Why is the game going down every expasion?

[ddwarbird]

The main problem with Dawntrail is the dungeons. Whether you think them easy or not, a lot of casual players did not and it made the game not enjoyable for people just there for the story. Which is one of the reasons subs declined drastically (that and the lackluster first half of the expansions story). Not everyone wants to be a hardcore raider so I do not understand why normal story dungeons could not have been kept the difficulty they were in Endwalker, Shadowbringers and Stormblood. The entire dungeon roster for Dawntrail has been a travesty of rather cheap "gotcha"-like mechanics.

[Rithy255]

Why is the game going down each expansion? Simple because the game has become worser and worser over time, through micro changes like small job adjustments, slowly removing interesting aspects of the game, slower content coming out, it starts off as 3 months but slowly time between patches have become larger leading to people getting bored quicker, story declined pretty fast but showed its signs in endwalker of decline.

When Core gameplay such as Job design slowly goes down, people are going to eventually leave no matter how loyal they are, people are going to get fed up with the game if it keeps following it's trends and as mechs are the main focus of the game, but FF14's mechs aren't really it's strong suit considering how much lag from the inbuilt detection is apart of that, it becomes a "dance fight" but not even a good one at that.

Why are we not getting any reversions? because SE are so scared of taking risks, they don't want jobs to be OP/UP, they don't want content that could possibly fail, they don't want to innovate on dungeon formulars, because they've gotten away with not taking risks for so long I doubt they will anytime soon, they will go safest option always, even if unironically being safe with ff14's design is it's major weakness.

The only thing we can do as consumers is play or stop playing, our voices aren't getting listened to, I'll be brutally honest here if you don't like the state of the game, the best thing to do is find something else that's what I've been doing and I've been having fun, I only play this game right now for some friends even then I don't see a lot of them on ff14 more and more.

[Absurdity]

Onslaught is an oGCD though. 100 potency oGCD is worth more than 100 potency GCD.
Generally, constantly pushing Onslaught on cooldown did hurt your damage iirc, so you wanted to be smart with its usage.

I probably should've touched on that but yes, this.
It was an oGCD so you had to include the GCD you gained from Onslaught into the calculation, since you wouldn't have had that GCD if you pressed Fell Cleave instead.
Now this could be as low as an extra Heavy Swing in which case it probably wouldn't be worth it... or it could be as high as a Storm's Path and the extra 20 gauge from it.

This obviously made it a lot harder to pick the "correct" choice compared to "I have 50 gauge I press Fell Cleave" but it also made your choices more interesting.

[Volgia]

Not everyone wants to be a hardcore raider so I do not understand why normal story dungeons could not have been kept the difficulty they were in Endwalker, Shadowbringers and Stormblood. The entire dungeon roster for Dawntrail has been a travesty of rather cheap "gotcha"-like mechanics.

Stormblood, Shadowbringers and Endwalker have all varying difficulties when they were on content. The first and second dungeon in ShB had pulls where you could completely wipe if you weren't careful about your mechanics, Bardam's Mettle was rough on low geared tanks and healers, the Burn also had pulls where people would wipe, and sometimes people couldn't do the Mist Dragon. Endwalker is just a complete snoozefest, please don't bring that back.

[Rithy255]

The main problem with Dawntrail is the dungeons. Whether you think them easy or not, a lot of casual players did not and it made the game not enjoyable for people just there for the story. Which is one of the reasons subs declined drastically (that and the lackluster first half of the expansions story). Not everyone wants to be a hardcore raider so I do not understand why normal story dungeons could not have been kept the difficulty they were in Endwalker, Shadowbringers and Stormblood. The entire dungeon roster for Dawntrail has been a travesty of rather cheap "gotcha"-like mechanics.

I've never once had people quit in dungeons because it's too hard, they're still very easy to get through. I've known a lot of casual players not one said they quit because dungeons are too difficult, casual players that only have interest in the msq most likely quit because the story was bad its that simple. You can get through DT's dungeons pretty easily even if you wipe a few times.

The reason why they're focusing more on encounters is because they've abandoned job design for dance fights on a outdated system that has a lot of inbuilt delay. If they start to reduce encounter design they literally got nothing to hold casual content together anymore.

Casual doesn't = absence of a game, casual gamers still want some fun, taking that away will just lead to less players, if the story, jobs and encounters are all bad what's even left of the game?

[Drimn]

I’m a person who loves this game,the world and everything in between but I feel like the game has dropped in quality in story,job indentity(coming from a War main who have seen War get massacred every explosion.I still love War to death but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the obvious massacre done to it) and in my honest opinion,the localization has gotten worse and people just blindly ignore it because of reasons I don’t know.Yoshi has to wake up and realize the state of the game and whoever is giving him council to be fired.What do others think of the state of the game and what do you dislike that they have have done to it?I’m really curious of what everyone who loves this fantasy world as much as I do thinks.

From what I've seen people have been pretty vocal about the state of writing/localization, to the point that people namedrop the main English localizer pretty often when it comes to complaints about the recent direction of the game. If you want to know what happened in that case, Square leadership saw that CBU3 was the big moneymaker and gave them more responsibility. This meant that the management pyramid had to get a little higher, so the more competent localizer and storyteller got promoted to oversight positions, and their replacements are struggling because the writer's in over his head and has too big of shoes to fill, and the head localizer is, frankly, too immature to fill the role, and the rest of the game (and even Square Enix's reputation to an extent) suffers for it.

[Sifpatata]

This mmo is in its decline phase, i.e. it is going through what happens to mmos when their time of fame is over, hey but as long as there are players ffxiv will not die so easy, look at WoW for example.

In the end, this mmo will become a single player experience like ff11.

[Rithy255]

This mmo is in its decline phase, i.e. it is going through what happens to mmos when their time of fame is over, hey but as long as there are players ffxiv will not die so easy, look at WoW for example.

In the end, this mmo will become a single player experience like ff11.

This comes across as "oh well it will decline but some people play it so its not a problem"

The reason why FF14's fame is over is because they made bad decisions quite frankly the reason why wow is staying around is because they actually listened to their players and try to actually innovate once in a while, ff14 is too scared to evolve or listen to anything other then "make thing easy"

If ff14 actually managed to have a better content cycle and better gameplay then players would actually want to stick around and we wouldn't have a declining game.

[hydralus]

I'm hoping the number of players go down a bit. Maybe then I can get my S-rank achievements done.

[LilithGardenia]

From what I've seen people have been pretty vocal about the state of writing/localization, to the point that people namedrop the main English localizer pretty often when it comes to complaints about the recent direction of the game. If you want to know what happened in that case, Square leadership saw that CBU3 was the big moneymaker and gave them more responsibility. This meant that the management pyramid had to get a little higher, so the more competent localizer and storyteller got promoted to oversight positions, and their replacements are struggling because the writer's in over his head and has too big of shoes to fill, and the head localizer is, frankly, too immature to fill the role, and the rest of the game (and even Square Enix's reputation to an extent) suffers for it.

I’m one of those that don’t like none of the localizers and I am waiting on AI to develop to the point of replacing these good for nothing people who hate the original source and making the enjoyment of the game less enjoyable every time a patch gets added.The writer got to be taken out of the position and replaced with the one who did shadowbringer because majority of the community agrees that she was better