AT THIS POINT in World of Warcraft

[Striker44]

Its crazy how if you look at the patch number for ffxiv at any given time, the problem the community has with the game is the same as the problems wows community had with the game when it had a similar patch number.

Like my biggest complaints with ffxiv are: class homogonizing, and what op said. And were at like 6.2 or 6.3

What was wows 6.2 / 6.3? Warlords of draenor. The expansion with great leveling, non existent solo only endgame outside raids, and classes so pruned you'd swear it was butchery. They even have garrisons

Except that what actually destroyed WoW was the switch from casual-focused gaming to going all-in on the toxic cesspool that is M+/E-sports, and then finished it off with terrible storytelling in several expansions. By contrast, FFXIV is maintaining its focus on casual players first and foremost, and both ShB and EW are widely praised for the quality of their stories (you have to go outside the little negative echo chamber here to see it, but it's practically the rest of the entire internet).

[Shurrikhan]

Except that what actually destroyed WoW was the switch from casual-focused gaming to going all-in on the toxic cesspool that is M+/E-sports, and then finished it off with terrible storytelling in several expansions. By contrast, FFXIV is maintaining its focus on casual players first and foremost, and both ShB and EW are widely praised for the quality of their stories (you have to go outside the little negative echo chamber here to see it, but it's practically the rest of the entire internet).

Tell me you haven't played casually over those expansions without telling me you haven't played casually over those expansions.

What came out at the same time as M+? Some of the largest degrees of casually-accessible catch-up gear, a granular and infinite means of progression available to all stratums of engagement with content and which with decay in value as gear advantage increased, content additions disproportionately of use to casual players (4 post-cap zones in Legion, World Quests being added to the game), purely for fun side-content (an entire chapter of the main storyline via Suramar, Wretched Training, etc.)...

The breadth and depth of content available to players who enjoyed more combat-gameplay-centric content increased, yes... but so did the content available to those who more enjoyed the open world, puzzles, questing, soft progression, etc., in equal measure.

[Striker44]

Tell me you haven't played casually over those expansions without telling me you haven't played casually over those expansions.

What came out at the same time as M+? Some of the largest degrees of casually-accessible catch-up gear, a granular and infinite means of progression available to all stratums of engagement with content and which with decay in value as gear advantage increased, content additions disproportionately of use to casual players (4 post-cap zones in Legion, World Quests being added to the game), purely for fun side-content (an entire chapter of the main storyline via Suramar, Wretched Training, etc.)...

The breadth and depth of content available to players who enjoyed more combat-gameplay-centric content increased, yes... but so did the content available to those who more enjoyed the open world, puzzles, questing, soft progression, etc., in equal measure.

Well, given how I did in fact play casually over those expansions, the issue might lie with you making the classic blunder of "correlation != causation." M+ is what caused ActiBlizz to go all-in on the eSports approach, which in turn shot toxicity through the roof. Should I say that if you actually played through those expansions, you'd have known that the "catch-up" mechanics were always too late and still too inferior to feasibly allow casual players to jump back in later in an expansion?

[Donoman]

Tell me you haven't played casually over those expansions without telling me you haven't played casually over those expansions.

What came out at the same time as M+? Some of the largest degrees of casually-accessible catch-up gear, a granular and infinite means of progression available to all stratums of engagement with content and which with decay in value as gear advantage increased, content additions disproportionately of use to casual players (4 post-cap zones in Legion, World Quests being added to the game), purely for fun side-content (an entire chapter of the main storyline via Suramar, Wretched Training, etc.)...

The breadth and depth of content available to players who enjoyed more combat-gameplay-centric content increased, yes... but so did the content available to those who more enjoyed the open world, puzzles, questing, soft progression, etc., in equal measure.

In the same expansion, they made profession recipes drop in dungeons, introduced borrowed power in the form of artifact weapons and legendaries, and gutted PvP customization with the introduction of templates. The thing is, if hardcore players are playing a grindy mess, it's even worse for casual players who don't want to grind because there's no way they'll ever catch up, and that's exactly what Legion's release was. Yes, they "fixed" some of the grinds on the last content patch, which is what they have done for years, and that is why so many people quit because they were getting sick of Blizzard's formula of releasing crappy content and then "fixing" it as the expansion progressed. WoW just has the illusion of better and longer-lasting casual content because it's so grindy, but it's not even close to what FFXIV has to offer. The endgame is a different story, however.

