FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[Puremallace]

Say what you will about Yoshi P. but the man clearly loves 14 and is almost always happy to share information about it, I do not get the same feeling form Ion Hazzikostas who always seems exhausted talking about the game.

The problem is and it is in direct contradiction to FF14 design philosophy is the focus on new systems. Either their developers are in one hell of a bubble or even they realize they are using more development resources reinventing the wheel then creating content.

That is why the Burning Crusade guys are laughing because all they did was majority carry over Vanilla systems and make actual improvements without changing the game dramatically. FF14 took the TBC formula and ran with and has not see a good reason to change it while making it work for this multi job system.

[Shougun]

I just returned to FFXIV since I really love the FF world here. I still love shadowlands though. Both game have pros and cons

For me the biggest cons of FFXIV is its website, forums and account management service UI. It is so archaic that it can turn new players off by being frustrated in navigating it just to create an account etc. Overall though FFXIV in the game is awesome, except for pvp and again certain UI, it has awesome characters visuals stories and animations.

Blizzard's authenticator is crazy easy to use.... Please look into it SE lol.


On the whole FFXIV vs WoW thing of course I like FFXIV more, that's why I'm here- but I've no desire to make huge sweeping statements on WoW either to prove my enjoyment of FFXIV (some are more specific on what issues or reasons and that's fair and useful, but I feel it's popular here to make a show out of your dislike of wow to look like a better fan, well it's popular to do in general for all hobbies but I don't think it makes for the best feedback). The games often have similarities and could learn from each other (I encourage SE to look not just at WoW but it's a great way to see ideas in action and have others do your research for you- of course do your own too but you can take advantage of others homework lol, learn from history).



An example of something I wish FFXIV tried a bit more of is the roleplay and whimsy items. Like engineer in wow can do so many absolutely awesome things that are not strictly related to battle content. The race and 'jobs' of wow getting loads of flavor skills and passives, not just that but to critters, fires that burn, camps, and more (although for FFXIV I'm not suggesting we get racials, it would be super messy this late in the game). I feel FFXIV doesn't do the flavor / roleplay as well. That stuff is 'fluff' so if someone was like "you can have fluff or good story" you'd of course pick the later, but to me it's really fun fluff that adds to the immersive experience (and with the job system I think is pretty friendly fluff too).

[Ralph2449]

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

Oh yeah it is clear it is a dev problem, especially after an interview with a pvp dev that left blizzard that revealed their process in many decisions including refusing to balance for months on end which is why I dont believe the problem is simply one dev, they argue and agree together on things so there's a big number of devs who hold the similar mentality of seeing casual content as something "inferior" or simply focusing and protecting their "elite" high end players above all which has the same result really.

The issue with WoW right now is that even if the dev team completely changes from the ground up, the community has degenerated far too much in all levels of play, the amount of tryhards, meta slaves and elitists are everywhere even in low end content, and mythic is even worse because you are expected to be a complete metaslave tryhard, they have completely forgotten what was meant to be play a class or spec for fun or even the challenge of trying to think and figure out how your own comb could deal with a boss' mechanics, all those have been abandoned for their pursuit of prestige and we are talking about guilds that are very very far from World first so it doesnt matter how fast they clear, they wont lose anything other than prestige which sadly their self worth and ego lies on.


The devs nurtured that attitude and unhealthy mentality by repeatedly focusing and pushing high end content at the expense of everything else, by refusing to balance classes leading to broken specs that last and are being abused for 6 months or more, by never really doing much about toxic behavior so their community knows there's no point to even report anything since nothing would happen anyway unless 30 people reported them at the same time.

And when a community is so unhealthy I dont think there's any way to fix it because the way things are now people either accept that mentality or leave which of course makes the game pretty unfriendly to new or casual players. You can always subtly influence a community as a game dev but once you created a monster it is almost impossible to control without extreme measures. (And seeing how they completely dropped the ball on faction balance and let it go out of control I doubt they ll do anything for this)

FF14 has WoW beat in most areas design wise, especially on casual content and the few positives that are left in WoW are completely overshadowed by a terrible community which you cant avoid because they are everywhere, and it gets even worse if you want to do high end content.

