FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[Puremallace]

So I keep up on World of Warcraft news and other MMO's to see if they are doing anything interesting that is worth suggesting to the FF14 devs on these forums.

Just got done watching Blizzcon and dear god have Blizzard got themselves into a massive pickle. As predicted the people who said FF14 had systems that were too predictable have now gone silent here and in multiple other forums after seeing how the latest mess has played out.

It is literally so bad that World of Warcraft is about to face the mother of all content droughts as they try to fix the mess they have created and also try to time their next content patch to drown out the FF14 expansion release.

All I got to say is more power to the FF14 devs for having a vision of how they want the MMO played and sticking to without having to reinvent the wheel. I expect a FLOOD of new players leading up to Endwalker because Blizzard just has no vision and yet again they are in clean up mode to fix a mess they created.

If the most we are complaining about is the difficulty in getting a pretty blue glow on my Resistance weapon or how many Ultimates to add then you guys are doing just fine!!

[Reap00]

The heart and soul of Blizzard left with its founders. All that is remains is Activision.

[Puremallace]

The heart and soul of Blizzard left with its founders. All that is remains is Activision.

It is an uncoordinated mess. If you told me the new slogan was "All we got left is nostalgia" I would believe you because it is just night and day how bad it is. Game director basically admitting on stage they have no clue what to do with one of the core features of the expansion and asking the players for help is nuts.

This is not some side feature like glamour but literal core function of the entire expansion and they are clueless how to fix it.

[Vahlnir]

It is an uncoordinated mess. If you told me the new slogan was "All we got left is nostalgia" I would believe you because it is just night and day how bad it is. Game director basically admitting on stage they have no clue what to do with one of the core features of the expansion and asking the players for help is nuts.

This is not some side feature like glamour but literal core function of the entire expansion and they are clueless how to fix it.

What's funny about that is the player base tried to tell them what was wrong with these systems during the beta. Did they listen? Nope. They doubled, no, triple downed on them. This isn't the first time this has happened though. All I know is I jumped ship not even 2 weeks into Shadowlands, and as an 11-12 year WoW veteran I have never done this before. Been playing FF XIV exclusively since. I'm just glad I've been playing FF XIV all along. It really does put some things into perspective.

[Shougun]

What's funny about that is the player base tried to tell them what was wrong with these systems during the beta. Did they listen? Nope. They doubled, no, triple downed on them. This isn't the first time this has happened though. All I know is I jumped ship not even 2 weeks into Shadowlands, and as an 11-12 year WoW veteran I have never done this before. Been playing FF XIV exclusively since. I'm just glad I've been playing FF XIV all along. It really does put some things into perspective.

Say like with some issues people have with healers or bozja I find it likely that also those changes were in part due to feedback, maybe feedback gone wrong in that particular example of Healer at least (at least one of the healers probably should have kept an interesting DPS rotation), but I've always found it interesting that SE, imo, incorporates feedback even though it has the whole language barrier (there is a lot of evidence, imo, of feedback gone right- I don't meant to create an opening for someone to be like "devs should ignore players").



I have seen, a few times, where WoW has had a beta and then magically ignored ALL the feedback beta players gave and then pikachu faced when that exact issue from beta was an issue people had in the release. When Yoshida joked about working at Blizzard (for Diablo) I was like "maybe he should, could teach them a few things". Naturally there will be cases people feel unheard, part of that is just impatience (I swear if people looked at 6 month intervals rather than days / weeks they would see a lot more of their feedback is actively incorporated into the game). Diablo 3, once it was under new leadership, felt like they improved - I was hopeful it was a sign in general, but it seems like it didn't spread :/. Still talented people there, imo, interesting to watch- like EA still makes good games occasionally, just a little bit like your friend decided to abandon you for their new GF (activision) and you feel burned lol.


If only our team spoke back to us lol, but maybe they're trying to save their sanity XD.

