Your thoughts on the direction of this game?

[Renik]

snip

Seeing oils, sands, and alex on hunts was a surprise, a bad one, i don't think anyone asked for them, and if someone did it was wrong. On the other hand, we are supposed to ask for things we want, not say how they should be implemented, and even if we do SE has already proven they don't want our ideas, they just use their own bad implemented ones. But is this is not enough for you, it seems like i have read the alpha, beta and actual forums more than you because i remember some good ideas for NMs that SE simply decided to ignore.

Now redirect your anger to the dev team, this fail system is their fault, ppl would ask for NMs and open world sooner or later, but they decided to implement it this way.

[Assirra]

ARR is a WOW clone,so it will also face the same fate,
after few months or 1 year, people will get tired of it and leave, and jump to the next "modern" clone.

Many XI/1.23 player had already warned that ARR won't have the longevity like XI/XIV1.23 did.

XIV 1.23 was heading in a very good direction,contents were carefully designed.
It had a good community, I met some friends in that game
People log-in not just because the game was fun,because they want to play with each others,
not mindless grinding for tomes or gears.

If it truly was so good then why does ARR exists?
No dev in their right mind would remake a whole game if it wasn't a disaster they tried to fix. Otherwise a couple big patches would have fixed it.

[Lemuria]

Ahem... *rolls up her sleeves and prepares to pull no punches*

First off, as a disclaimer, I don't hate the game no matter what this post may claim. Far from it, I genuinely love the game, but I'm utterly crushed about the direction the devs have decided to take content. It's a genuine slap in the face to anyone who played 1.0, and an even bigger slap in the face to any players who enjoy playing at their own pace. Here's why.

CRAFTING: Everything works fine up to 2-star recipes. We find items, we synthesize with them, we can meld our gear to improve our chances, but we don't need to go too crazy just to get up to a level where we can make the good stuff.

Enter the update: We're now forced to grind out high-quality items. Five of which require 9 of a rare material, and are required for the books. A further 50 of which have a difficulty rivalling 3-star recipes, and each one requires rare materials only found in gathering points which show up once every 70 minutes. That's 200 crawler cocoons, for those doing their math, and that's assuming you can HQ every time. All this just to even GET the tools necessary to attempt the 3-star recipes.

So, let's reiterate. You need maximum stats to even ATTEMPT the 3-star recipes. You need 45 potash or equivalent, assuming no NQ's. And all this just to ultimately create GLAMOR items since the highest we can craft is a mere ilvl 90. I swear, Square-Enix just plain hates us crafters...

COMBAT: So, you want a new sword eh? Perhaps your staff isn't quite as sturdy as you might like. Maybe your bow needs to be a touch more accurate? Enter the Zodiac weapons!

Ugh... there are literally a billion posts explaining why the Atma grind is both stupid, boring and meaningless so I won't go into too much depth. If you need this explained to you, then you're probably the type who thinks Pong is the most engrossing video game in history. Suffice to say you can either get really lucky, or you can waste hours doing the same thing over and over never getting anywhere nearer.

Okay, so you've ground out your Atmas. What next? Tomes of mythology? Easy as pie! Wait, I need how many?! 13,500 tomes. I'm just going to let that sink in for a few minutes. On average even the best dungeon only gives you 70 tomes, with a couple of hundred if you do your dailies every day. Oh, did I forget to mention that's just to pick up a single book, which then has further grinding to be done for completing it? Do I dare even mention that some of those tasks involve Fates, which can involve standing around in the SAME SPOT for hours waiting for the thing to show up?

Okay, fine... we've worked hard. We have our Animus, so what's next? Thal's balls, you must be joking right?

Let's talk about Novus shall we? Because it needs discussing. So, you spend yet more myth to get some inks and then obtain your lovely scroll. So far, so good. You then need to find two things. Firstly, materia to meld to your scroll. Secondly, Alexandrite.

I'm rather glad that they were smart enough to add Alexandrite map to a daily quest. This at least gives people a guaranteed way to obtain their Novus, so we can at least notice some form of progression. A step in the right direction after that awful Atma quest. However, the way they approached the materia melding itself is just silly. I'm glad you don't lose your alexandrite, but on the other hand the grade of the materia has ZERO effect on the weapon. Grade I? 1 point. Grade 2? 1 point. Grade 4? 1 point.

The different grades are only there to act as a 'reset' point for the success rate. This means that ultimately you'll be paying a fortune just to finish your novus, or spending all your spare time spiritbonding to obtain the tier 4's needed.

GLAMORS: Why? Just why? I can understand wanting to look unique, and therefore making some of the nicer items that little bit harder to obtain, but wow... these guys really hate crafters!

