Zepla about FFXIV Relic and Square Enix not taking any Risks

[Alpheus]

Been saying XIV was Average at best, and that influx was merely a fad.......

WoW is the biggest MMO ever, of course those players will flock to XIV in droves if popular WoW streamers did.....

If WoW figure heads said "Hey....lets play Superman 64"

Superman 64 would have 100k viewers on twitch.....

I am glad people are seeing it, not to be that guy....but maybe they will improve the game & stop living off of that WoW boom. Saying that, it is XI appreciation week, so I will be over there chillin for the most part. I will be leveling this guy.....



Best three headed doggie design in gaming.....

Monster models were so huge in XI relative to the player. Seeing an Ampiphitere swoop down from the skies in Beaucidine Glacier [S] and the Cerberus bosses and Chimeras like Apademak. Man, did a lot to really sell ya on their deadliness lol.

[TheNight]

Sort of in line with this, I feel like the FFXIV team has been leaning to heavily into the "We want you to play other games" ethos. Yea, its great not having endless grinds just to get new gear, but I also don't want the opposite where getting new gear is braindead easy.

They can hardly find a solid middle ground, sadly.

[Shurrikhan]

Sort of in line with this, I feel like the FFXIV team has been leaning to heavily into the "We want you to play other games" ethos. Yea, its great not having endless grinds just to get new gear, but I also don't want the opposite where getting new gear is braindead easy.

To be fair, you can give non-raiders things to actually do and progress outside of raiding, albeit at far less efficiency*, without requiring every player to go through "endless grinds".
You leave an at least partly connected incentive for raiding (e.g., doing will at least slightly accelerate Relic progression, directly [such as via additional spendable item drops] or indirectly [via faster farming]) but allow alternatives to it for those who want that shiny and needlessly* high-ilvl gear.

Better yet, you could make that upper-casual-to-midcore content that would be thereby available to nearly all players, raiders and non-raiders alike, more enjoyable, so the hours played there feel less like a "grind".

* Heck, it might not even be so terribly inefficient... when compared to post-prog days where any non-farm Savage PF is 90+% likely to be a 'trap' group.
* I say "needlessly" because unless new content forms are added that are tuned analogously to Savage but have lower difficulty, one will find little to no benefit to having that gear outside of that same Savage raiding that they don't want to do anyways.

[Reimmi]

Sort of in line with this, I feel like the FFXIV team has been leaning to heavily into the "We want you to play other games" ethos. Yea, its great not having endless grinds just to get new gear, but I also don't want the opposite where getting new gear is braindead easy.

It reaches a point where why do we bother playing this game then
I want to play *this* game, but all i really log on for is raid and to keep my house from being demolished (making that argument of there's very scummy, oh go play other games but dont unsub if you want your house)

[LilimoLimomo]

I would recommend taking Zepla's opinion on this with a huge grain of salt. After playing the game as a full-time job for years on end, she made a video in the past few months about how she had burned out and finally needed to get away from it. It was a perfectly reasonable step to take, but in the meantime she hasn't been doing much in the way of FFXIV, which suggests to me that it's quite possible she's still burned out.

Burnout can really do a number on how we experience things. Which isn't to say that the opinion she came to was wrong or anything, just that I'd encourage folks to take that context into account while hearing her out.

[Shurrikhan]

I'd take a hard long think about how much stock to put into the negative opinion of someone who recently burned out hard.

I feel like this makes little sense if/when the negative opinion is about exactly what caused them to burn out. Feeling encouraged to play many hours per day but having no interesting long-term goal to invest in/towards could very easily be a factor in that, and it's an avoidable one, unless we're to consider casual/midcore-accessible means of satisfying progression a waste of resources.

[LilimoLimomo]

I feel like this makes little sense if/when the negative opinion is about exactly what caused them to burn out. Feeling encouraged to play many hours per day but having no interesting long-term goal to invest in/towards could very easily be a factor in that, and it's an avoidable one, unless we're to consider casual/midcore-accessible means of satisfying progression a waste of resources.

I'm not quite sure what you mean? When Zepla announced that she was taking a break from FF14, she made a video explaining why she was burned out, and she cited 2 reasons:

She explained that her burnout was as a content creator, that she was was burned out from trying to create content on FF14 all day everyday after doing that for 7 years. That's a very unique problem to have that doesn't have anything to do with how normal players play the game.

She also mentions that something that contributed to her burnout was that she put together a poorly-vetted group for the Omega Ultimate, and she spent 8-hours a day in this negative, mismanaged group that made her miserable and contributed to her burnout. I would find it hard to see this as anything besides a subjective personal situation.

