FFXVI has now officially proven to have taken over Yoshi's time

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

I might have used the incorrect term, but "Maintenance mode" is the best thing my mind came up with to describe the state of XIV. It's structured, and there are no decision-making processes. One of the examples of the structure I'm talking about is the boss fights, with the ever-present mechanics of "Tank buster" "Raidwide Damage" "Stack marker" and "Death-Edges around the arena", and then whichever mechanic they decide to recycle for this fight (Like Zodiark Ex triangle and square signs in Rubicante ex, or Hades arrows in Golbez fight)

The devs have created a recipe for new content, and they're following it strictly without attempting to change it. Just have a look at the job design, job identity has been sacrificed in order to make jobs of the same role homogenous. No longer do jobs feel unique in the same way boss fights don't, as each role has its jobs sharing the same kit one way or another (Tanks having the buster cooldown that can grant healing is an example)

When I said: "The game has entered an unofficial maintenance mode" then what I'm saying is: "There's no longer something refreshing to see or expect."

You 100% are using the wrong word here. Saying FFXIV is in Maintenance mode, is False as new content is still being Produced. To say the game is in Maintenance Mode suggests No New Content is being made / The game will see no further development or additional Add-Ons. Knowing we still have 6.45 to come out with the other half of this 6.4 Patch, knowing we still have 6.5 to come out with content such as the Finale of Myths of the Realm and MSQ and etc, immediately Debunks the Word "Maintenance Mode" when it comes to FFXIV.

Now, after reading your post I can see what you are trying to say, but you can't just weave in a Personal definition or Interpretation to fit your mindset, words have definitions, and we need to stop trying to change them for no reason. What you are looking for, is that FFXIV has become "Safe" or even "Stale" alot of the things feel the same, you'd like to see new Mechanics. Which is 100% Valid. But saying The game is in a "Maintenance Mode" or even a "Unofficial Maintenance Mode" is just silly and wrong.

[Ivtrix]

Pretty much. It's easy to pretend criticism here (or e.g. on the 14 discussion subreddit) don't exist or just dismiss it as all being Titanmen muckraking, but I'm afraid that's divorced from reality and it does the game 0 favours.

I know, I know, billions love EW, muh metacritic etc.

It’s why the whole GCBTW meme is so prevalent. There’s a lot of people who will vigorously defend yoshi p like he is some sort of god and defend this game like it’s infallible, it’s insufferable to read people bend over backwards to try and defend bad decisions made by yoship/CBU3/SE

Holding them accountable is really what got us ARR and it’s what the playerbase needs to continue to do.

I’ve said it before but a lot of the players who are critical of this game are also very passionate about it, we really enjoy this game and want to see improvements made so that this game can be the best it possibly can.

Pretending the room isn’t partially on fire when it is undos all of it.

[Nav_Fae]

It’s why the whole GCBTW meme is so prevalent. There’s a lot of people who will vigorously defend yoshi p like he is some sort of god and defend this game like it’s infallible, it’s insufferable to read people bend over backwards to try and defend bad decisions made by yoship/CBU3/SE

Holding them accountable is really what got us ARR and it’s what the playerbase needs to continue to do.

I’ve said it before but a lot of the players who are critical of this game are also very passionate about it, we really enjoy this game and want to see improvements made so that this game can be the best it possibly can.

Pretending the room isn’t partially on fire when it is undos all of it.

I agree with what you say. I think for me is that there are some folks that act like the game is constantly on fire even when they get what they want. As if the fire can never be extinguished under any circumstances. They could give us everything we want in 7.0 and there would still be a group of people who are unsatisfied.

[Ivtrix]

I agree with what you say. I think for me is that there are some folks that act like the game is constantly on fire even when they get what they want. As if the fire can never be extinguished under any circumstances. They could give us everything we want in 7.0 and there would still be a group of people who are unsatisfied.

This is true! I can’t and won’t disagree with your assessment. There will always be doomposters and people venting who will never have anything nice to say. Goes back to human psychology where negative memories always seem to be far more prevalent in our heads.

Combine that with people generally playing and enjoying content they enjoy and not posting about it on the forums and it’s easy to get washed up in doomer mentality. After all, if you’re enjoying it and it isn’t broke, why fix it? It’s a tough balancing act sometimes being critical vs being doomer.

