The slow decline of FFXIV, a summary.

[Valence]

A critical point that is understood by the majority of the player base and a minority on these boards.

This puzzles me because, outside of the MSQ, there is plenty of challenging content.

This is a false dichotomy. Encounter difficulty will definitely raise the bar on every level. Job complexity, as long as they remain accessible, will do less so, for example. Raising only the ceiling, in a perfect world I do agree there, would leave enough wiggle room for the baseline casual difficulty not to change too much. Game didn't crater or failed spectacularly back in HW even with the most complex version of jobs in XIV history. Casuals just went by just fine. If anything, the game grew a lot from ARR which was piss easy in comparison.

The problem with encounter difficulty is that it tends to act in a very binary way: you either succeed or fail mechanics. Jobs and the battle system though? You can add enough depth that a player that wants a bit more out of the system can actually play with levers that are totally optional for clearance otherwise.

Also, I do think that players need to learn to fail again, even in casual content. There is literally no feeling of accomplishment is there is nothing at stake, because yes of course we lost friction everywhere.

[PercibelTheren]

FFXIV pros: (or what's better than compared to WoW as the gold standard)

Character design/customization
Side content
Minigames
Farming content
NPCs/big ticket characters -might be a personal preference
housing -but WoW is getting it soon and it's gonna be better so...

FFXIV cons:

Gameplay
Inbuilt execution and interaction lag
Garbage PvE
Garbage PvP
(mostly due to the first 2 factors)
Spaghetti engine -can't do this while that, everything needs confirmation like it's a toddler playing

So? Just address the cons while building on the pros? A complete gameplay and class overhaul is inevitable if they want to save this game. FFXIV is the only game that makes me fully aware and conscious about the fact that I'm pressing the same damn button sequence over and over and over. Start with that first, then do real PvE mechanics.

I wouldn't say FFXIV customisation is a pro because it's extremely limited. Most races have one, maybe two good faces, a handful of hairstyles. I play a male Duskwight, which is a very rare combiantion, and even still I have run into basically indentical characters twice now. Your regular catgirl/bunny characters have thousands of clones in the playerbase.

[Supersnow845]

You misinterpreted my post. These types of threads have been happening for as long as I have been playing, which I started in early Heavensward. People have always been saying "the game is dying", when in reality, it hasn't. Just a funny observation from someone who's been playing for a long time

And as a funny observation from someone who has been playing longer than you it’s funny that this is the first time they can actually back up that claim with dropping population numbers

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

FFXIV customization is definitely an acquired taste... but it really is lacking the flexibilities & options. Do they exist? Yeah... Acceptable? Debatable.

Like, what do you mean I can't make an old af character if I play female character? What do you mean I can't make a mid-thirty/forty male midlanders when the option really only offer me young adults or 'yoshi-p'-old? Why do they shove all male middies into "meteor"-code? And the list goes on...

Also don't even get people started with those two discounted races in the game.. lol. They might as well get a discount on their sub at this point.

The video said it: the game in many facets are lacking the passion and love that used to be poured into. It shows. Don't have to look farther than the very character we play as of DT release. You should be giving more options, not replacing them. You don't change players' characters. You just don't, period.

EDIT: you’re also stuck with said customizability for like what, over 10 years? Over a decade of profit, and yet not enough can be given to invest their character creator system? Really? Not even a way to preview… say, hairstyle? One has to be content with consuming half a$$ed slops they’re churning out to remain stunted for this long & getting away with it.

Demand for better, gdi.

[ForsakenRoe]

This is a false dichotomy. Encounter difficulty will definitely raise the bar on every level. Job complexity, as long as they remain accessible, will do less so, for example. Raising only the ceiling, in a perfect world I do agree there, would leave enough wiggle room for the baseline casual difficulty not to change too much. Game didn't crater or failed spectacularly back in HW even with the most complex version of jobs in XIV history. Casuals just went by just fine. If anything, the game grew a lot from ARR which was piss easy in comparison.

The problem with encounter difficulty is that it tends to act in a very binary way: you either succeed or fail mechanics. Jobs and the battle system though? You can add enough depth that a player that wants a bit more out of the system can actually play with levers that are totally optional for clearance otherwise.

Perfect example of this in action: Look at the first 24man of DT, and the first 24man of HW. Apples to Apples comparison of the last bosses, you've got Echidna in Void Ark, versus Shadowlord in Jeuno. It should go without saying, that Shadowlord is many times more complex to execute than Echidna ever was . For example, I'd say the bit where you have to remember 3 cleave positions on the boss, then 2 from an add, then an Implosion from the boss, then an Implosion from another add, that sequence is more 'complex to execute' than the entire Void Ark raid put together. But unlike HW, the 'complexity' of Shadowlord isn't in the job, it's in the Shadowlord encounter itself. If a Healer player is less skilled now, tough, they're getting hit by the constant 270degree cleaves and dying after the second (due to the vuln). If a player was less skilled in HW, they'd... drop their DOTs, but they'd still be alive, and able to heal the team, and complete the content.

