FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[Vahlnir]

The thing is I don't think WoW even caters to its own audience particularly well anymore. There is a reason why current and past WoW players are known for often being very bitter. They love what the game was and should be, and Blizzard deliver enough of what it should be to keep people hanging on, but not enough for them to be truly happy. It took me many years to quit because I was clinging to nostalgia and unfulfilled promises. It wasn't until I found FFXIV that I was able to let go. FFXIV is far from perfect, but the devs do a better job of catering to their multifaceted audience.

It just makes me so sad. Even though I prefer FFXIV I have no desire to watch WoW die. I loved that game for a reason and I'm so disappointed that newer and current players don't get to experience those reasons.

And no classic is not a way to truly experience the reasons why WoW was so great because you can't have an authentic classic experience when a huge majority of the players have a completely different mindset to over a decade ago. You can experience something for the first time only once, so the days of true classic WoW are long gone.

It also feels like, for me at least, that releasing classic was a cop out. Classic servers rose in popularity as the public opinion of retail continued to fall. That's not a coincidence. Had WoW continued to maintain the standard that gave them the crown, there wouldn't have been as much demand for classic. Instead of working hard to make players want to play retail far more, they released classic to inflate sub numbers.

Well said. Very well said.

[MPK]

Sounds like to me that people who like FFXIV more are people who want the easier game.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Sounds like to me that people who like FFXIV more are people who want the easier game.

Then you can't read

[Puremallace]

Sounds like to me that people who like FFXIV more are people who want the easier game.

Not really but it is dramatically clear that one design philosophy based around not upsetting things that work is definitely the way to go. The sheer amount of systems that WoW devs have embraced have cost a significant amount of dev time fixing those systems.

It draws out their content patch cycles to an extreme degree and also causes a lot of player frustration as they have to wait for those systems to be fixed and when they finally are you find yourself 2 years into an expansion where the cycle literally is about to restart again.

The good thing about the FF14 event and Blizzcon being close together is it was fairly easy to compare the 2 developers side by side and see what their focus was on. I think the FF14 devs are looking around for how they can maybe spice up the game and I hope I speak for a lot of people when I say those systems are not welcome here as they are a money pit of wasted development resources.

Best example would be instead of getting Island Sanctuaries imagine instead we got some type of time sink system that was thrown out with the next expansion. So instead of actual content we get something that is disposable. That is where these two mmo's really vary right now.

[Rae88]

Sounds like to me that people who like FFXIV more are people who want the easier game.

So for people who are unfamiliar with WoW, this is the background.

For a long time now Blizzard has been focusing on making the game accessible to casual players while also making the game extremely challenging for endgame raiders. Because of this what they decided to do was reduce the button count (in BFA my warrior hotbar, before borrowed power, maybe filled one and a half hotbars ... maybe) and make overworld content really easy (except for perhaps Nazjatar but everybody hated Nazjatar so maybe that says something about the playerbase.)

There has been push back against the button "pruning" to the extent that Blizzard has chucked back a few useless abilities to the public to expand button count without actually expanding button count.

But the way Blizzard balances this for raids is to make the encounters extremely challenging. So your rotation is actually simple, it's a simple priority list that isn't very long because small button count, but the mythic encounters themselves are incredibly difficult.

The hard content in WoW is really, really difficult.

But when people say that WoW is the harder game, unless they're talking about mythic content (raids and dungeons), they either don't know what they're talking about or are just trolling. Because the casual content in WoW is extremely simple, too simple honestly.

[Kes13a]

S

But when people say that WoW is the harder game, unless they're talking about mythic content (raids and dungeons), they either don't know what they're talking about or are just trolling. Because the casual content in WoW is extremely simple, too simple honestly.

MPK is a known troll

[Rae88]

MPK is a known troll

I know, and it's stupid. Like, none of these companies have enough of a budget to make a game that's amazing in every regard. WoW has an amazing endgame grind system and mythic dungeons and raids which take days, yes, but they have no housing, their gathering and crafting systems are a joke, their overworld and leveling content are terrible, and there's very little variety in their transmog. Blizzard spends all their budget tearing down their endgame systems and rebuilding it every expansion. FFXIV is similar to WoW but with much more of a focus on everything Blizzard ignores and less of a focus on endgame. I mean, these two games compliment each other really well, you can swap between the two quite easily. But FFXIV will never have the mythic dungeons or WoW, and WoW will never have the content FFXIV focuses on.

And I'm perfectly at peace with that

[Jojoya]

Sounds like to me that people who like FFXIV more are people who want the easier game.

Sounds to me like you don't understand why most people play games.

[Ralph2449]

Sounds to me like you don't understand why most people play games.

Very true but it would depend on what kind of people one surrounds themselves with.

Coming from WoW where many player's egos depend on clearing high end content as soon and as fast as possible for prestige that kind of attitude is sadly the accepted norm. (No matter how much they might trivialize the challenge by stacking the most broken combs and specs)

That is why that community is so terrible over there, a huge % of them have forgotten it is a VIDEO GAME and not their main source of self worth.

[Puremallace]

Very true but it would depend on what kind of people one surrounds themselves with.

Coming from WoW where many player's egos depend on clearing high end content as soon and as fast as possible for prestige that kind of attitude is sadly the accepted norm. (No matter how much they might trivialize the challenge by stacking the most broken combs and specs)

That is why that community is so terrible over there, a huge % of them have forgotten it is a VIDEO GAME and not their main source of self worth.

This is a design decision that the game director actively makes to have professions be next to useless, content outside of raiding be useless and have incredibly strange ways of allowing casuals to progress. You do not see this in FF14 because on day 1 of the new patch you could get 510 ilvl penta melded crafted gear, on day 1 tokens for 510 gear, in a few weeks of not going near a raid get 520 gear doing dailies and if you wanted to push 530 gear then do the Savage tier.

The main difference between the two games is you can take a day off and go at a casual pace to get geared without some huge grind. The elites still get gear capped on MULTIPLE characters before the casual gets a full 520 set but where is the forum rage that you see on WoW vs FF14 on this issue?

My main fascination with the FF14 dev team is they have not done what every single other dev has done and follow Blizzard blindly into the abyss. The thread is really not hating on WoW but pointing out to the forum mods and whatever dev reads this that I agree with your design philosophy.

There was NEVER a single day playing WoW where I thought of buying a 6 month bundle but in FF14 it is common practice for me to do just that. I don't even think about it because I do not have to fear the FF14 devs going off their meds and radically changing the game from 1 patch to the next much less what they do with an expansion.

What is truly sad about WoW is if you listen to J. Allen Brak it sounds like he truly wants to make an enjoyable experience but continues to let Ion HazExcuses tell him everything is fine and the players are just complaining for the sake of complaining.