Variation of content?

[Miakisu]

It's just tricky because just about everything they've tried to do outside of the main formula has met with mixed success or negative results so far. Hunts are and continue to be a mess that they seem to have given up on reigning in. Diadem's been a mess. Lords of Vermillion seemingly took a lot of resources and has been seemingly pretty unpopular. The Gold Saucer was pretty popular for the first month and is now largely empty most of the time. Triple Triad's largely died out in popularity as well. Treasure Maps were new but ultimately have ended up being an incredibly minor part of the game, which have varying levels of player involvement. Though not directly related when it comes to new content, their experimentation with difficulty in HW has been kind of a mess, too, and I suspect the team may be getting reflexively more conservative.

Right. That's why I specify Battle content. Some people need a carrot for that stick. Seeing them implement minor gear possibilities may not be a bad way to go like Diadem.

[SendohJin]

What do you think?

the biggest problem is itemization. you can make all those things and none of them will matter if they don't figure out a way to put drops in them that matter.

Treasure Maps is not a bad system but the drops are inconsequential. put pink i210 gear in the top tier map and you will see people doing them a lot more. that would also give them reason to make the maps tougher. the hardest maps right now can be duoed by basically any Tank/DPS + Healer combo. if the drops are good, you can justify having 8 waves of mobs that you need a Full Party to clear before the time limit.

hopefully with the materia change in 3.2 they actually give us more ways to acquire materia that's not just spiritbinding and farming Diadem tokens.

[Alahra]

Right. That's why I specify Battle content. Some people need a carrot for that stick. Seeing them implement minor gear possibilities may not be a bad way to go like Diadem.

Right. There's not a lot of room for new battle content to really offer compelling rewards unless something about the structure massively changes (and that's unlikely). I think that's part of what Diadem's trouble was. They wanted it to be compelling for people to run, but not too compelling, and they overshot the mark on the compelling thing at first. Now it's absolutely *not* compelling after the nerfs, and I honestly don't necessarily agree with Yoshi's thought that i205 gear would have still been a compelling carrot.

It'll be interesting to see what they try in the future.

[WellFooled]

I couldn't agree with the OP more. FFXIV has some great variety in non-battle content (Golden Saucer for example), but I would love to see its battle side expand beyond dungeons and trials with with their endlessly circle arenas and linear hallways. The battle content has always been amazingly varied in lore and atmosphere, but not so much varied in gameplay.

[Thayos]

This is why I think FFXIV needs to adopt an exotic gear system.

Exotic armor pieces and accessories would be significantly more powerful than typical gear pieces -- strong enough to last much longer than a typical piece of gear. And they could also have unique bonuses on them to make them stronger in various situations.

The catch would be you could only equip one exotic at a time.

Likewise, there could also be lesser-tier gear pieces (legendary?) that would be similar, but not as strong. These could also drop more often, and players could possibly wear one legendary + one exotic piece (or maybe just one or the other). But the legendaries could drop much more frequently.

Imagine if the Diadem were a place to farm legendary and exotic gear? You could continue farming legendaries because each would contain different stats that would be useful in different situations. And they'd be relevant longer, so they wouldn't have quite the treadmill feeling as other types of gear.

And if Diadem were set up that way, then that wouldn't cancel out the importance of other kind of content like Void Ark or Raiding, becaues you'd only be able to wear one or two Diadem pieces at a time (and you could keep other content even more critical by making the exotic/legendary pieces be accessories, and keeping left-side pieces in Void Ark and raiding).

So there ARE ways to make itemization in this game more exciting without massive overhauls.

The development team just needs to do it.

[Kurogaea]

the hunt example

If they did it like everyone assumed they would, like making hunts instanced, making us look for monsters on our own instead of competing with the rest of your server then yeah, it would've went perfectly.