Lack of content on patch release

[Airget]

From the standpoint of challenges, the game does lack the content each VU. in 4.3 the challenging content is just the new EX, dungeon is a cakewalk and the other new battle content is tuned to be easy.

In theory the Ultimate content would be released at the same time as all other content but for the sake of allowing players to finish other content before grinding ultimate they hold it off for two weeks.

With Deep Dungeon I'm not certain but I do wish this content could see more production earlier in the patch cycle rather than the 3rd Version update, pretty much a year after Stormblood release, it provides the most bang for your buck when it comes to challenging content on top of RNG to get loot that other content doesn't provide.

Though there is also the question of wasted resources, aka Squadrons, releasing 3 new areas NPCs can go to with players does use up resources that could be used to make other content I honestly don't see the worth of doing Squadron instances since the game already provides a bunch of other ways to level a DOW/DOM. If they had worked it to be it's own entity unique from just npcs can go to dungeon with you and play as well as Tataru plays arcanist. . .

What could help a lot is if SE considered releasing standalone boss encounters of all the raids tuned to 8-man content. Imagine all the bosses but extreme versions, while yes it would require resources to produce it would have the benefit of already having the main assets designed for the boss while adding more layer on top of it.

Basically using what they deemed overtuned fora casual 24-man experience and create unique challenging 8-man encounters.

[Remedi]

Firstly, FFXIV is not very casual-friendly. It's incredibly mechanics-intensive, which is quite punishing for people who are more casual gamers.

Let's not kid ourselves, the game is very easy all around, it only gets mechanically intensive when you reach savage and ultimate level, it's not that complex before.

[Alleo]

Feels like most of the content of this patch won't be released for a while until eureka and deep dungeon eventually come out which seemingly could be anywhere from 2 weeks time and 2 months time.

I just wished that they had at least put one of the two casual updates in it. Ultima might be nice for hardcore raiders but its not something for casuals and thus we have to wait more weeks to get more content. I am fine if they dont release all of it with the patch but putting all of the meaty content for later releases feels just a bit bad. Stretching all of their extra content out like that really feels like they themselves dont believe that its longlasting content..even though the palace is still run even today so the new tower should keep us busy for a while.

It doesn't matter how much content is added at once. It's always the same idea of "take time off of work, rush all the content on the first day, complain there is nothing to do on day 2."

People make it their goal to do the content as fast as possible. They could release all the content that will ever be in Stormblood, at the expansions release, and in a week people will complain about nothing to do.

There will always be those people that can play a huge amount of hours per day and yes you probably wont have enough content for them to do. (Other than truly restricting everything with a weekly limit) But why should we force ourselves to just play the patch a minimum amount per day so that we might have enough for a few days more? This patch has nothing in it right now that takes huge time to complete. MSQ and any side quests can be done once. I read through every text slowly, I talk to all the NPC near the quest to see if they say something else, so I dont race through the MSQ. Heck with this patch we had another server problem so I could only do the last part of the MSQ later that day. Yet with doing everything without true rush I was done with the majority of the patch in 2 days.

Now I have only the daily quests and the weekly stuff left from the patch itself. How much more should we hinder ourselves so that the patch feels bigger than it is?

I have other achievements ingame and as soon as a friend comes back from his break we will try to do palace runs again but shouldnt a new patch itself at least keep the people busy for a few weeks? And leave the rest of the game and achievements for those weeks till the next patch comes out? Right now it feels more like the patch is done in less than one week and I have to try to find something else from older content to find, to keep me busy for the rest.

[Remedi]

The only way to make patches have a longer lasting feeling would be ditching the idea of casual from running 24 man and have them to be a real raids feeling. There's really no other way. Maybe also tuning dungeons to be much harder that it's not a 15 min clear.
Outside of that there's really no way that you can make lasting content outside of grinding.
No game had patch content lasting for longer than a day, what they had however were walls either timed/skill/grind/gear walls that lead you to take time, be it forming a group, gear up or skill up or wait to get things done.

Think about it as the game change that it was CD beignj resetted on wipe. You now save so much time between wipes that a 100 pulls inc requires much less time to be cleared. In the same way, having no real lock on the content, and a duty finders too has speed up it's consumption incredibly, but the creation time has not really speed up.

That is why Legion has spread all the quests of the story on a timer, why they are still reliant on mission tables and why they now release raids on .5 patches which leads to why now they are able to release an expansion before the 1 year mark of the release of the last raid.
And this is important because it's a known fact that the FFXIV dev team and the Wow team do look at each other.

And honestly i MIGHT just be fearmongering here now but I believe they'll split story in parts next even before the last patch of an expansion

[Remus]

This game is wide as an ocean but only deep as a puddle.

[Sotaris]

4.1 was more lackluster imo. Also every patch is lackluster for us who already got everything leveled to cap.

