Playing an expansion as current content has been a lacklustre MMO experience

[VelKallor]

Island Sanctuary which is just the Garrison from Warlords of Draenor,

Oh PLEASE

They are nothing alike, to suggest otherwise is utterly laughable in the extreme.

Borelords of PayMore was an utter disaster because the head honchos at Blizzards are, were, and always have been addicted to the raid or die mindset. Garrisons were literally the ONLY content left in an expac designed for "raaaidderssssss" AND NO ONE ELSE.

Add to that the MASSIVE amount of cut and cancelled content, the blatant lies around the flight debacle and the solid fact that Blizzard was WARNED what the Garrisons were and how they would turn out was, as usual with every alpha , beta and PTR test IGNORED utterly,. and you have a recipe that saw 50% or more of players walk out the door in utter disgust.

Chorelords of Paymore was touted as "the expac all our staff would love to play", forgetting that the game wasnt meant just for them. Ill also add that the Garrisons were all there was because Blizzard got out its chainsaw and OBLITERATED the entire legendary cloak questline along with a pack of other content.

Their FOMO mindset came back and bit them...but they never learned, they never will.

The Garrisons were the way they were because of the devs DELIBERATE intent. Island sanctuary is a hobby, a pastime, for fun, no player power, no mission tables, no gear aside from glamours...there is literally zero comparison between that and the utter dogs breakfast designed to keep you busy as there was literally nothing else.

WOD was raid or die on steroids, Garrisons were for the rest of the "lesser class of players" who didnt raid, pvp or do m plus. With predictable results.

Its still this way in WOW "If you dont raid do pvp or m plus GTFO theres no reason for you to be here"

See for yourself

FF 14, fortunately, doesnt do that at all. Unlike WOW, all prev content is still there, sans a few tweaks from ARR which removed a lot of pointless fetch quests.

You have LOADS of other content to do, and have fun with in FF 14, I also suspect that you are another "rush to endgame" player who then discovered that this isnt WOW and that with FF 14, the game starts at level 1.

Crafting, other jobs, loads to do yet.

Ill put it bluntly: The ONLY "savage" part of WOD was the price tag for the expac.

[DrWho2010]

The main "issue" of playing XIV on content, when you have "exhausted" all the content *that you are willing to do/take on* means that there will be times when you basically have almost no point to log in other than to say keep on capping your tomes each week or collect your savage books if you do that. Other than maybe keeping up with your friends.

The other thing that some people don't like to accept is that XIV isn't a game where you can live in it 24/7 and expect to keep you entertained 24/7. It's just not possible. You have to drop the mentality that some gamers have that they have to pick some game that is their "forever" one and only game and it must satisfy their every need every waking moment.

You really need to do what Yoshi-P says, play other things, take a break if you need it and come back later on.

[VelKallor]

I'd glamour collect but there's no glamour catalogue.

Yes, there is.

and here

[Reinha]

I have been doing a lot of stuff in the past month. Farming Criterion for the mount, farming savage for gear and also p8s for the mount, doing weeklies like unreal, gathering mats to build submarines for my fc, doing hunts for the achievement mount, making Gil to bid on houses with, farming Eden mounts, doing pvp for the series mount and to level alts, farming the 87 and 89 dungeon minions, and doing the occasional Aglaia to finish some glamour sets and to get coins which will be needed in 6.3 and 6.5.

Criterion has been one of the highlights of this patch for me but I guess it's not for everyone. If you're more into things like Eureka, there's bicolor gemstones to get. You'd have bots to keep you company just like in Eureka. I was a collector already back in WoW and I find that farming things isn't much different in either game, except that it's a lot less dependent on luck in FFXIV. I would guess after a while that's what most players end up doing between patches. Or they take a break.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Unless you own a house.
Unless you don't mind falling behind farming tokens.
Unless you want to clear current content before people stop running it.
Unless you want to miss out on any events that will take place during your break.
Unless you don't mind missing out on PvP season rewards.

BS with the power progression part as the whatever current tier of gear you need to get a foot on the door with endgame raiding is easily obtainable no matter what. You dont need to run multiple savages to do the next tier of savage in a patch

[dspguy]

Unless you own a house.
Unless you don't mind falling behind farming tokens.
Unless you want to clear current content before people stop running it.
Unless you want to miss out on any events that will take place during your break.
Unless you don't mind missing out on PvP season rewards.

I used to feel like that. I found that once I "let it go" - my experience became much better.

Right now, I don't even have to worry about auto-demolition (which should be on, but that's another discussion entirely). It is a great time to take a break with no consequences. Consider "farming tokens." If we are talking about tomestones... let's say you stopped right now. And didn't come back until... 6.5 which probably about a year away. You would just skip an entire tier and come back at a time when you could jump right into exchanging uncapped tomestones for augmented crafted gear, capped tomestones and farm hunt marks for tomestone upgrade items. And you'll have a week or so where the game feels "new."

