This game is on a terrible state right now.

[Kaurhz]

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.

It would be difficult to balance if my full recollection is to be there. On one hand of the coin, you could limit the usage per craft. But in doing this you would then make it difficult to balance around what changes you would need to make with experts, e.g., turning it into net positive buffs to net loss, e.g., instead of Pliant decreasing CP cost, you would increase the CP cost of the subsequent action. Honestly, with enough time on the system, it just bleeds together where you do steps according to a pretty rigid ruleset to dictate how you handle the crafts. After 2-3 attempts it's not immediately obvious, but if you were doing it on the scale of Resplendent Tools or Hand of Creation then it does very quickly come together.

I suppose it would add a degree of self-satisfaction to learning it, but when you got to a certain point the end result was guaranteed regardless of how much you necked your stats, which does also remove some of that thrill with doing experts in the first place. I would be curious to see how it would hold in actuality, but I still think it would largely trivialize the recipes. Trained Hand under innovation and ingenuity back when that was a thing was absolutely busted.

I can't speak much on it, but I would say given the choice I would have stuck with the removal, but delayed it until after the first release of Experts, and then removed it for either redesigning or reworking to a system designed to work exclusively with experts, e.g., give expert recipes their own little toolkit. Rather than just attempt-limit the recipes. Even with infinite attempts, someone skilled enough could do them far more efficiently than you might do with traditional experts.

I have already gone on to say that systems ideally shouldn't be removed until they have been tested. But then I'm also the same person that thinks Guildhests have so much potential.

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.

Uh, yes and no. They should still encourage people to improve, but that is always difficult as forcing people into those situations does not always yield the best result e.g., you cannot force someone to learn if they do not want to – You can only encourage it.

I’m going to bring a little bit of personal experience here now, but when I’ve had difficulty, e.g., Sophia NM, or Shinryu NM on patch, my experiences with them were, someone got it for roulette, literally sat down in the instance and proceeded to hold everyone else hostage, requesting that they were kicked to avoid the penalty. This occurred after 2 wipes. Granted, I think there's a miniscule number of people that would go this far. However, I would say there’s a good number of people in the community that whilst they may want something engaging don’t necessarily want the territory that comes with it e.g., people not being good enough for said content and more wipes, which is an inevitability when you introduce harder or more sophisticated content to the general community.

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.

Honestly, this is precisely the reason why beyond a certain point, areas of content should be dropped for the time being, e.g., exploratory zone/relic content. Again, I personally don’t think they’re ready to do the innovation on it as such should try something new. Until they can. If I were being frank, I wouldn’t want to have seen another Deep Dungeon until they could transform it into actual dungeoneering.

Preventing it is impossible, but in the case of a deep dungeon they literally ran into it unmitigated, and the community practically begged for it. I suppose what I’m trying to convey here is… The question shouldn’t be “Why haven’t we got xyz this expansion” (e.g., Deep Dungeons), because this is precisely why we got Orthos.