I guess it's time

[KitingGenbu]

Well they are a company, so yes money is one of the deciding factors in content they make or not. They definitely listen to player feedback, they just don't listen to destructive criticism.

One could say they would get more constructive criticism if they extended their testing past their family/friends methods? Like actually having a PTS. Many of these content 'failures' could've been avoided or minimized if there was one and since you believe they listen to proper player feedback.

[ADVSS]

One could say they would get more constructive criticism if they extended their testing past their family/friends methods? Like actually having a PTS. Many of these content 'failures' could've been avoided or minimized if there was one and since you believe they listen to proper player feedback.

A PTS would be great for those in between times during patch cycles for sure, would also help them to develop stuff with less risk like diadem of lov

[Shurrikhan]

One could say they would get more constructive criticism if they extended their testing past their family/friends methods? Like actually having a PTS. Many of these content 'failures' could've been avoided or minimized if there was one and since you believe they listen to proper player feedback.

By the time something's testable on a PTS, the only thing they'd really be saving by taking it back is reputation, not development costs.

Filling in players through design circles and more frequent releases to talk about random ideas that SE's considering, with no guarantee (read: panic) of their actually being implemented would go much further in stemming poor development branches or keeping them from falling prey to oversight.

[Braden]

To Velhart:

I have done raids, like I said. Im not hardcore or a raider, never will be. Raids are a WoW import. They don't need to be in a FF game imho. XI was fine without them.

Almost every raid I have been in has had one or many hostile individuals. First time healers and tanks just get blasted with bs. Having all instanced/duty finder content just breeds that type of behavior. I've seen it in all 4,8, and 24 person content. It spreads if left unchecked. In XI, you had to get along or move on because your reputation actually matters.

The mechanics are just old. Newer content just add more frequent dance moves. They should branch out and use some other form of player reaction in combat to counter a boss move or phase.

[KitingGenbu]

By the time something's testable on a PTS, the only thing they'd really be saving by taking it back is reputation, not development costs.

Twelve forbid having a good reputation of putting out non-failure content would save them money in development cost. They waste more money and time putting out stuff like LoV or diadem which isn't properly tested to see if its even worth releasing in their current state. A PTS is never a bad thing regardless of how fast a game releases content. Dead content isn't content....

[HeavenlyArmed]

We need to start a riot or thread "[To Dev's] Suggestions for greater future of FFXIV" (we need someone with good English, free time and understanding of current formula flaws). Though I like riot more.

I've started threads that are basically that... 3 times? And they've fallen into the aether every single time. You say this is what you want, but every time the thread actually pops up it gains no traction whatsoever, while this thread here has refused to die.

It's kind of hard to say all the the things that I want to change, but this question made me realize that I can put it simply into 1 idea: I want the devs to bring justice to every content they made and actually make them matter (rewarding).

Primals:
✅The first 3 primals had weapons and were necessary to complete the relic quest.
❌The succeeding primals acted like they're a content of their own and focused only on the slightly higher ilvl weapons as reward. (easily discarded, can easily be skipped by anyone new to just do newer content)

Raid Content:
✅You had to finish BCoB to proceed to SCoB and then finish SCoB to enter FCoB. No normal mode.
❌Normal mode. Something about goblins... probably has something to do with cheez... cat... BOOM, BANG... BEAMZ.... (Yea I didn't pay attention to Alex... sry)

Towers:
✅Use to only have items exclusively found in it.
❌Became the tool that helps people catch up by providing upgrade items similar to what the current raid content offers.
Fix: Make it relevant in its own light without ruining other content in the game. Also I would like to have 8-man tower mode, please and thank you.

❌Unsyncing.
✅Reverse sync. Let the content sync to us, not us syncing to the content. (Lvl 60 coil anyone?)

Creatures all over eorzea:
❌Only there for the sake of Hunting Log. Some drop important mats. Harmless.
✅Please add purpose to them. Like make the mobs spawn a boss mob that drops some special material maybe. Make them as challenging as what their supposed level is in the game and give out reasonable experience. Make them more interactive with different aggro triggers. Make them more than just moving pixels around the map.

Gil:
❌Why do I even have Gil?

Zones:
❌Straightforward. Easily explored. Feels like its dead.
✅Utilize ships (yea they exist), have hidden tunnels, make us feel there's danger in the outside world, or something, please.

