Please Make this the Best MMO

[Jeeqbit]

Teleporting is immersion-breaking, but it's convenient. Who wants to use a taxi system to get everywhere? You can do that when you feel like role playing and immersing yourself, but when you just want to teleport somewhere to unlock a raid that your party is waiting on you really don't want to have to use something like a chocobo porter to get everywhere.

Switching classes to an entirely different gearset without going home is immersion-breaking but again it's giving the player the freedom to role play if they want. If for your personal immersion you don't want to be able to switch classes without going home, you can always travel back to a house before switching. The game just gives you the freedom to not role play if you don't feel like it right now.

I don't agree that there is a lag when characters run around on the screen. If you race someone you may see yourself in front while they see themselves in front but that's true in a lot of games because of ping. Try turning up your system and character settings.

Even with 200 ping, if I move out of red right before the cast ends then I'm out of it. I've been dodging red at 95% of the cast regularly farming the latest raid, and it works every single time.

I don't know what abilities you think are not fun, but on a tank I find my abilities make a difference. I have used my party mitigation or Reprisal many times and resulted in everyone surviving with 1% health, especially when they have vuln stacks, and whenever that happens I know I made a difference and that they would have died otherwise. On a dark knight I sometimes apply my shield to someone low on health who is about to die to a raid-wide AoE and it saves them and sometimes that is the last healer or a red mage, so it makes a difference. In Shadowbringers dungeons you can interrupt the worst casts in trash pulls and if you do it's a lot easier for the healer so it makes a difference as well. I could go on because there are so many more examples of why I find tanking fun.

[Kaedan]

Now I play FFXIV ARR on both a powerful PC with an incredibly good internet connection and the PS5 Pro, and previously on the PS4 normal and Pro. The game has always had a sort of "lag" when characters are running around on screen.

Not really sure what you're referring to here. Never seen anything like this unless I was running too many things at once on my comp.

When you are performing an action with a cast time and have to move, the body is in an animation lock during movement. It looks really bad, very immersion breaking, and I cannot believe they've never improved on this.

Unfortunately, that's something we're stuck with. It's a carry-over from 1.0 and something that's far too ingrained in the coding to be "fixed".

Example, the ninja's teleportation, why just two? It's very fun to teleport around in smoke, why are you limiting that?

Because of balance. They build Savage and Ultimate raids around what abilities can be used and how often. If you could suddenly have on-demand movement anywhere, that would be game-breaking.

As it stands playing a lvl 20ish dungeon as max level, for example, is punishing, highly unrewarding, because the abilities are removed. There has to be a better way to handle this that doesn't involve punishing the max level player.

This is the one thing I agree with you on. I think they should allow us to use our full kit in level sync, just sync our damage down appropriately.

The current travel system in the game is teleportation to an "atheryte". However in most FF games travel occurred using an airship, a boat, a vehicle. It seems like it would have been a bit more authentic to the game if travel actually happened using a vehicle around the world to "landing zones" but whatever, the atheryte is the decision they made and it's too late to change it.

It's been done in countless MMOs, and the vast majority of people hate being forced to manually travel. So they definitely need the teleport travel. If you want to travel manually though, you kind of can. There's a fishing boat you can take, and you can also turn off skip cutscene so you see the airship take off and land.

[Rohen]

Because of balance. They build Savage and Ultimate raids around what abilities can be used and how often. If you could suddenly have on-demand movement anywhere, that would be game-breaking.

Hi there, then it sounds like they need to rethink raids. An example take the WoW Mage, they can blink constantly and the only limiting factor is mana. Why can't we have that! If we have an ability that allows us to get out of trouble, then let us use it, it's why we chose the class in the first place right, because they have that one skill we really like ? It's their job to think of these game balancing solutions and not take the easy way out with just limiting actions and giving us limited character abilities.

[Titancleaver]

Hi there, then it sounds like they need to rethink raids. An example take the WoW Mage, they can blink constantly and the only limiting factor is mana. Why can't we have that! If we have an ability that allows us to get out of trouble, then let us use it, it's why we chose the class in the first place right, because they have that one skill we really like ? It's their job to think of these game balancing solutions and not take the easy way out with just limiting actions and giving us limited character abilities.

I don't know what WoW you're playing but Mages blink have always had a cooldown. I think it's 15 seconds right now. It's a bit more frequent than Ninjas yes but not "THEY CAN BLINK CONSTANTLY".

I honestly don't know what you think is a fun ability either tbh. It's not really clear at all at this point. As a WoW veteran since Vanilla I don't think WoW has had any fun abilities in a long time (maybe a few exceptions, Draught of Souls trinket on Warrior was fun in Legion).
Dragoon has a cool and fun kit. Black Mage has badass big monster slaying spells. Except for teleporting around unlimited (which wouldn't work in any game trying to maintain som balance) you've not said anything that would make FF14 abilities more "fun".

Limiting abilities also makes sense from a lore perspective, since you've been talking so much about immersion breaking, it wouldn't make sense if our characters could just do everything constantly. There's such a thing called fatigue. Doing your special move twice in a row might be too much for our hero and make them unable to assist for the remainder of the fight.

"Limiting actions and giving us limited character abilities" is literally what balancing means. Even if we removed ALL cooldowns on everything we'd just get a Stamina bar that if we used too many of our abilities we'd run out of. But I would be interested to see this magic solution you have.

[Rohen]

I don't know what WoW you're playing but Mages blink have always had a cooldown. I think it's 15 seconds right now. It's a bit more frequent than Ninjas yes but not "THEY CAN BLINK CONSTANTLY".

