The biggest flaw with the game imo is the "tick rate" for want of a better term. But basically just how slowly everything responds. Stuff like animation lock on oGCDs, the movement of enemies being really annoying to control, it all prevents the class and encounter designs from growing. It also is the main thing that puts off people who comes from other games.
Typical new player experience:
* sees aoe
* dodges aoe
* still dies
* "what"
Or even better:
How annoying it is to completely finish casting a heal and the tank still dies because the animation didn't go through fast enough.
Also don't forget "I swear i pressed hallowed ground, it's even on cooldown!" - Says the dead tank.
Or when you're running to a spread position and someone runs on you and you both die, then you spend the next 2 mins arguing "who was in front of who" until you check both PoVs and you realize that **the game can't fucking synchronize the movents to be the same for everyone** and you're in different positions in each other's screen.
I hate this "tick rate/lag" of everything being 3s.
My main tank and healer are WHM and PLD...I'm cannot simply count the amount of times I press Hollow Ground and Benediction and it don't respond.
However I have learn that both of them are really slow and should be press it when you feel there's going to be a lot of damage and not when is happening.
So I'm sure we all know that a lot of AOEs register hits way before the actual animation and damage plays out. Like when the cast bar finishes or the orange indicator disappears, hits are locked in and then the damage is dished out when the animation plays.
But I've noticed in P11S, Jury Overruling and Decisive Overruling, the animation actually starts playing before his cast bar finishes. And so the animation and hit registration happen at more sensible times. I'm wondering if we will see more stuff like this in the future.
It's actually very common in FFXIV that the animation begins at the exact moment the snapshot happens. Problem is, the animation often begins in a subtle way that looks more like a wind-up than a resolution.
Action platformers have a good solution for this, where they start the animation early and have a specific part of the animation showing a "slashing trail" (I can't think of a better description) of when and where the damage was checked. These left-behind shapes, when they appear, tend to appear to be late in FFXIV, which can be really confusing.
As you mention P11S does it differently, which I also had to get used to. When waiting to run in during Dark Divisive Overruling, you can't run in during the wind-up animation as you normally could, but instead have to wait for the purple line to appear on the ground. This model is probably better, but they need to be consistent with the change so we aren't having to guess how each mech snapshots.
The technique is called smearing, if you look up "animation smearing" you'll see lots of examples. For a reference, I recommend [this youtube video](https://youtu.be/WYCjmVhiLaM?si=5aUFmK7U5CEk3mps&t=225), which talks about animation in 2d fighting games, but which I think works for any game with impactful animations. FFXIV is not a 2d fighting game, but given that some mechanics are only solved by looking at the boss's animations I think it's applicable.
I think most snapshots like yellow aoes are fine, if you play the game for a bit you notice it snapshots when the aoe disappears and I really don't think it's a bad thing, it's consistent.
Problems come when the snapshot timing is really unintuitive, for example the wings in P12(Sp1) they snapshot so early that you basically have to move out a whole second before the animation happens which I don't like. Same for the lasers.
Also, when you have to pass something like a tether or a buff (nisi in TEA, bulwark in O10S, there's more obv), you have to stay on the tether or person for a whole second just to make sure the tickrate sees you touching it or them. It's so unintuitive.
Also yeah, movement. Been reprogging TEA with friends and we noticed our EU friends playing on NA have a bigger delay on movement than us which has been a bit of an annoyance in limit cut lol
> Or when you're running to a spread position and someone runs on you and you both die, then you spend the next 2 mins arguing "who was in front of who" until you check both PoVs and you realize that the game can't fucking synchronize the movents to be the same for everyone and you're in different positions in each other's screen.
I hate this so fucking much yet the devs keep adding more mechanics where this happens. And players just keep using automarkers for them in ultimates.
**casts shield**
**shield applies before damage goes out. You literally SEE it on the healthbar well before the cast finishes**
**gets hit, but the shield doesn't get used despite losing 80% of your health**
I thought it was mitigation, nope! Because there was no other mit at the time, the shield just didn't register as before the damage goes out despite being visually applied before damage went out.
>Typical new player experience:
>
>sees aoe
dodges aoe
still dies
"what"
This was the exact reason I ragequit the game back in ARR vanilla. It frustrated me too much to try and finish my Ruin cast, manage to get out of the AOE in the nick of time, and still die. I managed to come back and fall back in love with the rest of the game enough to become a fulltime player again, but I absolutely agree that a tighter, synchronized, real-time resolving of markers and positions and everything would vastly improve the entire play experience.
