Thread: What would casual gamers like to see with regard to 'battle' content?

Me:
I'd like them to 'expect' players to be better by the time they have done 'ARR & HW & SB & ShB & EW, assume they have done most of its content and are experienced. This means:

• All instances (must include dungeons) your play must have consequences for your character. just for example, if neither the healer nor the tank can do any of the mechanics, your going to have to pull again, unless there is another role able to carry 'unusually' well. By all means make the mechanics easy to learn, easy to do, but there will be some that kill on every boss and for the 'vast' majority of the expansion, not only if everyone is min Ilvl.
• increase the speed. Just a little. Increase the speed. (Extreme shouldn't be a total shock. You could actually put a Chaotic speed hand mechanic in, just kill one person not your healer + tank) Put a chaotic speed suck or pushback (just don't kill everyone or start doing it telegraphed random mixed with memory)
• put a memory test mechanics in. Just slow it down. 1 per expansion will do even.
• do more un orange telegraphed, look at boss mechanics 'you've got to teach that before Extreemes' and its got to kill! (or people aren't going to notice) Make those 'really' slow, but make them count.
• Alliances shouldn't ever be as easy as Void Ark, shouldn't ever be as easy as Jeuno (Jeuno can be easy to carry, but it doesn't even KO either) . Rabanastre/Dunscaith should now be your stating point. Your expecting people to be experienced now. Thalaia was unacceptably easy for a final raid (repeat mechanics should have been hitting REALLY hard to punish you for 'still' not knowing after Aglaia and Euph, because by and large people did know them and it was a cakewalk). Again if you are training people "juuuuust a little", it not going to be as much of a problem.

Dungeons used to have to be easy, people didn't hit end game and have 500 hours of experience. You don't have to do that anymore.

Use the core content you are already doing. Get people from 'casual' to Extreme.
Extreme can be casual, you can prog it blind, if you are more patient than the average PF expectation.

• I recommend marketing it to casual by saying, "if you clear each Extreme just once, we'll now be giving you an extra new mount at the end of the expansion. We will be adding a second token per instance. Youll need 30 of each. Do it while its high end and we'll give you 30 for clearing once (not 15! ALL 30), do it while its expansion but not high end well give you 10, after expansion well give you 1". A mount that is a bit cool not just a recolour.
• people will already be less likely to be shocked and run screaming because you've made instances more challenging above, you've 'trained' them at least a little (your not training them at all so far. Forget new novice, wrong kind of training. That's just basic Ed)
• We are going to improve PF culture. We are adding prog point flags to the instance. You'll get 1 of the current game's totem for reaching P2, total of 3 for reaching P3, total of 6 for clearing 'Provided the party votes to agree to leave' if there is an abandon, no rewards. If don't want to stay for a P3 party where just 1 person keeps wiping P1, *FROM NOW ON ITS GOING TO BE TOUGH! NO YOU DONT GET TO BE TOXIC if you want rewards just for prog*
• BUT ITS NOT GOING TO BE THAT TOUGH, because we are scaling back the totems to 80 for example. We calculate you are not going to spend more time when all is said and done.
• We will be adding a new PF requirement where you have to have some/any type of item in your inventory, configured by PF leader/poster. We will be giving you special untradeable inventory items for reaching a prog flag. Don't lose it or you'll not be able to prove you reached it and will have to re prog. 'game will check your inventory for <batwing>'.

Again get people into high end.

• delay just a bit. Just two. Give people 2 weeks for MSQ to 'enjoy' it. 2 Weeks to farm Normal. 2 Weeks to prog Extreme (they wont be done if they are new). Then release saavage.
• After Savage is out, Extremes should provide uncapped raid gear equivalent to crafted, but which you can't pentameld.

Ideally MARKET 'non' savage criterion better.

• Have it issue a currency that you can use to also buy that Extremes non Penta gear. Do any criterion you want.

Savage criterion, market it better. Just offer a title, and an almost ultimat sshiny weapon. Make people aim for it. I don't believe weapons are expensive to develop, unless you've got some thing about outsourcing. In which case, you've got a choice to make about if this game is going to survive.

An open world that actually has meaning outside of gathering and poorly/outdated designed hunts, and isn't thrown to the wayside after story. Open world should have meaning.

There needs to be repeatable content to engage with, that isn't just the same artificially extended longevity of "Complete 2000 S-Ranks" or "Go with frontlines 3,000 times", or "Do 10,000 levequests". Bozja and Eureka are great examples of repeatable content, as is Deep Dungeons to a lesser degree.

