Live letters have lost their magic - Zepla

[SongOfTheWind]

But you want to call me a cultist for trying to keep your heads above water? Where exactly am I harming you by encouraging hope?

Do you have a saviour complex? I genuinely hope you jest.

[CVXIV]

Me saying that Deep Dungeon can be soloed wasn't even a big part of my argument, but the fact that it can be soloed is simply true so I mentioned it. Not at one point did I claim that most players would do that, I even put that in brackets because I considered it a minor addition. I'm confused why you would focus on this one comment so much when I've mentioned other, stronger examples.

Fact aside that it's merely speculation on your part how other people would approach Variant Dungeon, the point still stands. Endwalker did encourage solo play, and that was part of the confirmed strategy. Yoshi-P himself said that they wanted to lure people in who didn't want to do group content.

Which is fine, I get it, they want the game to grow and attract a wide variety of players, but you can't tell me that this helped FCs stay active, in fact quite a few FC leaders told me the opposite as I've mentioned before.

No you're right, I think you have stronger examples with Variants and with duty support / trusts
Variants are very easy to solo, and dying has no consequence because unlike the deep dungeons you can get back up and keep throwing yourself at the boss you died at rather than having to scale several floors

I do think that the benefit of running it with a group is the convenience and community aspect, but speaking strictly in terms of rewards I don't think you get any benefit. It'd be nice if they implemented the feature they added in chaotic cloud of darkness where if someone is new then you get a bonus, and having random bonuses throughout the day - which they could make it only obtainable in a party

but that's disregarding the issue Variants already face like lack of rewards which seems to be the biggest contention for most people

Trusts are a bit trickier because while I think it's nice to have a way for players to queue into old dungeons that are harder to pop, especially as a DPS, but designing the dungeons around a trust means we're unlikely to get some of the cool, more complex features we had in some older ARR dungeons

I apologize if I came across as antagonistic in any way in my initial post, it wasn't my intention

[Exmo]

...

This is all just a big excuse. You made a claim, I asked politely for an example of it, after dancing around a bunch you can't provide one. You should have just said that. Ok, moving on.

[Auro_Seldaris]

Do you have a saviour complex? I genuinely hope you jest.

Yes, they literally have Main Character Syndrome. They think Yoshida is going to give them a Gold Star for defending CSIII's honor on the internet. They also are trying to continually derail this thread and make it all about them. How egotistical can you get?

[Kaurhz]

I don't think there's a cult...

But I do think some people are overly sensitive about criticism of the game, and seem more concerned with the fact that people are criticizing it in general, and not necessarily concerned with what the criticism is and whether it is or isn't valid, and in many cases they don't really have valid counter-points beyond "U just hate the game".

[Auro_Seldaris]

This is all just a big excuse. You made a claim, I asked politely for an example of it, after dancing around a bunch you can't provide one. You should have just said that. Ok, moving on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ike_dawntrail/

"I liked it!", with no explanation of why. Meanwhile those that don't spend literally paragraphs explaining why, in detail, it's a bad story and bad expansion.

There are even literally two "I loved it!" directly in a row with basically no elaboration. And I found that in like, 2 minutes of searching on Reddit for "Dawntrail I liked it"

I'm literally not going to engage with you any further on this.

[Mondschnee]

No you're right, I think you have stronger examples with Variants and with duty support / trusts
Variants are very easy to solo, and dying has no consequence because unlike the deep dungeons you can get back up and keep throwing yourself at the boss you died at rather than having to scale several floors

I do think that the benefit of running it with a group is the convenience and community aspect, but speaking strictly in terms of rewards I don't think you get any benefit. It'd be nice if they implemented the feature they added in chaotic cloud of darkness where if someone is new then you get a bonus, and having random bonuses throughout the day - which they could make it only obtainable in a party

but that's disregarding the issue Variants already face like lack of rewards which seems to be the biggest contention for most people

Trusts are a bit trickier because while I think it's nice to have a way for players to queue into old dungeons that are harder to pop, especially as a DPS, but designing the dungeons around a trust means we're unlikely to get some of the cool, more complex features we had in some older ARR dungeons

Yeah, see I completely agree with basically all you said above.
And a small addition, for me personally, I also found Variant Dungeons easier to do solo because you didn't have to rely on others wanting to do the route you needed, and that way you didn't have to waste anybody elses time if you wanted to take your time looking at the environments and all.
These days, it's also quite hard to get a queue to pop, unfortunately.

I apologize if I came across as antagonistic in any way in my initial post, it wasn't my intention

It's all good! I do think we did reach an understanding after all which is honestly a nice experience, so thanks for that!

[ElysiumDragon]

I don't think there's a cult...

But I do think some people are overly sensitive about criticism of the game, and seem more concerned with the fact that people are criticizing it in general, and not necessarily concerned with what the criticism is and whether it is or isn't valid, and in many cases they don't really have valid counter-points beyond "U just hate the game".

To be fair, a LOT of the criticism is blatant grifting, doom-mongering, outrage farming from so-called 'content creators', and outright hyperbole.

These people exist in gacha spaces too, you learn to spot them pretty quickly ^^

[yesnt]

To be fair, a LOT of the criticism is blatant grifting, doom-mongering, outrage farming from so-called 'content creators', and outright hyperbole.

These people exist in gacha spaces too, you learn to spot them pretty quickly ^^

Which content creator are you referring to?

[Kaurhz]

To be fair, a LOT of the criticism is blatant grifting, doom-mongering, outrage farming from so-called 'content creators', and outright hyperbole.

These people exist in gacha spaces too, you learn to spot them pretty quickly ^^

These aren't exactly baseless concerns though, really.. If the general population is dropping and if the number of overall returner players is lowering, then yeah, there's a concern. Sure, we can dance around the "ThE NuMbErS ArEnT ThAt BaD" all day long, but the general decline in population is nothing to scoff at, especially when the reason for it you can pretty easily ascribe to their current formulas.

A lot of players have had their wishes, and content type ignored for well over 4 years, and they should very little enthusiasm in actually curbing this issue, or putting the necessary investment or changes to the core content pipeline to mitigate that issue.

Based on their current trajectory, we will get the final iteration of Occult Crescent in, what? 7.55 with a new area and new Phantom Jobs, then in 8.25, we will get whatever content type or new iteration of Exploratory. This will still be an 18 month gap between the major content types for the general player base.

If you don't think these issues are tied pretty exclusively to the steadily declining player base, or if you don't think it will continue to decline expansion-by-expansion, then I really don't know what to tell you. The numbers are OK, but the trajectory of where it is heading is not good. If the content pipeline trajectory continues on the path, then so will the dwindling population as a result.

Again, these aren't really baseless concerns.. Obviously they are not as extensive as some believe, but the trend is heading that way. Sure we'll see a small population explosion when the expansion launches, but it will also go right down again, and then it's a question of how low if we're already heading to Stormblood numbers. Then you also need to consider this is probably the first expansion in a very long time where they've visibly annoyed casual folk and story-enjoyers.

As for the PLL, the content and structure is exactly the same, but the passion isn't there.... The way I would consider it, is that it's like taking certain courses on LinkedIn, or general corporate training materials (e.g., manual training) where the overall tone is so monotonal that it's so hard to actually watch with passion to learn.. Then when you compare it to some on-demand optional instructional training resources where the passion is very visible.

It's very easy to spot passion, even in text form.. and much easier in video, and this just ain't it tbh.