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

[strawberrycake]

If you are a professional game critic, sure. If you are recommending a game for someone else to play, yes. If you are continually disappointed that the choices you would have made for game design are not the choices made by the actual development team, not so much. Feel free to be critical. Just don't whine about it when someone else's ideas of what deserve criticism are different from your own, because, frankly, the only one who can be critically objective is that professional game critic, who does not play the game after assessing it.

Do the mechanics in this game work? Obviously.

Was the 2-minute burst window a development team design, or was it a meta that became so popular the developers decided to incorporate it into the game officially? Chicken, meet egg. The majority of players will look at you and ask, 'what burst window'?

Was the choice to create everything instanced a good one back in 2014? Absolutely. It allowed members of different worlds to play a dungeon together.

Is that choice still a good one in 2022? It provides a means to increase the number of players leveling in a particular zone, as an example. Would you rather have a queue for each zone in the Open World during an expansion launch?

Are classes losing their uniqueness? It depends on what you mean by 'unique'. The playstyle for a Black Mage is indeed different from a Red Mage. The difference between Dancer and Bard is high enough that one is chosen for raids more often than the other. Your definition of 'unique' will be different from mine.

So, as for the 2 min burst, raiders pre-warned that it would be a horrid idea, same with the DPS meta pre Shadowbringers. They just didn't listen lmao.

DPs and Burst meta were wholely on them, The Synergystic meta is what everyone wanted to keep. I was there back in Stormblood when they scrapped it.

Edit: Also they choose to BLATANTLY ignore that only high end groups specifically went for brute forcing content with DPS. The game was way more open ended back then and now it's a lot more linear, which, frankly kinda sucks.

Edit 2: ALLLSOO, The 2 Min Burst Meta is such a bad idea that it makes them look like Liars when they say all jobs are viable. The Synergy based Meta THEY get rid of was better for the game and more healthy for players looking to get into savage, tho the Skill Cieling was higher, Lowering the floor actively gave the, a bigger work load. That being said I don't think they shouldn't lower the floor, but they could have done it with fixing how viable all jobs were AND by keeping more play styles of raiding, and not just brute forcing bosses.

[ForteNightshade]

frankly, the only one who can be critically objective is that professional game critic, who does not play the game after assessing it.

"Professional game critics" aren't special. They're just people hired to work for a specific website. They don't have unique skills differing from you or I when it comes to game critique.

In fact, listening to them over your own fanbase is never a good idea. People who have no vested interest in your game aren't going to be able to provide nuanced feedback or even pick up on flaws they aren't outright apparent. Someone just starting out isn't going to realize how little actual healing is required, and thus how the jobs actually spend the overwhelming amount of time pressing one button. Listening to people who don't play the jobs is precisely Bard has been completely gutted. Instead of listening to players who actively played and enjoy Bard. They were more concerned with convincing people who didn't like it to play it. Guess what? They didn't. And Bard has dropped from being the most popular DPS in Stormblood to one of the least since.

"Professional game critics" are about the last people the devs should be listening to. They aren't playing FFXIV more than they have to for a review.

[strawberrycake]

Also you realize most Game Critics are jokes right?

[BaconBits]

Words words words.

Cat detected, deploying strike missile.



Target neutralized.

[DPZ2]

"Professional game critics" aren't special. They're just people hired to work for a specific website. They don't have unique skills differing from you or I when it comes to game critique.

They are, however, the only ones with any 'objectivity'. They cover a number of games and report on them using a set of standard criteria. Professional critics are good at telling you if it is worth your time to invest in playing a game.

They have nothing to say to the game's development team. It was not my intent to advocate they do so. It was decidedly my intent to assign the word 'objective' solely to someone who (a) reviews a lot of games in a professional capacity and (b) uses the same standards in describing the pros and cons of every game they review. (b) is more important than (a), by the way.

People who have no vested interest in your game aren't going to be able to provide nuanced feedback or even pick up on flaws they aren't outright apparent.

"Nuanced feedback" is indeed a better term than "objective criciticism".

