XIV EW Job-Gameplay is Terrible... Why?

[Somnolence]

NONE of the people have the original context for why MMOs were hard, why raiding, pvp, earning mounts, titles, and gear sets, were hard.

Imagine modern player reaction if it was like old school Lineage2 where you would lose XP, and possibly de-level, because somebody ganked you

Nowhere is this more evident than PvP which is full of leeches and carrot chasers who dont want to put the least amount of effort in.

If PvP gameplay loop was fun it would not be a problem, otherwise we have the current situation were rewards are basically the only reason to do it.

I feel that Yoshida treats us like toddlers in kindergarten, as if he has to protect us from all the evil of the outside world and therefore has a duty to create a safe environment for everyone, without any risk of harm. As if he had to hold our hands all the time so we wouldn't get hurt. That's pretty stupid, man.

The problem is, that to maximize the audience the game has to cater both to Limsa AFKers and Ultimate raiders. So all "casual" content is easy, boring and quick.

[ty_taurus]

I really do not care about players who have a negative amount of interest in the actual combat of the game and just want rewards. The games difficult is not and has never been defined by the complexity of the jobs—rather, it is defined by the lack of expectations set by the content itself, which barely checks if you’re breathing or not.

Kneecapping job design time and time again because some percentage of players couldn’t care less whether their job was literally 1 button is insulting. It doesn’t matter to them. It didn’t matter to them in ARR, HW, or SB, why does it magically matter now?

[Colt47]

I really do not care about players who have a negative amount of interest in the actual combat of the game and just want rewards. The games difficult is not and has never been defined by the complexity of the jobs—rather, it is defined by the lack of expectations set by the content itself, which barely checks if you’re breathing or not.

Kneecapping job design time and time again because some percentage of players couldn’t care less whether their job was literally 1 button is insulting. It doesn’t matter to them. It didn’t matter to them in ARR, HW, or SB, why does it magically matter now?

I don't think it is so simple as people just want rewards, because getting items is not really what makes something worthwhile as much as the journey to get the reward. Yoshi P. believes that players just want rewards immediately which is overlooking the value of the journey. This is unfortunately, a common problem when dealing with MMOs because by design they want people playing longer so they pay more money.

The first half of the problem is that the rewards they offer are often out of sight and out of mind. Orchestrions, housing items, and even outdoor housing items, tend to be unimpressive rewards because they never are available readily to display, so they should be relatively trivial to acquire. Dyable armor is also kind of a trivial reward because most of the aesthetic is determined by the base armor set, and on top of which dying armor is a basic customization system that should be available on all armors anyway.

So that leaves minions, mounts, and higher gear level items as the primary "long term" rewards, which pushes things in an aggressive performance related environment. What they are missing are the kind of special flare that games such as Path of Exile have on offer like special cosmetic glow effects, travel effects, weapon effects, etc, that people could earn from doing various things and have more long lasting value, thus making the tougher journey to acquire them worthwhile.

In the end the game is what the developers make, they just don't always know what they are making when they make specific choices like this. Glamour items they've added like the umbrellas and cosmetic wings are probably the start to these special flare items, but they got to work in all environments and right now they don't. They also need ways to turn them on and off just like weapon effects.

[ty_taurus]

You know what rewards I’d grind for? More attack spells on my healer. That something that will get me grinding Criterion. You want me to make my island sanctuary level? Give me another GCD attack on Sage.

[Colt47]

You know what rewards I’d grind for? More attack spells on my healer. That something that will get me grinding Criterion. You want me to make my island sanctuary level? Give me another GCD attack on Sage.

They already went on record saying healers are where they are going to be staying, for good or ill. Healer is going to be the dog of FFXIV both early and late game it seems. Albeit, at least at end game they got enough spells to work with for healing to keep it from going into complete boredom, but an extra attack on healer doesn't sound like it is coming. Not unless it turns into something like the Pneuma laser from Sage. The over all direction with the job design is more indicative of the complete lack of resources they have to support good interactive gameplay. We're basically a step or two above genshin impact levels of complexity.

[iVolke]

I don't think it is so simple as people just want rewards, because getting items is not really what makes something worthwhile as much as the journey to get the reward.

Yet so many people defend the current relic design of teleporting to an vendor, buying 3 materials, turning them in, watching a cutscene, then receiving lore-wise a super special weapon that is really hard to make. Endwalker has completely removed the journey and there are people cheering for it.

[Colt47]

Yet so many people defend the current relic design of teleporting to an vendor, buying 3 materials, turning them in, watching a cutscene, then receiving lore-wise a super special weapon that is really hard to make. Endwalker has completely removed the journey and there are people cheering for it.

