Future direction of FFXIV

[IdowhatIwant]

It's really difficult to compare the 5.x patches and 6.0 to prior expansions because of the pandemic.

Some of the EW dungeon gear is dyable, as it was in ShB.

And on top of things we've been dealing with stuff like removal of TP in ShB, the stat squish in EW, the graphics update, the DC visiting, and of course we can't forget the server crashes and login queues.

I just find people whinging and trying to bookkeep whether the content is "deficient" or not to be a lot of aimless nitpicking. Pick a couple things you want the devs to work on (that they actually *can* work on) and promote those ideas. Don't expect the content to be comparable from expansion to expansion--it never has been in ANY MMO.

TP was pretty obsolete even in HW. It existed but I don't remember people having the TP issues that ARR had. Server crashes should have never happened as it should have been fixed the first time back in ARR but they were quick to blame player internet rather than looking into the issue themselves. And the Pandemic is such a old excuse. This is a multi-billion dollar company and it is not my problem how they address working around the pandemic. Delays I think are understandable, but I can't excuse poor content as a fault of the pandemic. I have worked during the entire pandemic with little hinderance and my company is only multi-million dollar company. I don't care what about what excuses the player base makes for the short comings of the dev team because unless you are part of the dev team, your excuse is nothing more than a hypothesis.

Simply all I really want is the raid content to feel like something different than trials, and some class diversity back in tanks, healers, and ranged dps. I would not mind if classes actually had a decent skill ceiling and a skill floor again. I do believe some changes they have done were smart, Blood of the dragon and enochian being a trait is a good example, because these buffs were maintained basically by you doing your rotation correctly, and the change to a trait just removes the activation button. Some of the things seem so counter intuitive like removing stance dancing but keeping tank stance as something to turn on to generate emnity and turn off to halt emnity generation. It's basically a more boring version of stance dancing.

[Ransu]

So you want pointless trash pulls and pre-clears and running back to the boss after a wipe and other nonsense from raids to come back? Nah I quite like the current raiding format being similar to how trials are. Queue in, boss, done. Wiping resets your CD's so you don't have to pointlessly sit there and wait for several minutes for CD's etc...God forbid someone used a pot late in the fight.

[HyoMinPark]

I happen to main White Mage and I have a blast playing it. Spoeak for yourself!
(Late reply is late, sorry ;;; )

This doesn’t mean that WHM isn’t without its issues, though. Or that all of the healers aren’t without their issues. From clunky toolkits that don’t synergize well with one another (AST and SCH) to mana problems if you are just keeping up your standard ABC (WHM) to boring gameplay where you are spamming 1 button a total of 100 to 150 times during any given fight (all four), the healers have a lot of issues that will need addressing. Healer mains have already been pretty salty since SB.

So you want pointless trash pulls and pre-clears and running back to the boss after a wipe and other nonsense from raids to come back? Nah I quite like the current raiding format being similar to how trials are. Queue in, boss, done. Wiping resets your CD's so you don't have to pointlessly sit there and wait for several minutes for CD's etc...God forbid someone used a pot late in the fight.

While I don’t see the point in adding in trash mobs to Savage fights, I would prefer door bosses that weren’t nearly as long as the phase two boss. Exdeath’s length was perfect; he didn’t feel like he overstayed his welcome. Some of the door bosses (E12S and P4S) are just as long as the phase two boss, and I personally don’t like that. I also didn’t really mind the Faust mini bosses before bosses like Oppressor and Refurbisher.

CD and pot resets can still exist even with mini-bosses. So not sure why that’s thrown in there.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Sorry for cherry-picking but while those statements are true those events are much more recent than the event that settled the budget for EW and likely a good chunk of 7.0 work. Now that Yoshi-P is on the board XIV stands a much better chance of retaining a better portion of the revenue it generated.

Even if the funding problem has been solved that doesn't directly translate into content. XIV has long struggled with hiring enough talent to create that content. I have no idea how Square treats their developers but the wider gamesdev industry is looking much more like a career stain than a dream job. On top of that it's a workers' market with employers going to great lengths to attract talent.

