Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Kerrigen]

Heh, a good post on these forums. Thanks for taking the time to translate it.

I mostly agree with this guy's point of view and I think the points he raises are a good portion of what doesn't work with this game at the moment, and for the forseeable future (at least until the first expansion drops I guess).

I hear a lot of people saying how this is wrong and the current encounters (of which many are amazing) are the way to go and it's this way or the highway. Although I played it back in the day, I'm not a FF11 apologist (heck I hate the nostalgia goggles a portion of the player base has over this game) but if there's something this game did well, it was the absolute variety in content and encounters you could low-man or tackle in a multitude of ways, making it quite friendly to build a healthy community. I don't believe it was intended as this game was unbalanced as hell and the devs more often than not had no idea of what they were doing, but it somehow worked and I got to play with everyone I knew from my LS, regardless of skill or time commitment to the game. This game could certainly benefit of such a variety without throwing away the current "hard", mechanic-driven content which has its place too.

FF14 right now is "Statics: The Game". There's no denying that. Either you have, and can maintain (which is becoming more and more of a headache with people's interest waning with all the frustration) a static, or you're royally screwed and have nothing of interest to do, except maybe carrying less skilled or more casual players through older content. Forget playing with everyone in your LS/FC on anything that matters (you can still party for meaningless tome dungeons or the occasional meaningless Peisteskin map you could duo anyway, yay I guess).
The combination of lockouts, gating, learning (aka time) requirements we have right now makes for a content structure and hierarchy in which less and less players are willing to partake. I also believe it's one of the causes of that really nasty, impatient and unforgiving mentality a lot of people have in this game and it cascades down to all content.

As for the "mechanics-driven content", I don't think he's wrong either. I'd qualify my playstyle as fairly hardcore (and my time commitment pretty low) and I don't have a lot of problems learning and executing mechanics but I can't disagree with this part:

The current "mechanics-driven battle system" is considerd bland by the hardcore gamers (the biggest problem here, I think), frustrating by the mainstream gamers, and actually prevents the casual crowd from playing altogether.

At the moment, almost every single endgame fight in this game feels like a glorified Heigan Dance, which gets stale fast, especially when less skilled/commited players have a hard time learning and the content isn't easy enough that you can just shrug it off and fully carry multiple people.
These past days and because there isn't much to do, I've started to take more casual people from my LS through Ex Primals and T5 to get them back in the race (and before they quit the game out of spite and because they have nothing meaningful to look forward to, being roadblocked by a couple of fights).
From the cries of rage I was hearing through mumble during Titan Ex, I can tell you the mechanics in this fight (among others but especially this one) are extremely frustrating and painful to "mainstream" players, as easy as they feel to me. We had 3 first-timers and we had to carry one of them, who died maybe 8 times during the winning attempt. He's by no means a bad player, he's even decent, he just has a lot of trouble dealing with the kind of mechanics stacked plumes or landslide are (and an unhealthy dose of lag, too).

I don't have a solution but this game isn't in a good place to last long if the content structure stays the same throughout the first expansion. Hardcores are getting tired of playing the game of statics revolving doors. Mainstream players are in a place where they have to deal with a really unfriendly community that can't really achieve anything meaningful using Party Finder, so why bother. Casual players can't even attempt content. Free Companies are useless, glorified statics.
Variety is important, and over-reliance on a single or a handful of unforgiving mechanics for "difficulty" in every fight as a main game design pattern won't get FF14 far.