What went wrong? Is it the game or the grenre?

[YuriRamona]

There are two problems:

• Very fast vertical gear progression
• Lack of content tuned for item level 80-90

You could obtain half of a full set of i90 within a month operating on an average item level of 50-60 through mythology tomes. Combined with a weekly run through Coil and farming of Extreme primals, you could finish a set in less than a month.

Almost all of the new content in 2.1 filled the already-crowded item level 50-60 gap. The problem is that, as just mentioned, you don't need to progress from item level 50 to 55 to 60 to 65 etc, but skip directly over content such as Crystal Tower, Pharos Sirius, Copperbell HM, Mogking, etc.

If the content in 2.1 had been released at launch, we'd be in a very good place. Instead, we're in the opposite position. Now that Twintania has been totally figured out and nailed by thousands of players, there's nothing left to do at ilvl80+ content.It would make sense to say that grinding out lower level content would be meaningful to players who've already cleared T5/Extreme Primals, if any content at all demanded or encouraged the availability of alternative jobs. However, in the interest of making ilvl80+ content accessible, party composition is nearly meaningless. Any given party of any job combination can clear all the content without problems, so why level a new job if it doesn't make higher level content easier or possible?

I think this addresses the concern of the original post. We saw a lot of this from the very early stages of the game, when players would clear T1-4, cap myth, and essentially be done with ilvl80+ content for the next 6 days. Now, the only addition to that are the Extreme Mode primals, which take 45 minutes to clear through, at the most.

[Saccharin]

Over the past two or three weeks I have started to watch my free company members log on less and less and we have gone from having 3-4 active coil groups down to one if we are lucky. I myself am on my 5th job just to give me something to do. I am still enjoying the game and have plenty left to do but it just feels like the community as a whole is shrinking day by day.

It's not so much the game or the genre. With a normal game people finish it then move on to the next title. MMOs are different, you buy it play it and then decide if you like it long enough to play it long term. When an MMO is released people try it some stay longer than the three 30 days and then decide it's not for them. This is what has happened with your free company. It'll take a while for the population to stabilise. You'll always get new players who try it and then decide it's not for them. You also get people who play it for so long and take a break If you want to maintain a free company you need to recruit often to maintain a sizable player base.

[Pylfer]

In this thread already there have been about 10 different/unique "I would prefer if the game was this way" comments.

I personally think that the game, in it's current condition, is essentially the foundation of a house. It's built a strong base upon which all of the rooms and fixtures and doors and windows will be added (and of course the basement and secret laboratories as well ;3). We have a lot of people leaving because they are in a mind set similar to that of what WoW offers where there is content from 1-90 and a slew of things to do at max level where here there is a finite number of things with a few lacking features (PvP). The fact that we are losing people from the community isn't necessarily a testament to something that has failed on the games end, but rather a failure on the end of the user to understand that content cannot just stream out of Yoshi-P's and his teams butt every week to appease them.

[Zezlar]

It has something to do with both the game and the genre. Square went with the typical safe route when developing XIV, and a lot of people are bored. How many times can you play the same game with different assets?

[Lumiin]

Snip

It's because you can throw your keyboard at the wall and be 1-50 in 3 days and faceroll through everything. If the game actually had an ounce of difficulty it wouldn't be that. The players are eating everything because it's hard NOT too. Yoshi said he wanted 1-49 to be fast because end game is "where the fun begins"

[Loony_BoB]

I will keep paying for the game and I will keep logging in because I have a duty to my LS and FC members to do so. My wife is still loving the game and I'm sure once she's back from her overseas work trip, she'll be jumping back in and encouraging me to get back into it, and to be honest I probably will.

However, these are the reasons (and I can only speak for myself) that I have lost a lot of the interest I once held in the game.

1. I have other games I want to play. I got six for Christmas, and I just completed the fourth of them. Once I'm done with the sixth, I'll probably get back into XIV:ARR - however, I have to keep in mind that there are even more games I'd love to get back into including Football Manager and anyone who knows this game knows that such things can't be done at the same time as an MMO, they're both "full time games". Likewise Dwarf Fortress, which I do miss. I'll also likely get Lightning Returns and perhaps Thief soon.

2. I have other hobbies I want to keep up with. I recently bought the FF fansite in my sig after working for it for over a decade, and a lot of my time has been taken up with it. Managing an FC on top of it... I'm struggling, let's put it that way. Both have their stresses and it's nice to be able to get away from the two different but very linked social environments so I can have some "me time".