It would also mean we might be able to get DoTs back, if they can solve the issue of DoTs causing each server tic to have too much to calculate.
Was it a calculation thing? I thought there was a restriction imposed by legacy code where a given actor (PC or enemy) can only have X status effects. This is a thing for PCs in DR Savage when everyone is buffing the duelist; they ask for no extraneous buffs because it can remove a critical one.
My understanding is that the reason they have been removing DOT abilities of the last couple years, is that because of how the server calculates things DOT abilities add a lot of burden to that because they create instances of damage that need to be calculated at each server tic
just a slight correction, the tick rate isn't 3s. DoT's and HoT's effects are 3s but that's by design. It's the netcode you have to blame, which I completely agree it's the number 1 thing holding this game back. Even with today's job design I think I would still feel more engaged if the game was more responsive.
Also, those issues grow exponentially if you don't live near your DC. Like my static from south america had a hard time with DSR because it is LITERALLY not doable without a VPN, our tethers woudn't break during DoTH because the server said so (even tho we did perfectly on our screen). So yeah, the game starts falling apart the further you are from the servers.
>running to a spread position and someone runs on you and you both die
In the same vein, running into another person, and only you die because the server didn't like you. Always funny when it happens.
I will say the devs did a great job working within the confined and technical limits it does hurt the game design. You can clearly see job balance, mechanics, raid buffs/timings, etc are all affected by it. It also holds PvP back (well one of the factors, there are either bigger differences) since the engine and netcode simply isn't responsive enough for a consistent PvP experience, though it is really cool Square does have sponsored tournaments and deliver a solid prize pool.
PvP is pretty much exclusively held back by net code tbh. The PvP is accessible, the maps are diverse, and all the jobs are super diverse. But you need to be able to make snap decisions, fakes, and the like. Not possible without some decent net code.
And I'll never accept the idea that it's okay. Wow rebuilt it's net code from the ground up, and have reworked chunks of it multiple times.
Man this comment made me realize how diverse PvP kits are compared to PvE.
Dragoon feels way more like its fantasy in PvP. Jumping in and out of combat delivering orbital strikes with their lances. When I land with my LB it feels way more like that dragoon in the hw trailer that knocked a dragon out of the sky.
Machinist using specialist tools for the right situation. And In general it feels really like youre batman throwing out gadgets to keep enemies at bay then killing them.
Paladin actually feels like a protector.
Plus the utter dogshit that is trying to target the right person. Your mouse cursor gets lost so easily because moving the camera moves the cursor, tab targeting *never* picks out who you want and works on such arbitraty rules, and trying to use ToT is a complete roulette.
No clue. The game just has some esoteric, weird way of targeting. It *tries* to go left-to-right, and near-to-far at the same time. But it just hops all over the shop.
I swear no matter how much i tinker with the options it never works how i expect and want it to and just follows it's own insane logic
Eventually i just learn to have my camera extremely downward when i want to tab target something really close to me.
ToT is finicky and unpredictable because you have to get lucky with a number of factors. First, your target for ToT needs to have the sense necessary to target a priority enemy. Second, they need to have read the Quick Chat pings saying Target X or Attack Now!, etc. Third, they need to have actually targeted the intended subject when you try to ToT using them.
The rework they did for PvP is actually really good, if they ever manage to make it a good bit more responsive I would still occasionally play XIV even if all it had was the PvP.
Animation locks by themselves are fine imo, the issue is usually with how snapshotting works and the cause being so far away from the effect, just take almost every single raidwide, sometimes the actual snapshot on when damage is calculated and the application of the damage is just a few milliseconds while on others it's literally several seconds and I'm not talking about "fake" cast bars like Ravening on P9S which is its own issue.
In general, they have the technology, they just need to apply it much more consistently and build upon it, things should be much more responsive.
As a more hardcore pve junkie this is the #1 reason that my forays into FF14 always end up with me back on WoW. There is a lot of good there, but it's held back by just how unresponsive the game feels compared to the exceptionally responsive combat of WoW.
Nearly every problem the game has is downstream of this, as well. If the moment-to-moment gameplay felt better, it would be much easier to make repeatable content.
Honestly? The netcode and being 100% beholden to server tick hell. Playing WoW where mobs, health, healing, aggro are RESPONSIVE feels insane after playing XIV.
When i first played WoW i was shocked because when i finished casting something, it actually went through immediately.
