I guess it's time

[Caitlyn]

Just to be clear:
FFXIV is one of the most polished, stable, good looking and extremely comfortable MMORPG at the market. I would say, there is no other MMORPG which make anything better.

But there is still a lot of unused potenial here. Even there are still major issues, like the Anima-Grind, the boring Alexander Raid and/or the lack of great PvP, I wont stop playing. There is still a lot to do and other MMORPGs arent good enough, to let me quit.

Zones
I like the large areas from Heavensward. But I still prefer the 2.X-ones. The new areas have several problems. Their larger size force you to fly. They are looking not as good as the smaller old areas. There is not much variety within each zone. And some zones (Sea of Clouds or Azyz Lla for example) needs more aetheryts. Nevertheless, I would love to have larger areas for 2.X, like having Thanalan as one large zone.

Dungeons
Stop with whatever you re doing right now! Just give us something new.
All dungeons share the same formular: 1 Tank, 1 Heal and 2 DPS are fighting 3 bosses with trash in between. It gets even worse, when it comes to Expert Roulette: Why is it call it "Expert", when you just rush trough 1 of 2 dungeons within 15 minutes? And please stop making "Hard"-versions, when those dungeons arent meant to be hard.

Content
Stop with unneccessary nerfs. Please. FFXIV needs to be hard and challenging. Thats why many players came to FFXIV. Nerfing old content makes it mindless and useless. You killed Coil by extremely nerfing it and because of being able to join it unsync. Coil Unsync was the worst idea ever. On the other hand, crystal tower is not unsync... why?

Tomes
Back then, it was a good idea. But after 2-3 years of grinding tomes for better gear, it gets really boring. No one likes to farm tomes to reach the weekly cap. You can keep them in the game, but maybe change how to obtain/use it.

Character
Give us a bit more (not to much) options for our character costumization. A few more faces, additional sliders (butt-slider? xD) and more race-exclusive options (horns seperated from faces/hairstyles for Au Ra, elfish ears for Hyur, s.ol.). You can add Viera as new race, but its more important to have a deeper character costumization.

Items
Make a seperate face slot for glasses. Why cant I wear a hat and glasses at the same time? And I would love to have more options for dyeing (2 colors per item, more dyeable weapons, s.o.). And please remove the shared global cooldown for using an item.

Raid
Coil was awesome, Alexander is boring. Alexander Normal Mode is a joke. It was one of the worst ideas ever to add a easy mode of an endgame raid.

Misc
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...sh-new-content

[LalafellDown]

Zones
I like the large areas from Heavensward. But I still prefer the 2.X-ones. The new areas have several problems. Their larger size force you to fly. They are looking not as good as the smaller old areas. There is not much variety within each zone. And some zones (Sea of Clouds or Azyz Lla for example) needs more aetheryts. Nevertheless, I would love to have larger areas for 2.X, like having Thanalan as one large zone.

Dungeons
Stop with whatever you re doing right now! Just give us something new.
All dungeons share the same formular: 1 Tank, 1 Heal and 2 DPS are fighting 3 bosses with trash in between. It gets even worse, when it comes to Expert Roulette: Why is it call it "Expert", when you just rush trough 1 of 2 dungeons within 15 minutes? And please stop making "Hard"-versions, when those dungeons arent meant to be hard.

Content
Stop with unneccessary nerfs. Please. FFXIV needs to be hard and challenging. Thats why many players came to FFXIV. Nerfing old content makes it mindless and useless. You killed Coil by extremely nerfing it and because of being able to join it unsync. Coil Unsync was the worst idea ever. On the other hand, crystal tower is not unsync... why?

Tomes
Back then, it was a good idea. But after 2-3 years of grinding tomes for better gear, it gets really boring. No one likes to farm tomes to reach the weekly cap. You can keep them in the game, but maybe change how to obtain/use it.