3. Housing release in patch 2.1 broke me. I spent all of Patch 2.0 looking forward to housing and saving up for it and then the pricing was released and, while the FC and I managed to focus on saving for quite some time and did fairly well considering we weren't massive (still decently sized with 75 members dotted around the world, of which 12-16 are usually on throughout each weeknight in the UK), but after spending that long looking forward to something in particular, it really did take it's toll on me and our savings have dropped notably as the price of the large housing continues to be months away from being achievable by our group. We could settle for less, but it seems like a waste of money if we spend all that hard-earned gil just to have to save up all over again. Making gil in this game is a bitch enough as it is with the crafting system / economy ignored in the way it is because of SE's perspective of RMT and how to deal with it.

4. The Social Slip. There's a lack of easy pop in, pop out party work where I can make friends with people on my server, for a start - I suppose treasure maps would be good for this but they aren't required for progress so it's not common to find treasure map parties, and of course there is the loot to consider and people can get crabby about that. The Duty Finder is used for almost everything that is required, and I miss having people shout for an L50 WHM quest to get their body piece or whatever (talking 1.x here). These simple missions took five minutes, were only tricky the first couple of times or so and after that were just a great way to meet friends. Likewise level-grind groups. The more we could sit in the same spot, the less we had to use our keyboards for moving around, the more we could chat with one another. Everything in this game seems to be a rush, and it's a darn shame. This is the reason I spend more time helping people with story DF's than I do with endgame DF's. People are so quick to speed run that they forget that this is a social game designed for you to do things with other people. PEOPLE. This game spends a lot of time forgetting that. Luckily my LS is pretty great for being very social, so I can jump on the game at any time and generally have at least one or two people up for just chatting about whatever while we craft, gather, do treasure maps or some other random job that can be done completely in the open world.

5. No more reward for exploration. I've seen everything now. I saw everything a long, long time ago. There is little I need to traverse the world for nowadays and I'm not very interested in doing a DF run of the new dungeons anymore because it's just a rush job.

6. Life! Work is busy. I want to come home and relax. Because of point #4, I don't feel very relaxed when I play the game. I spend about as much time running around as I do fighting, and I spend far more time fighting than I do getting to know people. If I wanted to relax my way into a non-social game, I have much more interesting/enjoyable solo games I can play! I want more multiplayer, but I want to have multiplayer that I can enjoy instead of feeling pushed around by.

This combination of things worked towards me spending far less time in the game.

EDIT: Perhaps the biggest irony in all of this is that if there were a little more focus on allowing players to relax in "casual" leveling, they might be more excited by the more "hardcore" instances. I know that if I could relax in this game and spend time getting to know people then I would be far more interested in doing the harder challenges. Instead, I feel that there is nothing to hold me in the game long enough to make me want to do the harder challenges. In 1.x, I could grind away on Natalan parties, craft gear to SB/sell, craft endgame gear for myself via an endless destruction of items (that unforgiving materia melding!)... which would relax me and also help me get to know people. Then, when I got to know people, and was relaxed enough, I could say "Alright, guys, let's take on Van Darnus!" and we would crack on until we beat him.

[Doo]

For example people would refuse ARR if it wasn't a generic Quest Grind and nothing but Dungeon Instances type of MMO because that's "industry standard" now.

Of course you'll have people state the game is highly successful and the most popular MMO to ever exist and there's absolutely no problems with it, but those people tend to be the ones who love this style of MMO to begin with.

Sad but true.

[Sciwolf]

The game has been barely released for five months and the kiddies are at it, moaning and complaining how this game has not forever changed their lives and how disappointed they are at the small amount of content. Not enough of this or too much of that.
I'm baffled at the number of QQers on this thread who should be playing other genres since they obviously do not like MMOs in general.
These players hop from one MMO to another always lamenting the same pathetic arguments without ever realizing that they probably should be playing an entirely different genre of games.

[Jarlax]

The communities have driven these games so that all of the content created from level 1-50 "or whatever the cap is" pretty much worthless, and takes only a few days or weeks to complete. A byproduct of this is the max-level grind currency from x-event/group content to be rewarded with items, and we all know how monotonous this can be. Communities and the majority of the players don't like it when it takes months to achieve max level; because, the perception is "that's when the game starts".Developers want to make successful games so they try to cater to the playerbase or what they "think" they want in the game.

This is the problem with the newer MMO's in that tremendous resources are put into creating "trivial" content that will be skipped, ignored, exploited, "whatever"; because, the way the game is set up it makes this content trivial after you outlevel it.

EQNext I believe has the solution and will be a genre changer just like it was when it was first released in 1999. I say this because I have literally watched in the last 15 or so years how the communities have driven a lot of the so called "grindy" stuff out of the games and we have this grind-to-win currency systems now otherwise the games would be completed by players in a week.

