Incremental Steps Towards Something New: What Should Be Gradually Prototyped?

[Shurrikhan]

For those a bit concerned by the stagnancy of the content model or the trends in its recent iteration, let's work under the premise that sudden and large changes (especially where those changes would typically take a large amount of explanation to preface as developers or even to usefully react to as players) are mostly untenable.

This may be a faulty premise, but if another thread wants to go that route, I'll link it here for contrast once it's come to my attention. For this one, though, let's work from that incremental approach.

To that end, let's start with two options:

1. Make a small (set of) incremental change(s) to an existing content type. What could those changes likely enable for/among further future changes? If this would require meeting a coding hurdle, how do you excuse it and what would meeting that hurdle future-proof? How do you imagine they'd be received?
   
   
2. Suggest a new, "experimental" content type (just as Diadem, Aquapolis, Deep Dungeon, The Feast, etc., were once new and experimental) that seems at least decently feasible to come from XIV's dev team but pushes boundaries in certain ways that could be useful down the line. Again, what does this enable, and how do you think it'd be received?

Reminder: Our interest here is to start something that, while seemingly isolated/individual, makes a natural inclination for further useful changes. The first low-hanging fruit reveals the next, and so forth. And that series should have some real direction that you imagine would be better for the game (and could pretty easily convince others of such). Please include where your suggested changes or additions would lead.

[Shurrikhan]

<Reserved for shortlist.>

[Jeeqbit]

Literally any QoL. There are so, so many things that are definitely not these huge coding, hardware or infrastructure hurdles they portray them as. I've (casually) coded in many languages since I was a child and sometimes it is baffling how things get portrayed as taking years or being impossible. If anyone here hasn't coded, believe me, there are certain things that you just know, no matter what the code structure or "spaghetti", are still not rocket science to do within the confines of those things, or there is even evidence within the game of similar "simple" things being done without issue. (That said, there are some things that people here portray as being easy to implement but would genuinely take years of planning and navigating hardware infrastructure challenges such as cross-DC PF or cross-region DF.)

QoL could be not clicking on other players/objects when clicking the hotbar, better targeting that has a competent priority system (such as closest engaged enemy>engaged enemies>unengaged enemies), rewards for doing content MINE such as Faux Hollows, better ilvl syncs for old content, better default UI arrangement that would make sprouts better at playing overnight, less annoying clipping in ARR areas before you unlock flying, landing more places, bulk split if they are going to have spawn conditions like Salt and Light, just 1 day of time spent on extra accessability options such as applying color blind settings to specific HUD elements and battle elements and adjusting non-player battle effects, abilities being such a problem to weave and register with high ping.

A lot of it is stuff a person could do in just 1 day or close to it. QoL is important because the more "little" annoyances there are, the more they build up to make someone feel a game is riddled with issues, at which point they quit. To be quite honest, what has made this game successful is addressing the major ones, but the smaller ones build up and as I said, many of them could be solved in a day by 1 developer if we're being honest.

Suggest a new, "experimental" content type

My idea for a new piece of content is a better version of guildhests that tries to re-create the traditional final fantasy experience. To give an example of the sort of content I imagine, watch these trailers:

• 1.0 trailer - Just this morbol fight, exactly as it is. We have the morbol fight but it's boring because it just autos the tank instead of pouncing on random players like that.
• 5.0 trailer - My idea is each player would be forcefully switched through their available job's highest ilvl gearset, and swiftly defeated each time, until their last job is a Dark Knight and then their damage is extremely buffed.

Just fun gimmick fights, basically.

In order to recreate the final fantasy experience:

1. Have no tank so that the boss jumps around and does whatever it does in its respective trailer.
2. Make the GCD very long - such as 10-20 seconds. This will force a healer to decide very carefully if their next GCD will be a heal, or an attack, and make their decisions a lot more important. Because if they choose wrong, the party may die. This is largely what made old FF games feel a certain way - if you chose not to heal, all you could do was watch for ages as the party got killed while the bar recharged. It added similar stakes to cleric stance in a way, whereas now the GCD restores fast and we have lots of OGCDs.
3. Disable abilities except certain ones, such as gap closers, rescue, role actions generally, etc.
4. In exchange for the long GCD, make the mechanics extremely intense so you have to move around like crazy and the focus is just to get your 1 attack in.