[IkaraGreydancer]

It’s why the whole GCBTW meme is so prevalent. There’s a lot of people who will vigorously defend yoshi p like he is some sort of god and defend this game like it’s infallible, it’s insufferable to read people bend over backwards to try and defend bad decisions made by yoship/CBU3/SE

Holding them accountable is really what got us ARR and it’s what the playerbase needs to continue to do.

I’ve said it before but a lot of the players who are critical of this game are also very passionate about it, we really enjoy this game and want to see improvements made so that this game can be the best it possibly can.

Pretending the room isn’t partially on fire when it is undos all of it.

Thing about that is who can really say some of this stuff is actually an issue in all fairness? Being passionate doesn't make you automatically correct and that goes for both ends of the spectrum. In fact that could lead you to being blind to things (Also ofc on both sides). It's a complicated situation.

Some folks don't like when anyone defends the game at all. Judging from what's gone down here over the years you're treated worse here if you defend the game and have more support if you criticize it at every turn. Yes holding them accountable is what got us ARR but XIV is nowhere near the state of 1.0. Folks would have you believe the game is dead/dying but nothing outside of opinions supports this.

Like I said before it's a tricky situation. Many folks aren't for the game to be the best it can be, many want the game to be the best it can for them. Other folks be damned (again on both sides). So there will always be a constant battle in this space due to this. All I can says is you'd think XIV was the worst MMO on the market if you came here for the first time. Its such a stark contrast to how the community is basically anywhere else and myself n many others notice this. I personally believe sadly many folks here wouldn't be happy if they did get what they want/the playerbase would see a drop if some of what they want was implemented.

Long read sorry lol

[Minarisweet]

Honestly this isnt the worst of his lies and I've learned to take everything he says with a grain of salt at this point... I still think everything you mentioned should be fixed tho I love this game and its hard sometimes to want to play it in its state.

[Zebraoracle]

Thing about that is who can really say some of this stuff is actually an issue in all fairness? Being passionate doesn't make you automatically correct and that goes for both ends of the spectrum. In fact that could lead you to being blind to things (Also ofc on both sides). It's a complicated situation.

Some folks don't like when anyone defends the game at all. Judging from what's gone down here over the years you're treated worse here if you defend the game and have more support if you criticize it at every turn. Yes holding them accountable is what got us ARR but XIV is nowhere near the state of 1.0. Folks would have you believe the game is dead/dying but nothing outside of opinions supports this.

Like I said before it's a tricky situation. Many folks aren't for the game to be the best it can be, many want the game to be the best it can for them. Other folks be damned (again on both sides). So there will always be a constant battle in this space due to this. All I can says is you'd think XIV was the worst MMO on the market if you came here for the first time. Its such a stark contrast to how the community is basically anywhere else and myself n many others notice this. I personally believe sadly many folks here wouldn't be happy if they did get what they want/the playerbase would see a drop if some of what they want was implemented.

Long read sorry lol

Healers are a problem
Viera are a problem
Hrothgar are a problem
Au ra and miqo'te are slowly becoming problems
Housing is a problem
The 2 minute buff window is a problem

There are a lot of glaring issues with the game and anyone saying "there aren't problems" or "there are no problems for me" or "muh majority" or any other inane line does not have this game's best interest in mind. It's not that complicated. Sure, you can bring up "well some people never have anything nice to say" but that doesn't automatically make the issues go away. I'm honestly tired of this whole "there are too many white knights defending the game/there are too many doomers complaining about the game" dialogue. People need to get over it. Let it go, it's always going to happen, if it bothers you (you in general, not you specifically) then ignore them. Fussing and fighting with them's not going to change anything or do anyone any good.

[Ivtrix]

This is a great point. You hear all the time how the 2min meta is bad but nobody goes into great detail about why it is bad and why the previous systems were better. When people don't give explanations, it just feels like the hip thing to do is to be against the 2min meta cause all the popular people dislike it. I have heard about the explanations on the stat variances like with crit but then I have to ask myself, is it the 2min meta that's the problem or Crit/DH? My experience from previous expansions is that while a 2min meta did not exist, most statics artificially created a meta by holding buffs and stacking them together when possible. Like I agree the 2min meta doesn't feel great, but it's always been one of those things where I feel like the community doesn't explain the why very well nor offer a solid solution to the problem. Another thing the community often fails to bring up with the 2min meta is why we should care. We can discuss why the 2min meta is bad, but we also need to discuss why someone should care about it.

