the "go play another game" mentality

[Avoidy]

Full disclaimer going in, if you're loving the current XIV experience, god bless you dude. Keep enjoying it and have fun. This isn't meant to dunk on people who're enjoying the game.

Onto OP's topic. I've been playing a lot of other games recently. I'd unsub from this one since I'm literally not playing it at all right now but the psychological warfare around letting the home I spent years trying to get/decorate get demolished is real. I keep telling myself I'll wait for the new ally raid but we'll see. These days I barely even want to return for that; whenever I log on to enter my home, just the act of moving around and doing my rotation at a striking dummy (gotta stay fresh!) feels so clunky and bad. Protip btw, if you want people like me who're critical of the game to vanish from these forums forever, pressure SE to remove housing demolition. I'd let my sub lapse and you'd never see another wall of text from me again lmao. Anyway.

MMORPGs are like, my favorite gaming genre ever and I've been playing them since 2007 or so. Initially when I decided to take someone's advice and play something else, the first game I went back to was a classic Maplestory private server (PS). Despite being a PS, it had ~1,200 players online and the older game systems were refreshing. There was space to create multiple "builds" for each class and these builds manifested in the form of different weapons, different playstyles, etc. Was there a meta and an agreed upon "best" setup? Yeah. But you had incomparables as well to balance that out. A certain weapon might be great for 1v1ing a boss, but worse for actual level/EXP grinding, so you'd have to be honest with yourself about what you were going to do most often or what mattered to you. There were balancing issues and it wasn't perfect, but it was still fun and you could see people's unique playstyles in how they chose to build their class. The devs also tweaked exp values when you joined a party so that people would want to group up. I went with a healer class, and began prioritizing party support skills early so that I could join players on boss runs in the open world. There were times when I was basically in a party and we were hunting worldbosses (Bigfoot) together and I was buffing the group and felt like my presence there actually mattered just a little bit, which is more than I can say about 99% of healing in this game. At another point, I joined a group for a party quest and realized that everyone had unique party buffs that had an immediate and noticeable effect on how we experienced the game outside of just "boosts ur damage by 3%" so that was nice. Also despite being literally run by an indie team in a basement somewhere, they had a really nice anniversary event that loads of people logged in for. Eventually I stopped playing because there's only so much old school maplestory I can stand, but the month that I spent there was really enjoyable and clued me into the fact that something felt missing in XIV's gameplay, where you and the other NIN next to you are doing the exact same rotation with 0 variance and builds basically don't exist and everyone just cares about crit and healing feels worthless and support classes feel hella negligible and blablabla.

After that, I went and tried Black Desert Online, which I initially bought on launch, played for a year, and then quit sporadically due to the publisher's mishandling of the game and its P2W nature. Under the new management, most of those P2W elements are just given away for free, and there's a support class called Shai that feels like more of a bard than the bard in this game which is really really sad considering BDO's playerbase largely prefers to grind alone for a vast majority of its content. At lategame zones though, taking one of these with you is basically required and her buffs produce a noticeable effect because they increase your tankiness, your overall strength, and your attack speed while also debuffing stronger enemies. You get a genuine edge in battle and it's actually felt at the gameplay level because you're faster and you're suddenly melting these guys that used to be hella tanky, unlike bard in XIV where you get like, the equivalent of a food buff or whatever from your songs and just tap 1 while waiting for a proc and most of your team would be forgiven if they forgot you were even there outside of the 2 minute mark. The musicplayer in game as well, is one of the best I've ever seen in an mmo and blows 14's bardplayer out of the water. There's an actual user interface for composing, saving, and replaying songs in game from scratch with support for multiple instruments, tempos, reverb, etc., and there's support for ensembles and bands so you can actually compose something intended for multiple people and then party up with others and just play it all natively with no 3rd party tools. Outside of that realm, the game goes down once a week for maintenance and when it comes back up there are events and actual changes made to the game that make me want to log in.

Now, the game isn't perfect, not by a mile. The developer's communication with the players is god awful (bad as our forums are, I do miss live letters sometimes), and most of the glams are in the cash shop, but I can overlook a lot of that because I was able to literally reinstall this game and enjoy its latest content without spending a dime because I bought the game once back in 2016 or whatever, and the amount of QoL cash shop stuff they've fed me for free has made it so I don't even feel tempted in a gross way to spend money. I can't even say that about XIV anymore because the last time I played it and wanted to put FC rooms in my solo FC house, I made alts and then immediately felt tempted to buy the ARR skip so I could just immediately start decorating without doing the world's most boring prologue. And that's another thing. I own like 6 houses in BDO and even though I was gone for like 4 years none of those homes were demolished when I came back. And when I changed PCs last month and logged back in, all of my personalized settings were saved but in ff14 they were all gone even though I imported them using the game's own tool beforehand. Every personalized crafting macro, every skillbind, every job thingy, all my character settings, all gone despite literally using the option in the character select that said it would back those settings up for me. That really pissed me off, because in BDO they managed to save my settings even though I'd been gone for literal years and when I changed PCs it was like nothing was different. This game is maintained by a multi billion dollar company and brings in sub revenue every month. Where is the money even going, like wth.

idk man I just think it says a lot when even some cash grab korean mmos considered to be hella scumbaggy are straight up kicking this game's ass by just giving the smallest of cares. On the topic of what we've seen in other games that we wish XIV would implement: I wish XIV implemented more filler event content between its content lulls to give its paying customers something to do. I wish jobs didn't all feel hella samey. I wish playing support didn't feel like crap. I wish housing demolition weren't a thing. I wish the devs actually felt hungry for success again and didn't seem content to just sort of chill and show up to their live letters playing nintendo switch games to announce 3 hours of gameplay in 4 months while my friends and my whole guild are dropping like flies, and I wish the players were actually critical so the devs might feel some urgency to even try and get it right but whatever. And this whole post ignores all the good single player games out there that're absolutely blowing the mmo genre out of the water in general really, like saying "play better games" isn't great when the other games are so good that people will play them, wonder why your game is hella slacking, and then not return.