This game is on a terrible state right now.

[NekoMataMata]

All MMOs have to do that to some degree, it's been nice seeing FF have one again since NAs has been gone since the end of Stormblood.

I mean sure, if you can't be a top of the hierarchy in real life then I guess your best bet is to try and create a hierarchy in a multiplayer game that you can top.

[Reinha]

I mean, was I wrong tho if you're not gonna answer me? It's not like raiding takes 8 years to do, and also you play a MMO bro, don't act like you're not here for the dopamine hits LMAO.

You were wrong, I'm not doing Diadem or achievements right now. If you wanted an answer you would have waited for one, but it's obvious you aren't looking for things to do in game. You're looking for ways to shit on the game and I'm not interested in helping you do that.

[VirusOnline]

...

Players have gotten so good and have seen so many mechanics that the way they make fights harder is now by making fights longer (in effective "thinking" duration) and more punishing, rather than develop mechanics that players will be surprised by or struggle to learn. The latter is much harder for a game this old. There's no reason to expect this to change though, so there's no point of sticking around if Ultimates are the only thing keeping you.

This is an amazing outlook and really summed up how I feel about raiding these days. Though it had the opposite effect on me. I no longer care about that logging website. I'm here to clear and get loot and idc if I die or lose uptime bc someone messed up for xth time.

A bit of a rant on my part, but if I had to look back and really think at my experiences in HW/SB ... it's that the mechanics of the fights worked in a way that made you have to understand why a mechanic was happening and how it worked. It takes more time to grasp because you're learning. SB trials in particular were incredibly fun for me for this reason. Nowadays we have videos and diagrams that tell us where to stand and what to do rather than why we're doing that. And I get why: we have times when there's several mechanics going off all at the same time and if not executed perfectly, it's catastrophic (P6S). There's no room for comprehension and intuition or even creativity on the player's part when mechanics are a sh*tstorm and don't give you room to process in the moment and instead have to rely heavily on memory or a diagram. I mean hell, a majority of times Healer LB3 these days mean nothing because you're getting up to die to the next 1 hit mech that inevitably wipes out the entire party.

It probably won't make sense, but to me something is missing. It's like you know by the sound and sight of a water spout at an edge that there's a KB mech coming up, except how they design mechanics these days they take away the sound and sight and just KB you and call that "hard".

It feels like it all amounts to synthetic difficulty in order to counterbalance the inability to be mechanically creative. Gods, even Eureka orthos everything is literally 1hit KO. Stop this. It's dumb. I'm tired of this inanity. Sometimes simpler is better, SE.

[SassyAssassin]

Oh great this is going to be another one of those threads that will be here for months isnt it? If only people had new complaints, just wait for 6.4 damn

[Kaurhz]

Of course HoH was a copy-paste job. It wasn't good. The contention isn't whether there have always been copy-pastes. It's that the copy-pasting has gotten worse in ShB/EW. This applies to every piece of content. Dungeons have become copy-paste since mid-HW. ARR dungeons were unironically the best dungeons this game has to offer. Simple things like Dzemael's Crystal Veil mechanic adds a lot of variety to ARR dungeons. And in comparison HW and SB dungeons were all pretty stale. So no, no one is saying copy-pasting never existed. It's that it has gotten progressively worse. Same deal for jobs. HW introduced Whistle which you said added a degree of sophistication. It is obviously not some otherworldly mechanic but it's certainly more sophisticated than ShB/EW crafting. So again, the problem is that it has gotten worse instead of being built upon. Not that it was always some pinnacle of gameplay. And finally, with alliance raids, I certainly experienced way, way more wipes in Mhach and Dun Scaith and Ivalice than I ever did in ShB/EW. So even if it's easier for you the fact that things can go wrong makes it far more exciting for me.

Eureka started off poorly. But there is a place for open-world exploratory content. It builds in-game community, something that basically is relegated to Discord now. There just needs to be something more than FATEs.

Whistle was a degree of sophistication, it was a degree of sophistication which they in many cases failed to actually capitalize on or provide a good enough set of recipes to use. It was used for gear leapfrogging, however, unfortunately, the actual uses of this would not really become apparent until later parts of Stormblood, which was still several years after the release, and even this was fairly nuanced in and of itself since you also had the first universal set of scrip gear in the form of Handking.

Further, I wouldn't necessarily view the overall system for crafting as complex just because it included Whistle, if you were to look at the fundamental system of crafting and arguably in general it was, for the most part lacking complexity and engagement. E.g., you weren't manually crafting because the system was complex, you were manually crafting simply because the underlying touches were Hasty Touch, and something that you wanted to eliminate as much as possible by converting excess CP (Be it via Melds or ToT) into Basic Touch or Precise Touch. The actual logic you had composing of macros were no more, nor less sophisticated than the manual crafting that 99% of people were doing.

This was entirely the problem, where there was nuance with crafting there were absolutely only a few niche use cases for it, and unless it's something that could be much more widely adopted was just a wasted system. It was also a horrifically unbalanced system wherein if you learned even the fundamentals - You could pull very inane stunts such as the one below, this is something that never, ever should have been doable, as fun as it was. Contrary to my post in that thread, I do think Whistle would have been more harm than good if introduced with current experts - It's a system that downright needed redesigning more than anything.


