I hope Square doesn't keep deeming certain content unnecessary

[linayar]

If they do that they could just change the name of the game by FFXIV Arena since the only combat content you are going to see will be almost exclusively inside instanced circle/squared zones, i hope they don't do that since im really tired of how much they are dumping down everything, at this rate they could make eventualy a mobile version of the game.

Ooh, you just reminded me of alliance raids. That structure would still work on a smaller scale for dungeons.

[Deceptus]

It was not, we had Eureka's 4 zones and BA for SB, but we also had HoH, Tataru's outfit, Allied tribe quest, more EX dungeons, ponctual events, two Ultimates, and possibly more I don't remember were cut.
Despite reaping more money in than ever with ShB, SE didn't give it back to us as content nearly as much as they did in the past.

Sadly this is 100% accurate.

It's a combination of SE is siphoning money away from FFXIV developments, and FFXIV team not hiring more people to share the workload.

And it's showing. Glaringly so. FFXIV is SE's cash cow right now and they're milking it for all it's worth and not giving it time to properly recuperate.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Your Hildibrand lore excuse is funny, considering he literally shows up in the 5.3 dungeon.

To be fair, he showed up there in a lore compliant manner, within the context of what was happening at that exact point in the story that would make zero sense out of that small window of time. There's only one current path that non-WoL people can reach the first, and you'd have to do some extreme handwaving to explain why the Exarch summoned Hildibrand, let alone even knew who he was. That's also for just Hildibrand; it'd be an even gianter stretch if you wanted to bring in the usual cast of Hildibrand characters like Godbert.

But lore aside, they already explained why they canned him for SHB: He was getting stale. Which I agree with. i'd rather they remove him for an expansion and come back with a great, well thought out and funny storyline than try and shoe-horn him in just for the sake of it. HW's Hildi plot already felt forced as is (which it was, since Scholastic was meant to replace it but fans cried out for more Hildi so they had to bring him back and rapidly write a shoe-horned story), I'd rather not see a repeat of that.

As far as squadrons, you fail to see one of the biggest points of why they developed trusts instead of expanding on squadrons:

trusts cost no investment from player time in order to use them for their intended purpose.

trusts are auto-leveled to dungeon levels while you're in the middle of the MSQ, meaning they're always an available option in order to help complete the MSQ if queues are taking too long, which yoshi-P described as one of their intended purposes before SHB launched. Even post SHB, they're auto-leveled to 80 during your first run of any of the level-capped MSQ dungeons so you can't ever get railroaded by a dungeon.

Contrast squadrons, which to theoretically use them in level 70+ dungeons would require:
-Hitting max ARR rank of your grand company
-RNG recruiting one more off of challenge log entries which reset weekly to allow them to be used in command missions
-manually leveling them up all the way to 70.

It's not really surprising why they focused on trusts. They're malleable in terms of design & usage, mandatorily forced on you as part of the MSQ so you can't avoid unlocking them compared to squadrons being fully optional, have much more character identity and make more sense being with the WoL than random squad peeps due to being heavily involved in the MSQ. Not to mention even if they brought squadrons to the first, you'd have to explain why these 'shard' selves feel compelled to align & fight with you when they haven't met you ever, or why they somehow have the exact same stats, gear, experience, etc as their source selves.

[KizuyaKatogami]

snip

For the hildibrand thing ill just stop you right there. The funny thing about hildibrand is that the questline literally doesnt adhere to lore rules. It does its own thing and thats what makes it "funny." Like him getting the absolute crap beaten out of him time and time again and coming out unscathed. It doesnt make sense and its not supposed to.They said he was getting "stale." For who? His storyline is still widely popular. They literally canned his storyline and gave us nothing in return,AND they took away the allied beast tribe quests as well. Was that getting stale too? It makes you wonder too if that flower shower emote which...looks suspicously pixie-like, was really supposed to be the reward for it and they just shoved it behind mogstation to make a quick buck. As for your squadrons argument, my point is instead of refining them or adjusting them with the way trusts work, they just dropped them completely for a new system that is inherently worse. Theyre trying to simplify everything this expansion and it shows and it gives us far less. I'd rather they refine older things instead of giving us half assed content like theyve done time and time again this expansion. If 6.0 is doing the same im just gonna leave and not look back. It's ridiculous how much money shb has made, and all it does is get funneled to their other projects that dont even do well.(their Marvel games). We're left with less content than even HW id argue, which is sad. People can blame the pandemic, but a majority of the content thats been referred to here was missing before the pandemic even hit.

