YoshyP saved FF 14 but also killing it.

[Anvaire]

Is it really Yoshi P.? Or is it a problem of SE in general and the CEO?

Yoshi is not a wizard. If SE is not willing to spend more ressources and manpower into FFXIV, then he and the dev team are unable to solve the problems of the game, while producing cool interesting new content at the same time. They just can't.

Maybe he makes bad decisions, too. For example thinking that turned based stuff would be outadet. I really had to laugh hard after Baldurs Gate 3 was such a huge success, while the 'action' system of FF16 is so boring and the game itself is not a good 'game' and would have been a better anime/manga/series, because it lacks interesting gameplay. I was very disappointed when I first heard that FF16 will be not turned based again. Both action and turnbased can be very cool. But we had too much FF action style over the last years.

In the end, I think the elephant in the room is SE itself and how it just pulls money out from FF14, but not spend enough ressourses into it back. Yoshi can just try to work with what he gets.

I think its both. I think Yoshi P unfortunately has no counter, thats why you ususally have a director and a producer. They balance each other out to ensure nothing is too risky or too stale. With YP in both roles, I think he could do with someone to challenge his ideology. Because lets be real, the foundations of the game are cracking, because of recent decisions, but those decisions are born from an attempt to make the game better. The problem is its either gone too far (template being the same, job dumbing down for accessibilty) or not far enough (not challenging or altering the template) There needs to be a bit of both for the game to succeed. But at the same time, there are likely constraints we arent aware of, and that is SQEX. Perhaps they need more people, but if SQEX wont give them that, then YP is handicapped no matter what he tries. As time goes on the game only gets bigger, so if it has the same resource as ARR i can see how it ended up in the state it is. (this all pure conjecture, i dont know either way)

[Kazuke_Miso]

Is it really Yoshi P.? Or is it a problem of SE in general and the CEO?

Yoshi is not a wizard. If SE is not willing to spend more ressources and manpower into FFXIV, then he and the dev team are unable to solve the problems of the game, while producing cool interesting new content at the same time. They just can't.

Maybe he makes bad decisions, too. For example thinking that turned based stuff would be outadet. I really had to laugh hard after Baldurs Gate 3 was such a huge success, while the 'action' system of FF16 is so boring and the game itself is not a good 'game' and would have been a better anime/manga/series, because it lacks interesting gameplay. I was very disappointed when I first heard that FF16 will be not turned based again. Both action and turnbased can be very cool. But we had too much FF action style over the last years.

In the end, I think the elephant in the room is SE itself and how it just pulls money out from FF14, but not spend enough ressourses into it back. Yoshi can just try to work with what he gets.

But you literally just mentioned how Yoshi P makes tons of terrible decisions.

Even if this game is resource-constrained, they could still make creative dungeons, raids, with a compelling story. They did that in HW.

[Valence]

They did that with pvp. They have no excuses.

[MitsukiKimura]

I'm not sure if killing the game is the answer. I would say he's been a bit distant lately with the community regarding feedback from the player base. Seems like he has his own personal goal for what he wants FF to be and we're just along for the ride. Will say it might cause more harm than good in the long run.

[Heavenchild]

But you literally just mentioned how Yoshi P makes tons of terrible decisions.

I spoke about ONE bad decsision. xD

They limit theirself because of the TRUST system regarding to dungeons. :c
Don't get me wrong. I don't want to defend it. I really don't like how boring dungeons are. They look pretty, that's all.

But I think that they just have not enough resources to make things better. For example, to make 2 dungeon versions or implement a complety new style of dungeon into the actual code.
One version for players, and one version for doing with TRUSTS. Or stuff like a modern glam system that would need to code the game new from scratch.
They can't do that when SE's is not giving much more manpower to them. (Well now Tencent made it for them, but it's a mobile game :x )

I don't know why the storywriter changed. But Yoshi can't just conjure up the perfect replacement. And which author works on which game, is probably out of his hands, right?

I really don't think that the FF14 dev team willingly is trying to make a bad FF14 experience for us. But they seem to have very limited resources.
Maybe Yoshi is still the guy who holds everything together, is not allowed to speak about whats happening behind SE's doors, and people in forum shitting on him, like it's his fault that FF14 is not evolving better.
Then people are wondering why he grows distant to the community.

I am just trying to say, that we all have no clue. And we should not judge so much about single 'persons', and just stay with 'topics and feedback' about actual problems in the game.

[Fatch38]

Yoshi is not a wizard. If SE is not willing to spend more ressources and manpower into FFXIV, then he and the dev team are unable to solve the problems of the game, while producing cool interesting new content at the same time. They just can't.

you say that like CBU3 isn't composed of 300 devs (and i mean only devs not writter etc). compared to some other studios like let's say falcom which are roughly 60 devs and still released 3 games (trails through daybreak and its sequel, ys nordics) one after another in 3 years and those 3 games are amazing. you can put all the manpower you want here, creativity, talent and passion aren't here anymore

[MicahZerrshia]

That's the thing. I could never get past WoW's cartoonish style.