[Ralph2449]

devs seem really good over there but my god they lack vision

I feel it is more due to devs sharing a mentality with certain high end players who see casual content as something "beneath them", especially people who use the word "deserve" a lot in a video game as if this is a real life job

They keep making changes to shield their high end from having to do anything in the game other than raid log which means everything else in the game suffers

-Covenants/legendaries, great idea, variety is great, yet they themselves admitted they didnt want to balance covenants much because some players would be "too invested" implying that if they balanced covenants these players would lose the investment and start from scratch, the kind of player who obsesses over minmaxing to that degree is usually not a casual one, so we had terrible covenant balance exactly because they didnt want the high end to feel """forced""" to change

-Balance, similarly to the above the class balance is horrendous exactly because they dont want their high end community to feel """forced""" to change because god forbid their spec is not FotM for a week, this also attracts the worst kind of players because they know if they change to FotM it ll be a long time till it gets nerfed so the community degenerates further into "play X, not Y"

-Torghast, especially twisting corridor that can take 2-3 hours on layer 8 can be a decent solo challenge, yet awards 0 gear, hell you only get a dumb mount to make another grind slightly faster, they said early on they did this to avoid repeating visions because their high end raiders complained they had to do visions instead of just raid log, and with the removal of titanforging this effectively ends solo gear progression which has lead many to be stuck at 200ilvl which is worthlessly low in random bgs or warmode with 226+ players running around

-Casual content, they have no idea what to do with it now because their high end players complained they had to play the rest of the game because casual content included some form of power gain, so instead they removed all power gains from casual content, made it ridiculously time gated and grindy and called it "casual progression" aka all those anima buildings and upgrades and expensive mogs, they might not share the mentality of "casual content is inferior and doesnt DESERVE rewards" but if they act to protect the people who do have that mentality the difference is irrelevant

-Esportification design, over the years they have abandoned many aspects of the game for the sake of performance, responsiveness etc, I only noticed that since I started playing FF14, a far more immersive world, from minor facial movements that express clear emotions, weather systems that affect the world/your clothes/hair, great animations that feel good to press, a far superior world building, all these in WoW have been completely abandoned for the sake of performance

[Jirah]

ff14 has issue lets be clear on that but ...lol could be much worse. Grass aint so green on the otherside

[Shurrikhan]

Unintentional necro, but...

so we had terrible covenant balance exactly because they didnt want the high end to feel """forced""" to change

That was the reason given for being cautious and incremental with buffs that could force degens to grind for 40+ hours to get back to their former power with that faint bonus... just before or after a new raid would be launching. Bigger changes, therefore, were purposely staggered away from raid release / progression periods.

They wanted those who had swapped to X not to immediately have to swap to Y and grind it out because they'd inadvertently made the previously 3rd place covenant that much better than the current 1st place covenant. That was never given as a reason not to balance covenants at all. Such was instead the nature of each covenant ability doing something unique, meaning that even if as as balanced as can be, one would often be better for BGs, another for Arena, another for AoE or M+ (most weeks), and another for Raids or single-target or maybe certain high-key M+ dungeons on Tyrannical weeks.

They could and should have made those skills a bit more versatile, perhaps even sacrificing a bit of that uniqueness and the thematic component for that greater breadth of content for which a given skill would still be useful, but it was precisely because they prioritized story-telling and the more casual content side of things that we ended up with that 'problem'.

-Balance, similarly to the above the class balance is horrendous exactly because they dont want their high end community to feel """forced""" to change because god forbid their spec is not FotM for a week, this also attracts the worst kind of players because they know if they change to FotM it'll be a long time till it gets nerfed so the community degenerates further into "play X, not Y"

This was, again, true only during raids' release. Once most servers have already finished up any competitive span of progression, that no longer applied at all.

And consider the alternative, such as making fine adjustments away from raid releases and big changes right when the new raid comes out:

Let's say you play Arcane Mage and it did quite well last raid tier after its first couple weeks of being undertuned (having been accidentally overbuffed in compensation). It also saw very few nerfs in the time since, so you don't bother gearing up many alts on the off-chance you'll be nerfed.

Then the new tier comes out and only then is Arcane made to suffer for having been accidentally overbuffed last tier... and your main is ****ed, while the alt you didn't bother gearing because its kit isn't very flexible and you just don't like it as much... got gigabuffed because its inflexibility hurt it last tier, so now you have to scramble to deal with that.

Is that matter of being thrown to the wind and having to reroll and regrind right in the middle of release-week progression somehow more fun than just having only incremental and cautious buffs/nerfs during progression and saving the larger tune-ups and reworks for between tiers?

-Torghast, especially twisting corridor that can take 2-3 hours on layer 8 can be a decent solo challenge, yet awards 0 gear

Even when Layer 8 was current, it took under an hour. Heck, back then, the "soft-timer" (a one-shotting boss, the Terragrue, slowly pursuing you) would have booted you from there long before.

And it gave the resources required for legendary gear. You know, the pieces that could be responsible for over 10% of your throughput?

