Disappointed With XIV Direction

[Kuroka]

I started playing here because of the MSQ, then I started with PvP because it was a nice way to pass the time.
I never skipped Cutscenes. Everything seemed fine until Endwalker, but then a big shift happened.
Yoshi P. and almost the whole Team only had Final Fantasy 16 in mind and spent most of their time working on it.
Final Fantasy 14 fell by the wayside. The time between patches got longer, the Content got less and less, the MSQ got worse and worse.

This so much. People will insist im just burned out, but no, i just dont get much, its less and less substance... not even two dungeons anymore. Every time its "we can give you A or B" while what we need and want is A B and C.

While some things are nice and ill always accept story will be a matter of taste as well, it just feels like gettin less and less, like the recipe for the special sauce got changed and just doesnt taste as well...

Why rush to end a 10-year-old story by eliminating most of it behind the scenes?
Why pack 2 Expansions into one and hope for the best?
Who says that an Expansion can only have a maximum of 120-150 quests in a MSQ? Who says how much Content there can be in an expansion?

Yeah that so much, We travel to other shards, space... yet it feels like 90 of our continent is unknown to us...

[Jeeqbit]

Everything seemed fine until Endwalker, but then a big shift happened.
Yoshi P. and almost the whole Team only had Final Fantasy 16 in mind and spent most of their time working on it.
Final Fantasy 14 fell by the wayside.

There's just one problem with all that. They started working on FF16 during Heavensward patches. So they have been working on it the whole time and moving staff over; you just didn't notice. I will also point out that FF16 is done with (and has been for ages beside minor stuff like porting it and small addons), yet the content cycle has not changed much. The actual truth is it has nothing to do with FF16. It's just their decision-making.

The time between patches got longer, the Content got less and less, the MSQ got worse and worse.

The first point is objectively true. The second point is objectively untrue. The third point is ultimately an opinion but seems to be shared by many.

We're now at 7.1, where there are a total of 7 Quests in the MSQ, 1 Dungeon, 1 bit of a new Raid with 4 Quests.

Exactly the same as 6.1, 5.1 and 4.1.

This Raid, is like the Raid before just a Fan service.

Ivalice was fan service. Nier was fan service. The Twelve is sort of fan service, but arguably just clarifying lore like the ARR and HW alliance raids. FF11 is fan service. They make them fan service quite a lot overall.

Most players and even I can't understand where this came from, because there was absolutely no backstory and both Raid's don't fit into this world at all.

Just like Omega and Nier. They're explaining it by saying it's from the other shards. We're on the brink of visiting other shards often (13th, 1st, 9th), so it sort of makes sense to do it now.

I suspect their reason for doing it now is because the people who remember FF11 will likely be retiring at some point and they have to do it now or never is my guess. Doing this also means they upgrade a lot of assets from FF11 which (maybe?) could be ported to FF11 to give it a bit of an upgrade, giving the work a dual purpose. That remains to be seen, but it could be their logic.

a Chaos Raid with 1 Layout, 1 Boss and we've already had this boss twice before.
Then there's 1 Trial with a Boss that we've only had a short time before. Not to mention Byakko, who isn't new either. Oh yes, and because it's so nice to bring back everything old, Ryne and Gaia can't be missed.

It's fine that you don't like their formula, but this has always been their formula and isn't a "recent" Endwalker change like you are painting it as. Of the things you listed there, we didn't used to have a Chaos Raid or Unreal. If you go back to Heavensward we didn't even have Ultimate.

This super modern doesn't fit into any of the Areas in our World. We only have one tiny Area where some of this Modern Glamour fits and that is Solution 9.

I agree this whole theme isn't really hitting for me personally. They tried something and it just didn't land too well in a fantasy game.

As for PvP when you consider that Astragalos and Borderland Ruins have been 'temporarily' disabled for years, we have lost more PvP content than we've gained.

The entirety of Rival Wings didn't used to exist and Onsal Hakair didn't used to exist, so we still have a net gain. I think they are just building on Crystalline Conflict at the moment. We have been getting regular new maps for Crystalline Conflict since Endwalker release. Maybe at some point they will shift that focus to the other gameplay modes.

[Rehayem]

The entirety of Rival Wings didn't used to exist and Onsal Hakair didn't used to exist, so we still have a net gain. I think they are just building on Crystalline Conflict at the moment. We have been getting regular new maps for Crystalline Conflict since Endwalker release. Maybe at some point they will shift that focus to the other gameplay modes.

Unfortunately, their "attempt" at fixing PvP has made it currently worse due to animation lock and delays. It's as high as 2 seconds on some skills and CC happens at the end of said animation (i.e: Gravity 2 on AST). Sometimes some things shouldn't be fixed if they aren't broken. They wanted to fix WAR's Primal Rend stun happening before the animation finished, but in return they made everything else laggy, delayed and less snappy. PvP this patch got no new goodies except Series 7 nor a way to spend Trophies on anything.

