Thread: The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

I totally understand the Alexader: Gordias Savage gearing situation is the reason for this "bind" that development had been put into. I did also think they probably could have raised the Gordian weapons to i215 in this anima patch but maybe that would upset the balance a little bit for this cycle. It's also good to hear that the Gobdip, normally "tomestone" weapon upgrade being the same ilvl as the raid weapon was also an issue, and honestly I liked how it was before with Second and Final Coil incentives of getting a weapon tome in the 2nd turns, and the upgrade catalyst in the 3rd & 4th. If they did that cycle we might have not had a larger A3S "wall" either. There was a gearing limit between A1S-A2S, then if RNG wasn't in your raid's favor at-all you probably had to spend 6 weeks of pages to get a real i210 upgrade for your job. So that added more gearing pressure for some.

As for the Anima, I get that it's supposed to be for the more casual crowd. But I also think there should be incentive for those who want to press ahead in the high-end raiding community. Like include Alexander: Gordias Savage Pages for part of the turn-in process. We are limited to one page a week anyway, but maybe something like 4 pages gives some items. Or perhaps add incentives for turning in Thordan, Bismarck, and Ravana Extreme tokens just as to the effect of Alexander: Gordias story mode. These extremes already are starving of more skilled players lately because most of us get what we want from the token system and call it a day. More incentives to press ahead with ALL content is where I think the development team can find a balance to satisfy both casual and hardcore crowds with this chain. I just think it's a bit short-handed to think "well 2.x primals were too hard for some, so we have to cut this out". Why not make it more of an incentive to tackle harder content?

Originally Posted by Eul

It's not pretty at all for SCH, only ilv 200 is the good one compared with 210. Totally turned off for grind it to be honest :/

No, i205 Codex of the Heavens from Thordan is pretty good too. It's a baby version of the i210 Gordian Codex with the same type of sub-stats.

Guys, guys...Mr. Yoshi.

Do you remember when you showed that presentation at E3 that was like a ARR development post-mortem, and one of those slides said something like "If it isn't fun, we're doing it wrong"?

Part of why the improvements you made to 1.X and the release of 2.0 were as successful as they were was because in those cases I believe you were making the game you wanted to play. With 3.0 for whatever reason you lost the plot, and you made it into a game that makes easy quick money. But that isn't sustainable, as has been proven by the plethora of MMORPGs out there that haven't been as successful as FFXIV thus far.

I suggest you take your roadmap for 3.0 and 4.0, chop them up into fine pieces, and examine each piece. Seriously ask yourself, "Is this fun? Is this something I would enjoy?" And if the answer is anything other than an enthusiastic "Yes," then trash it and figure out something better. And always remember: Quality Over Quantity.

Originally Posted by KaitlanKela

The only time unique content was added for the relic was the Chimera and Hydra. Which, compared to all the grinding for tomes/atmas/lights/alexandrite was probably one-tenth of one percent of the process of Zeta. Yoshi doesn't want trial gates anymore because the relic isn't intended to be difficult, and he said this and made good on in since Titan HM. Everything since was rehashed. If you had a problem with it then, fine, but don't expect it to suddenly be different now.

I wasn't expecting new content for anima. I was hoping it wouldn't be a painfully tedious grind.

Originally Posted by technole

I'm sure some can probably argue the time spent for Lord of Vermillion could have probably been better spent on Anima trials or "fun content" for this long-winded quest.

Also this. In what fever dream did they think that was a good idea?

Originally Posted by KaitlanKela

For those who will expect new content even though there is hardly any legitimate precedent for it, well, you're not getting it. Why? Because the new content takes development time and that time is doing toward the MSQ, no surprise. Resources are not unlimited and I think, given the choice between new MSQ and new relic storyline 99% of the playerbase would choose the former. Sorry

So why not utilize 3.x content rather than reusing 2.x content that doesn't need to be revitalized or doesn't give player interaction (2.0 hunts and beast tribes)? They put off the anima questline for so long, you'd think they have something to show for the 4+ months of development, or even planning. They've had plenty of development time and very little to show for it, it really drops my expections and hopes for what they've actually been doing behind-the-scenes.

Step 1 requires FATEs, but honestly this is something that should've been in since 3.0, and was delayed to 3.15 and seems incredibly out of place to reward i170

Step 2 has you going into 2.x dungeons, and the option to unsync is there, so a typical player isn't even going to use duty finder.

Step 3 has part of the steps (if you wanted to finish before 3.2 anyway with daily tasks) that requires you to do 2.x beast tribes, which is solo content and doesn't really make sense if they wanted to make it more lively. If anything, CT is in desperate need of attention and they completely opted out of that.

Simply admitting that you messed up and are trying to fix it is only a first step.

Alexander: While I disagree with some of your findings I do agree that the way loot was distributed/earned within Alexander Savage was a huge misstep.(Loot in Coil was much better handled). But this is not the only problem with Alexander Savage. Part of the drive to continue to work towards clearing all of the three Coil raids was that we wanted to see the story. By removing that driving factor by delivering the entire story in Normal mode and that story turning out to be completely uninteresting, AS failed. It became a boring brick wall that a great number of players gave up on. When you combine the fact that the Savage mode encounters were often times boring and unsurprising dps checks you end up with even the hardcore world first groups giving up on them before next tier shows up. If Savage had the same mentality to the encounters as (Hard) does with dungeons this would eliminate a lot of these feelings.

