SE, no effort anywhere lately.

[Jojoya]

Maybe step back a bit before you need your blood pressure medication. lol

When everything except for Relic Weapons take at best a week to finish for a casual player, adding the relic on top of it and saying "Look, the content lasts longer than a week if you squint at just the right angle in just the right time of day" doesn't make the rest any better.

Considering combat itself is now dull, farming Relic is going to be just as dull. We're now missing the whole engaging part of the game, and adding more on top of the pile of content that never gets cycled into roulette doesn't make this at all enjoyable.

But WoW has the same problem. You could take all the content and have it done in a week if there was no timegating. It does have multiple difficulty levels to choose from for some content but players tend to beeline right into the difficulty level appropriate to their skill and ignore the rest.

After the week is done, it's you either want to repeat the content or you don't. WoW has tried to tie players by using borrowed power systems the last few expansions and that has backfired on them. The game stopped being a game and turned into an unpaid job in the eyes of many. Without those borrowed power systems, there really isn't much to keep players repeating the content more than a couple of weeks after release other than the player actually enjoying the content.

From looking at the responses I'm seeing in this thread, there are two problems at work for most of those who are unhappy. They have been playing the same game too long and need to be playing something different, or they're very unhappy with the changes made to job design over the years. The first is something that the player has to solve for themselves. The second is one that is worthy of conversation with the developers in charge of job design, and the start of the conversation should be why were the changes made? What feedback had they been getting back from the general player base that influenced those changes?

Disagree. They address bugs, balance jobs as far as dps, started creating ultimates to give raiders more to do, etc. Are they perfect? No. Do they take feedback and address it? Sure. There's evidence of that throughout the FFXIV 2.0+ project.

If I'm to be honest, I think the core of the problem is the demand for job balance. It's difficult to come up with engaging job designs when you also are also expected to make each of those jobs perform at roughly the same level when in the hands of equally skilled players.

A choice has to be made - do you want interesting RPG job design, or you do want competitive balanced job design? The first requires the player base to stop obsessing over individual job performance and welcome all jobs into their parties regardless of what is the best performing. The second requires the player base to accept that jobs are going to get "dumbed down".