Nice to return

[Rithy255]

it will be nice for a week or two when you have stuff to do, then you go back to afking.

[Asari5]

not like achievements in this game are very interesting.
in other games you have stuff like do this to make that boss more difficult . not to get better loot just for fun and the achievement.
do this or that content in a certain time or without dieing.
kill that entirely worthless monster you dont need for anything.
jump down a cliff of a certain height.

compared to do this content 1 time... 5 times... 10 times. do that 50 times... 200 times.... 1000 times... not enough? then do it 20'000 times.

[Uzephi]

not like achievements in this game are very interesting.
in other games you have stuff like do this to make that boss more difficult . not to get better loot just for fun and the achievement.
do this or that content in a certain time or without dieing.
kill that entirely worthless monster you dont need for anything.
jump down a cliff of a certain height.

compared to do this content 1 time... 5 times... 10 times. do that 50 times... 200 times.... 1000 times... not enough? then do it 20'000 times.

Good ideas:
{Role} Party! : complete the duty only using {role}.
T(h)ankless {duty flavor text}: complete {duty} without having the tank role in your party.
Heals? Who needs heals in {duty}: same as above but healers.
Damage is for chumps in {duty}: same as above, no DPS.

[Asari5]

Good ideas:
{Role} Party! : complete the duty only using {role}.
T(h)ankless {duty flavor text}: complete {duty} without having the tank role in your party.
Heals? Who needs heals in {duty}: same as above but healers.
Damage is for chumps in {duty}: same as above, no DPS.

yes. just a tiny bit of creativity and you can end up with more interesting achievements. not for everybody but for more people than now.
adding replayability and variety without having to make a lot of additional assets. and also pushing some people to do stuff differently without forcing them. (not just the game is stale. quite a few players are as well)

[Shistar]

Welcome back, Arma! Enjoy yourself!

Was housing advertised as a luxury commodity from the start of its implementation or was the demolition timer just latched on because they couldnt/didnt want / were talent hamstringed to not give more housing wards / houses?

From what I know, housing was initially introduced as an insanely expensive status symbol to entice legacy players to spend their 1.0 gil and even out the playing field a little with the 2.0 players. It was only for FCs back then, and the most expensive house could get up to 600M+. They later introduced personal housing.
The autodemolition timer was requested by the players because back then, you could just buy a house and unsub forever, and that house would be there forever too. There were many, many houses "occupied" by people who hadn't been in the game for months and months, so it was introduced so active players would have a chance to get housing. The whole "SE added autodemolition because they want your money!" like, yes they want your money, obviously, but it was a convenient side-effect to something the players wanted in the first place. They should have made it a bit less strict in my opinion, but that is besides the topic.


The whole thing about constantly needing new wards is a combination of strange system decisions seemingly coming from what YoshiP thinks player housing should be like in an MMO based on his past experiences, NA being leagues larger than EU, OCE and JP combined, and SE being unable to add good enough incentives to make people move to different worlds/datacenters to alleviate the issue.

[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?

[Trianna]

" Every bit of content is still in the game. "

Except Diadem 1.0, Diadem 2.0, Ishgard Restoration Phase 1, 2 and 3...


EDIT: Also about housing, people really seem to forget Yoshi P saying that housing would not require a monthly fee or be temporary.

[Striker44]

" Every bit of content is still in the game. "

Except Diadem 1.0, Diadem 2.0, Ishgard Restoration Phase 1, 2 and 3...


EDIT: Also about housing, people really seem to forget Yoshi P saying that housing would not require a fee or be temporary.

Ahh, I never did the crafting stuff back in the day, so I didn't think of those. To be fair, those are meant to be limited-time events - I didn't bring up similar types of events in other games, either (e.g. Gates of Ahn'Qiraj in WoW). I'm talking core content that isn't designed from the outset to be completed on a server and then retired. Can we do better than pick one very specific type of limited-time content and try to act like it's something enormous when it it's really the smallest of blips?

[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?

[Shistar]

[...] Also about housing, people really seem to forget Yoshi P saying that housing would not require a monthly fee or be temporary.

It did not when it was added. Like I said, players had to request the demolition timer to be added because the ward system could not support everyone having a house, and YoshiP was adamant he wanted housing to be in neighborhoods. He also said personal housing would be separate from the FC neighborhood system, but they ended up adding it to the existing wards.


I assume their original plan went like this: You can buy a house for gil, the house is yours forever unless you choose to move or get rid of it yourself, and it would be separated from the FC neighborhoods, most likely in the same vein apartments are kinda their own thing or straight up a different neighborhood somewhere else in Eorzea. If they would have been able to follow through with that plan, then yeah housing would have not required a monthly fee (besides the sub you need to pay to simply exist in Eorzea, but that is besides the point) and it would be there forever, like apartments are currently.


The reality is that things never were as YoshiP said he wanted them to be back then. I'm not blaming the players that had to ask for the demolition timer obviously, it was the least stupid solution to a poorly-designed system that players could have suggested, but I wish they could invest more into housing to fix these kinds of things for everyone. I find it stupid that you can't have a house unless you're insanely lucky or you happen to be in a server that isn't packed like a sardine can.