Disappointed With XIV Direction

[Fuyuqi]

The dev team has fallen into the bad habit of most MMO dev teams of only paying attention to the formula and abandoning old systems. Things i was hopeful would one day be updated but never have been...

I feel like you can already see this happening with newer things like Island Sanctuary as well. It's something that could easily be relevant for multiple expacs just by updating the materia available for purchase to always include the most recent materia like it offered in endwalker, but the continued value of maintaining your island is just going to go down with time... Ofc there will always be glams and mounts for new players to grind for, but it would be so easy to make island sanctuary valuable past the service life of the expac it came out in that the devs just aren't thinking about.

[GinzoKazama]

One thing someone had said was that I am providing complaints but no solutions. While I would happily provide a few thoughts as to how I think would engage people, and will, I would remind people that suggestions are an uphill battle to convince those who think nothing is wrong that something is wrong.

Suggestions I would like to see happen specifically with content:

- Variety of PvP Modes: Right now everything is restricted to Frontlines. There's not even a Rival Wings roulette and queuing for it specifically is always an eternity. More objective based combat as well as smaller scale battles (Rival Wings size) would be better. I will use WoWs Battlegrounds as an example:

- Alterac Valley: Large Scale (Frontline sized) objective based battles to win by fighting NPCs, enemy players and also defeating the final boss. A quasi pve/pvp battle.
- Warsong Gulch: Basic tried and true Capture the Flag battle.
- Arathi Basin: Resource collection by holding nodes. Benefit of dominating other team are quick matches.

The benefits of this kind of variety is everything from the most simplest (CTF) to the more drawn out objective based (Alterac Valley). Ironically, WSG could essentially more 'skill based' whereas AV could end up in deathballs as well. But that's the thing, that's the variety. For AV, you can either deathball the enemy or do the objectives while fighting the enemy or straight up run and gun to the end. It all depends on the group.

FFXIV has nothing like that in terms of PvP. It's a simple objective with no real nuance to it. Deathball/meatgrinders have their places, but that's all it is in FFXIV.

- Carry Content Forward: Make content like Bozja and PotD relevant to the current expansion. Not saying it needs to have NEW content, but what I am saying is a lot of good content has been left languishing for no one to really do. No one is going to do PotD when they could do HoH or Eureka Orthos. Or HoH when they could do Eureka Orthos. At least allow us those avenues to level some jobs in the same way you do OLD dungeons with Roulettes. Treasure maps too would be a great thing to carry forward. No one does the old ones at all.

- Add Mini-games to Gold Saucer: Someone mentioned this and this is a great idea, but there are a lot of mini games that are in the toy box or some even in side quests that aren't even in gold saucer. I'm sick of jump puzzles. Maybe I wanna go snow boarding like in FFXIV or command an RTS game like Fort Condor. There's so many ideas you could put into Gold Saucer but so long as the masses are sated on glamour and mounts there's no real reason to add new rides to the attraction.

I've got a few others, but stuff like that is a start.

Add to it if you think it's constructive or constructive state issues with my suggestions. Can't build a new bridge to better things alone. But XIV is a bridge built with no thought of change in mind.

[Fuyuqi]

- Carry Content Forward: Make content like Bozja and PotD relevant to the current expansion. Not saying it needs to have NEW content, but what I am saying is a lot of good content has been left languishing for no one to really do. No one is going to do PotD when they could do HoH or Eureka Orthos. Or HoH when they could do Eureka Orthos. At least allow us those avenues to level some jobs in the same way you do OLD dungeons with Roulettes. Treasure maps too would be a great thing to carry forward. No one does the old ones at all.

From a raiding perspective, tying best-in-slot gear to stuff like Bozja is a great way to get raiders to do stuff other than traditional hardcore battle content. I know plenty of people who hated feeling 'forced' to do countless hours of bozja for BiS, but it's certainly more engaging than spam-clicking through Hildibrand quests they feel forced to do for 20 minutes and a single one and done trial and grind hunt trains and roulettes for tens of thousands of tomes. It gives you something to progress on every time you log in, and it's active battle content instead of a mindless grind.

Another good way is to just... update old content to give current drops? Such as allowing Bozja to drop current uncapped or capped tomes if you're doing it on a max level job. In patches where new field content isn't available, it'll be a good source of tomes, and players can make progress towards weapons and other old rewards they never got at the same time. And like I said before, updating island sanctuary merchants to sell materia from the current expac would be incredibly easy to do. It's gonna benefit players going through the content for the first time since it'll draw more veteran players in making it more populated, and it'll benefit veteran players too by giving them more choices on how to do their tedious weekly tome grinds and catch up on older content. Players who like doing hunt trains or roulettes for tomes can still do those, and players who still love the older content don't have to sacrifice time they could be using to grind current tomes to play the content they love.

