I need to vent about FFXIV as a whole at this point.

[Absurdity]

CBU3 is nothing if not insanely stubborn. There are tons of examples of them acknowledging feedback and then shrugging it off or ignoring it.

I still remember everyone and their dog telling them that Stormblood WHM lillies are a terrible idea and are going to suck before the expansion even released.
"Wait until you actually play it." is what was heard in response.
Lo and behold, they absolutely sucked and the devs spent the entire rest of the expansion trying to salvage them until the system could be completely ignored.

[Supersnow845]

I still remember everyone and their dog telling them that Stormblood WHM lillies are a terrible idea and are going to suck before the expansion even released.
"Wait until you actually play it." is what was heard in response.
Lo and behold, they absolutely sucked and the devs spent the entire rest of the expansion trying to salvage them until the system could be completely ignored.

Stormblood lilies are even worse because they are the reason they don’t reveal job changes before the game is already down for maintenance now

They showed them off we all said they were shit, square said give them a try, we gave them a try and they were shit and squares only response was to just stop showing us job changes so we wouldn’t be able to say ahead of time that the job changes were terrible

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I still remember everyone and their dog telling them that Stormblood WHM lillies are a terrible idea and are going to suck before the expansion even released.
"Wait until you actually play it." is what was heard in response.
Lo and behold, they absolutely sucked and the devs spent the entire rest of the expansion trying to salvage them until the system could be completely ignored.

“Please give it a try before you complain…”

-Fast forward an expansion from 4.0 to 5.0-

“… Okay well you may be right about the gauge needing a change from the start… fine. But also we’re just not going to tell you anything about job changes until it’s too late lol.”

This will never sits right—it’s such an obtuse stance.

[LilaIronman]

Ironically these monsters actually have monster skills they could use effectively, but way too slow to actually utilize it so the party members don't have to actually worry about using real tactics in combat.

honestly the monster skills dont even matter, when you play any tank, you just pop a mit and stand in everything so you dont have to reposition and call it a day, you can go the entire MSQ Roulette without ever popping a mit or dodging aoes as a tank, its actually a joke how braindead they made these

[Avoidy]

Agreed on a lot of things. In fact, anything in this post that I don't touch on in regards to your OP is probably because I agree with it.

Saying it was just casual feedback responsible for making this game boring is mistaken. Fun jobs like ast got their quirky rng/card elements streamlined because there were raiders whining about how the job was too inconsistent/random for their scripted tastes and saying stuff like "I only fish for the balance anyway, so why bother having these other cards here." That job, along with others, has been sanded down nonstop to fit the standardized palette of an fflogs connoisseur. I also distinctly remember (though they'll all deny it now) people bitching in here about how annoying it was to have some cds be on 90/180 seconds while most of them were on 120. A casual player would not care about/notice this sort of thing. But alas, in EW it was changed to further standardize this game, and now we're sat here pissed about how boring it feels to play. Meanwhile, every expac has a crappy .1 that's just seen as a given at this point, because the devs love prioritizing their hardcore base first and foremost, which means frontloading their expansion with hardcore raidslop as quickly as possible while their casual base sits around doing nothing for nearly a year post-msq.

But despite all this, people will seriously come here with a straight face and act like casual players are eating good in this game, lmao. Is some dummy casual content dumbed down to appeal to casual players? Sure. Was Endwalker's normal content basically a testament to the dumbing down policy? Absolutely. But I'd argue that despite that, they're not even really pleasing casuals anymore. Look at the current state of the game. What can a casual player log in and do? Expert roulette? A five minute beast tribe? Maybe maps? It's pathetic. Meanwhile, hardcore players and raiders at least have savage, ultimate, ex, unreal, and ofc the upcoming chaotic. And yet, even those players do not seem happy because savage content has this inane "once a week" soft-cd on it, ultimate appeals to like 5% of the population, unreal is literally just byakko -- an ex that was easy on release, now with more abilities at your disposal -- and EX stuff is legit just 1 fight that there's barely a reason to repeat unless you want the glam or an ugly mount i guess.

It's just important to retain perspective, I guess. I'm relatively casual? At best I'll do an EX with friends. But I've watched several of my favorite jobs get sanded down to fit a 120s mold that only raiders seem to prattle on about. And I'm about to cancel my recurring sub because there isn't jack shit for me to do in this game. As someone who's relatively casual, I don't recall asking for any of this and from my perspective it seems like the game is hyper focused on pleasing hardcore types who log in once a week, bang out their weeklies, and treat the game like a second job with all their metrics and constant bitching about minor percentage point differences. Because at least they get something to do. At least their content seems like love was applied to it. And when they submit job feedback, they usually have obnoxious streamers being really loud about it until they get some semblance of what they want, even if it comes at the cost of the job's uniqueness. As I write this, I'm remembering how quickly they changed PLD last expac because it fell behind in savage. IIRC they changed how the job functioned and made it more bursty like other jobs so it'd be in line with the rest of the tanks.

And lol, now I see people complaining about modders like it's their fault the designers are lazy and the game is dull atm. At least when ERPers and modders have their fun, they're not on here actively calling for the watering down of all the stuff I used to like. ERPers didn't ask for every AST card to be The Balance. ERPers didn't whine about a card based job having randomness associated with it. ERPers didn't put every job on a 2 minute cycle. These guys just textbang in a basement somewhere. The devs are lazy and want everything standardized so they can have an easier time designing fights. That's basically it.

