Should FF14 take a new route? Discussion

[Remedi]

I know that we are kinda on the same page on this Remedi. I am just a person that likes to answer questions that are directed at me so I gave them even after you already posted a bit more. So yes both are greedy and its kinda sad. I do have a friend that loved FF and kinda bought a lot of stuff from SE but the recent things in FF14 and the greed kinda turned him off and he said that he does not want to buy any bigger things from them. So this can turn negative for them too. (And yes I also have posted that I find it bad that we get more paid retainers and not at least one free one per expansion..)

I just hope that they get more budget, a better server/code and finally take some risk..and if they dont want to risk then its completely fine to just use the great things from other MMOs and put their interpretation of this in FF14. (But without it being completely complicated..)

Dw wasn't saying you didn't, was more directed to interwiews never tackling this problem, the discussion kinda triggered me on what I hate about the microtransaction culture

[Clover_Blake]

I enjoy the game as it is and I have no idea of what exact changes people want to see. What's the magical formula for endless fun, considering that there are tons of different tastes and situations?

Also, saying that Yoshida should leave feels super random too. The game is doing well, yet the director should leave? O_O (??)
I'm always very confused about doomsayers.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I enjoy the game as it is and I have no idea of what exact changes people want to see. What's the magical formula for endless fun, considering that there are tons of different tastes and situations?

Also, saying that Yoshida should leave feels super random too. The game is doing well, yet the director should leave? O_O (??)
I'm always very confused about doomsayers.

While by no means a comprehensive list. Here are things which come to mind.

• Actual innovation on core concepts. Is it really so much to ask for a new progression system beyond "collect this newly coloured tomestome?"
• Gear which has greater longevity than a few months.
• More engaging and/or challenging low level content
• Variation in how we approach content. (Dungeons with slightly different layouts decided randomly once you queue in.)
• Allowing old content to rest. (It's simply not fun being synced down from 70 to 50.)
• More variation on encounter design. (Eureka suffers due to trash mobs doing little more than auto attacks)

Basically, not another retread of the the precise same formulas they have been using since ARR. Honestly, what has Stormblood offered that differs from Heavensward? They don't need to overhaul the whole game but they do need to innovate. The fact I can predict almost everything that will release before 5.0 speaks volumes to how absolutely safe their approach has been.

[Clover_Blake]

Basically, not another retread of the the precise same formulas they have been using since ARR. Honestly, what has Stormblood offered that differs from Heavensward? They don't need to overhaul the whole game but they do need to innovate. The fact I can predict almost everything that will release before 5.0 speaks volumes to how absolutely safe their approach has been.

Thank you for the reply! It's true we can predict the formula that next patches will follow. I understand this might not be good for some people, though it's not a bad thing for me. I enjoy doing dungeons and I especially enjoy doing 24-man raids, and knowing what's coming next helps me plan ahead with my alts. Furthermore, beside the means to obtain tomes, SE always makes efforts to add other different things and mini games, so I personally can't complain about lack of variety either.

If it's alright, I'd like to comment on a pair of the suggestions you said:

[*]Actual innovation on core concepts. Is it really so much to ask for a new progression system beyond "collect this newly coloured tomestome?"

I see many people asking for this, but no one actually says what kind of innovation. The current tomes system serves a) for everyone to get the gear if they work for it (no RNG involved), and b) for everyone, no matter how much or how little time you have, to get the gear at the same pace. This means no one is left behind, which I’ve always been thankful for. I for one can’t come up with any other system that might be better, and I fear that changing this might result in a less friendly system (>_<)

[*]Gear which has greater longevity than a few months.

This point comes with two possible problems that I at least can foresee. 1. Since the gear can last for a whole year instead of half a year, perhaps the means to obtain it might be more grindy and might take longer. Perhaps tons of RNG involved like Mabinogi:Heroes/Vindictus? (This wouldn’t be a good thing for me). And 2. Since there’s no better gear to obtain for a whole year, people who already own it would have no reason whatsoever to play. There could also be no point in releasing new sets at all for a long time. I like getting new gear because it gives me new purposes, and I personally think the half a year spawn is quite good, for it's not too demanding and neither does it make you wait forever with nothing else to aim for.

In any case, SE keeps experimenting with new kinds of content, like Eureka which is different than anything else we had ingame. So I don't think that they maintaining the same formula about gear progression is a bad thing; it's worked so far, at least for me. Other things you mentioned, like dungeons that have some randomly generated elements (if I understood that correctly) sound fun in my opinion; perhaps SE will implement that someday ^^

[Aronys]

This point comes with two possible problems that I at least can foresee. 1. Since the gear can last for a whole year instead of half a year, perhaps the means to obtain it might be more grindy and might take longer. Perhaps tons of RNG involved like Mabinogi:Heroes/Vindictus? (This wouldn’t be a good thing for me). And 2. Since there’s no better gear to obtain for a whole year, people who already own it would have no reason whatsoever to play. There could also be no point in releasing new sets at all for a long time. I like getting new gear because it gives me new purposes, and I personally think the half a year spawn is quite good, for it's not too demanding and neither does it make you wait forever with nothing else to aim for.

That's false. GW2 for example adds new gear but it's not necessary to get it to continue the game. I've had a set there since 2012 that is still relevant and I can do every piece of content with it. I even made a new character and in a month got it to the endgame, got max level gear really easy and continue with it into the 2 expansions they released since. The game is still very much active, many people still play it since launch and enjoy it. That's because the emphasis is not on gear in that game, but on skills, as it has horizontal progression. The game is designed with much harder enemies and nothing is faceroll difficulty. Heck, the old launch dungeons are still sometimes so hard it's impossible to beat them.