Job complexity aside or lack thereof, the player base is largely just better now than it was. To put it into perspective, do you think people would be wiping in droves like they once were had Weeping City and Dun Scaith been introduced now instead of in HW? The only wipes I've experienced have been from some unfortunate sprout getting the meteor markers in Ozma and thus wiping their party. otherwise it goes down just as all the others do.

I'm going to half-agree with you here in that there is a place for exploratory content, but it is a place that should exist natively in the general overworld zones. e.g., Ahm Araeng, Tempest. The fact that players would need to do this content and that it is not experienced naturally in the standard zones is a big problem. It shouldn't exist as side-content it should be naturally embedded in every single zone in the game.

Edit: That I got that tangent off my mind; I think the copy and pasting job has been in varying amounts and to a varying degree. For the most part with many games, you'll inevitably find yourself going down this route. e.g., SE didn't think people liked deep dungeon, so didn't inc. in ShB - People complained, so they reintroduced it. The same would apply to exploratory content sooner than later when they've exhausted their creativity with it. E.g., Logos were just copied and pasted into Essences. BA was just copied and pasted from EM in that function, I would like to say (to some degree), just as CLL and Zadnor were copied and pasted features from BA.

Further replies I'll likely attach to this post or subsequent ones provided the discussion is worthwhile (Probably nearing cap on my post-count for the day)

[Stormpeaks]

Oh great this is going to be another one of those threads that will be here for months isnt it? If only people had new complaints, just wait for 6.4 damn

What a great take you have, why not wait for the next expansion for complaints ? Or maybe the one after ? This reminds me of something very interesting from WoW that ended up making it fail miserably, before actually listening to feedback.

"wait until alpha"
"wait until beta"
"wait until release"
"wait until x.1 it'll be better guys"
"wait until x.2 it'll be better guys"
"wait until x.3 it'll be better guys"
"wait until x.4 it'll be better guys"
"wait until x.5 it'll be better guys"
"wait until next expansion guys it'll be so much better you'll see !"

[SassyAssassin]

What a great take you have, why not wait for the next expansion for complaints ? Or maybe the one after ? This reminds me of something very interesting from WoW that ended up making it fail miserably, before actually listening to feedback.

"wait until alpha"
"wait until beta"
"wait until release"
"wait until x.1 it'll be better guys"
"wait until x.2 it'll be better guys"
"wait until x.3 it'll be better guys"
"wait until x.4 it'll be better guys"
"wait until x.5 it'll be better guys"
"wait until next expansion guys it'll be so much better you'll see !"

You could charge up New York with that negative energy in your every post



Not saying you shouldn’t complain btw, but it’s clear nobody is listening to any complaints when you just shout into the void with zero constructive feedback

[Stormpeaks]

You could charge up New York with that negative energy in your every post



Not saying you shouldn’t complain btw, but it’s clear nobody is listening to any complaints when you just shout into the void with zero constructive feedback

I didnt know me suggesting ideas in regards to dungeon and raids was "zero constructive feedback", but I guess it's funnier if you go "duh negative energy wow guys"

[Incinerator2]

Whistle was a degree of sophistication...

Yes, Whistle would be harmful with current experts because it starts with a MaMa spam and goes on forever, with or without delineations. But why is the solution to just REMOVE the system? Why not balance it and add to it to make it better? The core gameplay of Whistle if you forgo the infinite loop to me is to simultaneously balance multiple stacks - Comfort Zone, Manipulation II, the Whistle stacks, SH stacks, Ingen stacks, Innovation stacks, the IQ stacks, etc. all at once, and the decision on what to do is not always clear at all. This is also subject to RNG. If they expanded on this and made it interact with expert recipe conditions they could've made a far more interesting system. Having even 100 or 200 steps is honestly not a big deal if the rewards were commensurate. The key issue they would need to solve is to make it so that you can't go on infinitely long or that it is not a good idea to do so (for example by scaling rewards inversely with the number of steps taken).

People shit on games like Destiny II for removing content, but FF14 has removed so many promising systems over the years.

do you think people would be wiping in droves like they once were had Weeping City and Dun Scaith been introduced now instead of in HW?

Of course not, but shouldn't the gameplay scale with the average skill level of the playerbase? Even if it's not a 1:1 scaling so that new player can catch up? As of right now I don't even think it's a flatline, I seriously think alliance raid and dungeon difficulty have gone down while average skill level has gone up, which makes literally no sense.

but it is a place that should exist natively in the general overworld zones

Yes, though I doubt they have the tech.

copy and pasting job has been in varying amounts and to a varying degree

You obviously can't prevent every sort of copy-pasting (every innovation is a combination of previous innovations after all), but PotD -> HoH -> Orthos is seriously beyond the pale. The key hope is that they copy-paste less, not that they never make a dungeon again since it'll have trash and bosses like previous dungeons.

[SassyAssassin]

I didnt know me suggesting ideas in regards to dungeon and raids was "zero constructive feedback", but I guess it's funnier if you go "duh negative energy wow guys"

Yeah, I do have more fun than you clearly