[Fuyuqi]

From a raiding perspective, tying best-in-slot gear to stuff like Bozja is a great way to get raiders to do stuff other than traditional hardcore battle content.

Oops I forgot to add that I said this because Bozja weapons are STILL BiS for ultimates released before EW. Which might contribute a bit to why Bozja is surviving a bit better than Eureka.

Also just after I sent that reply, I thought of two more things.

If they want to do this, SE needs to seriously consider job balance and feel at lower levels. They're improving this recently, by moving PLD gapclose and DRK aoe mit so that they have them at 70 for legacy ultimates, but jobs like RPR and VPR are still gutted below 90 and 100 because they lack crucial parts of their kit. It would also help new player enjoyment since you aren't gonna have to suffer millennia without an aoe attack or get your gauge before you get anything to even spend it on. It would just be an overall improvement to the game to shift certain things in job kits earlier in the leveling process.

Second, improving drop rates on old content like EXs if done synced and maybe even more if done minimum ilvl and echo off. This way it'll give people two options to farm old content and can appeal to the people who already enjoy mindlessly unsyncing and to those who'd rather challenge themselves a bit in return for a notably shorter grind. I hate farming old EXs right now because it feels like a mind-numbing chore, but if I felt rewarded in some way for actually learning and beating a fight (something I enjoy doing) instead of punished, it'd incentivize me to do it a lot more.

At least for the suggestion I had previously and the drop rate suggestion, these feel like things that would be INCREDIBLY easy updates. No new assets or items that need to be made, very little testing and balancing needed.

[Supersnow845]

Bozja also did really well at actually having good catchup gear, the blades gear (basch and penelo’s outfits if you played 12) was 525 in the patch after savage released 530. So for a lot of situations blades formed the “I haven’t finished the savage tier BIS” for things like the caster chest piece for classes that didn’t want SPS, most of the healer gear didn’t have piety and a lot of the tank gear didn’t have SKS.

That plus the relics made the late ShB gearing system quite interesting because it wasn’t just “either do savage or wait and hope and the alliance raid stuff isn’t terrible”

[tsuchii]

Why not take a break and hoard the content, so when you return, there will be lots of it.

[Duskleaf]

Why not order a meal at a restaurant and take it home to stuff it in the freezer?

Sure definitely not a bad idea and I'm sure it works just fine for a bunch of people but for me it does leave a bitter taste in my mouth buying an expansion and maintaining a monthly sub just to be told I can have a better time if I return at a later date. Yes nobody is forcing me to stay subbed if I'm unhappy with the product and I get that it just makes me wonder what kinda business strategy that's supposed to be.

[Fuyuqi]

Why not take a break and hoard the content, so when you return, there will be lots of it.

Because part of the fun of a social game is playing content when it's fresh and having a large community to share it with. Drip feeding content this slowly is just a typical predatory player retention strategy just like weekly loot lockouts and tome caps. They don't actually want people to leave and come back when there's more to do. Just like any live service game they use FOMO and timegating to stretch people's game time over as long of a period as possible so that people keep their subs going instead of being able to play however much they want when they want to, and as little as they want when they don't feel like it. And the longer they stretch things out over, and the less satisfying content they provide, the more people will grow frustrated.

[Reinha]

Why not take a break and hoard the content, so when you return, there will be lots of it.

That's a good individual solution but designing an MMO that way destroys the social aspect. I've got someone on my friends list that I saw logged in during DT and I couldn't be bothered to message them because the last time we spoke in game was more than 2 years ago and also 2 years before that. Because they've been unsubbed.

The only people with connections in this game have them because they stay connected outside of the game. This was the case even in my last fc where barely anyone used fc chat and the core members were active on discord. But I refuse to do a second shift on discord to stay in contact with people after playing the game by myself, because that would be an unhealthy time commitment and it also wouldn't change the fact that I'm doing content alone most of the time.

ARR and HW were the most social era this game has seen and it's been downhill ever since. It used to be a good MMO but it's not good enough as a single player game like the devs want it to be, and I'm better off playing actual single player games from now on. I'll probably jump back during a free login campaign to do the content I already paid for when I bought the expansion, but the thought that I can catch up on everything I missed in 4 days is just sad.

[AnnRam]

Why not take a break and hoard the content, so when you return, there will be lots of it.

People like you are completely brainwashed by Yoshida.

"Pay the sub for one year, but we only deliver 3 patches yearly that last less than 30 days to catch up/clear, please look forward".

Meanwhile f2p games out there gives you massive events every 2 weeks, patches every month, COLABORATIONS with other games and include more content and guess what? they don't ask you to pay 15 usd plus tax plus all the cool items are behind a CASH shop in a BASED subscription game.

And if you want more space? pay for additional retainers, and absolutely 0 compensations for taking a day off of your sub because weekly maintenances.