Short (or not) constructive feedback to the development of the game.

[Alice_Nightingale_Odin]

Hey everyone!

A bit of background about me before I get to the topic -
I started this game around 3+ years ago, at first I had no interest in the raiding content at all. It scared me, but I was still amazed by things like ultimate weapons and savage armor. I fell in love after never really clicking with any mmo, the game had its casual side, but if you wanted to spend tons of time into something, savage + the new ultimates and crafting existed.

They were endgames in themselves. Even tho I was a bit mad about how hard it was to get these gears etc, and complained about the crafting taking long to max, I started working towards it. As a new player that never did those, I wanted it as easily as possible. And I think most people that find themselves not doing things complain, but they in the end never really quit the game because of it, because it aint really anything but a thing to complain about. If you want it, you do it anyways.

I finished maxing crafters, I reached a point after an extremely long time where I was one of the best players at my job. This took time. It took patience. Leves. Crafting was extremely long and time consuming."Thats a bad thing, isnt it? You complained about it at the start."

Yes, because as a new player, I didnt really put any value in anything. I just wanted to have everything everyone else had. If I got it quickly, I would prolly lose interest after a short while and never really build a love for the game, a hardship to accomplish.

Crafting took months and months of leveling, because I needed all of the crafters at max. Raiding and ultimate was an extreme leap, even extremes were a big leap from normal raids. At the end I felt so rewarded, so accomplished, crafting ended up being what I absolutely adored sinking time into, I became one of the most famous crafters on my then server. It was basically a job and endgame I adored and did during all of my freetime. I don't craft anymore. I don't have "omnicrafter, dm for commissions" in my bio anymore. I buy all my pots, all my food, and a part of me was... cut off. I lost an endgame and ended up going over to just raiding after the changes. But I will get to that later.

I've played games since I was a tiny lass, often on the highest difficulty, so I learned to know when things were easy because I was good at it, and when things were easy because... well they were easy. (1/3)

[Alice_Nightingale_Odin]

The achievement and time and sweat I put in was rewarded, because of the difficulty, even people that played the game kept playing the game, but didnt touch it because of the difficulty wasnt for them. But guess what, they had a ton of other things to do. Relics. Treasure hunting. Pvp. Tomestones. Achievement farming. Just chilling with friends. Housing. They might have complained about the crafting not being easy to reach, and ultimates and raiding being hard but something to look up to, but they never left the game for it. Which is extremely important to keep in mind. They complained because they didnt have it, and humans will always do that.

Accessible does not mean good, it takes away the feeling of achievement, and the reward for it. An example is ishgard. A lot of you might say "it was great, I wouldnt ever have touched crafting otherwise". Thats my point. Crafting, not to sound salty or anything, became fairly useless apart from crafting things for yourself. Earning money on it, getting reward for picking up something and spending tons of times maxing it, meant nothing anymore. Things dropped in price after a day after patch day, because everyone was a crafter. The word "omnicrafter" had no achievement to it anymore.

Now you might call it salty because "I had to go through this while you didnt". Not at all, but you need to have locks if things are available to everyone to make things not bland and worthless because of accessibility. The way an example is doing, is like wow that also has things extremely easy to max crafters or gatherers, but if I remember right from research, they had a lock to how many you could have.

This lock made professions still desireable and worth money. You had something others needed. I felt that by the hard road to reach endgame crafting, it turned into an endgame in itself, and people played the game only for the crafting or gathering. It was so complex and desired in itself that people built markets. People might say "but theres many more people that play crafters now, theres many more crafters".

I have a lot of people that quit the game when they made crafting as accessible as it is now. They didnt add any kind of lock to even out the market with the crafting becoming so accessible, that crafting became fairly worthless. People didnt ask for omnicrafters or crafters to make glams, because pretty much everyone is now a maxed crafter. (2/3)

[Alice_Nightingale_Odin]

People didnt quit because they didnt have the time or patience to max crafters, but people did quit because they took that unique endgame away from them. People did quit because it was now so accessible that crafting was a sidething, and not a mainthing anymore. They made crafting into a sidecontent. From omnicrafters and people actually having gear to hq craft things being rare, to everyone being able to craft anything.

Accessibility can be good if done right and implementing some kind of other "lock" instead of time that forces you to still rely on others in crafting. Accessibility can hurt the individuality and layers of a game, the high goals that you look to obtain over a long period of time, which mmorpgs are meant to span over, if they make it obtainable to everyone even if they dont really have an interest in it.

I still adore the game, it is very much a home, and I've already gone on for too long to also involve the raiding and extremes... but I feel that their focus on accessibility has slowly started to push away the core playerbase of the game for easy and fast rewards. And the rewards that you can aim for and take a long while to reach are often even less rewarding and has less effort put on them than the easier to gain content.

Balance. If you're gonna make something accessible and easy, please also make a counterweight, because right now I feel that more and more things become accessible that wasnt to everyone before, but at the same time lacks any counterweight that still makes it actually worth spending time on it.

