AT THIS POINT in World of Warcraft

[Striker44]

Its crazy how if you look at the patch number for ffxiv at any given time, the problem the community has with the game is the same as the problems wows community had with the game when it had a similar patch number.

Like my biggest complaints with ffxiv are: class homogonizing, and what op said. And were at like 6.2 or 6.3

What was wows 6.2 / 6.3? Warlords of draenor. The expansion with great leveling, non existent solo only endgame outside raids, and classes so pruned you'd swear it was butchery. They even have garrisons

Except that what actually destroyed WoW was the switch from casual-focused gaming to going all-in on the toxic cesspool that is M+/E-sports, and then finished it off with terrible storytelling in several expansions. By contrast, FFXIV is maintaining its focus on casual players first and foremost, and both ShB and EW are widely praised for the quality of their stories (you have to go outside the little negative echo chamber here to see it, but it's practically the rest of the entire internet).

[Shurrikhan]

Except that what actually destroyed WoW was the switch from casual-focused gaming to going all-in on the toxic cesspool that is M+/E-sports, and then finished it off with terrible storytelling in several expansions. By contrast, FFXIV is maintaining its focus on casual players first and foremost, and both ShB and EW are widely praised for the quality of their stories (you have to go outside the little negative echo chamber here to see it, but it's practically the rest of the entire internet).

Tell me you haven't played casually over those expansions without telling me you haven't played casually over those expansions.

What came out at the same time as M+? Some of the largest degrees of casually-accessible catch-up gear, a granular and infinite means of progression available to all stratums of engagement with content and which with decay in value as gear advantage increased, content additions disproportionately of use to casual players (4 post-cap zones in Legion, World Quests being added to the game), purely for fun side-content (an entire chapter of the main storyline via Suramar, Wretched Training, etc.)...

The breadth and depth of content available to players who enjoyed more combat-gameplay-centric content increased, yes... but so did the content available to those who more enjoyed the open world, puzzles, questing, soft progression, etc., in equal measure.

[Striker44]

Tell me you haven't played casually over those expansions without telling me you haven't played casually over those expansions.

What came out at the same time as M+? Some of the largest degrees of casually-accessible catch-up gear, a granular and infinite means of progression available to all stratums of engagement with content and which with decay in value as gear advantage increased, content additions disproportionately of use to casual players (4 post-cap zones in Legion, World Quests being added to the game), purely for fun side-content (an entire chapter of the main storyline via Suramar, Wretched Training, etc.)...

The breadth and depth of content available to players who enjoyed more combat-gameplay-centric content increased, yes... but so did the content available to those who more enjoyed the open world, puzzles, questing, soft progression, etc., in equal measure.

Well, given how I did in fact play casually over those expansions, the issue might lie with you making the classic blunder of "correlation != causation." M+ is what caused ActiBlizz to go all-in on the eSports approach, which in turn shot toxicity through the roof. Should I say that if you actually played through those expansions, you'd have known that the "catch-up" mechanics were always too late and still too inferior to feasibly allow casual players to jump back in later in an expansion?

[Donoman]

Tell me you haven't played casually over those expansions without telling me you haven't played casually over those expansions.

What came out at the same time as M+? Some of the largest degrees of casually-accessible catch-up gear, a granular and infinite means of progression available to all stratums of engagement with content and which with decay in value as gear advantage increased, content additions disproportionately of use to casual players (4 post-cap zones in Legion, World Quests being added to the game), purely for fun side-content (an entire chapter of the main storyline via Suramar, Wretched Training, etc.)...

The breadth and depth of content available to players who enjoyed more combat-gameplay-centric content increased, yes... but so did the content available to those who more enjoyed the open world, puzzles, questing, soft progression, etc., in equal measure.

In the same expansion, they made profession recipes drop in dungeons, introduced borrowed power in the form of artifact weapons and legendaries, and gutted PvP customization with the introduction of templates. The thing is, if hardcore players are playing a grindy mess, it's even worse for casual players who don't want to grind because there's no way they'll ever catch up, and that's exactly what Legion's release was. Yes, they "fixed" some of the grinds on the last content patch, which is what they have done for years, and that is why so many people quit because they were getting sick of Blizzard's formula of releasing crappy content and then "fixing" it as the expansion progressed. WoW just has the illusion of better and longer-lasting casual content because it's so grindy, but it's not even close to what FFXIV has to offer. The endgame is a different story, however.

