The content should be enjoyed by all players?

[Gurgeh]

....

Sorry to see you going Aid. Because obviously you cared enough to actually find this upsetting. It's clear that you once, and recently, really loved this game. You are not alone. Joining you shortly.

P.S. The live letter announcement: they are going to have to do better in future because live letters don't come along often enough to respond to these problems. And with regard to them being untranslated, that's just not good enough either anymore. Like Zepla recently said for those of us who are fed up and have left, or have left but just haven't admitted it to ourselves and are dead players losing logging in for our houses, they now need to be knocking it out of the park. With communication that now means building a relationship, such means communicating directly, not via delayed community translation BS. That was great when things were good and people want to make the effort. We don't anymore. If you can't be bothered or are too stingy to hire a translator (SE shouldn't even need to hire one) we can't be bothered to listen.

I'm sorry that you've had to go Aid. And we know there are so so many of us. And the damage that's been done can never be undone. We were here for the community, and that community will never be 'trusted' again. That community can never exist again. Not for us. And there really are so many of us.

[Gurgeh]

You know noone is blaming you, personally, for anything to do with state of FFXIV, right? Like, why take on this victimhood?

"Typical of those people."
"But not you of course. Your alright"
("I'm not racist. I have friends who are X")
It's all the same BS.

F me.

[Shurrikhan]

Yoshi-P recently said that after trying to get the balance right and get the game to a perfect state, he had finally accepted that it's not possible because no matter what he does, a section of the playerbase will be upset about it, so all he can do is keep trying.

Interestingly, the WoW director recently did a presentation where they had concluded the same thing. There are subjects where the playerbase is diametrically opposed to eachother and it's impossible to satisfy all of them.

Satisfy fully? Certainly. For some 0.1% of players? Also sure. But the idea that you can't even salvage opposed desires across any significantly sized groups is such a cop-out.

Take open-world content in either game.

Group A wants to be able to mow through enemies like in Path of Exile or Dynasty Warriors. Something chill while st(r)oking the 'god-mode' feeling.
Group B wants dangerous mobs to sneak through, necessitated use of traps and zone-acquired items and deliberate study (in-game, as from watching the mob fight another) and strategy for taking down even fairly average mobs solo, with a large portion impossible to kill without a group. Something that makes for a more lived-in world.

Impossible to satisfy both together, right? Except, even in the same content, you could easily have an area with mobs that are easily mowed down with positioning optimized for that feeling of a battle-high AND have mobs that are more spaced out and are legitimately dangerous for a very different sense of thrill, and you can balance them decently well against each other. Hell, you could even bring in the latter's items to create means of intense period of farming or add new triggers, while farming weak enemies at whatever speed could likewise drop shit that makes the other areas more accessible.

No, not 100% of the content will 100% fit either need, but both can absolutely, 100%, have enough content 100% within that need so long as sufficient effort is put development. And at that point if players complain just because something outside their preference exists, you then ignore those complaints.

When looking at the likes of healer issues or OC, though, that's clearly not the limit of player complaints. Most are not inevitable and insurmountable issues born solely of conflicting preferences; they're generally failures of imagination and/or effort.

[Vazdan]

...

Yeah, I'm right there with you. I just cancelled my sub. I've come to the realization that I have pretty much quit already, and have admitted it to myself. I don't know if I'll ever come back to be honest. Unless things change and CBU3 actually makes an effort to communicate with us... there doesn't seem to be any point in sticking around. I think pride has soured all of them and has fed their arrogance in their unwillingness to communicate.

[Eris249]

Best way is to have a hardness setting for every duty going from No combat to extreme combat level.

[Gurgeh]

They have genuinely gone in a full circle trying to please everyone:
- Wait times between NMs = complaints
- No wait times between them = complaints

- Big relic grind = complaints
- Big relic grind, but not as big = complaints
- Relic grind but new content = complaints
- Relic grind both new and old content = complaints
- Tomestone handouts = complaints
- Full circle repeat = complaints

I do believe that in many cases it's possible to satisfy both sides of the playerbase when they are opposed by giving them an option/choice. But there are going to be situations where you actually just have to choose one or the other as a game designer.

They haven't tried to please everyone. What utter coolaid BS.

- After the Endwalker COVID draught, and then the DT MSW disaster, CHAOTIC should never have been allowed to happen. The designer of that fight should have been told on no uncertain terms that those body checks for example just need to go.
- Criterion (read Savage not Extreme) should never have been allowed to happen more than once. It's happened three times.
- Forked tower, without an accessible challenging instance like Castrum, should never have been allowed to happen.
- It's taken them a decade to still screw up and fail to deliver FATEs that scale fast and properly, scaling that works.
- I asked them to give me lots of Extreme difficulty in OC, and not 'just' lots of one hit tank and spank hunt content. Instead they did give me lots of great Extreme difficulty CE, but then took away 'nearly' all the mob farming, and amplified the worst aspects of hunt farming with bad scaling and having so few.
- No one asked for a small grind that involved a low RNG drop rate. It should have been big grind with a high drop rate it's basic maths. It's basic pavlovian reward psychology that every dog owner knows. They basically turned it into grind into the Extreme mount grind, but without the totems. No one asked for that as the replacement to tomes. We just don't want a huge ARR grind that is ALSO ground on boring FATEs again.
- No one asked for rubbish MSQ, rubbish role quests rubbish event quests and finally... a frankly rubbish OC quest story.
- no one wanted to be starved of something to do with their sub, and then hammered in the crotch by stupid tome caps.

The point is, for certain very large player populations they are getting 'everything' wrong all at once.

