Ffxiv monthly sub isn't stretching & response to PCGAMER article

[VerdeLuck]

I definitely feel what they're saying as a primarily casual player. There is minimal casual content being dropped while it feels like most of the new stuff is either extremely niche to high end raiders like savage, chaos, and ultimate or it's niche to ff11 or foray fans.
We used to get trials and dungeons in new patches, it wasn't just loading in, do 2 hours of story, do 1 dungeon, and then log out and that's your content for 5 months.

I have to assume this is an overcorrection from endwalker where raiders were complaining there was a lack of rewards and "midcore" raider content, so SE overcorrected and frontloaded this expansion with their stuff. Still feels absolutely terrible to have minimal things to do, and I can't even justify having this game installed anymore with how slow they are to drip feed things to do for casuals.

Overally the game currently has the stink of MVP: Minimum Viable Product. They have everything templated out and we have a bunch of newbie designers and new workers just churning out tested known good content without much variation. All the good senior devs are off working on new projects and have been pulled off of FFXIV. It feels so shallow and low effort, like they're testing the lmits of how little they can give us while we still take it and keep subbed.

[HeyMcFly]

I think xiv should take some inspiration from WoW's gear progression system, allowing more ways to become geared & more 4-man content to do-
Currently, XIV's hard content can be summed up to just 8-man only content.

The raid & Fate scene needs some reinventing.
-Fates reward character lvl equivalent piece of gear. (All mentioned in further detail below)
-Introduction of world quests/ world fates & reward cosmetics, one high ilvl gear/container based on character level in open world.
-Crafters being able to make legendary/savage BiS gear

The 8man hard content needs the time between release extended from one another, as well as more rewarding hard content in between.
I've completed nearly every tier of savage raids while they're current only for then a few months later, to have the gear be quickly replaced & eventually realized there's nothing after to work towards. Even Ultimates can be quickly narrowed down to more "8-man content with a cosmetic or two"

Other things I'd like to see in xiv are:
24-man extreme, savage and nightmare style content (I know there's something similar being released but will there be gear & will the gear be BiS? How rewarding will doing that content be & is it worth repeating?)
4-man extreme, savage & nightmare content- Rewards BiS ilvl full set of gear that has the same gear progression as savage raids.

Crafters being able to make savage equivalent gear & being able to make mounts. A ballpark suggestion: To make BiS savage equivalent gear, they'd have to obtain very limited resources(daily or weekly) that allow crafting BiS gear (savage raid & svg Dungeon level gear) But to get the resource, crafters can gather limited mats that can make the material they need, something that can only be done in a similar limited capacity as obtaining BiS gear with svg content or they can clear the savage trial/raid/dungeon to get mats. (guaranteed drop) Or they can only craft 1 savage piece of gear a week. Basically; Crafters don't have to do the hard battle content- they can literally just gather x amount of mats to then synthesize it into z mats then turn it into y mat and enough of y mats makes savage equivalent BiS gear. There are better ways I can word this, so please don't jump my case.
It may sound clunky & unnecessary, but with the right fine tuning, it can work.

Each Fate & World quest should reward different things such as mounts, bardings, cosmetics, high Ilvl Gear based on characters level (but the gear level is capped, example: if you're in a stormblood map at level 100, you will be rewarded the max level of stormbloods level cap which was 70.) World quests can be limited to 1 weekly reward, while Fate rewards limited to a daily drop to stop the zerging & then quickly abandoned zones but keeping the bicolor gemstone rewards given from doing fates; those should remain untouched.

[Hallarem]

Third time I've said this on these forums, but FFXIV is a single player game in the skinsuit of an MMO.

Either FFXIV needs an innovative force or SE to give them enough funds and leash to experiment.
Because there's only two possible reasons that I'm suspecting are the main cause for this:

- SE isn't giving enough room for FFXIV to take risks or giving them budget, because the money keeps coming in, so why bother?
- Yoshi-P's formula is on repeat and the devs are happy with it, because it makes their workflow easier, and makes everything release on schedule at the cost of any innovation or risk, but the money keeps coming in, so why bother?

Lack of competition, in my opinion is the main culprit here. WoW or FFXIV, that's your option, those are the main two. Everything else is niche or some Korean garbo pay to win fiesta with an amazing character creation kit that whales will try and convince you is the "new best MMO" just so they can roll all over you with their credit card gear.

WoW is trying to focus on the story now, because it has always been the weak part, the gameplay has been it's strong suit though it suffered bloat.

FFXIV has flashy gameplay, but the systems and substance is lacking, gear doesn't matter really, there's no gearing progression, there's no build up of power and seeing how it affects your character in unison to the world around you (open world), there's no common, rare, epic, legendary, there's nothing rare that drops with that rng feel that matters, why bother farming anything from mobs either cause you can just buy the items from vendors, stats don't matter really, jobs barely are different from one another, why would I bother even touching endgame when the next patch gives me a craftable for free that's better. Everything is just the same MASS. Streamlined, boring. Still the best MMO for RP, hence why I still pay a sub, but man oh man is the gameplay boring after you complete the main stuff. (Though pvp can be fun from time to time, cause the jobs play different.) And all this has become very very visible when the story actually sucked for the first time properly.

