The State of FFXIV: A Followup

[HeavenlyArmed]

So, a few days ago I posted a thread that was to act as a survey of players' thoughts on the current state of a number of systems in the game as well as the game overall. This was following a couple of other threads that tried to discuss the same thing, which I give credit to for sparking the discussion in the first place. Now that incoming votes on the strawpolls I put up have slowed to a trickle, I want to discuss their results and go into depth on what I believe are good solutions that would please the highest number of people.

But before I do, I want to discuss the polls themselves. Despite getting praise for being far less biased than the previous poll that tried to tackle this subject, there were still some concerns from people on reddit about my poll options having too much flavour, to the point where some even accused me of trying to push a certain agenda. This was not my intent, and in the future I will try to make poll options that are less flavourful in the interest of not biasing the results. As for the accusations of trying to push an agenda, if this was my intent then I failed miserably as some of the poll results were not at all where I personally stand on those topics. But put simply, no, I was not trying to force my opinion to be the one people tended towards in these polls, and I apologize if you got that feeling from my survey.

So to let this lead somewhat naturally into the discussion of the poll results, which one(s) did I not personally agree with the consensus of? There were two that really surprised me, Raiding and Gear Progression.

RAIDING

Poll Results

I'll start off with my thoughts on raiding, and why I think that the results of that one don't point the game in a good direction if followed. So as you can see, there were two options that were very close in votes. One was the return to the coil system/delay the easy mode of the raid, for the purpose of giving people more motivation to do difficult raids by having an early look at the story be the carrot. The other was to introduce more difficulty levels so everyone has something that suits them. The first problem should be pretty clear, these two options are polar opposites. As such, if you were to try and please both crowds you'd end up in a situation where you're removing and adding a difficulty at the same time which makes no sense, or more realistically either introducing a middle-ground difficulty or an extremely tough difficulty and delaying some number of these difficulty levels. I think this would only serve to further fragment the playerbase, and would do so in a very confusing manner. Hell, I'm getting confused just writing this.

But all that said, I do have a personally preferred solution that I'm going to suggest here, that I think would at least appease the "more difficulties" crowd, and still leave the option to please the "bring back Coil style" crowd as well. What I mean by that is I'm not sure where I stand on the potential delaying of the easy mode of the raids, but I do think they should still exist for reasons that were made very obvious back in the Coil days. As for what I'd like to see for the harder difficulty, my idea is to see the difficulty slightly lowered in the encounters themselves. In my ideal world, raid tiers would be five bosses, three at/around the difficulty of A5S, one at the difficulty of A7S, and then the final boss sitting around the difficulty of pre-nerf A6S except tuned to higher gear values. "But that will be cleared really fast, what will the hardcore players do after?" Challenges.

FFLogs has already started doing this, with each fight having a certain challenge that players can do which makes the encounter more difficult to complete than just doing it entirely as intended. My idea is effectively for the devs to put this system directly into the game. "But why is this necessary when FFLogs already does it?" Not a lot of people use FFLogs, and even fewer know this feature exists there at all. Also, if it were to be implemented by the devs themselves, it would be getting implemented by people who know exactly how the encounters work and as such could ensure that all challenges were doable, but only really manageable for a group that has already progressed through the entire tier.

As for rewards, at bare minimum this would need to work similarly to how SCoB Savage worked, where you get an achievement and a title for completing it the first time. If the goal is to make people want to complete them multiple times rather than being a one-and-done sort of deal, then my idea would be to reward every player in the raid with one extra Manifesto page whenever they complete the challenge, with usual weekly limits applied to that reward. This way, people who have finished the tier and just want to get their gear can do so more quickly, and can even use this to improve their item level on alt jobs more quickly. This helps address the old complaint about how due to current weekly limits everywhere the armoury system can't be used to its full potential. While it doesn't do so immensely, in my opinion it does enough so that players should have less room to make this complaint. Of course, that's just in the case that you don't want it to be one-and-done like Savage SCoB was.

GEAR PROGRESSION

Poll Results

This leads me into the next topic, Gear Progression. Similar to raiding, there was a clear split in player opinion, resulting in two options being very close in votes and fighting for the top spot. While these two don't directly oppose each other like the raiding options did, they can't exactly be compromised on. One wants the current system to remain, with a few more options here and there, and the other is asking for a fundamental restructuring of gear in this game. Frankly, I don't have a solid idea for either.

