Dear Community what even holds you in this game

[TheInsomniac13]

Honest Question not a Bait post.

I recently had to admit that the potential I saw in the game when I first started to play did not deliver in the later expansions of this game, Side Quests stayed as low effort as they started Dungeons are a linear corridor of pull all and kill it and any interesting Boss gimicks we had in the past were phased out of the game so that only DDR Remains.

The only thing that keeped me in the Game was the story making FF 14 for my basicly a Visual Novel interupted by medicore to bad gameplay.
So when Dawntrail drove the story against the wall my biggest draw to the game endet.

The other think I enjoyed was Jobidentity. I loved leveling them all learning the to play them all and then seeing them all getting more and more Braindead. Yoshida acknowledged the communeties worry about the Homoginazation and sayed it would be adressed... only for 7.2 to drop and proving... the Devs do not give a fuck about Jobs and see High end Raiding as the be all and end all of this game, and I coulden´t care less for it.

In the last view weeks I read a lot of Discords and Forum posts and... Many agree... DT was a shit show of story, Jobs dummer then ever and the majorety of the people I saw do not care for Extream, Savage and Ultimates and lament that jobs get cut down to fit this kind of content. Space Exploration is a shit show on an embaresing scale as it seems, which leaves me with this question to the community...

what even holds you in the game? Because my honest answer there is nothing left for me and I am really interested to hear what other people still see in this game.

[Kaurhz]

Honestly, nothing innately to the game, and I don't really think there's anything they can do. I mean, there's a tonne to do with new Cosmic and I could go for the 500K mount again, but the crafting abilities are just so unfun and unengaging... Gathering is a nightmare for relics let alone doing the 500K achievement.

I've only really been attached because of friends, but now I am just doing cross-play on Wilds with them, so I am rarely actively online.

[Nero-Voidstails]

roleplay and that's pretty much it not gonna lie

[Boblawblah]

Nothing at all. I sub for a month when I feel like it, and stop when I'm bored/haven't used my sub.

[Volgia]

I've lost track of how many times this question has been asked in the forums lol.

Why would you pay 15$ a month for a VN that drops 4 hours of story every 4 months and a half is beyond me. What keeps me in this game is that it's low-commitment, it's easy to take a break to play other games and come back whenever the content that's out interests me, even content like savage is long enough for me to take a couple months break and come back and attempt it.

[ViinaS]

My house,
the friends that are still playing
....
sunk cost fallacy.

That's pretty much it tbh and its rather sad.

[kajv95]

I revisit on occasion. Sometimes it's because friends will try and drag me back screaming by buying me a sub, then get all flabbergasted when I'm not positive about it. Other times, I'm genuinely curious if things have improved.

My fiance and I, we met on this game, but lately when we play games, we often think back to how FFXIV could be like the things we're enjoying playing now, if the developers hadn't decided that the best thing to do is to simplify everything so that everyone with a pulse can play. Maybe that's a rude way to phrase things, but it is what it is. Whether or not the simplification is truly meant for accessibility as the developers themselves have put it, or rather at the behest of something else entirely, such as ease of designing encounters is a little besides the point. The simple truth of the matter is that I have now spent as much time feeling like, and being told that, maybe Final Fantasy XIV isn't for me anymore.

This is difficult, because as it stands, Final Fantasy XIV is in many ways the reason I am who I am today. The game saw me through dark times, and engaging with its playerbase quite literally carved out a future where I previously had none. So, of course, I still cared about it. And in some ways, I still do. But to be told time again that the game is no longer made for me by both players and, indirectly, by the developers themselves... It's kind of like being stabbed in the back. I played when this game hadn't reached its fame yet, and the moment it did, it discarded me.

Fortunately, Final Fantasy XIV isn't the only MMO on the market, and through it, I've come to deeply adore the MMO genre... So, for now, I've been taking my business elsewhere. It's my love for the FFXIV game of the past and the community that keeps me watching the forums, hoping to one day see a spark appear that draws me back in. But each break becomes longer everytime, as with every other game I play between breaks, the flaws in this game become more and more apparent.

Often times, my friends tell me it's fun to play with them and their extended circle of friends... but if the game itself isn't fun on its own, then adding friends to it won't magically make the game more fun. Yes, playing with friends is inherently more fun, but I simply cannot afford to pay monthly for a game that is only fun with friends when in reality, I can have the same level of fun doing something else with my friends. Because it's not the game I'm enjoying with friends; it's the friends I'm enjoying, and we're simply using the game as a medium to get together over the internet. Which is something we can do in many, many other games.

No, you can't have my gil.