[Amnmaat]

Oh yeah it is clear it is a dev problem, especially after an interview with a pvp dev that left blizzard that revealed their process in many decisions including refusing to balance for months on end which is why I dont believe the problem is simply one dev, they argue and agree together on things so there's a big number of devs who hold the similar mentality of seeing casual content as something "inferior" or simply focusing and protecting their "elite" high end players above all which has the same result really.

The issue with WoW right now is that even if the dev team completely changes from the ground up, the community has degenerated far too much in all levels of play, the amount of tryhards, meta slaves and elitists are everywhere even in low end content, and mythic is even worse because you are expected to be a complete metaslave tryhard, they have completely forgotten what was meant to be play a class or spec for fun or even the challenge of trying to think and figure out how your own comb could deal with a boss' mechanics, all those have been abandoned for their pursuit of prestige and we are talking about guilds that are very very far from World first so it doesnt matter how fast they clear, they wont lose anything other than prestige which sadly their self worth and ego lies on.

I've seen that in too many mmorpgs; Wakfu and Blade and Soul to name just two. The "elite" or high level community grabs the developers by the hand and do everything short of threatening to cater to them only. Any casual player suggests making the majority of the game accessible by normal/casual players and you get chopped to bits before your voice ever reaches the devs. I'm glad YoshiP set a tone from the beginning that he will listen to those of us who value accessibility of content before all else. Difficulty only gets you so far, accessibility gets you a healthy community who believe in you because you believe in them in return. In return those who want harder content are rarely if ever challenged or criticized. Want more difficulty? Go ahead and ask it, you won't see too many casuals berate you for asking for harder content, as long as it's not required for the casual crowd.

So yes, world of warcraft is a decades-long experiment on sadism and masochism. You lose so many years hoping blizzard will ever listen to the casuals, you'll get old as hell waiting on blizzard to stop catering to hardcore streamers. FFXIV is one of the few last standing accessible mmorpgs.

[Rae88]

So yes, world of warcraft is a decades-long experiment on sadism and masochism. You lose so many years hoping blizzard will ever listen to the casuals, you'll get old as hell waiting on blizzard to stop catering to hardcore streamers. FFXIV is one of the few last standing accessible mmorpgs.

Love your post and agree But I think most of the top RPGs these days are really accessible. FFXIV, ESO, and GW2 are all really nice and casual and chill I think really only WoW and BDO are pretty elitist, with WoW holding the top raiders attention and endgame PvP in BDO being dominated by pay to win players I think

[Edax]

Having played Wow From Burning Crusade to Cataclysm, the only thing WoW struck me as superior to FFXIV that appealed to me personally was the vast distances of the land. Most classes could not teleport so you really had to travel far to get to places, many zones had inns in villages because you were expected to log out far from a city after a gaming session. You had the hearthstone that could return you to a single location and it had a long cooldown. The FFXIV teleporting network really kills the overworld in many ways in FFXIV for me. Add to that, the zones are arranged for convivence, most of the zones in Shadowbringers can be accessed from Lakeland, it makes the world feel small. But this small thing isn't worth playing WoW for. It amazed me in 2007, but in 2021 I feel it should be standard with all these open-world games being released.

[Packetdancer]

For me the biggest cons of FFXIV is its website, forums and account management service UI. It is so archaic that it can turn new players off by being frustrated in navigating it just to create an account etc.

While I agree, the truly terrifying thing is that this account management system is a vast improvement on what there used to be with FFXI.

Blizzard's authenticator is crazy easy to use.... Please look into it SE lol.

I just want them to use standard RFC 4226 (HOTP) or RFC 6238 (TOTP) authentication keys. If they are already (I don't think they are, since the timeout on the OTP seems much longer than the standard), I want them to expose the key generation process so you can use normal HOTP/TOTP auth software. If they don't... I realize it's hard to retrofit given that there are hardware tokens out there they don't want to make obsolete, yes. But it would be so much nicer if people could keep their OTP in Google Authenticator or Authy or 1Password or wherever else they keep all their software authentication keys.

