Survey: What are your thoughts on the state of XIV?

[Shurrikhan]

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I'll try to be concise for once in response here. I will go into more depth if wanted.

1. Agreed that certain systems may need to break first (e.g. instanced theme park and/or universally mandatory trinities) in order to open up numerous more opportunities.

2. I'd like to know what you mean by "substantial difficulty levels of content". Looking at my time guild-raiding with my main and pug-raiding with my alts up to Mists, I can't honestly say that XIV feels that much harder content-wise than many a WoW fight, for instance. In many cases I preferred the aesthetics and mechanics of those WoW fights, finding them more unique, but that comes down to personal preference. Learning times between the two often felt similar when considering that XIV only releases a wing's worth of bosses at a time where WoW was releasing a raid, or four wings worth, if at a somewhat lesser frequency. What strikes me most is small differences in the community. I came from one of the smaller WoW servers, but it still felt much more populous and able to quickly throw together a PF raid, even a couple 25-mans simultaneously, than my current medium sized one, and just have fun—though usually progressing faster than more serious / nervous newer guild parties. Somehow, I haven't felt that much from XIV. I'm sure we could blame DF for some of this on the server-by-server basis, or even housing for the reduced value of shout chat, but to me a lot of that seems to come from the nature of the fights themselves, and how they're flowed into.

But if you mean the sheer number of different levels of difficulty, I'm in agreement. I feel like we could get a lot out of things in the range of challenge modes, achievements, or mythic dungeons, or even just a Diadem-like experience without the obvious oversights. Aquapolis and the Deep Dungeon, I hear, at least, are / should be a step in that direction. I have yet to try Aquapolis, but I can't say I'm sold on the idea going by Youtube footage, and look forward to the other's release.

3. There will always be certain constraints. I just hope that they stop seen as the tertiary elements such as combo systems, cross-class skills, and/or an arsenal of mitigation cooldowns, and bring it down to the simple question of "is this composition worthwhile?" where jobs within the same role, range, or line-up may differ somewhat individually, but always have a place in some similar, even if therefore adjusted, party. It can favor a trinity-based setup for a majority of content, but at least gives other options for part of it. I'd love to be able to skillfully no-tank or no-heal a heroic dungeon. But that doesn't mean I'm okay with a certain job, especially with untranslatable gear, being left on the sidelines for cutting-edge content, either. I want to start bringing out the differences, but, depending on the context, those can come out more flatly or numerically than one would think. Designing with that in mind requires both intentional and generally-constrained development for class viability in the "hard" or "fixed" content, while pushing the availablity of options both intentionally (Can a 4-DPS party, working perfectly, clear this? How do different compositions compare?) and generally (allowing CCs on most mobs or giving enough of a delay in certain attacks to make certain mobs kite-able, etc., maybe even eventual changes to enmity systems, who knows?) for lighter content as well.

4. While I do think this game is basically a theme park MMO, with scarcely any sandbox elements at all, and I feel that it often under-challenges and under-instructs the player in terms of combat classes, while allowing little synergy or innovation between DoL and DoH classes and the combat side of the game. Progression in general feels weirdly dislocated precisely because of how little different DoW/DoM classes intersect outside of certain cross-class skills, and, again, that (to me) lackluster approach to DoH and DoL. (Granted, I've only taken either to 50, so take my disappointment with a grain of salt; I am however serious about the untapped potential for connecting these things, although that's quite the pipedream to get into.)

5. I feel like a flexible and manually challenge-additive system would be a good start. Work on the undermechanics, the reusable system first. Reap the benefits later. I can throw out a few spitball suggestions if you want.

6. My fear with trying to be more directly connected to the devs, and I understand just how elitist this may sound, is that not only might the opinions being heard not be representative—they might not even be thought out. I want more discussion with the devs, but I have no issue with the idea of "doing their work for them" first, because when we refuse to delve into that, we may well complain about symptoms whose removal only worsen the disease that caused them. I feel like aside from the CMs seeming to focus their interactions on just a narrow band of (typically UI/QoL/lore) concerns, we have almost a direct enough means to voice our concerns. What I don't feel we have are truly hashed out suggestions in most cases.

[Jetstream_Fox]

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Out of sleepiness I'm only going to go into detail with number 2 and hopefully come back to the other points.