The playerbase and income has been at a steady rise since HW. Why is it that SB, the middle expansion was able to give us much more content, yet ShB somehow couldn’t despite having peak ratings and income. Let’s say for a moment that those earnings didn’t go towards shb, i’d at least expect them to be put towards EW, yet still, we are seeing cut things and nothing changing and more reused assets.

[ForteNightshade]

Ya, all the WoW players advocating for this game to play like the game they just left because its been murdering itself for the last several expansions is just comical to me. Like I said earlier though, its pretty obvious OP is a troll and its a shame this thread has gone on for 25 pages lol. Anyone who advocates that Yoshi-P and the devs should be replaced or complains about content releases in a game that has a consistent release schedule of content every few months is either a troll or is hyper focused on a single piece of content. In no way can anyone legitimately complain about the content this game releases when most other MMO's go nearly an entire year without any major content updates.

Hi, non-WoW player here. In fact, FFXIV is only my second MMO ever; my first being Guild Wars. In terms of content I partake in, I...

• Have every Primal mount; most farmed on content
• 300+ minions
• Am an Omni-crafter
• Have cleared every Savage fight since Creator
• Have farmed every Ultimate weapon
• Have 5+ relics from every expansion save SB; where I only finished three

I could go on but needless to say, I participate in a LOT of content. Even on the casual side, I spam 24 mans, dungeons and so forth. I even have alts. So when I criticism the lack of content, I'm speaking from a place of experience with said content. 6.1 is about to release and if it weren't for Dragonsong, I'd have the patch finished over the weekend. It has virtually nothing to terms of content longevity besides farming Endsinger until her mount drops.

None of this is to say other MMOs don't have their own issues. Frankly, I couldn't care less because I don't play them. I do, however, care about this one.

Not only does the content itself lack in longevity, everything has become increasingly easy. Crafting is an absolute joke; most jobs have been simplified in some form or another; healers are essentially boring DPS with one button that sometimes heal and so forth. Obviously, FFXIV does a lot right or we wouldn't all be here. That does not, however, absolve it from criticism.

[Ransu]

Hi, non-WoW player here. In fact, FFXIV is only my second MMO ever; my first being Guild Wars. In terms of content I partake in, I...

• Have every Primal mount; most farmed on content
• 300+ minions
• Am an Omni-crafter
• Have cleared every Savage fight since Creator
• Have farmed every Ultimate weapon
• Have 5+ relics from every expansion save SB; where I only finished three

I could go on but needless to say, I participate in a LOT of content. Even on the casual side, I spam 24 mans, dungeons and so forth. I even have alts. So when I criticism the lack of content, I'm speaking from a place of experience with said content. 6.1 is about to release and if it weren't for Dragonsong, I'd have the patch finished over the weekend. It has virtually nothing to terms of content longevity besides farming Endsinger until her mount drops.

None of this is to say other MMOs don't have their own issues. Frankly, I couldn't care less because I don't play them. I do, however, care about this one.

Not only does the content itself lack in longevity, everything has become increasingly easy. Crafting is an absolute joke; most jobs have been simplified in some form or another; healers are essentially boring DPS with one button that sometimes heal and so forth. Obviously, FFXIV does a lot right or we wouldn't all be here. That does not, however, absolve it from criticism.

That's called you need to take a break...You are the .01% that consumes content way too fast.

[HyoMinPark]

That's called you need to take a break...You are the .01% that consumes content way too fast.

I’m with ForteNightshade. I’m a non-WoW player; I’ve been playing this game since late 2015. And while it always seemed like there was a lot of content when I was first going through the MSQ, unlocking old Extremes, farming those mounts, etc., there is actually very little to do at endgame when you’re caught up. And this has been the case for a while now.

During ShB, I took a 6-month break, came back, and caught up within the span of a week in terms of missed content. I’m playing now for a couple hours in the evenings (usually due to a heavy work schedule) during the week, and I am purposely dragging out leveling my jobs to 90 because once they reach 90, that’s one less thing for me to do. And one less thing for me to have to stretch out content.

