Thread: 4.5 month patch release is NOT a problem

Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

• Field Operations contain Skirmishes/NMs, that take about as long as FATEs.
• Field Operations contain CEs, that take about as long as a dungeon boss.
• 8-man encounters take about 10 minutes per pull. You can choose to do more pulls, but it's designed this way so you can stop every 10 minutes if you need to go, thus fitting the "pick-and-mix" concept.
• HoH is split into sets of 10 floors, each of which take roughly 10-20 minutes. Can take longer at higher floors if solo, but yeah.
• Relics are... grinding dungeons, FATEs, Skirmishes, things that last less than 20mins on average. You can stop any time. Thus pick-and-mix.
• Island Sanctuary was reduced to a 5-10 minute weekly or daily upkeep. And it didn't take much work to rank up initially either.

I'm not disputing that they have grinds like relics and Island Sanctuary ranks. In fact, that is what I have been saying the whole time. We have mount grinds to motivate us to repeat content. But the content itself can be done in increments of 5-20 minutes.

It is just a lot of people take the "5-20 minutes" thing and use it to say the developers are lazy, when it's intentional to allow people to manage their time with a pick-and-mix and take breaks.

See whilst this may be true, with all of these there is a grander goal at play, e.g., in doing Skirms/NMs, you build up Lost Actions, items for relics, and there is a level of actual character progression involved, since this usually involves weapon, gear or collecting Mettle to eventually make yourself stronger, it's the same with doing deep dungeons, you build up Aetherpool, you can get a weapon which may be stronger, and you climb floors, with the goal of eventually reaching the highest, and due to the randomization involved with floor generation, and how certain classes interact with the content, it means there is still more of a reason to go for higher floors.

This is what Square Enix failed to understand with V&C dungeons, it's what they partially fail to understand with any content they release. Players like and want character progression. Grinding more a minion, a mount or an orchestrion role just doesn't have the same level of incentive as character progression. A mount, minion orchestrion role is like a nice little side checklist, and another issue you have with many of these is you have your things you can grind 10-25 FATEs on, e.g., for a minion for that zone with the gemstones, but then the next stage up from this is 50,000 gemstones, which is the equivalent to around 3200 FATEs, give or take on napkin math. There's no goal between that, which is what makes the distinction between doing something like Skirmishes/NMs and FATEs (even if you can argue they are technically the same thing), they just don't have the same goal posts with them. People still want that progression to actually matter in some shape or form.

I am fine with content involving miniature 10-20 minute activities, but there still has to be a goal at play to mean that you repeat that content, otherwise it's just a hollow and soul-less experience, which is what most of the content is. Again, going back to your example a lot of them are... You do it once, then it is done, like literally done, either for the patch (e.g., story quest), or for the day (e.g., roulette/beast tribe), or for the week (e.g., Custom Delivs)

My actual play-time outside of joining friends, and helping friends is perhaps a couple hours on the weekdays, and maybe a bit more on weekends, outside of that I am doing other things, whether this is personal IRL goals, studying, other games, or learning new skills, and even on that I am really struggling to find a valid excuse which isn't just dopamine play with seeing my gemstone voucher count increment every 6-7 FATEs, until I have done a good 3000-odd for a mount that will probably never get used outside of a checklist.

Originally Posted by Kaurhz

See whilst this may be true, with all of these there is a grander goal at play, e.g., in doing Skirms/NMs, you build up Lost Actions, items for relics, and there is a level of actual character progression involved

Extremes, FATE farming and beast tribes have a mount and other rewards as a grander goal to farm/progress for. Dungeons' grander goal is leveling, tomestone capping, minions, orchestrions, TT cards, relics and glamour. All of them have a grander goal, which is ignored or dismissed by many posters.

it's what they partially fail to understand with any content they release. Players like and want character progression. Grinding more a minion, a mount or an orchestrion role just doesn't have the same level of incentive as character progression. A mount, minion orchestrion role is like a nice little side checklist

For me personally, I can just view mounts as character progression.

