Dear Community what even holds you in this game

[Alexusss]

Honest Question not a Bait post.

I recently had to admit that the potential I saw in the game when I first started to play did not deliver in the later expansions of this game, Side Quests stayed as low effort as they started Dungeons are a linear corridor of pull all and kill it and any interesting Boss gimicks we had in the past were phased out of the game so that only DDR Remains.

The only thing that keeped me in the Game was the story making FF 14 for my basicly a Visual Novel interupted by medicore to bad gameplay.
So when Dawntrail drove the story against the wall my biggest draw to the game endet.

The other think I enjoyed was Jobidentity. I loved leveling them all learning the to play them all and then seeing them all getting more and more Braindead. Yoshida acknowledged the communeties worry about the Homoginazation and sayed it would be adressed... only for 7.2 to drop and proving... the Devs do not give a fuck about Jobs and see High end Raiding as the be all and end all of this game, and I coulden´t care less for it.

In the last view weeks I read a lot of Discords and Forum posts and... Many agree... DT was a shit show of story, Jobs dummer then ever and the majorety of the people I saw do not care for Extream, Savage and Ultimates and lament that jobs get cut down to fit this kind of content. Space Exploration is a shit show on an embaresing scale as it seems, which leaves me with this question to the community...

what even holds you in the game? Because my honest answer there is nothing left for me and I am really interested to hear what other people still see in this game.

Honestly nothing at this point. Bashing scripted enemies in raids for hours on end was never enjoyable for me in first place (in any video game), same goes for crafting/gathering - I just suffered through all of that to get specific emotes/glam items that couldn't be acquired through other means. The story was enjoyable for some time, but it got progressively worse (in my subjective opinion, which everyone is free to disagree with) with Endwalker and got really bad with Dawntrail, so I only keep up with it by watching streamers play through it (which thankfully doesn't require any monthly fees). Socializing with others (the real kind of socialization that doesn't involve bashing dumb enemies in raids) can still be nice, but I've seen a lot of them leave this game for various reasons (especially during last year or so) and socializing was made much, MUCH worse with artificial "congestion" where you can't even "visit" certain servers on certain datacenters until 3:00AM local time. And honestly many other games or "virtual worlds" like, for example, VRChat do socialization much, MUCH better in just about every aspect.

[MsMisato]

honestly just the banter in populated worlds at this point. honestly haven't been playing much since DT dropped.

[CidHeiral]

The story, FC, raids, PvP, housing, field zones, side content, etc. There's lots to enjoy about the game even if the devs make some major mistakes. My main gripe currently is the abysmal job design.

[TakoyakiLala]

Habit, new content, love for the game, Sufferhymn, Novafunbun, BeneG and Xenos.

[Gwenkatsu]

what even holds you in the game?

A MMO these days is my home away from home experience. I just decide day by day what I want to do now, no stress, no meeting demands, and *no* hard content - real life has enough of that, don't need this in my spare time.
For example: When CE hit, it got obvious very fast that I have no idea of how crafting works. So I just started leveling my crafters on an alt char, to relearn what I once knew. End result - I now mostly ignore CE, and just continue leveling that char I will never use her as a crafter, but at the moment it's just a fun thing to do, so that's what I'm doing for now. When I finish it (or loose interest), I will just do something else.
This is my playstyle, and FF14 is a very good place to live it. Of course there are things I don't like, but these are everywhere. Story being one of them, but I got through the terribad ARR post-MSQ and the Stormblood story, so I will also get through Dawntrail

[TheInsomniac13]

A MMO these days is my home away from home experience. I just decide day by day what I want to do now, no stress, no meeting demands, and *no* hard content - real life has enough of that, don't need this in my spare time.
For example: When CE hit, it got obvious very fast that I have no idea of how crafting works. So I just started leveling my crafters on an alt char, to relearn what I once knew. End result - I now mostly ignore CE, and just continue leveling that char I will never use her as a crafter, but at the moment it's just a fun thing to do, so that's what I'm doing for now. When I finish it (or loose interest), I will just do something else.
This is my playstyle, and FF14 is a very good place to live it. Of course there are things I don't like, but these are everywhere. Story being one of them, but I got through the terribad ARR post-MSQ and the Stormblood story, so I will also get through Dawntrail

I could relate really well with your post, back when I started playing FF 14 every streamer and YouTuber keeped telling me rush the MSQ get to the endgame and then fokus on side content... and I was just like... you know what I think I level all crafter and gatherer jobs because continiuing even ARR.
It then became my entire thing do do all the sidequest and content bevore advancing to the next expansion. Heck I made all the Relic weapons every expansion and I think Eureka Weapons permanently damaged my sanity but I still was proud on having archived it.