In fact, in her burnout video Zepla explicitly states that FF14 isn't designed to be played at the magnitude that she was playing it at; that it's designed to just have a trickle of content that doesn't pressure you to play a lot, and that you can just come back to play when you want to. Which she most definitely did not do. And she burned out. And I greatly respect that she was able to acknowledge that, and that she was able to own her burnout and proactively step away to address it.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm not quite sure what you mean? When Zepla announced that she was taking a break from FF14, she made a video explaining why she was burned out, and she cited 2 reasons:

She explained that her burnout was as a content creator, that she was was burned out from trying to create content on FF14 all day everyday after doing that for 7 years. That's a very unique problem to have that doesn't have anything to do with how normal players play the game.

She also mentions that something that contributed to her burnout was that she put together a poorly-vetted group for the Omega Ultimate, and she spent 8-hours a day in this negative, mismanaged group that made her miserable and contributed to her burnout. I would find it hard to see this as anything besides a subjective personal situation.

In fact, in her burnout video Zepla explicitly states that FF14 isn't designed to be played at the magnitude that she was playing it at; that it's designed to just have a trickle of content that doesn't pressure you to play a lot, and that you can just come back to play when you want to. Which she most definitely did not do. And she burned out. And I greatly respect that she was able to acknowledge that, and that she was able to own her burnout and proactively step away to address it.

Okay. Let's put it this way:

She's a content creator who's established herself around FFXIV. To make money, she will primarily be playing XIV (or reacting to other content creators' [reacting to other content creators' [etc.] XIV-related, -comparative, or -adjacent content), and her doing so has to be at least decently entertaining to her viewers. To avoid burnout, it must also be decently entertaining to herself without overwhelming stress as she perceives it. Good so far?

Now... if the only thing you can create some sort of many-hour-spanning stream narrative out of after MSQ is (briefly Savage, and then) Ultimate, then the chance of entertaining both self and audience without overwhelming stress... is limited to solely the most stressful content in the game (exempting minority reactions to say, seemingly unfair Triple Triad NPC fights).

Now, compare that to what would be relevant to her even as a full-time streamer / content creator... if there were more midcore content. See how those aren't likely to be all that separate of issues?

But at the same time, such would benefit the rest of us, too. What would help address her complaints wouldn't be an undue expense to the rest of us; it would probably be a boon.

As such, I don't see why her complaints about having less to do surrounding, say, Relic progression should be ignored just because she burned out or just because she's a XIV streamer. That seems a misread of the larger picture there, equivalent to mistaking a problem felt in (potentially reluctant) option A with being somehow unrelated to any issue in lacking any real options other than A.

[MonsutaMan]

Influencers are wined & dined, thus are obligated to say nice stuff about things they get for free.......

"Beggers cant be choosers" sort of deal. What.....??????? You gonna complain about $hit you got for free lol? When they receive their fresh 7.0, they will be back to shilling. That is how it works........

Anyway, if WoW players invaded Champions Online it would be the most popular MMO on the market. We really gonna act like XIV was popular on its' own, and not due to the most profitable MMO in gaming history? Come on now....lol.

XIV was never HIM, WoW was though.....& if you are associated with HIM, you are cool by default.

[DixieBellOCE]

Why listen to the opinions of content creators when you can just form your own opinion.

Manderville relics are lazy and unsatisfying to obtain. There is no overarching storyline to tie them to the expansion, there is no actual 'content' based on them, leaving you to just repeat the same dungeons/raids you have already been doing on repeat all expansion and are sick to death of.

Relics, in the past, were used as a way to keep player retention up and fill the empty overworld with players doing activities to progress their characters, or offer alternative zones where communities were built to complete the content over the lifespan of an expansion.
They would have become a 'tome step' after the expansion ends anyway, the same as every other relic in the game. There was no need to just make that 'fast track' step the only way to obtain them ON PATCH.

Square Enix needs to start taking risks with content, People need to remember that content designed for the average and above player, becomes 'casual content' in the next expansion for anyone not willing to challenge themselves when it is current.

How many 'casual' players run old extreme fights unsynced and call it content?
How many 'casual' players run old raids unsynced for glamour?
Now how many of those 'casual' players even do current expansion content?

None of that content would exist if it wasn't first made for the average or above player, It is that 'harder' and 'more grindy' content that backfills the game and has so much replayability later in the games lifespan.
Right now, Endwalker is slowly moving towards the end of it's lifespan, and the content left behind for 'casual players' to soak up is basically zero.