Yoshii P wants to know why people are leaving

[Lyndina]

Gonna be honest...played for almost 10 years now and never was at a lowpoint like that. When i log in i look at my character and the "weekly" stuff i have to do. So Khloes Adventure Book and getting the Tomestone cap. And i cant even do that anymore. I dont really care about FF11 so the upcoming Allyraid is nothing i look forward to. DT Raidseries looks good...but i can do those once they are all released. My Guild went from 10 people online daily to...well..just me when i have the urge to stand around and do nothing. Everyone else plays destiny or other stuff. We had some talk over on discord last week and yeah...most of them see no reason to login. Nothing to do right now, even the ally raid wont pull them back, because..."by the time its out, the gear from there is useless anyway". So yeah...i think this ship is sinking and i'm not gonna stick around anymore. Last month after always having an 6 month sub running. Dont know if i use it for anything or just ignore the game. Played Wow for a long time too, and after it burned so many bridges before i finally said goodbye. Yeah...not doing the same with FF14. call it a quick and final cut.

[Hallarem]

Can't say it enough, this isn't an MMO, an MMO wants to keep you playing and provides you activity for your money. A MONTHLY sub.

This is a raiding lockout simulator with just enough fashion on the side to appease the casuals PRETENDING to be an MMO, but even that magic is wearing out. This game needs a major gameplay shift, job shift, and needs to redo it's whole make-up, add more QoL, character customization and fix it's broken or early access features like hats.

[TBerry]

Can't say it enough, this isn't an MMO, an MMO wants to keep you playing and provides you activity for your money. A MONTHLY sub.

This is a raiding lockout simulator with just enough fashion on the side to appease the casuals PRETENDING to be an MMO, but even that magic is wearing out. This game needs a major gameplay shift, job shift, and needs to redo it's whole make-up, add more QoL, character customization and fix it's broken or early access features like hats.

It did keep me playing personally, so does that mean it's still an MMO to me?
Maybe you just experience fatigue. I did too, but you know what I did? More roleplay. Went on Light, and took part in an arena fight similar to the Lynx, with an alt.

[Ghost_of_Ebina]

I just cleared DT with my second character, while also playing another character through ARR.
One thing I noticed is how you really don't have a "home" in DT.

In ARR, you had Waking Sands and Rising Stones, which sort of served as a "home" for random NPCs until the end of EW.
There I was able to interact with characters that were an important part of the plot during past iterations, which made me feel everything is connected in some way.
To me this gave the overall setting / character a believable and relatable dimension that was also connected with my experiences in the game.
In a way I felt like "oh, good to be back home" when I enter the Waking Sands and Rising Stones (even to this day, when I see characters in those places it makes me happy)

With DT, they tossed all of that and they didn't introduce too many memorable NPCs such as Wuk Evu... nobody else was really memorable and seemed to just be one-dimensional.
Compare that with characters like Edda, Hoary Boulder, Noraxia, Biggs & Wegde, the leaders of each of the main city-states... and many more. They even have character development.
Even the old dude Isildore you meet in front of some dungeons goes through character development. DT has zero of that which made the experience fairly dry.
It is hard to say if Wuk Lamat had character development. Krile had a great opportunity but the execution was abrupt with little build-up or focus.
Erenville seems like he may have had some good character development, but I think they withheld the tension too much to the point it was a bit annoying.

[Volgia]

I would like to add, that the MSQ could be top tier, like say God of War Ragnarok or Last of Us I, and I'd still be pondering if I should leave.

A lot of the people in the thread have said that the content is predictable, but I think we are kind of missing one of the points that since Shadowbringers they've been designing content around what was easy, things like the lack of aggro making dungeons completely braindead instead of improving it. That's what they do, because it's easier and cheaper to design it that way, even if it's boring.

These changes to what's easier to deliver and cheaper to design have some brutal consequences. Remember when casting Medica 2 would mean you'd be eaten by mobs? That doesn't matter anymore, because you don't have to think about healing unless it is to map out on hard content.

I don't wanna get into the specifics of each job issues, it's just the development of FFXIV design philosophy that has me jaded. Instead of building on something the tendency seems to simplify it because it's just easier to do it that way. and it's just making the game bland.

[Jeeqbit]

lack of aggro making dungeons completely braindead instead of improving it. That's what they do, because it's easier and cheaper to design it that way

That's not why. They made aggro easier so that it's intuitive for new players, many of whom simply never ever came to understand tanking at all.

You would get PLD's that would spam their enmity combo endlessly in tank stance ignoring the rest of their rotation, tanks that would spam 1 button, obviously you still get tanks that can't use mitigation - that's after they get through the all-to-common "tanxiety". So making tanking more intuitive so that more people would tank was their goal and it did work. We had at least a relatively small but significant increase in tanks. Significant because that shifts the balance of queues and how much PFs fill, to where sometimes tanks have queues while healers don't.

These changes to what's easier to deliver and cheaper to design have some brutal consequences.

The difference in design is also to make it more intuitive. As in, better telegraphed (instead of saying you should wipe and figure it out), no "annoying" mechanics which there are lots of in ARR and Heavensward.