I've found that breaks are great and I'm looking forward to taking another after this patch drops and I have my fill.

[Carin-Eri]

I do think the Endgame is better than many of the alternatives, having come from a F2P game with a firm commitment to loot/gamble boxes. In fact the most disappointing thing about that game was that, despite the commitment/reliance on gamble boxes, there seemed to be no real investment in the game itself. It was a tedious cycle of selling super-expensive bundles in their cash shop, gamble boxes and so-called 'events' using recycled/pre-existing content, with a FOMO-driven reward as an incentive to log in. New content? Pfft - two or three new 'episodes' (worth about 25 minutes each) per year.

[LaylaTsarra]

3330 days subbed and never took a break. I have fun each and everyday.

[Johners]

You reached what we all do. A content drought. Also every time any piece of midcore content comes to the game the casual playerbase shreds it to pieces with complaints. The game used to be a lot more midcore around Stormblood gameplay wise and it all got dumbed down to appease the mass market.

This game does not have a middle ground unfortunately. And people have been working non stop to make this division exist.

Unfortunately in this current tier, I hit that drought point very quickly versus 6.0/6.1 content. I was genuinely excited to play an expansion launch in another MMO but that's worn off really sharply. I heard great things about this game, both as a story experience an MMO, but now I just don't think it's much of an MMO at all.

It wouldn't be as much of a problem if XIV wasn't subscription based as there's other single purchase or entirely F2P (as the entry point) games in which I had more replay value. In 6.2, I did the story content and then just kept logging in for tomestone capping and later the beast tribe. After completing both of those, there's no desire to play at all. In fact had I been paying on a month-by-month basis, I don't think the story content was even worth paying £10 for to play on release but rather I should've just waited to binge it all at the end.

As other posters have pointed out, these are intentional design choices but ultimately I just feel like playing XIV as a current game is a complete waste of money unless you actually want to do everything. For someone like myself, mostly skimming the surface to experience the story, it's much better value for money waiting until 6.55 (or whatever the last patch of Endwalker ends up being) to buy the expansion discounted with a few months of subscription so I can cheaply play the story before putting it down again.

I'd like to see a midcore in the game. If it actually existed before I started in ShB, then I'd like it back. I'm already subscribed for what'll be the 6.3 launch window so I'll give that a go but if I soon find myself bored, I'll just do what I've seen some people suggest and only care about XIV as a story game... even if it's frustrating as I have to play an MMO to experience it and I'd rather play story games as an offline experience made in something like the Unreal Engine for the fancy ray tracing and not tab target combat.

Oh PLEASE

They are nothing alike, to suggest otherwise is utterly laughable in the extreme.

Borelords of PayMore was an utter disaster because the head honchos at Blizzards are, were, and always have been addicted to the raid or die mindset. Garrisons were literally the ONLY content left in an expac designed for "raaaidderssssss" AND NO ONE ELSE.

I made an entire statement about Garrisons and Island Sanctuary both being bad due to piss poor, limited customisations and the gameplay being a mission table and you went on a tangent after half a sentence. I'm aware that WoD was bad for other reasons, a lot of that being cut content and the failed Warcraft movie crossover that left them abandoning the expansion.

However, the Garrisons were part of the raid or die problem because guess what, the mission table gave you access to Heroic and Mythic quality loot via the weekly mission to send your NPCs to the raid for 12 hours. The idea that they were the only non-raiding content is laughable. They were also mandatory for some profession and PvP stuff. There was no actual casual element to that content as everything tied back into existing end game.

Island Sanctuary doesn't have the end game problem that Garrisons did but it's still a terrible system. Your customisation is placing a few animals and what seeds you want to plant in the garden area. You then do "missions" in the form of making items with a mission table UI in which you allocate NPCs time to make stuff. It's an incredibly boring and predictable system that shouldn't have been added to an MMO in 2022, it feels like a decade old system already despite being in the game for all of two months.

[Raven2014]

Said this many time before, and will keep saying: FF14 is a theme park MMO. As such:

- The people who will get the most out of it are the people who can enjoy a variety of content.
- The people who can keep playing none-stop are those who seek to complete everything the game has to offer.
- You can find other games that will do some specific thing better than FF14, and if those specific things is your primary irks, it's better to go play those other games.
- You play FF14 because you prefer a more well rounded package.


The examples of a the last two points can be raiding. You don't play FF14 because you simply enjoy raiding. You play FF14 because raiding is only a part of what you want to do in MMO. if Raiding is the only thing you want to do ... go play WoW instead. And I'm not saying that to be dismissive.

What you're taking as an issue, to the developers it's an intended feature, and to other players it's actually a good thing. For example just in this year alone, I was able to finish Trail of Cold Steel 4, Tale of Arise, Xenoblade 3, Star Ocean Divine Force and a bunch of other game along side playing FF14. FF14 doesn't demand and take over all of my spare time, and I greatly appreciate that. It's probably the reason why I have been able to stay with it for almost 10 years.