We've seen an attempt at adding alternative gearing methods through the Diadem, which did great for a while but eventually died off for a number of reasons including being extremely boring in most people's eyes and the rewards no longer seeming worth it. Perhaps they will learn from earlier mistakes when Diadem gets revamped in 3.4 or 3.5, whenever it happens, or maybe they'll take it in a whole different direction where direct gear rewards aren't involved at all. But neither of these will satisfy the players who want a fundamental restructuring and rewards with more longevity than what we currently have. But honestly speaking, I don't know what exactly would satisfy them, or if satisfying them would even end up actually being good for the game. No solution I can see coming from that camp would do anything to help the complaints of the armoury system being painfully underutilized, and having large gaps in gear between different sets of players could introduce a whole new set of problems to be dealt with. If you're in this camp, please tell me your suggestions, because I'm at a total loss.

STATS

Poll Results

Stats is the next topic, and here's where things get a bit easier, as this has been one of the bigger points of discussion. This is a topic I've talked about my own ideas for at length, have gotten other solid discussion on in the threads I've been involved in and due to a recent interview has even picked up traction in a thread I've not been involved in.

Since the discussion on this is already plentiful, I'll keep this section short. The poll for this one was relatively balanced, with most people at least wanting some change, but a lot of people also thinking not much change is needed, if any at all. My personal stance is that small changes are all we really need in a lot of areas, replacing one or two of the more boring stats with stuff that's more interesting, having a general design philosophy of stats needing to be felt rotationally to be truly worthwhile and that philosophy leading to additions such as something like the Mastery stat in WoW and changes to stats such as Skill Speed and Determination to make them more viable or interesting respectively. It'd be nice to have more, with things like Materia that add bonus effects or set bonuses or even a new gear slot for something like a trinket, where the piece of gear gives you a new cooldown or something, but these changes would take a lot of time to correct an issue that I believe has a simpler solution.

CONTENT RELEASE

Poll Results

Lastly on the specialized topic list we have Content Release. I'm genuinely amazed that over 1% of respondents actually believe that the devs are already deviating too far from the formula, though I'll concede that these could just be troll votes, especially considering how it got less votes than other options I left in other polls that would attract such votes. Honestly speaking, I'm of the opinion that with the upcoming revamp to Diadem and Deep Dungeon being just a few weeks away, I'd be okay if they kept up the current trends in content release. And most people seem to agree to some extent, that the current formula is really not that bad and just needs a bit more experimentation and maybe a couple minor alterations as a result of that experimentation. This experimentation could also leave room for solutions to other problems, by allowing these new types of content to drop different gear which may have more interesting stats or effects. Or they could just give us broken Pinks again... but I've been trying to remain positive in all these discussions, so let's leave that where it lies, shall we?

CONCLUSION

Overall State of XIV Poll Results

Overall, the state of the game is not considered to be that bad. Over half of the people who responded to the survey said that at most the game needs a few fundamental changes here and there, but is working from a solid enough base that they think only small changes are needed if any at all. Also of note, that group of people who said that these polls will do nothing and I should stop trying to care. The group that's even larger than the group who thinks that the devs are already straying too far from the content formula. Yet that's smaller than the group who claims to have quit a while ago and is only assuming what the current state of the game is. Still, to this group I want to be clear. I want discussion to take place. I want the dev team to take note of how much traction threads like this have been gaining, especially since the E3 Live Letter and following interviews. If they see how much we care about these things, they'd be crazy to not at least reconsider certain positions they've taken, and possibly even consider some of the things that players are suggesting.

And to the community team, these threads will continue. You know as well as any of us that players are clamouring for these changes, and have been for a very long time. Let our voices be heard. Relay these thoughts and suggestions to the dev team. Trust us, as dedicated players we want nothing more than for this game to be the best it can be, and while we may not always agree on what that means, we know that right now it means there needs to be change in a number of areas. So please, don't just pass on this as "another topic about horizontal progression." Listen to us. Let the team know that there are plenty of ways the players think these changes could be made without causing the problems they keep telling us are inevitable if they try. We can make this game what it's meant to be. Thank you for reading through all of this, and I look forward to seeing even more great discussion on this amazing game and how it can be even further improved.