This has nothing to do with being cheaper/easier, and everything to do with making the product look high quality, polished and easy to understand for new players.

Again, in the past, to this day even, people will do old "Hard Mode" dungeons and not understand the mechanics. Why? Because they are not telegraphed. The dungeons don't feel polished due to that. Take Lost City HM for example - people will just aim the AoEs at you and cleave you because they don't know the mechs and rack up lots of vulns on you. In the dungeons since Shadowbringers, that would all be telegraphed and made more obvious so that the "average player" gets it right first try.

It's actually this very point that they were talking about reversing in Dawntrail to some extent, so that people have to figure it out again by wiping a few times. Because it has pros and cons. It's nice for it to be enough of a challenge that people wipe, but it's not nice when you go through the dungeon and most people never figure out the mechanics even after years of playing.

Instead of building on something the tendency seems to simplify it because it's just easier to do it that way. and it's just making the game bland.

It is true that SE just removes things instead of improving them though. If X thing is redundant or unused or annoying, instead of changing it to something better, they just remove it. Examples being TP, damage types, elemental stats, protect, detrimental status effects applied by mobs.

[Saidosha]

My hot take remains that the XIV solo experience actually isn't all that great and that forcing multiplayer under the umbrella of MMO expectation is not for the better. People should organically want to come together for fun and assisting others, but when difficulty tends to boil down to doing the dance while meeting DPS and body checks, the formula gets stale pretty quick. Otherwise, non-combat activities are fairly lackluster. Systems that also don't rely on combat per se, like glams, are mired in an archaic system no one seems to like of which we're told nothing can be done. Anyone who's been around live service games long enough knows that's just PR speak for not wanting to spend the money to revamp the system. Those with a wider awareness of SE's situation also know XIV is basically the only thing keeping the company afloat as the trend of bad decisions from higher ups has them bleeding cash left and right. This includes botching the easy layup of the VII remake and turning it into mini-game hell.

I used to do things like max all crafts and overmeld gear, but when I came to terms with the fact I was really just wasting gil because the economy is never allowed to exceed the instanced content scene and making my own stuff was hardly an accomplishment. Forget about selling things in a bot/RMT-laden MB field. I want crafting and gathering to matter, though, and not just for the insatiable small percentage of players that want more and more endgame raids. This goes on to tie into how the housing system is garbage and the retention timer is predatory even though there exists players who want to build things... and I don't just mean houses. Personal challenge dungeons, jump puzzles, personalized RP venues, and more are all potential creative and entertainment outlets that presently just try to do what they can with little scraps they're given. Heck, even the instrumental/song system is bogged down by minimalism because no one's allowed to have nice things with music on the internet anymore.

Could I go on to present revisions of various content or even new proposals altogether? Certainly. Would it do any good? Fat chance. I don't buy into the self-defeating spiel that a game trying to appeal to everyone winds up appealing to no one. MMOs, if anything, are the very genre to prove that's a falsehood. However, the bigger problem with the games industry today is that giving players what they want is not the focus, it's what will best make the lines go up for stockholders. And they don't like volatility, which in turn encourages the rigid, repetitive expansion cycle XIV has lived on for a while now. Actual sit-downs and conversations with players could tell you where things like Island Sanctuary would go wrong even before implementation if we actually had some insight. I have no hope for DT's equivalent to Eureka, as earlier soloist gripe aside, I had some other issues with it and Bozja that encouraged some bad habits or unnatural play. Regardless, SE has their metrics and all sorts of internal data to tell them what players are doing or aren't. When you aren't giving people variety, you're not going to get a fair read on interest and enjoyment when the alternate is having nothing to do. Sunken cost fallacy may keep some suckered in, but others have no issue taking prolonged breaks if not leaving entirely.

[Volgia]

Snip

Well they did it with mechs too, it's simplified to the point of lazy design, you can tell the 2 min meta was done to streamline their design, you can tell the removal of TP, damage types and all the things you mentioned were to make it easier to deliver content, despite the interesting potential of them. Maybe those elemental stats coulda meant that there was content where you needed more Water/Fire resist to clear it? But it got dropped.

I've seen a lot of people say that they like it better this way because it's more accessible and everything felt like unneeded fluff, but there's a difference between making things more accessible so your players know what to do and how to play the game, and simplifying things so anyone can do it with their eyes closed (All of Endwalker comes to mind).

Things improved a little in 7.0, but not enough to hold my interest past this expansion. Again I go back to my point, I'm not sure if it's because the game needs improving or because I'm growing apart of it.

[sindriiisgaming]

So, a while back I heard that Yoshii P wanted to know why people were leaving FFXIV.

Citation needed

[sindriiisgaming]

For all the issues retail WoW has had in the past few expansions, you can't deny that the foundation they built back in 2004 still shines brightly as one of the best examples of immersive MMO gameplay, and they haven't done a half-bad job of reinforcing it over the years.

I'm too much of a post-Cata andy to really enjoy Classic WoW content that much, but I might give Turtle a try later.

im amazed your allowed to have that signature tag given that its photoshopped and contains false information that could cause damage to ffxiv or yoshiP