The lodestone is just a store front now

[Hypnotic13371337]

FF14 Jewelry Available now!, Buy our art book!, OST is here, buy it!, Optional items added to mogstation!, Heres our vinyl set for you to buy!, dont forget the tabletop game too!

Meanwhile, for actual ff14 news: Live letter with the website for the patch getting updated with the new info, Dont forget PVP season resets with the patch, a post announcing the patch website launching, a post telling you that you can find communities on the lodestone now, a post telling us WHEN the live letter is....

Most of the game related updates are just about the same topic over and over again so it doesent look like they are just using it as a front for more stuff for you to buy.

How about posting some interviews with devs up on there instead of 3 live letter posts that they could just edit with the new info, same for the special website posts.

Or just add a "Merch" tab for all the news :V

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

It’s a general news site. This is pretty on par for how it’s been since like 2015

[Jeeqbit]

The lodestone does advertise what the game is doing, including all seasonal events, crossovers, merch, official live streams, statements from Yoshi-P, maintenance, patches and live letters. Which is normal for MMORPGs. It's true they don't normally post interviews although they did one time link to a few. It has several tabs, so you can in fact filter it like you wanted.

The lodestone is a lot more than that though. It has a database of items, quests, duties, commands and other basic things. It has a game manual, a glossary, job guides, UI guides with FAQs for new players, a new player start guide with a youtube playlist, guides for specific game systems such as PvP and the Gold Saucer, PvP and DD rankings, a character search with character data, a linkshell/CWLS search, an FC search, a community finder to just see actually active FCs, an event calendar (you can create events requiring a party on there such a PUGs or statics), blogs, activity logs of people you have a connection with, an archive of patch notes and so on.

Needless to say, English speakers ignore 99% of the lodestone features or don't even check the lodestone at all, so all of that may as well not exist. I am just saying that it does, in fact, exist.

[Greyhawk]

What would you expect when they have cornered themselves into content drought? They need to supplement revenue for the lack of creativity management and dry content. This has turned into such a rinse repeat cycle of game style, and it now takes them 4-1/2 months to copy and paste the mechanics coding.

[Calysto]

Where are the teasers ? hints ? roadmaps ? things that actual players care about ?

We do get notices for the events (that may take more works than the events themselves)

The LLs are nothing much, and we have to wait weeks for an official forum summary that the community can do in real time ?

Merch / collabs are getting weirder and greedier now
-Erenvile is a fan favorite ? let's put the minion behind unrelated merch
-instant paid crossover gear ? it sure will promote our gacha game with the whales, our core demographic
-camping gears ? take a break from the game, but not too long or a tent will be the only house you can get

[Jeeqbit]

Where are the teasers ? hints ? roadmaps ?

They setup special dedicated websites and link to them on the lodestone. Here https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/dawntrail/patch_7_1

It includes teasers, hints and a roadmap for 7.1 content.

We do get notices for the events (that may take more works than the events themselves)

Unlikely especially as it involves lots of cutscene coding (ie. camera angles and switching), reward model creation and texturing and localization to different languages.

The LLs are nothing much, and we have to wait weeks for an official forum summary that the community can do in real time ?

Of course it's an afterthought for them and not such a priority over other things they do. From what I recall, they struggle to hire translators to the point one of them was posting on twitter trying to get people interested.

Merch / collabs are getting weirder and greedier now

Bigger game = more people interested in doing collabs with it. But it's true they were hiring a lot for people to manage such collabs a while ago, so this is the logical result of that. Yoshi-P likes if both companies get something out of it (like how Fall Guys wanted to use FFXIV characters but originally didn't offer their IP to SE, so SE requested it for a new kind of content for FFXIV).

[Kakurady]

The Lodestone is a full-featured social network. People can post blogs, player-run events, group recruitments. There is a "wall" on your profile for latest updates. There is also a database where people can leave comments on every quest and item in the game.

The blog and events functions are well-used by Japanese-speaking players, but seems seldom used in other languages. The database, on the other hand, doesn't seem to get many posts in any language...

[AnimaAnimus]

We do get notices for the events (that may take more works than the events themselves)

Unless they are using AI to make them, which wouldn't surprise me in the least at this point. All of DT feels like it was AI generated.

Welcome to the world of tomorrow.

[Rolder50]

I mean, FF14 development is suuuper slow, so there usually isn't anything to post about. Might as well toss some ads in.

[Jeeqbit]

Unless they are using AI to make them, which wouldn't surprise me in the least at this point. All of DT feels like it was AI generated.

Well it was meant to be a story about AI and how we may be faced with such a situation where we require so much power for AI versions of people that died that we have to shut them down. Backing this up is how companies are having to invest heavily in nuclear power asap to power AI. If we had a chatbot version of every person that used to live, eventually the earth might not have the resources for it, but I've not really done the maths here.