Your Top 5 Areas for Improvement and Brief Suggestions Therefor

[Shurrikhan]

What areas of the game would improvement thereto most improve the overall game experience?

In brief, how do you think those areas might be pushed towards a more lucrative result?

[Shurrikhan]

<My two cents, for a later time.>

[KageTokage]

I don't know what's going on with the support team, but it's seriously frustrating how easily people are able to get away with underhanded behavior like botting, hacking, or PvP win trading for years on end.

There seems to be something fundamentally flawed with how they currently go about investigating reports made regarding these matters as it's rare to ever see anyone get punished for it. It's worse when they have a GM team that's constantly online and active and despite how quickly they'll address matters like verbal harassment, they seem powerless to do anything about blatant cheaters who don't take more then maybe a minute of observation to identify.

[Stormfur]

Well, at least now we know that they CAN accept video evidence, but that they have to use their own tools to check/verify it (there's a post in the PVP forum about it, I believe)

[Marxam]

I don't know what's going on with the support team, but it's seriously frustrating how easily people are able to get away with underhanded behavior like botting, hacking, or PvP win trading for years on end.There seems to be something fundamentally flawed with how they currently go about investigating reports made regarding these matters as it's rare to ever see anyone get punished for it. It's worse when they have a GM team that's constantly online and active and despite how quickly they'll address matters like verbal harassment, they seem powerless to do anything about blatant cheaters who don't take more then maybe a minute of observation to identify.

My understanding is that the people who run said rmt schemes are paying a sub for it, multiple even. So why would a company regulate such claims when it isn't affecting their bottom line. All companies react to extremes and will not change unless otherwise stated. The Battlefront 2 lootbax debacle is an example of such a thing where enough people cared enough to create a stink about it and so EA changed it and all products going forward. In SE's stance if you have one person with multiple RMT accounts for botting, selling etc. That is worth far more than one person with one sub.

Outside of garden variety PR statements of "we are always listening to your feedback" and "if you see and activity that is against ToS in-game please report it" I understand that SE is a company and as harsh as it sounds their bottom line is more important than us because their real customers are their investors. RMT is a fact of life in FFXIV and given how lazy more gamers are to pay others to play the game themselves I don't think it would ever be eliminated without taking a hit to the actual players who do enjoy this game. I'm part of the problem myself as I just ignore them even though I do report them but I becoming more jaded to this game because the one thing that still can't get right is VO. I love stories and characters but when I can't hear them speaking and expressing their emotions I feel a disconnect.

My only suggestion is to fully VO the MSQ, job/class quests, DoH/DoL job quests, beast tribes, primals/trials and Hildebrand (if they decide to continue with it) in full English and Japanese. I understand that other languages will be left in the dust by they are speaking Eorzean after all even though it is just old world English.

[Tint]

they should remove or rework Fish Eyes, that skill sucks and has no other purpose than making your day worse.

then they should add new exclusive stuff for fish desynthesis. getting the bathing suits and minion was awesome in 2.x.

an auto-desynthesis would be awesome. i can catch more than thousand fish a day. no way will i desnyth them by hand...

also new titles for catching all the big fish. and a quest for the legendary fish like we had in 2.x. maybe with a mount as reward? i would like that.

and in general proper ways to make money with the fisher. it was good in HW and early SB, but right now nobody buys fish or aethersands and i have no idea how i should afford the 340 gear wich i will likely need for future big fish...

[MageBlack]

Horizontal progression for a whole expansion at minimum.
- This chasing the iLev is killing your content. By the next patch (or even the end of the week) its faceroll easy and only gets easier. Its a boring way to enhance your character to just chase your one main stat. Give us something like Eureka that holds us at a particular iLev but we enhance our streangth another way. Would be nice if it was tailored to the job we use.

Better incentivization of the players.
- Why do I want to do savage when its current other than the one day bragging rights for being a world first or because you like the challenge. The gear gets out leveled in a couple patches by lower tier gear you can get through much easier means so any gear bragging rights you might get are again subverted by the natural iLev progression. Or there is a minion that does... LoV? I've avoided the need to interact with uptight savage raiders by simply waiting for the patches to progress. Maybe i'm behind but I still experience the fight, story, and get the drops so I really dont feel like i'm losing out at all.

Better dungeon diversity.
- For the love of god give us a dungeon with a choice... all dungeons are Hallway, Boss, Hallway, Boss, Hallway, Final Boss, get gear, leave. I havent even "studied" a dungeon since 2.X before I entered it (and I tank) I just go in blind and we always win. IIRC in the 2.0 Alpha there was two paths in Tam Tara Deepcroft when you reached a certain part. You could go out of your way to fight an optional boss before fighting the final boss, since then I havent seen anything else like it. Give us a hidden passage, optional boss, more than one way to proceed to the end depending on how we progressed to a particular point. Make our actions matter.

Make Death Matter.
- There is literally no fear of dying in this game, the only fear I have is if I die once for whatever reason, the other players will get mad and might boot me... I'm more afraid of other players than I am of wiping. Gear degrades but never permanently breaks, just costs a bit of gil to repair every so often. I get a weakness for a minute or so that I dont even notice a difference. The worst is when I am starting to fall asleep as I play, die, then my respawn point is in another zone, then I have to teleport back to the closest aetherite and run back to where I was. Eureka sorta tried to make it scary but there are always so many people around, even if you arent in the train, that its a quick skip over to my corpse and a raise, nothing is lost. Nothing is scary in this game...

