AST (and DRG) had their improvements pushed to 7.0 PLD are getting theirs in 6.3

[T-Owl]

Maybe...except you might be surprised that that isn't likely the majority of players. Like I don't think I've ever watched a stream of anyone doing a Savage or Ultimate fight. I've never found it fun watching other people play an MMO - Sword Art Online (Abridged, I think) got that point right in the end.

I would argue casual content DOES get the clicks. Think of how many people have watched Island Sanctuary guides on YouTube since it came out just a couple weeks ago! And that's not "hardcore" content. People watched how to do Bozja stuff, how to get gear, and streamers playing the MSQ get massive amounts of views, and I imagine you wouldn't classify the MSQ as hardcore content. I have no idea the numbers, but I'd bet you even odds that the casual content gets as many or more clicks than the world first twitch race does. I bet casual content gets a LOT of clicks and views. Hell, Ginger Prime's controller guides get a ton, Mr Happy just conversation videos do, lore videos do, Asmon broke the internet leveling through the MSQ, Zepla's various discussions on bunny ears get a somewhat absurd amount of views, too.

I guess my point is, I've not seen much data supporting the argument hardcore content DOES "by far" outweigh casual content. They're probably far closer to even or even the casual content ahead over the course of a given patch or expansion. The hardcore stuff gets a spike at the start of a patch (if there's not casual stuff like Island to compete), but over the 4/8 months of that patch? I bet the casual stuff has overall more cumulative views.

Just because you didn't find it fun doesn't mean that plattforms such as youtube aren't a critical engagement tool for a MMO. They always have been since early WoW. And you ignore that FF14 streamers and content creators often tend to be raiders themselves. Its actually more of a flaw of FF14, that the game offers so little content, that everyoen has to cover everything.. Also even with people doing stuff like Island sanctuary content, thats not the casuals, its people who immediately tackled it as hardcore content and were done after a week or so.

There is the additional question of who probably subscribes for longer, somebody who is just doing msq and its content or somebody who raids savage. And I personally would guess its the savage raider, just because outside of week 1 clearers, the average raider probably is kept busy with this content for at least a few weeks, while all casual content outside of stuff like Island Sanctuaries, which is fairly new, can be day 1'd. And if you aren't raiding, there isn't also much to do long term in the game for most of an expansion, like relics are only released once its halfway through. I mean, except hardcore casuals, who often tend to be this weird intersection of gaming addicts who spend most of their time and social life in a video game but remain perpetually just not good at it, if you know what I mean.

[Renathras]

Just because you didn't find it fun...

I didn't say that.

I said watching people raid isn't something that as many people do as you think. If we tallied all the views of all FFXIV content creator videos, videos on glamour, fight guides for Extremes, Job guide and leveling from 1-90, and people's MSQ playthroughs probably have more combined views than world first raid clears do. EASILY.

I've easily watched hours of FFXIV content. I've watched a lot of Wesk Alber's Job guides. I've watched Ginger Prime/Gaming Kinda's talk cast things. I've watched Cole Evyx videos (which are just about whatever random topic he feels like and sometimes mini guides for things), Mioni's showcases of new glamour/weapon items, Desperious' for fun Job tier rankings and his random whatever topic videos, guides on PotD solo runs, Zepla random videos, Belular's FFXIV commentary, Mr Happy's "Monday with Mr Happy" videos which are also kinda random things, Speakers of Hydaelyn videos like Remnants of a Realm, The Fall and Rise of FFXIV, and occasionally some of their weekly talk cast things, and Synodic Scribe's lore videos. While I have watched Mr Happy or MTQ Capture (or some others' I can't think of at the moment) Extreme guids (and now, Savage guides), I usually do so weeks or months after the content went live.

None of that would you define as hardcore, world first, raider, etc stuff.

And no, just because people throw themselves as Island Sanctuary does not make it "hardcore content". If that's true, then I'm a hardcore player, because I was one of those people. YES, that's for casuals. YES, the videos for it are for casuals. You can't redefine terms so you can insist you're technically correct when you're wrong.

Savages raiders unsub after about a month of a patch then resub about 2 weeks before the next patch. The players who stick with the game and don't unsub are generally people who do SOCIAL stuff (housing more than anything because people not wanting to lose their houses), which is generally considered casual content.

