Xenosys Vex explains how to save the game

[Noumenon]

Despite all its flaws and being built on the same stale combat system EW can at least claim the somewhat dubious title of “expansion where they tried quite a bit of new content”

But then you look at all the content and it all died on patch, nobody runs CV dungeons, nobody interacts with IS besides setting up the weekly spreadsheet, it’s all just there

Meanwhile 2 expansion old field content still has a massive and lively playerbase because there is so many glam and mount accessories locked behind eureka

If people truly didn’t care for mounts and glams eureka would have died on patch on CV would be flourishing, instead it’s the reverse

I'm sorry but this is ridiculous - neither of those content are lively nor have a massive playerbase. Most people actually do Criterion in statics, and the amount of people using PF as an indicator is mind-boggling. If you look in recruitment Discords, barely anyone does Criterion, but it's certainly high enough that it's above 100 a day on patch. But the same goes for Eureka - there's maybe one or two BA runs every day or so on Aether. On average, less than 100 people participate in BA every day. It's frankly ridiculous to say that Eureka has a "massive and lively playerbase" when it can barely fill an instance on Aether. And on DCs like Dynamis, it's practically just bots and no real humans.

EW cannot claim to "try a bit of new content". Can anyone with a straight face say that Variant dungeons are innovative? It's three linear corridors mashed into one, with the "innovation" being giving you a paragraph of lore whether you knock a tree down or not. Does that really pass as "innovation" these days? Have our standards got so low?

Island Sanctuary is by far the most unique new types of content they've done in Endwalker, but it's horribly designed and serves only as a case study of how you should not be innovating. Island Sanctuary has a higher completion rate than on-patch Eureka, but the content is even more dull, even more braindead than on-patch Anemos. No one can seriously say that they actually tried to innovate when it comes to IS. Trying implies effort, and IS has none. If I splash paint randomly on the floor, it is certainly unique, but the word "innovative" has a positive connotation, and it most certainly should not be used on that mess of a floor.

If FF14 aims to retain players by satisfying either:

--- the people who want a mindless grind (at the extreme, those achievement hunters who grind for 20,000 Accursed hoards in PotD by repeating Floors 1-20 again and again)
--- the people who want to do next to nothing and get everything they want (extreme casual players who treat this game as Second Life and love the new tomestome weapons)

Then this game is going to die.

Because it was never about them.

Because most gamers care not about the carrots but about the actual meat, the substance of the gameplay. And most of these players have long since quit, which is why we have a remaining echo chamber of players fighting over rewards when players should be debating over how to make the actual gameplay more fun.

The context, for one. Watch his vid again, then read my original post.

Also, you're putting word in my mouth, I literally said NONE of what you're claiming I said.

Also noted that I was very carefully said his point is NOT invalid, rather it's coming from a very narrowed/limited perspective.

Exactly what are you saying then? Why are you bringing up your experience of grinding alliance raids for months to get every piece of glamour and then concluding that you speak for a lot of players and that players don't want it to be grindier?

Glamour = reward.

Hence, you're saying that you're satisfied with the rewards you get from grinding and that it is at an appropriate level of grind for you.

I am saying the debate over what level of grind is appropriate or what rewards should be behind those grinds is far from the primary concern or even the primary issue that plagues FF14 today - the staleness of gameplay. I am saying your disagreement with Xeno completely misses the mark on why this game has a 20% churn rate every patch, and why the vast, vast majority of players who played in HW and SB have long since unsubbed. It's like debating whether a patient dying from lung cancer should be treated with natural remedies or surgery for the fifth pimple on his thigh.

[Jojoya]

snip

Those who consider themselves gamers are not the only ones who play video games.

Considering the number of reward-obsessed people I know who do consider themselves gamers, I'm not certain you know gamers as well as you think you do.

If you feel the problem is the gameplay and not reward structure, then address what is wrong with the gameplay.