I feel the game needs both more levels of difficulty and now difficult fights. Why I think this? It actually has nothing to do with MMO games, it is something I have learned through other genres of games. For one being the fighting game, you can start out on easy and work your way to the top difficulty the game offers and you can feel and see just how much of a better player you have/need to become at that level. As with this, you have total control on how you actually progress yourself in a battle. You can go into practice and fine tune what you need to learn until you feel you can complete the game at whatever level. Now the next is shooters, every difficulty the AI gets stronger, gets more responsive and typically more health, accuracy and aim. You have to be very responsive and knowledgeable to beat most shooters on their hardest difficulty and without trying new tactics for different situations you'll likely find yourself dead.

Now how does this relate to 14? The game attempts to mimic different difficulties with leveling, hard and expert roulette, but let's be honest here, there really isn't much of difficulty increase with these steps outside of more health and a bit more damage, the mob still reacts the same, similar to a shooter going from easy to normal. Then we have primals, which are currently only two different difficulties (Garuda, Titan and Ifrit story excluded) again they tried to mimick the mentioned genres but in this case with primals they're more the fighting game genre. Between hard and expert the primals do different attacks and even have brand new phases, in many fighters going to hard mode typically gets you AI rushing you down, blocking and combing you with 2 or 3 main combos, but then in extreme mode the same fighter is getting full moveset, parry counters and throws. So far we see two different ways difficulty is handled within 14 and between primals and dungeons, the only time any difficulty is shown is on extreme primals.

So let's look at raids we have 24 and 8 player. The 24 player is the weakest between the two, yet they require more people and the 8 player is the harder. So why is it, so many people seem to lose ground going from extreme to 24 player content to 8 player? There isn't any fights that are difficult enough for us to grow and see the need for our skills, more so, when to use what. It's like playing Street Fighter and going for easy to hard, you're going to get punished or playing Halo on easy then jumping to legendary and getting obliterated by a group of needler grunts. Raids don't help build up players, they assume we are already at the best level of knowledge. That we know what to do because we cleared everything else, but that's not the case, and it's due to the lack of actual meaningful fights that required us to learn more about our classes and when to utilize our skills.


If I had to put all the battle content on a ladder I'm thinking this would be it dungeons -> primal hard -> 24 player -> primal expert -> 8 player. We just climb up the ladder with no real meaning, it's once you hit X item level go ahead! Which is the equivalent of Street Fighter saying "Hey you learned Hadoken? Go fight on hard!" Or Gears of War saying "Hey you learned to active reload? Go to insane!" There isn't enough difficulty levels or fights for players to learn in this game, so you can never really trust who you are with, you get players who don't know where they fit in on that ladder, players who belong at the top, and ones that need to take a step back and relook at things.

I know it may sound meticulous but just look at the Weeping City thread, people thought that was too hard because Ozma, I simply thought it was badly designed and the hardest fight was Forgall simply because of the amount of mechanics he has vs Ozma Look at the Father on savage, it crushed people left and right. Even the primals have had such crazy difficulty. The game is basically screaming for redesigned or more refined difficulty throughout each area of battle content.

[Xlantaa]

I dunno.I Think the game is good as is it. Just need few adjustments. That's all. I wish no big changes. The base system is good.

I won't ask to turn this game int oa different thing.

[loreleidiangelo]

Poll results were pretty interesting. Despite forum discussion, most people seem happy with stats, content, and itemization in the game. Most desire for change seems to stem from methods of gear acquisition, which is interesting to consider. Either way, a good poll, with some decent polling options. I look forward to seeing if there's any significant shifts in the results.

[Iromi]

I guess these polls show how few people visit these forums or actually took the survey...a few hundred people out of 600k+? (as per lucky banchos) makes me wish se would release their own survey in emails like they used to.

[RiceisNice]

....

1. IMO they really need to break the horizon and make those jumps. Even at first if it's not working as intended because it's op or up (see BRD, MCH, and AST), numbers can always be changed. Mechanics, on the other is much more tricky (such as WM/GB, fc crafting, and content layout). They've really shot themselves in the foot by making "FC crafting" the way it is, giving MCH and BRD two functionally same abilties at 52, because honestly what can you add at that point to make it evolve instead of adding more of the same recipes and skills that add no job depth/variety because of the aforementioned stances.

2. Aquapolis unfortunately feels like it runs into the same problem that their new content (such as diadem) runs into, it's interesting for the first few runs, but after that you just realize that you're fighting mobs that have very little interaction or diversity with abilties. They all do their abilties associated with what they are (such as dodos doing foul stench and treants doing canaopy)...but they're ultimately all the same abilities anyway, just different names and aoe indicators. The very little variation you'd get is the arges (which is a cyclops mob with the tonze swings) and a goblin punching bag. You have the rewards and that's about the only thing that's keeping it going imho.