Which makes me now with 7300 Hours in this game... and still a sproud, so my main problem is all I right now have to look forward to is the shitshow that is the DT story and every new patch jobs beeing watered down even more. So there is no side content for me I could do hoping the Devs wake up and roll back a lot of the Job changes.
I also cannot just start a new character because the main draw to that would be to enjoy the leveling process of the jobs again... which I would really love to do if I still enjoyed playing this jobs.

Honestly when I reached Shadowbringer and noticed there are no Job Quests anymore but Role quests I was dissapointed but in retrospekt I see it as the point were the devs stoped caring for Jobidentity.

[Gwenkatsu]

Honestly when I reached Shadowbringer and noticed there are no Job Quests anymore but Role quests I was dissapointed but in retrospekt I see it as the point were the devs stoped caring for Jobidentity.

I have mixed feelings on this one, as the job quest lines in FF14 often were written terribly bad. Take the Warrior quests as example:

• Level 30: This is Curious Gorge. He is a Warrior. Warriors use the Beast Within, but he cannot control it yet.
• Level 35: He still cannot control the Beast Within.
• Level 40: He still cannot control the Beast Within.
• Level 45: He still cannot control the Beast Within.
• ...
• Level 70: We have some wonderful news - Curious Gorge is now in love! Oh, and he still cannot control the Beast Within.

Or Machinist: "Hello, I'm Stephanivien, the Machinist Guild leader. Machinists do a lot of fascinating things, but unfortunately I'm the worst leader in the world. Therefore you will spent 90% of your time as a Machinist searching for the other guild members that will constantly run away from my terrible lead."

Or Bard: "These here are Sanson and Guydelot - two guys that are constantly at each others throat, for whatever reason. Oh, and Sanson also is a moron that will fall for even the most obvious and childish trap. Your job is to babysit these guys for 30 levels. Have fun!"

Or take the Alacrans, an army of ruffians that is short of overtaking Uldah. Every other jobs fights them until level 30, and then they completely disappear out of the world. Why? Nobody knows. Fun fact: when you're new, the game throws a lot of names at you. I always confused "Alacran" and "Ascian", so the whole story made even less sense

And so on.

Job identity through different quest lines is a good thing in my book. But I honestly felt relieved when they got rid of them, as the majority was just very bad. And I liked the Shadowbringer role quests way more; unfortunately the 90 and 100 role quests were another drop in quality.

[TheInsomniac13]

I have mixed feelings on this one, as the job quest lines in FF14 often were written terribly bad. Take the Warrior quests as example:

• Level 30: This is Curious Gorge. He is a Warrior. Warriors use the Beast Within, but he cannot control it yet.
• Level 35: He still cannot control the Beast Within.
• Level 40: He still cannot control the Beast Within.
• Level 45: He still cannot control the Beast Within.
• ...
• Level 70: We have some wonderful news - Curious Gorge is now in love! Oh, and he still cannot control the Beast Within.

Or Machinist: "Hello, I'm Stephanivien, the Machinist Guild leader. Machinists do a lot of fascinating things, but unfortunately I'm the worst leader in the world. Therefore you will spent 90% of your time as a Machinist searching for the other guild members that will constantly run away from my terrible lead."

Or Bard: "These here are Sanson and Guydelot - two guys that are constantly at each others throat, for whatever reason. Oh, and Sanson also is a moron that will fall for even the most obvious and childish trap. Your job is to babysit these guys for 30 levels. Have fun!"

Or take the Alacrans, an army of ruffians that is short of overtaking Uldah. Every other jobs fights them until level 30, and then they completely disappear out of the world. Why? Nobody knows. Fun fact: when you're new, the game throws a lot of names at you. I always confused "Alacran" and "Ascian", so the whole story made even less sense

And so on.

Job identity through different quest lines is a good thing in my book. But I honestly felt relieved when they got rid of them, as the majority was just very bad. And I liked the Shadowbringer role quests way more; unfortunately the 90 and 100 role quests were another drop in quality.

Absolutly agree Warrior had some of the worse story writing in it´s jobquests but I rather wanted to see it betterd and not gone for good. I found the Stromblood Jobquests had some majore differences in stakes... Warrior Curios Gorge is in love!
Meanwhile Black Mage the legendary ancien Mage Shantoto transfears her mind into the body of your Black Mage companion to repel an astroid that is about to destroy Eorzea!... quite the difference if you ask me.

Heck I could probably fill entire book talking about the different Jobquests and which story lines worked well and which don´t.

[Eastwall]

pvp and lalafell. I honestly would have quit so long ago if l didn't find lalafell so adorable

[TaleraRistain]

I'm still enjoying myself. I've played MMOs since 1999 EverQuest. I've left many of them when they weren't what I was interested in anymore. It was hard sometimes because I used to be swayed by sunken cost fallacy. But I've moved on from so many now that that doesn't hold me.

If XIV comes to the point some day that I'm not enjoying myself, then I'll move on from it. But for now I'm enjoying what I do in the game. I have things I dislike, but they don't outweigh the likes yet. I just give feedback on those where possible and focus on what I enjoy.