Final Fantasy 14's grinds feel horrible to midcore players

[Skiros]

It feels to me that this game cannot strike a good balance for grinding. In short, I feel that, as a midcore player, there is nothing much to do in this game because achievements and rewards are either gated behind insane grinds that take hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to complete (such as the pterodactyl mount from Ishgard or the mentor roulette mount), or they are just one-and-done content, where once you do it for the first time you've really done it forever, like the Lone Hero title or the MSQ (inb4 "you can do the MSQ multiple times to appreciate the lore" when 99% of players don't do the MSQ twice for fun)

Most of the one-and-done content that takes significant amount of time are actually interesting, like solo deep dungeons, Ultimate fights, and so on. But grinds that require you to do something X amount of times feel horrible in this game. They are so far out of reach that most players have no motivation to ever even try grinding for those rewards.

The problem is that there are no significant or good rewards for milestones, and that for some achievements, there are too few milestones, with most of the milestones having horrible or irrelevant rewards (like 20 achievement points) that it is functionally a single achievement with a super grindy milestone at the end with all of the middle parts being useless.



What other MMOs like Lost Ark have done better is to sprinkle many more rewards and many more milestones throughout your journey. In the above screenshot, one of the game's collectibles, masterpieces, is a long-term grind that takes roughly the same amount of time as - I would say - 500 A-rank hunts. But the reward structure is significantly better because it gives you relevant rewards along the way. You are getting a relevant reward every 3 or 4 days and feel motivated to continue grinding the collectible.

FF14's reward structure for achievements needs to do this.

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Beyond that, FF14's achievements are also extremely monotonic. They have you do the exact same thing thousands to hundreds of thousands of times, with very little variation. Grinding out an achievement in FF14 feels like torture. In Lost Ark, collectibles have you do all kinds of different activities, which makes the grind much more bearable and interesting even though it also totals to hundreds of hours. But it's spread apart over months and staggered so that you're doing a little bit of each every day, and for most activities you are spending 5-20 minutes on it each time, tops. That makes the grind much more bearable.

In FF14, the game does not stagger the activities for you, and does not have systems in place that allow you to switch between different grinds/activities naturally and easily. For example, if you want to grind out Eureka light, you had better stay in a party and grind +6 mobs for hours in a row because that is the most efficient way of grinding it out.

The monotonic nature of grinds in FF14 is horrible especially now that jobs and systems like crafting have been so gutted that it's even more mindless tedium than before.

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Finally, too many grinds in FF14 just feel flat out too insane. Grinds like 2000 mentor roulettes or 500k Skyward points on every single profession just shouldn't be a thing in a modern MMO in 2022. In Lost Ark only one such instance exists - Isle of Yearning - and that is already a huge source of consternation for players. The game needs to encourage you to do a variety of activities and try out a bit of everything. Not have you tunnel on one single activity to grind it out. That's what Lost Ark does better and is what FF14 should learn from. You do so by making sure that any single grind where you are doing a single activity lasts for a few hours at maximum. A grind that is most efficient when the player sits there for 12 hours in a row, multiple days in a row, is bad game design, period. Stagger the activities somehow, even if it means putting timegates. That's why Savage lockouts exist, so that players aren't grinding out the same encounter again and again for days to get all their loot. If it works well for Savage, it should be a thing in all other forms of grinding.

[Saraide]

It feels to me that the crystal conflict battle pass is a serious attempt at making a non-awful grind. Changing old awful grinds though is unfortunately going to be met with a ton of pushback. People would rather have others suffer the same misery as they themselves did than make the game overall better.

[Skiros]

It feels to me that the crystal conflict battle pass is a serious attempt at making a non-awful grind. Changing old awful grinds though is unfortunately going to be met with a ton of pushback. People would rather have others suffer the same misery as they themselves did than make the game overall better.

I agree. But I would hope that SE understands that a PvP-based grind will fail if enforcement and anti-cheat (not client-side software, but server-side detection) is not robust. They need to actually ban significantly more cheaters and wintraders to make the mode work IMO.

[Kaurhz]

I think they need to be a little more innovative and consistent with their rewards. I want to go out on a limb and say that even certain content which you may otherwise typically do just once and done, can be further incentivized by creating achievements that are job-based. E.g. completion of a solo deep dungeon on a particular class. Certain rewards and grinds such as the Pteranodon could do well by having better milestones. Create another for 100K on each class, another for 250K, and then the final one for 500K. As it stands some of these grinds reward you for an entry point, but then require you to make a full-on commitment for any additional rewards. -- I must admit that achievement-wise Ocean Fishing has been a fantastic experience thus far.

