If you continue to dumb down the game, you will lose half your player base

[SamsaraTrickstar]

They've finished the FFXIV story. There will be a little extra padding for the die hards, but now they are clearly shifting focus to make the game more suitable for the many millions of solo FF players who skipped XI and XIV.

They could well lose 50% of MMO players, yes, but they will gain 10 times that number in solo-players who can then experience the story from ARR to EW.

There was one tiny hint to the wind down of the game in the last Japanese live letter, #70... Yoshi said "I hope we can still make it to live letter #100". Which goes against the "10 years more" and brings it to a much shorter period. Enough time to push the solo players through.

That where you are wrong. This solo players leave after a month. Nothing solo players hate more that a unfinished story in an rpg.

[Shibi]

That where you are wrong. This solo players leave after a month. Nothing solo players hate more that a unfinished story in an rpg.

6.0 finished the main story. That's stated by SE.

The changes now to make ARR and onwards more soloable is also stated by SE.

I expect we can expect another huge trimming of ARR and Post ARR quests to happen in coming patches to speed up the boring parts and help retention. Because ARR and post ARR is still mostly a boring pile of steaming cow poop.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

6.0 finished the main story. That's stated by SE.

The changes now to make ARR and onwards more soloable is also stated by SE.

I expect we can expect another huge trimming of ARR and Post ARR quests to happen in coming patches to speed up the boring parts and help retention. Because ARR and post ARR is still mostly a boring pile of steaming cow poop.

And going for 10ore years of new story. So?
The reason low lvls are boring is you have no skills and shit it to easy. It's the mix of badly made boring jobs 8n a bad boring content.it geting ok.by lvl 40 to 50.

[Shibi]

...The reason low lvls are boring is you have no skills...

Yoshi said in Live Letter 70...

"We also made further adjustments on the balancing on lower levels"
"You will learn some actions sooner on lower levels so it doesn't feel as boring playing them, but that of course results in some potency nerfs"

More details of this will be in the patch notes tomorrow.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Honestly I'm getting tired of fighting this battle. Understand that Blizzard had little RPG experience prior to WoW. They had Diablo, which was derivative and more focused on action than RPG elements. Weird for someone in a company (SE) that has a much longer history in RPGs to put WoW on such a pedestal

Wow was a great game, however much of what was great was borrowed from other games, and much of that has been removed. There's nothing wrong with using certain ideas from other games, but it was clear they didn't really understand why they even copied those ideas. Why those ideas helped develop the world and the community was apparently lost on them.

The worst thing was when they started talking about fun. Fun is important, but fun is not hard. In any genre you need to have goals that are bigger than just raw fun. And when WoW devs started talking fun, it meant something that that many people found fun was going away.

This sounds just like 14 though. The devs have said they take stuff from other games, including WoW. 14 doesn’t really develop the word outside of msq. There’s almost nothing substantial to do on the open world. The whole fun is important aspect you’re talking about reminds me an awful lot of the “solo play is fun” notion they’re trying to push, and it seems to be taking a lot of peoples fun away when that partially equals job simplification and dungeon/trial simplification.

[Kolsykol]

having to press 500 different buttons during combat does not make the game fun

No but around 16-18 isn't 500.
A lot of the buttons aren't pressed often either and have longer CD's.

People severely overexaggerate how many buttons the DPS Jobs have to press, it's especially ridiculous imo when people combine Single Target with AoE into one lump and go '' look at how many buttons ''.
It's really not hard at all to comfortably bind your single target rotation I can do it without even having to turn to shift + or whatever.

My partner quit due to the button bloat recently. He hated it.. "why do we need so many buttons" he said. Noone is asking for 6 buttons active at once like ESO but I do feel there are too many buttons for some jobs.

Why?...
Your partner can play a different Job...
Why does every Job have to be reduced down because your partner dislikes it? There already are Jobs that require less buttons that they can play.

[Nekokaori]

tbh I doubt it considering people are overall are stupid these days to the point dumbing down something seems like a good thing

a sad fact

[Kolsykol]

tbh I doubt it considering people are overall are stupid these days to the point dumbing down something seems like a good thing

a sad fact

I dunno about stupid, but I do question sometimes if people are actually interested in *playing games* or not.
Sometimes it feels like people want content to be non-challenging to the point they can just turn their brains off and watch Netflix and see bright lights and '' you won '' pop up on their screens.

Obviously removing the one button isn't going to do that but it's a step in that direction and one step turns into many.
Kaiten in particular I think people severely underestimate too how much it adds to the flow of combat especially as a weaved ability tied to your finishers.
But I just fundamentally disagree with people trying to hand-wave this away by saying that '' more buttons isn't more difficult or skill ''...
It's just objectively wrong I think, pressing an extra button IS more difficult than pressing less and does require more skill, that's not to say it's super hard tho but I don't see how people can with a straight face say that doing less = not easier.
Especially in harder content where there's more going on.

And the thing is too that the people who have issues with this I have serious doubts that they even do the endgame content altogether.
If you have issues with 16-18 buttons or whatever then I seriously doubt you're clearing the Savage tier, it's such a small entry requirement.
If you think you're failing in Savage of Extremes because of supposed button bloat then you're probably just blaming something else for something that is internal, the issue is you at that point I think.
And if you're not in content like that then why does it even matter to you, sure it's going to make the run take longer but then don't use Kaiten I guess.
I mean ffs I see people who constantly ignore positionals in dungeons.

In the end of the day these things being removed makes for less engaging content, in a game that already has issues with content being too easy.
I don't think it's a matter of people being too stupid tho I just think it's a matter of people not wanting to do challenging content but believing that they do or feeling entitled to it.
And they want the game and everyone else to have to adapt to them when the content isn't even designed for them to begin with.

[Tsukino]

As always, there is a huge bias among the people likely to post on forums compared to the total population of people who play the game. People here play more often, do new content sooner, and are way more likely to do more difficult content in the game than the average player. It's natural for those types of players, for whom a single game is a big part of their lives, to feel like the game is second nature and thus quite simple to execute. Then any decrease in complexity for those people is going from "easy" to "even easier."

But this is simply not the case for a huge percentage of players. They don't level up 17 jobs to the max, they don't cap tomestones every week, and they definitely don't do every raid and extreme and ultimate every time they're added. They play the game for a little bit when new story is added, and it takes up only as much time as the other 30 games they played that year (or they actually have "a life" and don't do that either, but you get the idea). There are way more people who are closer to this style than "half" of the people who play the game, and there are of course even more of them who don't play the game at all because MMOs tend to be inscrutable to newcomers with only really WoW and FFXIV ever breaking out into the mainstream of gaming. I've had a handful of friends who have tried FFXIV out at various points and they are completely overwhelmed by how many actions they have to learn when to use, as well as the thousands of UI settings and various menus that mean nothing until you've played the game for 50 hours.

I don't mean to say that either of these is more valid than the other, just to point out that a company like Square Enix providing a subscription service game is going to go with doing the thing that they think is good for a majority of people and not a minority. It might seem like the forums or "everyone I know" agrees that the game is too simple or too easy, but that sampling is heavily skewed and not likely to be representative of the real majority.

[Demetri_Delethorn]

Plus the game is more popular than it's ever been. Claiming that half the playerbase is going to vanish just because they're fixing button bloat is just the worst kind of hyperbole. It won't have a negative effect at all.