[Shurrikhan]

In the same expansion, they...

made profession recipes drop in dungeons

Dungeon recipes also dropped from world quests and rep. It was also far from the first time dungeons dropped recipes; the difference was merely that it affected upgrades rather than even the base item being restricted to the dungeon-dropped recipe, etc.

introduced borrowed power in the form of artifact weapons and legendaries

First off, let's not pretend borrowed power is any different in itself from any other sort of temporary power (which is, of course all of it... from Tier Sets to Blessed Blade of the Windseeker to WotLK's ICC catch-up legendary sword) except in that they tend to offer less RNG-dependent customization by taking some power from gear alone to sub-systems akin to talents. It's not as if you're going to hold onto the previous expansion's tier sets over gear from the next expansion's first raid, or even take the first raid's tier over the second unless the latter is cripplingly bugged.

Artifact Weapons and Legendaries (which were disproportionately dropped by open world content; to the point I got my second just doing Argos before my Maw-spamming friends got their first from M+), as a form of gear inflation, helped equalize ilvls across stratums. Both increased the relative power available to players who did only casual content as the rewards scaled poorly with increased difficulty. The only groups to lose out from Artifact Weapons were those who simply played very few hours.

The thing is, if hardcore players are playing a grindy mess, it's even worse for casual players who don't want to grind because there's no way they'll ever catch up, and that's exactly what Legion's release was.

Let's not confuse a massively diminishing returns to the point of basically soft-capping progress with if someone wants to milk a 0.2% advantage over others for 300x the AP of the same flat bonus (at the time, a hugely larger relative bonus) at earlier times... with a necessarily "grindy mess" for all.

If XIV gave you means to, for infinitely upgrade your relic weapon at 1 item ilvl at a time, but for double the work every item level, would the game instantly become a "grindy mess" just because a few might take the game up on that opportunity well beyond any time-efficient extent? When it takes 5% of the grind to get 80+% of the bonus held by any no-lifer, how is that "even worse for casual players"?

You can dislike that the carrot is being hung there at all (rather than catch-up mechanics being included at fixed item levels and on a fixed release schedule whereby casual players are encouraged and then, in relative terms, discouraged from playing based on the recency of their release), but it at worst that system only hurts the truly obsessive min-maxers; by itself, because AP's resultant power growth diminished sharply with height of said power, far more so than M+ or weekly raid farms even when considering the relative waste faced in nearing BiS, AP was largely a catch-up mechanic. You can call it grindy, because it always gave people something to do, but at its core it was not "unfriendly" to those who didn't care to do the harder parts of combat content; it just gave everyone a lot more available to do.

By all means, there's a ton to criticize, but those reasons don't particularly pan out.

Yes, they "fixed" some of the grinds on the last content patch, which is what they have done for years, and that is why so many people quit because they were getting sick of Blizzard's formula of releasing crappy content and then "fixing" it as the expansion progressed.

Now that is a good point. Trying something new every expansion from Legion until Dragonflight meant that the new things usually started off very flawed. I'm still not sure though that I'd consider that worse than literally just never trying in the first place, though.

WoW just has the illusion of better and longer-lasting casual content because it's so grindy, but it's not even close to what FFXIV has to offer. The endgame is a different story, however.

It doesn't even any attempt any such illusion until endgame, though? Leveling takes only 5-10 hours and gives you complete freedom to go for whatever expansions/storylines one wants until reaching the newest expansions' levels. If anything, it's a plethora of content that pretends to be next to nothing.

And at endgame, even if we ignore M+, WoW has just as high a release rate of boss fights (e.g., combining ARs, NRs, SRs, and Trials), atop typically including whole new zones each major patch, something we haven't seen here since Stormblood with Anemos. Like Eureka, they haven't all been great, but it's difficult to point any particular XIV metric, fairly compare it to WoW, and say "yeah, WoW's just producing way less content," even when ignoring a M20 does indeed feel very different from a normal dungeon.

[rainichan]

People will likely say they have loads to do, and that's fair, I'd assume they've not been playing since ARR like myself, and have kept up with FFXIV's patches since.

Your assumption would be wrong, considering I've been playing since closed betas (not so much in 1.0, but heavily since closed beta 2 for ARR). I still have things I can and want to do, I just don't speedrun content to get it done and wonder why there's nothing else I want to do.

The only thing that would be correct to assume is not everything I want to do is things you want to do, and that's fine.

Dungeons are definitely not designed to be fun. They're designed for easy, fast, efficient roulette chores.

... If people enjoy 1500 tomes and 5 min dailies then great, I'll be off having fun.

Damn, I must be way too casual if I'm not completing every roulette for tomes within a 5min window.

