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

[Ibi]

With yesterdays live letter it only shows that SE didn't really care for anyones opinions here sadly.

Kaurie: I'm refering to the Digest one yes. Witht he screenshots that are added to the thread too

When Bayohne mentions in the first post of this thread that "These points echo the ones he made during the Letter from the Producer LIVE, but also give a bit more insight into the situation" he's referring to the same Letter from the Producer LIVE that had the digest posted today (Part XXVI).

In other words, this thread was created shortly after the Letter from the Producer LIVE that is detailed in today's post took place.

[myahele]

I personally believe that the devs should do more polling/ survey like they did during 1.xx That's what made 2.0 such a success, probably.

It might be too late for the 3.xx patches, but at least they can get additional feedback to use for 4.0

Limiting it to forums probably not a good idea. But since they have a system to email players of homes that're facing demolition then perhaps they can send email to players - previous and current- that way?

[Rowyne]

I'm not sure where people are getting that Relic is always meant to be BiS. Gear is outdated with every new patch, relic or not. Relics are also not meant to be BiS either, they're designed as an alternative to the top endgame equipment.

Because once upon a time, that's what Yoshi-P said - that relics would always ultimately be the best. The fact that they're now a side-grade and raid weapons are top-tier is actually a deviation from the original model.

Relics once meant that you were experienced in all pre-raid content, and then became a requirement for raid entry. Now, new players who started with Heavensward got to 60, finished the MSQ, and jumped straight into Alexander because raid content was no longer gated with this kind of skill check. I watched several of them, new to endgame group content like this, really struggle.

Relics used to be something to be proud of, and not just for the time invested. I'm truly sad to see it becoming something second rate.

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.

I haven't set foot in Savage and have no desire to because I've already finished the story (and a completely unengaging one, at that). However, our FC spent months and months bloodying our hands in Coil to see a story that you had to put in real work to experience. We discovered the secrets of what happened to Bahamut and Louisioux after the Calamity, and that's something not everyone got to do. It truly felt like an accomplishment.

Alexander suffered from a problem that everyone had figured out in a very short amount of time - Normal would be too easy, and Savage would be too hard.

It is also a matter of playerbase being lead to believe one thing and then the delivery falling so flat that even the strongest of supporters are left wondering what happened. False promises are worse than no promises at all, and are a reason why players get discouraged.

I shall list some examples:

What was advertised: New ranged class, machinist to add spice and variety to ranged support dps, presumably mobile and able to shoot on the run.
What we got: Homogenization of bard and machinist, and turning them both into turrets, killing mobility.

And this is why my husband has all but quit the game. He has been a bard main since 2.0 release. In 3.0, bard was completely reworked into something he no longer enjoys. He was hopeful that machinist would be a suitable replacement, until he realized it was basically the same class as the bard rework with a gun. For months he stuck it out, even tried other jobs, but just didn't enjoy them. He likes playing physical ranged DPS, the way bard used to be. He logged on tonight for about five minutes and logged out in disgust.

My husband and I aren't just people who are casually enjoying the MMO of the week. We're legacy players who have been here since 1.0 beta. We attended the fan festival in Las Vegas. We love FFXIV, it's the game that finally feels like home. But we're watching our FC suffer right now because nobody's enjoying the game. One of our officers said it best, that the rushed version of the game (2.0) felt like level-capped content was more well thought out and executed than in Heavensward. He expected with 3.0 he would get more, but felt like he actually got less. In a way, I agree. Only two expert dungeons to run instead of three, two classes that are reskinned versions of each other (one that got an undesirable rework and has spawned thousands of posts full of negative feedback that has barely been addressed), an unengaging endgame raid story that's easy to beat, the same old relic grind for a weapon that now feels like a pale afterthought. Heavensward promised to be amazing - the new areas are beautiful and the main scenario quests were breathtaking. But I think that's truly where the majority of the development of 3.0 was concentrated. I'm really concerned about the state of the game right now. It's suffering from some major issues, things that I'm not sure the dev team is willing to or can even fix.

[Mindy_Macready]

They pretty much destroyed end-game raiding and crafting because they didn't want Alexander Savage cleared in one week, they somehow made the awesome-in-2.x crafting a chore by adding the weekly lockout for a red scrip system nobody likes, and were too focused on side-event type stuff like The Gold Saucer to address the short-comings of the expansion.

