So, I was playing some other MMOs that I haven't in awhile...

[Atelier-Bagur]

Something I really value in MMOs is a sense of progression...but in FFXIV, that tends to dry up quickly at endgame outside of exploratory zones like Eureka/Bozja.

Once I finish leveling all of the jobs for a given expansion, I suddenly feel considerably more...lost on what to do if I've already finished the latest savage tier.

True but thats also a plus on some people, including me. Having progression is fine, but not seeing the end of that tunnel is the worst imo. I like having my progression goals met and then go back on focusing on other things.

Ive currently finished up on my arbitrary self impose ilv gearing for all my jobs, including bis crafter/gatherers pentameld. Now I can focus back on my island progression that Ive been slacking. Its really how well you approach things in this game.

[Jojoya]

But why? It is pure optional content. If you do not like it, then don't do it.


Cheers

You're missing the point. Flying cuts down on time wasted for travel in WoW. Unless you're a mage, you have no teleports outside of your single Hearthstone location. Even if you are a mage, the number of locations you can teleport to are far less than the number of zones in the game.

Travel in WOW is designed to waste player time intentionally. Flying offers a way to reduce that travel time but only by investing dozens of hours into doing the content needed to complete Pathfinder for some expansions.

It's going to be a really awkward experience for a player used to the quick travel times we have here if they later try to play WoW because of that time waste.

So you are right in that it is optional content. Don't do it if you don't enjoy it.

Many of us took it one step further. Not only did we choose to stop doing Pathfinder, we chose to stop playing WoW. Why play a game that intentionally forces to waste a lot of the time you have available to play doing absolutely nothing at all just to get to where you want to be?

[SieyaM]

I feel like XIV doesn't have a great deal of personality because of the conveniences in it. I know this will earn me the fury of all but the world just doesn't feel very alive because it is just there to serve the purpose of the story, it has no existence outside of whatever current plot development is taking place there. While teleporting all over without real cost is certainly convenient, it makes the world feel more like a disconnected series of set pieces and not an actual place that we are a part of.

[Renalt]

Video games in general are time waster.

If you enjoy it...it's time well spent if you ask me. I enjoy what I do and when I'm not having fun I put it down for a bit and do something else.

[Jirah]

Theirs a limit to everything and those conveniences start to water down the game. The jobs themselves being sanded down is a debate for “ff14 doesn’t waste my time” and I’ve seen many arguments using this sentence and it’s as contrive as it sounds

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

I feel like XIV doesn't have a great deal of personality because of the conveniences in it. I know this will earn me the fury of all but the world just doesn't feel very alive because it is just there to serve the purpose of the story, it has no existence outside of whatever current plot development is taking place there. While teleporting all over without real cost is certainly convenient, it makes the world feel more like a disconnected series of set pieces and not an actual place that we are a part of.

No.

I like the no travel time penalties. I've played too many games and mmos that waste a massive amount of time on travel.

[Amarande]

Like take flying. I can unlock flying on zones before I even finish them (and they made it easier in older expansions) and being able to just teleport nearly anywhere you want without a timer is amazing.

Definitely this, even with one of Endwalker's aether current quests being cursed up to eleven, LOL.

WoW meanwhile basically just party pooped on the whole thing, they went from "just be max level and pay gold" - a couple weeks' worth of dailies and farming, mind you, but that made it feel like an achievement rather than a box to tick off, and back then gold didn't have any legitimate RL value so what else would you do with it? - to "oh, by the time we let you have flying, you won't have any use of it but on an alt" combined with some of the most alt-hostile expansions we've had. (I don't even know how their actual focus audience, i.e. hardcore raiders stay sane, given this plus the whole "bring the class" crap combined - at the top anyway - with needing enough alts of the anointed class to get lucky enough on RNG on one to be on the dream team ...)

..which confirms my point about raiding...people dont work 9-5 anymore, time is at a premium and people cant..and wont... schedule their lives around a video game. The gaming population is ageing, and with it the priorities and necessities change, they HAVE to. MMO's that learn this have to accept one very basic rule:

Adapt..or perish

The demographics now include a SIGNIFICANT percentage of gamers over 65, both male and female. Times change, and industry will need to accept that, or lose people as their gaming playerbase says "I dont have time for this rubbish anymore"., They are happy to spend money, sure, but on games that meet THEIR expectations and their needs.

EXACTLY. You can hardly afford to schedule after work, because you don't know how much energy you might have left after a bad day.

You can't really reserve energy because then you'll be underperforming at work. We're getting to the point where people are even expected to min max LIFE, now I'm not even so surprised P2W is getting to be such a big thing because it allows players to leverage the thing they're being forced to max anyways, while traditional games expect you to be able to max a side pursuit in life (what work expects you to "min" so you can be "competitive and performant").

You only get a couple nights off of work. Do you want to be a complete hermit away from anyone? At least I can hang and talk with the housemates while I'm in Radz-at-Han bamming out the 50+ intermediate crafts it takes to make the next batch of collectables I'm using to level DoH.

Savage raiding? You need as much focus it might as well be a VR game at this point (and that focus matter is, I'm pretty sure, one of the main reasons why VR has failed to go mainstream as some expected!), especially when you can never be sure anymore if something is just pretty decor or the little cue you're expected to need for that mechanic that doesn't flash AoE until too late to respond (and sometimes this happens on Normal for that matter now, even).

