#nofunallowed

[Moonleg]

Could you imagine playing chess and you have 20 queens while your opponent has 20 pawns? Ya, not fun!

Could you imagine playing Triple Triad with all four and five star cards while your opponent has only one star cards? Ya, that's Triple Triad from the NPC's point of view and they seem to have lots of fun.

[Mikhaill]

I'm in total 100% agreement with OP. I have two suggestions...
Blitzball!
Blitzball tournaments? We can even watch people play on the sidelines and stuff, have bets on which team will win and all that fun stuff.
Watch players grow and have fun and relax. Please if they DO add this, don't make this a friggin' ridiculous grind and crap.

Crafting and Gathering: can be more fun if... we need FATE's or something fun for them too.
Have cute events like a wedding, you can craft/gather things for picnic's or parties and stuff like that, and it'll be fun to gain EXP like that as well.
Get the people who enjoy C&G more things to do!
Some stuff hidden here so people don't have to scroll a lot.

I feel like the problem with 'on the side' content is they make it a huge ass round about.
Glamour: you have to be 50 to look pretty...why? Also costs ALOT to glamour.
Housing: is a big ass joke, the biggest joke of them all. 1% of the game has a house...and I remember seeing a topic where a guy had 6 houses for the hell of it.
Then they proceed to release BS furnishings while I'm chilling with Hobo the Clown in Ul'dah because I ain't got no house.
Chocobo Racing: Takes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long to level.
Your Chocobo friend: WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too long to level, and the fact we can't use them in PT's sucks butt. I used him the entirety of my HW from 50-60 AST and he level'd once...and he already halfway.
Triple T: is annoying because of ridiculous NPC's and rules imo and takes hours upon hours to beat and not get a damn card.
SightSeeing log: Personally don't like it because of the weather thing I have to keep looking out for.

The end-game is bad. It's really bad people. I'm 3 days til' I'm out of my sub and I may run one more course then I'm done til 3.1.
SE cannot make fluff content just that. Oh no! It has to be an arm, a leg and your first born son type of thing.

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

The end-game is bad. It's really bad people. I'm 3 days til' I'm out of my sub and I may run one more course then I'm done til 3.1.
SE cannot make fluff content just that. Oh no! It has to be an arm, a leg and your first born son type of thing.

Wow, they gave casual players Alexander Normal, and they don't even want to play it, What a shocker!!!! Of course endgame sucks, you beat all of it in 2 weeks!

[Mikhaill]

Wow, they gave casual players Alexander Normal, and they don't even want to play it, What a shocker!!!! Of course endgame sucks, you beat all of it in 2 weeks!

I'm asking for more variety than banging my head against the wall with 2 dungeons and weekly raids. :l
But you can pick and choose one sentence and all then go from there, yep.

[Lemuria]

Wow, they gave casual players Alexander Normal, and they don't even want to play it, What a shocker!!!! Of course endgame sucks, you beat all of it in 2 weeks!

The fact you can beat it in 2 weeks says it all, really. But way to totally ignore most of his point, or maybe it went over your head?

The complaint in this thread is that the 'fun' content is often just as much of a grind as the core content. That's just bad game design, and there are really no excuses for it. The whole point of 'fun' content is to have something to do when you're burned out from the grindy core content. It's intended to be a diversion. A bit of fun to keep you amused briefly and not intended as a focal point in the game.

The only thing that even comes close to this in FFXIV are the mini-games in the Gold Saucer which are over in about 2 seconds and are basically timing games. The complaints leveled at Triple Triad are entirely justified, since what was meant to be a bit of fun became an arduous card hunt where you can't even use half your deck until you've found tons of new ones. Such restrictions were never in the original TT game, and they certainly don't apply to any of your NPC opponents.

Also you can get 80% of the TT cards pretty easily, theres nothing stopping anyone from enjoying TT with friends or NPCs.

Yeah, let's ignore the fact that dozens of NPC's play with multiple 4-star cards and need to be beaten upwards of 20 times to get a single card, and it's never one of the good ones. Let's casually gloss over the fact that buying card packs inevitably results in getting countless repeats before you find the one you need. And let's hide the fact that many cards are only available as rewards for beating certain in-game dungeons or battles as a rare drop.