[DrWho2010]

snip

imma bout to deem you unnecessary here in a minute.

not everything is about you or your investment in it. why should the devs churn out something that they don't feel is good enough for themselves in the first place? that just leads to bad content.

[anhaato]

imma bout to deem you unnecessary here in a minute.

not everything is about you or your investment in it. why should the devs churn out something that they don't feel is good enough for themselves in the first place? that just leads to bad content.

...Because it's about what we, the players, want. None of the stuff being said here is a minority opinion. If they're refusing to give us what we want because of personal reasons then they're just turning into Blizzard.

[anhaato]

The discussion on content is more nuanced than just getting more or less, we also need to look at the quality of the content we got. We got less dungeons and they were much easier as well. Blame those on covid, whatever, but to be fair, Paglth'an wasn't THAT brainless. I was actually happy to see that the packs were more difficult and you could wall pull again. Yes, Bozja had less zones than Eureka and I'm forever disappointed by that, but the actual quality of the content within was much higher than Eureka, and the option to farm your relic outside of it was, imo, a net positive. More people finished their relics because they had less of an excuse not to. The Eden raids are... debatable. The last tier, imo, was great. Everything else, though... Shiva was intense but the ramp up in difficulty was too jarring with how braindead 7 was. I'm willing to believe they learned from how generally panned the 5.2 raid tier was, most people said it was boring and they followed it up with a genuinely good raid tier. I don't think they're actively ignoring us, but it seems to me that it took them too long to listen, and any fixes they wanted to make to the quality of content in response to us came really late in the pack's life cycle.

They've been making great promises about how 6.0 is going to be full to bursting with content. Ideally the way they would do that is by listening and looking back at their previous successes. It should be obvious to them by now that everyone thinks Stormblood battle content was better than Shadowbringers. Yoshi-p also promised more Hildibrand and a new deep dungeon because of the outcry. In fact, that's how we got a new healer to begin with, because of outcry. And that's why I believe the battle content started to suddenly improve at the end of this pack; because of the outcry about how boring it was. It's probably how we ended up with Matoya's being a strange combination of bosses with actual mechanics and sleeper trash packs made of tissue paper, and Paglth'an being a respectable dungeon in its own right, much more fun to get in expert roulette. And it's probably how we ended up with a raid tier that was much more exciting than the ones before.

The devs usually listen. There's no need to lie to yourself and constantly stick out your neck to defend their bad choices. They won't start crying if we tell them we don't like what they've been giving us, that's how the game gets better. And that's my purpose for making this thread, to let them know that there's still more we want, and we don't want them to half-ass it either. They pushed off 6.0's release another two months, the content better live up to all of their promises.

[DrWho2010]

...Because it's about what we, the players, want. None of the stuff being said here is a minority opinion. If they're refusing to give us what we want because of personal reasons then they're just turning into Blizzard.

So their vision of what they would like to create shouldn't even enter into the equation at all then? It should always only ever be about what the playerbase wants? No matter how dumb or bad it might be?

I'm sorry I just can't agree with that line of reasoning.

[Kolsykol]

Going back and doing my ARR relic weapons kinda reminded me of some content that is kinda just dead nowadays.
I'd like to see new levequests and guildhests and better rewards.

[DrWho2010]

There's no need to lie to yourself and constantly stick out your neck to defend their bad choices. They won't start crying if we tell them we don't like what they've been giving us, that's how the game gets better. And that's my purpose for making this thread, to let them know that there's still more we want, and we don't want them to half-ass it either. They pushed off 6.0's release another two months, the content better live up to all of their promises.

I don't think people stand up to defend creator creative choices enough. People demand too much these days from their entertainment (and this is just a game, it is not a way of life and too many people are substituting games as such). You ratchet up your expectations way too high, you're gonna get burned by the sun because you've put yourself up there.

IMO one should have ZERO expectations going into anything. That way you can be pleasantly surprised instead of experiencing crushing bitterness.

So what if they added a couple extra months to the production schedule? That's two more months I have to do other things. I'm in no hurry here.