Joking aside, considering XIV's current way to play is "do everything fast because my time is worth more than anything, how dare my dungeon runs take longer than 10 minutes" and speeding through dungeons has been the meta since FOREVER: how often do you see people go through the other rooms in Sastasha and not just go into the Captain's Quarters and the Waverider Gate? How often did you go an alternate path in Toto-rak when it wasn't a hallway? How often did you see the full map in a dungeon they've recently reworked in ARR? Because if your answer is "not since 2.0 in 2013," that's you answer on why dungeons are boring as all get out. The argument to get more xp is gone with the EW dungeon reworks of bosses giving all the prior XP, and no one went through those rooms or different paths anyway. There's no incentive for them to make more interesting dungeons or reasons to make other paths except now in the Variant Dungeons because everyone takes the most expedient path so they don't have to be in a dungeon "wasting [their] time." It's why no one wants to run other alliance raids except for CT because they're faster and can be completed in a very short time frame... except maybe WoD, no one knows how to run that.

Otherwise, I'm glad you're having fun, regardless of what you're playing. Generally when I come out and say "then unsub and play something else" it's out of a "if you're not having fun, why are you torturing yourself playing a game you aren't enjoying?" place. Play what's going to get those serotonin hits for you, play a game you're going to have fun with, come back later to see if things have changed for you. There's rarely fomo in XIV, the only things you may miss are seasonal events. Take a break, play other things to let your brain reset, see how you feel in a couple weeks. It's not a bad thing, I do it too, even if I've been subbed for... a very long time lmao. We don't talk about that.

[Rilifane]

Joking aside, considering XIV's current way to play is "do everything fast because my time is worth more than anything, how dare my dungeon runs take longer than 10 minutes" and speeding through dungeons has been the meta since FOREVER: how often do you see people go through the other rooms in Sastasha and not just go into the Captain's Quarters and the Waverider Gate? How often did you go an alternate path in Toto-rak when it wasn't a hallway? How often did you see the full map in a dungeon they've recently reworked in ARR? Because if your answer is "not since 2.0 in 2013," that's you answer on why dungeons are boring as all get out. The argument to get more xp is gone with the EW dungeon reworks of bosses giving all the prior XP, and no one went through those rooms or different paths anyway. There's no incentive for them to make more interesting dungeons or reasons to make other paths except now in the Variant Dungeons because everyone takes the most expedient path so they don't have to be in a dungeon "wasting [their] time." It's why no one wants to run other alliance raids except for CT because they're faster and can be completed in a very short time frame... except maybe WoD, no one knows how to run that.

The difference with dungeons there is variety on many levels which leads to a very different rhythm when running dungeons. They're easy, they're casual but they don't get stale. And although you can skip a lot, only about 1/3 of groups in leveling dungeons actually do it; most do full runs because they're fun and the skippers usually only skip a bit here and there and not 3/5 bosses with the majority of the trash. No single layer of variety is the deciding factor (e.g. varying amounts of bosses, different layouts) but all combined make for a dungeon experience that never feels repetetive.

The most variety you have in terms of rhythm in FFXIV is whether a tank pulls one or two packs at a time.
FFXIV had some of it to a degree once but they purged it and made dungeons into sterile "2-3 pack > boss, rinse & repeat" corridors that look nice but that's it. It's efficient, it's dev-approved, it's the same you will do in pretty much every single dungeon, no way around it.

My sub will run out tomorrow unless we botch our last reclear today, already been back to WoW for several weeks, having a lot of fun there with no intention of returning in the foreseeable future and I have a long list of things I look forward to doing. It has a number of issues and maybe not all of them get fixed but they're types of issues I can work with just fine. It has more than enough positives to make me shrug off the negatives.
There's no nostalgia here, there's experience from playing it, looking at it carefully and deciding "Yep, this is what I enjoy and will continue to enjoy".

[caffe_macchiato]

anyone defending FFXIV is defending their nostalgia. nostalgia is simply the mourning for something that is lost. the only way you'll stop being slapped in the face with that nostalgia-level depression of what things once were is by moving on which i suggest everyone defending FFXIV in this thread do.

just let go. the FFXIV you know and loved is gone and it'll happen (or is happening, depending on who you ask...) to this game, too.

just move on.

Nuff said!

[MahthildisMMORPG]

Be careful, Zepla might make a dismissive Twitch segment about your post because you mentioned Garrisons. *eyeroll* I will never get over it (when she made one about my post for simply hoping we get Garrisonlike features in Island Sanctuary, like Aesthetician, Glamour Dresser, and Marketboard), it stressed me out.

[hunkygladiator]