Diadem: With Diadem you failed in many ways. You failed because your insistence to not bring the Alliance UI into the open world. You failed because of your insistence to make the zone work for too many groups. You failed because of your insistence to make the content into a race to see how many you can kill before the timer is up. You failed because of your insistence to make even the Rank 3 enemies have too much HP that a single group could not kill them with a reasonable amount of time/effort. You failed because your continual insistence to look at the types of content FFXI gave us that worked and then implement modernized systems that would work in FFXIV. A lot of us had hoped that Diadem would end up being XIV's version of Tu'lia/Sky. Where we would have to find/farm/buy triggers to spawn high level enemies. Where a Free Company mattered more than it didn't. This was the content that was going to allow us to schedule FC events, bring in a full alliance of our FCmates, strategize and enjoy ourselves. What we got was Hunts 3.0 with randomized loot. The "points" style of obtaining loot is not a bad one. It has worked many times before. But 1) if you are going to give us points for loot, make them a currency. Inventory space is already a premium, stop giving me more tokens that have no reason to be tokens. If you are ARE going to do this, make them keyitems. 2) Give us actual gear from these tokens. How difficult would it have been to sell bronze, silver and gold boxes for 10, 25, 50 spoils that would have RNG rewards? How challenging would it have been to add actual armor sets with static stats and interesting skins in there? How about accessories at the very least? (Having only 2 sets of accessories available has been horrible since day 1, you knew that once and gave us Titan/Ifrit/Garuda extreme accessories back in the day, why did you stop?)

Anima Weapons: Lets just get this out in the open. I have only TWO problems with the Anima Weapons and their questlines. Let's get the smaller one out of the way first. 1) The final grind is far too much. I understand completely what you did and why you did it. but 20+4 items and their prices are entirely too much. The questline needs to be a bit arduous, but this one is far too much for something that is far too late to truly help the majority of players. 2) Well I just said it. Its far too late. Why do we even have Esoteric weapons? If the first Anima questline had been introduced with patch 3.05 we'd have all looked at it and been overjoyed. A mostly "Free" weapon that takes a large chunk of time and effort to complete for new players and a decent chunk of effort for returning players with a Zeta would have looked awesome to ALL players back in late August/early September. But now it falls flat. If the second part of the weapon was added with 3.1 even in its current form, there would be a lot less backlash to its grind. Yes its a tad overboard on the time/effort wheel, but if it was added in November, and not late December a lot more people would be looking at it as a viable way to get ahead. As it is now, we are 6 weeks out from a patch (I sincerely hope its not much longer away than that) and the majority of your targeted playerbase for these weapons will not be completing them in that amount of time. These weapons should be there to help those players who want to work and clear content but need a little help in do so. That is NOT what these weapons will end up doing for most players and it needs to be completely reevaluated because of this.

The Void Ark: Going a long the same train of thought, Void Ark equipment (just like Labyrinth, ST, and WoD before it) should be designed to push those players a long that want to complete the current "raid" content but just don't have the level of skill to do so within the first 3-4 months of a raid tier. During its initial incarnation Crystal Tower did just that. The i80 gear helped a lot of players get over that threshold and at least into actually attempting Twintania if not defeating her outright. Since then, the difficulty of the raids has increased and the gear is no longer the push it needed to be. Since Labyrinth, you also implemented a manner to "upgrade" tomestone gear making the 24 man gear less and less valuable outside of alternate jobs and the super casual or new players. Making matters worse, the Diadem was added that may reward higher level gear than Void Ark. Even if you made the gear 205 in Diadem, it would still outshine Void Ark. To toss more fuel on the fire, we may earn upgrade tokens for tomestone gear through 24 man raids. Making the actual drops in the raids worth even less. So please do what you SHOULD have done since WoD and give us the option to upgrade the 24man drops to the same level as the tomestone gear can be upgraded to. It is the exact same time to gear ratio for gloves, belt, head and boots. It requires ~1 week to earn these via tomestones and 1 week to obtain them from the 24man.

New Content/New Types of Content: We want content. Diadem was a failed experiment but at its core it was a good idea. As a former FFXI player I can't help but to look at all the very "cheap" ways that team created content. BCNM/KSNMs were the cheapest of content but also some of the content that I participated in quite a great deal. Reusing battle arenas and existing monsters in unique manners a long with incentivizing the continual farming of outside content for tokens was a brilliant style of easy to produce content. So much so that the team regularly added more and more of them over the years with varying party sizes, difficulties and reward levels. Sky/Sea/etc was pseudo casual end game content for organized groups. We do NOT have this in XIV and we desperately need it. The only organized group content we have is made by the groups themselves. Its all fine and good that a select handful of FCs put on in game social events in Eorzea but we also need game content related events. We do not need a return of the "HNM Camping and Latency related Pull competitions" we had in XI but we definitely need some content each patch that is for the FC. Change Diadem into real 8-24 man content. Give us more 8-24 man content that we can organize within our FC (or multiple small FCs/Linkshells) that isn't a zerg fest and is rewarding. I miss this type of content.