State of the Game: Quality of Life Adjustments for Players with Friends

[Delmontyb]

There is a lot to love about Final Fantasy XIV, and having given the latest expansion some thought, I figured I'd like to share some ideas that would add to the overall replayability of the game as a whole.

While I have a lot of ideas that I want to share, this post is focused on the idea of Quality of Life Adjustments for Players with friends, and what that really means, it's focused on the overall player experience for friends helping friends on quests and more.

YouTube video

1. Party Level Sync
Outside of Fates, Dungeons, and Trials, if players want to play together and help each other out with quests and missions, it's in their best interest to be at the same level or have the other friend hang outside the party to assist their friend and only group up for FATE content and Dungeons. This can be a hassle, and if players where able to group up and sync to a player in the party's level, this would remove the need to keep dropping and reforming the party. Players would only be able to sync down to the select player, and it wouldn't allow you to sync upward. Furthermore, as talked about in another post, if there was some benefit to XP once at the cap, then you would help add a benefit for the higher level player (see XP at cap post for more on that final thought)

2. Quest Sharing and Scaling
One we have the ability to party level sync and help each other run questions and missions, the natural extension of this feature would be to allow players in a party see the quests, as well as objectives that the other players are seeing. This would remove the need to have a perfect memory of content you've done before. Being able to see on the map where quests objectives are located and the name and info of what quests a player is working on would be a huge help. With the quests being balanced for one player, then the next request is that as players team up to tackle these quests, it would be nice to see the difficulty scale for quests where a certain number of enemies need to be beaten, etc.

3. Upgrade Single Player fights into Party based fights if the player wishes
It would be nice if these single player battles that FFXIV has in the main storyline where to be opened to allow for multiple people to run the fight. Right now it's a bit of a disconnect that as we help players through the main story, there are always those times where you have to drop party to run a specific fight. It would be nice if a player could take others into these fights, and if they did, just scale the enemies up in terms of difficulty and stats.

4. Shared Map Markers
Being able to post your map marker into the chat, is a very nice feature. However, it would be so much better if each member of the party had their own flag, and that they could mark the map, and players in the party would already see it. Without the need to post to chat, and for other players to select the post. Each player's flag should be a specific color or even show their job stone and name.

Those are just my ideas, I’d love to hear your feedback, and hopefully get the attention of the development team with this feedback.
Thanks for your time and attention.