Thread: Thoughts and observations from a 1.0 player about the current state of FFXIV

I wouldn't in any way, shape, or form call FFXIV a WoW-clone. If it was, I'd still be playing WoW. There's a reason I left that game behind almost 5 years ago, made FFXIV my main MMO, and have never looked back. They may both be MMO's, but they have very different target audiences. WoW went all-in on the eSports approach with Arena PvP, ever higher levels of Mythic+ dungeons, etc., and the result is a notoriously toxic playerbase focused on those things. FFXIV has always been about the story, role-playing, and a decidedly more casual approach to gaming. WoW sees leveling as an inconvenience that gets you to endgame, where everything really exists; FFXIV sees the journey as an essential component of the experience.

Naturally, games look to each other and borrow things here and there, and for FFXIV making 2.0, it made sense to look in WoW's direction since it had recently hit its peak but was also rapidly shedding players, so the dev team here could get a good sense of what worked and what didn't. For example, pretty much the main thing they "borrowed" from WoW was the token system for getting high-end gear that WoW was getting criticized precisely for abandoning in favor of low-% RNG drops.

Yoshi-P seems to be losing some of his strongest long-time supporters,

This happens to anyone, anywhere, anytime. The forums aren't really a good indication, because this place is always negative, and largely populated by whichever specific people happen to not like the current expansion, while those who do largely tend to just play the game and don't post much. Heck, ShB is widely viewed as the "best" expansion, but you'd never know it if you were actively perusing the forums at the time.

But here’s the thing: shouldn’t whatever you create still be unique?

And that's exactly what FFXIV has done. Seriously, just poke around the forums and you'll see the usual litany of complaints that largely amount to pointing out all the ways FFXIV is not like WoW.

Before anyone jumps in with the classic “this isn’t a WoW clone” response there’s literally an interview where Yoshi-P told his team to study and play WoW

Studying a game doesn't mean you're taking everything from it. See above for how little of WoW's systems were actually brought to FFXIV.

If that weren’t the case, why would so much effort have been put into studying WoW for development purposes? It’s hard to ignore the fact that Blizzard’s player base seems to have been the primary target all along

With apologies, this actually makes me laugh out loud. One of the common refrains from some particular doomers around here is that FFXIV "failed" precisely because it didn't actively do anything to become "more like WoW" and attempt to keep those who came here during the infamous WoW Exodus. Again, simply studying other products while designing your own doesn't somehow mandate that everything you do afterward will copy them. It may mean (as it did here) taking very specific things like gear tokens while precisely avoiding other things that you realize you don't want your game to have. The take I'm reading just doesn't feel believable.

These days, FFXIV feels like a ghost town people don’t socialize, don’t chat, and many just log in to maintain their houses.

I'm not familiar with your server or what DC is might be on, for me on Greg (Aether), FFXIV feels just as populated as usual at this point in a patch cycle. FC and NN chat is alive, Hunt trains are as social as ever, and there's often various chatter going on in the random Roulettes and WT content I do. I'm not getting the sense you're getting. At all.

Lack of innovation take its turn on the game.
Mechanics are outdated
Figths are outdated
Classes are dead boring.
All you have to do is to learn where to stand in certain frame of the fight.
People get tired of it and quit over the time.
Whats is in here to be supprised about?

On top of that there are :
Massive submarine fleets what people actually bot owning +30 houses at once leading to flooding the market with empty gil and enforcing the issues related to healthy economy.
Lack of accessability towards the content you might not be able to do latest 4th fight of the raid tier to unlock the newest ultimate as nobody does do it anymore as people moved on.
Lack of accessability towards learning the forced patterns in fights the game does not teach you things specially if you are a sprout
600h+ of visual novel based on emotes what is not exciting over certain period of time.

There is way more moments when a player can feel that the game is against them than the opposite where the content is not something to be happy about but more of a chore or heavy duty grind like 99 tomes for a mount if you got a bad luck. - Is it really fun to beat the same boss for over 99 times? It's not a content it's just a punishment for trying if your luck is bad.