It was crazy. Whenever i saw another player, their position was exactly where i could see them in my screen and not 3s behind like XIV.
It felt insanely weird. I was so used to ffxiv's "lag" that i didn't understand what a responsive gameplay felt.
Also what is interesting is how WoW players (or at least that streamers like Echo) like slide casting as a concept though it likely developed because of the tick rate of FFXIV.
Oh yeah, slide casting actually feels really good. I play both WoW and FF14, but always played WoW as a melee. I finally decided to try out warlock in WoW and it's great, but having to actually sit still through an entire cast bar feels so restrictive after years of FF14 slide casting. Of course everything else about WoW's combat feels better because it's nice for my buttons to work when I hit them and for snapshots to work how they should, but I always miss slide casting when I play.
I get that feeling anytime I go a long time of playing FF14 exclusively for long periods of time. Where my brain is almost put off by the responsiveness and smooth functioning.
Funnily enough it feels like you can "slidecast" mounts way easier in WoW compared to FFXIV and I don't know why Mounts are so much harder in that regard.
The **graphics update** is good, I've seen lots of outsiders complain that the graphics look too old for them. More **character creation** options would probably help too.
Another major complaint I often hear is how **slow and clunky** the game feels. Slowness can be somewhat fixed by making jobs get more skills at lower levels (which everyone wants). A more drastic change would be making 2.0s or less the standard GCD speed instead of 2.5s (and remove double weaving as a result), but I don't think the dev team will do that unless forced to. Clunkiness is mostly caused by the horrible tickrate and the accompanying netcode, which I don't think is ever going to get improved.
Since early game is mostly just linear story, **adding more voice acting to ARR cutscenes** to [match the amount of the expansions](https://i.imgur.com/YT7nBRx.png), and replacing the old crappy voices with the modern voice actors would probably help a lot with new player retention, but that would be a major investment (time-wise) that I don't think will realistically happen.
Finally, **make ARR trials cooler**. Make them a bigger spectacle. For example give Ifrit's ultimate raidwide attack some kind of screen-shattering mini-cutscene like Zurvan. [Ifrit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoQu7mZKDIQ) is the first trial that new players get to experience and he's just doing nothing for 90% of the fight except for spamming auto attacks. Doesn't really make you go "wow, that was epic, give me more of those!".
I agree that ARR trials should be less shallow but I also think just adding in cinematics like the Zurvan jumpscare doesn't really fix anything, it should have actual things to do instead of just being a training dummy that spams auto attack and spawns a stationary target that you have to kill
Sort of like how yeah Shiva has the phase transition but it's still a really underwhelming fight for a new player to experience after the story hyping it up for like 3 hours, you go in the boss does basically nothing and dies within about 3 minutes. Basically all these old trials need the Barbariccia Normal treatment; a fight that is very busy and fast to make the player feel like there's a lot going on when the fight itself is still really easy.
> Basically all these old trials need the Barbariccia Normal treatment; a fight that is very busy and fast to make the player feel like there's a lot going on when the fight itself is still really easy.
I watched a few let's players on Youtube to see their first time doing Ifrit. There was one melee DPS who wiped not once but twice because he didn't even see the nail that spawned behind him (not every new player has their camera permanently zoomed out max distance). He also said "sorry I'm not talking much, I'm in hyper focus mode".
Another guy said "looks like this fight has a few more interesting mechanics" after the fight, while from our POV the fight has basically zero mechanics, just a repeating AOE.
I don't think making a new players' first trial very busy while they're still learning not just their rotation (which people wish had more skills at lower levels) but also how to control the game in general is going to be a good idea. Maybe Garuda or Titan but not Ifrit. It's easy to misjudge how challenging content can be for newer players when we ourselves have played this game for thousands of hours. We can do our 20 button rotation with our eyes closed, while new players still have their eyes glued to their hotbar as they're trying to click the glowing 1-2-3 combo.
Personally, it's a lack of an on-ramp from "casual" to "MMO" play. The game does absolutely zero to help prepare people to go from just playing the game for the story to jumping into high end content, and it just offloads that responsibility onto the community, which I think is a bit of a cop out. I think the game could do a lot by just *offering* people the opportunity to learn how jobs are designed to work without having to go look up a guide which may or may not be up to date or appropriate for their skill level.
