Suggestion for 5.0 launch

[Zojha]

I'm just sitting here wondering how anyone has nothing to do in this game.

Let me enlighten you:
When people say "There is nothing to do", they mean:"There is nothing to do that I find enjoyable".

If you enjoy grinding, you can always get more Relics, you can make well over 20 of them and each one will occupy you for at the very least a week. If you enjoy mindless grinding, you can level a gatherer or three. You can make it a point to wait for the ideal conditions of the ARR sightseeing log or complete the fishing log. You can gather all triple triad cards and spam leves to work on the High Roller and Honest Gillionaire titles. There's also Second Coil of Bahamut (Savage) on min iLvL and you might not have a perfect pedigree racing chocobo yet either.

It's not like there's nothing to do, it's just that many of the things there are to do are about as enjoyable as watching paint dry with a cheese grater running down your spine. And that's why people say:"There is nothing (fun) to do."

[Clicked]

No matter how much content they release, you will be done with it way before they have time to create more. That's just the type of game this is unfortunately.

Moving the relic quests to be sooner isn't really going to postpone the feelings your having much longer. Plus, toward the end of Stormblood, there will likely be a decline in subs and extended quests like the relic quests are one of the few ways to entertain the playerbase while you finish up the new expansion.

[alimdia]

I perfectly understand people who decide to take their time doing content, all I'm saying is that it's not something you'd expect out of the majority, consuming content at a "normal" pace just playing a few hours per day you're gonna hit a wall no matter what, and forcing yourself to go snail speed isn't a good solution.

I'm not asking for a lot of content, just to have the relic be a higher priority so we can start working on it during that awfully long downtime. If you look at the way anima was implemented it had 3 steps that could have been split, adding the first two in 3.05 and the third in 3.15 instead of all three steps in 3.15

[Ametrine]

Snip.

Because we're not spending our game time solely forcussed on level and gear progression. That seems to be the trend between casual and hardcore players, I think. We take our time goofing off with silly side things.

The past few game sessions included me trying to solo ARR EX primals for the fun of it. I'm trying to grind MGP to finally get all the minions there, and God help me, I'm trying to learn Verminion to get that Penguin Prince and Shalloweye minion. At least Triple Triad is easy!

Also, I've been working the challenge log to rotate out some of my Adventurer Squadron (I want all Lalas!), Wondrous Tails, hunting for Centurio seals, and more.

I don't usually run dugeons beyond a couple roulettes for tomes, and I'm simply not interested in leveling all my jobs since it feels like a huge waste of time to grind a stuff that I'll never play.

[Sandpark]

I'm just sitting here wondering how anyone has nothing to do in this game. I still have a huge list of things to do, and at launch, was still scrambling to get things done. How much do you guys skip over story and consume energy drinks to burn though content so quickly?

See below

Let me enlighten you:
When people say "There is nothing to do", they mean:"There is nothing to do that I find enjoyable".

If you enjoy grinding, you can always get more Relics, you can make well over 20 of them and each one will occupy you for at the very least a week. If you enjoy mindless grinding, you can level a gatherer or three. You can make it a point to wait for the ideal conditions of the ARR sightseeing log or complete the fishing log. You can gather all triple triad cards and spam leves to work on the High Roller and Honest Gillionaire titles. There's also Second Coil of Bahamut (Savage) on min iLvL and you might not have a perfect pedigree racing chocobo yet either.

It's not like there's nothing to do, it's just that many of the things there are to do are about as enjoyable as watching paint dry with a cheese grater running down your spine. And that's why people say:"There is nothing (fun) to do."

At least you are saying what that group of people really mean.

If I don't like raiding or pvp and two portions of released content is that then that applies. I do enjoy grinding when the challenge is somewhat comparable to my character's progress. Here I either just play when something I do like comes out and play other games when there is nothing. Or continue playing this for long durations and add pain to my experience wondering why the game doesn't do exactly what I like.

Maybe a solution is to give feedback on how to make relic, crafting/gathering, logs, gold saucer, and other content more fun. I am sure opinions would vary and that content may improve or get worse with feedback. But even if that other stuff becomes more fun, some people will not like certain types of content regardless of what get's done to it.

Personally, I would want each style of content to have different avenues of progression just as the combat game gets. And of course fun would have to be part of that. I fall in that category of combat centric stuff. But I would like to forage into that other side but it needs some variation too. If all I have to look forward to is grinding nodes/items, guildleves, and scrips, it doesn't encourage me to want to progress much unless I am crafter centric, it is just a barrier to the end or the big money.

