Lack of content on patch release

[Vhailor]

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).

I disagree, unless you define 'casual' as 'experienced gamer who is time-limited'. My girlfriend is what I'd call a casual gamer: she's got a fair amount of free time, but has never strayed beyond the friendly confines of mobile games and the occasional Nintendo title. She wasn't comfortable running dungeons on her own until she'd progressed all the way to 70. Think about that: she sunk in hundreds of hours over weeks of effort before she was comfortable queuing up a Roulette on her own. Now that she's got enough experience, sure - anything short of EX / Savage / Ultimate content, she can do. But there's a steeper learning curve than you're admitting to.

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.

There's more complexity to the jobs than you're admitting to, and very little help provided. Consider a Bard, for example: for even your standard, run-of-the-mill dungeon run, you'll need to be able to maintain uptime on songs, watch people's TP / MP as appropriate, and maintain enough DoT to generate Rain of Death procs. That's just for standard trash pulls. To make matters worse, many of these demands are seen almost exclusively within dungeons, meaning there's little ability to practice - because oh, right, those Squadrons require quite a bit of progress before you can really take advantage of them. Really casual-friendly, that decision was.

Oh, and all of this of course is combined with handling increasingly diverse boss mechanics. It's a lot easier when you're doing your second, third, fourth job: all you're focused on is the ability usage, because mechanics are almost on autopilot by then. That first one's not so easy, though, particularly for people who are more casual gamers.

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.

Yes, Eureka is easier (so far). I exempted that one from my post, if I remember correctly, but maybe not.

However, it's not about need. It's about who this content is accessible to, and who it's targeting: casual gamers on up. And in the past, it's been quite brutal.

I'd also point out that you've kind of made my point for me with this response, too. Introducing long grinds is perfectly OK, so long as it's not to the exclusion of more friendly goals.

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.

Depends on the player. Some will, some won't. And, no, not everything in the DF is casual-friendly, as I explained in more detail above, with an example player for evidence.

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.

So... what about Relics? What about Savage? What about Ultimate? SE is already making content for players with more time and/or experience.

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.

Wow, bias much? Since when is a different play style / more available time a reason for getting defensive on behalf of a development studio?

Here's the thing: FFXIV shoots itself in the foot with this crowd because it is so fucking shallow. If it would stop its steeply vertical progression tree, this problem would disappear. SE releases tons of content, as I said before, but when they eradicate the relevance of all content six+ months old, they leave players with an awfully small segment of content to focus on. Is it any wonder that when something truly new comes around, people gorge themselves on it?

Hell, look at the game most people in this 'not enough content' boat pine for: FFXI. It had time gates all over the place! 2-3 day spawn timers on HNMs (with competition risks!); 72-hour lockouts for Dynamis; lockouts on Einherjar; lockouts on Salvage. Want to know why people weren't bitching? Because all of it was relevant at the same time, so you could space things out. Dynamis a couple times a week. Einherjar a couple times a week. And these were long events!

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One other thing to consider: this vertical itemization path SE is on, and the rapid depreciation of items, is inherently anti-casual. Personally, I felt FFXI was more casual than XIV. If I took a break for a few months in XI, which I routinely did, my gear was still roughly as relevant as it was when I left. My Mog House wasn't cleared out and destroyed. My SPs and Linkshells hadn't replaced me to make space for someone new, because most content was quite flexible in terms of how many people could actually participate.

In FFXIV? None of that. My gear right now is significantly depreciated in three months, and almost what I'd consider baseline in six. Always. My house would be bulldozed, and I'd be left with a message along the lines of 'your shit's in storage, don't let the door hit you on the way out'. Any SP I had would have had to replace me, because every Duty in XIV requires exact group numbers for the most part.

SE can do better. They can build deeper content that stays relevant longer, and in the process silence complaints about having nothing to do, and make the game more friendly for people with erratic time needs. The only thing stopping them is themselves. And, the oddly defensive players on the forums who seem to think it's their job to defend problematic design decisions.