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

[Hallarem]

not now but they kinda turn into a direction we saw from blizzard. Hope they will get the turn around and remember the roots

I quit before Shadowlands released, before their weirdness to sniff chairs and drink breastmilk began to be shown in public. I assure you, it's the same blizzard with worsening and worsening monetization strategies year by year and I vowed to never give them a dime of my money ever again when I quit. I started in actual vanilla WoW.
The lore is a mess, the characters are a mess, the story is a mess, the gameplay is a bloated mess. The only way to make it "good" is to reboot it.

But people forget, even if they brought Metzen for nostalgia brownies (Trust me, thats the only reason he was brought back, he himself said that he doesnt have creative control.)
Its the same people, its the same people in the studio that have been mucking up the game forever. They hook you in with pretty cinematics, and people who have connected their personality with the game are too stubborn to quit or all their friends are there. I was one of those people, the people that play WoW hate WoW mostly, but still play cause its the only thing for them.

[Jeeqbit]

A commitment to “we might address it just not at a rate you seem fast enough” is a bit rich when they’re sat behind their army of white knights telling people to go play other games for nigh on 3 expansions now

How many players have they already churned from their glacial pace and their stream of bad decisions

It's hard to say, but my feeling is the statistics grow in spite of it but could grow a lot more if the churn was reduced.

The churn isn't even just endgame complaints like we see on the forums. It's also all those little things along the way while people do the MSQ that turns them off. They can overlook one thing, but after enough times they're done. It's very common for people to say they tried "several times" to get through MSQ before the game stuck for them.

[Supersnow845]

It's hard to say, but my feeling is the statistics grow in spite of it but could grow a lot more if the churn was reduced.

The churn isn't even just endgame complaints like we see on the forums. It's also all those little things along the way while people do the MSQ that turns them off. They can overlook one thing, but after enough times they're done. It's very common for people to say they tried "several times" to get through MSQ before the game stuck for them.

So if you have an MSQ that’s hostile to progression of new players then I’m SUREEEEEEEE actively churning your veterans by telling them to go away is really a winning strategy

[Kisshu]

Looking at FFXIV and then ZZZ, it's a very different impressions I get of both.

Both launched early July.
ZZZ operates with patches every 40-45 days. We're already at 1.2 and 1.3 is dropping November 6th.
While there are differences in the games (ZZZ being single, gacha, and shorter instances), they both have story parts in their patches. ZZZ is roughly the same length or slightly shorter than the FFXIV type patch-story, but the quality is so much higher. The simple stand around and talk cutscene is fully voice acted, and then it also gets a lot of fully rendered cutscenes with character movements that FFXIV has never reached (1.1 patch had 7 mins of this, 1.2 had 12 mins).
On top of that, tons of events, new mini-game that's a full Vampire Survivor clone, 2-3 new characters, new combat minions.
And sure, it's F2P gacha that's meant to drain your wallet, but if you can save up the pull-currency instead of using it right away, you can easily save up for some characters that you want.

But then looking at FFXIV, it almost feels glacial in its delivery of the game and content.

[Daralii]

Looking at FFXIV and then ZZZ, it's a very different impressions I get of both.

Both launched early July.
ZZZ operates with patches every 40-45 days. We're already at 1.2 and 1.3 is dropping November 6th.
While there are differences in the games (ZZZ being single, gacha, and shorter instances), they both have story parts in their patches. ZZZ is roughly the same length or slightly shorter than the FFXIV type patch-story, but the quality is so much higher. The simple stand around and talk cutscene is fully voice acted, and then it also gets a lot of fully rendered cutscenes with character movements that FFXIV has never reached (1.1 patch had 7 mins of this, 1.2 had 12 mins).
On top of that, tons of events, new mini-game that's a full Vampire Survivor clone, 2-3 new characters, new combat minions.
And sure, it's F2P gacha that's meant to drain your wallet, but if you can save up the pull-currency instead of using it right away, you can easily save up for some characters that you want.

But then looking at FFXIV, it almost feels glacial in its delivery of the game and content.

