4gamer Interview

[Atelier-Bagur]

Perhaps if you made the new content also be efficient, instead of making it like Delubrum Reginae originally dropping one timeworn artifact when you needed 15 for one weapon.

Gee I wonder why not many relics were completed in Shb with the timeworn artifact step because it was too tedious.

And look! Gee! I WONDER why so many people have completed many EW relics because you based it solely on being tomestone purchases which everyone gets easilu via daily roulettes.

Its like hes looking at the data, and he has the right idea but is not actually understanding the data.

[Anonemoose]

The award winning Final Fantasy Fourteen Online community will never be happy and will never agree on anything. Ultimately, this community needs to be saved from themselves. No longer shall the developers make relic weapons obtainable through gameplay, henceforth, they shall be MogStation exclusive.

[Nizzi]

On DC Travel flocking to a single DC: "I once created a mechanism (to take measures), but a bug appeared, so... even if I were to take countermeasures, it would be after Dawntrail. This is a phenomenon that only occurs in Japan" (??? not true, NA flock to Aether and EU flocking to Light now apparently)

"If I were to listen to everyone's opinions now, the quickest response would be to close data center travel so that it cannot be used."

Man, if the JP community ever acts like the developers listen to us, just point them to this. Beyond peoples personal feelings towards job design, the story, etc whatever; this is just an outright lie. There's no good way you can spin this statement other than what it is, the developers not listening to the NA or EU communities or paying attention to them even when they experience the same issues that the JP community is.

The strangest thing is that there's no reason to even lie about this. I'm on Primal right now for Rival Wings and I'm looking at the Party Finder, there is not a SINGLE party for progging the current tier or any Ultimates, and I am fully confident it is 100% the same back on Crystal and definitely Dynamis. You simply cannot play the high end content in this game on NA without a static anymore unless you go to Aether.

[Aldath]

Man, if the JP community ever acts like the developers listen to us, just point them to this. Beyond peoples personal feelings towards job design, the story, etc whatever; this is just an outright lie. There's no good way you can spin this statement other than what it is, the developers not listening to the NA or EU communities or paying attention to them even when they experience the same issues that the JP community is.

The strangest thing is that there's no reason to even lie about this. I'm on Primal right now for Rival Wings and I'm looking at the Party Finder, there is not a SINGLE party for progging the current tier or any Ultimates, and I am fully confident it is 100% the same back on Crystal and definitely Dynamis. You simply cannot play the high end content in this game on NA without a static anymore unless you go to Aether.

This, so much. Asian Dev companies like to listen to "in house" complains first and only adress global ones once the whole ship is sinking.
To the people that say "Just do a PF" or "Join a Discord", that's a band aid fix on a gaping wound, most of the time people just isn't interested. On Primal we usually have to wait over an hour to gather about 5 people for an 8 man party. You enter PF and there are about 3 to 5 parties, most of them are for Blue Mage only runs, and the rest are just Hunt Trains or Venue Ads.

[ForsakenRoe]

'SE reads some data and comes to the correct conclusion' challenge: impossible difficulty

Like, no duh the EW relics have the highest rate of 'people reached the max item level for them', you designed the damn things to be completed within 15minutes even by people who have been on a break for several weeks waiting for new content. Being 1500 tomes means someone can potentially log in, blast the quest, and immediately 'finish' the new step of the 'grind'. Can't even call it a 'grind' anymore, can we

This, so much. Asian Dev companies like to listen to "in house" complains first and only adress global ones once the whole ship is sinking.
To the people that say "Just do a PF" or "Join a Discord", that's a band aid fix on a gaping wound, most of the time people just isn't interested. On Primal we usually have to wait over an hour to gather about 5 people for an 8 man party. You enter PF and there are about 3 to 5 parties, most of them are for Blue Mage only runs, and the rest are just Hunt Trains or Venue Ads.

Maybe related maybe not, it took me and a friend two hours (7-9pm local time for us) to get a PF to reclear P9S and P10S, and to zone into P11S. Both the first two were oneshots. We spent a total of over 90mins looking for a tank for each of the fights, and then 10 mins to actually do each of them (P11S taking 20, we wiped once). The PF on Light at the time was like, 40% Ultimate PFs. The pre-expansion blues have kicked in hard, because now is the time when we'd normally be IN the pre-expansion phase. The extension to the patch cycle (2 weeks per patch) adds up, and the playerbase feels the fatigue earlier relatively speaking. It's very worrying.

Doesn't affect me, I cleared the tier yonks ago. I could stop doing reclears and it wouldn't affect me whatsoever. But I do find it concerning, how 'dead' the game feels now, because I cannot imagine it's going to go any direction but 'worse' as time goes on. Maybe they're relying entirely on the Fall Guys event to keep people around

[Aldath]

Doesn't affect me, I cleared the tier yonks ago. I could stop doing reclears and it wouldn't affect me whatsoever. But I do find it concerning, how 'dead' the game feels now, because I cannot imagine it's going to go any direction but 'worse' as time goes on. Maybe they're relying entirely on the Fall Guys event to keep people around

The longevity of content in a story focused MMO is an issue they MUST tackle sooner than later, it will become increasingly bad as time goes by. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this the expansion with the most short-lived endgame content? As far as I understand it fell into the category of "dead content" earlier than before.