And then doubled-down by making everything more tedious. Anima grind, red scrip grind, needing 5 logs to craft one friggin piece of lumber, 1-per-craft on battle-pots that would actually help people clear DPS checks, ephemeral node mats competing with gatherers' red scrip items for their own gear, etc.

And we still don't have cooldowns reset upon wipes.

[Kallera]

Question to everyone: the subsequent 4gamer interview with Yoshida, did it bolster or quash your hopes that 3.2 will help address the problems people have with Heavensward?

[Alahra]

Question to everyone: the subsequent 4gamer interview with Yoshida, did it bolster or quash your hopes that 3.2 will help address the problems people have with Heavensward?

Bolster, personally. But I spent many years in both FFXI and WoW, where the developers almost never admitted mistakes until it was far too late and were never willing to change course except at major expansion launches. Ghostcrawler's irritating "retrospective" on Cataclysm drove me nuts because it came far too late. I like that the FFXIV team does their best to respond to feedback as soon as they can and that they are willing to examine feedback even when it contradicts their own findings, but I also respect that they are usually cautious about doing so, making sure to examine things closely (as opposed to the interesting juxtaposition for WoW, which was often slow to address large problems, but far, far too quick to change class ones, resulting in a rollercoaster of balance).

[RiceisNice]

Question to everyone: the subsequent 4gamer interview with Yoshida, did it bolster or quash your hopes that 3.2 will help address the problems people have with Heavensward?

Indifferent, if not lower it a bit. I've made it a point to not raise my expectations for anything after a month or two after 3.0, moreso after 3.1 and they managed to even disappoint me somehow with 3.1's very lack luster MSQ, and 3.15's anima objectives.

Some of the more delicate, behind-the-scene, issues they had acknowledge, but didn't seem to show that they were going to correct it. For example, their approach to designing fight encounters; they take each phase in a vacuum and do a mechanic test in a state of immortality (they take damage but they don't die). It makes it really hard to fine tune or catch things like incoming damage if they aren't paying attention to where it's coming from (such as A4s' Nisi if we're to actually believe the healers are supposed to heal through that without the entire party having higher than i200 body, leg and weapons). They also mentioned that they had cut testing for A3s and A4s short due to deadlines, which seems to be a reoccuring trend for most of the content they've been designing lately. Again, no acknowledgement that their rush to meet deadlines is an actual problem.

Then you also have them being adamant about players still not understanding how to play AST, although going by history players have frequently explored the job performance more than what the developers can scope out, like 2.0 warrior, ninja on release, and 3.0 BRD/MCH. It's not to the degree of PLD that they can't keep up because of how the fights are designed (mostly magic oriented and huge focus on dps), but that an AST cannot output to the same degree and flexibility as a WHM or SCH (which is to raids in general,not exclusive to fight design) and you need the buffer of over gearing to comfortably take in an AST.

[Kaurie]

Question to everyone: the subsequent 4gamer interview with Yoshida, did it bolster or quash your hopes that 3.2 will help address the problems people have with Heavensward?

Honestly, I got pretty angry reading that interview. That said, the interview took place prior to this Live Letter - which also pissed me off. Ultimately, I disagree with a lot of decisions. It feels like the vast majority of his responses to feedback are, "We hear your feedback. We don't care. We're going to talk about this other thing now." or he doesn't address the feedback at all. I mentioned either in this thread or another I can't remember, if I wasn't leading a static, I'd probably have jumped ship to WoW, ESO or GW2 by now.

[Velhart]

Question to everyone: the subsequent 4gamer interview with Yoshida, did it bolster or quash your hopes that 3.2 will help address the problems people have with Heavensward?

Their idea of raid structure still sounds terrible. That hasn't changed.

[Ibi]

Question to everyone: the subsequent 4gamer interview with Yoshida, did it bolster or quash your hopes that 3.2 will help address the problems people have with Heavensward?

I was already on the fence about continuing to play in 3.2 after the way stuff was discussed in the Live Letter and the first post of this thread, but the interview was enough to get me to cancel my sub.

I'm still paid up through early March and I'll give the 3.2 content a shot to change my mind, but it's clear they have a direction in mind that they want the game to move in, and it's not one that appeals to me.