemingly done it, there's nothing stopping you from making a third party tool that could end up trivialising high-end raid content such as ultimates. Likewise you could probably find ways to make ranked PvP unfair via the use of third party tools also.

I appreciate that large parts of the modding community self-moderate but at the end of the day, if you can do something in an MMO then people will do it. There's enough areas of optimisations that can be made with third party tools, the game should really have proper mechanisms to detect this and actually moderate this with warnings and suspensions. You'd catch some of the "innocent" modding in the crossfire but it's entirely fair to do so as it's already against the terms of services.

More so, the game should actually generate exportable combat logs to upload onto FFLogs by the default. While parsing is also a third party tool, the implications are entirely an opt in experience. Players that don't care just don't have to look. Players that do care just look at their logs to see how well they're executing their rotation or comparing to the performance of other players that also care. In the circumstances that people are being harassed for parsing badly, you just report them because it's already against the terms of service to do that.

I guess there's multiple hot takes here, an anti-cheat is needed to ensure the integrity of the online environment with "innocent" modders not being victims of the bans they could end up with afterwards and logging/parsing is actually fine because any negative implications are harassment and can be reported as such already.

[SeverianLyonesse]

Here is a hot take. The convenience of being able to change to any job on your character at any time has made it impossible for your character to have any real identity. You are forever just the generic WoL.

I think that attitude of "impossibility" only applies to people who have no restraint. Since some 3/4 of the jobs add very little to my enjoyment of the game or how I envision my character, I simply don't play them.

[SieyaM]

There are a lot of jobs I don't play since I also don't have any interest, but that does not change the fact that I was a WHM for ARR, AST for HW, and then RDM for StB and ShB and now Summoner. There is just no consistent identity for your character since in RPGs and MMOs so much of it is tied to character class or job and for us that is constantly changing.

[SeverianLyonesse]

There are a lot of jobs I don't play since I also don't have any interest, but that does not change the fact that I was a WHM for ARR, AST for HW, and then RDM for StB and ShB and now Summoner. There is just no consistent identity for your character since in RPGs and MMOs so much of it is tied to character class or job and for us that is constantly changing.

The identity is only as consistent as you make it. My character went PLD -> DRK -> GNB, then picked up RDM and SAM to become a sword generalist. And even now, after I dropped a couple of those and picked up a few, I still am playing jobs that I feel all work within a kind of theme I set for my character.

At any rate, I don't think it's the game's fault for following a job system that has been around since 1994. If you don't like that your character doesn't feel consistent, be choosier about which new jobs you pick up--which you are clearly capable of doing if you skipped the ShB jobs. I would further argue that your character does have at least some higher degree of internal consistency than a lot of other players' characters, since you seem to be sticking primarily to mage archetypes--add a BLM and maybe a SGE and your character could just identify as a master of magic.