Absence of end-game content : the downfall of every MMO.

[Aragor]

... and FF14 ARR doesn't avoid that. The honey-moon when you reachlvl 50 lasts what? A month at best? Unless you're really bad or super casual, it's not gonna take long for you to kill the HM primals, get your relic, mess around in Coil and be decently geared from thos brain-dead CM/AK runs.

Once that is done, what is left? "Level other classes!" some people say... But who wants to grind fates non-stop for days? Run dungeons? Please... the XP gained in those is absurd.

Level your crafting/gathering profession? Yeah well it's kinda fun for a short while... until you're sitting on 1M gil and wonder "is there anything worth using that money on?". The answer is no btw. Not even talking about those flawed professions providing near to nothing relevant.

Since they announced that Crystal Tower would be a walk in the park to farm sub-Coil quality gear, all of my friends gave up on this game and I'm doing the same now. Too much attention is given to esthetism and RP and not enough to content. The introduction of dailies is not gonna improve anything. Levequest were close enough in term of boring repeatable content with meh rewards.

To keep players hooked to a game the recipe is simple : a large diversity of dungeons and raids to run with relevant rewards, PvP and the possibility to level different classes in an enjoyable way (please avoid the suggestion of making new toons to level other jobs with quests, the main feature of FF is to have all those jobs on one toon).

I don't see how the devs are going to make PvP viable with the terrible delay between actions, but I hope they work on the end-game more than on what is cute and sparkly (housing? really!?). This game has a lot of potential.

[TrickedOutHoro]

That's the price you have to pay when you get into an MMO in it's earliest stages.

[KogaDrake]

you go into EVERY new MMO knowing that every MMO starts with little endgame and get upset when there isnt endgame? Unless a new MMO actually states they are changing the endgame system with lots to do at release, why would you expect anything else? And even if they did would you truly expect that it would be filled with a ton of content to keep a hardcore player busy all week?

[zakalw3]

OP doesn't understand how mmo development works and expects too much too soon because of that.

[Tagihi]

to all who are making new threads just about end game .. Perhaps time and wait a while.
Because it will take at least half a year before it comes as something great.
2.1 will not be any major patch but more of a filling.
2.5 then maybe we're talking about a major change.

then probably a 3.0 expansion.

you go into EVERY new MMO knowing that every MMO starts with little endgame!

And this!

[NoctisCaelus]

The game just started. Big patches won't come for a while. 2.1 will come soon and then 2.2 with more things. If it's not popular now (Even though it is), it will be more popular later on. I think you should be grateful a bit since you can work on contents a lot quicker than others. Hitting 50 soon so you can max mythology for example.

[Aragor]

you go into EVERY new MMO knowing that every MMO starts with little endgame and get upset when there isnt endgame? Unless a new MMO actually states they are changing the endgame system with lots to do at release, why would you expect anything else? And even if they did would you truly expect that it would be filled with a ton of content to keep a hardcore player busy all week?

I understand what you mean and I'm not that hardcore neither was I expecting TONS of stuff to do. Still, compare this game to the gold standard : WoW.

Dungeons.
Farming AK or CM VS UBRD/LBRD, Scholo, Stratholme.

Raiding.
Coil : 4 pretty short turns with a 5th broken one.
MC : Over 10 bosses (with much more interesting mechanics let's be honest).

What came in the first serious content patch.
Crystal Tower : can't speak too fast from what we haven't experienced, but from what they've said, it's gonna be welfare gear for those who can't handle Coil.
BWL : how awesome was this place seriously?

My main point isn't really that RIGHT AWAY there wasn't a lot of stuff to do, but mainly that was is in the pipeline for further content patches is futile (housing, dailies) or isn't going to last more than a week (CT). I LOVED that game going from 1 to 50, I'm just disapointed the fun didn't last past that.

[Sayura_]

That's the price you have to pay when you get into an MMO in it's earliest stages.

I have to disagree. My friends and I (full-time jobs) in recent mmos got 1.5 years out of Aion, 6mo out of SWTOR, 1 year out of GW2, and we're feeling the boredom now after 2mo in FFXIV. We're waiting it out until the new patch because we do like the game but you can't say we have to "pay the price" when competing mmos don't see these issues 2 months in. IMO all those games had some sort of pvp so our interest was kept.

[Sybreed]

The only mmos I can think of with any appreciable amount of endgame content (or time to complete it) at release are EQ and WoW. Why? EQ was just a gigantic grind from hell, both for levels and for gear (gear was also a massive RNG crapshoot to acquire), and the game was VERY unforgiving. WoW at launch had issues: server stability, class balance, you name it. But the big thing with WoW at launch was that it took cues from EQ and had massive time sinks like having to have specific resist sets that you needed to build, and massive PITA quests to get keyed to even enter instances at all. What's the common thread between EQ and WoW? Timesinks. Gated content. Things that the mmo playerbase will NOT accept nowadays, period. So every mmo since WoW has either become fairly casual or tried to copy the WoW model of mmo design, and as a result, they're all fairly "easymode" and "casual" compared to EQ and Vanilla WoW.

[Sybreed]

This was just giving the market what it wanted. Sadly however, as others have pointed out, developing an MMO is a MASSIVE undertaking, and it's just reality that companies cannot design a huge game, deal with bugs and balance, and also have a huge queue of endgame content waiting for the extremely dedicated and flat out no-life basement dwelling 12+ hours a day 7 days a week sort of people, it just can't be done. And yet SOMEHOW people think it SHOULD and CAN be done, and then QQ when it isn't done. They then proceed to cry foul and sing songs of lament and doom about how they game will fail (see every single mmo since WoW). Because of this, huge tracts of the mmo playerbase have become "franchise jumpers". I honestly think at this point no mmo can "be good", because the playerbase itself is so insanely entitled, toxic, and unrealistic.