Are the devs playtesting their own game?

[Doki]

I honestly cannot fathom anyone developing this and then playing it and thinking "yes, this reward structure is great!"

[Laerune]

I honestly cannot fathom anyone developing this and then playing it and thinking "yes, this reward structure is great!"

To be honest, I think developers dont care anymore. This game is a cash cow to fund other Square Enix games and while I am glad that FFXIV is paying for the recent Dragon Quest and the new paranormasight the mermaid's curse (fantastic game, please play and support it) I wish they spend more money on FFXIV.

Maybe its just me, but part of me thinks, the developers want to see this game fail. How can you keep making mistakes like this?

- Fork Tower being not casual friendly and having a horrible way to enter.
- Bringing back Demiatma
- Removing rewards from casual content and adding them to the hardcore content.
- Locking character creator options behind hard content, this is 2 hairstyles now locked behind hardcore content.
- Classes have no identity

Maybe Yoshida wants the game to fail, so he can get the greenlight from his boss to turn this game into a mobile game.

[NegativeS]

Personally, if I were a soulless suit at an entertainment-focused corporation like Square Enix, I would also want to design my company's hierarchy to extract maximum value with as few living wages paid as possible.

One product keeping all the lights on, designed so formulaically that the only significant budget allocation would go into art, modeling, voice acting, just enough PR to keep people hooked even if some of them get mad, and a skeleton crew IT team to keep everything just barely running. Everything else would be pure profit. My golden parachute would already long have been weaved, at this point it'd just be a faucet pouring money into my Scrooge McDuck pool.

As a bonus, whenever a shareholder asks "what does Square Enix even do?", we'd have plenty of excess in the coffers to throw together a convincing game demo designed to keep investors invested... but not convincing enough to be able to convince me or my soulless suit collaborators that it's worth seeing through to a viable product.

[Doki]

"Man I sure wish there were more useless fireworks drops & umbrellas!"

[MsMisato]

"Man I sure wish there were more useless fireworks drops & umbrellas!"

Here you go friend, another Indigo Star for these trying times

[Alicie]

To be honest, I think developers dont care anymore. This game is a cash cow to fund other Square Enix games and while I am glad that FFXIV is paying for the recent Dragon Quest and the new paranormasight the mermaid's curse (fantastic game, please play and support it) I wish they spend more money on FFXIV.

Maybe its just me, but part of me thinks, the developers want to see this game fail. How can you keep making mistakes like this?

- Fork Tower being not casual friendly and having a horrible way to enter.
- Bringing back Demiatma
- Removing rewards from casual content and adding them to the hardcore content.
- Locking character creator options behind hard content, this is 2 hairstyles now locked behind hardcore content.
- Classes have no identity

Maybe Yoshida wants the game to fail, so he can get the greenlight from his boss to turn this game into a mobile game.

This game exists and will continue existing only because of second life framework that is built on top of it pretty much
Developers can safely switch it into maintenance mode

[VictorSpoils]

So glad all these guys are being honest, or else we'd have to think they were lying.

[Jeeqbit]

"Man I sure wish there were more useless fireworks drops & umbrellas!"

Obviously, nobody likes the fireworks, but they meant as a way to say "you didn't get the loot this time". It would be better if they just dropped nothing when you didn't get the loot, but it's difficult when it's like a consumable coffer that can drop multiple things, because then it has to contain something.

Parasols aren't necessarily for the western audience. There are other cultures that play the game.

Maybe its just me, but part of me thinks, the developers want to see this game fail. How can you keep making mistakes like this?

- Fork Tower being not casual friendly and having a horrible way to enter.
- Bringing back Demiatma
- Removing rewards from casual content and adding them to the hardcore content.

I haven't done it, but I doubt a variant dungeon" doable by two people is "hardcore content". But I'm sure some people will dismiss it as such and pretend like it's an Ultimate. It's obviously their attempt at a midcore version.

A lot of people asked for grindier relics so they merely did what players asked and many are happy with it actually. Most relic grinds in the game's history have had something akin to demiatma. Heavensward had Luminous crystals. Stormblood had currencies in Eureka that were, well, crystals. Shadowbringers had countless memories to grind through most stages, including Haunting/Vexatious memories, but memories in FFXIV are... crystals.

[Shialan]

This will never change as long as Square does not move away from the Japanese gaming mentality.

[MayuAmakura]

What? You don't like getting another firework / useless materia?