Future direction of FFXIV

[Lunalepsy]

Ive been lurking and interacting with the forum here for a good time. I know I havent been here a good majority of this game's history; or at least havent been in the forums long enough to gauge general feeback and topic trends but from the majority of people here I'm curious about something.

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?

Wanna know people's thoughts.

Future of FFXIV: Everyone gets their single-player experience.

[IdowhatIwant]

The team has done a fantastic job simplifying most jobs, butchering healers over each expansion, ignoring said healers for the past 6 years, and taking 6-8 years to somewhat fix their horrible housing system. But hey, at least the casuals are happy.

When did the housing system get fixed?

Jobs don't need to be that complicated, as long as the content keeps you busy instead, which for me it does.

That's just your opinion. My opinion differs in I think the content does not keep me busy and has gotten lazier in design, and has become less engaging. That combined with my opinion on class simplicity just makes an over all boring experience.

Of course, they sit on top of statistics to inform changes like this.

Highly doubtful. If they sat on statistics to inform changes like this, you would not have so many unhappy healers currently.

Future of FFXIV: Everyone gets their single-player experience.

FFXIV is already about 80% single player experience but soon it will be 100%.

[SyphinAes]

This thread reminds me of the WoW forums back in WotLK where people were constantly whining and complaining about the state of the game, asking for change etc. even though the game was peaking at a massive 12 million playerbase. Cataclysm arrived and change they got. Then everyone quit. Problem is that a lot of people don't know when to be content. There's always something to nag about that makes acting like it's the end of the world seem like a sensible reaction (even though the game is doing extremely well). Such is the danger of living in the echo-chamber of forums imbued with a constant negativity. Eventually it's all you see.

I absolutely do believe the game is fine, but could use some improvements in some areas. They need to adress healers and maybe also tanks. Doesn't seem like those roles have received the attention they deserve. Other than that? Fix the glamour system and make roulettes more interesting for max level characters.

Aside from that, I thoroughly enjoyed the EW MSQ - especially my time in Elpis. I've yet to meet a single person in-game who didn't like it.

YES. As a WoW refugee the shit in this thread is making me cringe so hard. "Let's take what's working like gangbusters and ruin it just because."

[Vahlnir]

YES. As a WoW refugee the shit in this thread is making me cringe so hard. "Let's take what's working like gangbusters and ruin it just because."

Pretty much. Not saying the game is perfect, but it is consistently what it is and it never tries to be anything but, for better or worse. Usually for the better. WoW has tried to reinvent the wheel every expansion for years now, and instead of taking the good they've done and using it later...they take the worst possible aspects of every bit of content they create and somehow make it worse with a "new" iteration. Heck, even their pet battle system isn't any fun anymore and it hasn't been for a while now. Complicated and grindy just for the sake of being complicated and grindy. That's...WoW content design in a nutshell.

[Minarisweet]

I think you guys should stop replying to this thread its basically just fighting over some guy having the weirdest take anyone has ever had in these forums.

[Ransu]

OP definitely a troll lol.

[KizuyaKatogami]

YES. As a WoW refugee the shit in this thread is making me cringe so hard. "Let's take what's working like gangbusters and ruin it just because."

I mean, so are we just supposed to be silent when they’re butchering the healers because some people think it’s “working?” Or be silent when they continue lowering skill ceilings of jobs, lowering engagement and fun in jobs, giving us less things, and then telling people “oh if you want your job to be engaging, go play Ultimate, a piece of content that only gets something new once an expansion if you’re lucky.” Great developer work, 10/10. It’s working guys.

[shao32]

This game use to offer a proper balance between easy casual content aka the story and tribes and midcore/hardcore for endgame stuff with a more engaging and less baby proof jobs gameplay so you could have fun as an invested player no matter what content you face.

In SHB Yoship has adopt a heavy direction to casuals or more specific to players who don't wanna play/invest in the game and get everything easily bcs there is casuals raiding savage and doing it complete well.
We get less combat related content and more simplificated dungeons in post of single player systems to play them, less long standing new content making taking breaks being way more frequent and last way more than before, and the dev team seems to start taking a posture of ignore any feedback against this model with "this is how we want to do it now" as we already saw when talking about jobs.

The game has already taken a significative change and it's ok being against it and ask for a revert of the situation to make it no so invasive and get a middle ground at least, it's actual popularity has to do much more with the pretty obvious increase of marketing budget more than his gameplay changes since all new players have 0 idea about how it was the game before apart the retention is awfully low, and more importantly Blizzard and WoW team commiting a company suicide.

[AziraSyuren]

I like how healer mains are responsible for a disproportionate number of complaints on this game’s direction lol

Not that I blame them, but as a 6 year tank main I find the assertion that the devs are constantly lowering the skill ceiling of most jobs to be a little strange. Removing upkeep stuff is a skill floor thing which has little to no effect on how high you can push the performance of a job, and the difference between good and bad players is the same as ever, with WAR, SMN, and healers being pretty much the only major outliers. Even then, the difference between a good tank and bad tank is still pretty massive no matter what the raw damage numbers show. Raid mechanics are also more complex and difficult than ever, with first tier difficulty having remained the same since Stormblood. That being said, O3 and O4 are definitely much better fights than P3 and P4 regardless of their difficulty, and P3/4 aren’t even that bad.

Dungeons have also remained roughly the same in quality since HW, with the only difference now being that the devs are less willing to occasionally throw in that one experimental dungeon with strange and usually pretty cool mechanics, and more willing to throw in the occasional forced single pull with a coin flip between whether or not the damage accommodates the lower number of mobs. Which is a shame, but still not a big difference in the end. The only thing I really want is a dungeon that’s as cool and fun as Gubal Hard, which is the best expert dungeon of all time, fight me.

Either way, I guess these individually small differences do compound into something much greater to some people, but we’re not really on a downward trend and I see no indication that it’s getting any worse.

The devs are just refusing to make a lot of this better. The name of the game in HW was silly and experimental bullshit that everybody hated and I think I want a little more of that back. Give me more shit that starts out as some of the worst, most boring content in the game that eventually blossoms into something truly special (like deep dungeons). Bring back some of the weirder and jankier mechanics in Eureka in the next exploratory mission series, like fighting mobs being more important along with difficult terrain (but not to the extent of Pagos, please). Give us more shit to do with Blue Mage. Bozja was great and all, but it was way too sterile and not nearly experimental enough outside of DR and it’s Savage counterpart.

[ForteNightshade]

Removing upkeep stuff is a skill floor thing which has little to no effect on how high you can push the performance of a job, and the difference between good and bad players is the same as ever

People aren't complaining about the removal of things like Blood of the Dragon or Enochian. They're referring to the nuanced gameplay of Stormblood Bard, Heavensward Machinist, Dark Knight as a whole and so forth. Back then, you had things like Foe's optimization and catching crit buffs within Iron Jaws for Bard; the whole ammo system for Machinist; a proc based tank that actually had to consider their MP. All of that being stripped away is, indeed, lowering the ceiling. Bards nowadays don't have anything to think about. Their DoTs hardly have any interaction—to the extent they're likely gone come 7.0. Machinist's gameplay essentially boils down to being a glorified tank and I needn't elaborate on the jank Dark Knight has suffered through for multiple expansions now. Even maintenance buffs like Heavy Thrust, Straight Shot and the like were still something skilled players had to be mindful of. Were they likely to drop them? No. But the same can be said for Healer DoTs. And yet, if they were removed healers would, rightful, riot.

We can debate whether some of these changes were good, bad or somewhere in between. However, there is no denying the game has become noticeably simplified from Shadowbringers onward.