Trying to understand the negative posts I keep seeing about the Dev Team

[HyoMinPark]

but the alleged "lack of content" is a bit absurd(see competitive Smash players for example for such complaint)

Sure the pace of releasing content slowed down....but that's an eventuality for a game running for 6 years now(8 if you count 1.0) to slow down updates until a big patch or an expansion come by.Raiding isn't the end all be all "hardcore content" to enjoy and while not every quest in the game is a winner there is still so much to do and play through.

To give you my personal perspective of why I think there’s a “lack of content”, I think there’s a lack simply because there’s nothing new or innovative being introduced, there’s nothing being introduced that lasts in terms of lifetime of the content relative to new patch releases, and there’s no reason to go back and do older content short of nostalgia or vanity farming.

Eureka was supposed to be the “new and innovative” content for 4.0, but it’s just a reskinned Diadem (which flopped, not once, but twice in Heavenward) that attempts to emulate older MMO grinds, but it missed the mark by a mile by taking the things people disliked from old-school MMO grinds and forcing them into a game that just isn’t designed for it. And the Relic, of all things, is tied to it—which is something that is supposed to keep the casual playerbase occupied in the same way Savage (and Ultimate) is supposed to occupy the raiders (and even raiders participate in the Relics). If the Relic wasn’t in Eureka, people wouldn’t touch it. And I think the developers know this.

And it doesn’t stop at Eureka—HoH was a reskinned PotD; “expert” dungeons are repetitive and faceroll; 8-mans are glorified trial fights as opposed to actual raids; 24-mans are fun, but they’re every other patch, and short of getting one in Alliance Raid Roulette, there’s not much reason to go back to them other than nostalgia because they’re no longer relevant. There’s not much reason to go back and do any of the older content aside from nostalgia, or maybe glamour or mounts for some. Previous relics used to keep older content relevant by tying steps to participation, but that’s not the case now that the Relic is stuck in Eureka.

The content formula itself is predictable enough I could sit down and map out how the rest of the expansion is going to go in terms of content we’ll get. If the formula doesn’t change, I could do the same for the entirety of 5.0. And the content we’re receiving just doesn’t last the fifteen weeks between patches when more “major content” is supposed to be released.

I’m not saying the developers need to throw surprise curve-balls every patch, but they need to think of adding things people can look forward to each major patch, things that will last longer than a couple of weeks, and things that aren’t reskins and that mold well with FFXIV. And I mean this for the majority of the playerbase, because right now the only content I’ve personally found that has lasted long enough between patches is Ultimate. And that’s just for the 1% (and raiders better than me had it cleared in a couple weeks, farmed it weekly, and some did optimization runs of it because what else do you do at that point?).


The repetition of formula, combined with the way SE would rather stagger-release content to keep people subscribed and the way they’ve made running older content not at all worthwhile, has caused the game to grow incredibly stale, especially for players who have been playing for a really long time. Sidequests aren’t really a remedy for that, in my opinion—especially for those who have already completed all of the sidequests. It’s not content that lasts—it’s one and done—and I think that’s the main complaint a lot of people have. Content is just stretched too thin, and it doesn’t last long enough between patches. And there’s nothing new being introduced, just reskins that tend to be more disappointing than their original incarnation (HoH and PotD) or flop just as hard (Eureka and Diadem).


I’m sure my opinion will probably be dismissed by some because “you’re a raider”, but it’s my opinion. And I’m not one who no-lifes content to the point where I finish it all in a day or a week, because I go to school full-time and I also like to spend my free time doing other things (like reading and writing). I log in, at most, for a couple hours in the evening; rarely do I spend all day actively playing the game anymore. I spent the most time in-game when I was progging Ultimate compared to the time I spend in it now progging Alphascape. I’ve even “saved up” doing content to try and give me reasons to log in during the 4.5 draught we’re inevitably going to have. Because, if I hadn’t, why even log in?

And it does have me concerned about 5.0. Is it going to be more of the same? Are they going to listen to the constructive criticisms, or just continue to push their “vision” onto the playerbase? I can only hope that the developers actually listen to some of the reasonable feedback—I can only hope that they don’t stick the relic in a piece of content like Eureka and instead tie it to more types of content like ARR and HW was.

And one day I will not write a novel as a response to someone.

[MetalSnakeXI1]

And one day I will not write a novel as a response to someone.

Note:Sorry I couldn't quote the entire post cuz the character limitation only allows for 4000 characters.


I'm not dismissing what you say.....it's just I'm a bit of a newbie since I joined in June of this year so I don't have the broader perspective a veteran who's been playing since ARR(or 1.0 if they had the patience of a saint) so I'm a bit of a casual MMO player...........that and the type of content I dig into differs from most people so I can only speak of stuff like Eureka and what little I played of it and the raids I'm participating in alongside ex primals.

