Yoshii P wants to know why people are leaving

[Arzalis]

Imo, it's because they don't really solve any of the issues around systems that do keep players subscribed and playing. You wanna decorate houses and play around with that system between patches? Better get one somehow. You want to collect glamours and make outfits? Limited slots there and tons of arbitrary limitations, sorry. Even the achievement system seems to be mostly forgotten about by the devs.

One of the easiest things you can do to keep people engaged and playing is essentially collection/decoration type stuff, but the FFXIV devs just kind of refuse to acknowledge/address it and have for a decade. It's a shame too because the long term stuff like this we have is pretty close, but they just seemingly don't care to put that last 10-20% in to make them actually good. They just kind of called it good enough and now they just joke about it on the live letter instead of doing anything meaningful.

Actually, I actually think the "good enough" mentality kind of defines the last few years of FFXIV to me.

[Asari5]

i'm a collector and yet i dont feel any motivation to collect barely anything in this game.
triple triads mostly.
minion and mounts.... well, i lose motivation overall when there are mounts locked behind too much of a grind. which is the problem of many achievements. either they are like 'do that once' or they are 'do that 10000 times'.
and i dont think there are any fun achievements. other games have stuff like achievements for no death runs (which wouldnt even be fun to get in ff14) or achievements for beating content in a certain way (which wouldnt work either because all the fights are very basic and samey).
from what i heared wow has a ton of achievement who arent just 'do that content x times'

i'm looking at the hunt mounts and am like: 'seriously? how is that reasonable for a working (which means 2/3 of your day is gone) person?
and the devs are like: 'hunts arent supposed to be done how the community does it'
oh yes we are supposed to kill 1000 s-ranks with 5 day (?) respawn timer without the hunt community. which brings several questions on the table like 'how to spawn?' 'when is it possible to spawn if you may not even know when the last one was killed?'
if youre unlucky you're at work or asleep... good luck in 5 days again.

and then there is glam. i would absolutely try to get all the glam... if its like in wow or in eso a collectable thing. but it isnt.

for collectors this game is garbage

[Shieara]

For me personally, I'm considering leaving due to how unstable the servers are. Between the frequent DDOS attacks, and what I've been told is a bad node between me and the servers, it's hard to actually play.

There's plenty of stuff I want to get into if the game will allow me to do it.

[Catwho]

Sometimes the answer is that the game didn't do anything wrong. Sometimes you just fall out of love with a game. Another game comes along and you want to spend time in that one instead.

An MMO is a massive time ask, and if people want to go do other things, then they are going to do them instead, and probably unsub.

Content like Bozja and Eureka can keep some of the player base engaged, but not everyone wants a big juicy grind. Some people really do just want stories.

Edit: The bad node is in San Jose and that's an NTT problem, not a Square Enix problem. Unfortunately, it's between our ISPs and NTT. A VPN can work around it in some cases if it reroutes you past the NTT node in San Jose.

[Metafron]

I came to the forums to say exactly what the OP said. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the game, especially after Shadowbringers, but it's gotten way too repetitious and It's killing my motivation to even log in and I seriously HATE that. Like I really enjoyed the raids, but it's the same old routine. The game needs more fresh ideas on multiple fronts. Everything just feels so cookie cutter. Like jobs need more flavor; I feel like once Ive played 1 dps, ive basically played them all, or healer, or tank. They have little differences here and there, but nothing that REALLY makes them feel distinct imo. It's so homogenized that it's being drained of fun.

[Voidmage]

That's what flight amounts to, isn't it – quick traversal past objects you had to go the long way around on foot?

Even if you don't consider them equivalent, flight would quickly make such paths obsolete, to the point that it probably wouldn't be worth the time to program them.

I'm not sure how Genshin works specifically, but for RPGs in general, "a path that can only be traversed with a special method" is only really useful as a way of locking parts of zones off until you progress further and acquire that method.

Mounts can't be a progression-blocking method here because every player has already acquired them. If you wanted to make it significant then it needs to introduce some new way of traversal entirely – in the past we had the addition of flight (reach things above ground) and swimming (reach things below the water), but what other dimensions of movement can be added after that? The only thing I can think of spontaneously is some kind of dimensional shifting to go around impassable objects, but that might be a bit much to pile on top of the game's already convoluted cosmology. And still you could only "give" it once and then any further uses of it are just routine.

No, the question originally was how to make questing more interesting.
Making a path in quests mount only for that quests wouldn’t be made obsolete by flying.
For the MSQ flying wouldn’t even be an issue because you don’t have it yet for that zone.

Mini games also wouldn’t be made obsolete, something like the chocoborace in FFX.

It’s really just a matter of wanting to do it.
You don’t need to implement a new system just make it so for example a cave NEEDS a mount for a quest.

[ovIm]

Sometimes the answer is that the game didn't do anything wrong. Sometimes you just fall out of love with a game. Another game comes along and you want to spend time in that one instead.

While not wrong, consider this - more times than once, I found myself wanting to play FF14, but not finding any current content I actually wanted to play. Right now, all I do is PVP, because my interests are more in line with Deep Dungeon, Variant, or Field Operation content.
What I want to say is: sometimes you love the game, but the game does not love you back.

[BabyYoda]

Bring back 3 month cycle. 4.5 is just too much

[Darnath]

Bring back 3 month cycle. 4.5 is just too much

This is gonna be the reason (not rest) I'll leave, at least until 7.2
7.0 was long enough
7.1 with only the Ultimate and Alliance Raid (once a week for an upgrade token) for 4.5 months along with a trial to do once and no more for the side story? And I'll probably have most of my DoW/DoM jobs levelled up by early 7.1 anyways.

I'm a DF Denizen so Extreme's and Higher are off my radar. Besides CLL and Daliridum I freaking LOVED Bojza. A bit less punitive than Eureka (which I didn't experience in its heyday) and was a great place to level alt jobs that were in the Shadowbringers realm. I thought the 4.5 month cycle was because of COVID difficulties but that's a good chunk over now. Go back to 3 months, or even 3.5.

[Folsom]

Bring back 3 month cycle. 4.5 is just too much

This is something I'd like to see as well. There just isn't enough content to go 4.5 months; the only thing that keeps me subbed is for the whole time is the fact that housing gets auto-demoed. Otherwise, I'd play the new content, linger around for another month gearing my jobs, and then take a break until the next patch. If content came out faster, it'd be a lot better.