As far as the point milestones go, e.g. 20 points for something mediocre, whilst another has approx. 5 achievement points for tenfold the effort. This practice I don't necessarily mind, really. What I do mind, however, is that beyond the now abolished veteran reward system, all rewards contained therein have just been relegated to achievement tokens, and there are not nearly enough rewards locked behind these tokens. Add more mounts, minions, etc. I'm sat on approx. 330 of these tokens and I have…

Absolutely nothing to use them on... and this doesn't account for not recently retrieving them. The sad part is they already have fairly good systems in place, they just don't execute consistently enough, or even utilise them to a fraction of their potential.

[Skiros]

I think they need to be a little more innovative and consistent with their rewards. I want to go out on a limb and say that even certain content which you may otherwise typically do just once and done, can be further incentivized by creating achievements that are job-based. E.g. completion of a solo deep dungeon on a particular class. Certain rewards and grinds such as the Pteranodon could do well by having better milestones. Create another for 100K on each class, another for 250K, and then the final one for 500K. As it stands some of these grinds reward you for an entry point, but then require you to make a full-on commitment for any additional rewards. -- I must admit that achievement-wise Ocean Fishing has been a fantastic experience thus far.

As far as the point milestones go, e.g. 20 points for something mediocre, whilst another has approx. 5 achievement points for tenfold the effort. This practice I don't necessarily mind, really. What I do mind, however, is that beyond the now abolished veteran reward system, all rewards contained therein have just been relegated to achievement tokens, and there are not nearly enough rewards locked behind these tokens. Add more mounts, minions, etc. I'm sat on approx. 330 of these tokens and I have…

Absolutely nothing to use them on... and this doesn't account for not recently retrieving them. The sad part is they already have fairly good systems in place, they just don't execute consistently enough, or even utilise them to a fraction of their potential.

That's a good point. I definitely wish there were better things to spend achievement points on.

[Caddo]

Oh piece of candy! is all I saw from those rewards. It's the way to try to keep you going by constantly giving you stuff, hoping you'll stick around, especially in F2P games. Look at Black Desert as well from a 100% new player. They throw a crap load at you hoping to stick around.

While I can't say I hard grind achievements on FF14, the system seems to be working fine from how I understand it. Do this task, sometimes requiring a lot and achieve the goal, instead of small increments throwing rewards at you constantly.

[Skiros]

Oh piece of candy! is all I saw from those rewards. It's the way to try to keep you going by constantly giving you stuff, hoping you'll stick around, especially in F2P games. Look at Black Desert as well from a 100% new player. They throw a crap load at you hoping to stick around.

While I can't say I hard grind achievements on FF14, the system seems to be working fine from how I understand it. Do this task, sometimes requiring a lot and achieve the goal, instead of small increments throwing rewards at you constantly.

Why would I pay for cardboard when I can get candy for free? If anything the candy in FF14 should be sweeter because it's paid.

[Jeeqbit]

I brought up the mentor mount recently because I couldn't imagine doing Mentor Roulette 6 times a day to get it in one year. A lot of mentors were in the same boat. The meme that they are just trying to get the mount doesn't even seem to be true, because it's just way too steep for them to even consider it. It's not that I can't find the time, I'd just rather do a variety of content in the game rather than doing a roulette all day for a year that I can't possibly know whether it will take 50 minutes or 1 minute.

[Roda]

My FC just had a similar discussion over the weekend and concluded similarly, that this was hitting most of the fc's desire to play the hardest.
While it's important to not have the game become a skinnerbox trap, we do play games to get a little hit of that good dopamine, and ffxiv's systems don't really do a good job of making you feel good to interact with them.
(Once again I am suggesting the dev team look towards games like gw2, while they don't do a good job with cosmetic rewards, they STILL have an amazing reward-for-time-committed philosophy on their content, that I think XIV would benefit from learning)
(And once again I am suggesting that the open world be the place for this 'cause that bit of content has the most empty capacity for gameplay atm)

[game_enjoyer]

It's not that I can't find the time, I'd just rather do a variety of content in the game rather than doing a roulette all day for a year that I can't possibly know whether it will take 50 minutes or 1 minute.

i actually really like mentor roulette precisely because of the content diversity. guildhests, MSQ dungeons and trials, alliance raids, optional dungeons and trials, and extreme trials. perhaps this is because i enjoy most duty finder content and don't do savage so i don't feel like i'm missing out, just getting access to the truest "roulette" in the sense of the word