3. Like point 1, those constraints need to stop being the limiter, especially when you're looking at into a new expansion and higher level cap. Less abilties that add no depth to the jobs, less homongenization, and more diversifying each job idenitity. If we're going into a lvl 70 cap, this almost definitely needs to be the case unless they plan to introduce no new skills/passives only (which is already the aforementioned shooting themselves in the foot, espesically if said passives are extrremely generic and add nothing). It's really the one place you can't afford to cut corners on because that's the foundation for future patches.

4. Your impression isn't completely wrong. It took up until 3.2 for them to introduce relevant recipes for combat classes. The patches before that, even gatherers didn't need much crafted equipment from crafters. It was a trend where crafters only made gear and tools for other crafters, but their materials were gated by both crafting and gathering scrips. This, alongside what specialization was supposed to be for, really took out the flare out of crafting and gathering for me (and i previously did a crafting service in 2.x, made about 60mil in a matter of few weeks)

5. I feel they really need to up the overall difficulty a bit, at least to the point that players need to be held accountable for failing basic fundamentals like avoiding aoes and knowing your job's 1-2-3 combo from level 26. Honestly, it should never get to the point that "I'm new to the fight" can justify dying on a telegraphed circle, consistently.

[Ibi]

Poll results were pretty interesting. Despite forum discussion, most people seem happy with stats, content, and itemization in the game.

That's pretty much to be expected. It's rare that someone is going to go to a forum to make a post along the lines of "Everything's great, keep it up," but much more likely that someone's going to go to the forums to start a thread if they dislike the direction something is going.

[Shurrikhan]

Snip.

The difficulty ramping of the game, where there are plenty of points that will seem obvious to most players from the start while others just don't see the need to notice anything (because the game just doesn't really make that need), is definitely pretty shallow. Just for example, let's take when a Lancer first has True Thrust, Vorpal Thrust, and Impulse Drive. For some of us, these are distinct. We quickly realize that there's a faintly, faintly greater dps and TP cost on ID spam. We also notice that we can modulate damage by using TT instead—for instance if an enemy only has a fraction of health left and the next pull is reachable within 10 seconds, we can finish with TT instead, and open the next fight with VT. This all occurs around the same time that the DPS start to recognize enmity-modded abilities like Overpower, Flash, Savage Blade, and Skull Sunder, and an archer might (just *might*) think to hold onto Bloodletter for that extra GCD needed for the tank to put more than ~440 enmity-potency on the target (AA+SS/HS+BL+10% trait). At the same time, they might realize that if the archer can keep moving while fighting, he might as well be the one to pull, while the tank AoEs once while coming to the fore, or that the tank can move enemies back and towards the next pack as long as he's not interrupting positionals. They might realize that it's faster to Repose one mob while killing the other and forgoing heals entirely. But the thing is, even when you put together all those plus some twenty other tips and tricks, it just does very, very little, to the point that those of us who do notice kinda look like we have OCD...

Responsibility isn't something that actually became a thing at all, as far as I can recall, until CCing the second Brayflox boss while handling the add, and hardly noticeable until no-tanking or no-healing Sunken Temple or onward (or if you have a tank with broken gear earlier who still insists on tanking, while having less defense than everyone else; seen that plenty). There's just nothing to really put the minutia of the gameplay on display, and yet we expect that ALL players will develop the habit of seeing through that mostly homogeneous clutter to try to find optimal choices. We don't mention anything about considering group composition in order to kill a given mob or mob pack in the fastest time, or sub-considerations like aiming to kill something just as the majority of its DoTs are fading, CD matching for larger pulls, what have you. Either people learn all these things on their own, or they just don't really learn them at all. I can correct or suggest adaptations to someone's rotation while typing between GCDs on Paladin, etc., but I can't introduce these whole concepts just in the span of a still mostly efficient run. Nor do I, or likely quite a few other players, want to simply introduce them through beginner videos on Youtube or the like, where there's on hand to test them against, and a player would first need to basically give up on the game being able to teach them on its own.