Most of the glamor specific items require rare components which are about as hard to obtain as the novus weapons themselves. Most of them are rare finds from treasure maps. Treasure maps which, I should point out, can only be found once per day. That's before I even mention things like Mist Silk... which is a rare find from a map which itself is a rare find in another treasure chest, from another treasure map.

...

I'm not overly pleased about the direction many of the recent updates have taken, to be honest. The core game is still there, and it's still fun to play, but it's being glossed over by endless grinds and boring hunts with no reward in sight most times. The nice things have become the sole prize of the very lucky or the very rich, which is a far step beyond the casual game it opens out as.

I just want the devs to take one step back, take a good look at what they're creating and then think "how can we make these fun and interesting rather than endless grinds?". Maybe then, just maybe, they'll do something to remedy the issues which plague it.

[Yukiko]

If it truly was so good then why does ARR exists?
No dev in their right mind would remake a whole game if it wasn't a disaster they tried to fix. Otherwise a couple big patches would have fixed it.

Many players helped them with solutions and ideas to fix it, but mostly the answer of SE was:
The game engine does not allow us to do so, because...

They were too focused on the "remake" thing, they havnt even tryed to fix something...
Mostly with the words: "in 2.0 all will be better"

Edit: Well not really true, because they tryed to help us against RNG with adding garuda tokens 100% and skirmish loot... and some other stuff, that all vanished in 2.0

[Lemuria]

Many players helped them with solutions and ideas to fix it, but mostly the answer of SE was:
The game engine does not allow us to do so, because...

They were too focused on the "remake" thing, they havnt even tryed to fix something...
Mostly with the words: "in 2.0 all will be better"

To be fair, it was more of a rebranding. FFXIV 1.0 had a stigma attached to it which it wasn't going to shake off easily. It needed to be remade and rebranded in order to become anything remotely successful.

I don't begrudge their decision. I miss the good parts of 1.0, sure, but I can understand why they needed to do what they did. I just wish they'd kept their eyes on the prize the whole time and remodeled old ideas rather than destroying them entirely.

[Tupsi]

exept weishan

She had a point though - The director/producer Naoki Yoshida has been straight forward with calling this a WoW clone essentially as that was his goal. Find any interview or talks when someone mentions the design of this game or look back on ARR development and how he went to Blizzard for inspiration.

have come mostly for please player oldschool

According to this community, the "old school" population is the minority - SE wouldn't focus on the minority, as people here love to state.

I get the feeling you weren't there in the beta forums where people were begging for NMs because of FFXI nostalgia

Except it's been done way better in FFXI and even 1.x than it is here. I get it's the cool thing to state this to try to have a point, but when the source material and previous version does it better..there's a problem. XI has been on a forced spawn system for 7+ years, more than half of it's life span.

Continuously adding stuff to hunt rewards as the game aged. That would actually work

So yeah, once again something FFXI and XIV 1.x did. So you can't blame 'FFXI nostalgia' for something the dev team of FFXIV admitted was a last minute option. Btw, it's been over a year since the beta and they're doing a last minute addition now? You don't please people by doing something a year later and trying to blame that for the reason

[Barimu]

Honestly, I kind of miss Hiromichi Tanaka. Not that I don't like Yoshi-P, but his will to please everyone is just horrible because he's doing terrible things to please people that just log on once or twice a week by giving so many handouts.

[Souljacker]

Honestly, I kind of miss Hiromichi Tanaka. Not that I don't like Yoshi-P, but his will to please everyone is just horrible because he's doing terrible things to please people that just log on once or twice a week by giving so many handouts.

I don't think it's about giving "handouts" - I think that he just didn't understand what players enjoyed about the old NM systems in XI and how it could translate to the modern mmo. I don't think we would have nearly as many complaints if the "hunts" had been a re-interpretation of the ZNM system in XI. That's a good example of something that a linkshell could work together on, take down powerful monsters in the world, and get a good reward for success. Instead, he put in monsters that were basically 0 challenge for a zerg, and they drop far too much reward. FAR too much.

So in short - it's only going to take a couple more of these idiotic systems before I take my gaming dollars back to blizzard. At least when their playerbase screams at them that something is broken, they acknowledge it and try to come up with reasonable adjustments. SE just doesn't care. It's like they believe that the job is over now that gaming mags and sites have re-reviewed it and given them a 9\10.

[Barimu]

snip

I agree with what you said, the fact they made it so in theory the whole server can go fight one of these mobs is ridiculous. Honestly, this game keeps pushing me back to FFXI, and I know its not the same nostalgic game I once played but since they added ilvls to that game, hell it's practically this game with more content to do.

[Staris]

1.0 failed, it was horrible, get over it already.
It is the only game I ever wanted my money back from for a collectors edition.

If you played it and liked it, your a fool and your opinion should be ignored.