Although, in the middle it can be both the devs and the community at fault. (Perhaps this is another reason the middle is rotting out?)

i will never go back to WOW. sometimes i get struck with nostalgia and think about it but i never will.

Yeah, I think I'm at least pretty near done with WoW, even though I do usually end up going back to it for a time every now and then when I run out of stuff to do in XIV besides endlessly grumping about raid culture, lol.

I'd have to buy another expansion pack, and then at least a month's sub (or use up my gold on a token, but I know in retail I'd certainly need that gold). I'd get to endgame, and then hit the usual point where it isn't fun to proceed - most annoyingly, not because of the actual difficulty (unlike XIV, where the cliff really is a little too steep) but because of all the endless "scoring" garbage.

Apparently, what we used to consider an annoying virtual male organ size comparison party is now to be seen as "it's like your resume, don't you understand?" and an important part of proving yourself and respecting people's time, so if you don't want to get into the measuring contest, you eventually just don't even get to play (and they'll tell US to "adapt or perish" into the bargain).

I'm not sure what can be done about this though, or if this is simply the youth generation finally successfully kicking us off the field, between the ridiculous hatred that what seems most of the young have for anyone over 30 or so these days (I'm barely old enough to be Gen X, and I've been unironically called a Boomer when I bring these topics up in WoW, for Twelve's sake), and the fact that the young increasingly don't grow up with the same spectrum of seriousness in team events that we did (as the traditional Little Leagues are increasingly becoming extinct due to financial asphyxia and replaced with a choice of ultra-casual "everyone gets a trophy" or of joining the super serious travel tournament circuit - which ... is pretty much what you see in MMOs lately too, even XIV).

That's right and there are several reasons for this actually.

• In Stormblood, it seems like they began to notice how the majority of people are just casual players and don't have time for grindy content like Eureka, so it shifted even more to "you can do the new patch in a day" then work on goals. The developers can relate - they don't exactly have too much time because they are busy developing.

Ironically, most of the casual players I've played with adored Eureka, as the NM train provided rewards at a reasonable rate while the downtime in between spawns provided lots of "hangout" time. The later expansions have not really provided much of a substitute (the closest gameplay wise maybe being hunt trains, but the pace is too frantic there to do any hanging out), while the "standard" endgame content divide has only become even more glaring.

Video games in general are time waster.

Yep. This is why I usually laugh at least a little at tales about "people not respecting my time."

I can get some of the sentiment but - maybe it's a generational difference here too? - aren't video games literally something you play to essentially enjoy wasting your free time?

[Avoidy]

I say this without sarcasm or irony: I love comparing FF14 to other MMOs I've played in the past. I could talk an ear off about this.

For example, I used to play Black Desert Online. And that game had a lot of problems. But I will always praise its seamless open world (no "instanced" open world zones, no loading screens), its immersive housing system (your home was in the towns and not in some neighborhood dimension, and people could own multiple homes and the building itself was instanced so that thousands of people could own the same piece of property) its market setup (if someone listed 99 of something and you only wanted 3, you could elect to buy 3 from their stack of 99; prices were also set by the game, so you couldn't just wake up and find your shit undercut by 50% by bots and trolls), the endless amount of things to do with no cap on personal productivity, and its guild system (guild activities increased the amount of money your guild earned, and those profits could then be distributed among your members depending on their personal contribution level and rank, unlike this game where 1 person can hoard an FC's submarine wealth entirely to themselves while the actual FC has nothing going on for its regular members outside of maybe a buff that they don't even get to choose; guilds also provide backup in pvp and there's a very real desire to join a nice guild unlike here where there are 10 reasons to make a solo fc and maybe 1 reason to join a communal fc). Hell, they even had regular content updates and they were all free, lol. I bought the game once, like years ago when it launched, and can just log in right now and play the most up to date version of the game for free. That said, BDO's also... BDO. It has a disgusting cash shop. The glams are almost all cash shop oriented. The RNG progression is nasty. The people running it are lying scumbags. The community's dead. But the things I listed above, were done really well. I wish we'd get similar things in XIV, but it's just impossible and not worth hoping for.

Then there's maplestory, which I played over a decade ago. And that game had a LOT of issues. But one area where I felt like it excelled, were the events. XIV will throw a 10 minute questline with a costume at the end of it and be like "event," but maplestory would have like... doubled EXP events, doubled drop events, just a ton of stuff like that to get people out there and playing the game. Is this capitalizing on the player's "fear of missing out"? I guess. But by that definition, so is a Valentine's event that goes away after 2 weeks. Every event has a certain level of FOMO attached. At least maplestory's events felt ongoing. I did the valentine's event once and never went back because there was no reason to. Imagine if, for a two week period, dungeons had doubled drops. You're farming a glam? Now twice as many glams come from the chests. You want verdant partitions for your house? Now's the time to farm that dungeon for it. etc. etc. It's just an idea, man. Don't gotta reinvent the wheel here; other games are already doing this shit.

[Zaniel]

Ashes is going to be a full loot open pvp game from day one, incl exp penalties along with being looted as well as gear damage. Can anyone spell gank squads?

. I give it six months ( if it ever releases ) before it goes on life support. IF THAT.

It'll be lucky to make it that long. These PVP auteurs need to come to grips with the fact that 99% of people don't like gank in their PVE.

[Caddo]

I wonder if WoW still makes you wait a stupid amount of time into an expansions life to fly..