[Kuroka]

The entirety of Rival Wings didn't used to exist and Onsal Hakair didn't used to exist, so we still have a net gain. I think they are just building on Crystalline Conflict at the moment. We have been getting regular new maps for Crystalline Conflict since Endwalker release. Maybe at some point they will shift that focus to the other gameplay modes.

Yet since they made it we got ONE more Rival wings arena, with the first one being deactivated for YEARS. YEARS! There should be a new pvp mode/Arena every other patch, there should be a PVP Team thats main task is making more PVP stuff - and i say that as someone whos not heavily into pvp.

I feel like PvP arenas are fine being "the same but with a different kind of paint" so its not that monotonous - CC did that very well.

[Ardeth]

I'm honestly kinda done.

I couldn't finish the new AR raid. It was just too much flash and too fast for me.

I keep getting less and less as a player. I don't know when I will quit for good, but if it keeps going like this, it will be soon. Over 11 years down the drain.

But it's how it is. I can't change anything as a player, but if I pay them or not. But it's getting harder and harder to justify it.

To qoute J.R.R. Tolkien

"I feel I need a holiday, a very long holiday, as I have told you before. Probably a permanent holiday: I don't expect I shall return. in fact, I don't mean to, and I have made all arrangements....

I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something."

[TBerry]

There is less salt in the Lochs.

[Roda]

Today my allied society content lasted 2 whole minutes.
The only buttons I pushed was right click (steering, make sparkly go away), left click (accept quest, advance confirmation text, turn in quest), and W.

Like, there's respecting my time, and then there's disrespecting my sub time...

[Rueby]

I resonate with this as someone who has done everything there is to do in the game and watched my friend circle dwindle away. I log in and I alt tab and watch youtube until my queue pops, rush the dungeon and go out to do it again.

PVP isn't enjoyable because it's just a treadmill for Series Level, 3 years now and they didn't add anything worthwhile to spend trophy crystals on. It's just a FOMO series, they could've added the old series stuff for people to buy, at least there'd be something for the new people to do (and I say this as someone who had done every single series on multiple chars since the first...)

There's nothing...open world is dead...
Dungeons are linear tubes (and in DT now eyestrain is added to the mix)
My DC's PF is dead and I've stopped doing extremes/unreal because of it

Mix it with subpar MSQ, weird graphical changes and design choices...and honestly DT is the worst expansion for me for eyestrain alone.

I keep hoping they won't ruin it further but they keep inventing ways to make things worse and doing changes no one asked for or want.

Before DT I was enjoying Eureka alot...I hated bozja on the other hand due to the lack of community feel and I was trapped on my own in a zone with no one to help me...

[Luluya]

As for PvP when you consider that Astragalos and Borderland Ruins have been 'temporarily' disabled for years, we have lost more PvP content than we've gained.

Even the 7.1 patch did nothing to remedy this, not to mention we don't have any new rewards to purchase with trophy crystals and wolf marks.

[Quuoooote]

I don't want to come off as completely doomer about it, but it seems clear to me that XIV is effectively entering its maintenance mode. People seem to be expecting some sort of signpost or announcement, maybe even an expansion with heavily reduced content to mark the beginning of a hypothetical maintenance era, but the reality is that easing the players into it like boiling frogs is better for business.

A forward-thinking development team wouldn't be going back to ARR to future-proof their game with Duty Support, so that players looking to experience the story can still progress through the game even when queues are dead. Or expending so many resources to freshen up all the old visuals for new players, with minimal benefit for existing players that are metaphorically bleeding out at endgame. Granted, I do not think these changes and additions to the game are bad in a vacuum, but it does give us insight into SE's priorities when existing, long-time players are practically begging for more content and the development time and energy goes to ten-year old, optional dungeons instead so that NPCs can run them. The development team is clearly more interested in chasing churn rates, and my tinfoil hat tells me that may also play a role in job design being so smoothed-out. It's much easier to keep the new players invested when they have zero pain points in their gameplay; the older players will just suck it up and take it. Not to mention the fact that simplified rotations make it much easier to maintain jobs/balance with minimal effort on the development team's part.

As an aside, I hope people in general are able to move past this "casual vs. hardcore" dichotomy to recognize that content is being stretched thin for everyone, and infighting over who has it better is reductive. At this point in the game's lifespan Savage tiers are nearly a full year apart. The new Ultimate is releasing five whole months after the Savage tier. Raiding content innately has more longevity than casual content and has an advantage in that sense, but the cadence of content still leaves an unacceptable amount of dead time. We need field content, we need relics (with actual grind attached), we need something that can tide over the entire general playerbase if we're all going to be stuck in the same boat waiting for months until the next patch.