I don't like the way they stagger relic releases in general and I totally understand the reasoning that some people might like the current relic grind. The problem is their content design keeps pushing everyone towards having to do savage when the gear level should be achievable outside of savage at the exact same point savage releases. People should be doing savage for the challenge of completing it, not for getting geared up to be BIS, but the old design motto seems to keep burning with this team. The only reason they did this with gear level is because they lack any good customization rewards for beating savage. They literally stapled dyable raid armor as a savage reward: The very basic system we should have on all armor regardless of the situation. It is unbelievably stupid that they have not moved on from this.

But from what we have seen so far this expansion... they got problems implementing full features. Glamour items like wings couldn't even be used in combat for a long while and even though they can be used now, we can't use them in instances. The portrait system is a walking alpha test that is barely at beta stage, given that we have to constantly reapply the portrait with so much as a change in a ring slot item and it had to go through a second pass just to deal with people using positioning to make rather "creative" portraits to show to people. New races being released with a complete lack of support for helmets that has to be gradually introduced over time is another example but probably not as bad as the glamour and portraits. And then we got the DC travel which felt like a rather big social experiment, given the lack of almost all available content outside core content when one is on a different DC, let alone a different world on the same DC.

Again, we don't know what trials the developers are having to deal with, just these points are out there and it shows that they must have some rather considerable challenges going on.

[CelestiCer]

I really do not care about players who have a negative amount of interest in the actual combat of the game and just want rewards. The games difficult is not and has never been defined by the complexity of the jobs—rather, it is defined by the lack of expectations set by the content itself, which barely checks if you’re breathing or not.

Kneecapping job design time and time again because some percentage of players couldn’t care less whether their job was literally 1 button is insulting. It doesn’t matter to them. It didn’t matter to them in ARR, HW, or SB, why does it magically matter now?

The fetishization players have towards turning XIV into a One-Button-Bashing-Experience is something I'll never understand... and there are players that are in full support of it, as long as the content lore and story isn't lackluster enough to complain about, then players truly don't care how much more simplified Jobs can get or shouldn't be. Players complaining more about Krile being the right Scion for Pictomancer or Wuk Lamat's voice acting... I can believe it yay which is really sad...

Or that they couldn't show us in-game which Orch rolls/Minions/Mounts we had already collected

until a plugin came out which did exactly that, made SE look very foolish, and suddenly we had the same functionality added to the game, it miraculously changed from 'can't be done' to 'well actually it could be done the whole time, we just didn't'

Yoshi-P seems to undersell a lot on what's possible to make sure they never overpromise and fail to deliver.

[Oizen]

The fetishization players have towards turning XIV into a One-Button-Bashing-Experience is something I'll never understand... and there are players that are in full support of it, as long as the content lore and story isn't lackluster enough to complain about, then players truly don't care how much more simplified Jobs can get or shouldn't be. Players complaining more about Krile being the right Scion for Pictomancer or Wuk Lamat's voice acting... I can believe it yay which is really sad...

Here's my 2 cents about that.

No one will ever say "Bro you gotta try this game, its good cause the controls are so complex!". Its just not going to happen, its not what makes a game good. The best games tend to have simple controls and their complexity come from game play mechanics. To me, almost all of the complexity of FFXIV has been stripped out, and it's all kinda mindless right now. I'd like to see that change more on a mechanical level rather than the buttons you press in sequence over the course of 10 minutes.

If the complexity of this game is resting solely on pressing 123 over 111, its too late for us. I functionally see very little difference between the two.

[Solakor]

Here's my 2 cents about that.

No one will ever say "Bro you gotta try this game, its good cause the controls are so complex!". Its just not going to happen, its not what makes a game good. The best games tend to have simple controls and their complexity come from game play mechanics. To me, almost all of the complexity of FFXIV has been stripped out, and it's all kinda mindless right now. I'd like to see that change more on a mechanical level rather than the buttons you press in sequence over the course of 10 minutes.

If the complexity of this game is resting solely on pressing 123 over 111, its too late for us. I functionally see very little difference between the two.

This game had a distinctive class gameplay. It has been steadily stripped out. If we were at HW or SB i would say absolutely play this game and the class gameplay feels fantastic. Now it's a shadow of what it was.
Why does this game need to be closer to some other games when it had it's own flare and it worked extremely well before? If you want to play like wow then go play wow or whatever else combat system you liked. But no. Ppl cry like the bi***es they are and want the game to be braindead and load everything to the encounters. Well guess what, you made the game worse on every level because no matter what kinda encounter you make, if the underlying system is flawed, it will still feel ass.