Yoshi-P has actually said he understands that people want power progression. I have my doubts if that will happen in a much more significant way than relics ever. Part of that is going to be so people can return to the game after a long break, buy crafted gear and hop into Savage immediately.

It does really feel like FF 14's dev team has gotten "lazy with success" these days even Everquest II is besting them on content, both in quality and quantity, if not for the fact that I fought for a house in 14(before the lottery) for 11-12 hours straight(my arm hurt for days), I would have shifted my subscription already. If they don't put some actual effort into things soon, I may just go ahead and give up the house, as other have mentioned, when a mobile title(Azur Lane is my reference) is outdoing a full subscription based MMO in terms of both quality and quantity of content, there's something seriously wrong. The sheer amount of money FF 14 pockets monthly is staggering, I see no viable reason why they can't match teams and budgets less then half their size, other then simple greed.

For examples of the kinds of things they could add, have you ever stepped foot into the Feerrot in Everquest II, it's a decent sized zone, with your normal MMO quests, most are labled on the map, however you'll notice that sometimes walking through the zone that random flytrap flower lights up when you cursor over it, if you investigate, there's a page from a book in there, thus begins an unmarked quest to find all the pages, they could be in any flytrap flower in the zone, they shift around and spawn in a different one any time they're picked up, by any player, no quest markers, just a search to put a book back together, that when you're done is a fancy furniture item you can place in your home. Or, in the same zone(this probably won't work in FF 14 exactly as it is) you can find a totem, it's not always there, as it teleports all over their world, to preset locations, but it's teleports are as random as random gets(to this day there's no way of knowing exactly where it is(that I could find)) you get one piece of a language there, you need 4 pieces to understand the language, there are 4 different totems all teleporting to their own locations all over the game world(not just in the one zone) finding them turns into an epic quest that can take days to weeks of searching if you don't cheat with a guide. Then there's their dungeons, they're not a single corridor with mobs in it like FF 14's are, they're mazes with puzzles, hidden passages, hidden quests, with no on screen map or quest indicators. Getting lost is a real possibility(and I have done so more then once) took myself and a friend 3 days to clear the temple of Cazic Thule, and it's easily been more memorable then any part of FF 14 has ever been.

Originally Posted by Sunhwapark

I thought it's because they wanted a break ? Or something along the lines of "having an extra week will give us an extra bit of time to catch stray problems so that each patch has good quality checks on it".

In any case, less content over a longer period of time doesn't feel particularly great to me.

I really don’t remember the entire thing word for word but that was in shadowbringer and Covid pretty sure had a hand to play in this. I mean we got only one ultimate in shadowbringer because of Covid and the workplace changes for SE at the time. But that situation has past a long time ago and they still don’t really give us enough casual content per patch or reinvest money into ff14. I mean look at this small patch breaking the light instance servers so they have too emergency fix that (which by the way didn’t help because we had so many dcs in fru it wasn’t even fun anymore). In my eyes it looks like they have become complacent with the success ff14 has and when online games do that the way downwards isn’t normally far away anymore.

Yes, the fact that patches are released every 4.5 months is not an issue if the content has good longevity and replayability, and if the patch quality is up to par.

However, I don’t feel that the current Final Fantasy XIV patches are better than those from the 3.0 era.

Patch cycle 4.0 undoubtedly had the best balance of quality and content longevity for PvE and other features.

In that case, yes, it negatively impacts the perception of the game when patches were better during the Stormblood era in terms of replayable and engaging content.
Back then, there was a massive amount of content delivered in patches every 3.4 months.

The extended patch cycle now is clearly noticeable and frustrating, especially since the game’s quality hasn’t improved—neither in features nor job design,
on the contrary, it has declined.

Even the mobile version of FF14, still in developpement and not yet released, already has far far away better features than the PC version has managed to deliver to the players in 12 years of existence.
The developers clearly aren’t making enough effort, and one often wonders where the money goes.
Is it being used to fund the commercial failures of their poorly executed AAA games?

Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Just a correction 16 wasn’t a flop, 16 was a success that wasn’t a big enough success to cover their actual flops like forespoken

around 3 millions copies sold for a budget of roughly 230 millions, it's not what ppl call a success