4.5 month patch release is NOT a problem

[CNitsah]

Lately, I've seen a lot of people claiming that the 4.5 month between patches is was the reason it feels so barren and we should go back to shorter patches. I've seen that argument repeated so much, but truthfully, this argument is sooo bad. This a perfect exemple of the community being very bad with analysing the problems.

4.5 month scheldule is not a problem. At worst, it's an aggravating factor to the real problem, the lack of content with shelf life. Give us content supposed to last for 4.5 month in your 4.5 month patch, and there won't be any problems.

Heck they could go to 3 month patches, if the patches content is the same as the 7.1 content, we'd still have the exact same problems. I mean, 7.1 was released 2 month ago, and look how happy we are. We'd feel so much better if this was 3.5 month scheldule.

No wonder SE does bad choice with the entire community seem to singlemindedly focus on a non problem instead of the actual problems.

[edit]
Ok, for some reasons it seems it need to be precised : this in a post saying everything SE does is good and shift the blame on players : this is a post about players pointing at the wrong problems.

Saying that the problem is the "4.5 month scheldule is the problem" imply getting shorter patches will fix the problem : it won't. Yet that argument is everywhere when it comes to talking about XIV problems.

I feel like a dumbass repeating myself, but with the several answers that imply I said there was no problems with the game and that the content we have is fine, it seems it's needed. Do some of you only read the title?

[Kaurhz]

Inherently, it isn't a problem if the patch cycle can lead to a higher quality product, or generally a more consistent product in quality, or higher amount of content / reason to engage with the game.

But at this point they have none of the perks of a prolonged patch cycle, and all of the downsides of it, so I can see why people do see that as a problem in and of itself.

[Kes13a]

I tend to agree.
they could take 6 months for all I care, to release patches.

as pointed out, the issue isnt that length of time for most, for most, the issue is that there is so little actually in them, and the quality seems to have deteriorated

3 months is not a great amount of time to put out quality product anyway, most realistic people know that. problem is, you start adding up the various issues, and not sure any length of time would be adequate

[LilaIronman]

I tend to agree.
they could take 6 months for all I care, to release patches.

as pointed out, the issue isnt that length of time for most, for most, the issue is that there is so little actually in them, and the quality seems to have deteriorated

3 months is not a great amount of time to put out quality product anyway, most realistic people know that. problem is, you start adding up the various issues, and not sure any length of time would be adequate

hasn't been a quality product in a long time, as long as they keep milking the fans dry and rather spend their revenue on other games failures lol. Put out content every 3 months and then idc if you spend your money on more DEI garbage games that will flop but at least I have something to do in the meantime.

[ovIm]

I don't think that was ever out of the question - when people complain about the patch cycle, they inherently complain about the lack of activities they are interested in. It comes to no surprise that players of an MMORPG want the ability to spend lots of time in the game, without feeling the need to do so. If we had a plethora of diverse content with a long shelf life that is fun to play, then none would even bat an eye about the wait for the next patch.

Patch cycle and patch content are linked. .1 patches were always a lull, and Square Enix have not yet considered a fix.

[Teno]

Lately, I've seen a lot of people claiming that the 4.5 month between patches is was the reason it feels so barren and we should go back to shorter patches. I've seen that argument repeated so much, but truthfully, this argument is sooo bad. This a perfect exemple of the community being very bad with analysing the problems.

4.5 month scheldule is not a problem. At worst, it's an aggravating factor to the real problem, the lack of content with shelf life. Give us content supposed to last for 4.5 month in your 4.5 month patch, and there won't be any problems.

Heck they could go to 3 month patches, if the patches content is the same as the 7.1 content, we'd still have the exact same problems. I mean, 7.1 was released 2 month ago, and look how happy we are. We'd feel so much better if this was 3.5 month scheldule.

No wonder SE does bad choice with the entire community seem to singlemindedly focus on a non problem instead of the actual problem.

