Thread: The game is more dead than it was pre-3.1

Originally Posted by Zojha

So, let's brainstorm: Fun content.
Content that has replayability beyond any possibly offered rewards, because it offers the intrinsic reward of enjoyment.

Any ideas?

I'll be honest. I don't get paid by SquareEnix to develop a game for them. I pay them to do that for me. If they no longer develop what I like, I stop paying them. And there it is in a nutshell.

Originally Posted by Alahra

They've gotten into a sort of rut where anyone that keeps up with their gear and Esoterics has no need for gear that isn't maximum item level on their main jobs, and the largest portion of the playerbase doesn't spend a lot of time gearing alt jobs so far as I can tell. That greatly shrinks the amount of content regular players consider worthwhile, I think.

Yeah, I've gotten to the point where I think I'll be skipping gearing in the "one class only" update patches because I really don't want to do the treadmill that much.

Originally Posted by Voltyblast

Yeah I agree with OP and unfortunately, as a house owner, I'm also "threatened" to not leave the game, or else I'd lose my hard-earned house, in a server where housing is already hard to find, if not impossible.

And suffice to say, if I lost my house I'd definitely lose all the little reason I have to keep on playing.

See, my subscription has ended and I've thought about the possibility of coming back somewhere down the line. Maybe in 3-4 patches, maybe the next expansion. But then I started thinking of the content that I will have missed out. All of my FC has already quit with me and if I do come back, it'll likely be alone and I can't help but think all of the content save for the latest ones I want to try will be out of date and irrelevant. I will either have trouble finding people to tackle through it or I will be pushed through them asap like I was a fresh 50 character going through CM/Prae with 7 other people who just wants to get it done in 10 mins either because of it being turned optional (see titan ex) or just sheer over gearing.

By the game's design, I will just be pushed to the latest series of contents as soon as I resub but I really cannot see this as a good thing. 1-2 years of content that can be passed through in a week or so wouldn't feel right to me and I don't get how most people see this as an incentive for new players. Maybe some of them will enjoy being pushed to the same level of play/content as the long time players without getting there on their own but I really can't imagine going through something as garuda hm and then getting kicked out of the instance 2 mins later because the other 7 players have brute forced it for you while you try to grasp what's going on constitutes as playing. If this is what's waiting for me if the thought of resubbing ever crossed my mind down the line, I'm not sure If I will.

I really really question if other players are really thinking of the new/returning players when they support this kind of setup and throw the "catch up" catch phrase around or whether they just want stuff to be easier for themselves.

Edit: I quoted the person I quoted because she's talking about what's keeping her in the game and I wanted to give input on what's going to keep me from getting into the game again.

The broken foundation of the game is really starting to catch up to them.

This entire process of releasing content then releasing content with better rewards for "catch-up" purposes is the core of the problem. Stat progression is so linear and so simplistic that they simply design half the content out of existence with new patches which is just ridiculous. Not only that but they spend so much time and effort on designing redundant "alternate" progression that basically isn't used by a chunk of the population one way or the other. Then on top of this Yoshida is starting to complain that his team doesn't have enough resources. I mean, no sh*t? You push everyone to a tiny bit of new content every few months. Then to make content relevant they have to pull terrible design decisions like putting the best gear in Diadem to actually draw people to the content. Again this core of this issue is the terrible progression plaguing the game.

The other side of things is their homogenized game design means they are pretty much out of new mechanics options. The fights are just getting to be downright boring because they all have to be designed with a 2 tank, 2 healer, 4 DPS composition in mind. And beyond the mechanics are all dead simple and similar simply because they refuse to give jobs defining abilities that could be designed around because of this silly fear that you might have to bring a BLM to one encounter and a SMN to another. Oh but they designed out that whole possible aspect of what could make this work as well. The biggest defining feature of FF14, the Armoury System, is completely pointless because of the silly lockouts and limitations of consuming most of the game content on a single job. No repeatable quests to help other jobs level up, stupid alternative path gear that is always weaker than the best stuff making it difficult to raid with secondary jobs until the restrictions are lifted and making all of that pointless again because a new set of better, locked content is available.

I honestly don't think there is much they can do for the game than look at the foundation of the game itself and I doubt that is going to ever happen.

Originally Posted by Ladon

Snip

This plus lack of replayability in the most of the content is seriously killing the game.

I think people definitely cannot use "the game has been out only for 1 year, the expansion has been out only for 3 months" etc. excuses and need to face the reality.
We need content with more replayability, gear and content that stays longer and equipment choices that aren't only about mainstat > crit > det > skillspeed (for BRD).
The question is - Is FFXIV team able to put such changes in game without getting bigger? I personally don't believe that. If I was SE, I would put one similar patch every 4 months and milk us trough cash shop more and more (well they already increased pace of that) untill the game has to be shut down. Because increasing the number of people in the team is definitely not the way they wish to go.

EDIT: The gear and content gets outdated so fast it's ridiculous. I know I know I am playing vertical progression game, white knights have been repeating that since 2013. Well, maybe it's time to change the system of progression or atleast slow it down significantly.

I agree with majority of the observations here about what kind of "content" we've been getting and how its really starting to make me feel disillusioned with the future of the game, which is a problem for me, because I've been here since the launch of 1.0 and have never spent any significant time "away" from the game.

It's pretty bad when the playerbase often has cynical expectations of the next up-and-coming patches, but the predictability and simplicity of the nature of content that frequently gets regurgitated back at us with a different color paint job is getting old and more and more people are (thankfully) calling them out on it in these forums. A couple friends of mine and I were talking about the state of the game, and we feel that its just lacking in community and most new content lacks any real "staying power;" and as Ladon (as well as countless other posters in assorted threads) pointed out, they invalidate and kill their content that they spend patch cycles designing at such an alarmingly fast rate. Free companies are mostly glorified social channels with perks if you throw enough money into it; since nearly everything midcore is best off done repeatedly with the same 8 people you're comfortable memorizing fights with. Anything that puts you with more than 8 people either turns into a zergfest or a extended game of "run out of the lights on the floor."

There's just so much wasted potential and questionable design choices in nearly everything.