I hope Square doesn't keep deeming certain content unnecessary

[KizuyaKatogami]

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The thing is both Hildibrand and Allied beast tribes were cut but both are very popular. So i don’t think it’s them indicating people aren’t interested. HoH was also extremely popular. Especially because of the mounts and hairstyles locked behind it. Eureka had very negative reactions and results(as much as i personally love it) and the relic weapons had a very low completion rate amongst the playerbase yet they thought the best thing to do was repeat that same style again? But this time made it worse where the relics are locked behind raids? Lol. As for the squadrons thing, i don’t think the story is a very good excuse. If they wanted to they easily could’ve transferred squadrons over to the First with minimal issue. I think a lot of people’s problems with Squadrons vs Trusts, which again is a trend in this expansion, is just how much of a downgrade trusts are. They somehow managed to take Squadrons overall system and trash it in the form of trusts. Squadrons you can at least control so it makes things a minimal issue, whereas trusts have wonky AI amongst other things, and now instead of building on Squadrons, they just dropped it completely. They did the same with Chocobo Racing. They did the same with Verminion. They did the same with the housing placard system. They just seem to bandaid fix things instead of outright addressing them.

[DPZ2]

The thing is both Hildibrand and Allied beast tribes were cut but both are very popular. So i don’t think it’s them indicating people aren’t interested.

Story line: the Warrior of Light is the only one who can traverse bodily to the First. We have to have our Pixie friend act as a go between us and our Retainers. Everyone else we know on the First [Scions] who came from our world is, essentially, an embodied ghost, and it took great power to get that portion of them to the First.

Bringing in Hildibrand? Not gonna happen from a story perspective. In all the other expansions, his presence kinda made sense.

Allied beast tribe single quest? I thought that line of questing was pretty much finished in SB, unless you're telling me that being eaten by a shark(?) is a recoverable feat. I suspect the villain's presence on the First was cut short by a certain flood, or perhaps by starvation since his only source of possible income kinda died with a certain now-dead ruler.

HoH was also extremely popular. Especially because of the mounts and hairstyles locked behind it. Eureka had very negative reactions and results(as much as i personally love it) and the relic weapons had a very low completion rate amongst the playerbase yet they thought the best thing to do was repeat that same style again? But this time made it worse where the relics are locked behind raids? Lol.

Can't say much about the relic weapon, since I haven't gone for those since Heavensward. However, the use of Bozja and Zadnor for leveling alt jobs (instead of another deep dungeon) is brilliant in that you are encouraged to work toward those things necessary for completing relic weapons AND also leveling from 71-80 to get the basic weapons, all while providing over 100 potential drops of anything from glamour gear to mounts/minions/orchestrion rolls and other items of interest.

Is it different? Yes. Do some people miss deep dungeons? Yes. Did the ability to get everything except haircuts from Bozja mean that a deep dungeon's purpose (alt leveling) was replaced? Yes.

I think that it became so much easier to level alt jobs using other methods than deep dungeons over the years since Palace of the Dead came out. The grind may have done it in, no matter how popular it was four years ago.

As for the squadrons thing, i don’t think the story is a very good excuse. If they wanted to they easily could’ve transferred squadrons over to the First with minimal issue. I think a lot of people’s problems with Squadrons vs Trusts, which again is a trend in this expansion, is just how much of a downgrade trusts are. They somehow managed to take Squadrons overall system and trash it in the form of trusts. Squadrons you can at least control so it makes things a minimal issue, whereas trusts have wonky AI amongst other things, and now instead of building on Squadrons, they just dropped it completely.

While I had fun with Squadrons, introduced toward the end of HW and updated with Command Missions (the dungeons) in SB, it wasn't necessarily the best way to run dungeons single-instance. You have no control over Trusts, true -- but then you don't have control over the other 3 players in any dungeon instance you run through Duty Finder either. At least in a Trust, your companions knew the mechanics ... as an example, your Squadron tank didn't know enough to get out the lightning pool in Halitali to avoid taking damage. Thancred, on the other hand, knows how to dodge an AoE. I still curse the Squadron healer during my brief attempts at tanking with a Squadron.

See the entry under "Storyline" for an explanation for "no, your Squadron can't make it to the First".

As I've said earlier, squadrons were fun, but ... how many players actually did much with it past getting the rank of Captain and the neat emotes? SE has the numbers, and it may have been "do we work on Trusts or we do work on Squadrons?".

I prefer the ability to actually run the Trusts at level in ShB, rather than wait for a queue to pop. Less go-go-go, more "I have time to figure out where I am and what I'm doing and what's coming up next".