The fact that I haven't even hit my 60-card milestone, must be because I haven't been trying hard enough and nothing to do with the rarity and unavailability of the cards in question. Sure, why not?

I think you're too buried deep to think objectively on this. You need to be able to pull yourself away and look at the big picture. It's not supposed to be hardcore content, it's fluff content intended for fun. There's no shame in having game mechanics designed purely to kick back and relax, but the restrictions placed on TT make it difficult to do anything with. Heck, you can't even play a casual match of TT in a sanctuary unless it's one of a handful of designated locations!

See the wood for the trees, won't ya?

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

See the wood for the trees, won't ya?

Yeah, ok sure! We will just have to agree to disagree. If they made all the cards easy to get people would be complaining that the devs need to make more cards because TT is pointless. Either way, most of the cards are very easy to get and there are a few that are difficult to try and encourage people to play the game more often.

Like everything else you choose how to spend your time. You can play TT casually for fun or you can go super commando and grind it out 8 hours straight to try and get the cloud card.

[Moonleg]

go super commando and grind it out 8 hours straight to try and get the cloud card.

I can earn maybe 100 MGP a minute with a specialized deck against specific opponents.

That's 6000 MGP per hour assuming they don't have a window of opportunity.

That's 48000 MGP in eight hours.

To hit the million MGP required to buy Cloud I would have to play like that, nonstop super commando, for ten thousand minutes. Do you have any idea how long that is? It's 166,67 hours - or rounded off, it's a full week NON STOP SUPER COMMANDO TRIPLE TRIAD against the same opponent. Over and over and over until my eyes bleed. No bathroom breaks. No food breaks. No sleep. A FULL WEEK.

That is not fun. That is grind for grind's sake.

[seorin]

It's a perfectly valid argument. People leave WoW all the time because they feel it's too easy.

You're ignoring the history that I'm referring to. When WoW came out, reaching the level cap in an MMO required an enormous time commitment. WoW changed that through questing instead of grinding, and by removing harsh death penalties. That formula was a wild success, spawning over a decade of imitators. This same history played out again between FFXIV 1.0 and 2.0. Anecdotal claims don't hold any weight when facts show otherwise.

People are bored to tears already and we barely 2 months in.

They're bored because everything they have left feels like a slog for little to no reward. It's not because everything is so easy they finished it all. Nobody is accusing SE of making it too easy to collect all the triple triad cards, for example.

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

You're ignoring the history that I'm referring to. When WoW came out, reaching the level cap in an MMO required an enormous time commitment

No it didn't. FFXI took an enormous time commitment, WoW took 2 weeks.

Ultimately everyone payed $40-60 bux for the expansion, got roughly 50-60 hours worth of gameplay from the campaign. So everyone got their money's worth. Yea I agree. Endgame sucks, but it sucks because the community caused it to suck. Ultimately you can stick around for 3.1 if you want. They will add 2 dungeons a 24 man raid and a chocobo-themed pilotwings minigame. Everyone will blast throught that content in a few weeks and we go back to waiting for the next patch with time gates, because the raid will prob drop 4 pieces of loot for each 8 man party.

I'm personally going to finish out Heavensward but another expansion will be a hard sell for me with the current WoW-esque model that ff14 is using. While a WoW game skinned in final fantasy is still better than WoW, not by much IMO.

EDIT: Also you can get 80% of the TT cards pretty easily, theres nothing stopping anyone from enjoying TT with friends or NPCs.

[seorin]

No it didn't. FFXI took an enormous time commitment, WoW took 2 weeks.

That's exactly what I'm saying. WoW's explosive popularity stemmed from its accessibility, not a long grind. It toppled grindier games EQ, DAoC, and FFXI in an instant.

If you don't like your games to be more accessible, that's fine, but it's incorrect to say that most people prefer the grind when history shows otherwise. The facts support the OP's claim that the game would be more successful and sustainable with less grind. Players who prefer more grind should seek out a title aimed at that niche audience, of which there are plenty (but they don't tend to do too well, financially).