The 'complexity' hasn't been reduced per se, it's been shifted from a source where it was 'optional' in most content (you didn't have to be optimal to clear EX roulette or 24man or NM raids or EX trials, you could 'choose to focus on mechanics execution' and take more time to clear, but still clear), to a source where it's no longer 'optional'. You either interact with the complexity provided by 'the mechanics of the fight', or you die. No longer can a Healer player say 'I'm not so confident in my abilities, so I'm gonna focus on staying alive, and keeping my team alive, rather than trying to push for maximum DPS', because 'focus on staying alive and keep the team alive' is 80% of the challenge of the content. The skill floor has been raised, and the skill ceiling has been reduced, so now instead of a range of 1-100 in terms of 'player skill expression', we're now at a range of, say, 45-55. Which just results in anyone below the 45 mark feeling like they're not able to keep up, and anyone above the 55 mark feeling like they have to look to alternative places (ie other games) for a challenge

And somehow, SE's solution to this is 'make it so that if the Healer IS below the 45 mark, can't keep up with the mechanics vomit, and does die, don't worry because the Tanks have enough selfsustain to just power through the fight anyway!' How does that help the casual player? How does the lower skill ceiling help retain the Hardcore player who is always looking for the next big challenge? It's like SE wanted to insulate players who are not as skilled from the realization that there's players who are better at the game than them... But then they don't do anything to help those less-skilled players gain the skills to grow and become the high-skilled player themselves

Edit: It's even funnier, thinking about it. Previously, in HW, say an AST wasn't using their DOTs at all, preferring instead to focus on cards, healing, and the occasional Malefic when they had time to. They lost some damage, from not using their DOT. But now, consider an AST who cannot keep up with the mechanical complexity of the Shadowlord. They're going to be at 25%/50% damage lost, even if they were doing their rotation perfectly, because they've got Weakness/Brink of Death. SE hasn't solved a damn thing, they've just moved the issue to a different source! And even worse, it's so much more visible when someone's having trouble keeping up, because everyone in the party can see the Weakness/Brink of Death debuff icon!

[AvoSturmfaust]

snip

First of all you should finally start to stop with splitting between "Hardcore and Casuals" i know many really many many Casuals who even raid are they now hardcore?

And no casuals are the issues for the easy job design and im not talking about the standard casual which even does extreme trials or huh even savage? IMAGINE WHICH BLASPHEMY CASUALS DOING SAVAGE HOW DARE THEY ARE, im talking about the hardcore casuals which are to dumb to even press 2 buttons in a raw and refuse to do content where you have to follow a set mechanics, people which even called dungeons like alexandria TOO HARD, so even with dungeons staying the way it is and improving the class difficultiy these kind of player couldnt even press 1-2-3 without a 10s delay between each skill, so pls even when i would love to see more challenging classes, with that kind of playerbase here its not possible

Hey you wanna know something funny? I even do Ultimates with my Main and still say "NO" to easy Extremes like the Dancing Plaque

[Gunz_Zbestest]

You were fun to rile up for a while but this is just getting sad. I honestly did not imagine questioning why someone who didn't clear UCOB would jump into a conversation about UCOB would provoke such a long-lasting fixation. Actual rent-free lmao. I honestly think I hit a nerve there.

Keep it up bud, you're not the first reply guy I had, and you won't be the last.

Oh look everyone, he has just enough awareness to know that he's irritating like a fruit fly.
In the near future someone will reply to one of my posts. It could be this one or a different one.

[Mawlzy]

Also, I do think that players need to learn to fail again, even in casual content. There is literally no feeling of accomplishment is there is nothing at stake, because yes of course we lost friction everywhere.

I'd suggest that for many players, clearing MSQ combat content doesn't produce a sense of accomplishment, merely one of relief that another impediment to them enjoying the story has been overcome.

It's conceivable this may change for some if the fights were actually interesting.

[Sekundessounet]

snip

I mostly agree about introducing more failure and raising the skill ceiling of the game overall, but I wanna point out that casuals didn't "went by just fine" during HW. HW was the period where, to my experience, the playerbase was at its most toxic because of the job design. Job design was convoluted, complex and satisfying to optimize maybe, but also unintuitive for most jobs, and a time where balance was at its most out of wack. It made it so casual players were scorned by midcore/regular players and some hardcore players for not mastering what they thought should be the baseline of job usage. It's one of the many reasons for the simplification that started in Stormblood (notably the cross-class skills system, remember that casuals were supposed to "know" they had to level up Thaumaturge for Swiftcast or Lancer for Invigorate).