[Jeeqbit]

The High-End content is still a lot of fun, despite that some people think otherwise. And all the people I meet in Party Finder who are doing it seem to think the same. To double down on that, sometimes I join little Discord servers with these parties and they are having a lot of fun in voice. So clearly that is a factor.

I enjoy hunting (spawning S ranks and conducting hunt trains). If you don't know what I mean by that, then just think of it as a rabbit hole that you can only understand if you've done it and enjoyed it at some point.

I enjoy collecting mounts. Achievements in contrast are very boring, but just going as far as the mount tends to work for me. Part of the fun is that you meet the same people doing what you are doing, and you come across them again and again. So it's a social fun for me.

I enjoy dungeons purely as a stress relief. Click button, instantly cure any sort of loneliness, relieve family stress on enemies, stress gone.

I still want to see future expansions and story, because I think longer term than just Dawntrail.

The moon crafting is honestly kinda boring, but it is a social environment and you are doing it together. And that's what makes it fun. Shout chat. The regular events, Red Alerts, help a lot with rallying people together every few hours to just chill in /shout while doing their thing. It's way better than Island Sanctuary which was so isolating that you may as well have been playing a boring single player game. I also feel that it will be more fun to see what planets we go to and build. The moon itself is just the starter lore for how we do it.

There are a lot of things that could be improved about the game. Mostly these are little things, but there are so many of them that they build up like lego to become a big issue in combination and when there are enough "little issues" they push people away. Obviously any game is going to have things that could be better, there just isn't a speedy and proactive effort to address QoL, but rather a few are hand picked to be fixed in each major patch.

Now if we do actually compare this to other MMORPGs, the others put me off in comparison. FFXIV is still just better. No matter what people say that WoW is doing, I will never like the aesthetic, the ugly goblins, the cartoon graphics, and how it overall presents a complicated feel when that's not what you want if you're attracting new players who need to be able to feel like they can digest everything. There are some others that are good, but either they feel more tedious or their aesthetic isn't as positive and doesn't make me feel happy. Word is their content is way less frequent than this game too, but I don't follow them enough anymore to know myself.

I also just like the community, and that is one of the reasons I started playing (whatever the current FF MMO was). Becuase it appeals to and attracts certain types of players over others.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

RP, friends, and 'things that should not be named'. These three are the major reasons I'm around.

Raid & gameplay used to be one of them. A static also used to reel me back in, but I'm no longer in one since 6.58 with half of them losing interest in FFXIV and I severely dislike PF mentalities of modern times. Not happening anymore.
Story & lore was a big contributor. But come post EW and all the way to 7.1 had destroyed so much of my enjoyment from this aspect. While 7.2 restored a bit---stress on 'a bit'---I'm still not ready to embrace this back just yet.
Some achievements here and there helps to occupy me to the game, but they're running thin at this point.

Supposedly Occult Crescent would be my 'bastion' when it arrives in less than a month from now. But after having seen how isle sanctuary, criterion, and eureka orthros turned out to be, this too, I'm growing more pessimist.

[TheInsomniac13]

Yeah I can relate with the people recognizing you for the content you appear in. I made some really good regular friends back in the time when I played Eureka in order to do all Relic weapons. Some of my best times in this game I had there with players that just keeped meeting again and again.
Heck I tendet to do so many Duty rouletts daylie that some people even started to remember my name simply because I keepet popping up.
But all that leant on the core principle I liked, the way the Jobes played so every time another big change took part of a jobs identity away it left a bad tast in my mouth. I remember Yoshida saying how he heres the playerbase in regards to the Homoginazation issu... then bamm a monthe later Monk gets scrubed clean of all dot´s and selfbuffs...
7.2... I was honestly not even mad when I saw the patchnotes... I just thought yeah... why would I even be suprised... loged int... went to the next dummy... and tested Black Mage... casted Fire 4 till my MP were empty... and then just stood there... 10 effin Minuets staring... I feeled empty.
I havend done a single Roulett since then. I only loged in to help a firend through Bozja and currently eureka, I left my Island Sanctury to rot, I lost any kind of passion I had left for this game because I know no matter what job I will try to invest myself in it´s only a question of when not if the Devs come around and castrat that job as well.

as kajv95 sayed it, If I use the game to have fun with my friends... then I could just have fun with my firends while playing and also fun game.
In terms of WoW I really do not like it´s grafik but at this point I am ready to give it a shot anyway and depending how Caster plays in that game I may even like it in spite of it´s look.

However if some one knows a game with great caster classes (heck dosen´t even have to be an MMO) Please let me know.