I'm with you on Eureka 100% tho,I was too bored with it to even bother continuing to the hell that is pagos and I kinda wish they'd just wrap it up with Logos and Pyros and move on to either improving the current content or creating better content in its place

And while yes some people may have finished everything with how long the game's been out in-between expansions,they need to improve the pace in which content is released a little bit(tho there is so much crunching one can do to a dev team to push content frequently).

You're not wrong(even if I don't agree about few points you mentioned) and Square Enix does need to listen(and they better be).........but it's at a time like this where a break from the game would be necessary

I know that's practically a forbidden thing to say with games like this cuz of the whole "You might go play the competition like WoW or something" but even Wow struggles to address all the feedback from their playerbase and all the issues marring the current expansion there.

MMOs as a genre seems to struggle the most when it comes to keeping their playerbase alive and justify the subscription fee,sure some do it better than others but they all struggle at the same points from my observations

Thats where I take a break and play something else(be it an online MMO,a competitive online game,a fighting game or heck just regular single player stuff) for a while before coming back to the game.

I'm probably the least qualified person on this entire forum to talk about the situation so take what I say with a grain of salt.Tho just know that while I don't complain much I'm far from being a fanboy or a worshipper.After all I wanna see this game flourish and improve just as much as you even if I seem a bit passive about it

I don't want what's currently my favorite Final Fantasy game to be ruined by Square the same way they did with the rest of the series from XIII onward

[Vidu]

Note:Sorry I couldn't quote the entire post cuz the character limitation only allows for 4000 characters.

Just a quick note on this: You can bypass the characterlimit by editing your post - just type your novel, quote as much as you want, copy the whole thing, post something as a placeholder and edit your novel back in - tada! More than 3.000 characters (which is the current limit - at least they increased that from 1.000... still one of those rather weird things they have...)

[HyoMinPark]

snip

Yeah, it’s probably a bit easier to understand if you had been playing probably a little bit longer. I don’t think that makes your opinion less valid, but I think it would make it easier for you to sympathize where some of the content criticisms are coming from simply from experience.

I started in Nov 2015, so I’m not an ARR veteran or 1.0 veteran, but I have friends who have played since 1.0 or ARR Beta and some of them are in the same boat as I am. One last night said that he doesn’t even know if he’ll be around in 5.0, and he’s our static’s MCH. Our SCH said that he, too, doesn’t know if he’ll continue on in 5.0. The stagnation that the game is feeling right now is having a negative effect on the playerbase, and I hope that the developers can rectify it. Sometimes I feel like they are more concerned with bringing in new money instead of retaining their veterans.

I’m not a game designer, so I’m not saying that things I would want are the things necessary to improve the game for those who feel disenchanted. And some, you may not be able to change their disenchantment. But I think that something does have to change; if 5.0 is a carbon copy of the previous expansions, I don’t know if I’ll make it through. And I would rather not lose the sole game I play, because FFXIV is the only MMO I have ever played, and the only video game I have played for extended periods of time—I’ve never been much of a gamer, and it surprised me that FFXIV hooked me the way it did.

So, hopefully something changes. And hopefully for the better.


Sidenote: I wasn’t saying that you specifically would disregard my opinion because I’m a raider; I apologize if it came off that way. But it seems to be the “cool thing to do” to disregard the opinion of a poster simply because they raid. Because “lul raiders” or...whatever.

[MetalSnakeXI1]

Yeah, it’s probably a bit easier to understand if you had been playing probably a little bit longer. I don’t think that makes your opinion less valid, but I think it would make it easier for you to sympathize where some of the content criticisms are coming from simply from experience.

I started in Nov 2015, so I’m not an ARR veteran or 1.0 veteran, but I have friends who have played since 1.0 or ARR Beta and some of them are in the same boat as I am. One last night said that he doesn’t even know if he’ll be around in 5.0, and he’s our static’s MCH. Our SCH said that he, too, doesn’t know if he’ll continue on in 5.0. The stagnation that the game is feeling right now is having a negative effect on the playerbase, and I hope that the developers can rectify it. Sometimes I feel like they are more concerned with bringing in new money instead of retaining their veterans.

I’m not a game designer, so I’m not saying that things I would want are the things necessary to improve the game for those who feel disenchanted. And some, you may not be able to change their disenchantment. But I think that something does have to change; if 5.0 is a carbon copy of the previous expansions, I don’t know if I’ll make it through. And I would rather not lose the sole game I play, because FFXIV is the only MMO I have ever played, and the only video game I have played for extended periods of time—I’ve never been much of a gamer, and it surprised me that FFXIV hooked me the way it did.

