We need more casual PvE content.

[Valence]

I bet if they didn't release forked tower at all nobody would have anything to complain about, but now that it's there, suddenly "the only point of engaging with OC is to do forked tower". Nope, some people legitimately just enjoy playing.

It's not like there has been countless threads about fate scaling, the fate/CE train that has no brakes, the rng atmas, the silver/gold currency imbalances, the monsters on the map that do nothing and the lack of threat, the lack of story, how phantoms compare to logograms and lost actions, etc.

[legg]

I hope they inventing dungeon with 4 mob packs like mt gulg because its epic and i want to get stimulant as a healer

[UNDEAD10000]

When it comes to leveling in Occult Crescent you don’t need to do fates, you can just do critical encounters and in their case you can either skip joining the party completely if you want to just heal yourself from aoe damage or you can join one of the parties formed at the spot simply by saying lfg at the encounter spot.

Well problem is that my knowledge level is only at 4 and all critical encounters i have seeing are in areas with enemies that have higher knowledge level then mine.
I did tried doing critical encounter once that was like 3 knowledge levels higher then me but i died on first few AoE attacks boss did and yes i didn't use chat to looking for party before critical encounter started when i'm pretty sure no one invite me in party anyway.

[Kaurhz]

So,

I am sort of... inclined to agree yes, but the issue isn't that we need more content (Players need more reasons to engage with content more than once before dropping it)... The content we have already just needs to actually... Mean something, or it at the very least needs looking at in terms of rewards. It's stupid that normal raid gear for instance is equivalent to crafted., especially when it is on a weekly lockout and even more so when you factor how low the entry to crafting actually is... Just really makes it content that is dead on arrival for anyone willing to spend 45 minutes crafting their own gear. IMO, it at the very least should be equivalent to non-augmented tomestone.

Alliance raid suffers with the same thing, equivalent to augmented crafted, the former on a weekly lockout, the latter on no lockout at all, with the only requirement being tomes that are handed to you.

Like, both contents have been dead on arrival to me outside of story since 3.05. I suppose I can get a minion, but lol? when you have 400+ minions it's just a checkbox. Same thing with mounts? lol? Show it off in a dead overworld, fantastic.

What I do sort of disagree with though is that they only care about the 'savage part of the playerbase' - They are ultimately treated with the same level of contempt as what the casual playerbase is, really. Like, I don't think this needs to be an 'us vs them' thread... All players are really treated with sheer contempt.

The only real major conundrum/issue with casual content is that they've reduced it to non-substantive, under the guise that... Player A who quit 48 weeks ago, who has only just returned to the game needs to be caught up immediately, so throw aggressive catch-up mechanics (Not exclusive to casual content). Plus the fact that the way they treat casual content is really more of a side-quest rather than a substantive system to actually engage with, like, the only real 'casual' content where this still exists is fishing, everything else is beyond watered down (even on a casual level), or outright abandoned. The developers sort of treat casual players as being practically synonymous with "Doesn't want anything engaging or work towards", which is pathetically disingenuous.

I mean, it still exists there with Eureka and Bozja, but literally at that point, unironically unsubscribe from the game and just get a free trial account.

Hardcore content is sort of shafted in that, they still only get a raid tier every other patch, and ultimately they are still bound almost entirely by a weekly lockout, or content that dies within a patch cycle. Basically done because they know this game has piss poor longevity. Then there's jobs... I say this as a casual, because I know how it feels with DoH/Botanist/Miner, and Grand Companies... Classes shouldn't be designed for people that don't want to learn them or engage with their mechanics (Don't see why they all need to be so... same-y), in the same was content shouldn't be designed for people that don't actually want to interact with it (or learn it)

Between content types, and the overall game they really don't know who they are designing the game for, so what you're left with is just a lot of half-commitments to the overall design of content. This is ultimately the biggest issue and it plagues everything, and it's largely why it's difficult to see the there's anything beyond contempt or gross confusion.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to have the OC step of the relic function as a one-time step, and whoever thought it was a good idea to detach levelling from the field operation should not be allowed near design, IMO... Especially when the only rationale is "But deep dungeon"... Decision making and autonomy for players? Nah, not this game.

[DBriggs304]

We need more content, period. More involvement in the world that makes the world meaningful. FF14 has the deadest world of any MMO i've played. They are focused entirely too much on the story now. We have spent way too much time in cutscenes this expansion instead of in the world doing things.

[TalithaSolarien]

Can you give an example of an interesting piece of casual content you would like or feel like it's worthwhile doing?

Take for example the Variant dungeons. Add for example a challenge log requiring you to run certain paths per week. Add token rewards (like Faux Hollows) for unique rewards. You could add a similar log for Normal raids.
Because right now these are run-and-forget content.

[Kaurhz]

Who's ALT are you..lol...

FATES, crafting, OC, EX, new dungeons, new alliance raid, society quests, maps, elite marks (Hunts), Pvp adjustments, class quests, Normal Raid series, Side quests, UR, sitting AFK in Limsa 99% of the time... yet you dare to talk about savage that is released once every 10 months.

The absolute audacity to even bring savage into discussion and make this a "casual" vs "hardcore" argument. God forbid you try "hardcore" content instead of spamming forums with nonsense.

Oh no, people are having fun, we cannot have that now, can we?

Not that I disagree in principle with an issue of a savage raid released every 10 months, but I don't really think you should be stating that in the same sentence as arguing half of those items being content, like... literally..