Gear Lust.
- Aside from "Hey, that gear visually appealing" There is no reason to go after any particular piece. No special stats, no unique bonus to some kind of move, nothing that would make me actually have to think about what gear i'm equipping other than that almighty iLev. Even Materia is so bland. They stole the idea from FFVII and its such a useless concept in comparison. You could get summons, enhance fire magic, mimic enemy attacks, boost your ATB, and many other combinations you could make depending on how your slots were linked. But not in FFXIV, get the one Materia that boosts the one stat that enhances your role, and the only reason I would even bother doing that is if I was doing the savage content.

Summary
The game has become boring and predictable in its core progression. Since the end of ARR its just been reskinned for each expansion. Sure they have tried adding distractions into the game but they even fail at distracting from the rut this game dug for itself. LoV, Diadem, Golden Saucer, Chocobo Racing/Raising, and more.

I still like the game, dont get me wrong. I like when new content is added because for that brief week after it drops, the game feels fresh and alive again. Then the content is done or on zombie-mode where I dont even need to think about it or worse, dont want to do it because I know it will be the same thing over and over (Hell's Lid for example, Great dungeon! Then after two weeks of only having that pop in the queue I dont even want to do it anymore. Praetorium... need I say more?)

So far the best additions to the game that have held interest beyond that first week are the Deep Dungeon and Eureka additions. While not perfect, they have shaken up this ho-hum pattern we have seen since ARR enough that it feels interesting. I like not being limited to weekly caps in Eureka and I like the Procedurally Generated levels of PotD, Expand and refine that, please! As well as the points mentioned above. Thanks and sorry for the rant.

[Enla]

1. Go after the people supplying the bot code rather than the people using it. Blizzard won a hefty judgement against their own botters not that long ago and set a precedent that I think SE should very much consider following. Better to go after the coders rather than the millions of botters who multiply like ants and rarely are removed in time.
2. I want a high texture pack. It's to the point I'm tempted to make my own, especially for ARR areas.
3. Fix the game's coding, even if you have to delay an expansion to do it. Eventually the problem is going to balloon to an unsalvageable situation and I'd rather they bite the bullet /now/ rather than later.
4. Make the non-flying mounts able to fly. It's silly that so many mounts can't fly when we even have flying elephants in the game now.
5. Instanced housing please, or improved apartments.

[KisaiTenshi]

What areas of the game would improvement thereto most improve the overall game experience?

In brief, how do you think those areas might be pushed towards a more lucrative result?

This will surprise nobody.

1. Do more to destroy RMT botting in the game. "out of sight" is not a solution. The other day I must have been standing in just the right place for the bot teams shift change or something, because it went from the level 50 button mash bots that stand in place, to the level 1 bots all at once. It's always the same number too, 44. So I reported like 88 bots in one zone, alone. If this means everyone has to have a hardware authenticator, then do it.

2. No more cash shop single-character only stuff. If you aren't willing to give us a chance to earn it in the game, then it will be seen as a money grab. Please stop cribbing the bad and harmful microtransaction ideas from Nexon, Zynga and EA.

3. Just delete gil from the game. The marketboard now deals exclusively in kuponuts. You must hire Moogle retainers to manage your marketboard shop. Your player-character retainers are now your estate guards / errand-boys/girls + extra storage and can be partied with on the overworld. If someone doesn't guard your estate, players are free to visit and adjust your orchestration player and eat your leftovers.

4. Allow arbitrary recording of all duty content. If players do not have permission set, their character is replaced with a story-relevant Scion during playback. Allow Machinima-style record and editing as well, where you can basically stick anything that the game is capable of doing in a cutscene in. Extreme closeups, emoji's, emotes, Hildebrand facial expressions, etc. Store the actual edited "playback" data on the client for later editing so it's not lost between maintenance.

5. Less DPS-burn based duties, less RNG, more puzzle-solving mechanics that the solution can't be predicted. Like why does every dungeon necessarily need a final boss fight, put the boss in the middle. Start each player at 4 corners of the maze. Traps will either create lava floors, turn the players into chickens, zombies, or shrink them. Shrinking allows the player to sneak through cracks in the wall.

[Elamys]

1.) Add more gil sinks - right now with even a little bit of effort from crafting, gathering, or just plain killing things, players can easily amass a horde of worthless gil. Outside of purchasing housing and a very very few expensive NPC items, there's nothing for it to be spent on. Add some ostentatious mounts and luxury glamour gear and fancy housing items to NPCs so players have something else to spend all that gil on and get it out of circulation.

2.) Overall healing design - healing as a role seems to be limping along in this game just because healers have nothing to do. SE has stated they don't expect healers to DPS but then give us mediocre healing "checks" that aren't that difficult so, for the sake of nothing to do, we DPS. When I'm healing I almost prefer to get crappy parties because then I have things I actually need to react to. Please make healing more than "One target took damage so I hit this button and the whole party took damage so I hit that button." If you don't want to do that, then make DPS for healers more interesting.

3.) More unique encounter design - a lot of mechanics in the game get repeated a lot but we know SE is perfectly capable of coming up with new, unique mechanics. It seems like you can expect some combination of the same mechanics you've seen in almost every other fight to get repeated.

4.) Crafting/Gathering activities - I would like to see some more things crafters and gatherers can do. Not entirely certain on what exactly. Maybe an improved version of Hamlets?

5.) UI design - the UI in this game is just horrendous, I understand it was designed with controller players in mind as well, but there's no reason the UI can't be changed to adapt to playing on a keyboard vs using a controller. I have to click a million times to do everything, very little of the UI is customizable, and finally, it's just kind of ugly. I want more options to edit my UI to my liking (such as being able to hide the TP bar, seriously, I don't need it on anything except bard right now, or for options to change colors or fonts - I want to be able to do more than just choosing a preset scaled size) as well as for the UI to essentially be "divorced" in a way and adapt to a design that is most suited to keyboards and another that is most suited to controllers, with it switching automatically depending on what you are using.

bring back the real expanded inventory