We lost 70% of our player base half a year in

[sharknado]

That is what FF14 is doing too. Favors, abandoned after one expansion. Restoration, abandoned after one. Every exploratory content, abandoned after one.

Yet the old content tends to live through it. You can and often should use Ishgard Restoration to level DoH/DoL. Eureka is still the only source of glowing armor aside from some top raiding content not to mention chances for appealing relic weapon design.

Even dungeons work due to roulette. Aurum Vale lives while WoW old dungeons (and raids) die next expansion or next raid tier minus timewalking from time to time.

[Sindele]

Favors were fatally flawed from the outset and the only saving them was getting rid of them. Don't think that's an argument nearly so easily made for the rest of it. It's got far more in common with content like squadrons and airships - their limitation is not that they are robust pieces of content that are expensive and time-consuming to create, it's that they were experiments that didn't exactly succeed at what they were trying to do.

There were certainly missed opportunities along the years. The revival of favors, of all things, was not one of them. Might as well bring back Temple leves and the Hunting Log - some people actually liked those.

[TheNight]

Favors were fatally flawed from the outset and the only saving them was getting rid of them. Don't think that's an argument nearly so easily made for the rest of it. It's got far more in common with content like squadrons and airships - their limitation is not that they are robust pieces of content that are expensive and time-consuming to create, it's that they were experiments that didn't exactly succeed at what they were trying to do.

There were certainly missed opportunities along the years. The revival of favors, of all things, was not one of them. Might as well bring back Temple leves and the Hunting Log - some people actually liked those.

The big issue of favors is that they were weekly-gated. Remove that and you'll suddenly see far fewer people unhappy with it.

[TheNight]

Favors were fatally flawed from the outset and the only saving them was getting rid of them. Don't think that's an argument nearly so easily made for the rest of it. It's got far more in common with content like squadrons and airships - their limitation is not that they are robust pieces of content that are expensive and time-consuming to create, it's that they were experiments that didn't exactly succeed at what they were trying to do.

There were certainly missed opportunities along the years. The revival of favors, of all things, was not one of them. Might as well bring back Temple leves and the Hunting Log - some people actually liked those.

And yes, combat leves and hunting logs should be brought back. They would cost barely next to no dev time and would make the open world slightly more interesting, especially if they expand on it every expansion and make it a little more interesting each iteration. But sadly that's never what they do.

[Sindele]

Removing the weekly gate wouldn't have solved the horrific RNG and absurd time investment required - if anything, the weekly gate is what kept it a part-time job instead of turning into a full-time job. It was genuinely, sincerely cursed from every angle.

E: As far as the Hunting Log goes, I think the idea there is that Hunts superseded it - which is a fair argument compared to a one-time checklist, I'd wager.

[TheNight]

Removing the weekly gate wouldn't have solved the horrific RNG and absurd time investment required - if anything, the weekly gate is what kept it a part-time job instead of turning into a full-time job. It was genuinely, sincerely cursed from every angle.

I take it you probably would've disliked RNG crafting too. I completely disagree with your assessment of the fundamental system of favors however. I found them be a step in the right direction: of creating a system that encourages gathering optimization due to its time-limited nature, and of needing to adapt each time instead of following the same script because of the RNG (though the RNG is limited). It made for interesting gathering gameplay.

I suppose if you treat DoH/DoL as a chore and something to get over with for the week it would be terrible, but over the years Square Enix has basically removed any semblance of skill expression or involved gameplay from DoH/DoLs.

If we continued to iterate on favors, and make it so that:

(1) making the timed and optimization aspect of the system more pronounced, and give higher-tier rewards, achievements etc. for better optimized routes and rotations, perhaps even making a scoring system for it.

(2) make it interact with the open world more, such as by needing to kill a mob, use an explosive to open up an abandoned mine or talk to certain NPCs with knowledge of a 1000-year old tree to spawn a node, just like hunt spawns (except slightly easier) and make it more immersed in the world

(3) make the rewards optional to most players and only be applicable to DoH/DoLs (such as by making two different crafter sets, one at the usual ilvl and one with three guaranteed materia slots instead of two).

(4) double down on the RNG, especially the spawn locations, to reward players for map knowledge and scouting skills.

I suspect people would not complain as much, because it's not at all a chore for most players since they don't need it and will be a nice system and challenge for people who enjoy DoH/DoL gameplay.

[Sindele]

Any gathering subsystem that asks for 12 hours of my time a week is certifiably a chore, yes. Remove the gate and I don't want to think about the time investment it would plead for.

While I'm no great fan of the current crafting paradigm of zero-effort-or-all-the-effort-might-not-be-enough and the trivialization of leveling DoH classes, I will gladly confess that I am also in no hurry to return to the Heavensward paradigm of asinine subsystems and an overreliance on specialization. Also, Maker's Mark can and should stay in the hell it was sent to.

(1) making the timed and optimization aspect of the system more pronounced, and give higher-tier rewards, achievements etc. for better optimized routes and rotations, perhaps even making a scoring system for it.

(2) make it interact with the open world more, such as by needing to kill a mob, use an explosive to open up an abandoned mine or talk to certain NPCs with knowledge of a 1000-year old tree to spawn a node, just like hunt spawns (except slightly easier) and make it more immersed in the world

(3) make the rewards optional to most players and only be applicable to DoH/DoLs (such as by making two different crafter sets, one at the usual ilvl and one with three guaranteed materia slots instead of two).