FFXIV is lucky Riot hasn't come up with their MMO yet, because if they unleashed those catgirl and foxgirl, birdgirl Vastaya's to rival Miqo's and more with more character customization, better gameplay, a company that actually supports their projects with A LAAARGE AMOUNT OF BANK and that new MMO feel? FFXIV would bleed players.

[HeyMcFly]

There also needs to be plenty of casual content to do- The Fates & world quests I suggested is meant to be in part that casual content but also, players shouldn't be thrown into the power-gear cycle if they don't want to be. More content that people can just drop-in-and-out of when it comes to gear or whatnot.
Other suggestions that wouldn't fit in 1 post I have are Seasonal trials/ dungeons.
These events always come up in the respected season & while they can give the same past rewards, doing the content when a new season is up rewards new cosmetics.
Example: Halloween should let players get into a Halloween/spooky themed dungeon or Trial- upon completing, each player is rewarded a title or achievement & some currency for the Halloween cosmetics & also a chance at a rare mount drop which allows for repeated tries.

The story is there, (even if Welcome-Mat should not be the one to lead our story in DT)
I could go on about the issues with DT's story progression & why the heck certain NPCs didn't need to be there or why it felt like AI wrote the dialogue pertaining to our WoL seeing our old companions again. It's not like our character saved anyone, brought anyone back from the brink or had any sort of connection to each scion in their own way- no, just sum it all up to soulless writing & cliche, pointless dialogue.

[Reinha]

It really makes me sad, because some of the time I've spent playing this game has been some of the best MMO play I've ever experienced.

I desperately need another MMO to try.

It's the opposite for me. I think Dawntrail has finally cured my MMO addiction after 14 years of playing nothing but WoW and then FFXIV. Starting out as a noob in WoW was magical and I made great memories there. Even found a husband. Over time they changed character models, redesigned classes in a major way and completely shit the bed when writing the story in addition to having year long content droughts. The devs were arrogant and didn't care. Then I found FFXIV, a game that did everything right and had devs who listened. I finally dropped WoW and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner. After enjoying this game for almost a decade I see it walking in the footsteps of the other game and I know where it's headed. This is the second time for me where I'm playing an MMO and the magic is just gone. I don't think I'll ever invest time into another MMO again because even the best ones disappointed me in the end and erased the things I liked. It's a lot of money to spend on something without save files that would allow me to go back to when it was still good.

There is a huge backlog of games for me to try now on my husband's steam and ps5 accounts. Witcher and Baldurs Gate might be fun. I'm also thinking of playing Sims 4 which I bought but never delved into.

[BabyYoda]

I have lost my faith, since DT there was 2 LL from Yoshi P team and we didn't get any clear direction of what will be the changes if this says something it says "We don't know what we are doing so please look forward" and I am not ready for another 2.5 years 8.0 doesn't look promising.

any game that actually respect players will show a roadmap of how the game will be changing, since Yoshi mention that things will change, I don't trust it. no roadmap, no guidelines, no interest points, nothing.

[ZephyrMenodora]

I hate throwing around the term 'maintenance mode' for games that obviously aren't in maintenance mode, but DT feels like the prelude to that, at least in terms of gameplay.

I really get the impression that most of their good talent is just bored of developing XIV. They want to probably improve their resumes with developing more modern games for high-end PCs and the new consoles, explore new engines, etc. I think this is why their A team moved on to FF16 and whatever their next project is, leaving us behind....well, what we have now.

The owners seem to have little to no respect for XIV, using it as an ATM for whatever mediocre to failed project they want to release next, always chasing a new audience and just taking their loyal customers for granted.

I'm just talking out my butt, but I think they are devoting as little time, talent, and money to XIV as they can get away with without it actually being in maintenance.

[Ardeth]

Wow is just in a better position at the moment. Ironically, messing up their 20th anniversary event and selling a $90 mount hasn't slowed them down.

There's absolutely nothing to do in the game right now. We are getting announcements about what is coming, but in the here and now, there is nothing. Meanwhile, Wow is bursting at the seams.

Also delves. They're so good. Please steal them Yoshi P. Steal them wholesale. The FF version would suck. Just keep the Wow version. It's so good.

[Raim]

You know a game isn't doing well when most of the replies are stuff like "Akshually its totally normal to be unsubbed most of the time and not feel like you want to play the game, just quit!"

[caffe_macchiato]

The good news is 1 month subs exist so you can subscribe for just 1 month then return at next patch. This is what most people seem to have done for many, many years.

Are you sure that's a winning argument? Because that goes against what you and Yoshi-P argued last year. Your side wanted less content going forward so that we could have more time to play other games. That's a change. And you're saying there was no change. Why are you gaslighting?

If SE wants people to subscribe for more months than that, then they'll make content stretch longer for the players that are unsubscribing.

Correct, so when are the proper months to subscribe? Just the first month of the patch, right? It would be nice if our subs could automatically end after that first month instead of being on auto-renew. Because if that's how the game is meant to be played, then the Mog Station doesn't automatically do this and it should be fixed.

I can't personally relate though, because the fact of the matter is there are grinds for casual non-raiders

Wait, so there is content? The game doesn't respect your time? Which one is it? Because right now you're arguing for two opposite things at once. You want a game with no content so you can play other games, while also wanting content so you don't have to do that. Remember why you hate WoW? Because it has content, which means you're forced to play the game. Right? No content = no force. You treat FFXIV as that kind of an MMO, yet you don't want it to be.