Yoshi-P says the secret to keeping Final Fantasy 14 fresh

[Solakor]

I'm curious where you got the idea that its the raiding scene that are responsible for many of these changes? I'm asking genuinely not trying to start an argument or be passive aggressive or w/e happens on here just actually curious to your thought pattern.

From my perspective raiders are completely ignored 100% of the time because they make up such a small percentage of the playerbase. I can't see how raiders are the focus of the development team when every single patch is focused around things like furniture, side quests, story, crafting, gathering, maps, island sanctuary, beast tribes, dungeons, expert deliveries, glamour, I could go on for literally hours. Where as raiders get 3 tiers every 2 years, 1 ultimate every 2 years (if we're lucky) and balance patches that none of us asked for that make all the jobs less fun (easier for casual players) to play.

It could just be a difference in perspective but from mine, and many of my friends who play, it feels like the game is dangerously over catering to the casual community to the point that its degrading the actual gameplay experience of the game. Ie: over 50% of the community clamoring for the removal of Exploration Zones/Adventure Forays because fighting mobs too hard so we get Island Sanctuary instead.

This is what happens when the devs want to get single player and non mmo players into their mmo. The changes are catered purely to ppl who dont want to put effort into learning stuff or can't/won't. Also there is an increasing amount of raiders who think the classes need to be easy so that they can swap to any job without any effort. The culture has shifted quite a bit into ease of access, non grind mentality and the devs are the biggest advocates of this. If the devs had stood their ground and said no we think ppl need to learn to play and ppl need to make effort to get stuff then this would not have happened but they deliberately changed systems to suit ppl who can't be assed to do anything "tedious" as they put it.
Might as well put the relics on mogstation since they don't have any meaning anymore and ppl will 100% buy them.

I think it says enough that using addons has become the norm nowadays in every aspect of the game. So yes it is too late to go back and the devs prolly won't go back in any way because most ppl playing now like braindead design and cheating

[MonteCristo]

This is what happens when the devs want to get single player and non mmo players into their mmo. The changes are catered purely to ppl who dont want to put effort into learning stuff or can't/won't. Also there is an increasing amount of raiders who think the classes need to be easy so that they can swap to any job without any effort. The culture has shifted quite a bit into ease of access, non grind mentality and the devs are the biggest advocates of this. If the devs had stood their ground and said no we think ppl need to learn to play and ppl need to make effort to get stuff then this would not have happened but they deliberately changed systems to suit ppl who can't be assed to do anything "tedious" as they put it.
Might as well put the relics on mogstation since they don't have any meaning anymore and ppl will 100% buy them.

I think it says enough that using addons has become the norm nowadays in every aspect of the game. So yes it is too late to go back and the devs prolly won't go back in any way because most ppl playing now like braindead design and cheating

Pure accuracy

[Striker44]

The culture has shifted quite a bit into ease of access, non grind mentality and the devs are the biggest advocates of this. If the devs had stood their ground and said no we think ppl need to learn to play and ppl need to make effort to get stuff then this would not have happened but they deliberately changed systems to suit ppl who can't be assed to do anything "tedious" as they put it.

I feel like this has the right idea, but underestimates the impact of the culture shift and overestimates the impact of the dev team. There has definitely been a culture shift compared to 20 years ago (which will be true about virtually anything). For MMO's, the two biggest changes are that MMO's in general are no longer the "king" of gaming like they were in the 2005-2010 era...now it's mobile games and MOBA's.

Second, the prime MMO demographic has changed. Go back 15-20 years, and it was teenagers, college kids, and young adults with relatively large amounts of time on their hands. Fast forward to today, and it's those same people that remain the largest part of the MMO playerbase...except now they're adults in their 30's and 40's with families and full-time careers. They don't have the time that they did back in the day.

If the devs had "stood their ground" and ignored this culture shift...the game would probably be running on fumes. I think devs in general learned that lesson with Wildstar - that dev team set out specifically to make an MMO in the "old" mold of mandatory grouping, difficult content, significant time to really learn classes...and it had to shut down after just a few years because the playerbase just isn't there to sustain that kind of game. And even that was almost 10 years ago now.

I think about myself. I had a ton of fun back in the early days of WoW, and have fond memories of standing in XR putting a group together to head over to Wailing Caverns, a standard dungeon where a full clear of it could easily take about two hours or so. Those were great times. I also can't even fathom wanting to do something like that today. Life happens. I very much enjoy the other parts of life that are now here, and I still very much enjoy playing video games...but I just don't have anywhere near the same amount of time as I did before. I play games that I can pop into for brief periods of time, can quickly learn how to play, and feel like I've made meaningful progress.

Basically, I don't put this on the dev team. They're simply acknowledging the reality of what MMO's need to be like today to maintain the size of playerbase they want to be profitable. I'd also point out that "using addons" has been the norm since addons existed, and FFXIV is actually one of the MMO's out there that "needs" them the least. (Compare to WoW, for example, where the dev team intentionally designs encounters with people using add-ons in mind.) Players using addons isn't anything even remotely new.

[Turtledeluxe]

The secret to keeping it fresh is that they don't.

[splinter1545]

This is what happens when the devs want to get single player and non mmo players into their mmo. The changes are catered purely to ppl who dont want to put effort into learning stuff or can't/won't. Also there is an increasing amount of raiders who think the classes need to be easy so that they can swap to any job without any effort. The culture has shifted quite a bit into ease of access, non grind mentality and the devs are the biggest advocates of this. If the devs had stood their ground and said no we think ppl need to learn to play and ppl need to make effort to get stuff then this would not have happened but they deliberately changed systems to suit ppl who can't be assed to do anything "tedious" as they put it.
Might as well put the relics on mogstation since they don't have any meaning anymore and ppl will 100% buy them.

I think it says enough that using addons has become the norm nowadays in every aspect of the game. So yes it is too late to go back and the devs probably won't go back in any way because most ppl playing now like braindead design and cheating

Couldn't be better said. I feel so many of this game's MMO roots has just been stripped completely away. The only time it feels like an MMO now is at the end game, which just consists of standing around for queues for the most part.

This is basically a single-player game that I have to pay monthly to access.

[ReynTime]

Do people really play this as a FF game (or a pseudo single player game), it seems anytime people are recommending FF games people always say “skip 11 and 14 they are MMO’s”

Of course casual players exist but are they really interesting in nothing but the story as a solo experience or is it because it’s both able to be played as a solo game but it’s also a social MMO, the discussion of MMO’s being solo friendly is a tale as old as time, is the casual playerbase coming from “this isn’t an MMO to me this is just a really long FF game” or is it coming from people who’ve always wanted a seriously casual friendly MMO but got pushed away from older MMO’s that discourage solo play

People are right to say that.
11 actually still carries baggage from traditional FF system staples, while 14 removed all of them because... devs thought depth beyond learning your static rotation and dancing to boss mechanics was too complex for the average player I guess, and making beating the story not require learning to play your job. Even the easiest of the classic Final Fantasy games, IX, requires playing around with loadouts, compositions and taking decisions based on encounters.

Personally I don't recommend XIV at all unless I know the person will be content enough with the very superficial fanservice going on. It's the only "Final Fantasy" in XIV.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Couldn't be better said. I feel so many of this game's MMO roots has just been stripped completely away. The only time it feels like an MMO now is at the end game, which just consists of standing around for queues for the most part.

This is basically a single-player game that I have to pay monthly to access.

Not just MMO roots. It's been stripped of just about anything that defines a proper RPG.