EDIT (for space):


MSQ only players sub the least, that's probably true, but most casuals aren't MSQ only. You'd probably define me as casual - I've cleared exactly two Savages in all of FFXIV at level (P1S and P2S), but I've played since 2013 and had a sub that didn't lapse for most of that time because I do and enjoy other content. Bozja can't be day 1'd. POTD can't be day 1'd. Farming for mounts in Ex can't be day 1'd. Fully gearing my character with tome gear can't be day 1'd. If anything, Savage raids are the things with the expiration date. Normally, Savage raiders get their clear, they farm it for gear, they help their Static members farm it as they want to, but once everyone has their gear and their clears and mounts, what do you do the other 8 months until the next raid tier? You're done. Meanwhile, that person farming scripts in Ishgard so they can get that rare dye for their perfect glamour cosplaying Saber from Fate Stay Night? THAT PERSON - a casual - has WEEKS if not months worth of content at their fingertips.

I don't get what you mean about this game offering "so little content"/"isn't also much to do long term". I've managed to find things to do to justify staying subbed for years without raiding. In content lulls, I tend to go to Eureka/ARR/HW relics (and now Bozja), work on POTD, right now I'm in a weekly group proging DRSavage (which isn't current content raiding Savage/Ultimate), farm some old Mount, solo HW (now SB) Extremes/Riads for fun and/or achievements, work on maxing all Beast Tribe reputations (finally finished the last of those in November before EW came out), etc etc. I know a girl who has every ARR and HW relic and half the Eureka ones but has no static and has never done a single Savage raid (not counting BA).

Us dirty casuals just come up with personal goals to do. Right now, I'm pushing myself through POTD a few floors at a time - not too many, don't want to burn out on it. I'll get Necromancer eventually. Farming Bozja shards so I'll be ready on our group night with essences and Raises. Check my Island to keep my (near slave) workshop going so I can eventually buy all the mounts and such. Run Frontlines daily to get PvP season rank so I can get those minions and mount and stuff. Going zone by zone (every couple days) to clear all the sidequests I never did. Go on a mounted "walking tour" of ARR zones from one end to the other without using teleports to see all the sights and find old 1.X relics as well as references to past things (like the Allegan Sunway/Starway criss-crossing Thanlan), and so on and so forth.

While the entire community isn't me, a lot do play kinda like I do - they get it in their head they want to work on something and they...do.

And there is SO MUCH in this game besides Savage raids. If that's all you're doing, you're missing out!

Your view of the community as a whole, I think, seems rather...skewed.

[T-Owl]

Your view of the community as a whole, I think, seems rather...skewed.

To be honest, I think your's is kinda self-centered. There is also the issue, aren't people who are basically just doing social stuff or running old content once its yoloable the people Devs can legitimately least worry to maintain? Same with the people who are deeply into the social stuff and either make FF14 the one single game they play or outright the center of their social life. And tons of the content you mentioned boils down to people engaging in hardcore stuff and making videos from that point onward.

And most of the content you mention outside of Bozja and soloing PotD is basically stuff you get start to do if you set your eye on a specific piece of glamour and be done with it in a day or so. Beast Tribe Reputation is really more of a leveling catch up system if you ask me and not really a good one, with how limited it is and with how little experience they give and the new relic weapon farm zone is literally only gettinf released once the expansion is halfway done. And I hate to break it to you, if I don't really need to play the game as a social plattform and want to focus on combat oriented content, FF14 is still kinda lacking with the amount of content that is released, especially since a great number of it is really do it a few times and grow bored of it. With how big it is, SE should at this point slowly start to expand the team and ramp out production to catch up to the amount of Content WoW releases during a regular expansion. Criterion Dungeons look like a good first step, though I hope it doesn't end up like a system where we get only 1-2 new ones each expansion.

I'm genuinely curious if there was a survey on the topic to the community, if the result would be that people like it or dislike it, collectively. Pretty much everyone - hardcore and casual - seems to agree it's a bad direction.

If you ask me, it just makes the game much harder in the most nasty way, because with how most classes rotations are centered around building towards this strict, big two minute burst and to a lesser extend the 1 minute one, it makes recovery from death pretty much impossible. If you mess up once, you are basically out for the entire fight. I kinda feel like WoW is less stressful in this regard, because its really much less about pooling and slowly building everything for this big burst windows. There are burst windows, but these usually require much less preparation and usually you can recover from death and resume your rotation much much easier. Like if you're a BoS Frost DK and die, it isn't taking that long to pool back that runic power.

