Solutions for Content Drought during between Patches & other solutions for Gameplay

[Catwho]

It comes down to "what is content"?

I still have so much in this game to do, a lot of it centered around long grinds and farming achievements, but I understand that not everyone wants to do pointless grinds for glittery things.

I finally cleared Baldesian Arsenal last night. I just finished some four year old content, woo! Oh wait I'm not finished, since I still haven't actually finished a Eureka weapon yet. Time to throw myself back into that same four year old content and do it again.

I understand that some folks only view current level content as worth doing, but with such an enormous backlog of achievements to work through, I can see why SE doesn't view it as a problem. People who want to keep playing this game in particular will find things to do. People who don't want to do those things can play a different game.

[Striker44]

It comes down to "what is content"?

I still have so much in this game to do, a lot of it centered around long grinds and farming achievements, but I understand that not everyone wants to do pointless grinds for glittery things.

I finally cleared Baldesian Arsenal last night. I just finished some four year old content, woo! Oh wait I'm not finished, since I still haven't actually finished a Eureka weapon yet. Time to throw myself back into that same four year old content and do it again.

I understand that some folks only view current level content as worth doing, but with such an enormous backlog of achievements to work through, I can see why SE doesn't view it as a problem. People who want to keep playing this game in particular will find things to do. People who don't want to do those things can play a different game.

This is my experience. I enjoy the content "droughts" because for me it just means time to go back and do the plethora of things I want to do but just never found the time to yet. I play only a few hours a week usually between life/career commitments and other games, so I end up taking my sweet time going through new content. I frankly don't need more of it. I just finished the latest MSQ yesterday, and I still haven't completed the new Alliance Raid questline (did the raid, but not the post-raid quests). I haven't even touched IS yet, nor Criterion dungeons, and still have a few paths left on the Variant dungeon. And that's just EW. Getting my last ARR Relic Weapon (Ninja), Sightseeing Log, crafting classes, the list goes on.

They also can't get a lot of things right. Criterion is not mythic+ and it's almost dead content, while Mythic+ was a big success. Island Sanctuary is dead 2 min a day content. Expert crafts this patch flopped. The team just isn't as good at making games as they were.

Frankly, I'm still having a ton of fun, and for me, the team is at their best right on par with ShB. M+ wasn't a "big success"...it gives the illusion of one, but it's probably the single biggest reason WoW destroyed most of its playerbase. It's what altered the game from a casual and family-friendly MMO to the toxic cesspool it's become. I'm beyond glad that Criterion didn't try to be M+.

[Jeeqbit]

The team is doing very well at making the content they have been asked to. It's not like they aren't capable of making it like Stormblood.

They just have decided in meetings not to do that because certain content like Eureka was met with complaints from casual players who wanted content to be more casual, and there were large gaps in player performance (most obviously with some tanks using tank stance always and other tanks using dps stance always).

So we moved from Eureka to Bozja that was doable in a day, with optional grinds if you wanted to stay longer such as field notes, mounts and cluster farms and this is the sort of model we got for content now.

I'm beyond glad that Criterion didn't try to be M+.

It was deliberately put out of sight of people who aren't looking for it as well. It has its own user interface far away from the Duty Finder and it's behind its own level 90 sidequest that some people might not even ever unlock. It allows people who don't want to live in a world of challenging content to completely avoid it as if it doesn't exist.