I'm not saying that all this stuff needs to be explicit. Heck, you could make none of it explicit. But you need challenges that either act as testing or forced learning grounds for these concepts, by just bringing out the little details. Otherwise you're getting one fresh level 50 who gets the modular mathmatics of CD syncing naturally, and another who forgot to even put Blood for Blood on his bars, or thinks Heavy Thrust is a DPS-loss; who don't realize it can at times be more important to kill a few mobs until reaching a base healable level as the tank and healer run out CDs than to leave a couple at sub-10%, reDoTing the others, to get more out of your AoEs once your spam begins again; who establish no conventions for kill order in order to improve efficiency; who don't realize that both tanks and healers have highly manipulable dps rates....

Sorry. I'll end that rant there.

As for the difficulties we have at level-cap already... agreed, for the most part. I can't personally say I found the difficulty of anything too challenging since what little I saw of A4S as a static-less raider in a self-proclaimed trap group or two, or three, and those didn't give the best benchmark when just aiming to have mild progress over 90 minutes of masochistic "fun". Most of Weeping City, if anything, felt a bit too dependent on one-shot mechanics, in a kill-the-new-guys, rest-are-a-little-bored kind of short-lived spectacle.

Now, Expert Roulette... I feel like that's been a community joke since it's release, at least since Pharos Sirius was nerfed and/or no longer included in the roulette. (A shame, to me; I liked its original form.) I've seen quite a few suggestion tossed out there for how to improve upon it. I'd personally just like to see it cycle daily through a few marked bonus choices to be done at minimum ilvl or near to (non-optional if you want the bonus, and selected automatically through the roulette). Each has a bonus, collectable up to X times per day, while all share another single daily bonus. The roulette just speeds up your queue and allows you to collect the multi-count bonus from the same dungeon up to that daily cap, should the roulette toss you back into one you've already done. Make a "hero's trial" roulette that does the same with Ex primals, where each embonused/daily-selected near-minimum ilvl Ex primal drops the latest trial tokens. That's just a spitball idea, of course, but I think stuff like that would go a long way for adding variety at least. I still think we're going to eventually need some very different content, including shake-ups to the difficulty levels we expect from different types of content (e.g. savage dungeons), but that's a down-the-road kind of thing at best.

[Shurrikhan]

1. IMO they really need to break the horizon and make those jumps. Even at first if it's not working as intended because it's op or up (see BRD, MCH, and AST), numbers can always be changed. Mechanics, on the other is much more tricky (such as WM/GB, fc crafting, and content layout). They've really shot themselves in the foot by making "FC crafting" the way it is, giving MCH and BRD two functionally same abilties at 52, because honestly what can you add at that point to make it evolve instead of adding more of the same recipes and skills that add no job depth/variety because of the aforementioned stances.

Agreed. I feel like they should aim first closely for identity and fun, and then move on to relative capacities (say for burst, etc., for which Monk already out-dynamics any difference that likely would have occurred between BRD and MCH as is...), and then tune by numbers with an eye on internal balances (how many GCDs should it take X DoT to pay off relative to Y skill or Z average potency per GCD combo/rotation; CD syncing; additional rotational possibilities; situationals; etc., etc.).

This kind of stuff is why I've been almost too promoting of new undermechanics and large-scale changes to systems, like mob AI, enmity systems, damage-as-interruption, multi-striking, partial AoE, non-flat debuffs (debuffs as potency), etc., but also why I've been fearful of anything SE's likely to implement within those categories. If they can't even refrain from giving two jobs the exact same ability at the exact same level... how imagination do we really have to put into this? Just how distant a horizon could we actually see upon breaking those walls down, if we can't even see large cracks or.... reuse in the walls themselves?

2. Aquapolis unfortunately feels like it runs into the same problem that their new content (such as diadem) runs into, it's interesting for the first few runs, but after that you just realize that you're fighting mobs that have very little interaction or diversity with abilities. They all do their abilities associated with what they are (such as dodos doing foul stench and treants doing canopy)...but they're ultimately all the same abilities anyway, just different names and aoe indicators. The very little variation you'd get is the arges (which is a cyclops mob with the tonze swings) and a goblin punching bag. You have the rewards and that's about the only thing that's keeping it going imho.

I was afraid of that. Another one lost to over- and under-sight I guess.

As for the latter bit, I've always been a fan of increasing physical telegraphs but removing the orange AoE zone indicators (I swear the mere timing of them bugs every player I introduce to this game, as all damage hits per the indicator and never the animations—jump INTO the explosion for safety!). Somehow I doubt that's going to change though, and I think many players would be rightly pissed until sound and visual assets are placed to make them just as informed of incoming actions as the orange indicators do now, so it would take up a lot of resources for a mostly aesthetic change. A powerful one, I think, but still aesthetic.