Look, I say this from my perspective as a sprout who is about to lose his leaves. Yesterday I completed the Omega Raid series in Primal, but each DF queue as a DPS took about 30 minutes. I know Healers and Tanks have shorter queues, but it's the first time content queues take me more than 15 minutes. It also happened with some SB Trials. Thing is, we won't have DF for said content; new players who purchase DT and want to make blue quests and try stuff will find themselves, probably, in a worse situation than the one I'm in right now. ESPECIALLY for the ones who want to try old EX/Savage as they are in a limbo: no one wants to do PF for older stuff, but no one DFs for it either. Yes, I'm part of a Discord for older stuff, it's a coin flip if people will even want to join and judging by the low amount of PF for CURRENT endgame content, I bet older will be even less appealing.

I might have the luck to arrive fresh to Dawntrail and I'll be able to enjoy the content at the same pace as the rest of the people, but buying the new expansion, being forced into hours of older stuff you can't even properly play with others, only to arrive to the new one and find out that it isn't much different? Now that sucks and feels scummy. I am glad we have AT THE VERY LEAST DS for dungeons, but the fact they don't even plan to do it for older 8 man? Way to go SE...

[Zairava]

The longevity of content in a story focused MMO is an issue they MUST tackle sooner than later, it will become increasingly bad as time goes by. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this the expansion with the most short-lived endgame content? As far as I understand it fell into the category of "dead content" earlier than before.

Look, I say this from my perspective as a sprout who is about to lose his leaves. Yesterday I completed the Omega Raid series in Primal, but each DF queue as a DPS took about 30 minutes. I know Healers and Tanks have shorter queues, but it's the first time content queues take me more than 15 minutes. It also happened with some SB Trials. Thing is, we won't have DF for said content; new players who purchase DT and want to make blue quests and try stuff will find themselves, probably, in a worse situation than the one I'm in right now. ESPECIALLY for the ones who want to try old EX/Savage as they are in a limbo: no one wants to do PF for older stuff, but no one DFs for it either. Yes, I'm part of a Discord for older stuff, it's a coin flip if people will even want to join and judging by the low amount of PF for CURRENT endgame content, I bet older will be even less appealing.

I might have the luck to arrive fresh to Dawntrail and I'll be able to enjoy the content at the same pace as the rest of the people, but buying the new expansion, being forced into hours of older stuff you can't even properly play with others, only to arrive to the new one and find out that it isn't much different? Now that sucks and feels scummy. I am glad we have AT THE VERY LEAST DS for dungeons, but the fact they don't even plan to do it for older 8 man? Way to go SE...

It can kind of depend how you look at it, the closest this game ever got to the state we're currently in was Heavensward, because outside of hard-core raiding (which was a disaster during that time period until Creator) there was essentially nothing since Diadem flopped not once, but both times (They finally succeeded with Eureka in Stormblood), and pvp was still experimental at the time. The biggest benefit you could say it had elsewise was that the relic actually had steps to it, but I don't remember the exact patch the anima weapon started. Palace of the Dead was added later in the expansion (and had the the benefit of being new and fresh).

Arguably Heavensward can be considered worse in terms of the amount of content released compared to Endwalker's.

If Endwalker's place was swapped with Heavensward? It would likely be regarded as horrible post MSQ due to content longevity being thinner than a sheet of paper, and, again, no field zone to soak up time.

[DiaDeem]

My takeaway is that they are listening to feedback, but it seems they don't know what to do with it...

Glad they're buffing Endsinger and that they're looking into making Criterion rewards better.

The argument for Relic grind on the other hand is just plain awful. I have all jobs maxed to 90, but I don't main all jobs nor do I care about getting all jobs a weapon. I'd rather go on a long adventure for the 6 - 7 jobs I play than be granted free weapons for 19 jobs. The argument about Manderville being the Relic most people have completed... well, of course it is. You don't need a metric to know that. Anytime you have excess tomestones you just go grab whatever other weapon you still don't have. He says people have never complained about easy weapons, because up to Shadowbringres, we didn't have this problem so of course these are new voices.

Not everything has to be made the most efficient it can theoretically be.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Onto the relic grind specifically:

It concerns me that I feel like they're losing sight of that not all content has to apply to all types of players. Especially an entirely optional grind like relics.

When you try to make all content applicable to all players and fundamentally change it in the name of that, that's when you start getting lackluster content.

Optional grinds that's really just missing point of what they're there for in the first place: to fill the content drought gap time and keep players engaged with an "at your own pace" goal to work towards.

… But lmao who am I to kid, maybe we’ll start seeing relic weapon giveaway from simply logging in next expac. /s

[CidHeiral]

"If I were to listen to everyone's opinions now, the quickest response would be to close data center travel so that it cannot be used."