So, hopefully something changes. And hopefully for the better.


Sidenote: I wasn’t saying that you specifically would disregard my opinion because I’m a raider; I apologize if it came off that way. But it seems to be the “cool thing to do” to disregard the opinion of a poster simply because they raid. Because “lul raiders” or...whatever.

Don't worry I understand(at least a little bit enough),cuz I felt a similar stagnation when I used to play something like Overwatch(not an MMO but the drought and stagnation for that game pushed me away)


At least your complaints come from a place of geniune love and concern for the game unlike some of the over the top toxicity that can be found in a lot of game communities on reddit.

XIV is the only other game beside Smash Bros that I put over 500+ hours into and it's one of the few games that made me so addicted to it that sometimes I play 10 hour sessions during my off days.So I hope for both our sake and every XIV players out there that things would improve by the time 5.0 rolls around

[Berethos]

because FFXIV is the only MMO I have ever played

As someone who has played a couple dozen MMOs by this point, I can say that the issue facing FFXIV with stagnation in design is something all the MMOs that I've played (that stick around, anyway) have faced...

And it may be a fairly fatalistic view point, but I've yet to see an MMO really solve it.

People often cite WoW when talking innovation and such, but I've been playing that game off and on for over 12 years now...and you'd be surprised by how much of the "innovations" are just new coats of paint on the same old design.

Case in point - World Quests. Those are the daily quests the game has had since Burning Crusade (which launched in 2007), which are themselves a variation (once a day, higher individual payout per quest) on the repeatable quests that have been in the game since Vanilla. The big difference? They show up on the map and don't require that you talk to an NPC to begin and end it.

Gear drops from bosses drops went from RNG from the boss, to a mix of that and tokens, to a mix of that and gold, back to RNG from the boss (but you don't compete against others for it now, and there's additional RNG baked in...oh joy....). And now they're adding a token currency again. Round and round we go with the same old and a new coat of paint.

Artifacts are talents attached to a weapon, and now attached to one of three pieces of armor.

The point is, innovation rarely happens after the game has launched. It's not easy to do, and games that supposedly do it aren't doing it as much as people tend to think.

BUT...

New coats of shiny paint are fun (usually), so we tend to view additions of that kind in a favorable light and they seem like a bigger change than they actually are.

Once I started seeing these kinds of patterns, my expectations of dev teams shifted from wanting major innovation (which doesn't happen often and tends to fail in spectacular fashion as often as it succeeds, if not more frequently) to delivering consistency of a certain percentage of the things I already know I enjoy. I welcome innovation when it's good and adds to the game (rarely, if ever, if the "innovation" removes elements, as has been the case lately with WoW), but I've stopped expecting it from games that have already launched.

[Shurrikhan]

The point is, innovation rarely happens after the game has launched. It's not easy to do, and games that supposedly do it aren't doing it as much as people tend to think.

For the most part I agree. However, sometimes relatively small changes can have tremendous repercussions or advantages.

Sometimes even mere reward scaling, small decision by small decision, can allow for a feeling of freedom and connectivity that one would never have expected to receive from something so minor until everything fits just right.

Or, to take some of the WoW examples, the technology of Artifact Weapons was indeed only the smallest addition. But, the fact that the rate of talents was now linked to something other than leveling, that you could see mechanical rewards from gear (more specifically AP) progression, and that the leveling experience had paths of growth rather than truly mutually exclusive growth decisions all heavily differed the experience from the norm. In a time where talents signalled choice and a memory of progression (when talents were level by level), in an expansion aiming to be the best since WotLK (again, where talents were level by level), it provided rapid increments of growth to or addition of potentially gameplay-affecting traits, and then allowed for an RNG-less weapon value progression when players were otherwise getting ticked with RNG too largely determining their gear progression. It was a small change, technologically, but it couldn't have been better timed; it made itself out as a centerpiece to the expansion, and despite certain issues (alt-exclusion, etc.), it succeeded as such.

The addition of Dailies and later Objective Zones and finally World Quests was much the same. Technologically, they gave virtually nothing. But, in their effect on the player experience, they gave an excuse to create fun little gimmick quests or even just quests to grind out skinning or stick around a beloved zone a little longer and to check back later; places to grind out a bit more efficient experience if aligned in quest progress with a friend but behind in character level; places to revisit to keep the open world regularly, almost anywhere and everywhere, to at least protect some small form of relevance.

