Off Topic Discussion Megathread

[ThivraK]

[...]

I've been playing for way less years than you but honestly, as we've talked extensively over reddit, it's a feeling I too share and it's sad. I met so many nice people throughout this game that didn't interest me at first, plus the story that, despite having boring parts here and there, fully sucked me in, which surprised me myself.

But then, in my eyes, the glaring issues appeared. The community at large enabling toxic behaviour, most of the self-proclaimed nice and welcoming people being the biggest hypocrites I've seen (especially on this forum and reddit), the playerbases performance seemingly plummeting even further before and during EW, more and more people weaponizing the TOS to police the tone of advice and whatnot. And, at least in this forums case, the moderation enabling this hypocrisy as well.

It's only a few levels for the last 5 classes I gotta level but man, the desire I felt to max them out is completely gone vs the desire I had pre-EW, not to mention the lack of desire to play at all? And I know I'm not alone with this in my FC/circle, as not only the savage raiders but also the casual players like me experience more and more "rinhlettes" during their roulettes and are met with hostility* if they try to help

*someone from my circle was genuinely surprised that I tried to help a struggling tank with advice during stone vigil and didn't just pull more for them, as they've not had anybody tried to help them when they picked up the game over a year ago. Imagine a community so deep down into the enabling behaviour and keeping your mouth shut because saying something is seen as a personal attack that it completely stops giving advice altogether

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

snip

One of my FC mates had to all but bribe me to get on and do Sohm Al with them on their alt for the story, lmao. I just have that little interest in logging in lately, outside of scheduled in-game RP and DMing our Saturday events. I healed for them, we did a couple roulettes after while I was on (and I instantly regretted asking to do that, hoo boy those runs were giant messes), then I immediately bounced back off to Elden Ring.

I'm lucky that for the most part, my FC is full of close friends I can talk to outside the game (and who also tend to go on extended breaks during patch lulls, too), so I'm not losing that aspect at least. Just a shame when I genuinely do enjoy most content in this game and absolutely love doing dungeons, but just have zero desire to deal with everything lately. I'm hoping 6.1 reignites the spark somehow, but as things stand right now I'm severely doubting it.

Most of my FC are disappointed with how the housing stuff is gonna go in 6.1. :x We've had one member holding on to a small Shiro house all for the sake of relocating to Ishgard one day, and now even that's been complicated. I, personally, really kind of wanted to move us to that nice Mist large on the hill one day... but with how housing is right now, it's a bit of an impossible dream. I feel like the lottery system will only make it even less viable. Luckily most of us have come to love the Goblet and our little private island, but still.

For me, after how EW was obviously rushed out and the interviews speaking about a ton of rewrites to it before finalizing, I'm not exactly hopeful for any new story arc that we begin in 6.1... and the disappointment with the story has kept me from leveling my WoL alt, who I love and adore and had an absolute blast taking through the story from ARR to ShB. ;~; I miss her, but I just don't really feel a tug to replay EW right now like I did ShB and HW. I don't want to skip it on her either, though, as the entire point of the character was an 'official' WoL to go through the story start to finish on.

Ah well. 3-day weekend from capitalism grind, and I plan to enjoy it on Elden Ring; one of my best friends finally was able to pick it up, and they're a Soulsborne baby like I was, so I can't wait to help them through things like my co-lead helped me when I first got started in it!

[Kolsykol]

I mean, the SQEX's marketing department should notice this, that many people thought, that FF14 is a weeb game. In this case, they should have start some countermeasures against it. But they did nothing. Maybe they did not notice it or they did not care or they thought, that the game trailers are enough. But in all those cases it was a fault. I bet, Asmongold alone brought more new players to the game than SQEX's marketing department.


And the game is not very different. I came the first time in contact with the game in the ARR beta. And i did not like it because it was way too similar to WoW WotLK, which i also did not like. And i hated the long GCD. So i thought, that SQEX has created another WotLK clone (and there were maaaany WoW clones at the time) and i was not interested anymore.

I came back with Shadowbringers because the game reviews were very good.


Cheers

Oh I see what you mean now.
Yeah I honestly dunno what they can do about it, I think big Streamers playing the game and loving it was the best advertisement they could've gotten in that regard.
Especially when big WoW Streamers with very negative opinions on it went in and tried it and ended up loving it.
There's quite a lot of people who only play military FPS games and think that anything fantasy is '' cringe '', FFXIV being Japanese and not a gritty European medieval simulator is an even further step.

Everyone I know irl is kinda like that honestly, I think most who play games and the average joe so to speak.
The showrunners for Game of Thrones get memed on a lot because they said that they diminished and cut a lot of the magic in the show because they wanted to appeal to '' football players and moms '', but they're not entirely wrong I think most ppl at least in the West are quite close-minded to fantasy.
If Game of Thrones had been more book accurate then in all honesty I think it wouldn't have become as big, a lot of people would've just tuned out before it truly got going.
And then when you add a foreign element to it too it only adds to that.

The GCD is actually something I see referenced a lot too and I honestly dunno what they could do about that either, it's a bit like the story '' it gets good later ''.
It's hard to prove that to people.

[Kolsykol]

I really wish BDO didn't have forced PvP, the game is a lot of fun but I don't like having to deal with people who have no-lifed it or used their credit card and are totally overpowered against you .
I'd actually really enjoy a singleplayer offline version of the game a lot.

Also something I saw recently.
Loool, someone got banned from PSN for a week for posting a pic from the model viewer of Baiken in Guilty Gear Strive.

