The Endwalker patch content has been a series of experiments (and that's ok)

[Eisi]

Feast wasn't much different. It's really just some different rules, a different objective and different PvP abilities that take the focus off healers. It effectively is the Feast, so I don't want to call it new. It's just improved.

Different maps, too. And different team sizes. And role-agnostic team-composition.

However I agree in that it fundamentally speaks to the same type of player and is just better.

I also think Criterion is basically just Savage raids for that reason. If you play Savage you are interested in Criterion it's just that you think the rewards are worse because you think in that context where you usually get gear or exclusive stuff and Criterion (or Unreal for that matter) doesn't give that. But there are no players who play Criterion and like it, but don't like Savage at the same time in terms of gameplay, the only difference is team size. Nor are there players who don't like Savage, but like Criterion. Criterion is more content for Savage/Ultimate lovers. Interestingly, Deep Dungeon - which is still different enough from Savage to appeal to other players - was also shifted hard towards a "memorize, do the mechanic correctly or get oneshot" type of deal with Orthos that seeks to appeal to the same type of player again while reducing the resource management that was part of it's original appeal.

[Raikai]

Isn't any new feature an 'experiment'? Given that there's no Public Test Realms in XIV like how it is in World of Warcraft, there's no way for them to get feedback on anything before it actually goes live.

If EW introduced a bunch of new features, it's only natural that we'd expect them to be improved in future expansions.

[ChonkGoblinSuprem]

I liked the beta version of adventure plates, but then they released the "full" version and made them a clunky mess that breaks if you so much as hide a ring.

The portraits that show up in duties do break and need to be regenerated whenever you change your gear set, but the plate itself doesn’t. They are a lot more static and don’t need to be updated every time.

The only penalty there is that the duty portrait will show up as the default basic pose, so nbd.

[vetch]

Bold of you to praise the Duty Support system in a thread about experimentality when its effect has been to reduce the variety that used to exist in dungeon fights.

[Noumenon]

If you read through the sections provided in IS, the game explains clearly how you get the efficiency bonus. You just have to engage with the content and work it out.

It's amusing that you think these words will be received in any manner. Unfortunately, the forums do not have a minimum requirement of being able to read and understand the content before making any comment on it. Which is why you have people who do not even know how to get an efficiency bonus by themselves, which is so astoundingly simple that we are led to alternative explanations for this phenomenon if they actually did try reading it.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

I't wasn't any experiment.
It was just lack of developers and resources.

That's all.

XIV is already a secondary proyect for SE. For Yoshida himself.

[Zairava]

I agree with the sentiment that's this expansion was experimental, and that it is indeed okay. (I'm among those that want them to take more risks, after all. Things can be adjusted)

What really got to me, until recently thanks to interviews, was the complete lack of input and responses from the team. That they actually just kept releasing the content without acknowledging our complaints for such a long amount of time. It would have been an easier pill to swallow if we had known sooner that they at least were considering the adjustments going forward at X time.

I'm still not thrilled I have to wait so long for job change information, but not really anything I can do about that. They seem set on keeping that behind closed doors until they feel like they're ready to announce them.

[Reap00]

And unfortunately none of that had any staying power.

I don't agree. Thank you for you contribution.

[Byron-Blackfyre]

while I appreciate a lot of the quality of life changes made by the developers, I must admit that I too feel like there's a lack of things to do other than use party finder to form groups and tackle content together.

[KitingGenbu]

People aren't looking at Endwalker's development realistically imo. Two major things were happening during Endwalker's continued development: 1) Yoshida was heading up FF16 still and trying to get that over the finish line, so to say that it didn't affect the expansion in some way would be an obvious lie. That in itself would already affect things pretty bad but you compound that with major thing 2) which is the pandemic. I know some people think that the pandemic is 'over' and things can go back to 'normal' but unless you only have your head inside of the game or this forum, the average person knows that EVERYTHING is still changing due to the pandemic and SE isn't an exception. Now as a consumer, should you care? Probably not. But to compare this expansion to those in the past is purely naive imo given that the situations they were developed in were GREATLY different.