Zones
to me are zones are just empty hubs were players hang out, nothing more. Nothing worth exploring in any zone. Only reason to go to them is to get something. Sure some of the 2.0 zones have forts, but that's it. 3.0 is the same thing the levels are flat nothing to explore no secret caves or random chest in the wild with a possibility of a random legendary item in it. Compared to the 1.0 maps that had cave systems and caverns to explore, which could of had so much potential for events, puzzles, quest if they kept the maps and added on to them with 2.0. The open world in 1.0 was way better than 2.0-3.0. granted 1.0 was a work in progress MMO. At least the exploration was there and everything was connected. No loading screen required.

Fates... just go see what Guild Wars did with theirs and copy that SE because their fates are fun and people on every map do them. Most of the time I go to a location to gather or finish exploring, but i end up doing events because a huge dragon has spawned or a fort is under attack and there are tons of players doing the event. Our fates are dead only reason to do them is if SE forces you or lvl grinding.

http://www.ffxivinfo.com/maps/eorzea.php

Dungeons
Are the same thing might as well as slap a lvl 60 on Sastasha and call it new. Oh wait they did do that with hard mode. Why not add a open dungeon with different paths and story within the dungeon. It works in Guild wars 2. I was hoping diadem was going to be them bringing back open world dungeons with objectives and exploration... nope just another monster grind. Worst part you can even solo it for fun. Saw they had one cave to explore, but couldn't go there because the over powered adds would kill me and the party just mindlessly grinds all day. I don't think the dungeons can be changed with the way the game is made. I don't see how they can add any thing new mechanic wise except kill some adds and then boss... repeat. Why not have traps that can kill the player or the adds or make a small platform where the adds can push players off. Make it hard not by buffing the monsters, but by adding puzzles to the fight. I'd take 1 dungeon a patch as long as its fun to do over and over rather than 2 or 3 dungeons that i do a few times and dread doing again. Doing dungeons feels like a chore in this game. Add poison arrows shooting down a hall way that kill you in one shot or electric floors that you have to navigate through that turn off and on. If you die on one of the traps you'd have to start over. Something as simple as that makes it fun. Hopefully Deep Dungeon has this and isn't like Diadem were the adds have 1mil HP. I fell asleep one time trying to kill an add in Diadem with my party. How is hitting a few buttons for 5 minutes straight as the add does the same 3 moves every few second fun? Same thing with 24 man raids, the bosses are just sponges that take forever to die (The Weeping City of Mhach the spider boss). Add puzzles that people can die too before we get to a boss. Like moving boulders coming down a wavy hallway, while spiders are shooting webs from the ceiling and if you get stuck on the web you slow down and might get hit by a boulder

Tomes
they should of kept the old tomes and made it so that different tomes could only be gathered from certain dungeons, basically each dungeon has its own currency. [B]Since the dungeons are boring and there's no reason to run the old ones I guess they had no choice but to force players to run them for new tomes. When you force players to run something they have no interest in means you made a boring and mindless dungeon. Why copy and paste the same thing if its not fun.

I feel like this game is more like those dungeon crawler games they have on the Nintendo DS and Vita. Were all you see is the portrait of your party when you go into dungeons. You grind for loot over and over about 100 time in each dungeon and the world is just a big hub where people spend their coins to buy gear. Like Monster Hunter or God Eater. FF14 only lives on because of the patches they consistently put out, if they stopped right now at 3.3 or at any patch it would die right away. As long as you make your game fun people will continue to play it.

[Vantol]

I feel sorry for the people holding out on 4.0 chances are they will be dissapointed.

Most likely. My personal expectations are very low.

[loreleidiangelo]

Here's a question: if you were given the choice to change only ONE thing about FFXIV, no matter how radical the change would be, what would you decide to alter?