[number473]

(If you feel strongly about this please consider voting on my post in the live letter Q and A thread (it's the 1st one) to help make it more visible)

Those saying to play something else during the downtime really don't get the point at all. Personally, I have been in the position where I am spending much more time on other games since I finished with Eureka, which is months ago. The little bit of questing and half-hour of daily content really gives me almost nothing to do, and I am tired of being on a break!!!

Eureka and Deep Dungeon are the things that I have been looking forward to because they are the things that I can spend a lot of time on. Having to wait longer for these things, the specific things I am looking forward to, is extremely disappointing.

I'm not going to say that the new content is bad. The main story was enjoyable as always and the new dungeon is great. The dungeons are always good, even though the fact that they are so similar at this point makes them boring (I'll save that rant for another day). It's just that there's nothing for me to spend my time on.

[Sotaris]

I'm not going to say that the new content is bad. The main story was enjoyable as always and the new dungeon is great. The dungeons are always good, even though the fact that they are so similar at this point makes them boring (I'll save that rant for another day). It's just that there's nothing for me to spend my time on.

I didn't mean to come off like i was complaining. Problem for us who play more than 1 hour per day the content feel fresh and fun for a week or two then it just repeat mode doing expert daily and namazu for 10 min.

[Cirgellon]

There will never be a time where MMOs can put out enough content to make people who complaij about it happy. Gaming studios take years to create those single player games that you run through in 8-100 hours. You are givijg this dev team months between updates. The only way to give lasting content is to create grinds of doing the same thing over and over, which is why MMOs do exactly that.

[Maeka]

Firstly, FFXIV is not very casual-friendly. It's incredibly mechanics-intensive, which is quite punishing for people who are more casual gamers.

Only when you get to the non-Casual (Savage) Content.

Duty Finder is very casual-friendly except for a few outliers (Shinryu, and maybe Fluminis).

There's a significant number of abilities available, and mastering them is complex.

Not really. I haven't found a job yet that I couldn't play casually and passably well for Duty Finder content.

I've gotten NIN to 60, RDM to 59, PLD and WHM both on 70. Nothing about any of those jobs is all that hard.

The 'real' end-game (Glamours and such) are murderously expensive, or insanely time-consuming to acquire. The Relic weapons - supposedly the casual player's path toward end-game level gear - have, prior to Eureka at least, been ridiculous time sinks.

I don't know of any casual player who NEEDS the Relic Weapons. The current "Relic" weapon is from Eureka, and that one isn't that bad, I hear players being able to do it in 6-10 hours.

The storyline bloat and the sequential nature of the MSQ makes getting started a brutally time-intensive process as well (but, oh, wait, you can pay extra to skip this... what a convenient fix).

It can be done quite casually, an hour here, and hour there and you will eventually get there. That's how I did half of it, I would log on for an hour or two and whittle away at them and just enjoy them cutscenes and lore.

FFXIV is good about enabling people to catch up to modest gear levels upon hitting level cap. That's really about it, as far as newbie-friendliness goes.

Everything in Duty Finder and outside of Savage/Ex is casual-friendly, lol. FFXIV is a game you can log on for just a bit and do your daily roulettes, any beast tribes you're interested in and still have a little time to do put into other things too (gathering, GC turn-ins, what-not). Now if you're a casual player, then no maybe you can't afford the most expensive glamours, maybe you won't have a mansion, etc, but you don't NEED those things to have fun in FFXIV.

Secondly, aiming to be casual-friendly does not excuse Yoshi-P and the development team from treating shallowness almost as a point of pride. The original statement was a positive one (affirming commitment to a good experience for casual gamers), not a negative one (avoiding a good experience for anyone with more than 10 or so hours a week to play). So can we discard it as an excuse for the sort of bland bullshit SE has been feeding us for well over a year now?

If they did give things that were 10 hours per week of content, then casual players would get left in the dust because they simply couldn't keep up with that kind of ridiculous content release.

As I previously said, Yoshi-P says he wants us to play FFXIV for awhile, turn it off, and play something else for awhile too. He can't have a game like that if he dumps a ridiculous time sink that causes us to feel like we MUST play 10+ hours a week.

As it is, players have no control over themselves already, as evidenced by the relic weapon quests pre-Eureka where people would grind hour after hour after hour doing nothing but that grind and then burn out and then complain that they don't like FFXIV because it's too grindy. Nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to do that grind. Why do you think there's a 450 Tomestone Cap per week? Why do you think you can only do 12 beast tribe quests per day?

Because time-gating is the ONLY way to get players to limit how much they do, otherwise they would log on for 48 hours straight and gobble up all the content like greedy pigs at the feeding trough and then complain when it's all done and there's nothing left to do.

Players have no self-control, they've proven this in any MMORPG that has ever existed. They have to do it RIGHT NOW. They gotta have it NOW NOW NOW NOW. They can't proceed at a steady pace, oh no. It's gotta be ASAP.

EDIT: Just look at the whine threads about maintenance if you want a dose of players chomping at the bit to devour the content as soon as absolutely possible.