[Alice_Rivers]

Using other game systems for story telling purposes, per this thread, more than anything.

Also I'd like to see the player character have some meaningful agency, even if it is only minor and illusory, allow us different dialogue options and paths that may end up in the same place but get there by different routes. Maybe there's a peaceful route, an aggressive route, a more cautious route and a nope route. It's not like they can't adjust solo duties and such so as to account for your choices, it's only cutscenes and DF duties that require a set scenario.

I know it overlaps with my first offering but more role specific stuff throughout the game. Give tanks more opportunities to protect someone/something, healers more chances to treat injuries and dps to do... Normal MSQ things.

[Balmung_Griffin]

Oh, you made the thread I wanted to do!

I think first of all, they need to think of how they collect feedback from players.
I mean they say: "We're monitoring feedback", oh really? From where? From here? Reddit? In game? Whatever JP uses as main social media? At this rate they must have more people filtering feedback than developing the game.

Every week I receive an email from SQEX with "News from cash shop", did they ever thought of simply send a form with specific questions?

"Hello, Balmung Griffin!

We recently implemented PvP Series Malmstones into the game.
Did you accessed it? Yes/no

Follow up with relevant questions."

"Oh, congratulations on finishing DT MSQ, did you like it? What do you want to see improved?"

Give 20 teleport tickets as thank you and you're done.

Back to topic: this game sorely lacks "beta features", instead of throwing everything into a wall and see what it sticks.

Remember, Lords of Verminion?

If a single try out battle was available (without need of doing fancy graphics or anything) before they go all in, this thing would've been panned out of this world and maybe it could've been saved.

Then enter the form: what changes would you like to see and probably change battles to something like Pokemon or Turn based FF would be evident.

Island Sanctuary? Mammets? Workshop? Excel Sheet? No, thanks.

Go play Stardew Valley and make an abridged version of that, no need for fake rewards, content itself is the reward if it's engaging enough.

Make our NPC friends show up to hang out, no need to make quest, just hang out, help us out with gathering, play TT, any friendly competition, afternoon tea and boom.

Rotate friend once a month and we would never run out of friends lmao

[DiaDeem]

VIERA.HATS.

[Musashidon]

while it's not necessarily experimental content, as something new and innovative i feel like expanding on the GC via FC's would be cool and a good way to do it without trying to figure out content going forward with squads and other GC specific ish stuff.

add in FC alliances in game wise if players all have squads (lore wise) and you have multiple fc's while you may not be the actual leader of a FC or the alliance the game could just say you are as a way to not worry about specifics and add content for fc's/ fc alliances it does have to require many players or even players in the same said alliance/fc this way people can participate without having to worry about finding a fitting specific group which can be challenging as its easier to not get along with someone than it is to.

with the addition they increase the obtainable GC rank 3 to the high commander as a start to see how well liked it is, and add FC content attached to GC be it worked through individual players GC/FC's/or Alliances, course alliance could not be attached to a specific at all since it would be weird for each FC to be attached to a GC then the whole alliance attached to completely different one but thats just a minor point.

this is just an idea to have a way to add content to FC like they tried with diadem but it failed and a few of the reasons was at first it required just your FC and a FC airship which wasn't good the second is the content was never great and rewards mediocre so i believe if we start out with a completely open idea of players can just participate when they want and even with friends of other fc's and no forced attached your specific fc/group it will have the chance of becoming popular.

i know the game could use some more community based content and at least a start/reason to have a FC besides buffs and a FC chat would help.

edit some actual content idea's for FC/GC content.

some basics that isnt super new but would be nice.