What makes it so hard to create a game like this? It's simple people don't like to level up, but they do like to get new gear and progress their characters that way. We have the crowd that scours every instance for exploits and calls them "fair gameplay". The crowd that says "I don't have time" and actually want the currency grind with "speed run" type gameplay. We have the ones that think things should be earned over longer peroids , and by only completing top end content. Then we have the PvP crowd that wants their own gear, but they shouldn't have to participate in any other content in the game to be "on par" with everyone else that does. Then we have the "nerf that class" PvPer who thinks everyone is OP but them and demands nerfs to other classes until their class is like playing "god of war".

The way they are changing this is simple, and brilliant, no more levels. So why didn't a lot of us run dungeons when this game released? You didn't need the items because they would be outleveled fast, and in this case fates were faster, in other games the community finds the weakest content with best reward and grinds that until they complete whatever goal is in mind. So what will no levels do?

It turns the game into a gear grind only.

So you cant grind mobs to max level; because there is no max level, and you cant outlevel items.

No static content, so you can't "grind" the same spawns over and over, or camp that boss, all mobs have dynamic AI and they will move around the entire world, so no more "dungeon grind for currency"

Sense there are no levels your going to WANT to find that nice piece of gear hidden down in the bottom of that dungeon, and not skip it; because, there wont be a point your not going to "outlevel the content"

Action style combat, no more "click that guy and mash buttons" and 44 different classes with a max of 8 ability slots, and the ability to cross class abilities.

This will be a game you log into and meet with friends to go "adventure around" not max your comms for the week; because, mobs wont ever be in the same place, they will move to different areas of the world if they don't like that spot for one reason or another, and getting camped and killed over and over is one of them. So YOU may have found that uber mob that dropped that awesome sword, but when you bring your friends to show them where he was........he probably wont be there anymore.

I can't wait for this to finally be released, SoE have scrapped this project 3 or 4 times in the last 8 or so years and started over until finally they have something that is NOT going to be the same crap we have been playing for 15 years now that started with EQ1.

[Magis]

I think we need to change our perception of 'popular' as well. Both as a playerbase and as an industry. EVE, after 10 years, is JUST now breaking 500k players. FFXIV after its first month had 600k players. (with active subs that is) - yet which one would you say is the more popular game? (I would say EVE is much more well known imo)

The biggest problem in the industry today is that these games are so expensive to make that unless they have 1 mil+ subs the game is considered a flop. So they cater it to the widest audience possible by watering down their game.

There is still a crowd of players who reminisce of the old FFXI/EQ1 days where MMOs were about the multiplayer aspect of the game. Its a niche crowd though, and a developer is gonna have to be happy with 100-200k subs for years until a game like that can get real traction, something most investors I suspect will not want to back. I do think a game like that has more staying power than these quick fix wow model games that have almost always flopped after 1-2 years.

I'm with you, even with my limited play schedule I would take a revamped EQ1 PoP era style game over anything i've seen in the last 4 years any day. I think someone will eventually make a game like that, and it will be like EVE, starts small and grows each year. It's a game I would sub for long term for sure.

When I said popular, I meant it had a large playerbase that plays the game, and it keeps on growing. Too many people on this forum say "omg that style of game play is outdated an dead" when EVE clearly shows it isn't, and has way more gains in the long run.

The 1 million+ population count is a pipe dream and rarely happens... usually falling back down. The numbers WoW sees will never happen again unless an MMO brought something mindblowingly engaging. With the way the whole game industry is... I don't see that happening. Just look at how many MMOs breached 1 mil+:

http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png

Probably Lineage, WoW, and Runescape (damn, I didn't know it was that popular) are the few that haven't died or gone F2P.

It's too much of the short term, not enough on the long term. Like another poster said, the whole focus is on the "end-game". End game should be something that is worried about a year down the line. Heck except for Onyxia, WoW's first patches were adding instances like Mauradon and Diremaul, lvl 40s and 50s dungeons as well as open world mechanics like the honor system.

I myself work 9-5 and on off times I am out with friends or working on projects and I too would love an in depth MMO. The no-lifer stereotype is BS. I raided in WoW during vanilla, and our guild was full of 30+ year olds (I think our guild leader and main priest were in their 40's) who had families and jobs, and found time to do raids and complete content. Sure we weren't doing world firsts, but it wasn't impossible.

Snip

I have hopes for the ambitious goals EQNext has. Hopefully it will give the industry a firm kick in the butt to start bringing back the original point of MMORPGs: a virtual world where you take the role of your avatar, filled with other players to bring it alive.