All of their efforts to please, that you talk about Jeeqbit, frankly are coming across as 'malicious compliance'
They do what's asked for, 'nominally', then they find some way to really 'thoroughly' screw it up that takes it all away for another reason.

No this isn't "damned if they do, and damned if they don't"
This is "damned if they don't, and then damned for trolling is about it again and again"
That is the reality.

When people say they don't want a big grind, most mean they don't want a big grind that is also 'supremely' boring.
Or they mean "we'd rather not have a big grind at all, but if you're otherwise going to give us nothing instead, like a petulant control freak with bad parenting skills, well well take an ok grind instead. But just not a supremely shit grind.

Your oversimplifying Jeeqbit, and your argument is approaching pedantry.

[ChrysOCE]

"Typical of those people."
"But not you of course. Your alright"
("I'm not racist. I have friends who are X")
It's all the same BS.

F me.

Dude, you are so angry XD

[Raikai]

To the OP:

I do feel that FFXIV does have enough content (and difficulty modes, when properly set) to appease all sorts of players. The problem is the cadence and scheduling of such content.

Basically all the stuff that I consider with a long shelf life is being only delivered now in 7.2, which is way, way too long after Dawntrail's release. What they planned for this patch should've been in 7.1 at the latest, which also leaves plenty of room to be updated.

After DT's launch, the only thing to do that may last for a while is Savage prog, and even so, doing the same fight ad nauseum can only achieve so much. I don't know how they are fine with letting an expansion launch with a content drought because after 2 months there's nothing. 7.0.5 should've had the first Cosmic Exploration. 7.1, the first Criterion. 7.1.5 the first Field Operation and relic. 7.2.5 should've been Blue Mage and Beastmaster. 7.3.5 the Deep Dungeon, etc.

There's a feeling of enough stuff, but they are not well distributed through the expansion. Yes, to deliver some of those early they'd need to increase their workflow, but ideally it should be an one-time thing, since they follow a strict timeline, so the future production would be better aligned to deliver like this.

[hydralus]

The people with the memory of a goldfish are the players. They play the same game for years on end and expect it to suddenly be different because... reasons?

[Valence]

Island Paradise was just an example, but take as example, they do something completly new, never seen before, then they make the combat in it easy, what would happen? people which actually like even a small challenge start to complain, if they make it a bit harder what happens then? People will complain because its to hard, you see so or so someone has to take the L

Easy: make a hard version.
And don't muck it up like Criterion. Criterion that by the way, had only ONE creative, unique thing: not its bosses which were just a budget savage with arbitrary raise conditions due to single healer content, but the actual trash mobs: those were actually pretty damn cool, and relatively approachable (unlike the bosses), and you can bet you'd drop those in some casual endgame content like CLL/Dalriada/DR type of instances and people would love them.

PvP is a different matter, thats not something i consider counting in the direction "Improved Encounter Design" and heck yea even Deep Dungeons are scripted, i mean the Monster will always do the same, they will always cast the same, the Bosses will always cast and do the same, there is no randomness, if you learn what A does you will always know how to react to A which is a form of DDR, the only Randomness there is if a other monster joins in or not

You seem to have a pretty odd definition of what's scripted but that's always been a problem on the internet (or even irl tbh), where everything is binary. It's either good, or it sucks. It's either fully scripted, or it's full random.

I have never hidden that yes I do enjoy significantly more rng and chaos in pve to generate skill expression and see how players adapt and adjust. And it has the actual benefit to also make everything less of "always the same", which is nothing to scoff at. That's also why I can't stomach deterministic job rotations because they become so boring so quickly (which today is over 80-90% of the job roster). But that doesn't mean that I'm hammering for EVERYTHING to be absolute chaos and rng. For instance, I had a lot less problems with pve back in HW precisely because it was a lot less scripted DDR. But mainly, the game has always been heavily scripted, and my main beef is the DDR bloat, because no, the game has not always been about heavy DDR.

Taking your example though, imagine deep dungeons where the mobs actually have more rng in the sequence of their casts. Some like the chimera actually do, but it's limited to whether it casts Dragon's Voice or Ram's Voice first. There is actually quite a fair amount of mobs like that in deep dungeons and that's what keeps you on your toes.

You know what goes against the DDR in MMOs? i saw a few days ago a video about a new game where you fight a monster and with every fight the monster learns through KI your movements, your attackpatterns etc etc etc and trys to counter it and improve on it, so every fight is something new and every fight will be harder because the monster learns from you, THAT is randomness THAT is against DDR and that is something you will never see in FFXIV

Like, I'm sorry but where did I even say that I wanted evolutive AIs behind enemies in XIV?

They have genuinely gone in a full circle trying to please everyone:
- Wait times between NMs = complaints
- No wait times between them = complaints

- Big relic grind = complaints
- Big relic grind, but not as big = complaints
- Relic grind but new content = complaints
- Relic grind both new and old content = complaints
- Tomestone handouts = complaints
- Full circle repeat = complaints

I do believe that in many cases it's possible to satisfy both sides of the playerbase when they are opposed by giving them an option/choice. But there are going to be situations where you actually just have to choose one or the other as a game designer.

Maybe people also complain because their gameplay and the overall quality of everything sucks, who knows.
Also let's not be disingenuous, the complaints have never been about a big relic grind, but if that's how he chooses to read it, then no wonder he's stuck in this perpetual loop of hell.

WoW's dragonriding was the result of them getting absolutely trashed when they tried getting rid of flying completely.

If there is any truth to this, then perhaps SE needs a serious trashing?