[Shurrikhan]

In the same expansion, they...

made profession recipes drop in dungeons

Dungeon recipes also dropped from world quests and rep. It was also far from the first time dungeons dropped recipes; the difference was merely that it affected upgrades rather than even the base item being restricted to the dungeon-dropped recipe, etc.

introduced borrowed power in the form of artifact weapons and legendaries

First off, let's not pretend borrowed power is any different in itself from any other sort of temporary power (which is, of course all of it... from Tier Sets to Blessed Blade of the Windseeker to WotLK's ICC catch-up legendary sword) except in that they tend to offer less RNG-dependent customization by taking some power from gear alone to sub-systems akin to talents. It's not as if you're going to hold onto the previous expansion's tier sets over gear from the next expansion's first raid, or even take the first raid's tier over the second unless the latter is cripplingly bugged.

Artifact Weapons and Legendaries (which were disproportionately dropped by open world content; to the point I got my second just doing Argos before my Maw-spamming friends got their first from M+), as a form of gear inflation, helped equalize ilvls across stratums. Both increased the relative power available to players who did only casual content as the rewards scaled poorly with increased difficulty. The only groups to lose out from Artifact Weapons were those who simply played very few hours.

The thing is, if hardcore players are playing a grindy mess, it's even worse for casual players who don't want to grind because there's no way they'll ever catch up, and that's exactly what Legion's release was.

Let's not confuse a massively diminishing returns to the point of basically soft-capping progress with if someone wants to milk a 0.2% advantage over others for 300x the AP of the same flat bonus (at the time, a hugely larger relative bonus) at earlier times... with a necessarily "grindy mess" for all.

If XIV gave you means to, for infinitely upgrade your relic weapon at 1 item ilvl at a time, but for double the work every item level, would the game instantly become a "grindy mess" just because a few might take the game up on that opportunity well beyond any time-efficient extent? When it takes 5% of the grind to get 80+% of the bonus held by any no-lifer, how is that "even worse for casual players"?

You can dislike that the carrot is being hung there at all (rather than catch-up mechanics being included at fixed item levels and on a fixed release schedule whereby casual players are encouraged and then, in relative terms, discouraged from playing based on the recency of their release), but it at worst that system only hurts the truly obsessive min-maxers; by itself, because AP's resultant power growth diminished sharply with height of said power, far more so than M+ or weekly raid farms even when considering the relative waste faced in nearing BiS, AP was largely a catch-up mechanic. You can call it grindy, because it always gave people something to do, but at its core it was not "unfriendly" to those who didn't care to do the harder parts of combat content; it just gave everyone a lot more available to do.

By all means, there's a ton to criticize, but those reasons don't particularly pan out.

Yes, they "fixed" some of the grinds on the last content patch, which is what they have done for years, and that is why so many people quit because they were getting sick of Blizzard's formula of releasing crappy content and then "fixing" it as the expansion progressed.

Now that is a good point. Trying something new every expansion from Legion until Dragonflight meant that the new things usually started off very flawed. I'm still not sure though that I'd consider that worse than literally just never trying in the first place, though.

WoW just has the illusion of better and longer-lasting casual content because it's so grindy, but it's not even close to what FFXIV has to offer. The endgame is a different story, however.

It doesn't even any attempt any such illusion until endgame, though? Leveling takes only 5-10 hours and gives you complete freedom to go for whatever expansions/storylines one wants until reaching the newest expansions' levels. If anything, it's a plethora of content that pretends to be next to nothing.

And at endgame, even if we ignore M+, WoW has just as high a release rate of boss fights (e.g., combining ARs, NRs, SRs, and Trials), atop typically including whole new zones each major patch, something we haven't seen here since Stormblood with Anemos. Like Eureka, they haven't all been great, but it's difficult to point any particular XIV metric, fairly compare it to WoW, and say "yeah, WoW's just producing way less content," even when ignoring a M20 does indeed feel very different from a normal dungeon.