[Neoyoshi]

During that Blizzconline mess, i heard/read from some of my WoW friends that their twitter feeds were full of people commenting things like: "Might check out FFXIV now" or: "Final Fantasy XIV is looking like a tasty snack right about now."

I couldn't find those tweets, as Blizzard may have deleted them or they simply got lost/buried, but I'm not surprised at all. I watched Day one and two, and I feel like Blizzard is really misconstruing the wants and desires and just the overall culture of their own fanbase.

[Penthea]

Oh yeah it is clear it is a dev problem, especially after an interview with a pvp dev that left blizzard that revealed their process in many decisions including refusing to balance for months on end which is why I dont believe the problem is simply one dev, they argue and agree together on things so there's a big number of devs who hold the similar mentality of seeing casual content as something "inferior" or simply focusing and protecting their "elite" high end players above all which has the same result really.

The issue with WoW right now is that even if the dev team completely changes from the ground up, the community has degenerated far too much in all levels of play, the amount of tryhards, meta slaves and elitists are everywhere even in low end content, and mythic is even worse because you are expected to be a complete metaslave tryhard, they have completely forgotten what was meant to be play a class or spec for fun or even the challenge of trying to think and figure out how your own comb could deal with a boss' mechanics, all those have been abandoned for their pursuit of prestige and we are talking about guilds that are very very far from World first so it doesnt matter how fast they clear, they wont lose anything other than prestige which sadly their self worth and ego lies on.

Oh man you just reminded me of something that is equal parts hilarious and deeply depressing.

I remember back in Cataclysm when the second tier of that expansion had its release date announced, Blizzard also announced they would nerf what would become the previous tier. I didn't care because at that point it was already considered to be outdated content because it was out for sooo long already (tiers were super long, much much longer than in FF). Any halfway decent raid team had already cleared it at least several weeks before the announcement, and when a new tier released the older tier always ended up being abandoned because frankly no one cares about kills from when the content was already old. If a tier got nerfs during when the content was relevant then having your kill dated before the nerf was considered very noteworthy, and a kill after the nerf often considered as not very strong depending on the nature of the nerf and when it came in the tier. The raiding community was so strict on what was seen as a demonstration of skill. I expect it's still like this today.

Anyway while I didn't think nerfing outdated content was a problem, all the tryhards came out of the woodwork and complained about how Blizzard were ruining the game to appease filthy casuals. No amount of explaining that it's outdated content calmed them down. All they were interested in was bashing the supposed casual monster that was out of control spreading its disease in content it had no right to touch. Meanwhile myself and others who were actual hardcore raiders were looking upon this thinking "omg what is wrong with you...". I never forgot how ridiculous that situation was. And spoiler alert: nerfing that tier didn't magically turn the entire raiding scene into a faceroll. It literally had zero impact on it.

And when a community is so unhealthy I dont think there's any way to fix it because the way things are now people either accept that mentality or leave which of course makes the game pretty unfriendly to new or casual players. You can always subtly influence a community as a game dev but once you created a monster it is almost impossible to control without extreme measures. (And seeing how they completely dropped the ball on faction balance and let it go out of control I doubt they ll do anything for this)

Fixing a community problem like this is extremely difficult in a game as old as WoW. It would require a very definitive shift in design choices and players who have been playing the same game for over a decade often don't like being taken out of their comfort zone, even when they're not happy where they are now. Many would be very concerned that the little they like of the game would disappear if too much change happened.

I think WoW is long passed the point of being able to do anything about the community without risking enormous backlash. It's been like this for so long that the state of the community is almost a type of content in itself. It's completely interwoven with the experience of playing the game. It's not impossible to unravel it but doing it correctly would mean playing the long game of gradually introducing content that encourages change over the course of several years. And honestly, I don't think Blizzard can be bothered to do that because WoW already makes millions as it is. It won't be seen as a worthy investment.

[Vahlnir]

So yes, world of warcraft is a decades-long experiment on sadism and masochism. You lose so many years hoping blizzard will ever listen to the casuals, you'll get old as hell waiting on blizzard to stop catering to hardcore streamers.

I can't believe I'm saying this right now but...I kind of agree. It certainly feels that way. I guess the only difference between me and those who remain is that I walked away.