It's so hypocritical and tiresome at the same time, it reminds me of the Google and Apple stores where literal pixels of cleavage gets tagged for censorship by their automated systems.
Not just in game ads either but also in ads for other products, I've seen stick figure-esque art get taken down because of it ( just those one color simplistic figures often used in ads ).
I remember there has was an onion ad that was taken down too because the system registered the onions as naked breasts rofl it's so stupid ( it's also solely targeted against womens bodies, never seen this happen the other way around you can have half-naked guys and it's just fine ).

On PSN you can post actual nudity from games like Cyberpunk and extreme levels of gore from MK11 and TLOU2.
But Baikens ingame model is too much?????????????
Dear lawd this stupidity fml, I hate it so much.

[Raoabolic]

Loool, someone got banned from PSN for a week for posting a pic from the model viewer of Baiken in Guilty Gear Strive.

It's so hypocritical and tiresome at the same time, it reminds me of the Google and Apple stores where literal pixels of cleavage gets tagged for censorship by their automated systems.
Not just in game ads either but also in ads for other products, I've seen stick figure-esque art get taken down because of it ( just those one color simplistic figures often used in ads ).
I remember there has was an onion ad that was taken down too because the system registered the onions as naked breasts rofl it's so stupid ( it's also solely targeted against womens bodies, never seen this happen the other way around you can have half-naked guys and it's just fine ).

On PSN you can post actual nudity from games like Cyberpunk and extreme levels of gore from MK11 and TLOU2.
But Baikens ingame model is too much?????????????

It also stinks when it happens to imported media as well. Something too risque or might be too offensive? Time for a localization! I agree that there are elements that are hard or downright impossible to translate from one region to another but it feels like 9 times out of 10 the term localization gets interchanged with translated when they are two different approaches to one task.

[Kolsykol]

It also stinks when it happens to imported media as well. Something too risque or might be too offensive? Time for a localization! I agree that there are elements that are hard or downright impossible to translate from one region to another but it feels like 9 times out of 10 the term localization gets interchanged with translated when they are two different approaches to one task.

I think that FFXIV is a fantastic example of how to do it right, I think that the localizers for FFXIV just work way closer with the dev team too than usual.
I mean Koji Fox even helps developing the lore it kinda helps having people who are that invested and not just a third party who are handling the work of people they don't even know and had no hand in creating.
They also don't change or erase content in the game either.

Whenever localizers change or erase content it's always extremely frustrating and bad imo, only time I can understand it is if we're talking about some really touchy stuff that enters questionable legal territory too like minors being depicted in certain ways.
But that's totally different than an adult character.
Whenever I hear '' appeal to a Western audience '' too I just dunno how they can say this when the responsive is always so overwhelmingly negative.
It feels like people who went to school for marketing and bring in all of these weird ideas from other industry and are still stuck in the '' family values '' era.
And it's also not their job to care about the quality or vision of the game, all they care about is making it sell as much as possible even if it means compromising the product ( which I think more often than not results in less sales not more ).

It leads to so much dumb crap too in other industries like movies where they literally have swear quotas and movie directors are forced by the studio to censor their movies to lower the rating.
It's just really frustrating how a lot of media gets compromised because of idiots who shouldn't have any creative say whatsoever.

I think there's so many amazing games that could become the new big thing but are just never allowed to.
I am not a big Mortal Kombat fan, but like I can't imagine a new Mortal Kombat happening today especially not under a big publisher.

But yeah I dunno, I know a lot of people don't care but I just kinda find it sad in a way.
Because people are essentially putting up with worse products, if people were more unified about it then the market would have to adapt.
Instead people just shrug it off there's just something depressing about that to me like we could have a better movie if people just raised their voices a bit.
Peoples indifference is kinda rotting the industries and making it worse.

Edit: Damn Koji has been with them for 20 years it has been such a long time and he has worked on other FF games too.
Dude is awesome.

[Theodric]

Koji is no longer working directly on FFXIV and has been sent over to work on FFXVI instead. This is his replacement, who participated in one of the recent lore Q&A sessions:

https://twitter.com/fabulafatua

[RobynDaBank]

Koji is no longer working directly on FFXIV and has been sent over to work on FFXVI instead. This is his replacement, who participated in one of the recent lore Q&A sessions:

https://twitter.com/fabulafatua

Oof. Uhm. Night and day.

[Shibi]

...Whenever localizers change or erase content it's always extremely frustrating and bad imo, only time I can understand it is if we're talking about some really touchy stuff that enters questionable legal territory too like minors being depicted in certain ways.
But that's totally different than an adult character.
Whenever I hear '' appeal to a Western audience '' too I just dunno how they can say this when the responsive is always so overwhelmingly negative.
It feels like people who went to school for marketing and bring in all of these weird ideas from other industry and are still stuck in the '' family values '' era.....

SE are not innocent in this. Neutering, and eventual kill off of that major Heavensward Character was completely a mess-up of not wanting to offend the "English speaking audience".

Koji is no longer working directly on FFXIV and has been sent over to work on FFXVI instead.

Yeah, all of Shadowbringers and Endwalker I do believe they said.

[Theodric]

Oof. Uhm. Night and day.

Mm.

I won't pretend as if I don't have some concerns about potential bias because I very much do.

Square Enix would do well to remember that the English speaking side of its player base consists of more than just a vocal portion of American players subscribing to certain ideologies.