3. Like point 1, those constraints need to stop being the limiter, especially when you're looking at into a new expansion and higher level cap. Less abilities that add no depth to the jobs, less homogenization, and more diversifying each job identity. If we're going into a lvl 70 cap, this almost definitely needs to be the case unless they plan to introduce no new skills/passives only (which is already the aforementioned shooting themselves in the foot, especially if said passives are extremely generic and add nothing). It's really the one place you can't afford to cut corners on because that's the foundation for future patches.

Agreed completely. My only point there was that each job being a decent choice should be the only balance, and that even then that choice can be dependent on other shifts in composition, as long as that adjusted party is as good an option as the first. However, that takes very real consideration at the individual job-, party-, content-, and range of content- level.

I can discuss further about what I feel a particular skill, or its addition to a given job, should accomplish, but I feel like we'd probably be in agreement on that, so it might not be worth delving into at this time. I'll summarize my thoughts or find a useful quote if you like.

4. Your impression isn't completely wrong. It took up until 3.2 for them to introduce relevant recipes for combat classes. The patches before that, even gatherers didn't need much crafted equipment from crafters. It was a trend where crafters only made gear and tools for other crafters, but their materials were gated by both crafting and gathering scrips. This, alongside what specialization was supposed to be for, really took out the flare out of crafting and gathering for me (and i previously did a crafting service in 2.x, made about 60mil in a matter of few weeks)

My issue with it wasn't actually the disconnect between crafters and useful gear. It was in the leveling experience. There are SO many opportunities to use gathering and crafting classes as a means of world or milieu-exploration, and XIV neglected virtually all of them. The most it had going for it was leveling a particular gatherer (Botonist or Miner), and a 3-4 crafters simultaneously while a friend or two grabbed the rest, and being able to trade goods around, find the best leves for easy crafts to exp output, etc. There was nothing in that to do with the actual world, which gatherers were only involved in for the length of one to two loops of 4 nodes per zone. In many ways the issues here, as they stick out to me, follow in similar footsteps to the lackluster-ness of quests, key items, and world interaction in general. There's just a under-utilization, a kind of lack of imagination or integration. I realize I'm being vague for now; I can come back to this later if you like.

5. I feel they really need to up the overall difficulty a bit, at least to the point that players need to be held accountable for failing basic fundamentals like avoiding aoes and knowing your job's 1-2-3 combo from level 26. Honestly, it should never get to the point that "I'm new to the fight" can justify dying on a telegraphed circle, consistently.

Agreed. I've never personally taken that excuse. And I do get a little pissed when someone dies to a mechanic that was prominent in a recent mandatory dungeon. "At least blame the lag instead, but by the third death I really should be seeing your corpse on the far side of the room, if that's the case, seeing as you should be trying to compensate; there are clear telegraphs even before the AoE indicator appears, and you move early without those zones tracking you." < this coming from a fight where the Summoner had to rez the healer 3 times, and I was keeping myself up with Stoneskin and Conv + caster Physics (between DoTs or only during the CD). But, at the same time, I feel like this is more a community thing than it is a design consideration. We sometimes end up with unnecessarily juxtaposed groups of "you should be playing like this" and "don't tell me what to do", or "keep it chill" and "keep it competent". Granted that last one was reasonable. I realize I blew up your example a bit there. Sorry about that, it just really is probably my biggest pet peeve next to "I pay to play my way" (when that means very low-output) in group content.

I'd just really like to see the game's design itself, or the difficulty-leveling curve push for a higher quality player, so that your typical new 50/60 is better able to appreciate the finer details of gameplay and attend a higher portion of content without being a burden or nerfing said content.

[Jetstream_Fox]

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The need for more difficulty levels is something we need to see now, granted it might just be through my eyes only, it doesn't seem like good design to introduce a whole new system at once without any precious feedback, that tends to run things into the ground and then they are never salvageable (Diadem is good example) it was promised as something new and exploratory but what we got is field mobs dropping loot and a moderate grind built into, this has sense fallen off the face of the map almost within the next patch. Which is why I suggested we have a open line of communication with the devs, whether they need more community managers, who are active, or introduction of community polls. Now I know the likely response to polls, not enough people will do them if they are based of the website. Which is true yes, a mass amount of players don't visit this. However, all they would need to do is make it a prelogin requirement once a patch, granted some people will abuse this function by answering falsely, that's a norm, but the survey would be out there for everyone to see.