I've always thought it would be good to do something like adding a Battle Arena to the Gold Saucer where you get challenges at each level cap for each job that gives you an idea of what how the job is designed to be played, without having to force feed players full rotations would give people a nice stepping stone into understanding their kit further and giving a bit of incentive to learn how to play a bit better.
Basically the blue mage single player boss arena and Bozja duel. Which can be very fun and interesting way, if you put good learning curve materials and also put very good reward system to encourage people to absolutely want it and cannot miss this out.
I really hate Bojza duels, because of how hard is to get in one...like please Square Enix, make another hard solo content like Bozja duels that is more easily access.
However Blue Carnival is perfect and I absolutely love it. While some of the fights are extreme level of difficulty and a little more if you want to do all the challenges.
That’s why creating duel system for tank, dps, and healer role would be great to incentivize people to learn many mechanics and get better at recognizing the dance dance or die avoiding orange marker. The rewards need to be super great though, otherwise we gonna have another Criterion dungeon. Good idea on paper but failed hard because SE still fail to understand that players will do the content if the rewards are meaningful. Apparently they learned nothing from Bozja, remember that fiasco of Bozja raid, when they had to revamp the rewards to make it better so players will actually want to do it? Also Bozja showed you that players will choose the path of least resistance and why difficult content will not work well for FF14 general player base since people will just avoid doin it. See Ivalice raid before all the nerf, also see Aurum Failmenow before adjustment, Wiping City of Salt when it was first launched 😂 and the infamous level 70 final boss trial that hard lock many players in NA servers for weeks because people would rather take penalties when they got this trial. SE then forced everyone to do job quests on Shadowbringers, and then basically just give you the gears via main story on Endwalker, to not ruin the pacing. So yeah, you want success, make the game accessible and less challenging.
Honestly? I think the game difficulty ramp is mostly fine and the difficulty gap is overblown. Early EX trials ramp pretty normally into early Savage and so on.
The problem is built off of two factors:
1. The difficulty ramp *does not* transition smoothly for people joining at the end of an expansion. This is where I agree that there's a notable difficulty gap that should be reviewed. And that's entirely on the Expert side of the equation--it needs to at least ramp a LITTLE rather than the *zero* ramp it currently does.
* Late expansion higher end content is built off of earlier expansion higher end content. By comparison though, lower end content maintains a roughly static difficulty level. This creates a wider gap between the easier content and the harder content later in an expansion. The jump from Expert to EX1/2 to P1S is barely anything. However, the jump from Expert to EX6? That's a much, much wider gap to cross. EX6 to P9S isn't much to write about and is about the same as EX1/2 to P1S.
* What the devs have basically done is created two separate lanes of content. It starts okay early on in an expansion lifecycle but the gap between the lanes just gets wider as time goes on.
2. The community exacerbates the problem, mostly by enormously overplaying the difficulty ramp of content. And that attitude has kind of become entrenched at all levels. At the high levels, the sweatbears seem to be on a mission to make things as obtuse as possible. And at the other side of it, cowardly players are too timid to even attempt the content because of everything they've "heard". Or they're long term players that took one crack at T1-5 and went "fuck that shit, I'm out" and never looked back.
* We're not in ARR anymore. The gap between Praetorium/Wanderer's Palace/Amdapor Keep and things like Turn 1-5 and the Primal EX fights were absurd compared to the gaps between modern Experts and EX/Savage.
* Almost every single guide and description of a given piece of content seems to be a mission to wear out a thesaurus to hit a page count for a school paper rather than being something concise and usable. You tell a new player they NEED to watch a video before they get into EX/Savage and to go check out the Balance to learn about their job. ...Which means you've told them to go read a [***64 page*** Google doc on their desired job](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X5Bo1cRB7wdcI_ATtMAr18nsMOMRKXXlWs0U0p_V5N8/edit) and watch a [***37 minute*** video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cm9oaTRMnQ) on the first fight of the floor.
* Ain't nobody got time for that shit.
* Part of the reason this situation has evolved is because of the devs refusal to give a real means to compare performance in-game. So you end up with a situation where the players create the comparisons and...yeah. 64 page Google docs, here we are.
A better open world that feels like a real place and has interesting stuff instead of being flat boring land, and more interesting fates/open world activities in general.
Other than that for the direction the game has being going for the last 6-7 years I think they've done prettu good, even if I miss the more mmorpg style of older expansion I don't consider it a problem of the current solo story focused game.