Bro wtf ? It's SE's fault for delivering scraps on a 4.5 months basis, not the community giving feedback and SE acting wrongly on it or whatever.

Other games manage to deliver on a weekly to monthly basis with simple content that can last (ie some form of grinding usually), but this game gives you the bare minimum with little replayability. Farming mounts can only go so far, should you even care about that.

[CNitsah]

Bro wtf ? It's SE's fault for delivering scraps on a 4.5 months basis, not the community giving feedback and SE acting wrongly on it or whatever.

Other games manage to deliver on a weekly to monthly basis with simple content that can last (ie some form of grinding usually), but this game gives you the bare minimum with little replayability. Farming mounts can only go so far, should you even care about that.

Ok maybe I could have phrased that better, this is not one of my strongest moments. My point wasn't to shift the blame from SE to the players, far from it. SE is the only culprit in the circus that is DT.

But yeah, I also feel that, as a community, we take forever to point at the underlying problems instead of its symptoms/consequences. When they removed the exploratory zone, it took month, if not a year before the shelf life argument began to become popular. There was a whole lot of argument about needing things to do in larges group, and other few argument I forgot, but the shelf life problem was overlooked by most : which lead to SE communicating on those point : when they annouced 7.0 and chatic, it's the large group argument that came first. When they talked about the fact there would be another exploratory zone, it's also the large group argument that they presented. To this day, the only time they even talked about the shelf life problem is that interview in Australia a couple of month ago. I kinda feel that, if it didn't took the community nearly a whole year to point at the problem, maybe 7.0 and 7.1 might not have been such a drought. Part of me think that "content for large group" was one of the reason they focused on Chaotic, because they thought it would give us what we want. And we saw how it went : despite the content being good, it's not really what the game needed right now. Now sure, SE should do a better job at collecting the feedback and interpret it, but they've been bad at it for so long (I've litterally spend the last 20 years watching SE make questionnable decisions and wonder why), it could certainly help if the community could stop pointing as consequence of the real problem as if they were the actual problem.

This last sentence was not supposed to defend SE and shift the blame on the players, but rather pointing at the fact that the community is not always really good at pointing at the problems, and we don't really need SE to spend time tackling problems that are not there. And the 4.5 month patch is not the problem, yet in every community thread, it's repeated as a mantra, that the 4.5 month cycle is one of the biggest problem. It's not, it's only an aggravating factor of the real problem.

yeah you're basically just saying the same thing everyone else is saying, the long patch cycles are the problem because there's no long lasting content, and people are finally getting tired of the sorry state of said cycles that lack said content, nobody is arguing that fact lmao

Am I? Everywhere I look, being the forums, reddit, YouTube, I see this argument that the problem is the 4.5 month patch is the problem. Every discussion about FFXIV problems has this argument repeated again and again. There is a big semantic difference between saying "there is not enough content for a 4.5 month patch" and "4.5 month is too long". Yet I always stumble on the later one, and rarely on the former.

[Doki]

4.5 month cycle with minimal stuff actually added, next to zero meaningful community rep responses to major gripes, and now worse privacy issues and you still want to defend the poor corporation? This isn't a tiny indie studio. They should have better resources, and response times to things.

[VerdeLuck]

It is a problem, we're getting longer gaps in content but not any more content than we have in the past. When we have to wait longer for the same amount of content and it comes out full of mistakes and bugs that's a problem.

[Hallarem]

People want to spend time in an mmo doing things.
Devs dont make new things that last
Community coper team: "do old content"

I agree that the time itself wouldnt be a problem if they actually used that time to create stuff thats worthwhile and CURRENT.

But "play other games, do old content" is always the crutch the devs cling to with the people who are still tempered by SE.

Again, I feel like this "MMO" is created for busy officeworkers that dont have time to play more than max 1 hour per day and more on their freetime.
How are they going to even dreaaam of attracting new younger players with infinitely more freetime on their hands lol.