Unfortunately, many of the General Discussion threads on this forum are neither nuanced nor feedback. At least in the English forums a number of threads are either complaints with the implied command "make it better" or deliberate taunts and teases to generate a response.

Frankly, you may well have to post your request in the Japanese forums (using the Japanese language) in order for your "nuanced feedback" to be read. It is harder to be misconstrued in that language. Be polite and work for the general good of all.

[Magikazam]

They are, however, the only ones with any 'objectivity'. They cover a number of games and report on them using a set of standard criteria. Professional critics are good at telling you if it is worth your time to invest in playing a game.

They have nothing to say to the game's development team. It was not my intent to advocate they do so. It was decidedly my intent to assign the word 'objective' solely to someone who (a) reviews a lot of games in a professional capacity and (b) uses the same standards in describing the pros and cons of every game they review. (b) is more important than (a), by the way.



"Nuanced feedback" is indeed a better term than "objective criciticism".

Unfortunately, many of the General Discussion threads on this forum are neither nuanced nor feedback. At least in the English forums a number of threads are either complaints with the implied command "make it better" or deliberate taunts and teases to generate a response.

Frankly, you may well have to post your request in the Japanese forums (using the Japanese language) in order for your "nuanced feedback" to be read. It is harder to be misconstrued in that language. Be polite and work for the general good of all.

Not only those critics rarely spend a good ammount of time on a game to judge it in a good way, they also often are paid to set a certain score. Best exemple is the newest pokemon game that has a ''Critic'' score average of 73, while the user score is at a 3.1.

Video game journalism is a joke.

[Shurrikhan]

This is why no one take your argument seriously. Both game removed content, you picture it as a bad thing, but when FFXIV do it, sudently it for the greater good and their sins are no more. 1.0 was bad, not because of it content, it was bad cause of poor optimisation, bad gameplay design and weird choices (jobs having their pre level 30 name, no chocobo mounts...). In fact, people loved the 1.0 story and quests.

Agreed with the main point, but...

1.x had Chocobos.
It also had jobs (the post-level-30 names), starting in patch 1.18 (out of 1.23) -- regardless of whether that was actually for the best (since it essentially marked the end of the customization / build-your-own-job / incentivized multileveling model, after which ARR/HW's Additional Skills would be mere lip-service and the bonus stats mere bloat).
Left at identical graphics levels, 1.x's fps typically fell only some 2% to 10% short of ARR's fps. It bogged badly in player-dense environments, but so did most setups in ARR until having a sufficiently powerful CPU (as the game still gets badly CPU-bottlenecked in player-dense areas). Shadowy environments performed slightly worse (but, heck, they typically looked a little better, too) and certain weather effects like heavy gusts obviously taxed systems further (but we can't compare those because those effects were outright removed; no bushes blowing nor twigs and dust being thrown atop dense volumetric fog), but otherwise the optimization issues were badly (almost suspiciously) overblown by Yoshida's live letter.

Again, though, agreed that it's not as if 1.x's story was what drew so much criticism.
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Asking to delete all jobs and start over in an established MMO isnt a limitation, its utterly absurd.

How would their asking that the devs be more attentive to jobs' actual gameplay and perhaps roll back some of the more offending (devolving, reductive, bloating, etc.) changes "asking to delete all jobs and start over"?

___________________________

Edit 2: ALLLSOO, The 2 Min Burst Meta is such a bad idea that it makes them look like Liars when they say all jobs are viable. The Synergy based Meta THEY get rid of was better for the game and more healthy for players looking to get into savage, tho the Skill Cieling was higher, Lowering the floor actively gave the, a bigger work load. That being said I don't think they shouldn't lower the floor, but they could have done it with fixing how viable all jobs were AND by keeping more play styles of raiding, and not just brute forcing bosses.

The "synergy-based meta" not only had a narrower selection of jobs that fell into its "meta" selection but required equally strict compositions just to play certain jobs competitive. One wasn't able to play a job or even a particular role; they had to play (whatever part of) a set composition just to get full use of their job.

