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

[ForteNightshade]

The drought is purely the result of one's own choices and one can make the choice to adjust their time rather than expecting other people to move mountains to accommodate them.

This isn't even a disingenuous take. It's flat out wrong—to a comical degree even.

If you keep up to date on content, you will run out long before the next patch unless you barely play the game. Case in point, 6.3's entire content drop can be easily consumed over a weekend even playing at a slower pace. There is virtually nothing with any form of longevity save farming Rubicante 50 times. If it happens to take you nearly six weeks to finish the MSQ or Alliance storyline that isn't because there's oh so much content but because you've simply not been playing the game. Neither one of these things is more than a few hours. While I appreciate some people can only manage to play a few hours a week, content shouldn't be balanced around that sort of schedule for the precise same reason you shouldn't cater towards people with 10+ hours a day of free time. It's two different extremes when most people live in the middle where they do have time to play far more reasonable hours yet are still running out of things to do—particularly if they are long time players who have been caught up for years.

It shouldn't take what's looking to be two months for any form of content with longevity to release outside of Ultimate.

[IkaraGreydancer]

People want grinds but I'd be willing to bet that there would be issues if devs shifted focus to them. The fix isn't even just long grinds, it's long grinds that folks would actually like doing. That would need to include padded steps n road locks to keep you from the goal. Maybe even more rng to drop or obtain whatever it is that's needed. Outside of Eureka Style content I don't see it differing much from what's described above, and even Eurekas grind was criticized for being to much. So idk

[caffe_macchiato]

You remind me of the conversations in the WoW forums going all the way back to Cataclysm (and I know others say the conversations predate Cataclysm but I wasn't paying much attention prior). "WoW is doomed, WoW is dying. If the developers don't make this change I want then it will be dead and it will be the fault of other players who didn't want the same change."

And they were right.



So much hate, anger and toxicity in the MMO community comes directly from people who's favorite game came crashing down and left them feeling neglected by the developers. People lost their favorite hobby and their entire social circle because everyone else started deserting the game. Around 91% of the player base left. Do you really want that to happen to us too? Do you not understand how decimating that is for a game's community?

it's still got a healthy population and profitable as a MMO

[IkaraGreydancer]

And they were right.



So much hate, anger and toxicity in the MMO community comes directly from people who's favorite game came crashing down and left them feeling neglected by the developers. People lost their favorite hobby and their entire social circle because everyone else started deserting the game. Around 91% of the player base left. Do you really want that to happen to us too? Do you not understand how decimating that is for a game's community?

I mean can you show me a xiv graph? And (based on what I've seen) the masses don't have most of the issues people here present. I've yet to see anyone truly claim something like WoW is dead. That talk stopped months ago

[Atelier-Bagur]

And they were right.



So much hate, anger and toxicity in the MMO community comes directly from people who's favorite game came crashing down and left them feeling neglected by the developers. People lost their favorite hobby and their entire social circle because everyone else started deserting the game. Around 91% of the player base left. Do you really want that to happen to us too? Do you not understand how decimating that is for a game's community?

While I would like to agree with you. We dont have any grounded data to make these assumptions since I dont think SE releases those numbers.

[hagare]

And they were right.



So much hate, anger and toxicity in the MMO community comes directly from people who's favorite game came crashing down and left them feeling neglected by the developers. People lost their favorite hobby and their entire social circle because everyone else started deserting the game. Around 91% of the player base left. Do you really want that to happen to us too? Do you not understand how decimating that is for a game's community?

citation needed

[Striker44]

And they were right.



So much hate, anger and toxicity in the MMO community comes directly from people who's favorite game came crashing down and left them feeling neglected by the developers. People lost their favorite hobby and their entire social circle because everyone else started deserting the game. Around 91% of the player base left. Do you really want that to happen to us too? Do you not understand how decimating that is for a game's community?

The issue is that WoW crashed down precisely because it did change, from being a casual-friendly, family-friendly MMO to the toxic cesspool that is M+ and end-game raiding as the primary focuses. FFXIV right now has been at a steady upward trajectory, with EW being its largest playerbase yet and receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews. The disastrous approach would be to completely change their focus to appease the minuscule minority that is the negative echo chamber on these forums.

[Rolder50]

The issue is that WoW crashed down precisely because it did change, from being a casual-friendly, family-friendly MMO to the toxic cesspool that is M+ and end-game raiding as the primary focuses. FFXIV right now has been at a steady upward trajectory, with EW being its largest playerbase yet and receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews. The disastrous approach would be to completely change their focus to appease the minuscule minority that is the negative echo chamber on these forums.

Wrong. If you look at the graphs for WoW's sub numbers before they stopped releasing them, you can see they climbed nonstop up until the end of WotLK. Then, it started to dip at the end of Cataclysm. The end of WotLK is when they added the Random Dungeon Finder, and the end of Cataclysm is when they released LFR and overall started trying to make things more casual friendly and whatnot.

Note that one of the best received expansions after WotLK was Legion, which is the expansion they added M+.

[Midareyukki]

I think the only way to verify any of this for FFXIV is by having a census with active accounts and plot out all the numbers since EW. But not even XIVCensus gives out such information; they're not affiliated with SE, so they don't have access to how long people have been subbed and how their resub patterns are. That's information that's exclusive to SE.

Any other form of data would have an incredibly large margin of error, making it unfit to calculate.

Google trends is a neat idea, but that's just trends. Stuff dies down over time naturally unless massive events happen or it's sustained by the fanbase. It doesn't necessarily translate to in-game numbers for sure, nor how much SE is profiting monthly to really know if any drop is even affecting them. So "XIV is dying", we don't really know if it is past what is obvious.

[IkaraGreydancer]

Wrong. If you look at the graphs for WoW's sub numbers before they stopped releasing them, you can see they climbed nonstop up until the end of WotLK. Then, it started to dip at the end of Cataclysm. The end of WotLK is when they added the Random Dungeon Finder, and the end of Cataclysm is when they released LFR and overall started trying to make things more casual friendly and whatnot.

Note that one of the best received expansions after WotLK was Legion, which is the expansion they added M+.

M+ must not have done much to keep people sated n staying then