[ty_taurus]

There is also the issue, aren't people who are basically just doing social stuff or running old content once its yoloable the people Devs can legitimately least worry to maintain? Same with the people who are deeply into the social stuff and either make FF14 the one single game they play or outright the center of their social life.

This reminds me of a video from Misshapen Chair from back when Kaiten was announced to be removed. He brings up the question of who are the job changes we see meant for? Who is being appeased by the oversimplification of job design? I think the entire video is really good and worth watching, but here's a timestamped link for anyone interested that basically summarizes the discussion of the video.

[Renathras]

To be honest, I think your's is kinda self-centered.

Are you capable of one reply to me that isn't an insult?

Self-centered would be if I was arguing for content just for me/my interests. We aren't arguing about that. We're talking about the likely statistics of the playerbase. This is like two people talking about what percentage of stars are like our Sun and you coming in and calling one self-centered for saying Red Dwarves make up the majority of Main Sequence stars.

There is also the issue, aren't people who are basically just doing social stuff or running old content once its yoloable the people Devs can legitimately least worry to maintain?

So wait, which is it, we need new content to keep people interested (and must make new content for only 5-10% of the hardcore community), or people don't need new content to keep interested?

It's hard to say. People still want new content. This game has a lot of stuff, but if the game had no expansion for the last 8 years and only added new raid tiers, I'd probably have left. So while the Devs have to worry LESS about those people, they still need to make new content for them to keep them around.

Speaking for myself, if they go too many expansions without stuff like Bozja or POTD and only do raids, I might eventually lose interest, yes. So they DO still have to make content for casual and social players. Now, a lot of casual/social content doesn't require the same level of resources as a Savage raid. For example, adding a new emote and slapping it in as a PvP reward or MSQ quest completion reward. But these things still have to be added to maintain interest.

And tons of the content you mentioned boils down to people engaging in hardcore stuff and making videos from that point onward.

Except none of the stuff I mentioned was hardcore stuff? You guys can't just call stuff hardcore when it suits your argument but consider it casual the rest of the time.

and ramp out production to catch up to the amount of Content WoW releases during a regular expansion.

Setting aside the rest: How much content does WoW release during a regular expansion?

And I don't just mean raids and dungeons. New emotes, glamour/transmog, deep dungeons, exploration content, etc etc that FFXIV releases. I don't think WoW releases more overall content than FFXIV does unless you limit that metric to "raids only", but I'd be interested to see an actual comparative analysis between the two.

EDIT (for space):

If you ask me, it just makes the game much harder in the most nasty way, because with how most classes rotations are centered around building towards this strict, big two minute burst and to a lesser extend the 1 minute one, it makes recovery from death pretty much impossible. If you mess up once, you are basically out for the entire fight. I kinda feel like WoW is less stressful in this regard, because its really much less about pooling and slowly building everything for this big burst windows. There are burst windows, but these usually require much less preparation and usually you can recover from death and resume your rotation much much easier. Like if you're a BoS Frost DK and die, it isn't taking that long to pool back that runic power.

Combat raises in WoW are much less common though, aren't they? If you die, is there a "recover from death" in WoW if you aren't an important thing (e.g. main tank or someone)?

That said, agree on the 2 min thing entirely.

This reminds me of a video from Misshapen Chair from back when Kaiten was announced to be removed. He brings up the question of who are the job changes we see meant for? Who is being appeased by the oversimplification of job design? I think the entire video is really good and worth watching, but here's a timestamped link for anyone interested that basically summarizes the discussion of the video.

I think I saw that video. But I disagree with the analysis.

Changes like this are made for the Devs, it's that simple. They aren't made for casuals or bads or whatever. These changes are so the Devs can balance their numbers easier. To a lesser extent, changes are made for the midcore. People who aren't QUITE hardcore, but are trying to push themselves to be closer to it, and who didn't ask for these changes, the Devs just thought it would slightly close the gap. And I do thing Misshapen Chair focuses WAY too much on combat - "Why did I even play this Job/learn this?"

Because it was fun? If it wasn't fun, why would one do it? And if it was fun, isn't that an end unto itself?

Though I do agree with him that as long as something is viable, there's no reason to change them. I still don't know why WAR's cone was changed to a circle instead of just taking their 2 in that 1-2 AOE combo and turning it into a cone so the two would be normalized to each other.