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

[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.

[Deceptus]

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.

Which is why people are leaving BfA in droves. They've realized Blizzard is putting forth very little effort in improving the game and breaking the things that worked to make things take longer.

[Vahlnir]

Which is why people are leaving BfA in droves. They've realized Blizzard is putting forth very little effort in improving the game and breaking the things that worked to make things take longer.

Yeah. I mean, for awhile the game was solid. Starting with Cataclysm though they sorta went with bad expansion > good expansion (MoP, god I loved MoP) > bad expansion > good expansion...and here we are with BfA. While it looked promising I know even my friends who are hardcore WoW fans like I am were fed up with the game currently. It looks like they're trying to salvage it though based on the PTR additions, but...I hope it's not too little too late. It has just been one letdown after another. As far as both WoW and FF XIV are concerned, there's very little difference in the mentality of either the devs or the companies currently. Though in Blizzard's defense, they aren't afraid to pump money into the game if things get real ugly. SE doesn't seem to care one way or the other. And that makes me sad.

[Arrius]

Which is why people are leaving BfA in droves. They've realized Blizzard is putting forth very little effort in improving the game and breaking the things that worked to make things take longer.

I'd say after 14(!) years of that game, there possibly isn't much you can add into it and call that a solid improvement without having blizzard taking desperate measures or break up the core theme of the game.