Normal Mode content feels like a meaningless afterthought that is only necessary through story. There's no reason that normal mode gear should be invalidated in the same patch it is released. Normal raid gear should have a small edge over crafted, or have something added to it later on that enables players to augment it, from, say 710 to 720 or 725. It has been well over a decade since this game has actually given a lot of people a reason to actually do normal modes, especially with how affordable crafted is. It worked in HW when you were still paying 900K - 1.5Mln per piece. Not so much when it is 75-230K. It's the same ordeal with Jeuno.. Why am I going to bother doing it more than once when I will already have plenty of the uncapped tomes to fully augment crafted gear from 710 to 720 anyway. Obviously substats does mean there would be an optimization factor, but for the most part players are just going to go with the highest item level available to them, and when you compare inexpensive crafted gear with something locked behind a weekly loot, the answer becomes very, very obvious.

Way too much depth and excitement has been erased from this game, crafting is a pathetic husk of what it once was. If you wanted to craft, this is something that could keep you occupied for very long periods of time, it was exciting, and it encouraged actually doing other content, it gave people leeway to optimize things like a concealed node window, it encouraged people, everyone to actually engage with Grand Company since they were necessary for crafting and become a lucrative source of Gil, even for the most casual of players. These days if I want to craft it's just exciting for the first day, then it's a miserable experience. Expert recipes? Oh what joy, where the vast majority of your success is determined by what buffs you get and not necessarily how well you actually executed the craft. Sure, they are challenging and can be engaging, but after a certain point it's a miserable and pathetic experience because the amount of control over the outcome you have is just weighted as much to ridiculous buffs like Pliant and Centered not turning your obnoxiously 5 rapid synths needed into a complete and utter masquerade. Thanks for the courtesy token of experts as a result of your completely gutting the crafting system. Know what would've made this fun? If they didn't make the mistake of erasing WWYW, this would allow you to combat RNG in creative ways, it would allow you to craft in a creative way. Of course, this is my own personal opinion.

Devs need to stop making the mistake that not going into raiding means that you do not have any interest in being remotely challenged whatsoever, or that you do not thrive for at least a glimmer of resistance.. Like, you can hate raiding, but still be interested in being challenged, or meeting resistance. This is what made high floor deep dungeons extremely fun, and even when doing it solo.. Now it's just the same downtrodden formula. Can't believe we're 3 iterations into this content and we still don't have something equivalent to Logograms and Lost Actions to enhance gameplay and add some gimmick features.

I quite enjoyed the "hard" version of dungeons in ARR. I assume some are easier to make than one from scratch because of asset redundancy. Repeating that for other expansions with ilvl scaling to make them genuinely more challenging than MSQ content would be a helpful addition IMO.

And if we're talking about all battle content, there is so much room for improvement/expansion in PvP.

Okay, I am super casual. I never had much interest in raiding and I also dislike Dawntrail so not really doing any progression at all this expansion. I still do old content though. Mainly play WAR. I respect and love to watch other players do the hardest content though!

Zones like Eureka and Bozja are fun, Frontlines PVP is really fun for me so I wish they had better game modes on the large-scale side of things and more maps. So pretty much "zones" that allow me to just hop in and grind with other players are fun in my opinion, allowing me to AFK whenever I need too and not waste other peoples time. If they could somehow simulate a giant on-going warzone that mixed PVE and PVP together I'd have a blast, and add in gear somehow that'd be great. And to clarify it doesn't have to be 100% PVP... think a circle of PVE and in the center is a bit of PVP would be fine also.

Personally I hope FFXIV goes back to their roots of how ARR was and focus more on the alliances and their lore as well. Let Limsa Lominsa have pirating back on the menu, and Ul'dah being cutthroat traders... and Gridania crying about whatever, heh. Introduce new factions to join besides the big three would be awesome as well like Ishgaard, Garlemald, Ala Mhigo, etc. And then let these factions go into conflict with each other! There is much they can do but they seem so focused on the Scions and saving the world plots. Lore needs to become a a lot more grounded and everything might just follow suit naturally in my opinion, a least in terms of the developers creating new ideas and designs for gameplay.

This is off-topic, but I'd also really like if they continued the stories of the initial classes we choose to become something of a "pure" class. What would happen if our characters continued being a pugilist or marauder, etc and never used the soul crystal? Could add a bunch of new skills and flare to these classes by the time they're max level.

Maybe it's time for a Realm Giga-Reborn. And this time, our characters are no longer the Warrior of Light... but just another person in the world of Final Fantasy.