Future direction of FFXIV

[Nekokaori]

The people that are satisfied and not complaining vastly outweigh those that do complain.

So, no, let's not redesign the beach because a handful of sand over there is very unhappy, and very loud about it.

The other 8 billion grains of sand on the beach are fine where they are.

...

I dislike how people reason, sometimes. They see some videos on YouTube, they read this and that on Reddit, they watch a streamer on Twitch, and somehow they get in their heads that "everyone" is complaining, or "everyone" dislikes such-and-such, or "everyone" is unhappy. That's illogical, simple-minded nonsense. I am sorry, but it is.

3.5 million active players, one sees a Reddit thread with 12k upvotes, and suddenly "everyone" wants things "this way." What a weird way to view the world. It doesn't make a lick of sense.

The only way to know "what players want" would be to survey all players, which unfortunately doesn't happen. With that kind of data, there'd be no more assuming who wants what.

Until then, wouldn't someone of sound mind err on the side of logic? That logic being that a human being, in general control of their own faculties, would simply stop consuming optional entertainment, should that optional enjoyment no longer fulfill the human's subjective needs? (In other words, if a person doesn't like a game, they just don't play it. Same as if you don't like coffee, you don't drink coffee. You don't go into Starbucks or wherever and rant about how coffee shouldn't be that bitter. Duh?)

Yeah, if anything "generally" happens, it's that. It's a small slice of the player base that shows up to rant and complain. The rest play if it's fun, and don't if it's not.

Ergo, the idea that "most people" dislike or are complaining about such-and-such within FFXIV - to the extent that one would seek to replace the development team - is asinine nonsense. "Most" people are happily enjoying this game, and I'll bet my left leg it's not even a close race. People who just enjoy this game and play it, or stop enjoying it and simply quit, outnumber those that complain endlessly by 1000:1. Or more.

Okay I'm going to be honest with you, with most people the avarage person is a braindead fool this is why numbers mean little to nothing when it comes to quality.

The average person would be satisficed with a bowl of shit so long as the bowl is pretty and has a ribbion on it, which is basically what twilight and Justin beaver fans are and lets be honest both have more fans than haters.. The typical person have a lack of taste for things and either only follow it because "Oh look the girl has big boobs lets play and enjoy this mentality, or they just be like this pretty so lets play it over anything else.

And lets be honest ffxiv has some of the prettyist customization in any game, which is enough to satified the average person.

[RobynDaBank]

Okay I'm going to be honest with you, with most people the avarage person is a braindead fool this is why numbers mean little to nothing when it comes to quality.

The average person would be satisficed with a bowl of shit so long as the bowl is pretty and has a ribbion on it, which is basically what twilight and Justin beaver fans are and lets be honest both have more fans than haters.. The typical person have a lack of taste for things and either only follow it because "Oh look the girl has big boobs lets play and enjoy this mentality, or they just be like this pretty so lets play it over anything else.

And lets be honest ffxiv has some of the prettyist customization in any game, which is enough to satified the average person.

I guess the "average" person like me is too unascended to have the refined tastes you do.

[Mapleine]

It was a great Final Fantasy game and I absolutely enjoyed my time with it over the past eight years.

That said the tale is over, everything has reset and we're still on Heavensward's rather plain end game so currently it all feels a bit empty... Thus we dwell on things! As much as I love this game my biggest pet peeve is the smoke screen a chunk of the community applies to the games issues.

As always the content is good, great even but the spread is just miserable. It is simply unreasonable to try and manage an end game group with four bosses, no dungeons and no other form of content or growth.

I'm also dreading if 7.0 is just another JRPG on the stack with no new starting point or ability reshuffle or other changes. Boom is over and I can't imagine further erosion from keeping both a poor early and late game experience. "Just play these five full length Final Fantasy games while spamming Unleash for 300 hours until Yoshi P says you can have a second button!" cannot be the future. The team is better than this and Square needs to loosen the purse strings.

So personally I am looking forward to new things but I do worry about the future without foundation repair and a hard look at end game. Also, before someone hits me with it: Yoshi P's "you can quit whenever!" has always been PR nonsense to anyone who actually plays. We have caps, we have lockouts, Ultimates need a large BiS grind, houses fall down, etc.

We've been running Cataclysm's end game reward structure since ARR launched and they've never taken a moment to account for the job system either. Eight years later and I still do anything for an alt job.

[ReynTime]

They will continue doing what they've been doing since 2.1 with this game. For better or for worse. Between expansions they add something "new" that is usually something old in a new disguise (like, I don't know, a fifth iteration of Diadem). Or they "streamline" something I used to enjoy. So either things are the exact same or they become less engaging. This is a big reason why I unsubbed.

Nothing is going to change significantly until the day FFXIV gets a serious competition. So far there hasn't been any in sight.

