Nice to return

[Striker44]

Much of the 'hundreds of hours' of content has largely been rendered moot, when they've devalued their own content as spectacularly as what they have in this game, and I don't mean to be funny but if we're abiding by this sentiment then frankly you're just far better playing a game that actually respects that effort of thousands of hours.

I'm genuinely curious - what do you mean by this? What content has been "spectacularly devalued" or rendered moot? Compared to other games, I feel like FFXIV is probably the one that comment would least make sense about. Every bit of content is still in the game. There are still entire Discord communities set up and organizing runs of "old" content like Eureka or Bozja. They have a minimum iLevel setting so players can do old content at the challenging level it originally was (instead of overpowering it like we do now). The only thing I can think of are some things like Squadrons that didn't continue into further xpacs, but it's still content that's there to do with its own rewards system.

I compare that to other games like WoW, where they got rid of the entire Vanilla-WotLK world when Cata released (and even with things like Chromie Time, there are still some major events - i.e. Wrathgate - that are permanently removed from the game). Leveling now is a haphazard mishmash of unrelated stories without the continent-spanning quest chains they used to have. Or I think of Destiny 2, which has its "content vault" - a PR way of saying we're literally removing massive chunks of content from the game that you can never play again.

Then I look back at FFXIV, and I'm like "everything's still here." I've only ever leveled this toon, so I know a few changes were made here and there to old duties, but that's all I can think of. It's certainly nowhere near "most of the hundreds of hours of content". So, I'm genuinely curious - what am I missing? What are you referring to?

[Kaurhz]

I'm genuinely curious - what do you mean by this? What content has been "spectacularly devalued" or rendered moot? Compared to other games, I feel like FFXIV is probably the one that comment would least make sense about. Every bit of content is still in the game. There are still entire Discord communities set up and organizing runs of "old" content like Eureka or Bozja. They have a minimum iLevel setting so players can do old content at the challenging level it originally was (instead of overpowering it like we do now). The only thing I can think of are some things like Squadrons that didn't continue into further xpacs, but it's still content that's there to do with its own rewards system.

I compare that to other games like WoW, where they got rid of the entire Vanilla-WotLK world when Cata released (and even with things like Chromie Time, there are still some major events - i.e. Wrathgate - that are permanently removed from the game). Leveling now is a haphazard mishmash of unrelated stories without the continent-spanning quest chains they used to have. Or I think of Destiny 2, which has its "content vault" - a PR way of saying we're literally removing massive chunks of content from the game that you can never play again.

Then I look back at FFXIV, and I'm like "everything's still here." I've only ever leveled this toon, so I know a few changes were made here and there to old duties, but that's all I can think of. It's certainly nowhere near "most of the hundreds of hours of content". So, I'm genuinely curious - what am I missing? What are you referring to?

Grand Companies? When was their last update, when did they bother actually electing using materials from that pool of items, like they used to.
Desynthesis uses massively reduced and rendered pointless. Every material you get from there, you get far more efficiently elsewhere. Pretty sure we no longer get interesting things like Octomammoth, Twitchbeard, Gigantshark, or Ninja Betta anymore, and nor is it intrinsic to anything... It's literally one of the systems that exists purely for the sake of existing and slapping a system/feature quota.
Diadem deleted from the game several times. Emergency Mission scrapped
Devs so scared of getting flack from every diverting from gear formula like they did with the original Coven weapons that you can probably map the exact gear progression level-by-level for the next 10 years.

Devalued systems...? You can take a 16 month break and miss literally nothing because the game has absurdly aggressive catchup mechanics, and this in turn tosses a lot of the character progression fun in the bin. Like, if I compare ARR/HW capstone to more modern capstone levels for character/gear progression, and the former is so much more satisfying than the latter. Just finished levelling? No problem, do your custom deliveries and spam collectables for 25 minutes and there you go, fresh i720 Innovators, all caught up, all ready to craft anything within the span of 25 minutes. Much of this exacerbated by the fact that this progression is on an effective reset every 8-9 months. First and only ability unlocked through quests you're waiting for approximately 20 quests for, because they've gone through this half-committal process where they completely stripped quests rewards when they removed cross-class. So... You end up with that 1 random ability like Manipulation (Quality Assurance? Lol, basically useless outside of expert because no macro is ever created around the expectancy that you get a good condition. You simply fill the quality bar complete, or as high as possible and then buffer out base HQ by crafting elsewhere).. - This may also be a contentious opinion, but with how crafting actually functions on this game you could literally delete every ability, turn it into a cookie clicker where every end recipe takes 48 seconds with 1 button click, and in most cases, nothing of value would have ever been lost. Granted, this has always been the case, but right up to the 2* Ala Mhigan recipes from Stormblood there was always significant value of actually manually engaging with the abilities, with this, the incentive to actually learn that part of the game is buried in some unknown ditch.

They have a minimum item level setting? Near enough half of this games history has gone through stat adjustments, that even doing minimum item level Alexander is not true Alexander as originally was.

This is one of the games where 'spectacularly devalued' absolutely does apply. Even content such as Palace of the Dead, Heaven on High and Eureka Orthos sucks for queue over 90% of the time... Overworld is actually practically dead relative to what it used to be back in the times of ARR/HW where you could literally find trains of players still farming FATEs in South Shroud, Costa Del Sol, Coerthas, Northern Thanalan, now the overworld of this game is dead for 90% of the expansion schedule.

Achievement farming? for what? Achievement certificates? Which is another largely abandoned system, who's only purposes was to serve as scrapping and rebranding the veteran reward system into something else. Since the introduction of this system in 4.1 we've had a very small handful of additions, and from what I could see it took over 2 expansions for them to even bother adding rewards to it on top of what you'd get from the old veteran reward system. Grind for the mounts or minions from the achievements? For what? Game barely has you out in the overworld as is, so very little incentive, and the idea of having a proper mount/minion/achievement showcase on the adventurer plate is something that has seemingly not been thought up as an idea, e.g., "top 3 rarest...", do you know how cool that would be?

[MayuAmakura]

e.g., "top 3 rarest...", do you know how cool that would be?

I agree with all of this. The only rare achievement I can think of now are those pvp achievements that require for you to be in top spot of Crystaline Conflict. But honestly those ones are mega boring with all wintrading happening and same people somehow managing to be top rank in all servers by a mile or play 24/7. Plus CC is well known to be dead and you play with 10-20 same people over and over again which is not fun.

Other than that, it's pretty boring to do anything.