No, we do have enough content

[Kozh]

Just FYI:

Oh right, yes. Thanks for reminding me that I still need to chime in in that thread. As someone who love SB, I can't let the "white savior" nonsense off the hook just like that

[Basteala]

Yeah but why do you stay subbed if you don't play the game? Just unsub lol

What an original and compelling argument. What do you think would happen if everyone took your sage advice?

But I will answer your question. I run a FC of moderate size and I happen to like the community I've grown here. The lore in FF14 is still good enough that I can cook with it for RP purposes even if FF14's writing team burned down the kitchen with DT's MSQ.

And I've included dailies because I personally do them even after all these years, and everyone I know do them too. If you wanna include a small percentage of people who doesn't do dailies, then we're including the ultimate and reclears to the calculation, which adds hundreds of hours.

Unless you're part of some massive FC or community, "small percentage" is a bold statement to make for a personal sample size. Hasn't there been plenty of criticism of the daily grind?

Progression raiding often adds time to content, yes. This is probably why SE is focusing on it for the 1% at the expense of the majority of their fanbase. #content yeah? Too bad it doesn't appeal to most of their players, just basing it off of the community sentiment here. as well as ultimates being difficult by design and not achievable by everyone (which is fine when it's not the focus of your content), of course.

The problem with dailies is that you're paying, essentially, for recycled content. It's not like you get to recycle the money you're paying for said content.

[Kaurhz]

Well I came around 5.5, and at that time everyone was saying how great the developers are and how they listened to the community and saved the game. So I can't say what was happening during Stormblood, except the thing I heard from Xeno, that the devs created 2 minute meta because players was complaining that aligning skills was too hard. As for the Elden Ring that's exactly what I meant. These games are too different, so they either shouldn't have delayed the expansion or should've made it harder.

So I hate to be this person, especially seeing as I know dismissiveness doesn't amount to much, but this is the problem that you don't really see or have a frame of reference for when people actually enjoyed the game itself. By 5.5, everything was already an established formula, so a lot of the intricate things that HW, and even to a degree what Stormblood offered just aren't understood or appreciated by a lot of modern players. Things like, how, even if you weren't a raider, the game had plenty other avenues of content which wanted your attention like crafting, unsync raids for Neo-Aetherstones as an entry-point for making Gil, or things like FC-based content (even if it was a flop), these were things that gave people a sense of wanderlust, something that has been absolutely lost to rote formula.

It's easy for anyone to say "Well you all asked for this", but can almost guarantee if you polled them on whether they liked how excessive they took it (from those that actually played and complained back then), can almost guarantee many would respond with "Too much."

They saved the game in the sense that it didn't go to the complete brink of death, and it's absolutely something that is commendable, but things like this shouldn't really preclude all other issues that people have with the game.. Like we aren't in 2013 anymore, and the reality is, is that these hand-picked examples of where the devs actually deigned to listen just aren't that great, since the list of things they do not listen to is far more monumental. and from my experience, people took as much issue with the 2-minute meta, than what took issue with overall design back in HW and SB (With the exception of maybe things like Cross-class abilities), so realistically if they did actually listen then this issue will not have persisted for over 8 years with only recently being a topic of discussion with vague remarks like "Maybe we overdid it".. This tells me personally that their concern was not exclusively with actually listening to the feedback, but more so the fact of trying to remove as many fail states from the game as humanly possible. Things like BLM changes are an utter testament to this fact, as is the complete and utter obliteration of the crafting system, they've reduced this to such a state where, whether you're a scrip go-er, someone who did average melds or someone who invested millions and millions of Gil into melding, then the result discrepancy is barely noticeable beyond maybe an additional HW mat, they've reduced it to such a state where even macro differences barely exist. If they were concerned expressly with the feedback then the thing is, things like "we overdid it" shouldn't actually be a thing, especially when you've overdone it to such an excessive degree that even the casual players, such as myself (who are generally least affected by such changes, just between goals, reasons for playing the game, and general overall knowledge), are absolutely up in arms about everything.

I disagree on the comment of Elden Ring... The games are starkly different, but the overlap in audiences is very clearly there to where there is an advantage in delaying it. The point is that the amount of engagement you get out of doing, say, a custom delivery and exploring Elden Ring is just so, so starkly different. Like sure, you can equivocate to say "You get 60 hours out of this", but you also "get 60 hours out of this", but the underlying quality is just leaps and bounds different.

Edit: Also, on the not of.. We have enough content, but the issue missing is replayability, this may be true to an extent, but the result is really the same, and there is still a fundamental issue in that long-term they are relying on the same 3-4 major content types each expansion to provide that replayability, since it's eventually going to get stale, if it hasn't already... With very little demonstration in willing to take some risk to try something new... This is just as big a problem as something like what we had in Endwalker where we had all these content types but no excuse to actually do them more than once.

[YukioKobayashi]

Unironically true. We do have enough content. We are getting more content than ever before with 7.2 onwards.
The real problem is the quality and replayability of the content we are getting.

[AvoSturmfaust]

Anything considered Savage level should not be included. The engagement is very low, if we pick the entire playerbase. Same goes for Extremes with useless, low ilvl gear.