[IdowhatIwant]

Do you guys feel like the current dev team is incapable to lead this game 6.1 and beyond because of the good amount of complaints between gameplay, story, and general content releases. Should we shuffle devs around or replace Yoshi-P? Are people overall happy with the state of this game?

I do not think the current dev team is incapable to lead the game. How ever I will say they need to stop giving into to some player feed back particularly from NA. IMO a good example of this is the introduction of soloing the story from 1 - 90 through a newly implemented trust system. This takes a lot of dev time for something to appease what I would consider a smaller portion of the player base. I could understand if the game was designed differently or if this was to ensure new players could complete the story. But the games design is set up to have higher level players assist new players with this content. I also am of a mind set if you want a single player experience don't play a MMO. I don't believe this is a terrible idea to implement, but IMO it is something you would add as a necessity due to a large decline in player base, which this game is not experiencing currently.

I think the direction they are going with the game is the wrong direction and has been the wrong direction since Stormblood. We have seen the number of options you have to complete dailies go down, classes feeling very homogenized, and savage raid content that looks no different than your trial content. As it is right now most healers and tanks play almost exactly the same outside of a few minor differences. Most DPS for the most part still have a uniqueness to them, but that is slowly being homogenized as well. I would really like us to go back to HW / ARR where we have more dungeons that do not feel so copy/paste and savage raids differentiate themselves from the trial content by having something before the bosses. The very poorly outdated materia system really needs a rework to give the game some sort of flair to help you differentiate yourself from other players (granted there will always be a meta). It would also be nice if the savage content was released at a better pace. We are currently 4 months into EW, and we will not receive any additional savage raid tier content until atleast August or September. That is almost 8 months for players that want to participate in this content to wait, and most of them are likely going to just quit until then.

I think FFXIV's greatest downfall is going to be to appease casual players too much, at the cost of having any sort of end game, or post game content. Diversity is what keeps games like this alive, and I feel that FFXIV's content diversity has been dissipating to copy paste of what we had previously just reskinned.
Now to your final question, I have not been very happy with the game since Stormblood, Shadowbringers gave me some sort of hope with its MSQ, but only to fall into a drought for end game content. I fear EW will be the same, although I personally thought EW was a disappointment story wise as well. I personally feel the game lacks a lot of content under the guise of respecting players time. If it really respected my time it would give me more options instead of less.

As great as the Garlemald section was, we kinda covered most of the major story beats involving it already. A whole expansion dedicated to it would be a waste, especially after ShB.

People who didn't like EW will probably focus a lot on what could've been, but I can assure them that a Garlemald-focused expansion would've been even worse. There simply wasn't enough ground to cover.

I agree, how ever I think most players were very hyped to finally visit Garlemald. What we got was just an area we had seen in a cutscene from ShB but destroyed now, and a frozen wasteland. We never got to really go into the city of Garlemald itself. I feel that we should have had a little more Garlemald, and a little less Moon and Thavnir. Thavnir felt like it was only included in the plot as a location where they can kill off characters with out any repercussions from the fan base. The dragon plot did not need to happen, nor did it really serve much of a purpose in the grand scheme of the plot. EW as a whole suffered many of the same issues that Stormblood had.

[Lauront]

This is the correct response.

No matter what direction FFXIV stands to take, the people that'd replace the current team would only make it worse. There's not a lick of good game design sense left in SE outside of this game. I personally don't mind if this game's content schedule never really changes, I just don't want to see what others at SE would do to it.

What do you mean? I thought 7 Remake part 1 was great, and I also like some of their smaller scale projects, like Octopath Traveler. Let's say that Yoshi and Ishikawa both take more of a backseat approach while they work on other projects that interest them more, where there is less pressure to constantly adapt their work based on fan pressure on certain sites... they adopt a painting by the numbers approach of just staying committed to the project through providing oversight, because SE has no one else to head one of their steady cash cows, while they also get to work on side projects that interest them more, do you not think this is a somewhat concerning scenario? That in 10 years of this project now, not a single suitable replacement within their own BD is available? I don't think someone leading the project, doing so out of a sense of obligation/due to lack of any suitable replacements, is a great situation.

EW did well in sales, and this is in part because the MMO market is pretty slim pickings at the moment and one of the most popular games in that market has been floundering - it remains to be seen whether a game like Lost Ark will pose much competition, but let's come back in 6-12 months, and see how 14 is doing then, and how the "refugees" rate its content model at that point, and not when they had loads of content to catch up with.