Nor did picking/adhering to any of those set comps have a higher skill ceiling or lower skill floor. It was simply an added hurdle. Though only actual skill ceiling component (something affecting gameplay) was rare, requiring that one's job could settle into multiple compositions and those compositions had different primary raid burst timings (e.g., 90s or 120s) that were nonetheless close enough as to be worth holding CDs for despite potentially losing out on a further cast in that fight (much like MNK's Double-Solar or Double-Lunar openers now).

Was the 2-minute burst window a development team design, or was it a meta that became so popular the developers decided to incorporate it into the game officially? Chicken, meet egg.

This, mostly. It was a maybe a particularly... uninspired/unambitious way to handle the problems of the "synergy-based" meta, but it didn't come out of left field. Rather than creating mutual exclusion between comps based on their timers and portions of physical damage, they just consolidated damage types(' buffs) and the raid buff timers into a single/universal set each.

(Embolden, Brotherhood, like Trick Attack, would just buff... damage. Simple as that. And DRG was no longer dependent on double-ranged for its rDPS nor ranged on DRG for their pDPS, etc. In isolation, I think most would have preferred that direction over what came before. It wasn't a bad idea in itself; it just didn't really seem to take much note of larger contexts.)

[Magikazam]

Agreed with the main point, but...

1.x had Chocobos.
It also had jobs (the post-level-30 names), starting in patch 1.8 (out of 1.23) -- regardless of whether that was actually for the best (since it essentially marked the end of the customization / build-your-own-job / incentivized multileveling model, after which ARR/HW's Additional Skills would be mere lip-service and the bonus stats mere bloat).
Left at identical graphics levels, 1.x's fps typically fell only some 2% to 10% short of ARR's fps. It bogged badly in player-dense environments, but so did most setups in ARR until having a sufficiently powerful CPU (as the game still gets badly CPU-bottlenecked in player-dense areas). Shadowy environments performed slightly worse (but, heck, they typically looked a little better, too) and certain weather effects like heavy gusts obviously taxed systems further (but we can't compare those because those effects were outright removed; no bushes blowing nor twigs and dust being thrown atop dense volumetric fog), but otherwise the optimization issues were badly (almost suspiciously) overblown by Yoshida's live letter.

Again, though, agreed that it's not as if 1.x's story was what drew so much criticism.

And to be fair, 1.0 released 4 year b4 2.0. The averages users had a big leap in CPU performance between those years.

[Shurrikhan]

And to be fair, 1.0 released 4 year b4 2.0. The averages users had a big leap in CPU performance between those years.

Just under 3 years (Sept 2010 - August 2013), but yeah. On the same system, on the same settings, I couldn't notice any real differences to my framerate (~25 to 40 fps, typically, in 1.x, ~25 to maybe... ~45 fps on the same settings in ARR, and only where there was less going on in a given view in ARR compared to any scene I could find in 1.x). Granted, I had done the recommended stuff of playing 1.x in borderless windowed (had to use a separate app for that, but it took all of 2 minutes to DL and run automatically from then on) to avoid its bugged full-screen... I hesitate to say "optimization" (something, something SLI?).

It does seem like a lot of the "improvement" was largely just from either people not taking the 5 minutes to get around the fullscreen bug or buying a better rig for 1.x, not playing it, and then finding ARR not as bad as what they'd heard about 1.x.

[Jojoya]

They are, however, the only ones with any 'objectivity'. They cover a number of games and report on them using a set of standard criteria. Professional critics are good at telling you if it is worth your time to invest in playing a game.

Can you provide a link to that "standard criteria"? Because I'm not coming across any when I do a google search. I am finding a lot of variation on criteria that different review publications ask that their critics follow but they don't fall into a single standard. If it was truly standard, you would think it would be easy to find and that every review publication would point to it.

A professional critic is nothing more than someone who is paid to publish their opinion... and you can never be certain who is actually paying them. It's not uncommon for a professional critic to write a positive review based on their 10 hours of game play just to have the game get trashed by those who actually play the game as a player, not as a critic. It's not that much different from movie reviews. Just because a reviewer finds a movie technically brilliant doesn't mean the general audience is going to find it entertaining.