And that is exactly the issue final has right now, Endgames in MMO should ALWAYS be based on Raids/Grind or anything which involves Challenges in any kind of form, this is how it always was in MMOs but people in final take the game as second life and as social platform and these player are the reason the game cant evolve

[Gunz_Zbestest]

Does the box price of the expansion not count here? You are paying 40 dollars upfront just to access the new quests, raids, etc. on top of the monthly subscription.

I would much rather purchase elden ring knowing I am getting a well crafted 60 hour experience than to purchase a 40 dollar expansion and pay 15 dollars for a one month subscription each month for what you say is 27.5 hours of content each month, especially when most of the content in the game right now is a reskin of something we have had before.

Its extremely hard to be constructive when the devs don't listen or communicate with players well at all.

This is the problem though. People can't just keep using the argument that it's hard to be nice to each other. It's like some people here came to the conclusion that the devs don't read the forum so they will thrash about with general insults like a prisoner in isolation because any attention good or bad is still attention.

[Rithy255]

Unironically true. We do have enough content. We are getting more content than ever before with 7.2 onwards.
The real problem is the quality and replayability of the content we are getting.

If the jobs themselves were unique and intresting then maybe the content itself wouldn't be so bland.

You know what old interesting fun job design brought... replay value! it also turns easy content like dungeons into ways to learn your jobs and give you something to master in a safer environment.

But now because job design is bland and has no interest itself, if the content isn't that fun then its not like playing/learning a new job on that content would make that content any more interesting... Even if the content itself is fun the core of it is still bland because your job isn't really fun or interesting... imagine how much replay value could be added by having a unique experience on a different job.

[Kaurhz]

And that is exactly the issue final has right now, Endgames in MMO should ALWAYS be based on Raids/Grind or anything which involves Challenges in any kind of form, this is how it always was in MMOs but people in final take the game as second life and as social platform and these player are the reason the game cant evolve

They aren't. I don't know why people always seem to come back around to this problem of the phantom second-life people destroying the ga,e. A lot of people treating it like a second-life or social hub is because they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do.

The issue with this game not being able to evolve will squarely be on the developers and the developers alone.

[ovIm]

They aren't. I don't know why people always seem to come back around to this problem of the phantom second-life people destroying the ga,e. A lot of people treating it like a second-life or social hub is because they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do.

The issue with this game not being able to evolve will squarely be on the developers and the developers alone.

CS3's actions alienate those people that engage with the game mechanically, and those that don't do that and instead use the game as a social hub (no shade btw, its an MMORPG, the social aspect is part of the entire experience) without any ties to the gameplay remain because they are unaffected by the issues. Blaming those people is easier than pointing a finger at the dev studio that is actively ignoring their playerbases feedback, I guess.

[Loggos]

It's not (just) about the time you can spend on content but how well this time is spent. I'd rather have 1 or 2 hours of fun than 10 hours of blandness. The quality of content matters. You can spend a decent amount of time doing all your roulettes each day, esp. if you include the alliance roulette. But that doesn't mean it has to be fun. Roulettes are like a chore to me. Another example is the MSQ. The current MSQ doesn't have the quality it used to have in my eyes. Same amount of content but a vastly different experience due to execution.

I agree with Rithy255, the uniqueness of jobs was an important factor to keep content alive. Ideally, even if the fights stayed the same you'd still be able to experience them from 21 different angles as long as all 21 jobs were unique. Good class design would be such a good way to "increase" the amount of content we have by increasing its replayability value. It's mind-boggling that they decided to throw this away in their obsession to make everything either as easy as possible or to try to level the playing field so perfectly for high-end raiding that they killed any room for "tension".
Tension in the sense that not everything can be the absolute pinnacle of meta (something should be able to clear decently but not every job has to be the Nr.1 as long as they are fun) and tension in the sense that it's ok that jobs require some time to learn and that there is some friction when you progress with it. That it's ok if some of them are more difficult. That it's ok not everybody will like every job.

Ideally jobs should be designed so you can clear casual content even if you don't play optimised (at all) as long as you have the basics down but have lots of room for optimisation and improvement in high-end content (but if you want to go hard in casual content, optimise away). Simple basics, complex mastery. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling.

The fact that the devs have shackled themselves to statistics like win and pick rate has completely blinded them to the aspect of enjoyment it seems. They seem to think that "winning" alone is the epitome of fun. So as long as people win they are happy. They don't consider that it also matters how you win. If they make a job so strong that you basically need to play it to be "competitive" then people will pick it out of efficiency, not due to personal enjoyment.
But the devs seem to think "Let's make X too strong to ignore --> Oh wow, many people pick X! --> Many people must love X --> Our approach of dealing with X was a success --> Let's stick with this approach!"

There's a reason why I'm only playing PvP at this point. Even though we barely get new content (new maps) I can still spend hours on this mode having fun (Fun! In FF14! Devs, imagine!), even though it's just a minor game mode, because the quality of my gaming experience that the variety of the classes and the inherently random nature of matches provide keeps me engaged.
(I'm begging the devs not to mess this up and homogenise PvP jobs as well. Please cherish their uniqueness.)
I have fun being able to switch to different classes and having a completely different experience compared to the match before. And I enjoy spending time on learning and mastering jobs, solving problems and improving instead of mindless grind for levels and tomes.

The fact that this side activity is designed considerably better than their main gameplay shows the sad state PvE is in, but also that PvP could really thrive if it was given more love and care by the devs.