4.1 - The emptiest patch yet.

[Alash]

There isn't -----anything----- in the patch. So what games are you all gonna play instead when the servers empty out into shallow husks until 4.2?


--------------Edit--------------

Wow, I wasn't expecting such an outpouring of positivity towards my post! I am flattered. You're all such intelligent and witty people, and I love all of you. We're all God's creatures and I am nothing if not benevolent so I will now elaborate on the words which I wrote at 1:00 AM in the morning after a long day of watching garbage isekai anime and huffing rubbing alcohol.

When I said that 4.1 was the "emptiest" patch in the title I did not mean the "4.1 series" of patches. I am only including 4.1 in and of itself. I am not lumping the entirety of the 4.1 patch cycle (4.11/4.15) into this criticism. While I do think that the entire patch cycle is weak, given that it is lacking Eureka, that is neither here nor there.
Having painfully dragged my eyeballs across at least half of the postings this morn, whilst i deposited last night's morsels into the toilet bowl, I noted quite a few inanities that were recited again and again from various individuals whom I care not to address personally, and will do so here:

For the record, 4.1 (not the rest of the patches, because 4.15 could take over a month to come out - we don't know, so let's just say at least a month alright? Be good.) contains

- One 4 man dungeon wherein players will pull a million mobs to the boss door, AoE them down, and then proceed to punt the boss into the stratosphere because these dungeons are made for dumb dumbs to complete. This content is not relevant to anyone who is actually good at the game and has been completing the raid content.

- One 24 man dungeon. Cool boss fights designed to be cleared by 10 decent players and 14 players who require a carer to wipe their drool while the healers complain that the boss isn't dying fast enough despite not doing any DPS. This content is not relevant to anyone who is actually good at the game and has been completing the raid content...... Bangaa!

- One extreme primal that drops a weapon below the current raid tier iLV because it is designed for not-great players to clear. Maybe people who want to farm the new mount recolour will grind it out this patch but the smart ones will wait until the end of the expansion when the drop rate has been increased. This content is not relevant to anyone who is actually good at the game and has been completing the raid content (outside of Mounties).

-New weekly quest turn ins for gatherers/crafters that get boring very quickly, do not give you yellow scrips, and really at best will hold people's attention until they max the rank for them and hopefully get a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the bum for their efforts. Yawn.

-New daily quests where you get to ride around on a manta ray to various locations underwater, press a button to check a quest off, and then move to another location underwater and do the same thing. And you get to do this every day! Will BARELY hold the attention of anyone and hopefully at the end of it you will NOT get a kiss on the cheek because I don't want no crusty turtle near me. Give me a snake waifu next time and maybe I'll consider posting a positive thread about it.

-Hildibrand (actually is that even coming in 4.1? I don't even know and because 3.0's story was so crap, and they didn't even put any trials in it I just don't care.)

-New housing district that will promptly fill up, and then summarily empty as the houses are demolished from people growing bored of the above features.

In 4.11 a few weeks later you will get

-A single weekly limited raid (that will still drop chests at least) which will consist of recycled bosses and is completely gated off to anyone who isn't already a walking nuke.

Okay now that is out of the way I will now levy direct criticism to the way that they have handled this game's patch cycle. We have many times been told that they would like to, instead of churning out lots of boring dungeons, produce new kinds of content. As such, they've diverted man power towards creating these features and thus far we've gotten:

-PvP - It has taken them YEARS to get people doing this consistently, and in the end they basically gave up and decided to let people level their jobs through it. This resulted in lots of people just botting it for XP with simple autohotkey scripts. You know they still have an NPC titled "Materia Vendor" at wolve's den? That's pretty funny. Pass(?)

-Chocobo racing - which has yet to receive even a new course. Fail.

-Triple Triad - new cards are introduced on the regular, but I'm sure that if you look at the tournament boards they full of the same people boosting their way to the top every week. Fail.

-Palace of the dead - now this actually did a good job at doing what they set out to do - take fates, just about the only open world content in the entire game where players actually ran around and did things in it with each other (not including hunts, which also suck) and shoot them in the head and completely leave them for dead. Will not be receiving an update this patch either. Don't know how to classify this one but because I find the leveling process for it to be completely banal I'm gonna give it a personal fail.

-Lords of Vermin - Fail.

-Diadem - Fail. Twice.

-Treasure hunts/aquapolis - lets be real, this took no time to bang together at all. I imagine the design document for it was half a page and probably submitted by an intern. Pass(?)

-That stupid Zhloe thing - Is literally just collectible turn ins except it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to do them. Fail.

-The cool Khloe thing - actually got people to go back and do old content. Never had any luck with it so ultra-mega-personal-fail.

Okay so all of these failed attempts at producing content that will last more than even a week, let alone an entire patch cycle, what benefits have we actually gotten from this? All the man power and effort used to produce these could have been put to better use producing more boss fights and dungeons which are the only kinds of content that they consistently produce anything of quality with.

I can't really think of anything to sign off with so I'll just stop here. Toodles!