I was in the same boat, I hated WoW's art style, it was too cartoony, too exaggerated, too silly. But then I actually started playing it and something funny happened. I played the first few hours with my nose crinkled, cause yuck these cartoony graphics are so horrible and I cannot believe I am so bored I actually am trying WoW, ew gross. But then I started to realize, this actually isn't a bad game and I was strangely having fun. Then the more and more I got into it I started to understand that what I didn't like about WoW wasn't the art style, it actually has grown on me quite a bit, but as a FFXIV, and previously a FFXI, player, I had a giant bias against WoW, due to the silly "mine is better than yours" sides we join when play games, esp mmos. Even the community proved to be nothing like the incel monsters that my bias showed me in my mind due to all the talk you hear about them being incel monsters and I started having a great time with some really great and helpful ppl, where as here I have been playing solo since my FC fell apart when I got too busy to run things and realized that FC's here are so clicky and frankly useless these days, that there is barely a point to even having them.

So my dislike of the art style was actually just my bias against WoW itself, finding anything wrong with it. In fact, I hate the anime/manga style (esp the catgirl obsession and more cutesy elements) with all my being, always have always will, but here I am because as someone who has played this franchise since FF1 way back when I was a tiny little kid, I also have a nostalgia bias that favors Final Fantasy which help me dismiss many of it's flaws and overlook the art style and tropes that I genuinely dislike. Strange things happen when you step out of your comfort zone and try new things with a mind that is only even cracked open and learn to recognize your bias.

[Kazuke_Miso]

I really don't think that the FF14 dev team willingly is trying to make a bad FF14 experience for us.

Bro, they went out of their way to gut nonstandard BLM when 99.9999999999999% of casuals don't even know that's a thing and won't ever be affected by it.

It's malicious at that point. They clearly hate the playerbase doing anything that they did not expect. They hate that you are not playing the game they want you to. They hate that you find fun in something they don't.

They HATE that something they think is fun is boring to most players. There is no other explanation for the outright antagonism the developers have towards the playerbase in terms of job design when casual players don't give a shit about jobs like BLM in the first place.

These developers play their own game, and we've seen the obvious preferential treatment for different jobs over the last decade. They're not building the game for you, they hate you. They're building the game for their own idiosyncratic desires, even if most people hate it. I can 100% guarantee you that the job and encounter design team consists of parsing brainrot raiders who hate that they need to use more than one brain cell to think about uptime, who hate that they can't get 99s because there is a much harder rotation like TK monk out there that they don't get, who hate that they'll never be the best because some BLM on The Balance figured out some esoteric line that gives 0.2% DPS boost.

They don't have a healer on the job design team which is why healers are braindead because the team wants to turn off their brain to play healer because they are insecure over letting people die on old healer design.

Like literally go back to SB and see who even complained about TK monk? Or nonstandard BLM in EW? Why would they go out of their way to nerf it? Why are they even aware of it? Seriously think about this.

just stay with 'topics and feedback' about actual problems in the game.

That is like ignoring the elephant in the room. Square Enix, the developers, and Yoshi P are the ultimate problem of FF14: they have NO vision. They have NO resources. And they have NO skill.

[ovIm]

It's malicious at that point. They clearly hate the playerbase doing anything that they did not expect. They hate that you are not playing the game they want you to. They hate that you find fun in something they don't.

You saying that reminds me of the Eureka thing way back in SB. When Eureka Anemos was released, some issues with the combat system were already visible there - namely, that the rotations of the jobs, without a boss that sometimes throws wrenches in your way, were not particularily fun to execute (friction creates tension creates excitement, who would have thought). So grinding mobs for hours to end did feel boring to many a players (which is where a lot of the complains came from).
The community mitigated that a bit by using fate trains. Suddenly, Eureka Anemos meta gameplay became this super Zerg that ran through the map at high speeds and obliterated NMs. That gave people a lot of time to at least chat occasionally, taking a break from crunching monsters as the people working on spawning the NMs always rotated a bit.

CS3 disliked that the fate-train method preferred by the players so much that in Pagos, the possibility to Zerg like that was nerfed to the ground. That killed a lot of the enthusiasm players had (at least what I have seen, YMMV), many people on my own server and Discords at that time (myself included) turned their back on Eureka because of that. And that very sentiment you just said, "they hate that we are not playing the game the way they want us to", was something that was said a lot, at least through the people I associated by that time. Now I can't remember if they outright confirmed that this was the case or not, but it certainly felt that way.

Only with Pyros afterwards they managed to come back around somewhat, but you still have to clear Pagos to get to Pyros.

[Kazuke_Miso]

Suddenly, Eureka Anemos meta gameplay became this super Zerg that ran through the map at high speeds and obliterated NMs. That gave people a lot of time to at least chat occasionally, taking a break from crunching monsters as the people working on spawning the NMs always rotated a bit.

CS3 disliked that the fate-train method preferred by the players so much that in Pagos, the possibility to Zerg like that was nerfed to the ground.

This is 100% right. The only time this dev team makes significant changes is when they hate that you're having fun with a method they didn't anticipate.

Of course they don't want to ever outright admit it, but they have designed FF14 in an extremely player-antagonistic way for years now. Think about housing. Savage gear lockouts. Tomestone lockouts. Content being spread across four weeks each. Weekly lockouts being put in every single type of content. Achievements that are grindier than what you see in a KMMO.

It's so, so, so ironic that one of the chief complaints of FF14 1.0 is that they timegate you so hard and start nerfing your XP the longer you play. But modern FF14 has far more timegates than FF14 1.0.

They hated that people were being more efficient in Anemos even if it hurt no one because they want you to spend 3 months in that zone grinding so you pay $39.