Ah ok I guess it's been a while but I guess back in the day I just felt I could teleport much more often. Regardless it's a heck of a lot more frequent than what abilities in FFXIV allow.

Fun abilities: Using WoW's mage as the example, blink, sheep, nova, group portals, conjuring and being able to trade something you conjured, really just all those CC abilities are incredibly fun to use both in a PvE and PvP setting. There are zero (or very few) CC abilities in the game at all...

Limiting abilities also makes sense from a lore perspective

Yes your point makes sense and even so they still feel incredibly restrictive. It obviously wouldn't be great to be an unlimited thing, but the long cooldown and limited number of uses just make the ability seem not that fun nor useful during fights.

[Rohen]

Teleporting is immersion-breaking, but it's convenient. Who wants to use a taxi system to get everywhere? You can do that when you feel like role playing and immersing yourself, but when you just want to teleport somewhere to unlock a raid that your party is waiting on you really don't want to have to use something like a chocobo porter to get everywhere.

Agree, but they could have added a better back story than just turning into final fantasy atoms and going into the "stream", without making the user run anywhere if they don't want to, having an airship at your command can even be faster than having to run to an atheryte that's always in the same place.

I don't agree that there is a lag when characters run around on the screen. If you race someone you may see yourself in front while they see themselves in front but that's true in a lot of games because of ping. Try turning up your system and character settings.

Even with 200 ping, if I move out of red right before the cast ends then I'm out of it. I've been dodging red at 95% of the cast regularly farming the latest raid, and it works every single time.

100% sure it's there. It's not internet lag, more like the position polling for characters is very off.

I don't know what abilities you think are not fun, but on a tank I find my abilities make a difference. I have used my party mitigation or Reprisal many times and resulted in everyone surviving with 1% health, especially when they have vuln stacks, and whenever that happens I know I made a difference and that they would have died otherwise. On a dark knight I sometimes apply my shield to someone low on health who is about to die to a raid-wide AoE and it saves them and sometimes that is the last healer or a red mage, so it makes a difference. In Shadowbringers dungeons you can interrupt the worst casts in trash pulls and if you do it's a lot easier for the healer so it makes a difference as well. I could go on because there are so many more examples of why I find tanking fun.

Well it's just that... just hitting a button to increase defense... sound so lame, as well as just hitting a button for more DPS... it's super boring IMO.

[Arbales]

Your name seems weirdly familiar hmmm...
I agree with a lot of immersion points despite teleports, but i still prefer they way it works now. Its respects my time and im glad for it.
I would love improvement on pvp content, but i do belive it is imposible with the way its "server tick" works

[Kolsykol]

I completely disagree about '' skating '', in fact I have the opposite problem.
For example when you move as Dancer and the animation just stops, it feels bad.
I fail to see how it looks '' unnatural '', what looks unnatural to me is when damage comes out but no animation.

FFXIV isn't a realistic game either, I think any talk about immersion in that sense are a bit silly.
You need to judge immersion based on the established setting, not as a comparison to real life and the animations in this game and how things work are not like real life.
Our characters already break every law of physics there is.
It's like complaints about armor or lack thereof is '' immersion breaking '', like this ain't a medieval simulator and the game is full of characters and npc's that are canon and either don't wear armor or wear ulta fantastical armor.
This ain't real life and it's the wrong game to have that expectation.

Same with switching Jobs etc, this is just part of the setting.
We're not playing DnD or WoW here, in those it'd be strange but not in FFXIV.

And the Jobs are all the same?
Just wat?
Are we even playing the same game here?

[Rohen]

I completely disagree about '' skating '', in fact I have the opposite problem.?

It's there

[Kolsykol]

But he isn't toxic, he's just stating a point. Of course back in the day when we first started playing MMO's it was different. It was a different era. I came from FFXI, and if you know anything about XI, you know that game was b.r.u.t.a.l. to the player. I thought I craved that incredible mysterious world that was so terrifying and soul crushing (de-lvling/losing xp upon death = literal RL days lost). However, going back and watching videos, there's just no way I'd go back to that.

Perhaps you're not wearing nostalgia goggles like I was, but everything spoke here in opposition to your suggestions is overwhelmingly the majority. The convenience over the immersion is just incredibly valuable to our RL time. I'm not 16 anymore. I'm 35 with two small kids, a husband, full time job, and I'm thankful that Yoshi values me as a player still, even though I can't sink 10+ hours per day in this game to get anywhere.

The forums are for suggestions, and of course you should make your desires known and maybe the dev team will take some of them and give some content for those old school MMO players. However, please, if at all possible, try not to just label people who have a concise criticism to your requests. They have just as much merit as you, and they're not toxic.

I would strongly suggest you seek out games that are still up and going that totally cater specifically to you. EQ, EQ2, XI, Classic WoW, and many more MMO's are out there waiting for you to jump in and enjoy that old school feel.

Fast travel makes way more sense in FFXIV than it does in games like Skyrim or ESO too.
I fail to see how it's immersion breaking in the context of this setting at all.

Maybe in WoW because in WoW creating portals and all that is directly linked to specific Classes, but in FFXIV the Aetheryte is part of the lore and how we teleport around.
Again context matters, these things need to be judged based on the setting.
It actually does annoy me with the pseudo-realism in a lot of Western games where they try and go for '' realism '' but then armor is just made out of butter, but that is because the intent and stated goal is to '' aim for realism '' so yes then it becomes immersion breaking.
But in a game like FFXIV or heck even WoW my expectations are totally different because they're not marketed as realistic and they're very clearly not pretending to be.
And as long as it stays consistent with that then that is what you need to judge the immersion on.

It's there

I never said that it wasn't there.