How is anyone fine with the 4-month patch delivery schedule?

[Deo14]

Appreciate the reply.

I guess for me, I see your comment and it sounds like "I don't like the content they're releasing, I want 'x' instead of 'y". Which is fair, but what about people that do like 'x' and not 'y'? Does your opinion on what MMORPG content matter more than theirs? Also, can you give me an example of what you consider 'MMORPG content'?

Personally, I don't care too much whether we get content X or Y. For example, I didn't expect that I would like IS, but I did enjoy it - problem was its longevity. I've done it at a pretty slow pace of maybe 20-30 minutes per day, yet after 2 weeks, it was all done. I've had rank 10, all quests, everything. Unlocking flying made it all feel (and not just feel) like I've done this content and there is nothing else to do, just check in once a week for 5 minutes.

So that is root issue. It's not about the "kind" of content, it's the way the content is designed in terms of replayability. There are plenty of ways to design V&C/IS with this in mind. Give V&C some savage equivalent gear as drop, give it something more meaningful than a materia. Make some things time-gated, so people can't just spam it for 3 days straight. Give it some miscellaneous achievements, for example, "finish X or Y with team full of *insert job* " with title as a reward. If you get these achievements for every job, you get prestigious title for that. Stuff like that.

LONG, COMPLICATED EXAMPLE BELOW. READ AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION
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Best example for this is imo GW2. There is plenty of content that you can easily spend 10s/100s of hours on. Elegy and Requiem armor for example: Requiem armor is just Elegy with extra particle effects. So devs just made 3 armor sets (light, medium, heavy) and then same sets but with some added effects. Then they make 2 Collection achievements, which are pretty much quests. 1st has 20 steps, which include just talking to NPCs to finding out what's going out, traversing world, finding stuff and so on. You also need some endgame material for some steps. You get 1 set for finishing, then you can make 2nd collection to get Requiem set with 21 steps. This is much longer and requires much more material, which include:

Volatile magic - you get this from LW S4 maps.
Lump of Mistonium - some PoF maps, timegated trades if you don't want too much grind and so on
Amalganated Gemstones - Pretty expensive, you can get them from a lot of content, including previous expansion
Swim-Speed Infusion +10 - From doing achievement
and much more.

Plenty of those can be sold/bought at marketplace, so even if you have this armor, you can still sell the material, which means that doing this content will never be meaningless, since extra gold is always handy.

After you finish all this, you get 1 final Requiem set. If you want other 2 sets (since finishing these collections are account-bound), then there's another complicated method which involves crafting and so on.
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So where am I getting at? GW2 devs just made simple armor set, some pretty simple quests, and it turned into 10s of hours of varied content. Meanwhile, FFXIV spends much more time on a content that is one and done in 1-2 hours.

[Deo14]

Appreciate it

[Theodric]

Island Sanctuary is so bare bones the praise it receives by some genuinely makes me question how many of those satisfied with it have actually played other MMO's in the first place. In its current form, it's a lesser version of the garrisons in WoW - which whilst not perfect, at least fed into the gameplay loop in a much more meaningful way. I believe they were added to WoW in...2014? So almost a decade ago.

Usually when a feature is carried over from another game there is innovation involved. FFXIV has very little of that and it's probably the only MMO I've seen where a vocal portion of the community praise new content that can be finished up extremely quickly and then never touched again or just used as a place to idle in and take screenshots.

I was playing through an event in The Elder Scrolls Online the other week and opened up a reward box only to find a furnishing plan that sold for millions of gold. A nice surprise, especially since I got a second similarly profitable plan the following day as well.

Meanwhile, FFXIV's tomestone event just offers up a bunch of rewards that players who are 'all caught up' have likely already obtained years ago.

I'd very much like this game to be so much more than it is. There's a lot of missed potential across the board and it's sad but hilarious that so many players seem to expect to be catered to with their 'fluff and easy going content' but rarely, if ever concede anything for those of us who want something different.

[Rithy255]

In terms of "repeatable downtime content" theirs some stuff, but it also is quite lacking in some areas, I feel like the issue is for one how they've treated variant dungeons.. Like why do we only have one so far into 6.4? (we won't be getting the next one until 6.45), not to mention the lacking rewards for the harder versions.

New Deep dungeon? I mean this is likely the biggest "time sink" we have currently from ew, I personally don't really like deep dungeons much, many people don't, rauds/savage? Sure I guess but you get 4 raids every 8 months. Theirs a few other stuff I haven't mentioned in general such as PVP, theirs not really a "massive" lack of content, the issue is it's all too spread out and niche, You could tell people theirs, "older content too!!" but most older content being really out dated and classes feeling really bad to play compared to their ew skills makes that even unappealing. Bozja as much as I'm neutral on it actually had a lot and was appealing to a lot of people, Personally I just want more to do in battle content, why I enjoyed variant dungeons and felt like they were a fresh take on what we had compared to the normal dungeons we had.

I think really their needs to be 2 things changed from what we got
1. Making older content less boring to play, by fixing abilities, easily adds tons of replay value to a lot of old content.
2. More Varity in a single thing, its all well and good to have different types of content, but at the same time it's better to focus on a few things and refine what you can do in that content, theirs no point in adding things like variant dungeons if we're only going to get like 2-3 this expansion. (Prolly never to see them again)

[Oizen]

So you want them to just release whatever is ready exactly at the 4 month mark? And that will be better? Or, what do people want exactly?

