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

Originally Posted by RiceisNice

Both of you feel like you're just butting heads in agreement. A lot of context and direction of posts are loss when you both are snipping your replies, esp for long replies and the points aren't being specifically tackled. To me at least.

That's probably fair, sure. Longer posts are already a pain because of character limits, so I think everyone probably snips more than they probably should and that can lead to some miscommunication.

Originally Posted by RiceisNice

I'd say the overall enjoyment of the game has dropped, not just combat but crafting, gathering ( because of things like favors that affect both) and even glamour (from a mch perspective anyway, the crafted griffon top fails in every regard and the presentation of mch is just ugh)

That will of course vary from person to person. I agree with you on crafting/gathering (not that I ever liked gathering anyway, but...), though on combat and glamour I'm actually generally having more fun than I have in a long time (this is probably the most fun the game's been for me overall since 2.1). Honestly, I've been surprised to see that Diabolos is occasionally getting login queues again for the first time since the initial expansion rush. I don't know if other servers are seeing a resurgence of players or not, of course, but I think some of the perception on the boards that the game is dying comes down more in particular to smaller servers dying (which is, of course, still a pretty serious problem, but one that may not be as indicative of the quality of the game as it might seem).

Originally Posted by RiceisNice

The fact that they needed to make a topic on this very discussion shows how much of a turn the game in general has taken for the worse for the majority to the players ( and the overall well being of the game, especially if they still need to upkeep dead servers)

Oh, I won't deny that the game's taken a turn for the worse—I think Alexander as a whole has been harmful, and the developers seem to agree on the Savage end up of it, at least. But I don't think it's conclusively proven that the game is really bleeding subscriptions because of it. At worst there's been a slight exodus. But there are enough signs from the Lodestone census results that the game is more treading water at this point: certainly not the best place to be following an expansion launch, but I don't think the game's dying as has sometimes been the general opinion on the forums.

That is, I think things need to improve if the game wants to avoid a mass exodus, especially with Legion on the horizon, but I don't think the bell has tolled yet.

Originally Posted by Alahra

I'm not even sure what you're arguing anymore. My post was in response to you discussing more unique elements in the Relic quest. I agree with you that they shouldn't be doing more content if it's going to cause a drop in quality for other content, which is what I think would happen if they started putting unique story battles or instances of some kind in the Relic questline.

Its more of trying to answer both your quarrels. Bring up resources and lack of fun in relic content. I respond to both. Simple really.

Originally Posted by Velhart

Its more of trying to answer both your quarrels. Bring up resources and lack of fun in relic content. I respond to both. Simple really.

I guess I'm still a bit confused. You requested new content for the Relic in the first post that I responded to (in which I wondered if that wouldn't come at the cost of content elsewhere). Your next post seems to suggest that they should be focusing on the content that's doing well and maintaining that quality (which I would agree with)—but that feeds back into my original point which was that the developers are already strained. So if they need to work on maintaining current content (which is slipping, in your view) how do we get to a point where they can add new content to the Relic quest?

That's why I generally think it would be an achievable middle ground for them to use more current content in the questline at the very least, as they did in the original 2.0 stage (as most of the content there was released at the same time). New content specifically for Relic is probably out of the question at this point unless the game's team gets bigger, unfortunately.

Originally Posted by Alahra

snip

I don't believe I ever really said I disagree with you. Its called having a conversation, since we are exchanging words doesn't mean we are on different sides. In regards to dropped quality and relics. Last I recall, relic quest has been around since 2.0 for ARR. It's quality has definitely decreased over time with new content coming. I believe what I said about both is relevant. My apologies if I did not make that clear at the start.

Originally Posted by Velhart

Last I recall, relic quest has been around since 2.0 for ARR. It's quality has definitely decreased over time with new content coming.

To say that the Relic quest dropped in quality is, I think, to misunderstand the very nature of the Zodiac quest. While it's easy to see why people would compare Zodiac/Anima to Relic (since the Zodiac weapons were built from the Relic ones), I think that ultimately creates unrealistic expectations. Zodiac (and Anima, by extension) is ultimately a separate progression path that relied on the Relic weapons mainly because people wanted them to be more involved than just a few Trial battles. The 2.0 Relic quest is probably actually most comparable to the Tomestone weapons from 2.2 and 2.4, which required completing "midcore" content and had a similar tomestone cost to the old Zenith weapons.

The Zodiac/Anima quests, by contrast, are aimed at a different sort of player population. The Zodiac questline has been relatively consistent in quality ever since its inception. The Relic quest is the outlier because they ultimately repurposed it to fulfill another design goal.

(And I do apologize—for whatever reason your earlier posts came off as somewhat adversarial to me, so I thought you were disagreeing with me when it seems that you weren't in general.)

Post Cap Response

Originally Posted by Velhart

Its more to say they are not even attempting to be creative in the grinding department. They did atma farming for anima again, lights twice during the Zodiac, spamming previous tomestones to get items. I guess we should expect to do books again the next step.

I'm not particularly surprised they did any of this either. They've been using the weapon questline to increase participation in older content ever since its inception in 2.2. My expectation was entirely that we would see the same broad strokes—there really aren't many ways they can get people to do FATEs, for instance, unless they do something similar to Atma. We could have had a quest to do a certain number of FATEs in each zone, but that's even less inspired.

The double Light step was more than likely to create a reason for Light farms to exist again, helping folks who had stalled out during the Novus stage to find parties again.

When it comes to tomestones, I'm glad we had two different types to work with—if I had needed 54,000 Law alone, I probably would have gone nuts from spamming Fractal/Neverreap. So I was more than glad to do some content I hadn't touched in about 6 months. It afforded some variety, which was very welcome. And either way, there are still tons of players that aren't level 60 and want to clear those older dungeons (I lost count of how many new player bonuses I got from my L50 Roulettes while working on my Anima), so it's still of interest to the developers to increase participation for them. The need for Poetics also created a lot of interest in Roulettes, too, when there hadn't been much prior to that.

I can understand that some folks don't ever want to see content from last expansion again, but the Anima questline is really one of the best ways they can foster interest in the stuff from the past, and I never particularly expected any changes to the overall nature of the quest relative to Zodiac because of that. If they didn't do so with the weapon questline, they'd need to reinvigorate the old content in some other way, either by putting level 60 tomestones on L50 dungeons (undesirable, given that if the rewards aren't relatively low, people would just spam them as opposed to the new content, but if they are low, no one would do them anyway) or needing them for things like the MSQ or something (and I think we can all remember how well that went when they made everyone do Guildhests in the 2.1 MSQ).

The questline, for better or worse—according to one's individual taste—isn't going to see any significant structural changes. Much like dungeons, I think they've found the general formula that works and what they're doing now is recycling and giving us a new coat of paint each time it goes. That may or may not be enough for you, and that's fine—but the likelihood of it actually changing to any degree that would satisfy seems to be rather low at this point because the questline works and it works quite well at what they've set out to do with it: create a pathway for players to invest time to get a powerful reward, and at the same time, increase participation in less popular content for the time.

As I've mentioned before, they improved the player-friendliness of the quest in some noticeable ways and to my mind, the current leg of the Anima questline is better constructed than any of the Zodiac steps were—so I see that as an increase in quality, rather than a decrease in one, personally.

Originally Posted by Alahra

snip

Its more to say they are not even attempting to be creative in the grinding department. They did atma farming for anima again, lights twice during the Zodiac, spamming previous tomestones to get items. I guess we should expect to do books again the next step.