Has the dev team take accountability for the failure of Dawntrail?

[SkizzleAbernath]

@RaionKasen I find replies like these quite comical. This is my second character, and unlike yourself, I’ve been here since 1.0 a very long time. I ran out of things to do on my first character, and out of sheer boredom, I decided to run through the MSQ again in hopes of finding more joy, just to prove the “go play other jobs” crowd on the forums wrong. Mind you I don't do endgame raiding anymore due to how I can just do everything later with a higher ilvl or wait an expansion and do it 10 levels higher with even more cakewalk. The game promotes lazyness as it punishes players who devote time to learn things. This is excluding Fru and other stuff that actually are capped.
The experience is still meh. Being a 1.0 player doesn’t come with any real perks aside from a silly stamp on your back and a minor subscription discount. I’d easily give both of those up if it meant the game could actually be fun again — which, for me, it hasn’t been since Shadowbringers.
I keep giving this game the benefit of the doubt over and over and over again, only to be gaslit every single time by the dev team.

[SkizzleAbernath]

@Naosen When you’ve been here since 1.0 and the start of ARR, I can easily tell you that no — they haven’t been on the right track for a long time. There have been countless contradictions, promises that never amount to anything, and sloppy, low-effort content and patches that take no more than 30 minutes to clear maybe a day at most for larger updates.

This isn’t something that suddenly happened with Dawntrail; it’s been a 12-year cycle of disappointment. People are just finally fed up with being deceived. It's been a rough battle especially when you have a very load minority that's part of the yoshi p can do no wrong fanclub. I doubt 8.0 will magicially fix anything but I will give it the benefit of the doubt don't get your hopes up though.

[RaionKansen]

Mind you I don't do endgame raiding anymore

You've doubled down on it, great.

Like, Dawntrail story kinda sucks, but the actual content has been the best the game has ever had.

They've even tried to make the actual quests' content better as of last MSQ patch. I hope they continue the trend.

[SicariusSeven]

You've doubled down on it, great.

Like, Dawntrail story kinda sucks, but the actual content has been the best the game has ever had.

They've even tried to make the actual quests' content better as of last MSQ patch. I hope they continue the trend.

The Arcadion 8 man raid is like one of the best side stories I've ever done! I'm so invested in it!

[Appleboops]

The premise of this thread (OP post I mean) is something along the lines of...

Imagine a person who eats at the same restoraunt once a week every week
Every week they try a different dish from the menu (it's a big menu)
The past 7 weeks they'd thoroughly enjoyed the food
This is week 8 and they ordered something but didn't like it at all
So, of course, they slapped the owner of the restoraunt in the face and called them a fraud

Maybe you don't like the content that was released in DT and its subsequent patches. Oh well. Maybe the next one will have content you enjoy more. Maybe not. It's up to you whether or not you want to stick around to find out but don't blame the chef just because he cooked a meal and 1 time out of 7 you don't like the taste O.o

[Kaurhz]

No, you aren't getting accountability LOL. All you're getting is that this is to pave way for the 10 year plan, and that this was predicted because 'end of a story climax'

None of the issues are new, they are old, really old.

"But we got this cool thing once"

Cool, it's an exception to an incredibly mundane rule. We're lucky if we get one well designed quest in an expansion, and the last time we had one (with the exception of last patch) was 2022 lol.

Every other piece of content follows the exact same rule even if it is good... Do your weeklies and then be done with it and come back next week, is basically the ethos of the core content for this game... I suppose you can chase carrots for chests if you're so inclined to do something for the sake of it.

People attach way too much identity of this game to a single thing, e.g., raiding, or having a good story, and honestly the moment you start looking at the broader game..

[ForteNightshade]

What do you expect them to do more than they already have? Make some sort of announcement decrying how disappointing Dawntrail was, apologize profusely and vow to never do it again? The reality is while Dawntrail undoubtedly fell short of expectations, particularly with the MSQ, it's still far above a complete disaster that would necessitate any sort of apology. Regardless, they have responded to some feedback throughout the patch cycles. Is it enough? That's entirely debatable. For some people, it is. For others they want to see more sweeping changes that wouldn't happen outside an expansion.

None of that is to say we shouldn't continue to voice our critique of Dawntrail. I have plenty. But we're not owed any sort of "accountability" response. You may not like it, but the only recourse going forward is to unsubscribe. A significant loss in revenue echoes much louder than any forum or reddit thread ever will.

The money we invest through our subscriptions should go toward improving the game, not unrelated marketing tie-ins nobody asked for

Every company does this because there's only a finite amount of profitability an already exist product can bring in. Allocating all of XIV's revenue back into XIV would be a net negative on Square Enix as that wouldn't translate to high enough return on the investment. Put simply, doubling XIV's budget doesn't mean you'll double the subscription count to justify it.

Where SE does falters is they only seem to invest the bare minimum to keep the game functional and maybe allow for one or two updates here or there. Which isn't necessarily bad from a purely pragmatic perspective... if their other projects didn't routinely fall flat on its face. But that's a different conversation altogether.

[Derio]

Honestly the only thing they can do is focus on 7.4 and 7.5 and implement their fixes in 8.0

[Remarus]

You've doubled down on it, great.

Like, Dawntrail story kinda sucks, but the actual content has been the best the game has ever had.

They've even tried to make the actual quests' content better as of last MSQ patch. I hope they continue the trend.

It's never beating the Stormblood 2 allegations, tbh. Main story was okay but the combat content was a huge step up from what came before and all the side stories were excellent. Post-patch story content immediately started getting great in the .2/.3 patches. Major additions to the glamour system. Alliance Raids and Main Raids have both been excellent in terms of difficulty and design.

[SkizzleAbernath]

I’ve been MIA for a while due to some IRL things, but I’m here now.

How the playerbase has declined should be reason enough to acknowledge that something went wrong along the way. When it comes to FFXIV’s monetization, I’m all for the game making money it’s a business, after all but it doesn’t look good when the game is in its current state. The playerbase has stayed loyal by continuing to sub, and instead of addressing the core issues that came with Dawntrail, we’re getting Schwarzkopf collabs?

Who exactly asked for this?

When it feels like everything except the actual problems is being worked on, it sends the wrong message. The amount of copium on the forums is only going to hurt the game in the long run. The issues need to be fixed, not ignored.

Classical copiums to this subject whenever its been brought up has been the following:

“It’s not that bad actually!!”

“You’re all just overreacting”

“Yoshi-P knows what he’s doing, trust the vision”

“Player numbers aren’t dropping, it’s just your imagination”

I don't even know how someone die hard can just ignore the problems. I guess as long as it doesnt affect your own personal gaming experience it counts as nothing is wrong.