-because their high end raiders complained they had to do visions instead of just raid log, and with the removal of titanforging this effectively ends solo gear progression which has lead many to be stuck at 200ilvl which is worthlessly low in random bgs or warmode with 226+ players running around

People are free not to enjoy content. Imagine if to progress in Savage, you had to do Crystaline Conflict.

Note that they were fine with people being able to use Visions to get good gear. They just did not want to be forced to do it just to progress in wholly separate content.

-Casual content, they have no idea what to do with it now because their high end players complained they had to play the rest of the game because casual content included some form of power gain, so instead they removed all power gains from casual content

AP was never a "rest of the game" system if obliged at the rates it was for raiders. It was Maw of Souls spam, then Islands spam. By tuning raids around having well-leveled Artifact Weapons or Hearts of Azeroth, raiders were obliged to narrow the content from which they'd get AP to just the most efficient, since there was no hard ceiling on how far they could be progressed.

You may as well say that Endwalker's Relic Grind gives players all the freedom in the world by which to progress said relics... all while releasing that grind at the same time you release a Savage tier balanced around having those Relic weapons maxed out. See how many actually go and explore all the activities available to them, and enjoy doing so, rather than just spamming Hunts and perhaps a daily Expert Roulette. Oh wait, even without that urgency, that's already what people do now.

-Esportification design, over the years they have abandoned many aspects of the game for the sake of performance, responsiveness etc, I only noticed that since I started playing FF14, a far more immersive world, from minor facial movements that express clear emotions, weather systems that affect the world/your clothes/hair, great animations that feel good to press, a far superior world building, all these in WoW have been completely abandoned for the sake of performance

???

None among an immersive world, minor facial movements, weather systems, skill animations, or world-building were removed or 'abandoned' for the sake of Esports. There never were any weather effects, NPC conversations, or open worlds... in arena, M+, or World First raids. And they sure as heck weren't removing stuff like that just to give a streamer an extra frame or two in speed-leveling in WoW Classic.

At worst, Esports is arguably a tiny part of the reason why WoW removed the ability to clip many skills animations (you'd previously just pop 5 buffs within the same 0.1 seconds and one-shot someone, if your class was able), but that's it. Even that, though, was primarily because people disliked being no-telegraph one-shot, regardless of whether the super-bursty specs had poor sustain outside that ridiculousness.

_________

There are PLENTY of real problems in WoW to complain about, so I don't know why anyone would try for this BS instead.

Introducing some degree of actual cap to borrowed powers progression made sense. Not having major balance changes or spec reworks drop right with new raids made sense. Allowing people to play just what they wanted, instead of different forms of content being dependent on one another, made sense. Incentivizing alt-leveling and reducing the individual grind required per character just to keep up, made sense. And Torghast, for better or worse, had the largest reward in the game at the time, not "0 rewards".

Should they have released Covenants as reps and made each skill more versatile? Absolutely. Should they not have skimped out on Torghast, leaving it a bland portion of what was promised? Duh. Should they not have half-assed the story-telling and story-pacing, generally ruined characters, etc.? Obviously. But the 'problems' you're focusing on here... weren't problems.

[FelixDaCat]

The heart and soul of Blizzard left with its founders. All that is remains is Activision.

It's like when Anakin "died" and Vader was born. There is a small amount of light, but Activision like the Emperor , corrupts and destroys.

[Shougun]

What they did to wc3 was dirty, my baby. . . (Which I'm blaming to the leadership not the dev teams that worked on it and then got boot scooted out before they were ready).



On a goofy aside though, you said people are silent after blizzard's debacle, pickle, or w.e you want to call it.. but I mean blizzcon just finished day 1.. So it's not like you've actually had time fairly see how people are now talking lol. I just thought it funny. 12 seconds after meeting finished, there is silence. HA YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY FOR YOURSELF!!! Meanwhile me thinking "you didn't even give me time to breathe before you started that".



There are still a number of things I think WoW has done interestingly that I will be happy to reference as "good ideas in action" and then of course a number of things that are proof of "awful ideas, don't copy plz" in action. Just because they stumble here and there doesn't mean people can't reference the game still. Wildstar is literally dead and I still like referencing their housing as a neat concept, that is probably a major reason why it didn't implode instantly. I mean fanboy-ism will make it seem like you can't but, just going to ignore that and call good ideas when I see them regardless of source ("the enemy!!!" *gasp* lol).