i need to take some break from this game...!!!

[Ath192]

What is there to take a break from? Aren't we all on forced breaks for 4 months at a time? Last I checked it took me 3 days to finish this current patch and that was taking it slow and not even teleporting.

[Striker44]

What is there to take a break from? Aren't we all on forced breaks for 4 months at a time? Last I checked it took me 3 days to finish this current patch and that was taking it slow and not even teleporting.

Not me. The new patch has been out for a couple weeks, and I'm guessing I'm still smack dab in the middle of it (did the new dungeon, haven't been to the new TP crystal other than to attune to it, so guessing there's a bit more to go). That's not to mention getting my crafters going again, maybe gatherers, and of course continuing the FATE and Achieve grinds that I enjoy. I still have most of 2 variant dungeons from the last expansion to explore, never even touched IS yet...I have plenty to do that I'm looking forward to.

[ForteNightshade]

Not me. The new patch has been out for a couple weeks, and I'm guessing I'm still smack dab in the middle of it (did the new dungeon, haven't been to the new TP crystal other than to attune to it, so guessing there's a bit more to go). That's not to mention getting my crafters going again, maybe gatherers, and of course continuing the FATE and Achieve grinds that I enjoy. I still have most of 2 variant dungeons from the last expansion to explore, never even touched IS yet...I have plenty to do that I'm looking forward to.

Yes, but that doesn't mean there is actual new content. You're just tackling what's there at a glacier pace. No offense.

[Catwho]

Yes, but that doesn't mean there is actual new content. You're just tackling what's there at a glacier pace. No offense.

Yeah, that's the thing. I generally only play XIV for 2 hours a day max these days. Back when I could binge no life the game and spend 6-8 hours a day, I too would have been done with everything in the span of a weekend.

Can't do that any more, too many responsibilities. Adulting sucks.

[Jeeqbit]

Yes, but that doesn't mean there is actual new content. You're just tackling what's there at a glacier pace.

There is an opposite argument to that, which is that some people tackle it at a lightning pace and then wonder why there's nothing left. Streamers have especially always been guilty of this - they blast through content in an unrealistic way that most of the playerbase doesn't, taking advantage of the fact they get paid to play games all day and that good players tend to follow their streams and help them clear faster than others would. For example, if a streamer now says "ultimate, savage, extremes and criterions complete, what else is there to do?" it doesn't really reflect how a lot of players will spend months progging them.

Although most of it isn't Endwalker stuff, I've got to agree I'm still working on various things myself, personally, including daily Frontline, leveling my last 2 battle jobs for the mount, daily mentor roulettes for the grind, remaining TT cards, weekly alliance raid and more FATEs. I just finished my long 200 voucher Island Sanctuary grind, beast tribe ranking and a bunch of others, and didn't really start with the scrip grind yet.

[Striker44]

Yes, but that doesn't mean there is actual new content. You're just tackling what's there at a glacier pace. No offense.

None taken, and I think you're ignoring that most of what I mentioned is either DT content or "evergreen" content (such as leveling various jobs). I guess I also could have mentioned doing things like Hunt trains (in DT content), the weekly Raid 4 for the weapon drop (DT content), and a weekly Jeuno (ditto). I get in a fair amount of playtime; it's just mostly "repeatable" stuff rather than "progressing" stuff. Catwho also brought up a great point - the prime demographic for MMO's isn't teenagers, college kids, and young adults like it used to be. It's still those same human beings, but now we have families, full-time careers, and so on.

As I like to say, I look back fondly on the days of shouting for /lfg in XR to put together a WC run in WoW (which itself could take a couple hours just to run the dungeon)...I also couldn't imagine even trying to do something like that today, let alone thinking it a fun use of my time. MMO's today are primarily geared toward people who only have limited playtime compared to the past, so I'd say I'm consuming the FFXIV content at the "intended" rate, and the "issue" occurs when people blaze through it faster than it's humanly possible to create, then complain there's nothing else to do.

[Jeeqbit]

the prime demographic for MMO's isn't teenagers, college kids, and young adults like it used to be. It's still those same human beings, but now we have families, full-time careers, and so on.

I do think this game is catering more to older adults with families than this genre used to, but from the stats I see plenty of people who are 18-23 play as well and from memory I used to meet families all the time back in the old days.

I'd argue that MMOs used to flat out be unhealthy even for someone with unlimited time, because they'd go out of their way to consume all your time - even that which is used for eating and sleeping. Whether people were teenagers or married couples, they had to contend with games that didn't respect their time and try and cope with it.