It's true that they're not technological innovations of note. The transmog system likely required more to make or to later revamp than the frameworks of all those things put together. But, they were incredibly efficient determiners of player experience, similar to a change in broad quest design philosophy that results in more attractive questing (i.e. to give a real feeling of aesthetic not just graphically but through the urgency, tightness of space, types of quests, etc., to a given region), or a rebalance of a racial that was previously so weak that people wouldn't play it despite the attractive lore and model: little technical development time that nonetheless reaps big rewards.

Yet, we rarely see even that in XIV. So many of the design gestures are just that -- gestures. There's no determinable drive behind them, and therefore, if any lessons are being learned -- which seems unlikely, as it seems unlikely anything was purposeful enough to be learned from significantly -- we are not reaping the rewards of those lessons enough to notice. Technologically, there's little difference between same-location FATE chains and GW2 Dynamic Events. Yet, the prior is generally considered stagnant and the latter much more varied and immersive. Even with the tech, the basic ideas seem to go unnoticed, untested, and without improved understanding.

[Awful]

Snip

I agree with everything other than the Artifact weapon it may have been small to add but a lot of classes lost so much in BFA and alot of them don't function properly now and Blizzard is trying to fix them with Azurite Traits but it's created a problem with 3 imbalances. 1st one is that PvE Azurite traits are too strong, 2nd it overshadows the PvP traits which no one takes, 3rd the way of gearing up to get the trais are ass backwards as you can only get them from top tier raiding and left Mythic+ in the dust. Basically you run old dungeons and hope for an ilvl boost and do world quests which is the worst way: RNG which makes the Azurite system backwards compared to the Artifact Weapon route as I felt it was quite well done but I knew after the xpac they'd be getting rid of it which caused all these issues.

With this being said I wouldn't be opposed to XIV doing a Artifact Weapon/Relic Weapon for 5.0 where the weapon grows with you and you get abilities from a tree and grow but I know that it won't happen as they already said XIV wanted to be as far away as possible from talent trees. That and Mythic+ are the big things I want for the next expansion I feel that Mythic+ is a great system that provides great rewards and benefits as well as a challenge that lasts vs 2 new dungeons every odd patch but that's just me.

[Shurrikhan]

I agree with everything other than the Artifact weapon it may have been small to add but a lot of classes lost so much in BFA and alot of them don't function properly now and Blizzard is trying to fix them with Azurite Traits but it's created a problem with 3 imbalances. 1st one is that PvE Azurite traits are too strong, 2nd it overshadows the PvP traits which no one takes, 3rd the way of gearing up to get the trais are ass backwards as you can only get them from top tier raiding and left Mythic+ in the dust. Basically you run old dungeons and hope for an ilvl boost and do world quests which is the worst way: RNG which makes the Azurite system backwards compared to the Artifact Weapon route as I felt it was quite well done but I knew after the xpac they'd be getting rid of it which caused all these issues.

With this being said I wouldn't be opposed to XIV doing a Artifact Weapon/Relic Weapon for 5.0 where the weapon grows with you and you get abilities from a tree and grow but I know that it won't happen as they already said XIV wanted to be as far away as possible from talent trees. That and Mythic+ are the big things I want for the next expansion I feel that Mythic+ is a great system that provides great rewards and benefits as well as a challenge that lasts vs 2 new dungeons every odd patch but that's just me.

There's virtually nothing I can say in defense of Azerite Armor. Any of the alleged advantages could have been provided more effectively, efficiently, and easily without that system. It's been a ton of extra resources, and yet none of it led to a better gameplay result. So far the only truly positive change has universal allocation of AP (not having to choose which weapon to spend AP on, and thus filling your bags with AP items in the meantime), but even that was countered by needing 15+ pieces of gear to swap per spec and potentially per fight.

Tons of technical time. Tons of complaints. I just hope the XIV devs don't follow BfA's lead in that regard, or blame system development for the blatant issues with that system (each fundamental and irrelevant to moving the granular, little-to-no-RNG progression from the weapon slot to 3 pieces of armor + necklace).

How much of that "working" was intentional innovation versus stumbling on a formula that worked, I wonder?

Considering how much of that was tossed for BfA, I'm not confident it was the former.

My reference was to the few times reward systems seemed to sync up historically -- i.e. between Vanilla and BfA -- not just on BfA itself. And I imagine it was mostly just a lot of guesswork that rarely someone made a better (informed) guess as a result of.

[Berethos]

For the most part I agree. However, sometimes relatively small changes can have tremendous repercussions or advantages.

Sometimes even mere reward scaling, small decision by small decision, can allow for a feeling of freedom and connectivity that one would never have expected to receive from something so minor until everything fits just right.

How much of that "working" was intentional innovation versus stumbling on a formula that worked, I wonder?

Considering how much of that was tossed for BfA, I'm not confident it was the former.