All The Doom Threads Are Strange To Me

[Supersnow845]

But you missed the point, by doing what they did with Bozja (whether it was the relic, the story, the other rewards or the actual content) they pulled in an amount of people that rivals the roulettes without the roulettes and the content lasted longer (whether you liked said content or not) keeping people up in lulls during the entirety of the latter half of ShB

What’s the incentive to change content design to cater to new players who want to see the story when you can rope in the exisiting playerbase and hold them for as long as Bozja holds them for by doing what they did for Bozja in terms of design and rewards, they poured an equivalent amount of time into EO/VC and it could barely hold people for the patch it was released in and aloalo was an outright failure given how many people dropped off after sildhin

[Erzaa]

But you missed the point, by doing what they did with Bozja (whether it was the relic, the story, the other rewards or the actual content) they pulled in an amount of people that rivals the roulettes without the roulettes and the content lasted longer (whether you liked said content or not)

What’s the incentive to change content design to cater to new players when you who want to see the story when you can rope in the exisiting playerbase and hold them for as long as Bozja holds them for by doing what they did for Bozja

Precisely because I can't rope the existing playerbase into it. Some players may come, indeed on weekends it's very active, but by and large, once the existing playerbase get what they wanted out of it, they leave, never to return.

Does it keep the playerbase active when it's fresh? Yes! And I fully understand why people are bothered that it's missing. But does it keep the playerbase active 2-3 years down the line? No! So why is there a story attached to it (and a really interesting one at that, that links back into Endwalker at the start with Garlemald), if it's going to eventually die?

But the players are also quick to denounce the whole expansion, and every other content that they were given, because it's missing one exploratory zone, when it's not the first time we've been given less content. Since ShB, gone are the job quests, now we have role quests, gone was Hildy, gone were deep dungeons, and nothing came to replace them. At least in Endwalker, gone was the exploratory zone, but in its place came back Hildy and deep dungeons and Island Sanctuary and Variant Dungeons are interesting experiments, if nothing else, but I find them an enjoyable passtime.

And full glad I am that they're not just deleting the whole concept for Dawntrail, they're readding everything, including the next exploratory zone, and full glad I am that for once I'll get to experience it while it's fresh.

[Supersnow845]

And I’m gonna be honest like I said I don’t think content should be designed around its potential to be evergreened because that severely limits your design scope in content to functionally what can be soloed or what can be put in a roulette; both of which have inherent limitations in potential difficulty, scope of content and how long said content can be while still being in the same rough field

Some content should be designed around pushing design concepts especially when it’s massively successful during its iteration, not everything can be tailored to people who join the game 5 years later (and I say that as someone who takes long enough breaks that i often miss current content)

[strawberrycake]

I feel like the idea of evergreen content is a great idea when it's applied specifically to content that needs it, Relics Hunts, Fates, Deep Dungeons, Vartiant Dungeons, All need to be evergreen. This is content specifically tied to rewards and forms of character progression that will never change. It also is a great way to lvl in some cases and is an amazing alternative for future forms of content to be progressed through.

The problem is is that Yoshida and the team seem to not like the idea of iterating upon content that is already implemented.

[AyumiCosplayGlam]

Rewards are an issue, but Criterion is midcore, keep in mind it's released months after savage, so you can and, if you're a midcore player, you have maxilvl - 10 gear, so yeah, even with a loose expectation for midcore, it is midcore. It still is one and done, as they say, but that's because people complained about bozja and eureka being grindy.

Hard disagree on this.
I have almost 8k hours in this game, completed plenty of stuff that most people wont even consider trying but they are arguably more hardcore in terms of time invested and bigger in scale than beating any of the ultimates.
But you could not pay me enough to fight my way through any of the criterion dungeons let alone its savage version. And its not even because of the rewards or rather lack thereof, although that is a huge part of it.

You cant call something as punishing as Criterion a midcore content when 90% of the rest of the content available in the game dosnt even require a tank swapping and most people dont even trying to sync their burst windows together.
The spike in difficulty between criterion and an alliance raid or even extreme trials is pretty big. We can argue if extremes can be considered midcore or not, but criterion certainly isnt.
Its a slippery slope and if you just slap midcore on everything just because of item levels, the next thing you notice is that you call UWU midcore because its easy compared to TOP and has lower item level requirement.

Variant/Criterion as a concept is good, but the way people interact with it makes it clear that something needs to be done with it, it just cant stay like this, its ridiculous. I never seen a content die so fast.
95% of the people who engage with it is doing it on the easy mode or even solo, do the 12 routes as fast as possible to get the mount and forget about it. Then have 2 way too difficult options for it that nobody does because there are no rewards and are again, way too difficult to bother.

Its just a blatant design issue. Giving more rewards (god forbid exclusive rewards) to something that is not enjoyable for the people wont make them suddenly like it.
PvP is the best example for this, you can incentivize people to do it for shiny rewards, but in the end it only causes toxicity and forces people to find ways to get around it as fast as possible.

[MitsukiKimura]

Is this game perfect? No, of course not. But is it a grind-fest like WOW, where you literally can't stop playing if you want to stay relevant? No, and thank God for that. It's not supposed to be and it shouldn't be. WOW is WOW, FFXIV is FFXIV.

People claim the game has no content. I find that to be fundamentally untrue. I have been playing since the beta for 2.0, and I haven't done everything there is to do. Not on my main, and not on any of my alts. There may not be content you are interested in, but there is plenty of content.

People claim Endwalker, specifically, was limp on content. Without Eureka or Bozja. Ignoring the fact that people never stopped complaining about them when they came out, though I feel we really shouldn't ignore that, I could agree that non-story content was somewhat lacking. Didn't bother me much because I play for the story and RP, not high end raiding, but to each their own.

Now, I could address the complaining about the classes, but that seems to be a better fit for a thread of it's own, should I feel so inclined.
FFXIV isn't meant to be a grind-fest like WOW. It's never been one, it never should be one, and I thank God that it isn't. Having to do a dozen dailies a day to farm rep so you can keep playing the main story line, that's not content. That is tortue. That's retaining players by putting a proverbial gun to their head by saying 'you have to do dailies, or you can't stay relevant in story or PVE content.' It's not something to aspire to.

While I believe the game not being a grind fest is a good thing overall. However, many people who enjoy the game and have been playing it for years have seen the good and bad times of FFXIV. We've watched how our classes have been simplified over the years and catered to the people who don't want to put forth the effort into getting better at the job they play. Granted not being tied to log in and play the game all the time can be a benefit though I've seen a good amount of people that wish they had more to do because playing any MMO requires a grind regardless how you see it. Endwalker had a variety of content that fell short with the community. Island Sanctuary turned out to be nothing more than a weekly spreadsheet chore to set up and leave untouched till the following week. Criterion dungeons didn't offer anything special besides a mount/materia for rewards until Aloaha island Savage came out with the weapons which only a small minority of players are engaging with. I won't go into detail about the 2min meta because I believe a good majority of people just despise it and they can speak on that. Overall I believe this expansion fell short outside of the Ultimate fights. A good majority don't wish bad for this game, we just want to see it improve and become better.