Anecdotally, in year two of the expansion it became clear to me that the number of people actually doing level 70+ leveling content on a regular basis had decreased greatly. How so? The amount of time spent waiting for a selected MSQ trial to pop went to an outrageously high number for a DPS - we're talking hours, not the general 15 minute or less wait for Leveling Roulette to pop.

They did the same with Chocobo Racing. They did the same with Verminion. They did the same with the housing placard system. They just seem to bandaid fix things instead of outright addressing them.

Sorry about Chocobo Racing. I tried it once. Didn't appeal to me. Didn't even try Lords of Verminion. Perhaps that's why they haven't been improved since then? Personally, I enjoy the old game systems that won't ever see improvement, since they're still around when I run through yet-another-alternate avatar.

As for bandaid fix - sometimes that's all you can do, given that the development teams are (a) getting things ready for the next expansion (b) fixing bugs (c) getting things ready for the next patch (d) getting feedback from internal checks on what's hot and what's not (e) making decisions on where to put future resources based on past performance of added features (f) cognizant that a true fix for A will mean rewriting enough code to make creating a brand new MMO from scratch look easy..

I always consider the fact that this is a Japanese written, first and foremost, for a Japanese audience. It's not being written specifically for an American/English/Chinese/German/pick-your-country-of-origin audience. Tastes differ, and I'm sure feedback on the numbers from the Japanese servers drives a lot of what does, and does not, get improved upon in this game. Rightly so.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Story line: the Warrior of Light is the only one who can traverse bodily to the First. We have to have our Pixie friend act as a go between us and our Retainers. Everyone else we know on the First [Scions] who came from our world is, essentially, an embodied ghost, and it took great power to get that portion of them to the First.

Bringing in Hildibrand? Not gonna happen from a story perspective. In all the other expansions, his presence kinda made sense.

Allied beast tribe single quest? I thought that line of questing was pretty much finished in SB, unless you're telling me that being eaten by a shark(?) is a recoverable feat. I suspect the villain's presence on the First was cut short by a certain flood, or perhaps by starvation since his only source of possible income kinda died with a certain now-dead ruler.



Can't say much about the relic weapon, since I haven't gone for those since Heavensward. However, the use of Bozja and Zadnor for leveling alt jobs (instead of another deep dungeon) is brilliant in that you are encouraged to work toward those things necessary for completing relic weapons AND also leveling from 71-80 to get the basic weapons, all while providing over 100 potential drops of anything from glamour gear to mounts/minions/orchestrion rolls and other items of interest.

Is it different? Yes. Do some people miss deep dungeons? Yes. Did the ability to get everything except haircuts from Bozja mean that a deep dungeon's purpose (alt leveling) was replaced? Yes.

I think that it became so much easier to level alt jobs using other methods than deep dungeons over the years since Palace of the Dead came out. The grind may have done it in, no matter how popular it was four years ago.

Have the squadron members be "shards" of the one you have. There easy peasy. Your Hildibrand lore excuse is funny, considering he literally shows up in the 5.3 dungeon. No the allied beast tribe quests arent done. They easily couldve had him have had a shard on the first. Lore excuses are the least of why we didnt get these things or why they dont make sense lmao. Bozja is no different from eureka in that item drops remark, actually eureka was better cuz 4 zones instead of 2. It got double lmao. Honestly it just sounds like youre trying to make excuses for them. Ive seen this over and over. Instead of people like you actually addressing that theres a problem and there is a loss in content you try to use things like lore excuses of all things. Yoshi p said lore was why we didnt get male viera back at the start of shb. Look what happened. Im tired of seeing excuse after excuse for this.

[Shurrikhan]

Have the squadron members be "shards" of the one you have. There easy peasy.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind having to step apart (i.e., to a different bank of members) while in the Far East, the First Shard, etc., so long as I get to keep any other benefits of using a Squadron over using a Trust.

That means actually getting to tell the story NPCs what to do, for starters. By all means, beef up the enemy HP values a bit in ShB AI-Party runs to compensate for their finally being able to AoE and so forth, but we shouldn't be losing functionality, let alone enjoyable agency.

In that way, each expansion (or each after HW) that takes us somewhere completely apart at least gives us a reset or catch-up threshold. You didn't have time to level your Squadrons to Stormblood level before hitting Stormblood dungeons in Othgard? Not a problem; you've got the story NPCs available for the first run, and you gather further Squadron members while in the Far East, filling a separate pool, hitting enough for a full Squad run by level 64 or so. Maybe in Shadowbringers, those story NPCs truly become your squadron for the First; if so, fine... as long as they maintain at least all of the functionality we're used to.

[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]

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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]

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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.