[Noumenon]

Considering the number of reward-obsessed people I know who do consider themselves gamers

Catering to this group and ignoring everything else about the gameplay is how you kill any game in the long run. As I've said, the only reason people get that impression is because this game is so bad at gameplay that people have already moved on, leaving a playerbase that is actually a tiny minority within the grander scope of gamers in general. To be fair, this isn't just an FF14 issue. This is an MMO issue. Which is why MMOs are dying while people flock to games like Elden Ring, GoW, and BG3, all of which lauded far more universal critical praise than any MMO ever has.

Also, I have addressed what is wrong with the gameplay numerous, numerous times already. I am not going to copy-paste entire chunks of posts in here for you. My main point in this post is that the conversation over rewards is completely irrelevant.

[Raven2014]

Exactly what are you saying then? Why are you bringing up your experience of grinding alliance raids for months to get every piece of glamour and then concluding that you speak for a lot of players and that players don't want it to be grindier?

Yes?

Because Xenos keeps claiming in his vid (which is his habbit, often you can hear him said the samething over and over and over for 5min long) this is something people do one or twice or never even do. Which is not wrong ... if you're someone like him. But for people like me, because I want the reward, so I don't have the same yardstick as him. I actually like Xenos so I watched several of his vid over time, so I think I have a fairly good overall context of what he's getting at whether you seem to be looking at it in a vacuum.

- Xenos didn't like the fact the Relic raid dungeons (both Eureka and Borza) were lock behind the questline. Paraphased what he said: he should be able to unlock those raid dungeon without going through that BS.

- In this video he claim Stormblood is the best expansion (which I ironinically agree). But do you know that in the last cutsceens in Endwalker, Xenos didn't know Shinriyu and Zenos merged in Sb? What does that tell you about his opinion?

And I don't mention the above as a strike on Xenos's credibility, rather just context of the type of player he is. It's obvious where his content of focus is. Like ... around the 7:30 mark of this video you saw him try to acknowledge of the glam players but were too stubborn to go through with it, so he just tried to handwave it away (ok you may run it two time lol?). Grinding, longevity of content and whatever else he said in this video are really just window dressing, he does it for the camera. I imagine if you walk up to him and say:

"ok xenos stop beating around the bush and just tell us what you want in 20 seconds."

I think his response gonna be something like this:

"**** the story, **** the trial, **** the casual content, give me 8 floors per tier and 3 ultimate per expansion and FF14 will no longer need saving".


Which to be clear, I won't say it would be wrong of him to say something like that. People simp for their favorite content all the time. I'm just saying framing it as "my idea of saving the game" is a bit ... OH WAIT! That's also what people do all the time on this forum!. It just really goes to say a streamer is really no different than a forum posters. Their take neither more valid or invalid, their takes are neither hotter and colder. The only difference between you, me, and streamer like Xenos is we type a post and they made a video.


Edit: also if you can not acknowledge how big the glam community are ... I don't think you're grounded enough in reality to have a productive discussion. Self-example is I had never gone to a single nightclub/party even in this game in the 10 years I played, and I don't think I ever will. But it will be extremely foolish of me to deny their presence, scope and impact if I ever want to engage in a genuine discussion about the game community.

[Somnolence]

Because most gamers care not about the carrots but about the actual meat, the substance of the gameplay. And most of these players have long since quit, which is why we have a remaining echo chamber of players fighting over rewards when players should be debating over how to make the actual gameplay more fun.

PvP is actually good example of that.

This is something that when fun can carry the game by itself and the reason why multiplayer-only games even exist.

Since PvP was never good in FFXIV and did not had good rewards it was basically dead.

But it was improved and got "battlepass" to incentivize doing it. Still activity significantly drops when people get what they want from it as its gameplay loop is not fun enough to warrant doing it by itself.

It's why a lot of people are hoping for 7.0 to be this big reset event.

If SE is giving over the work to interns it will not improve and just get even more stale as interns will not take risks and might lack experience/talent to create good content.