Melbourne International games week Interview about content

[AnimaAnimus]

It isn't even just F2P games at this point as Raven2014 pointed out. I started playing WoW very casually due to a friend being curious about it. Just to compare timelines here:

Dawntrail released ( Early Access June 28th) July 2nd and the first major content update in Early November.

WoW: The War Within released ( Early Access August 22nd) August 26th and the first major content patch is the anniversary event starting on October 22nd.

Now you can make a lot of complaints about WoW but the point here is they have nailed a far better content cadence and this only is addresseing retail. For your WoW sub you also have access to all the Classic servers as well along with any event mode they put up like Plunderstorm or Timerunning past expansions. I know Blizzard may be an unfair comparison as they do have a large team and now Microsoft's backing but they absolutely have nailed release schedule.

TWW also released with Delves already in place, which was a fun little piece of content that you could group or solo and gave us a fun lil piece of content to do in the meantime that was leaps and bounds more interesting than 4 square arena bosses.

And the biggest twist, this time FFXIV needs to take a look at how WoW is handling their story and try to replicate the experience cause TWW story > Yawntrail. They also need to look at how Bliz, for all their faults, actually sat down, looked closely at player grievences and thought good and hard on how they could address them. Where as SE looks at random comments or tweets and does random things that only that 1 or 2 streamers wanted, put minimal effort into it, then get shocked when they get negative feedback.

[BabyYoda]

average answer from Mr. Yoshi P.. "Please look forward to it"

However.. I don't trust Mr. Yoshi P on this one, Yoshi P has bad record creating activities that will take longer time to finish, bozja which is breath of fresh air isn't type of content that we want it had a horrible execution on grinding mater, people so hungry that they loved it because it is bad is better than worst or you could say "this mode make me play my favorite game more".

F2P games, full price games, other mmos figure it out.. FFXIV require more work than EW and DT content combined to make the game much more fun.. you can actually loose track of your time spending it with digital world, it is just too much to believe him at this point.

for those people who like the story, I do say story will not recover any time soon, for those who like new content.. we will not get any new content it will be copy paste with little sparkles on top.

I don't expect much and I am not interested.. developers history to stick with the basics and my guts tells me nothing will change.. FFXIV is just a cash cow for Square enix and I want to find a better game to waste my best time with, sadly not anytime soon.

[Stasya]

QA Tester (this is logical as they have over 100 of these)

Yeah this guy is 99% working on SE and 1% white knight. There is NO qa testers beside devs themselves.

Prove me wrong. TOP p3 bug you will find it if you actually play (yet players had to playtest). If you care about this game even more, you can notice SMN talent bug for DT (and yet actual devs rejected bug report on this forum about it, while poking fun of people who pay subs because their bad work culture does not allow to work more than one month every 4 months).

"trust me bro they are working HARD on this game"

[Jeeqbit]

Prove me wrong.

I don't need to. You can simply look at the credits at the end of the MSQ yourself via The Unending Journey. I counted them quite recently and altogether it is actually more than 100 and I recall them stating this when explaining their workflow in one of their development panels (where they go over someone's entire job and workflow).

Just because a few bugs slip through doesn't really mean much. I'd say I've seen more bugs in other games than this one. The game has a lot of annoying things, like targeting, annoying animation delays on Abilities, snapshotting which is not intuitive to new players, but I wouldn't actually call them bugs so much as poor design choices.

[genuine_stranger]

Then none of what you're saying really related to anything I'm saying. That's why I specifically said "modern F2P" in my post. All of the F2P I play are 2020+. I hate the fact that every time F2P comes up, the discussion immideately shift to the gambling/addiction because people seems to get stuck with the old bias/stereotype that's hardly applied any more. I wasn't talking about that, what I want to pointed out is objectively speaking, a lot of modern F2P games are just simply ... a better game, specfically they feel like a game made after 2020, whether FF14 felt like a PS3 era game most of the time.