(4) double down on the RNG, especially the spawn locations, to reward players for map knowledge and scouting skills.

You've basically just reinvented something like the Diadem, right? - kind of a fusion of 2.0 and 3.0, transposed outside its own zone. It's not wholly unwelcome conceptually, but there's definitely some cursed aspects here.

Like, double down on the RNG but focus on the optimization - how, exactly? You have to be very, very careful here. Increasing the RNG for spawn positioning is one thing - promoting map awareness and on-the-fly planning over rote procedural behavior can be good things - but if you apply that to things like the quantity and quality of loot, well.. this is exactly the cursed problem that killed the perception of favors, even if it arguably wasn't the worst part of it in reality. When everyone gets a fixed amount of time per period, people get very attentive to the fairness of the random forces determining their fate and will go absolutely ballistic when it gets significantly out of line. Put actual (in-game) currency on the line instead of just ego, and that hate gets multiplied exponentially. At least when you can chain grind forever, they can sate themselves with the Gambler's Fallacy - not so when the clock is ticking.

Just about the only way to make people hate it more is to then make it competitive. Ask pretty much any competitive player in pretty much any mainstream competitive game how they feel about RNG and you will likely get to hear the sort of opinions usually reserved for debt collectors and people who double park.

E: Also, as fun as this is (and I kinda mean that, for once - there's some snark here but it's layered over actual discussion!) - I'm off to go be unconscious for a while.

[Kaurhz]

Favors were fatally flawed from the outset and the only saving them was getting rid of them. Don't think that's an argument nearly so easily made for the rest of it. It's got far more in common with content like squadrons and airships - their limitation is not that they are robust pieces of content that are expensive and time-consuming to create, it's that they were experiments that didn't exactly succeed at what they were trying to do.

There were certainly missed opportunities along the years. The revival of favors, of all things, was not one of them. Might as well bring back Temple leves and the Hunting Log - some people actually liked those.

I disagree with this, personally.

It's essentially taking the nuclear option of outright removing systems that they have developed rather than seeing how they could be refined. - The thing with favor nodes, is whilst they were heavy RNG and time investment based, you still got an appropriate reward for the time invested. - It rewarded you for the time you spent doing it. There were some unnecessary aspects but nothing that IMO would warrant complete removal

It's a pretty recurrent thing that they either neglect or remove systems that they don't like rather than seeing if they can refine them, which is unfortunate because many of them at their core are very good systems

[TheNight]

Like, double down on the RNG but focus on the optimization - how, exactly? You have to be very, very careful here. Increasing the RNG for spawn positioning is one thing - promoting map awareness and on-the-fly planning over rote procedural behavior can be good things - but if you apply that to things like the quantity and quality of loot, well.. this is exactly the cursed problem that killed the perception of favors, even if it arguably wasn't the worst part of it in reality.

I don't exactly see why RNG would be outrageous competitively. After all FFLogs is pretty much an RNG competition for the top ranks nowadays, other than on select few jobs like BLM (and perhaps MNK, but certainly not jobs like the tanks) that still allows one to get high 99 or 100 without crit RNG.

That being said, that kind of RNG is rubbish and no, I would not want to see that. RNG should not be done to activate people's gambling addiction or force players to grind forever to get a good run, but rather to force players to adapt to situations that they may not have envisioned.

One way of doing this fairly is to distribute the same number of random buffs or debuffs across time. For example, a random +2 yield buff that might appear on the first gathering node, or the fourth, but it will appear exactly once.

Another way of doing this is to reduce the variance, but this should be done cleverly. Let's say that hidden nodes are reintroduced, and has a 30% reveal/spawn rate every node. To mitigate situations where the player repeatedly do not see a hidden item, we can add an action that forces a node to reveal its hidden items (and indeed, such an action already exists). The problem then is that lucky players will also use that to gain even more advantage. To reduce the variance then, we can add a stacking buff that reduces the cost or cooldown of the action that reveals the hidden items every time the player opens a node that is unrevealed, so that it benefits unlucky runs more than it benefits lucky runs. This also adds another layer of optimization.

Another way is to introduce RNG that pushes players into using different rotations that end up with the same expected yield. For example, a node with +yield would incentivize actions that increase the gathering attempts, and +attempts would incentivize actions that increase the yield (and once again, this already exists, the game designer only needs to leverage this and expand on this concept).

And as you said, RNG to reward map awareness is a good thing that should also be put in.

Finally, one way to mitigate the feeling of unfairness is to let favors give a somewhat consistent expected yield of "base" materials unless one is exceptionally bad, and lock "rare" materials behind doing well. However, we can make the "rare" materials be only useful once or a few times and untradeable, so that players would want to strive to optimize well and get a single (or few) good runs and be done with it. We can then lock achievements, minions, etc. behind doing exceptionally well.

[Lunalepsy]

People have been saying make healers more engaging since Shadowbringers, and it’s been ignored.

People have been saying endgame is horrible with lack of content and it’s been ignored.

People want better hairstyles and headgears on the new races and it's been ignored.

After an ENTIRE year of receiving player feedback and FAILING to do what the community wants, now we have them scrambling to fix critical bugs after bugs like the housing lottery bug.

What a joke.

I wanted FF14 to thrive, I loved Stormblood but the game is dying and on it’s way out.

Square Enix, changes need to be made FAST.

NOT in 7.0, NOT in 8.0, it needs to happen THIS EXPANSION or you WILL lose the remaining player base.

Oh no! What are we gonna do?