SE, no effort anywhere lately.

[caffe_macchiato]

people treat this as a main game but there is no need.

It used to be seen as a competitor to WoW for our money and time. Many people switched over because they can't justify two subs for two very similar games. Nowadays that's no longer the case, as any depth has been ripped out in exchange for cutscenes and short-lived gimmicks. People defend this by saying that FFXIV isn't supposed to be a "main game" and that unsubbing for months at a time is the intended experience. Well, what happens to our friends and communities? What happens to the life of the game? What about the happiness of the actual player as opposed to Square Enix's quarterly returns? Is this why so many people use illicit third-party cosmetic mods, because it's the only way to bring social life into this game?

Hopefully socialization (in an official capacity) will return to the MMO genre in our lifetimes, but I get the feeling that Yoshida won't help.

[CStrife912]

It used to be seen as a competitor to WoW for our money and time. Many people switched over because they can't justify two subs for two very similar games. Nowadays that's no longer the case, as any depth has been ripped out in exchange for cutscenes and short-lived gimmicks. People defend this by saying that FFXIV isn't supposed to be a "main game" and that unsubbing for months at a time is the intended experience. Well, what happens to our friends and communities? What happens to the life of the game? What about the happiness of the actual player as opposed to Square Enix's quarterly returns? Is this why so many people use illicit third-party cosmetic mods, because it's the only way to bring social life into this game?

Hopefully socialization (in an official capacity) will return to the MMO genre in our lifetimes, but I get the feeling that Yoshida won't help.

Well 14 never needed to compete with WoW it was always just doing its own thing and WoW just slowly ate itself alive and now people are flocking back because they clamoured together a semi ok experience and could flip the switch once again. There has always been cutscenes and short lived gimmicks from HW to now...I mean heck how many times have we had the 40+ minute cutscene leading into HW...we haven't had anything close to that. I am not one to say oh he said take breaks no if you want to invest your time into the game then you should be able to. But there is an unhealthy level of commitment some people have, I suppose it is no different to people only playing FIFA or COD. Friends and communities will stick with a game regardless of gaps, you have a rough window of content drops and how they work. Communities work round that so do my mates, when 14 has a main patch we all focus in on it and will be again on Tuesday with 6.35 but in the last 2 weeks I have managed to play cod, yakuza, forgotten city etc etc and I haven't had to feel like well damn I didn't do XYZ in FF14 now I'm behind.

I do hope more socialising happens in the future but its still too early to tell on direction yet I feel. I am just trying to be reasonable and see both sides then some here who are clearly jaded the game hasn't hit their vision of the product.

[R041]

It used to be seen as a competitor to WoW for our money and time. Many people switched over because they can't justify two subs for two very similar games. Nowadays that's no longer the case, as any depth has been ripped out in exchange for cutscenes and short-lived gimmicks. People defend this by saying that FFXIV isn't supposed to be a "main game" and that unsubbing for months at a time is the intended experience. Well, what happens to our friends and communities? What happens to the life of the game? What about the happiness of the actual player as opposed to Square Enix's quarterly returns? Is this why so many people use illicit third-party cosmetic mods, because it's the only way to bring social life into this game?

Hopefully socialization (in an official capacity) will return to the MMO genre in our lifetimes, but I get the feeling that Yoshida won't help.

It's the exact reason there's been a rise in club activity. How else do you expect players to keep a form of community, when there's no actual engaging gameplay? They all just resort to RP/ERP/AFK. We're just turning into Second Life.

Most people just login for their Roulettes, so that means the players that ARE engaged with the gameplay and don't just AFK can typically only actually play the game for about 1 hour a day re-doing ARR content for exp. Then you have to just hope your FC friends roulettes match yours, or you may just never play together. Nobody's out here spamming dungeons, because the dungeons are so horrible and limited you just roulette once a day instead. Imagine if the average gameplay was even half as engaging or rewarding as WoW's dungeons and open world, we'd actually have people outside of Limsa once in awhile.

People don't understand how absolutely difficult it is to retain an FC through the content lulls that is 90% of this game. Most of the FCs just mass spam invites every patch cycle and expac, then the FC Lead has to keep their sub running all year so they don't lose the FC and house. It's kinda sad.

FFXIV Content Lulls and WoW Content Lulls aren't even comparable. Because the actual gameplay engagement from XIV is only a few DAYS every expac and major patch. I have 0 want to go do some side-quest that's all text, a ride across the map, more text, rewarded with 100gil and 1 Materia. Who designs this shit? Devs need to go play some other games, when was the last time they actually looked at the engagement data? Why do they think time is well spent on a world nobody runs around in, or side-quests nobody reads?

But hey, it's such a great Single Player game now, every new player can just login and read text for 400 hours without any actual engagement from the community or the MMO side of the game. We did such a great job of turning this MMO into the mainline single-player game Yoshi wanted. They've set this game up for maintenance mode pretty well, and that's a fact.