And you know what, I guess that's why you see the shift in Yoshi's tone in this interview. Comparing to the old F2P games, FF14 did really stood a step above and Yoshi knew he was offering something better than the rest of the market. That's why he could say "it's ok people to quit and play other games" because he knew players always gonna come back to FF14 simply because it was the better value. But now I think he's waking up to the fact that it's no longer the case, and the modern F2P games are giving his game a real argument about where players can spend their money.

^This.

I am playing 2 F2P games currently and spend around 20 - €30 a month on them combined. For what it's worth, they offer me a better value per money spent than FFXIV. I can log in for 30*min - 1h daily, make some progress and move on.
Truth be told, I got caught off guard and spent far too much money on one than I'm comfortable with, but that's the stupid tax. Learned my lesson after that.

Compared to 14, where I don't have any meaningful long-term progression for my character, so I log in maybe once every two weeks check on my retainers and log out.

[Jeeqbit]

Compared to 14, where I don't have any meaningful long-term progression for my character, so I log in maybe once every two weeks check on my retainers and log out.

So what is meaningful, long-term progression to you? What do these other games do that makes you feel that way?

I personally feel that FFXIV offers that for me personally, but I get it may not for others if they are not interested in the same things as me.

[Volgia]

I don't know, I find myself disagreeing with a lot of people on this post on why people are leaving the game, some of them are just tired of playing the same game with the same formula for 10 years and the world is currently shifting, the old population that might have started in their 20s are now entering a new stage on life, there's too many variables regardless on how good or bad the content might end up being.

I almost know for a fact that by the time 8.0 drops I'll likely be dropping out of the game, cuz I am ready to move on with my life to something else.

[genuine_stranger]

So what is meaningful, long-term progression to you? What do these other games do that makes you feel that way?

I personally feel that FFXIV offers that for me personally, but I get it may not for others if they are not interested in the same things as me.

A system, or rather various systems, I can work on which allow me a casual approach to gain and access power for my character.
Gear, power systems, and various other things which I can gradually optimize. I can launch the game, put an hour in and still feel like I made progress in some way, shape or form.

In 14, we just got gear, and if you don't raid, there is not even a point hopping onto that treadmill because it will become irrelevant in the x.2 and x.4 patches.

[Brightamethyst]

So what is meaningful, long-term progression to you? What do these other games do that makes you feel that way?

FFXIV's biggest problem right now is that there's very little incentive to actually log in and play every day. If you're a new player with a decade of content ahead of you, sure, but for veterans? Almost all major content is one and done things (MSQ, role quests, etc) and even the things that are repeatable don't serve a whole lot of purpose beyond the basics. Yeah, I could run the same 2 (3 at launch!) dungeons in roulette every day for umpteen weeks or months, but to what end? While I enjoy most FFXIV content in general, very little of it is sustainable past the first couple of weeks.

Compare to other games where the are daily quests, rep grinds, more varied weekly events, bigger random dungeon pools, etc. And yes, not everyone likes all, or even any of those things, and even if you do like them they will eventually wear thin after you've finished the grind or gotten all the rewards you want, or whatever, but the options are there.

[Raven2014]

I don't know, I find myself disagreeing with a lot of people on this post on why people are leaving the game, some of them are just tired of playing the same game with the same formula for 10 years and the world is currently shifting, the old population that might have started in their 20s are now entering a new stage on life, there's too many variables regardless on how good or bad the content might end up being.

I almost know for a fact that by the time 8.0 drops I'll likely be dropping out of the game, cuz I am ready to move on with my life to something else.

While that's certainly part of the reason, I think there is one important factor to consider is as people get older, they tend to become better with recognizing the value of money. The younger me would usually throw 50-60$ at a new 8-12hours long games without much thought despite having very little me. The current me, despite having a lot more money, are now only buying games which I believe offering me good value. That is why my original argument is mainly about the value offered by FF14.

There is a saying: in business you try to find the maximum amount of money you can charge the customer right before they turn away, and offer the least amount of service before the point they gonna complain. And I can't help but notice FF14 has been trying to do that for years (i.e extending patch time and decrease amount of contents), and now reaching and cross over that breaking point. Especially with how competitors are now offering better value.