Not to mention that the game changed and evolved a lot since it's initial launch. They changed how you move around the world, added masteries that also change your class on a almost basic level, and you can be building your character for months with those. In XIV, once you reach 70, that's it. Nothing changes anymore. No new abilities, no new traits, nothing.

[KisaiTenshi]

I see many people asking for this, but no one actually says what kind of innovation. The current tomes system serves a) for everyone to get the gear if they work for it (no RNG involved), and b) for everyone, no matter how much or how little time you have, to get the gear at the same pace. This means no one is left behind, which I’ve always been thankful for. I for one can’t come up with any other system that might be better, and I fear that changing this might result in a less friendly system (>_<)


This point comes with two possible problems that I at least can foresee. 1. Since the gear can last for a whole year instead of half a year, perhaps the means to obtain it might be more grindy and might take longer. Perhaps tons of RNG involved like Mabinogi:Heroes/Vindictus? (This wouldn’t be a good thing for me). And 2. Since there’s no better gear to obtain for a whole year, people who already own it would have no reason whatsoever to play. There could also be no point in releasing new sets at all for a long time. I like getting new gear because it gives me new purposes, and I personally think the half a year spawn is quite good, for it's not too demanding and neither does it make you wait forever with nothing else to aim for.

First, FFXIV's "progression" is basically "gear, gear gear", which in other "RNG-only" based games (see the the 2.x raids) means you may have to play the same dungeon 1000's of times to get the piece of gear you want. That is bad. It increases player fatigue, and when people burn out on a game, they don't come back. That's the entire addiction problem in a nutshell. When you erase that person's effort by releasing new RNG gear that obsoletes the previous RNG gear, then people just quit, because they don't want to commit that much time, and probably subscription/cashshop to it.

Loot Boxes, is basically this, but without the game play. Why bother creating any content, just put the gear into gachapon, and let peoples gambling addiction take over.

Which, means, that "RNG" based reward gameplay is bad. Think about the difference between farming Atma's for the relic weapon, and farming these crystals to upgrade gear that you already paid tomestones for. At least you're gauganteed one crystal IF you get a chain of, what is it, 30? Let's do the math, if it takes at least 30 seconds to kill one enemy x 30 it takes 15 minutes per crystal, and you need 100 of them to upgrade one item. so you're looking at a minimum of a 25 hour grind provided you get no other crystals, provided you can actually maintain the chain. At least it's not like the Atmas which you can spend a week doing FATE's in Southern Thanalan and get nothing. Likewise when people were doing Coil, you could only get one reward per week, thus if that thing you wanted didn't drop, nobody was going to do the raid again just for you, if they got their reward already.

Hence, the "coins" and "parts" and "tomes", and "Crystals" are a way to ensure there is always some progression, you're never actually wasting your time (in theory)

In practice, people don't like the pace. Yeah, maybe it should not be such a grind, because it puts off solo-play, but we're not looking at the big picture either. What other way can people get rewards that are not "replace old gear with new over powered gear that makes high end content a faceroll?", there's all that level-1 glamour gear, which works for costumes, but still, think bigger.

What do other games do for progression? Advance other skills, that aren't used in combat. Like, I've not done much of the crafting stuff because it, itself is a tedious grind, what's the ultimate reward from that? In other games, crafting tends to be entirely RNG as well, and tends to not advance the game in any shape. Crafted HQ gear should be equal to whatever "end game" gear is present, otherwise there would be no point to crafting anything at all, but the gist of what I've seen is that crafted gear is entirely pointless. Blue gear has one or two materia slots. But this Eureka gear has 5. Yet is still not BiS. No, the BiS gear is the gear you get from turning in the Sigmascape datalogs.

So there is already quite a bit of grind in the game, regardless. It's either via tome farming, crafting, or playing the hardest content. To quote a friend who quit playing a different game "It's just a geargrind, there's no point."

At least with every piece of content we get, there is storyline that goes with it. Other games tend to just release new gachapon, and that's it.

[Genz]

The game doesn't need a new route, just higher quality on the current template instead of stacking even more half-baked new side-content. There was no need to create an all new area like Eureka to have slightly more dangerous exploration, there are already "open world" areas and they are underused.

Also, on some aspects, Yoshida seems so unconvinced that asking FFXIV to go a new route could only lead to failure. For example, on "horizontal progression", would you really trust devs that are convinced it won't work? If they started to work on it, it would be with ill will (I suspect Eureka to have suffered from this too)

[Marluxia]

I think it's important to note that we, the players, don't have a strong idea of where FFXIV is headed.

The Letters from the Producer are there, yes, but they're sporadic and don't really give players any idea of what to expect other than the content that's been played to death already.

[Remedi]

I think it's important to note that we, the players, don't have a strong idea of where FFXIV is headed.

The Letters from the Producer are there, yes, but they're sporadic and don't really give players any idea of what to expect other than the content that's been played to death already.

I'd also say that each of us has a personal wiew of how it should go that makes coming together kinda hard.

[Marluxia]

I'd also say that each of us has a personal wiew of how it should go that makes coming together kinda hard.

This is definitely true, but even so I have no idea where the developers want FFXIV to go.

Should I just expect every new piece of content to be like Diadem and FATE grinding at this point? Raids, 24 mans, dungeons? I know the developers want to keep the core of the game (new dungeons, new raids, 24 mans, etc.) and I'm not asking them to change that, but is there anything beyond that to look forward to?