DOW/DOM:
Logs
Job quest
MSQ
Fates
Dungeons
Raids
Hunts
Company progress
Guildleves
Trials
Exploratory content
Relics
Squadron content
PvP

DOH/DOL
Logs
Job quest
MSQ
Fates
Dungeons
Raids
Hunts
Company progress
Guildleves
Trials
Exploratory content
relics
squadron content
PvP

[SaitoHikari]

I don't really think that it's so much the lack of things to do, it's more that there's a longer gap between patches from the initial expansion release up until the first patch. Surely everyone remembers the 5 month gap between 3.0 and 3.1 which pretty much killed all momentum the expansion launch had? 4.0 to 4.1 feels pretty long too, even though in reality it's only 4 months, slightly longer than the usual gap between patches. But it only feels longer because the amount of things to do at Lv. 70 is currently pretty barebones, and thinking everyone wants to go level every job and pointing to that as 'SEE? THERE'S LOTS MORE TO DO' is a dangerous thing to assume from a community and a design standpoint. (For one, if people ACTUALLY did that, have fun with the DPS queues being even worse in theory.)

Probably the biggest irony is that while there's more content for raiders in theory, the way vertical progression works in this game is that raiders actually have less incentive to stay subbed late during the usual 6-7 month gearing cycle (since they'll gear up at an astronomically faster rate than non-raiders do), especially if they happen to clear the raid tier earlier. I'm not hardcore by any means (I still haven't cleared O4S), but I'm already item level 339 - and I spent half of the patch without a static. This is contrasted to the fact that I spent much of 3.x avoiding Savage up until 3.4, where I pretty much never finished gearing up until the next gearing cycle was released. And no, arguing that such people should gear alternate classes is arguing for content that doesn't exist, and encouraging bloat for no real reason at all.

To me personally, my biggest criticism of the 4.0 launch was that it was released without Alliance roulette. I enjoy the 24-man raids more than anything else in this game, but now we're in a 3 month lull where nobody is running them because at this point, the only reward in doing so is glamour. Even if you want to run them now, they pretty much never pop. I'm also a bit miffed that their sole reason for existing even when they're the hot new content of the patch is only to act as catch-up content for gearing.

[ColorOfSakura]

My suggestion for 5.0's launch is that they have an expansion beta prior to the expac launch in order to allow people to try out the new jobs at Max Level and the new skills / battle systems if they change any for the existing jobs.

I feel the dev team has to spend SO MUCH TIME fixing jobs when they could be working on Patch content instead because the Jobs inadvertently come out unbalanced due to lack of playerbase input. If they did a couple beta weekends where people could play around with the jobs at max level and how they play, I think it'd really help streamline the feedback process and get jobs into proper order ahead of time.

[Snow_Princess]

You can't release salvage on day 1. That means you need to release raid crafting gear on day 1 and that would cause someone having too much power economically and it is obvious SE fights that.

[alimdia]

You can't release salvage on day 1. That means you need to release raid crafting gear on day 1 and that would cause someone having too much power economically and it is obvious SE fights that.

I have no problems with savage being 4 weeks after release, I'm asking for the relic weapon to be also 4 weeks after release instead of 6 months (now delayed to 8+ months) as the relic is something a portion of the playerbase likes to slowly spend extra time on.

[F_Maximillian]

Threads like this have existed since mmorpgs were a thing to begin with, probably before that even. Even if you became the richest person on the planet and had your own personal development team on hand to make content specifically for you they wouldn't be able to churn out content as quick as you would be able to get through it. Sure, your wait might only be a few days instead of a few weeks but it's impossible for a developer to keep up with how quickly players get through things. People say that while there are things to do that they haven't, those very things aren't enjoyable. That is totally understandable and I feel the same about a few of the things listed (like mounts, I pretty much stick to my chocobo/susano wolf) but as others have said that content still exists as something to do even if it isn't your first choice. There is no way for you to purely play ffxiv for any amount of time and have "new" content enough to keep up with how you go through it, especially if you only like to do certain things. The only way that this would possibly work would be for them to make content that is otherwise literally impossible to complete unless a certain amount of time has passed and nobody really likes content that's hard gated like that.

"Play another game" may leave a bad taste in people's mouths but that's the only realistic way to keep yourself busy if you eat through content too quickly and don't desire to do any alt classes or the number of other things you can do in the game. The devs can't keep up with you in particular no matter how much we wish it was the case. This stuff doesn't manifest out of thin air, it takes multiple teams working on different parts of it to turn each piece of content out. At best, in terms of getting content out quicker they could opt for quantity over quality but then people would complain about that instead of having to wait. There's no real way to please everyone and people who zoom in on one area of content can't hope to have something new to do every time they finish something.