Incremental Steps Towards Something New: What Should Be Gradually Prototyped?

[Musashidon]

while it's not necessarily experimental content, as something new and innovative i feel like expanding on the GC via FC's would be cool and a good way to do it without trying to figure out content going forward with squads and other GC specific ish stuff.

add in FC alliances in game wise if players all have squads (lore wise) and you have multiple fc's while you may not be the actual leader of a FC or the alliance the game could just say you are as a way to not worry about specifics and add content for fc's/ fc alliances it does have to require many players or even players in the same said alliance/fc this way people can participate without having to worry about finding a fitting specific group which can be challenging as its easier to not get along with someone than it is to.

with the addition they increase the obtainable GC rank 3 to the high commander as a start to see how well liked it is, and add FC content attached to GC be it worked through individual players GC/FC's/or Alliances, course alliance could not be attached to a specific at all since it would be weird for each FC to be attached to a GC then the whole alliance attached to completely different one but thats just a minor point.

this is just an idea to have a way to add content to FC like they tried with diadem but it failed and a few of the reasons was at first it required just your FC and a FC airship which wasn't good the second is the content was never great and rewards mediocre so i believe if we start out with a completely open idea of players can just participate when they want and even with friends of other fc's and no forced attached your specific fc/group it will have the chance of becoming popular.

i know the game could use some more community based content and at least a start/reason to have a FC besides buffs and a FC chat would help.

edit some actual content idea's for FC/GC content.

some basics that isnt super new but would be nice.

FC/alliance quests be it daily/weekly/monthly just something to hop on and do nothing super needy but something to be added that would feel like something a FC can work towards like dungeons run/leves completed/turn in done ect. nothing out of the way or maybe something alittle out of the way if someone more creative can think of something cool.

also maybe fc specific maps to get something needed to upgrade alliances once again nothing super special maybe put some rewards behind these that can only be obtained through this once again nothing crazy but something to get people to try it.

fc/alliance hunts waaay in the past SE wanted to do something with fc primal hunting/summoning but instead of that we can do just fc hunts they could be done some how through it with an item or a quest that can be done some how. could always just attach it to normal hunts but that sounds like it would only cause more problems if its done on anything higher than B rank for obvious reasons.

something dumb but could always take one of the pvp maps and rework it to have an alliance pvp zone it could work like frontlines but instead of queing for it, two fc's could iniate a que/match that you would just have pre made groups already done that could que right in.

this is just some thought with like 5 minutes of pre thought. but i say some more content for FC's would be nice i guess technically they wouldnt need to attach any of it to GC but i feel making a lore reason to attach adventurers/ adventurer FC's to GC would be a plus.

lastly the add a GC to all the major area's ishgard/kugane/thavnair/sharlyan/tural. (this one is my crazy too much work not worth doing at all suggestion but i would like) they removed any and all GC pvp requirments so it would hurt pvp and they could always add them into pvp later that way people could have more choices in GC.

[Catwho]

Transition the Amour over to something more like the WoW Transmog system.

Once you unlock the item, it's automatically marked as "done" like it was a minion, and you can equip it forever and ever going forward.

There's a lot of relic items in particular I had 3-4 expansions ago, but because I never bothered to chuck them into the armoire, they're something I'll have to obtain again if I want to wear them again. Lame!

In a perfect world this would apply to the Glamour Dresser too, but since we're talking about incremental changes, I think the Armoir gear sets are the more logical place to start, since it already stores seasonal items.

[Connor]

Using content like ‘Eureka 7.0 version’ or ‘Criterion dungeon #100’ would be the best bet for these kinds of experimentations, I think. Maybe having them attempt to give players an even wider scope and selection of ‘additional abilities’ (or w/e they call them this time lol) could give them an opportunity to try out giving players more varied and interesting support/non-dps spells and abilities.

I think it’d be cool if they tried gradually moving party support from being entirely passive and fixed to something that’s actively managed by the player and not the 120-sec timer. I mean, they could ofc keep certain ‘big raid buffs’ on the 120-sec timer so it’s not a complete mega change.
Like if healers stole ‘Protect’ and ‘Bravery’ from Bozja and put it in their role skills if it worked lol. Then they could gradually extend that to additional support abilities like Warden’s Paean, Curing Waltz, Lux Solaris, etc. Maybe they could even bring back things like MP restoration skills.
I mean, none of those skills outside of Bravery even have any effect on dps, so it probably wouldn’t be too game/breaking, especially if they developed it gradually.