For me, it's definitely the dumpstering of old content. If I had my way, the devs would be constantly expanding areas like the old 24-mans (instead of just forcing geared, level-synced players into queuing for it via the relic quest, players would instead run the "original" version simply to access the "new" floors), adding new hunts to each zone every so often (with less predictable respawn timers, please!), adding rare spawns or treasure chests with unique items into the old dungeons, inventing a reason for players to do Verdrfolnir/Metal Gear Revengeance 2/Proto Ultima/Odin/Behe/Coeurlregina again (possibly via zone consequences to teleporting/flying/gathering should they spawn and fail?), etc.

I'm curious to see what other people might change, if they were only given one option.

[Aezelas]

Here's a question: if you were given the choice to change only ONE thing about FFXIV, no matter how radical the change would be, what would you decide to alter?

That would be putting an end to the boring scripted fights. Lately, i've been bored the very 2nd time I enter any dungeon, trial or raid.
Knowing the exact second when shit is happening, on every single fight, is in my opinion the worst game design.

[Zojha]

Knowing the exact second when shit is happening, on every single fight, is in my opinion the worst game design.

The alternative is randomizing encounters - in which case, you need to ensure every possible combination is still clearable which in turn means the mechanics themselves need to be much more lenient. Basically, a tank buster can't require cooldowns to be used to make it through it if the cooldowns might not be available for the next. A telegraphed AoE needs to give you enough time to dodge it even if another ability just forced you to the far end of it and you need to run the full distance. And on the flipside, what is meant to be a challenging fight might become very easy because you got a lucky combination. You can't really make bosses do something they're not programmed to do either. And the trinity further works against more chaotic fights with its natural tank&spank design.

So...I could see some practical issues with that.

[Istaru]

The alternative is randomizing encounters - in which case, you need to ensure every possible combination is still clearable which in turn means the mechanics themselves need to be much more lenient. Basically, a tank buster can't require cooldowns to be used to make it through it if the cooldowns might not be available for the next. A telegraphed AoE needs to give you enough time to dodge it even if another ability just forced you to the far end of it and you need to run the full distance. And on the flipside, what is meant to be a challenging fight might become very easy because you got a lucky combination. You can't really make bosses do something they're not programmed to do either. And the trinity further works against more chaotic fights with its natural tank&spank design.

So...I could see some practical issues with that.

Step 1 could be no more tank and spank snoozes. Make it exciting to run that dungeon for run #50, entering the dungeon you know that you could get burned and that makes it fun. There is so little challenge to most things. Many of us could run these dungeons and fights in our sleep. That isn't fun.

[RiceisNice]

Here's a question: if you were given the choice to change only ONE thing about FFXIV, no matter how radical the change would be, what would you decide to alter?
.

Honestly, there's so many things that need to be addressed imo it's just not one thing. But the big thing I'd say is not cutting corners/rushing with content/expansion release, and to have plans for longterm. That means not scrapping initial ideas because it "didn't work out" (like multiple MCH attachments, Diadem, PvP) and not throw-away content.

[Istaru]

Honestly, there's so many things that need to be addressed imo it's just not one thing. But the big thing I'd say is not cutting corners/rushing with content/expansion release, and to have plans for longterm. That means not scrapping initial ideas because it "didn't work out" (like multiple MCH attachments, Diadem, PvP) and not throw-away content.

I will agree with you. They have a very good foundation and they could build a masterpiece of a game. It just seems that they can't pull it off for one reason or another. I think that is what frustrates me the most.

[Iromi]

I will agree with you. They have a very good foundation and they could build a masterpiece of a game. It just seems that they can't pull it off for one reason or another. I think that is what frustrates me the most.

I feel the same way as well. It has felt this way for a long long time now. I had convinced myself from all their hype and interviews foreshadowing 3.0 that since they claimed that this time its all "them" and no fixing 1.x or focusing on the past mistakes..that they would really turn the game around. I remember reading in an interview where the producer said that this expansion will be their original work, new envision and so forth. Then lo and behold it was 2.0 repeat. Really a big let down. Maybe I expect too much...is just such a shame because the potential is there for this game to be memorable and a masterpiece, yet they just continue to release dead on arrival content and nothing with longevity.