What else do you guys think the devs aren't utilizing to its fullest? I feel like this way when I log in I'd have something to do, game would be more alive with new people looking into beating old content that they actually need... What's more is that we can revisit them and do them at level 60 with reverse syncing, possibly have fun, and get the new crafting materials.

I sort of agree with most of what you say here, but not all of it and not entirely.

Primals:
I'd like to see primals go back to a 3 primals per patch cycle thing, where you get a weapon from the one in the even numbered patch, a ring and another random accessory from the ones in the odd-numbered patches, and an upgrade-equivalent weapon (this cycle would have an i240, for example) for beating all three Primal Focus style. We'd need one more Primal every 6 months to do this, but I don't think that's too much to ask.

8-man Raids:
I wouldn't say remove normal entirely, but the more I see here the more I'm in favor of having normal mode release after the version that presents actual difficulty. Having story as a motivator for raiders has proven itself to be a powerful thing, and in Heavensward that's been effectively thrown away. Alternatively, make normal mode more difficult so that can't just be cleared by DF groups on the first day, and have it be an actual progression mode. In combination with the former of those suggestions, I'd also like to see the base difficulty for "Savage" raids decreased slightly and a "challenge mode" of sorts added where there are achievements players can get for doing fights in a way that makes them more difficult than doing them properly.

24-man raids:
I don't think 8-man towers would be as fun, and I'd almost rather have savage modes with 24 people than an 8-man version. Obviously the difficulty couldn't be quite on par with even the easier parts of current Savage raids, but we have a healthy enough playerbase that a more difficult version of these for large organized groups could totally function. As for rewards, I really think that players as it is get too much gear, and all rewards outside of progression raiding need to be scaled back, with these raids being one of the things I'd scale back less.

Unsyncing:
As awesome as this would be (seriously, I'd love to be able to do Coil in its true difficulty with my current skills) it'd be too much work to implement. It's just not feasible. The reason level sync works is because it syncs everyone to the same place. This reverse sync would need to adjust itself too many different ways to be what we'd want, and implementing a system like that just wouldn't have the same benefits as putting the resources it would take to do into other things.

Open-world mobs:
I don't want these all over the place, but I would like more mobs just out in the world that are about on par with A-rank hunts, if not slightly weaker, that would maybe drop some cool level-appropriate gear or something.

Zones:
I don't have too much of a problem with zone structure in Heavensward, but the open world is painfully underutilized by max level players, and your suggestions would have the potential to help in that regard.

[RobbieH]

They probably care much more about the health of the game's active playerbase and how many people are daily players.

Which doesn't excuse the player base has been declining since 2.0

Even if the game has 500k people that's low for a big MMO.

How many accounts did SE said the game had, wasn't it 5m?

So the player base is 10% of the accounts, and we're including bots and low levels trying the game in the 500k.

Man, that's a whole lot of people paying to play a game they don't like. That's beyond me.

If you bothered to read all pages instead of picking the comments you like to reply you'd find various answers for that.

[HeavenlyArmed]

Which doesn't excuse the player base has been declining since 2.0

Even if the game has 500k people that's low for a big MMO.

How many accounts did SE said the game had, wasn't it 5m?

So the player base is 10% of the accounts, and we're including bots and low levels trying the game in the 500k.

Did you just say 500k subs is low for a big MMO? Because it's not. That's actually very healthy, and a lot of games (read: pretty much everything besides WoW) gets by on a fair bit less than that.

[KitingGenbu]

Did you just say 500k subs is low for a big MMO? Because it's not. That's actually very healthy, and a lot of games (read: pretty much everything besides WoW) gets by on a fair bit less than that.

To be fair, most games in the mmorpg market are f2p and have cash shops (this game is p2p and has a cash shop), so subs honestly arent as important as people think they are if you have others making up for the revenue in the cash shop. Given how many threads there are about wanting even more stuff in the cash shop, I'm sure XIV isn't hurting in terms of money.

[RobbieH]

Did you just say 500k subs is low for a big MMO? Because it's not. That's actually very healthy, and a lot of games (read: pretty much everything besides WoW) gets by on a fair bit less than that.

Blizzard used to report player base until it got to 2m since they considered it low so they've stopped giving stats since then, if 2m is low i wonder what 500k is.

500k is low when the servers are filled with sprouts that don't even reach max level, people trying the game and bots.

I said 500k but we don't know the numbers, t this point it's probably more like 250k lol.

Anyway for a game with 5m accounts 500k is very low.