And yes the game didn't exactly crater, but it was also maybe it's most dire moment since 1.0 too at the beginning of the expansion. Gordias remains the most ill-received raid tier in the game's history and almost killed its raiding scene, Diadem which was supposed to be the expansion's major feature failed catastrophically 3 times in a row. The game took a better turn in 3.2 but raiding remained unappealing not only because of the sheer difficulty of Midas, but also how gatekeepy the difficulty of both job design and encounter design made this side of the game (both in terms of investment required and community behavior towards "less skilled" players). Even the first release of Deep Dungeon 1-50 was poorly received. That's why we got the new raid design we still have now starting from 3.4.

So yes, I do agree about introducing more failure and raising the skill ceiling. I'd add also skills that are more interactive than "fancy animation + x potency". But HW was way dire for casuals than people seem to remember, if the main story didn't hit as much as it did, it would be treated worse than Dawntrail currently is.

[Valence]

First of all you should finally start to stop with splitting between "Hardcore and Casuals" i know many really many many Casuals who even raid are they now hardcore?

And no casuals are the issues for the easy job design and im not talking about the standard casual which even does extreme trials or huh even savage? IMAGINE WHICH BLASPHEMY CASUALS DOING SAVAGE HOW DARE THEY ARE, im talking about the hardcore casuals which are to dumb to even press 2 buttons in a raw and refuse to do content where you have to follow a set mechanics, people which even called dungeons like alexandria TOO HARD, so even with dungeons staying the way it is and improving the class difficultiy these kind of player couldnt even press 1-2-3 without a 10s delay between each skill, so pls even when i would love to see more challenging classes, with that kind of playerbase here its not possible

Hey you wanna know something funny? I even do Ultimates with my Main and still say "NO" to easy Extremes like the Dancing Plaque

Oh we have a badass over here.
I've never seen a casual complain about the complexity of a job. I've seen them complain plenty about the difficulty of encounters though.
I think this should tell us something there.

Especially since casuals coasted by just fine when jobs were a lot harder to play at a decent level. I still remember ice mages and the likes. They cleared content just fine. They didn't complain about anything. The team sure complained about them but it's not exactly something that's disappeared today (cf your post).

I mostly agree about introducing more failure and raising the skill ceiling of the game overall, but I wanna point out that casuals didn't "went by just fine" during HW. HW was the period where, to my experience, the playerbase was at its most toxic because of the job design. Job design was convoluted, complex and satisfying to optimize maybe, but also unintuitive for most jobs, and a time where balance was at its most out of wack. It made it so casual players were scorned by midcore/regular players and some hardcore players for not mastering what they thought should be the baseline of job usage. It's one of the many reasons for the simplification that started in Stormblood (notably the cross-class skills system, remember that casuals were supposed to "know" they had to level up Thaumaturge for Swiftcast or Lancer for Invigorate).

And yes the game didn't exactly crater, but it was also maybe it's most dire moment since 1.0 too at the beginning of the expansion. Gordias remains the most ill-received raid tier in the game's history and almost killed its raiding scene, Diadem which was supposed to be the expansion's major feature failed catastrophically 3 times in a row. The game took a better turn in 3.2 but raiding remained unappealing not only because of the sheer difficulty of Midas, but also how gatekeepy the difficulty of both job design and encounter design made this side of the game (both in terms of investment required and community behavior towards "less skilled" players). Even the first release of Deep Dungeon 1-50 was poorly received. That's why we got the new raid design we still have now starting from 3.4.

So yes, I do agree about introducing more failure and raising the skill ceiling. I'd add also skills that are more interactive than "fancy animation + x potency". But HW was way dire for casuals than people seem to remember, if the main story didn't hit as much as it did, it would be treated worse than Dawntrail currently is.

I do not have that recollection from casual content. Hardcore players have always crapped on less skilled players, it's a universal constant no matter the game nor its complexity. They still do today. I've spent most of HW doing casual stuff (unlike later expansions), played a ton of roulettes and casual content, and I can safely say that casuals went by just fine. The big difference was the skill gap and skill expression showing, when today it just barely does in comparison. But obviously you'll get less skill expression gap if there is less depth and skill ceiling to jobs, when the floor hasn't changed that much except for support jobs that have become literally braindead.
HW job balance was all over the place but it mattered in savage, not in casual dungeons and whatnot.

I really don't see what Gordias/Midas savage or Diadem have to do with casuals vs complexity though? Savage is by definition not casual, and Diadem failed not because casuals couldn't cope with its difficulty (it was all but hard, and a lot less grindy than eureka), but for other reasons.