SE, no effort anywhere lately.

[Zsavooz]

Yes. In WoW right now.

WoW is horribly buggy, unbalanced, messy lore and endgame has issues, but at least other games know what fun is. Pet battles, Toys, smooth jobs with utility and each with their own iconic abilities, proper achievements and collection tabs, ridiculous amounts of soloable old content with rewards and so on.

FF14 is so sterile, watered down and it feels like all the activities have to be Developer Approved and are restricted by the need to be morally correct. Can't make it rewarding, people will feel forced to do it. Got to make the dailies really short. Got to be accessible! Can't stress the healers and tanks, bland jobs and faceroll dungeons! Can't trust players with addons! Can't have crafting take effort, wanting gil is evil, hand it all over on a plate! Even the story is dull and just there to move the plot forward with a polite overstated "joke scene" thrown in here and there, instead of banter, conflict and real character interaction and development.
I never thought I'd play WoW again, but it has been so damn refreshing to load up a game and find yes, I get gold from everything, I can have my addons, there's gear all over the place, a million pet battles and toys, my achievements are displayed in guild chat and I receive and give out a "grats!" for good ones, side quests are actually worthwhile, everything gives exp, I can buy cash shop items with gold, there's tons of QoL, transmog tabs, so much bag space, crafting from my bank, season events I can spend proper time on ...and so on, without Dad (Yoshida) leaning over my shoulder and saying "oh no, I don't think that's good for you, I'm confiscating that. That'll be 12.99 a month please".

I'm playing other games like they told me to. Sub expires just before 6.4. I am not coming back for this patch or any after it.

I could not have said it better. Been meaning to get the new WoW Xpac. Haven't played in years but I do need a change from this rinse, wash, repeat of a game.

[CStrife912]

I could not have said it better. Been meaning to get the new WoW Xpac. Haven't played in years but I do need a change from this rinse, wash, repeat of a game.

The thing is this is just one ok expansion for the game after basically 3 back to back bad ones with bad content between expansions that pooped on player commitment and made it tedious as all hell. Its good to take time away and play other stuff..people treat this as a main game but there is no need. Hopefully WoW does change itself cause it needs it more than FF14 does...also its been out longer then FF14 to have a lot of those QoL. I think until 7.0 comes out its incredibly hard to find what concrete direction the game is going in..this is the chance to see it because they're not bogged down by the story of before they can go in a new direction with everything so its 7.0 il be closely keeping an eye on.

[R041]

I'd rather have a broken fun game where everything is imbalanced but you can still enjoy the class and combat doing non-bleeding edge content, than one where whole rotations across all classes are exactly the same and there's no innovation.

I do not enjoy the idea that SE min-maxes everything for us (It wasn't always like this!). From the way we play, the way we do dungeons, the way we build classes, the way we spend our time. I feel like I'm roleplaying a Japanese Salaryman playing this damn game sometimes, because that's exactly how it's been designed. Everything calculated by time instead of individual thought and effort. The fact that they can even calculate how long it'll take us to do content is not a good thing, it means every action and decision has successfully been pre-designed.

They've boiled everything down, they forgot what fun was actually like. Do they even play this game anymore, or do they just think of us like employees?

Are we the players, now being managed like he's managed his team's time? We know Yoshi's a life min-maxer. The game itself has been infected it looks like, and everything is predictable.

[Vahlnir]

Yes. In WoW right now.

WoW is horribly buggy, unbalanced, messy lore and endgame has issues, but at least other games know what fun is. Pet battles, Toys, smooth jobs with utility and each with their own iconic abilities, proper achievements and collection tabs, ridiculous amounts of soloable old content with rewards and so on.

FF14 is so sterile, watered down and it feels like all the activities have to be Developer Approved and are restricted by the need to be morally correct. Can't make it rewarding, people will feel forced to do it. Got to make the dailies really short. Got to be accessible! Can't stress the healers and tanks, bland jobs and faceroll dungeons! Can't trust players with addons! Can't have crafting take effort, wanting gil is evil, hand it all over on a plate! Even the story is dull and just there to move the plot forward with a polite overstated "joke scene" thrown in here and there, instead of banter, conflict and real character interaction and development.
I never thought I'd play WoW again, but it has been so damn refreshing to load up a game and find yes, I get gold from everything, I can have my addons, there's gear all over the place, a million pet battles and toys, my achievements are displayed in guild chat and I receive and give out a "grats!" for good ones, side quests are actually worthwhile, everything gives exp, I can buy cash shop items with gold, there's tons of QoL, transmog tabs, so much bag space, crafting from my bank, season events I can spend proper time on ...and so on, without Dad (Yoshida) leaning over my shoulder and saying "oh no, I don't think that's good for you, I'm confiscating that. That'll be 12.99 a month please".

I'm playing other games like they told me to. Sub expires just before 6.4. I am not coming back for this patch or any after it.

This is pretty much where I'm at, too. I've been playing WoW again for about a month now after taking an extended break, and it really has felt like a breath of fresh air. Dragonflight isn't perfect, but it feels like the devs just...get it, for lack of a better term. For now, at least. I know Blizzard's track record, and they can change course at the drop of a hat. Until then, I'm actually having fun progressing on multiple fronts while throwing some old content into the mix. I haven't outright quit FF XIV and I likely never will, but I haven't actually been playing for a couple of months now. SE as a whole just disgusts me at the moment. If FF 16 flops, I may end up letting my FF XIV sub lapse and my house go, and that is not a decision I may make lightly. I suppose I'm just sticking around at the moment hoping that things will get better.

[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.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

This is pretty much where I'm at, too. I've been playing WoW again for about a month now after taking an extended break, and it really has felt like a breath of fresh air. Dragonflight isn't perfect, but it feels like the devs just...get it, for lack of a better term. For now, at least. I know Blizzard's track record, and they can change course at the drop of a hat. Until then, I'm actually having fun progressing on multiple fronts while throwing some old content into the mix. I haven't outright quit FF XIV and I likely never will, but I haven't actually been playing for a couple of months now. SE as a whole just disgusts me at the moment. If FF 16 flops, I may end up letting my FF XIV sub lapse and my house go, and that is not a decision I may make lightly. I suppose I'm just sticking around at the moment hoping that things will get better.

But won't any game feel like a breath of fresh air of you've been dedicated to one single game for years?

[Vahlnir]

But won't any game feel like a breath of fresh air of you've been dedicated to one single game for years?

I'm not dedicated to one single game, so this doesn't apply to me. Do I invest more time in some games than others? Sure, but I'm not tied to just one at a time. I follow the fun wherever it leads. I have also played FF XIV and WoW simultaneously, and this has happened pretty regularly. WoW is just easier to take a break from if I need it. FF XIV holds my sub hostage just because I have a house, so even when I want or need a break, I still have to log in every so often to keep what I earned.

[R041]

But won't any game feel like a breath of fresh air of you've been dedicated to one single game for years?

It's more like having the realization that MMOs can actually have fun gameplay in 2023. When we've basically been conditioned to believe this is what an MMO is supposed to feel like and AFKing 95% of the time is just a part of the experience.

So yeah, a lot of us play a lot of different games. And even when we DO find another engaging MMO, it doesn't mean we need to be playing that 24/7. But it's mostly about just finding engaging content within the MMO space for once that doesn't entirely rely on you as a player to make the fun by socializing or pressing 1, 2, 3 until exp go up. Some MMO players find that engagement by being RP creepers in Limsa, others try to actually play the game part of the game.