This game has lots of short bursts of 10-20 minute things (be they beast tribes, trials, raids), or that you can stop any time at regular intervals (like Field Ops or farm parties), to solve that problem. In isolation, of course this fact becomes an easy target for people to say "it's only 10 minutes of content" but obviously it's not seeing the forest through the trees because you can mix and match those 10 minute pieces of content together depending on time availability.

[Ath192]

I do think this game is catering more to older adults with families than this genre used to, but from the stats I see plenty of people who are 18-23 play as well and from memory I used to meet families all the time back in the old days.

I'd argue that MMOs used to flat out be unhealthy even for someone with unlimited time, because they'd go out of their way to consume all your time - even that which is used for eating and sleeping. Whether people were teenagers or married couples, they had to contend with games that didn't respect their time and try and cope with it.

This game has lots of short bursts of 10-20 minute things (be they beast tribes, trials, raids), or that you can stop any time at regular intervals (like Field Ops or farm parties), to solve that problem. In isolation, of course this fact becomes an easy target for people to say "it's only 10 minutes of content" but obviously it's not seeing the forest through the trees because you can mix and match those 10 minute pieces of content together depending on time availability.

Jeeq, sorry but this is another way of celebrating the developers giving you less. Yet you still pay the same amount of money for the game. I'm glad you see an upside to it, but games who had things to do that could consume all your time didn't HAVE to. That was people's decision if they wanted to let them affect it this way and be unhealthy. Video games literally exist to consume time. That is their sole reason of existence. That is what you pay for.

And yet here we are, with a playerbase happy they are taking away gameplay. It's not respect, its charging the same for less to do.

-----------------------------------------
I'll give you an example. Zodiac weapons were design to be so time consuming they would be special weapons you would only farm for your main job if you were a regular gamer. There were some sick people who decided to do all of them for an unknown reason, but that was their perrogative, at least there was stuff to do and the world was full of people doing it.

Queue into manderville relics, where you didn't have to do anything out of the ordinary and could farm all of them in a week probably. That is trash, even the zodiac book grinds that people hated were more creative than this latest relic.

The only thing you run into in the world today are gatherer bots.
---------------------------------------------------

Even as an adult with work I would rather have the option to do another zodiac style relic even if ultimately don't finish it because I don't have the time than get it handed to me. At that point what is the difference, it's just another generic weapon that was given like the ones I bought in the marketboard or tomestone vendors.

At least I can admire other people who did go through the effort of acquiring the relics.

This is how you destroy the value or relics or any item in game, by making it so mundane it may as well be throwaway gear like all the normal items. Why not just buy the MB weapon and stick with it at that point.

[Jeeqbit]

Video games literally exist to consume time. That is their sole reason of existence. That is what you pay for.

I agree.

I'll give you an example. Zodiac weapons were design to be so time consuming they would be special weapons you would only farm for your main job if you were a regular gamer.

Those are alright on the basis you can stop any time. What you can't stop doing so easily is:

• Social as it may be, needing to form a party manually without PF or DF could potentially take hours. Which is why Yoshi-P decided the game had to be remade, because he said the old version wasn't capable of cross-world DF.
• Needing to travel places manually (yes the lore of traveling is realistic but it makes you tap your foot irl and delay your party, a feeling that barely happens for long in this game). Of all the games I'd played it had never felt faster to actually get where I want.
• A challenging raid consuming hours of your time due to the boss rooms being in sequence like Alliance Raids (and that's after potentially hours of forming an alliance). If you stop at any point in this process you're letting everyone else down, thus grumbling stomachs and lost sleep. Which is solved by segmenting them into 4 instances.

There were some sick people who decided to do all of them for an unknown reason

Achievements, which is another problem. It's fine if achievements are realistic, but many games including this made crazy goals such that if anybody actually tries to get them, it will bore them to death from repeating battlequest leves, treasure maps, deep dungeons and ocean fishing thousands of times. Yet there is a motivation for people to do it to "complete" the game so they create an unhealthy situation for people. Developers often don't really care and there's no chance they are doing those achievements themselves.

Queue into manderville relics, where you didn't have to do anything out of the ordinary and could farm all of them in a week probably. That is trash, even the zodiac book grinds that people hated were more creative than this latest relic.

It wasn't meant to be creative. Players were split on "how" they wanted to get their relic weapon. Some of them wanted a grind doing old content like the Anima weapons. Some of them wanted to do new content similar to Eureka. And a lot of people tried to get "all" the relics as you previously mentioned. At first they tried to solve this by letting people choose (via Bozja) but these two camps still complained.

So their solution was tomestones which drop from almost all content and thus allow people to choose their content and get more rewarded for doing it. Of course this ended up being gaslighting in practice because people had capped their tomestones already from merely doing their Tuesday hunt trains, but I understand the intention.

They are solving this in Dawntrail 7.2x though so we should move past Endwalker.