PvP adjustments? Do you know *how long* it actually takes for PvP to see any worthwhile adjustments? lol, arguing this is literally the same as calling PvE adjustments content.

New alliance raids that literally don't fit anywhere in their reward structure because they are the same item level as non-augment tomestone gear, also released on an equivalent pathetically long patch cycle..

Society quests and class quests? Are you joking LOL, you do this once, and then forget they even exist, literally.

Elite Marks? 90% of that content is literally Aetheryte camping.

The absolute audacity to even bring half of these into discussion when your follow-up statement is an issue with savage (Not that I disagree), but both of these being present is beyond peak irony. God forbid people actually try to expect quality from a game that has been in service for well over a decade. So yes, people should spam forums with 'nonsense'

Oh no, people are trying to give developers feedback (even if I disagree with it), we cannot have that now, can we?

[Exinias]

This is how I've felt, too. DT has been good if you enjoy high-end content, but for the other 80% it's been ehhhh. Base content and difficulty of DT content is perfect but everything else has missed its mark for me.

I enjoyed DT just fine the first 3 weeks but then they removed Noxious Gnash from VPR for Savage and future content (That still irritates me, honestly) and ever since I just haven't even been able to pick a main for this expansion and a lot of care and trust I had for the game went away with that, which sounds silly, but it's true. So, of course I was enjoying the other new stuff from the release of the expansion, but 2-3 months after release, there hasn't been much for me until OC came out, but a good bit of people stopped once we found out how unfriendly FT was.

So basically, yeah, we got an alliance raid in 7.1, which I did a ton, but we got Chaotic which ended up just being savage 24-man (Imagine if we actually got a fight as fun as P2, but nah, we got P3). This was 1 month after an Ultimate came out, too.

Then they released OC, but made it so casuals who don't want to do anything can just do fates, cool, but then made the "raid/dungeon" hardcore.

They keep leaving the middle class/mid-core players behind.

OC is middle class/mid-core, but then encourages people to not do it because some would rather level their jobs while doing fates. They could have done OC as a zone where you could level your jobs and play the game, but because FT exists in the same instance and requires everyone to be lvl 100, it couldn't be done that way.

Shame.

Too many L's because they're making everything that's not a dungeon or trial essentially savage content that requires studying outside of the game and 3 hours of communicating to find a group.

That's not fun.

I understand it's an MMO, but I did less communication for my Master's degree.

[Khryseis_Astra]

I bet if they didn't release forked tower at all nobody would have anything to complain about, but now that it's there, suddenly "the only point of engaging with OC is to do forked tower". Nope, some people legitimately just enjoy playing.

While I’ve enjoyed all the things you’ve mentioned, I’m pretty much done with all that now. I’ve gotten all the glams and rewards I wanted, leveled all my phantom jobs, got my caster gear to +1 and got a couple other sets just for the looks. I go in occasionally to gold farm and treasure hunt, but right now there’s no point in repeating the same CEs and Fates over and over again.

Everything does lead to the Tower, which makes it feel incomplete without a Normal mode. The phantom jobs, while fun to play, have skills that are only really useful in the Tower. You can’t get your gear to +2 without the Tower, because for outsiders that relies on support fates, of which I’ve only seen 2, for a whopping total of 4 pieces of sanguinite.

Bozja had 2 dungeons - CLL and Dalriada - both of which were slightly challenging at first but eased up as you leveled in the zone with mettle and actions. Plus it had DRN/DRS. Forked Tower is a descendant of Eureka’s Baldesion Arsenal, but what makes those such different experiences? One, Eureka had the big Fates for each zone that acted as kind of zone bosses. And those bosses had rare drops that were used for special items to give an in-zone advantage, and tradeable on the mb for millions to this day. Two, BA came at the end of the content so it felt like optional bonus content, as well as not having as many wipe mechs so newbies could be carried through. FT comes right in the middle, has 20-some places where a single person’s mistake can mean game over, and locks the last gear upgrade of the zone’s gear behind it, putting non-Tower clearers at a disadvantage going into the second and final zone. Third, and perhaps the most important to me, it locks rewards that should be Normal mode level, behind Hard mode content. The last FIVE field notes are in there, along with a TT card. This did not happen with either Eureka or Bozja: BA and DRS only had a mount, Bozja’s field notes were obtainable without doing DRS and their cards were sold in the cluster shop, Eureka had no field notes, but their cards were obtained from boss NMs and an NPC outside the zone.

As far as I’m concerned, current FT can keep the mount, and maybe higher drop rates for all the other stuff, but it needs a Normal mode so that everyone can go through and get the notes and have a chance in hell of getting the card (which honestly should be in the sanguinite shop anyway), as well as sanguinite for gear upgrades.

[Volgia]

Normal Bozjan raids were exactly that for me. Fun and nice encounters, part of relic farm, some really cool glams and at the top of that they provided some really nice story content (although in that aspect I’m biased as I really liked FFXII)

CLL/Dalriada or normal DR? if I recall correctly, DR came almost a year after Bozja came out.

Take for example the Variant dungeons. Add for example a challenge log requiring you to run certain paths per week. Add token rewards (like Faux Hollows) for unique rewards. You could add a similar log for Normal raids.
Because right now these are run-and-forget content.

Well what you are describing is the carrot (rewards) to the stick (content). I don't disagree we should have more incentive to do it, but this game doesn't lack for "casual content".

Cuz TBH, we had Criterion Dungeons and the same issue happened. Great content, no reason to do it.