Disappointed With XIV Direction

[Reinha]

Give this forum back to the fans that are still playing.

Fans can still post on the forum. Maybe they just don't care enough about the game to do so.

And again, you can keep ignoring it but the devs want feedback to be posted on this exact forum. If you dislike it, you dislike something the devs intend to happen. Hmm, perhaps you could give feedback to the devs about that...

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I kinda doubt they even remember about FL except once in a blue moon. Some of today's PvP jobs bugs really shows that they barely, if not never quite consider to test the FL environment.

They would know if they play it on their own instead of just looking at engagement metric, but here we are lol.

[Saraide]

I'm paying a monthly service provided by SE, I respect their choice and freedom on creativity. If I don't like it, I unsubbed.

Plain & simple. Not pushing them to make the game I want. This is their game, they choice. I as player can choose to accept it and keep paying/playing or I can unsubbed and leave to play other games for entertainment. Why is it so difficult to understand this simple logic?

Please give us back the forum.

If you dont like the forum and its content then why dont you just leave?

[JimCasey_RF6]

Square Enix is not doing well right now financially. The management team cost the company a lot of money by trying to force DEI into their products. They can't afford to invest more money into FFXIV right now. Thankfully they have realized their mistake and are taking steps to correct it, but it will still take quite some time to right the ship and get things back to how they used to be.

[BunnyQueen]

Long time player, first time caller sort of, but I just had to get this off of my chest.

I want to preface this with that I am someone who has dabbled in most content (aside from Ultimates) and have done everything from fishing voyages to some of the harder savage content. Not the best player but absolutely not the worst.

And hear me when I say, the direction this game is going is sad. I know Yoshi P said that the game is not meant to be played all the time, but I just finished what was in this content patch and am floored that there is NOTHING else to do. It offers NOTHING worthwhile to engage my friends or anyone else who I have had to watch fall off this game because it is so empty. I waited 4 months for essentially nothing to do.

"BuT tHeRe iS pLeNtY tO dO"

No there isn't. PvP is an EXP machine. Raiding is for a small sect of people (not knocking but stating the percentage of people who raid is much smaller than the whole). Criterion dungeons fell flat. And Gold Saucer is not entertaining when it's the same things (mostly) since it released in ARR.

The worst part of all of this is the player base enables it. There is no evergreen content that keeps the middle 15-80 percentile wanting to even come back. I played WoW SoD FAR LONGER and enjoyed it (with some qualms) than I did this major patch for two days.

Something needs to change because I am tired of seeing the people who I want to play this game with fade away because there is nothing to keep them engaged. And yet, there are people who say there's plenty to do.

Absolutely reprehensible.

Doesn't help that healing and tanking are boring AF these days. They killed healing in this game.

[ZodaSoda]

The dev team has fallen into the bad habit of most MMO dev teams of only paying attention to the formula and abandoning old systems. Things i was hopeful would one day be updated but never have been...

-Chocobo's system hasnt seen any development in years.
-Older Fates like Odin and Behemoth left in the past instead of being updated every expansion and keeping cool social aspects around for New and old players when they pop.
-The Gold Saucer barely sees new additions, they dont have to all be major, but even those are years between something new.
--Chocobo racing for example is basically just an abandoned side hobby now, dont even get new tracks in new areas let alone anything else cool to spice it up.
-Guildhests still sitting there being an abandoned system instead of figuring out something do with with it, Tutorials for mechanics was my idea before 7.1
-Variant having 3 dungeons but no daily roulette? i still dont get that...
-Hunting Logs still being the same system it always has been is pretty sad, I had an idea years ago now that a new Hunting Log UI that looks like an actual book would be cool, that adds some new monsters for every job and every expansion, just for completionist purposes would be fine, But i also though a page that tracks A and S spawn locations if you've killed one there would be pretty handy and then an SS page that records hints on how to spawn SS's but alas, same as its always been.

Thinking more as i typed these...
Sightseeing log actually has regressed, While i dont mind having an easy one for the average player, the Riddles of ARR was pretty cool and it would have been nice to atleast have "Basic Sightseeing and Advanced Sightseeing log" No to mention no rewards...

Underwater is essentially a flop, used as a exploration gimmick in Stormblood, I would have liked to see it actually turn into something more interesting than what it is.

Fate's in general have failed to evolve at all, the addition of Bicolour gems was nice, but mostly just a grind, I would really have liked to see cooler Fate Chains. I still think old multiplayer boss fates from ARR and HW should be Red on the map and reward Hunt tokens/nuts which would make people actually show up for them, and then some cool Fate Chain could actually lead to red Fates... with maybe super rare Purple Fates that are basically modern Odins etc.

Years I've been banging on about Multiplayer MSQ cutecenes and scenarios, everyone hates "This Scenario must be undertaken alone" or whatever it says, not just for Veterans but new players, I dunno who doesnt think it would be great to watch the Party leaders Cutscenes with them and even join them in their solo Scenarios, hell it would be cool to see the other players standing in the background too but not required tho... Just let people play the "MMO" together...

Theres so much more i could go on about, bigger things and minor things that should be addressed but are quite clearly never going to be.

[Fuyuqi]

The dev team has fallen into the bad habit of most MMO dev teams of only paying attention to the formula and abandoning old systems. Things i was hopeful would one day be updated but never have been...

I feel like you can already see this happening with newer things like Island Sanctuary as well. It's something that could easily be relevant for multiple expacs just by updating the materia available for purchase to always include the most recent materia like it offered in endwalker, but the continued value of maintaining your island is just going to go down with time... Ofc there will always be glams and mounts for new players to grind for, but it would be so easy to make island sanctuary valuable past the service life of the expac it came out in that the devs just aren't thinking about.

