"Another post will surely grab their attention-"

[Unixeon]

Spoilers ahead...

So, I've been playing XIV consistently since COVID.
I was so immersed, in love with the game, genuinely enjoying every single second of all the expansions leading through Shadowbringers. Yes I even loved ARR, because, lets be honest, if you didn't love xiv in ARR, you probably wouldn't be here today. The way the characters build up, environments, story, everything was handled. I loved it. However, I cannot help but feel neglected, forgotten, and taken advantage of. We've given devs "longer patch cycles, so they can give better content" and we've seemingly gotten less effort. I cried at the ending of Endwalker, that moment in Ultima Thule, where you walk with the shades of the past, it really touched me as someone who loves this game, the people, and the places.

That's about as far as I can genuinely say I've been in love with XIV.. Once the patch quests started to roll out, in Endwalker, they did not give me hope. It felt as if there was no real direction, no real idea of what was going to happen next. A spin off series in the 13th with Zero (how is she btw? lmao..). Then we get to the final patch cycle where we're suddenly agreeing to help this super passionate character to win her throne.

I'm not going to say anything about the story telling of Dawntrail, because.. let's be real.. there's enough of that. The zones? Beautiful. The story? Acceptable.. but it's a bit all over the place feeling once the fleets from alexandria show up, and we move into the Solution 9 side of the story.

My genuine concern with XIV recently has been.. What are we getting?
Is what we ask for as a playerbase even considered? We have Event quests for seasonal, big time holidays and such being widdled down to what feels like "Go talk to this person.-- Now talk to this person. -- Now go back to this person. -- Congrats heres a orchestrion roll." What happened to the community events? Fates? Interactions with other people? Even the Valentines event didn't have the normal "trust" instance for you and your partner to tackle.

We have job designs being nuked. Homogenizing classes does NOT mean people will be more willing to play them. I do understand that some balancing to classes is necessary, but taking identities from jobs away just to make them easier to attract new people to them is not what it should be about. Jobs need to have individuality. Classes like black mage for instance do not need to be made easier to attract players away from pictomancer. Pictomancer was a choice in its own right, it should've never been made to be that way. (More in replies, 3800 characters too long apparently..)

[Unixeon]

Making the game consistently the same difficulty from beginning to end should not be the case. As players learn to play the game, over time the difficulty, intensity, and development of the encounters should naturally get more difficult over time. I'm by no means saying I am only interested in hard content. I've dabbled in savages, ultimates, etc and while they do have some intensity to them, it's generally all mechanics we've seen before, and learning to do an endurance run of that is the real challenge.

This has become just another ramble post, but still.. I'm seeing creators for this game posting left and right about what's going on.. And I'm finally feeling a bit heard.. So I really would like to make this a big push back, and genuinely ask for what we expect.
As for the creators and videos, I'm sure you can find them by creator name, but we have:
Zepla
Lucy Pyre
Synodic Scribe
All of these videos made are valid. All of these are how I feel. And all of these are why long time enjoyers of XIV are bleeding out left and right. I'm just here to ask, and hope the developers are going to take this outcry and genuinely listen to what we're asking for.

[Kaliesto]

Personally I think we need to start rallying the community together, USA, JP, Oceania, and EURO to start saying enough is enough for all variety of reasons; I feel like we're being messed with and gaslit at this point by developer suspicious behavior, and some parts of the community that simply don't understand or will not understand that this game is in very unhealthy state.

We have nothing else left, and only unsubbing en masse is the only thing I think CS3, Square Enix, and those meddling Shareholders will understand.

I'm not saying it should be a permanent unsub, but a long vacation like after 4 to 5 patches in.

I think we all care about this game, but it really does feel like the Developers don't feel the same way with how they're doing things.

At least the Musicians & Graphics Designers of CS3 seem to still care, but idk about the rest of them.


Ultimately we need the Japanese FFXIV forum Community to be the loudest voice, they're the ones holding the cards at the end of the day. I would like to encourage the JP players to come post over here or vice versa and collaborate our grievances together.

[SongOfTheWind]

Who cared enough to be rallied - already left.

[Kaliesto]

Who cared enough to be rallied - already left.

You...have a point.

I'm mad, Lucy Pyre's video really struck a cord with me recently and her suggested methods feels like its the only message we can send.

[Kaurhz]

Honestly…

I actually don’t think it will matter what anyone does, or what the player base does as a collective. Generally they are just playing it far far too risk averse that even if they do turn it around, then they will only fall back on a rigid formula again, because, again… just that risk averse… Their comments of “we’ve been too relaxed”, “reworking encounters and reworking jobs in the future”.. but really nothing has shown for it, minus a collective community that forgot how expansion releases always are when it’s fresh, same thing happens every time.

There’s no interest in connecting with the wider community, just as there is no interest in actually understanding the grievances that people actually have with the game. They have no target audience, they never have had a target audience. They try to appeal to absolutely everyone and in doing so they end up appealing to nobody. Sure they used to be more innovative and took more risks, but ultimately they still never really appealed to any core audience.

The game has accessibility as tantamount, which is fine, but I have never seen anyone try to be this accessible, yet manage to fail so utterly hard with it.

[Kaliesto]

I had a long topic ready for this morning to post concerning all of this, but for some reason the forum crapped itself (I'll just take that as a sign); my post here is just a much shorter summary how I've been feeling lately.

Yoshi P and CS3 as a whole disappoints me, I don't get it anymore.

[Red-thunder]

Personally I think we need to start rallying the community together, USA, JP, Oceania, and EURO to start saying enough is enough for all variety of reasons; I feel like we're being messed with and gaslit at this point by developer suspicious behavior, and some parts of the community that simply don't understand or will not understand that this game is in very unhealthy state.

We have nothing else left, and only unsubbing en masse is the only thing I think CS3, Square Enix, and those meddling Shareholders will understand.

Have you seen the response to the black mage changes? I'm sure you've been on Reddit or Discord or some such.

This community has no solidarity. Outside of the forums, there are probably more people dunking on black mage, saying that they got what they deserved, trashing on the black mage players' supposed arrogance.

This community has always turned on each other first, way before turning on the devs. The white knights use thought-terminating cliches and bad faith arguments to shut every dissent down.

In a way, and not to be overly dramatic about this, it reminds me of the authoritarian regimes that you'd read about in history (and perhaps experience...). The real enemy is the authoritarian regimes, but we have no tooth and claw to fight back. The commoners instead unleash all their rage and anger at each other. And the deluded brainwashed class traitors get whipped up by the propaganda (live letters) and spend all their energy defending the regime. Yes this is over-dramatizing the situation but think about the psychological mechanism behind this. It's the exact same psychology even if the stakes are far lower.

[Azurarok]

It's easier to exclude smaller groups of people without backlash. That's where they started, and that's where they continued to keep eroding

[Basteala]

It's easier to exclude smaller groups of people without backlash. That's where they started, and that's where they continued to keep eroding

Very much like real life, innit?