Mihoyo has a very rigid 6-week patch cycle for at least 4 of their 6 games. The only deviation I'm aware of in the last 4 years is when a second wave of covid lockdowns hit Shanghai, one patch had to get extended because they couldn't work, and then some subsequent patches were slightly truncated so they could get back on track.

[Fatch38]

Looking at FFXIV and then ZZZ, it's a very different impressions I get of both.

Both launched early July.
ZZZ operates with patches every 40-45 days. We're already at 1.2 and 1.3 is dropping November 6th.
While there are differences in the games (ZZZ being single, gacha, and shorter instances), they both have story parts in their patches. ZZZ is roughly the same length or slightly shorter than the FFXIV type patch-story, but the quality is so much higher. The simple stand around and talk cutscene is fully voice acted, and then it also gets a lot of fully rendered cutscenes with character movements that FFXIV has never reached (1.1 patch had 7 mins of this, 1.2 had 12 mins).
On top of that, tons of events, new mini-game that's a full Vampire Survivor clone, 2-3 new characters, new combat minions.
And sure, it's F2P gacha that's meant to drain your wallet, but if you can save up the pull-currency instead of using it right away, you can easily save up for some characters that you want.

But then looking at FFXIV, it almost feels glacial in its delivery of the game and content.

simple answer is : one a (mostly) solo game and clearly is a cash grab (to me gacha aren't games, a game is all about gameplay/gamedesign first then monetized, gachas are everything about getting money first then thinking about gameplay/gamedesign) while the other isn't (debatable with how ff14 focus more and more on solo than being a MMO since shadowbringers).
second , i can say without taking any risk that ZZZ (and any mihoyo "games") bring more cash in trimester than all SE released games in a year.

[KLazarus]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/th...e-a-bad-habit/
https://www.pcgamer.com/lets-stop-ca...c-master-race/

Unfortunately, PCGamer also publishes nonsense articles like these, as well as half-baked hardware reviews. It makes it hard to take them seriously on any subject.

[Avoidy]

This article is spot on and speaks to what many fans have been saying all along. The fact that the comments in the article are some guy telling people that it's a good thing that we get content at a glacial pace because it lets us play other games is peak comedy. We have trolls here who say almost the same thing to mock that level of copium, but there they are, in the pc gamer comments section, saying it without a shred of irony.

The sad part is, I don't even know what this game could do to course correct. At the heart of the criticism is a call to change the formula, but good luck with that. Getting any company to stop doing what it's always done, when that tradition has shown them record profits in the past, is a tall order. And that's without addressing how hard it is to get a Japanese company to break away from tradition and try something different. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, right? Imagine being the person at SE to suggest changing a formula that works. Again, good luck.

Nah, I think we're cooked.

[Balmung_Griffin]

Sometimes I feel like I'm just repeating myself over here:

1. The fact that the team from FFXVI ported FFXIV Quest system directly as is, speaks volumes of how outdated their line of thought is.

2. FFXIV structure is so rigid, that even though DT launched a couple of months ago, it feels like it has been out for years.

3. Every new feature/system introduced in the game is a make or break situation, there's no feedback we can give that will translate into those systems because we can't preview anything. When things come, they're pretty much final and even when they rework something it takes a million of years to do so.

If we could've play a snippet from Island Sanctuary, Chocobo Racing, LoV, they would realize that these stuff would not fly early on, before they overcommit to dead stuff.

[AurisNix]

Dawntrail release didn't fix the stagnant feeling of EW, I wanna play FFXIV but there is simply nothing to do anymore, I wanna sub I wanna give them my money but I log in and the only thing im thinking is "huh what do I do now?" and log out. I became a raider in EW out of boredom now idk what to do to play the game. What the article said is true even if you take savage with the most chill approach can only take you like 2 months till it becomes boring either if you clear it or not is just the same 4 fights over and over again (take it from the guy that doesn't have a raider mentality at all), there is like 4 months between patches (I think is even longer now) and is simply not enough content to do in between patches. It sucks :/