What it does right now is take away effort and time, and thats all it does. People might complain about things not being accessible to everyone, but it is rarer that people leave a game because of them not want to put effort into it, than people leaving because an endgame they loved doing became so accessible that it fairly much lost it's value as a potent endgame, and became more of a sidecontent but available to everyone.

Thank you for the time you took reading this, and please keep an open mind before pushing the feedback down. This is all from my own personal experience and opinions. Hope you have a nice day.

[Masked-dingus]

That was a pretty nice and accurate sum up of the situation i guess, i also sometimes have the same feeling with fighting jobs becoming more simpler with every expac
I'm not trying to blame more casual players for it or anything, but i would like SE to give us some harder content, like an harder version of the 4 men dungeons, as it was suggested on another topic, or something in the middle between dungeons ( wich have no difficulties at all ) and Savage ( that some people find too hard )

[Alice_Nightingale_Odin]

Thank you! I agree that more crossover difficulties would be nice, especially brainstorming about it is interesting.

In terms of class design I think the problem is a lot that they listen to the general playerbase. What I mean is that they ask everyone "hey what do you think is bad with this class". Now in these cases people that don't really find the class interesting from the start, will bring up opinions that just makes it into their own current favorite class, instead of actual valid feedback. Which in return leads to people that play the class again feel alienated because they keep changing the classes around other people, instead of the people that have a knowledge and love for it.

This might be the reason to why so many classes in shb feel the same, because if you listen to everyone in posts and questions, the result will often be "simple and understandable", because if you have no interest in the class from the beginning, you dont want it to be a bother to play. By listening to everyone, they change the classes in a way that alienates the people that actually... plays it. That actually enjoyed that playstyle.

A class being the least played only means that its more of a niché, it doesnt always mean that the class is badly designed. There should be a class for everyone, and the only time you should really look into classes is if a majority of the people that still play said class voices out issues with it. Not always if the people playing other classes aint. Because that would just be how classes are meant to work. You like some, you dislike some.

In making more and more classes liked by a bigger population, and looking at "played" statistics purely instead of asking the people that currently play the class, you will sometimes make people leave the game because they dont have said corner that they enjoy playing anymore. In raiding and general gameplay class design is a big deal. People that played other classes, but complained about making it easier to play, wouldnt really leave the game if they didnt change it. Just complaining is again a part of humans. Its about finding which of these complains actually matter, and in my personal opinion they failed a lot with that during shb. As most of the classes lost their individuality in playstyle, and turned into "1-2 button press" bursts.

It is of course fine to like these classes, boring if everyone liked the same thing, but it becomes a problem when it affects every single class, making classes bland, simplified and people that like more complex classes have nothing they enjoy playing anymore.

[SeanCody]

You'll get more feedback for your thread if you posted it over at the "Forums Being Abused" thread. Everyone is too busy trying to catch a troll!

[Liam_Harper]

Sums it up well.

I used to craft endlessly. I really enjoyed crafting. Months and months leveling, gathering, researching, theorycrafting and finally producing those 3 and 4 star items and feeling that sense of satisfaction. Being an endgame crafter took effort but it was worth it. You could make things not everyone had access to and you had value too, you could help friends and FC. Nowadays I barely touch crafting.

I personally feel things like that are important in MMO's. Those are the things new players see when starting out in the game and are impressed by. It motivates them and gives them goals and that vision of one day standing on that pinnacle and impressing others keeps them going throughout the journey. It's normal to want to achieve and accomplish things that are impressive. Accessibility simply takes that goal, hands it over without the work and removes the sense of accomplishment. You feel like "Wow, I made it!", then a sort of disappointment sinks in that it was so easy and you realize everyone else has the same. It loses the point.

The game is still going fine and is fun, but it does feel like the motivation has dampened. Most of the big crafters have retired, they get their full pentamelded 3 star set in 2 days and potter about every so often. Ishgard is seeing activity, but after the rankings most just dabble in it every so often, maybe pick up a skysteel relic once a week with delivery scrips. Same with battle relics. EX and Savage people dabble in it and clear but aren't that fussed if they do or don't and there are less SoS farm groups than usual.
Another thing is that no one is particularly useful. High end crafters aren't needed much, everyone's self sufficient. Mentors mostly answer very basic questions. It's very hard to be a valued player in a DF/PF raids, skill hardly matters in most cases and even when it does it's so hard to spot (this is a big one, especially for healers) and everyone is replaceable. The whole way combat is designed is so the good player doesn't stand out so the inexperienced one doesn't feel bad and is tricked into thinking they're great. We're just going through the motions a lot of the time.

[Adeacia]

Based on what I've read here so far, the complaints can be summarized as such: I don't like it because I can't make myself look better than everyone else.

[ClickOnce]

No negative opinions or "criticism" is allowed on the ff14 forums.

[hobostew]

No negative opinions or "criticism" is allowed on the ff14 forums.

Are you living in an alternate reality? This forum is filled with a steady stream of complaints about every little thing!