Square Enix, what are you doing? (Another Crystal Tower post)

[Vesayth]

TL;DR: The Crystal Tower loot restrictions are a plain bad idea.

Warning: long rant ahead.

Edit: Thanks for mentioning that I can edit my post. This is my first time posting here and didn't know that I could lengthen it this way.

I've had a lot of animosity towards Square Enix in the past several years. Most of it stems from the poor decisions that have been made in regards to FF XIII (another rant for another time). Then I got excited about the new MMO and tried FFXIV 1.0 in beta. I uninstalled that game within 15 minutes because of how unfixably terrible it was. So imagine my surprise 2 years later when the game is re-released, and the game is more or less completely solid for being basically a "new game."

Fixating on 1.0 for a moment, that game was really bad because there were a lot of really drastically poor decisions made from the design team that just didn't make sense at all, and it seemed as if they didn't pay attention to their consumer base at all before it launched. Several months into this game, I have been thoroughly enjoying it. There are some kinks but that's to be expected with any new MMO. But here comes this new content patch to relieve the staleness of the current state of the game. On the one hand, a lot of it appears to be appealing to the players' wishes, but in the case of Crystal Tower, it seems like the FFXIV team is completely reverting to its old ways.

So there are couple of glaring problems that I see with Crystal Tower, and have been mentioned elsewhere in these forums.

First of all: 24 man raid content without the ability to play with more than 1/3 players whom you know. So you are being forced to pug with 16 players right off at the start? How did this happen? What good reason do you have to release raid content like this without supporting proper group dynamics first? I can't wrap my head around it.

I understand that you want to release new content quickly, but there's plenty of new content in this patch besides Crystal Tower and in my opinion it shouldn't be released until it is ready in its entirety. There will be people who enjoy it, no doubt, because they like playing with random players. But a substantially large amount of players will want to play with players they know and have a solid team to do this kind of content, even if they are already geared from coil and have no other reason to go in there.

Whew, ok, so now I've also seen this new loot topic that has come up. The situation above with the premade groups (or lack thereof) can be forgiven, but this is an absolute disastrous monstrosity that REEKS of 1.0's misguided approaches. So one treasure chest per party, that's fine when you're not allowed to group with more than 8 people for it that you know. However, why did you make the decision to only allow 1 piece of loot from the dungeon per week. You've previously state that this was PRE-COIL loot, so I don't see what the issue with letting people roll on things. What happens when all of the classes that need the item have it already and someone wants it for an off-spec? Or what happens when you have only one of a particular class in the group and 2 of that person's items drop? They have to pass on it and hope that it drops again the next week? That is garbage! Many people at that point will flip their table and say "Screw it, I'm just going back to Coil where I can actually loot the items I earn, even if it is more difficult content than I am currently prepared for."

I was so excited when I first heard about Crystal Tower, because PvP in this game doesn't seem to me like it's going to work out, especially with the server-side update step. But now I am no longer interested in Crystal Tower either.

I certainly don't want to see this become a trend either. This is one huge misstep but if it has to stay, can we just leave it with Crystal Tower and move on to do things the right way in the future? I don't want to see a future where I can only get 1 piece of gear a week max, especially since I am more casual these days than back in my WoW days. In short, I just don't have time for this crap.