That said, yeah, more openworld stuff would be a banger. More stuff to do that isn't just raiding would be great as well, because honestly this game's approach to "difficult raids" is awful; redoing the same scripted encounter with the same scripted jobs until everyone's in sync is boring as hell and there's a reason so many people don't want to do it. Inching towards incremental improvements while monitoring spreadsheet data and obsessing over parsed data is a blast for some, I'm sure, but holy crap is it a mistake to make that the bulk of your postgame content for a year+ and then wonder why people are quitting like crazy.

[Ath192]

But despite all this, people will seriously come here with a straight face and act like casual players are eating good in this game, lmao.

Yeah I agree, I actually don't know if even SE is aware of how parse centric they have made their game. I mean, even if they don't admit it or even know thats what happened to them FFLOGS literally took over their game in some ways. Everything was sacrificed in the name of balance.

I think the solution to start tearing down the parsing chokehold on this game is making mechanics that force random players to separate tasks and or add small downtimes at random. Like stuns, weaknesses etc... Because this way no matter how good you are you won't score a good a parse as someone who got lucky and didn't have to do anything.

And ultimately people who are obsessed with parses are just trying to say they are better than everyone else and quite frankly if the whole game is going to be unfun because of that I do think it needs to change. I do like difficult stuff of course but making it so nothing interesting can happen because people need to be able to compete against each other "fairly" with a TOS banned plugin and an unofficial site is crazy.

This isn't even a pvp centric game for it to be revolving around that...

[Avoidy]

Yeah I agree, I actually don't know if even SE is aware of how parse centric they have made their game. I mean, even if they don't admit it or even know thats what happened to them FFLOGS literally took over their game in some ways. Everything was sacrificed in the name of balance.

I think the solution to start tearing down the parsing chokehold on this game is making mechanics that force random players to separate tasks and or add small downtimes at random. Like stuns, weaknesses etc... Because this way no matter how good you are you won't score a good a parse as someone who got lucky and didn't have to do anything.

And ultimately people who are obsessed with parses are just trying to say they are better than everyone else and quite frankly if the whole game is going to be unfun because of that I do think it needs to change. I do like difficult stuff of course but making it so nothing interesting can happen because people need to be able to compete against each other "fairly" with a TOS banned plugin and an unofficial site is crazy.

This isn't even a pvp centric game for it to be revolving around that...

And not even the parsers I know seem terribly happy with it. So many will concede that ultimately way too much boils down to when the fight ends. And since everyone plays their job the same, I'll see them basically just looking at differences in crits once the gear evens out and things get so solved that there's genuinely no variance except rng. Even if this game leans towards that type of competitive player, it doesn't seem to satisfy them very well either. I frequently wonder who this game is meant to appeal to.

[ovIm]

I also distinctly remember (though they'll all deny it now) people bitching in here about how annoying it was to have some cds be on 90/180 seconds while most of them were on 120.

I won't deny that I have been one of those people in the past (how foolish i was), but at the same time, this has also been kinda facilitated by the core mathematical foundation of the game, which is the developers doing.
When you have high potency nukes on a longer cooldown and a multiplicative damage calculation that rewards players for synching up cooldowns, then getting "punished" by not being able to take advantage of these things because of the job you chose just feels bad (and could potentially lead to players excluding classes). If the game designers did not want this to happen, they could instead have worked on putting less emphasis on the high potency nukes and possibly reduce the damage ramp up from stacking multiple CDs. Flattening the damage curve, so to speak.
Seeing CS3's track record in taking in feedback, however... they are incredibly, incredibly picky as to what feedback they listen to. They knew what they were doing I'm sure.

Aside from that, I very much agree with a lot of your post.

[Ath192]

And not even the parsers I know seem terribly happy with it. So many will concede that ultimately way too much boils down to when the fight ends. And since everyone plays their job the same, I'll see them basically just looking at differences in crits once the gear evens out and things get so solved that there's genuinely no variance except rng. Even if this game leans towards that type of competitive player, it doesn't seem to satisfy them very well either. I frequently wonder who this game is meant to appeal to.

They're not. At least the ones I know. But they are not a single hive mind just like casual players, they can't stop others from complaining in ways that may result in the developers making undesired changes. The game turned into a blob where it tried to make everyone happy. And you know what happens when you do that? You make noone happy.

[Hallarem]

I return from my hole in the ground to say.

This game cannot in any universe claim to be a game that deserves a monthly sub fee with the little amount of stuff it gives you to do and with the neglect the devs are doling out with not even fixing basic functions like some characters not being able to wear hats, . (And no, content from years ago does not count.)
They should have two tiers.

One, no sub, access to an apartment, and "content"

Two, luxury sub, access to housing, monthly addition of cash shop currency and some other luxury stuff

This game is not an MMO, its a singleplayer game wearing the skinsuit of one. I hope someone in the studio wakes up and kicks their combat designer out, so they can replace it with someone who can create more exciting fights with variables, rng and player engagement, instead of DDR-memory gauntlets with you repeating the same rotation over and over and over again.
A quest designer that doesn't surmount to an AI repeating the same quests with a different text and same mechanics of... purple kill two mobs, or talk and talk with the dumb Soken recycled "Feel happy now, the quest is over" piano music. Might as well be Christmas when they give us the "Follow npc and hide" quest, that actually had some effort in it. Recycle recycle recycle recycle is FFXIV in a nutshell, it's lazy and lacks integrity.

While you're at it, please never let the Primals do another themesong again for an expansion, leave them outside of the game. I don't want to pay for the "privilege" of witnessing Sokens and Koji Fox's boomer band midlife crisis as they live their band dreams out, they should buy Harley Davidsons or Ferraris like any other self-respecting middle-aged person. This is exactly how Hildbrand went from a fun little sidequest-series into now ruining the integrity of the lore and feel of the game because "Haha funny meme".