Luckybancho census shows criterion savage was a complete and utter failure

[Shougun]

Which is why I liked the idea of Bozja's duels (even if they basically gave you no rewards besides bragging rights), the implementation on how you access them was just atrocious...I'm noticing a pattern here.

Bozja duels were an interesting idea. I wish FFXIV/SE had some better phasing technology, it could be cool if anyone and everyone who wanted to duel while everyone who wanted to watch or was also dueling themselves were participants for other players.

I'm not sure what it is, but they have had a few neat ideas that then felt like they didn't get the support they needed whether that was given more time, resources, or alternatively told to 'go back and cook some more'.. I'm not sure. My thought is Yoshida, or someone of planning positional power, is extremely effective at organizing human and game systems but it's so structured and so rigid that it has troubles with more organic situations. It's my theory at least on why FFXIV has pretty bad roleplay gameplay (gameplay that helps you roleplay a role, how you rarely see any ideas that add flare for flare sake and how jobs are more likely to be similar than dissimilar- this doesn't always mean a bad thing to be fair). I'm personally not on the doom is neigh wagon, but I do feel occasionally like 'wow that was a great, or at least interesting, idea that didn't seem to stick the landing'. I can appreciate other people expressing their concerns when done in a way that you can understand 'what' that concern is, regardless of if it is associated to doom or not lol.

Interestingly I do feel they tried a few 'different' ideas in this expansion but for whatever reason just had issues with the land. For example, it didn't seem there really was a need for savage + content, and it would have been better to be normal + (basically 'hard mode' between normal and savage), and then the rewards and some systems caused issues with replayability on top of that. Or with Island Sanctuary, while I personally really enjoy hanging out in my Island, I feel it was strange they went so hard on the excel side of the gameplay.. like super hard. I wish they had went to gamify other systems better, add gold saucer mini game to catching, create special gathering effects that mixed up your gathering, dynamic events and quests, etc.. with 'some' excelification not 'all of it'. Etc.

My concern is that negative feedback isn't taken with nuance of sticking interesting ideas better, but "don't try new things, just go back to the old formula".

Any content that you can't queue for in DF and have a reasonable expectation of both getting a group and clearing will be ignored by most of the player base.

I'm definitely, willfully, in that category. I will not queue for savage content, anymore (used to try it long ago), after many many hours of wasted time because people couldn't bother to learn the strat or play their job. Besides feeling like a waste of time, and not fun, it also created outside of game issues where I couldn't predict how long the content was going to be so I couldn't plan around other life responsibilities or desires (because who knows if it's going to be 10 minutes or 85 minutes). I can create a PF, I'm aware, and I encourage others to do that if they want to do that content, for better chance, but I don't want to wait around, at all, I do not like the lobby content vibe, and am probably jaded about it given FFXI and FFXIV 1.0 'begging for parties' (and so I just don't even 'like' using PF unless it's emergent content, like hunts, or almost full already). I am certainly at the point where if it isn't a certain level of convenience (like DF) and likely to accomplish them within a reasonable time frame then I'm probably not going to partake at all (unless I can solo it, which is why I think it would be cool if future criterion-like content has dynamic scaling to include solo and may act as a Delve equivalent as I quite liked that idea when I saw the presentation).