I'd agree that simply replacing the current team isn't necessarily something to wish for in the absence of any good alternatives (because an MMO is a different beast to a single player title... but then the game is moving to become more single player friendly anyway), but at the same time it does somewhat concern me that Yoshi's tone seems rather resigned - beyond saying the obvious to reassure fans that the next chapter will be great. Very dismissive tone to healer concerns, for example, and very blasé during story Q&As, in spite of the game priding itself on this. I did not enjoy EW's story much after Elpis, and the subsequent Q&As etc. did not do much to impress me, so I am concerned whether I will like the game's story focus going forward in addition to its somewhat sterile content model. I'd like to be wrong and impressed by the new story and content - e.g. the Criterion dungeons - but I'm not going to pretend they're not concerns of mine. Simply referring me to all the gushing over it, as some are wont to do, isn't going to change it. With that said, if you or others enjoy the game? Awesome, but as for me, I am hoping some new competition crops up on the scene to either stimulate improvement, or so I have an MMO available more to my tastes.

No.

The forum/Reddit/Twitter are not in any way representative of the player base as a whole. The sky is not falling.

/thread

I agree, but then 2/3 of that are unreservedly gushing in positivity about it, and try suppress any criticism, so that cuts both ways. People are happy to cite them when it comes to this being the "best expansion ever", but quick to dismiss them if the suggestion goes the other way. I fully agree that they're not representative of the playerbase as a whole, but SE does not do routine surveys etc. to provide more varied feedback, and has admitted to reading Reddit and Twitter at the least. It is the forum which tends to be more critical, and at least on the EU/NA side, gets much less engagement.

[HeyMcFly]

My only 2 complaints are how housing is being handled
and how dated the character creator feels

With housing, the item placement is atrocious compared to many other games and it would take a dev to care enough to actually delve into it, by getting a house and decorating it to an acceptable level but using every item atleast once. They also need to try to replicate some of the best housing decoration showcases players have made- then they'll understand how out-dated and frustrating the item placement is in FFXIV

The character creator is very dated, Many male races can't even use full beards
We can't separate eyebrow color from hair color
We can only choose 1 make-up option
The hairstyles available are all just not great yet NPCs get the best hairstyles and unique faces
Viera and Hrothgar are clearly unfinished
We can't preview battle voices
Clipping is a lie

[Gemina]

Okay I'm going to be honest with you, with most people the avarage person is a braindead fool this is why numbers mean little to nothing when it comes to quality.

If you stopped here, you would've had one helluva an rebuttal to the poster you quoted, or at least a compelling one.

and then...

The average person would be satisficed with a bowl of shit so long as the bowl is pretty and has a ribbion on it, which is basically what twilight and Justin beaver fans are and lets be honest both have more fans than haters.. The typical person have a lack of taste for things and either only follow it because "Oh look the girl has big boobs lets play and enjoy this mentality, or they just be like this pretty so lets play it over anything else.

And lets be honest ffxiv has some of the prettyist customization in any game, which is enough to satified the average person.

Whenever someone mentions 'the hivemind' in reference to the dissatisfied players within FFXIV's community, it compartmentalizes based on those who can't conjure up a thought of their own, so they mindlessly repeat what goes into their ears, which are the cries of the echo chamber. It does not include any and all players who have a problem with the game. That would require an ego so inflated that their heads lift them right off of the ground.

Keep that in mind the next time you decide to indiscriminately take a giant deuce on everyone who plays FFXIV.
Also... you are someone who plays FFXIV. You can place your bowl next to the others by the sink after you're finished.

[Claviusnex]

The game is largely drive by a single personality in Yoshi-P who won't be around forever. When he goes so does the game's leader and his direct influence on the SEQ board as a member. This is why I think the biggest potential effect on the direction of FF XIV is what type of succession plan is there for Yoshi-P and the other long term team members. Are they developing new talent with a deep understanding of the game and its history? Are the senior people giving the new generation of developers space to develop or are they micromanaged retarding their growth? Etc. My belief is if the development team can handle a smooth succession the game will continue on with the type of content that has made it successful and for me something I like to play. However if the transition is not successful, while not guaranteed, it does not bode well that the game will escape unscathed.

[Nekokaori]

If you stopped here, you would've had one helluva an rebuttal to the poster you quoted, or at least a compelling one.

and then...

Whenever someone mentions 'the hivemind' in reference to the dissatisfied players within FFXIV's community, it compartmentalizes based on those who can't conjure up a thought of their own, so they mindlessly repeat what goes into their ears, which are the cries of the echo chamber. It does not include any and all players who have a problem with the game. That would require an ego so inflated that their heads lift them right off of the ground.

Keep that in mind the next time you decide to indiscriminately take a giant deuce on everyone who plays FFXIV.
Also... you are someone who plays FFXIV. You can place your bowl next to the others by the sink after you're finished.

Cute u think i was talking about just ffxiv lol it was a In general since the majority of ppl well would rather eat from a pretty bowl of shit with the majority than be themselves with taste lol i wasnt just refering to ffxiv if you took it that way u even prove how true it is lol

Also i never said playing it i said being satisfied with what were given and im not lol more because what they took away still.. Learn to read what is there without taking it in a way that isnt said