[GinzoKazama]

One thing someone had said was that I am providing complaints but no solutions. While I would happily provide a few thoughts as to how I think would engage people, and will, I would remind people that suggestions are an uphill battle to convince those who think nothing is wrong that something is wrong.

Suggestions I would like to see happen specifically with content:

- Variety of PvP Modes: Right now everything is restricted to Frontlines. There's not even a Rival Wings roulette and queuing for it specifically is always an eternity. More objective based combat as well as smaller scale battles (Rival Wings size) would be better. I will use WoWs Battlegrounds as an example:

- Alterac Valley: Large Scale (Frontline sized) objective based battles to win by fighting NPCs, enemy players and also defeating the final boss. A quasi pve/pvp battle.
- Warsong Gulch: Basic tried and true Capture the Flag battle.
- Arathi Basin: Resource collection by holding nodes. Benefit of dominating other team are quick matches.

The benefits of this kind of variety is everything from the most simplest (CTF) to the more drawn out objective based (Alterac Valley). Ironically, WSG could essentially more 'skill based' whereas AV could end up in deathballs as well. But that's the thing, that's the variety. For AV, you can either deathball the enemy or do the objectives while fighting the enemy or straight up run and gun to the end. It all depends on the group.

FFXIV has nothing like that in terms of PvP. It's a simple objective with no real nuance to it. Deathball/meatgrinders have their places, but that's all it is in FFXIV.

- Carry Content Forward: Make content like Bozja and PotD relevant to the current expansion. Not saying it needs to have NEW content, but what I am saying is a lot of good content has been left languishing for no one to really do. No one is going to do PotD when they could do HoH or Eureka Orthos. Or HoH when they could do Eureka Orthos. At least allow us those avenues to level some jobs in the same way you do OLD dungeons with Roulettes. Treasure maps too would be a great thing to carry forward. No one does the old ones at all.

- Add Mini-games to Gold Saucer: Someone mentioned this and this is a great idea, but there are a lot of mini games that are in the toy box or some even in side quests that aren't even in gold saucer. I'm sick of jump puzzles. Maybe I wanna go snow boarding like in FFXIV or command an RTS game like Fort Condor. There's so many ideas you could put into Gold Saucer but so long as the masses are sated on glamour and mounts there's no real reason to add new rides to the attraction.

I've got a few others, but stuff like that is a start.

Add to it if you think it's constructive or constructive state issues with my suggestions. Can't build a new bridge to better things alone. But XIV is a bridge built with no thought of change in mind.

[Fuyuqi]

- Carry Content Forward: Make content like Bozja and PotD relevant to the current expansion. Not saying it needs to have NEW content, but what I am saying is a lot of good content has been left languishing for no one to really do. No one is going to do PotD when they could do HoH or Eureka Orthos. Or HoH when they could do Eureka Orthos. At least allow us those avenues to level some jobs in the same way you do OLD dungeons with Roulettes. Treasure maps too would be a great thing to carry forward. No one does the old ones at all.

From a raiding perspective, tying best-in-slot gear to stuff like Bozja is a great way to get raiders to do stuff other than traditional hardcore battle content. I know plenty of people who hated feeling 'forced' to do countless hours of bozja for BiS, but it's certainly more engaging than spam-clicking through Hildibrand quests they feel forced to do for 20 minutes and a single one and done trial and grind hunt trains and roulettes for tens of thousands of tomes. It gives you something to progress on every time you log in, and it's active battle content instead of a mindless grind.

Another good way is to just... update old content to give current drops? Such as allowing Bozja to drop current uncapped or capped tomes if you're doing it on a max level job. In patches where new field content isn't available, it'll be a good source of tomes, and players can make progress towards weapons and other old rewards they never got at the same time. And like I said before, updating island sanctuary merchants to sell materia from the current expac would be incredibly easy to do. It's gonna benefit players going through the content for the first time since it'll draw more veteran players in making it more populated, and it'll benefit veteran players too by giving them more choices on how to do their tedious weekly tome grinds and catch up on older content. Players who like doing hunt trains or roulettes for tomes can still do those, and players who still love the older content don't have to sacrifice time they could be using to grind current tomes to play the content they love.

[Fuyuqi]

From a raiding perspective, tying best-in-slot gear to stuff like Bozja is a great way to get raiders to do stuff other than traditional hardcore battle content.

Oops I forgot to add that I said this because Bozja weapons are STILL BiS for ultimates released before EW. Which might contribute a bit to why Bozja is surviving a bit better than Eureka.

Also just after I sent that reply, I thought of two more things.

If they want to do this, SE needs to seriously consider job balance and feel at lower levels. They're improving this recently, by moving PLD gapclose and DRK aoe mit so that they have them at 70 for legacy ultimates, but jobs like RPR and VPR are still gutted below 90 and 100 because they lack crucial parts of their kit. It would also help new player enjoyment since you aren't gonna have to suffer millennia without an aoe attack or get your gauge before you get anything to even spend it on. It would just be an overall improvement to the game to shift certain things in job kits earlier in the leveling process.

Second, improving drop rates on old content like EXs if done synced and maybe even more if done minimum ilvl and echo off. This way it'll give people two options to farm old content and can appeal to the people who already enjoy mindlessly unsyncing and to those who'd rather challenge themselves a bit in return for a notably shorter grind. I hate farming old EXs right now because it feels like a mind-numbing chore, but if I felt rewarded in some way for actually learning and beating a fight (something I enjoy doing) instead of punished, it'd incentivize me to do it a lot more.

At least for the suggestion I had previously and the drop rate suggestion, these feel like things that would be INCREDIBLY easy updates. No new assets or items that need to be made, very little testing and balancing needed.