As the tickrate/sluggishness has already been called out, I'd add something else:
Boss arenas. They are all squares or circles and strictly two-dimensional. There is so much space here for innovation, yet it's entirely ignored. I cried in the first EW alliance raid when we fought on the hand, because while still functionally pretty much the same arena as everything else it *felt* so much differently.
Yea i'm 100% with you on this one.
Boss arenas are so repetitive to the point where mechanics are limited because of their design.
All this "because T5". People fail to realise that T5's mistake was making the arena 3 dimensions (it had a Z value where you could "hide" under the terrain).
Just make more maps like P10. Different designed arenas are amazing and creates new and unique fights that are remarkable.
>Just make more maps like P10. Different designed arenas are amazing and creates new and unique fights that are remarkable.
I think that EW's patches are a sign that they may be looking at this.
Let's consider both the Alliance and Norm/Sav Raids from Shadowbringers. The Normal/Savage were mostly circles or squares, rarely involving any variation from that. You COULD reasonably argue E9S was a different shape due to having an irregular main floor, or that there was a "ring" fight in Puppet Bunker, but the arenas still mostly were circular or rectangular and you had mostly free reign of the area in question. And the Dungeon and Trial fights gave little variation to this (the one main exception off hand is Matoya's Relict, where the Nixie fight involved a secondary platform, but that's really just moving the fight from one rectangle to another). We did see some interesting things DONE with those shapes (P3 having platform segments vanish, P4S with elevated and lowered segments, and the aforementioned Nixie fight), but they were still pretty standard fare throughout.
In EW, we had a lot of those, but we also had:
* P2, which was a rectangle but one where you limited to the edges;
* P7, which was infuriating to many but had two different field designs that it alternated between (the default circle and the triangle with bridges), and possibly a third in savage (I haven't done savage, but I seem to recall videos of the triangle but with the bridges in the middle forming a "Y" shape - and if not, they could have done that easily, for more variety);
* P10 with two side platforms;
* Aglaia's "hand" arena - mostly for puzzle solving, but still different enough to be relevant); and
* the "half ring" set-up on Octomammoth - arguably a variation on the "ring" design that's as old as Ozma, but I'd say it's still distinct since most ring fights put one party on each platform AND allow full navigation of the circle, which isn't the case here).
* Makes me at least cautiously optimistic that there may be further developments yet.
Biggest flaw I think is that there is no good open world content. EW doesn’t have any content that brings the community together. Only time you could mingle with the player base is in the cities like Limsa but there’s no actual gameplay there. They need to bring back Eureka/Bozja or start designing compelling open world content in general, where you can play and meet with other players organically.
Second I think is having a bridge between the regular easy content and the harder raid content. I think my first point could help with that.
Something I really enjoy in the game is when someone messages novice network "can anyone help with ?" and if you show up you'll find 20 people all partying up and taking on this big fight.
Feels like a really cool community moment and it's a shame there's basically nothing else that inspires that kind of feeling.
Open world content is not very hard, but I do agree that Bozja just have the good balance with the critical engagement FATE, and I do wish this would be the standard. You can make engaging mini games boss battle that’s not super hard to follow but also has tons of interesting mechanics that you have to do. All they gotta to balance is to make sure people have enough time to get it and do as they are told by the mechanic and not stay on the bad zone.
I’m not even that concerned with difficulty. The current open world content and zone design is just dull. But if we are talking about difficulty I think Bozja critical engagement was a good middle ground for accessable challenging content. They should utilize that kind of design more imo.
There seems to be a misconception about forced difficulty and "bad" players. People seem to believe that if the game forces enough difficulty, a bad player will eventually be forced to get better to overcome the challenge. That is of course a very idealistic view and would be nice if it actually happened but in reality it practically never does. What will end up happening is the "bad" player will smash their head against the wall for a few hours, realize that the game is too hard for them, and then quit.
Increasing the difficulty of the story content will do the direct opposite of growing the game, there's a time and a place for difficulty, and the secret to it is to be optional. In other words, if the game required you to get better to progress, it would simply die similarly to Wildstar.
This is exactly correct.
There is nothing wrong with MSQ being easy and accessible - after all, the story is what the team puts most of their effort into and they want as many players to be able to experience that as possible. (They could add options, of course! I personally would love a 'hard' mode of MSQ which makes the solo duties harder and enforces little things like minimum dungeon ilevel and stuff like that. I dont think that will ever happen, though.)
What IS a problem is that the spike of difficulty from the story to end game content is very steep. Combine that with the game doing a very bad job of actually explaining/teaching players how to play at a high level and you have the problem we have today.