Additionally if they were going to incremental gameplay changes then making minor adjustments to healer oGCD/GCD balance could make healer gcds actually worth using outside of like day 1 ultimates (exaggerating, a little lol). Making small adjustments over time to rebalance how much they use gcds would mean they could make it more equal without having to ‘pull the rug out’ from under new players and causing them all to destroy the world or w/e lol. But then, it’s a bit more difficult for that kind of things to be ‘played around with’ when developing content (I’d imagine) too, so it’s harder to say like ‘maybe they could use X content for this’.

That said, there’s also extremely little in the way of ‘healer content’ in and of itself. Like when Estinian showed up and done a shield in Dragon’s Aery and you had to keep him alive during it. It’d be nice if general content could have ‘things that are meant for the healer to handle’, and not just ‘die and let tank solo’ lol

[Balmung_Griffin]

Transition the Amour over to something more like the WoW Transmog system.

Once you unlock the item, it's automatically marked as "done" like it was a minion, and you can equip it forever and ever going forward.

There's a lot of relic items in particular I had 3-4 expansions ago, but because I never bothered to chuck them into the armoire, they're something I'll have to obtain again if I want to wear them again. Lame!

And you know what's more infuriating?
This info about what relic weapon you've unlocked and what stage is already in place in game, because you can buy the Replicas that use this same info.

Crazy, I swear you just opened my eyes. Somehow, until now, I genuinely never realized that this game has no beta testing of anything whatsoever, when every other MMO I know does.

And it's not only huge MMOs like WoW that do it. LOTRO is a small, ancient, niche MMO and even they have a test server where they roll out new features/instances/class changes/etc before they actually go live with them. It makes a HUGE difference. It cannot be overstated just how important this kind of stuff is. It can save the devs so much time and a lot of headache that they go through when they release yet another content flop. Like you say, many of the critical issues become so obvious if you actually let the players try it for even a short amount of time.

They'd never change anything like that at this point though. This feedback will also never get "monitored" along with 99% of all other feedback.

Do you know what's even crazier, they wouldn't even have to create test realms, because 90% of FFXIV content is instanced anyway.
One example is Island Sanctuary, they can create any rule inside that instance, and you just hop out and nowhere inside the regular game you can get any info of that specific instance unless you enter it again.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Healers being able to contribute to fights in a meaningful way.

[Valence]

- Shifting normal Criterion away from ex difficulty and focusing on the difficulty level of their add phases, which are in my opinion perfectly approachable for the midcore audience the mod was supposed to reach, and could make for a form of "dailies" localized in time and patch schedule. But this would require to create 2 different versions of each boss for mechanics, so more resources and production time.

- Adding more variations in casual dungeons without necessarily breaking the general formula outright (time for completion, etc). Variations could entail: alternative paths (randomly chosen), more rng in trash, more rng in boss scripting, amount of bosses (brayflox?), elevator/train sections could be made use of more creatively as well, etc.

[PyurBlue]

An experimental area that tries to distance itself from scripted gameplay would be exciting to see. I'd like it to fit around normal class design as well, so no additions like duty actions or lost actions. Combat would be similar to what we're used to except that enemies would be less predictable and also react to what happens in the fight. A boss enemy could have some hidden attack resources and spend them in different ways each time it's encountered and if the party enters a state with low HP the boss could become more willing to spend resources on damage. That has the potential to create more demanding healing situations without resorting to instant death mechanics. Think of mini soft enrages that happen through out the fight if the right conditions are met. Tanks could also be given more opportunities to defend the party by being able to interfere with enemy attacks through their own abilities (Low Blow, Interject, etc). The effects of these abilities should be tuned to be less binary. Stun could be turned into a slow effect or modify the range of AoE attacks instead of completely incapacitating something.

Such an area would be a great place to test ideas for mid level difficulty that the game is missing and offer something different from scripted Extreme and Savage fights.

[Zaniel]

They need to start moving back away from the current dungeon design. I know all the reasons but they went too far, 2 packs -> wall -> boss -> 2 packs -> wall -> boss is getting WAAAAAAAAY too routine. They sort of tried to do it a bit in Criterion but they need to start having more diverse dungeons, just add some Lost Ark style flavour of randomisation or choices.

[Hallarem]

Incrementally adding more budget and staff into the game that earns them the most to secure it for the future, instead of tossing their money into other projects.

[Shivalah]

You know what we really need? Hairstyles linked to glamour plates! I’m an ingame coplay cat and I suffer, because I can’t have blue Hair for Aqua (KoNoSuBa), Orange for Futaba (Persona 5) and so on. It’s always my Aerith brown.