Second bit is hard to sell a lot of people on. My personal opinion is that balance doesnt mean anything until in the presence of an enrage timer. Most players simply wont touch content above and including ex trials. In content where your enrage timer is the instance timer, your dps is nearly irrelevant. Most of the discussion is from play on a higher level which frankly, most casual players dont care too too much about. Optimization of your job for a casual player is optional content.

But for higher level players, which dps balance is based around, it matters a hell of a lot more. So while I sit there and bemoan how SMN is a disaster, the issues arnt relevant to a majority of the playerbase. But for those who it does effect, it matters a damn lot.

[Kosachi]

snip

Ill take a crack at it then. The problem with the 2min meta is threefold.

A) While trying to make the game easier for people by having everyone buff at the same time, you're inadvertently making it harder by requiring pretty close to perfect play during those burst windows. With how rigid and linear rotations are in the game right now, you have literally zero chance of realigning yourself with the universal buff window without dropping a full usage of said raidbuff which feels like poo and is overall a bigger loss. So Option 1: Be late compared to everyone and feel bad or Option 2: Lose a usage and feel bad. Let's now talk about deaths. In a game that allegedly targets the casual players, they sure do penalize you to hell and back for dying. No only do you lose all your resources, buffs etc, your buff alignment is now FUBAR for the rest of the fight and there's not much you can do about that; which leads me to point number 2.

B) Back when we had staggered buff timers, there was ample opportunity for recovery in the event you screw up or die. "Oh, did I die just before my 2 minute burst? Oh well. I can pump during brotherhood (Was 90)" "Oh, did I screw something up and lose my Littany/Battle Voice window? I can send it during the next trick (was 60)". So for something that was supposed to be "too confusing" for people, it gave ample room to make the most value out of a bad situation whereas now, See point A.

C)Like you guys mentioned, concentration of damage. As it is now, damage is very heavily centered on your two minute windows with everyone's heavy hitting skills whizzing around. This does two things. 1) It overemphasizes the need to crit/dhit during those windows because of the multiplicative nature of raid buffs. Your run can live or die based on how your crit rng pans out during a buff window if optimization is your game. 2) It hampers fight design pretty heavily as to accommodate everyone in a party using their (generally pretty high apm) bursts. This leads to two general outcomes. Either the boss is sitting there twiddling its thumbs while eight people are running around punching it in the face or you have to do mechanics while playing the piano on your keyboard. Option 1 is really boring and puts me to sleep. Option 2 is really fun for me, but I also understand how it can be overwhelming for newer players so I would bet a small fortune that one of the main reasons SE has been dumbing all the jobs down to the point it's essentially smacking two rocks together is to allow people to do mechanics while pushing their buttons. This is also obviously undesirable. When we had the staggered buff windows, Losing out on a few buttons during a heavy mechanic window wasn't that big a deal because you could either hold until the next buff window which seldom was more than a minute away or you can lose whatever you lose and make up for it later since the damage profile was much flatter than it is now.

[Semirhage]

Isnip

Adding to this, the two minute meta is both a problem and a symptom of wider problems with job design. Jobs are becoming more samey for several reasons, one of which is making them fit this unified damage profile: A minute and a half of filler, followed by 30 seconds of dumping everything. Another culprit is inflating potencies on finisher moves. It moves more and more damage into that two minute window, and the multiplicative effect of crits, buffs, potions, etc moves more of your total damage contributions onto those big spiky hits. If you don't crit, whatever you did skillfully outside that two minute burst has a lot less importance. Ironically, in the name of making things more consistent to manage, it's transferred more of everyone's damage profile over to an RNG stat.

The 2 minute meta gets a lot of well-deserved flak, but it's not the source of its own problems. It's a downstream effect from CBU3's sledgehammer approach to stupidifying and homogenizing jobs. Lord knows Heavensward was janky, but instead of pursuing the interesting bits and working on the jank, they worked on deleting jank and smoothbraining the interesting bits. Stripping out RPG elements so everything is just DPS or DPS cost opportunity. "Refining" the hard content recipe down to a lot of stacking and spreading with occasional one-off interesting mechanics. Randomly throwing massive number buffs at jobs to get their play rates up. Every job they've put their "rework" fingers on since then has pushed it hard toward "press the buttons as they light up" pancaked skill ceiling design. I don't specifically want Heavensward combat back; I wish they had leaned in an entirely different design direction than they did after Gordias. It seems like CBU3 decided "welp, our playerbase is too stupid to have interestingly designed classes or content, so anytime we tinker with things after this you'll get back a job that could be macroed to one button".