I participate in hardcore content (I raid Savage, I’ve cleared all three Ultimates, I’ve cleared every Extreme except for Diamond weapon since I took a lot of breaks during ShB due to heavy work schedules), I participate in casual content (I’ve been to floor 200 in PotD multiple times, and Floor 100 in HoH multiple times; I do the relics—with the exception of Bozja because the content just wasn’t enjoyable to me). I do just about everything in this game in some shape or form. And I run out of stuff to do. I entertain myself by making alt characters and doing the MSQ on them.

And inb4 “you should take a break”: I took one. I actually took a lot during ShB. And I don’t play with nearly the same amount of time per day that I did during HW and SB. I play maybe 2-4 hours a night now versus playing 8-12 hours before. And I’m not even logging in every day. I haven’t logged in since last…Thursday, I believe it was.

If you are insinuating that FFXIV’s endgame has any sort of longevity to it, then you are sorely mistaken. Any longevity is from artificial caps (e.g., Tomestone caps) or from drop RNG (e.g., EX Mount farming). Patches don’t have enough for people to stretch out the entire 4 months of relevancy unless they just aren’t logging in and playing for extended periods of time.

I don’t want anything that requires logging in every day to stay caught up. But it would be nice to have more content that lasts longer than a few days to a week (I don’t count things that have weekly lockouts or caps as content with longevity, since the content itself is completed very quickly). I think it would be wonderful to have the relic steps coming out in the x.1 patches again. I don’t like that they come out in x.2 or later now. It’s just another thing that makes the x.1 patches feel empty. I’ll never forget 4.1, where there was basically Rabanastre, Shinryu EX, and UCoB. And if you were a casual player who wasn’t interested in extremes or raiding, you basically only had a 24-man. All because they delayed Eureka and the relic. It was boring.

[AziraSyuren]

People aren't complaining about the removal of things like Blood of the Dragon or Enochian.

No, people are complaining a lot about that. As a matter of fact, it's one of the things they complain most about. Boring upkeep gameplay is the first thing a lot of people point to when they talk about jobs being simplified.

The proportional difference between the high and low end has remained very similar since StB, with the major exception being healers and tanks (and even then, healers are the only really egregious example); that's what I mean by skill ceiling. The capacity to push your job's output higher than the average has not changed much. Nerfing the skill ceiling would be something like how they changed BoTD from HW to StB more than anything they did in ShB onwards.

If you are insinuating that FFXIV’s endgame has any sort of longevity to it, then you are sorely mistaken. Any longevity is from artificial caps (e.g., Tomestone caps) or from drop RNG (e.g., EX Mount farming). Patches don’t have enough for people to stretch out the entire 4 months of relevancy unless they just aren’t logging in and playing for extended periods of time.

They can't do that! Everyone knows that giving content longevity automatically equates to the devs making it mandatory to compete (or even get involved) in a high end raiding environment!!!!

:')

[iWaRTuRTLeS]

This game is so linear. New update/expansion, one end game content to get best gear, on top of that the content isnt even hard. Miss the good old days of ffxi where you had about 5 diff end game contents to get gear that was considered good. hard ass story quests that net you a bis piece. Relic quests where you can upgrade any way you wanted depending on your playstyle. Wide gap between what was great in the past and where this game is at.

[GeminiReed]

The playerbase and income has been at a steady rise since HW. Why is it that SB, the middle expansion was able to give us much more content, yet ShB somehow couldn’t despite having peak ratings and income. Let’s say for a moment that those earnings didn’t go towards shb, i’d at least expect them to be put towards EW, yet still, we are seeing cut things and nothing changing and more reused assets.

20/20 hindsight is a hell of a drug.

Stormblood wasn't nearly as well received as Heavensward. SE did SE things and diverted funds to other projects they felt would have made more money (oops). IIRC Yoshi-P wasn't added to the board until around the time Shadowbringers released. Endwalker had its own challenges with the COVID lockdowns and the WoWpocalypse.

With Yoshida on the board and EW doing well enough hopefully that should insulate XIV from the funding shenanigans they've had to put up with. My fervent hope is that they take a good solid look at XIV and deal with the things that make it unapproachable and unengaging for newer players. And I don't mean it needs more dumbing down, quite the opposite.