FC/alliance quests be it daily/weekly/monthly just something to hop on and do nothing super needy but something to be added that would feel like something a FC can work towards like dungeons run/leves completed/turn in done ect. nothing out of the way or maybe something alittle out of the way if someone more creative can think of something cool.

also maybe fc specific maps to get something needed to upgrade alliances once again nothing super special maybe put some rewards behind these that can only be obtained through this once again nothing crazy but something to get people to try it.

fc/alliance hunts waaay in the past SE wanted to do something with fc primal hunting/summoning but instead of that we can do just fc hunts they could be done some how through it with an item or a quest that can be done some how. could always just attach it to normal hunts but that sounds like it would only cause more problems if its done on anything higher than B rank for obvious reasons.

something dumb but could always take one of the pvp maps and rework it to have an alliance pvp zone it could work like frontlines but instead of queing for it, two fc's could iniate a que/match that you would just have pre made groups already done that could que right in.

this is just some thought with like 5 minutes of pre thought. but i say some more content for FC's would be nice i guess technically they wouldnt need to attach any of it to GC but i feel making a lore reason to attach adventurers/ adventurer FC's to GC would be a plus.

lastly the add a GC to all the major area's ishgard/kugane/thavnair/sharlyan/tural. (this one is my crazy too much work not worth doing at all suggestion but i would like) they removed any and all GC pvp requirments so it would hurt pvp and they could always add them into pvp later that way people could have more choices in GC.

[Catwho]

Transition the Amour over to something more like the WoW Transmog system.

Once you unlock the item, it's automatically marked as "done" like it was a minion, and you can equip it forever and ever going forward.

There's a lot of relic items in particular I had 3-4 expansions ago, but because I never bothered to chuck them into the armoire, they're something I'll have to obtain again if I want to wear them again. Lame!

In a perfect world this would apply to the Glamour Dresser too, but since we're talking about incremental changes, I think the Armoir gear sets are the more logical place to start, since it already stores seasonal items.

[Connor]

Using content like ‘Eureka 7.0 version’ or ‘Criterion dungeon #100’ would be the best bet for these kinds of experimentations, I think. Maybe having them attempt to give players an even wider scope and selection of ‘additional abilities’ (or w/e they call them this time lol) could give them an opportunity to try out giving players more varied and interesting support/non-dps spells and abilities.

I think it’d be cool if they tried gradually moving party support from being entirely passive and fixed to something that’s actively managed by the player and not the 120-sec timer. I mean, they could ofc keep certain ‘big raid buffs’ on the 120-sec timer so it’s not a complete mega change.
Like if healers stole ‘Protect’ and ‘Bravery’ from Bozja and put it in their role skills if it worked lol. Then they could gradually extend that to additional support abilities like Warden’s Paean, Curing Waltz, Lux Solaris, etc. Maybe they could even bring back things like MP restoration skills.
I mean, none of those skills outside of Bravery even have any effect on dps, so it probably wouldn’t be too game/breaking, especially if they developed it gradually.

Additionally if they were going to incremental gameplay changes then making minor adjustments to healer oGCD/GCD balance could make healer gcds actually worth using outside of like day 1 ultimates (exaggerating, a little lol). Making small adjustments over time to rebalance how much they use gcds would mean they could make it more equal without having to ‘pull the rug out’ from under new players and causing them all to destroy the world or w/e lol. But then, it’s a bit more difficult for that kind of things to be ‘played around with’ when developing content (I’d imagine) too, so it’s harder to say like ‘maybe they could use X content for this’.

That said, there’s also extremely little in the way of ‘healer content’ in and of itself. Like when Estinian showed up and done a shield in Dragon’s Aery and you had to keep him alive during it. It’d be nice if general content could have ‘things that are meant for the healer to handle’, and not just ‘die and let tank solo’ lol

[BakoolJaJa]

Back to topic: this game sorely lacks "beta features", instead of throwing everything into a wall and see what it sticks.

Crazy, I swear you just opened my eyes. Somehow, until now, I genuinely never realized that this game has no beta testing of anything whatsoever, when every other MMO I know does.

And it's not only huge MMOs like WoW that do it. LOTRO is a small, ancient, niche MMO and even they have a test server where they roll out new features/instances/class changes/etc before they actually go live with them. It makes a HUGE difference. It cannot be overstated just how important this kind of stuff is. It can save the devs so much time and a lot of headache that they go through when they release yet another content flop. Like you say, many of the critical issues become so obvious if you actually let the players try it for even a short amount of time.

They'd never change anything like that at this point though. This feedback will also never get "monitored" along with 99% of all other feedback.