Why telling people to unsub is a horrible defense of the game.

[Skiros]

1. The game is deliberately designed in a way that disincentivizes players from unsubbing.

The most common example that people use is the housing demolition timer. You'd still need to sub for at least 50% of the time to keep your house.

The other disincentive is weekly lockouts. For a raider that wishes to raid Ultimate on release, they would need to spend at least 6 to 7 weeks capping their weekly-capped tomes in order to get BiS for Ultimate. Split clears do nothing in alleviating this bottleneck.

The game is also deliberately paced so that even casual players would be subbed for more than one month to experience all of the patch's content if they want to be there on release. Have you noticed how every patch these days has a 4-week gap between the first and the final content patch? (e.g. 6.1, 6.11, and 6.15) The reason they provide is for players to pace themselves, but if that's the real reason they would've released the content in a three-week span, with 6.1 on the first week, 6.11 on the second, and 6.15 on the third. Releasing 6.15 on the fifth week is explicitly designed for players to stay subbed just beyond the one-month threshold.

Let's also not forget seasonal events, which while minor, also serve as mini-FOMOs because those items are only free during the seasonal events.

Obviously, the game is far from the worst in this respect. Indeed it's probably one of the best MMOs at preventing FOMO. But that is a low bar since virtually all MMOs are predatory at some level.

2. The game's community has organically developed in a way that disincentivizes players from unsubbing.

Want to keep up with friends? Want to prevent your static from breaking up because of a content drought? You gotta keep doing content together. Not everyone will want to play the same game. For too many players in FF14 now, the community and the friends they made are the primary reasons, if not the sole reason, they continue subbing to FF14.

You might think that that is not the developers' issue, but Blizzard understood that many players stay in the game because of network effects and switching costs (https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2...iplayer-games/). The game is designed in many ways to keep you in the game not just with its content and gameplay, but also with how its systems encourage socialization, bonding, and the making of friendships.

However, that is not sufficient to save World of Warcraft, and this alone is not going to be sufficient to keep FF14 afloat. Players who care less about these network effects will quit first. When your friends return to the game less and less and you stop hearing back from friends from since Heavensward, you'll be less and less disincentivized to stay subbed in the game.

Indeed, the rise of Discord means that Square Enix needs to realize that one of the huge profit-making mechanism of MMOs, the social bonds that keep the players in the game, is weaker and weaker. Telling players to unsub is bad for the game because very frequently you are also telling players to abandon their friends, statics, and communities. Even if you keep up with each other on Discord, there's no guarantee that bond will hold if you don't have another video game that you play together.

Ironically, Lost Ark is what kept me in FF14 because I've been playing it with my friends and my FC. Were it not for Lost Ark I'd probably have drifted far from the FF14 community. Not every player has the same privilege. If none of your FF14 friends play Lost Ark, and indeed many treat it with disdain, you might just switch to Lost Ark for good and never come back to FF14 if you actually enjoyed Lost Ark.

3. Unsubbing does not address the issue with the lack of meaningful content in the game for veterans.

Many players want to stay in an MMO and not feel burnt out. I understand that new players, especially those who have only started in Shadowbringers, find a lot to do in the game. But many veterans do not. One of the most important reasons is because an overwhelming majority of this game's content simply do not have good replay value.

A huge part of raiding is to figure out mechanics and practice until you do the dance cleanly. Once you have done that, you will always use your GCD in this particular order, barring one or two changed GCDs depending on mechanics. You will always solve this mechanic in this particular way. You will almost always optimize your rotation in the exact same way. The only exception is Black Mage, which has enough RNG elements in high-end optimization (transpose lines) to keep it fresh and different each encounter. But for the rest of the jobs, you are either dealing with RNG that requires minimal thought (like DNC holding fans for bursts) or dealing with zero RNG at all.

Even in the most current Ultimate, I have already settled into a static rotation on GNB that I execute in the exact order every time, unless I fuck up.

This goes beyond raiding. Crafting has become so repetitive now because there is close to zero incentive in doing anything more than clicking on the same macros figured out by someone else for you. At the very least, HW crafting and SB's Whistle mechanics added depth to crafting and allowed a crafter to have fun manually crafting even on simple recipes by needing to use some thinking, since the procs are going to be different every time.

So when someone says that current crafting is "content" I do not understand what they mean, because it's a chore - once you figure out the optimal rotation that minimizes the number of steps for your melds, you are done. That takes 1 minute if you are lazy and just copy the rotation from someone else, and 10 minutes if you have any level of understanding of how to build crafting rotations. Clicking on macros for the rest of the time is not content for the vast majority of players.

I can go on and on about various other aspects of the game. For example, once you experienced a treasure hunt a few times, you have experienced all treasure hunts. There is little to no variation in treasure maps - they all have the same few gimmicks (like limit cut kill orders). Once you've seen all the gimmicks, you've seen them all.

Once you experienced a dungeon, you have experienced all Expert runs for that patch. You will be doing the same mechanics in the same order every time.

Unfortunately, replayable content in FF14 are mostly out of reach for most players. Solo HoH and PotD are highly replayable because different floor layouts, different pomander drops, and even different monster distribution can alter a run drastically and sometimes even mean an easy solo run or a failure.

Feast was also a highly replayable content at the top levels when people generally know what they're doing. You are facing players who have different personalities, have different tactics and strategies. Different matchups determine what strategy you should pursue - on healer, I have to decide whether to go hard and use more Glares or focus on healing to cover weaker Platinum players.