Then newest relic area if we are at the luck side and it's drop rate.

My question is to who is this game targeted - Casuals no most of them left, RP community is shirnking each day and raiders we all know they cheat and push the raids quickest as they can same as the top ultimate clearing teams getting caught cheating each new ultimate is being realised.

So to what a type of the player is this game? Because i deeply did belived it was meant for everyone to enjoy and cheerish what it does have to offer not put obstacles each time something is realised. ( beating lvl50 of oldest deep dungeon as an example )

*edit*

Fates I forget about fates.. how repetetive and about nothing they are it's almost always not worth to bother aside of the special fates for special rewards
there is nothing about them what is exciting other than being dead repetetive.

Originally Posted by Dastan

I think my main complaint with this game, is that they are clearly trying to please and satisfy every type of gamer that exists. Someone has a problem that a lot of people agree with, they will make changes based off that. But at the same time, it will alienate others who hate that change.

You literally cannot make everyone happy. They should just take a direction they want the game to go in, and stick with that. If someone doesn't like it, they can unsub and go somewhere else. It might make people leave, but the game will stay on a consistent path and they can only make improvements to what they already have. People that enjoy that will stay.

Well I sure as hell wish they'd listen to some of the problems I have then. Considering the follow up every time I brought some of those up, why is SE never acting upon it then?

@jeeqbit & @Striker44
At the end of the day I get that this is a business players don’t own anything here, SE does. But we’re ignoring some key history.

@Myotis this one is for you!
One example is the old direction survey from like 2012 I think: the community split was roughly 62% vs 38%, and the majority did not want to be locked into a hamster-wheel progression loop that doesn’t respect limited playtime. In practice, it’s the same routine every tier: you log in, clear your weeklys for tomes, gear up 1–1.5 jobs, and by the time you’re “caught up,” your progress is invalidated and you farm again. There’s no breathing room for players who can’t no-life the game. Despite what a majority wanted you went against their wishes. Why even bother with a survey if you're not going to respect what your players want?

Another example: at the first EU Fan Fest, Yoshi-P was asked almost exactly what you mentioned about crafting and coordinated gameplay. The proposal was to have multi-role, multi discipline objectives e.g., go to Dungeon X, clear certain conditions to spawn an alternate boss that drops a unique item; hand that to a crafter; have gatherers bring complementary materials; craft a key item to spawn a world boss or unlock a special fight/dungeon(This sounds like MAPS I get it but this was meant to have a bigger purpose than maps.. The idea was dismissed as “too complicated for newer players.”

But… isn’t this an MMORPG? Isn’t the genre fundamentally about interdependence combat, crafting, gathering, exploration creating content together that no single role can complete alone? If we only want solo-friendly, single-path content, there are fantastic single-player RPGs like The Witcher or Skyrim. FFXIV can (and used to) be more than a weekly checklist treadmill.

When you backtrack statements across the years, the pattern often reads as goal-post shifting: things said to the community vs. what’s actually implemented later. That doesn’t have to mean malice but it does come across as contradiction without accountability. And for many of us especially 1.0 veterans that erodes trust.

TLDR: The player base repeatedly signaled it didn’t want perpetual treadmill design. Systems that could’ve fostered lasting, cooperative MMO depth were waved off as “too complex,” while the game doubled down on time-gated weekly loops. Over time, the gap between stated intent and delivered design makes long-time players feel misled and that’s the core of the frustration you’re seeing now.

Anothering thing Jeeqbit, I doubt that you're that gullable to believe that Yoshi P doesn't know that WoW had housing. News about housing travels fast and I'm sure plenty around him informed him of Blizzards next moves for their mmorpg. It's transparent that he does live in his own little bubble when it comes to FFXIV but I'm sure he knows very well what WoW had planned but had to be diplomatic about in a interview if that actually happened (haven't checked the interview).