I guess its less of "rush shit out the door" and more of "Don't lie to my face with fake tears then not even deliver on what you promised while crying"

And I want to emphasize this, Yoshida and his crew were fake crying for sympathy when they announced this, it was part of a live letter and it was honestly uncomfortable to watch. The reason we know its fake is because they can't even live up to what they told us about the increased patch cycle, and its not even something they address anymore. I'm guessing they learned to do this form 1.0 or something.

At the end of the day, Square Enix has the resources to do better than this, and they're choosing not to.

[Moonlite]

Bozja alone they could also let us get the field records by trading actual currency tokens for them. I only need a few from Dalriada, and they're the 5* "good luck getting this drop" ones.

And honst question. Does this make you want to do more of this content or less? I think MMO are a design in making you do something a lot, but you you feel fulfilled.

[RyuDragnier]

And honst question. Does this make you want to do more of this content or less? I think MMO are a design in making you do something a lot, but you you feel fulfilled.

Right now, I do not want to run Bozja because of how long I did with no real returns. Being able to buy the field records would make me more likely to come back just for fun. But right now it's filled with too much anger from a full year of trying to get the drops for to want to return.

[Moonlite]

Right now, I do not want to run Bozja because of how long I did with no real returns. Being able to buy the field records would make me more likely to come back just for fun. But right now it's filled with too much anger from a full year of trying to get the drops for to want to return.

Thanks for the answer. This game has potential to fill hours of the week. The Devs are just to busy or disconnected maybe. They make a lot of bad decisions. But I am not going to completely blame them for not adjusting old content to make players enjoy older content more. It really wasn't much of an issue when patches came out at a decent time in relation to the amount of content.

[ForteNightshade]

Appreciate the reply.

I guess for me, I see your comment and it sounds like "I don't like the content they're releasing, I want 'x' instead of 'y". Which is fair, but what about people that do like 'x' and not 'y'? Does your opinion on what MMORPG content matter more than theirs? Also, can you give me an example of what you consider 'MMORPG content'?

The issue isn't inherently the content itself but the utterly lack of longevity. Take Island Sanctuary, for example. It has completely arbitrary timers because the content wouldn't last a weekend without them. There is nothing of substance beyond the initial novelty. Yoshida begging players to "take it slow" isn't him trying to promote casual content, it's him realizing the content can't possible last if players interact with it for even an hour daily.

Variant/Criterion Dungeons are another thing. The rewards are awful, especially for Criterion. Therefore, you have precisely zero reason to continuously run it despite both serving as the "it" thing to do for their respective patch cycle. Variant actually highlights another issue: how useless healers are. There's no reason to touch the role as the content is designed to be solo-able with bonus actions. So you're just a gimped DPS with two buttons.

What's sad at their cores both Island Sanctuary and Variant/Criterion Dungeons are good concepts. The former is just incredibly barebones and both lack longevity.

[Shougun]

Island Sanctuary is so bare bones the praise it receives by some genuinely makes me question how many of those satisfied with it have actually played other MMO's in the first place. \.

I'm enjoying the content but if they said its done and not to be updated again I'd be like... "wot?". I made a thread (https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...Mammet-Qs-More) on it but I do hope they not only continue to add to the top of the tower but add to the base sections as well. The loop quickly becomes slap it the same way each day, export very specific things for gil. Both of which I was trying to address in my classic -walls of texts-... But anyway, if it's a base I'm happy and enjoy it, but I do hope for more.

One thing I would note / add is it does appear to me that while the content FFXIV makes might be new / different they usually try hard to make it specifically an island onto itself (pun not intended). There is fear that new stuff moves its way into other content, and there is particularly a lot of tower building but not too often building around the base of the towers. As a generalization it might be said a "conservative" approach. Like when Blue Mage first came out it was clearly made to not be used in current content but was hilariously weak (at release) for what it was, now they did very quickly buff it but like... it should have been obvious during design that it was like "why did we make this limited?" Blue mage at release could have very well been a normal job and not break balance lol. It can definitely mess the game up now (was actually something I was strongly calling out back then XD "pick one, make it broken or make it balanced but don't give us half n half and be limited".).

It's not entirely illogical, given a lot of rapid changes to lower parts of the 'tower' due to feedback or what have you could be frustrating to players and insulting / cost to the devs.. and they will change the base occasionally, but it's not uncommon that they focus more than usual at adding on the top of the tower rather than polishing the base until much later. Alternatively I don't envy the position of having to decide more content in a situation where there is never enough, and polishing content that could be better lol. I imagine it would be easier in a less linear environment but good luck with such a concept at this point.

This collides with just leaving a system alone sometimes that really feels like it could have been taken along with the ride and expanded on. Like the hunt UI, it's from ARR lol. If they made it actually related to the hunt system people actually engage with... could have been quite helpful and increase hunt participation more than normal.

Interestingly the Island has a fairly complicated demand system, it's just very smooth / linear in other ways-- if you had the demand level of complexity on the whole content it would probably be a huge timesink (but perhaps that'd be a good thing lol).

Anyway, I like the Island but I do want to see more at the top and base of the content (not just the top). Don't think I've spent too much time lathering on praise so maybe not exactly the audience you were talking about, and clearly not a person shy from feedback, but thought to add "I like it "but"".