Unfortunately too many content in FF14 is one-and-done, like the MSQ, trials, raids, crafting, treasure maps, and so on. Telling players to do insane grinds like 2000 mentor roulettes is not helpful. This kind of grind is worse than anything in Lost Ark, a KMMO. The vast majority of players do not consider such grinds meaningful content nor are they compelled to do these types of content. Telling players to unsub is not helpful and does not solve the lack of replayability of the game. Caught between the two a lot of players find themselves burning through the content in a single week even when playing at a casual pace. Were it not for Ultimate, I would have personally already unsubbed once again because I experienced all the 6.1 content in a few days playing only 2-3 hours a day. The rest are grindy achievements which are not what anybody is asking for when they ask for more content in the game.

I don't think anyone is asking for a patch to literally fill up all four months of our time. That is insane. We're just asking for the game to maybe provide us with more than 10 hours of gameplay. Replayable content is the key in doing this but they have failed in most of them so far.

4. Unsubbing does not address the issue with the lack of quality or dissatisfaction with the design philosophy of certain aspects of the game.

I'm sure it goes without saying but... telling players to unsub if they don't like healer design is even more nonsensical than telling players to unsub due to a content drought. Whereas you'll get new content if you come back to the game a year later, you are not going to really suddenly get a new healer design. If they intend on designing aspects of the game that are at odds with what you desire as a player, no amount of unsubbing is going to do anything. You will come back and face the exact same design and content that has previously dissatisfied you.

[hydralus]

I think they're just trying to give you a clue that things likely aren't going to change and maybe you should find a different game to play rather than praying that this one changes to suit your needs?

[IdowhatIwant]

Snip

Yoshi P said to tell everyone that isn't having fun to unsub. That is what we must do!

[aveyond-dreams]

I think they're just trying to give you a clue that things likely aren't going to change and maybe you should find a different game to play rather than praying that this one changes to suit your needs?

Wanting content that lasts in *this game* means we want to play *this game* not another one, especially for us veterans who've been here since the beginning.

[Skiros]

I think they're just trying to give you a clue that things likely aren't going to change and maybe you should find a different game to play rather than praying that this one changes to suit your needs?

I'm sure that went so well for WoW.

[hydralus]

I'm sure that went so well for WoW.

And the implication of that is supposed to be...? Last I heard you can still play WoW if you want to.

[Theodric]

And the implication of that is supposed to be...? Last I heard you can still play WoW if you want to.

The implication is that smart veteran players saw the problems WoW created miles away and spoke up in an effort to try and convince the development team to take a step back and reconsider their plans. Instead they doubled down on questionable design choices and the game began bleeding active subscriptions over time. Any feedback, no matter how constructive, was shot down there as well with the 'jUsT uNsUb BrO' declaration. As if people who are passionate and invested in something should just up and leave rather than fight to try and see a different trajectory embraced.

Eventually even many passionate fans left as well and all that is left today is a soulless husk. A shadow of its former glory.

I can safely suggest that FFXIV is likely to go the same way if recent rends continue. Do you really think those of us who have seen this song and dance before can't see the exact same issues arising here?

If people didn't care about FFXIV then they wouldn't speak up about how it can improve - and before the inevitable 'gotcha' arises, the development team do not need to take every bit of advice on board. However it's pretty clear that they're pretty far removed from player tastes given how things like the housing lottery and Hrothgar hairstyles have been playing out.

[SturmChurro]

Wanting content that lasts in *this game* means we want to play *this game* not another one, especially for us veterans who've been here since the beginning.

Exactly it. I want to want to play this game more. I've tried other mmos, and I prefer this one.

No, I'm not talking about having "one game" either. It's true I would like to just have one "main" game, or MMO, but that doesn't mean I can't play other games alongside it. I play a lot of single player games (or just don't play games in general at times).

[Eraden]

As I said in another thread, it's not the people who come to complain in these forums, that SE should be worried about. It's those who quietly go away and never return. There is no way to woo those people back once they leave because they never look back. Right now, the number of people doing this is probably rather small by comparison to new subscribers. If that ratio ever inverts, things could get problematic.

[Jeeqbit]

1. Not everyone has a house and with how limited it is, most of the people who want one probably have an FC room or an apartment instead. Not everyone raids. There isn't always an ultimate in every tier. Making people sub for 2 months to experience all of the patch's content is still better than making them sub for 4 months. You have a point about seasonal events but if someone is trying to be a casual player subbing for only 1-2 months then they would have to give up being a completionist anyway, so missing a seasonal event won't hurt them. They can buy the items later in the mog station too.

2. You can keep up with friends on discord or play other games with your static. A lot of statics do that.

3. Content has a lack of replay value in the sense that the story only asks you to do it once but they usually put mounts and achievements that involve repeating the content. With extremes you can do these to get 99 totems for the mounts, while leveling classes you can work toward the amaro mount, in bozja you can get field notes for a mount or get a random chance to loot a mount. You have items to work towards by farming clusters. There are similar features in eureka by farming treasure for mounts. There are plenty of mounts to work towards in pvp.

I could go on, but SE makes replay value optional by saying that if you are a casual player, you can just do the content once, but if you are a completionist there are rewards for repeating the content.

The content doesn't change a lot when repeating it, but that's how the game is designed. Fights are a dance and it feels good to master the dance while everyone around you can't. What makes the experience different every time is what goes wrong each time, but maybe the experience isn't very different if you don't pug.