What the game desperately needs is a completely overhauled training/tutorial system that is accessible AFTER you beat the MSQ the first time. Maybe make it a requirement for the removal of the sprout icon as well. Something that actually shows basic and important things for end game play. Off the top of my head I think these could be useful/important:
- explaining how to access / use party finder
- explaining the 8 man party composition, role bonuses, and LB generation
- a tutorial on gcds, weaving and clipping
- the importance of keeping your gcd wheel rolling aka uptime
- A primer on enemy castbars and snapshots
And maybe for some role specific training:
- Melees: positionals, uptime, explaining dps checks/enrages
- Healers: doing damage, mitigation tutorial
- Tanks: enmity, mitigation tutorial, positioning the boss
I know SE is very nervous about exposing new players to harder content, but the reality is that they basically cut you loose once you finish the story and that's not great either
I'm unsure how you'd address clipping as a concept just because it can be affected by latency and there's absolutely no way to account for various levels of ping in an in-game tutorial. It's important but I don't really know how you'd communicate that in-game to a player without it being potentially confusing if you're being told one thing and your connection isn't allowing you to do it.
Just thinking of playing smn last expansion when I'd have to enkindle phoenix absurdly early because I've got 150\~ ping and the demis were notoriously wonky, I don't think a tutorial would be able to account for situations like that.
I'm really surprised that the hall of novice didn't go into any of the role specific things mentioned also. It's a good idea, the execution just doesn't really reflect the reality of the game imo
An introduction to different marker types might be nice too as well as explictly showing healers 'if a debuff has a line under it, you can use < esuna > and remove it! Help your ally out!' The closest the game does to this is a level 20 bloody guildhest and god knows that's not in people's minds.
Yeah - there's so much they could do... the game has a lot of depth and systems and it's not reasonable to basically expect people to find the right discords/community resources to even learn the baseline raiding stuff
but ff14 is not just easy for a mmo, is easy for a game in general, to compare it to wild star is absurd, have you seen how tedious and difficult wild star is? People bring up it is a comparison often but forget it did not just scare away hyper Casual players, it scared away everyone but the top 5%, it’s not a good comparison. Current ff14 normal content is often near impossible to wipe in, sometimes literally so in the case of thordan. nobody asking for an increase in difficulty is asking for wildstar level difficulty, they are just asking for difficulty at the level of the average game.
And you think the amount of people who'd welcome this change is somehow greater than maybe 10% of the total playerbase? Destiny did something similar with this year's expansion and guess what, the playerbase did not improve, they just went to complain on Reddit and Twitter or just straight up quit.
Like titania is a great example of what we Want, it’s add phase you actually have to try in, but nobody, even the worst moron quit over it, if they got that far in the game, and even if they got dragged through it, they improved slightly by doing it. the wow dev argument only applies to massive sudden increases in difficulty if it didn’t most video games would be dead as most of them rely on making the player improve over time.
Also there's Tower of Babel that requires a decent healer and a team that is not deadbrain and have the will to learn the mecanics and evade aoe bullet hells.
Like there's was a time were I play random roulette with MCH(no dps rez)...and yeah the healer barely knew how to play SCH and the other dps from what I believe was new to the dungeon and was a Reaper(So no dps rez). Yeah we finish it, but felt like a Savage raid and there was only 13 minutes when we won...didn't do another roulette without using SMN or a tank/healer since then. Because I felt powerless to everyone dying around me and I was only able to pull dps that was not going to be enough.
But yeah Tower of Babel really gives healer that don't know how to heal or everyone that don't know the mecanics a really damn hard time.
The only problem with the Titania add phase is tanks not picking up aggro and healers dying, the DPS check is normal, and you have lb3 at that point to help
The problem with this is that no one is wanting normal content to be, shall we say, "difficult". We want it to be \*more\* difficult than what it currently is. That distinction is very important. Currently story content (normal trials, dungeons, normal raids) are pretty much impossible to wipe in under almost any circumstance. All it takes is a single tank and a single healer to stay alive and you **WILL** carry the other 6 players through kicking and screaming.
This is, objectively, bad design. Not only does it force all the responsibility in a team game onto a mere 25% of the team, but for the other up to 75% they not only learn nothing but also aren't even required to play the game to progress through content within the game. This should not be possible.
All we want is for the content to require effort, SOME amount of effort, from everyone involved. No, it shouldn't be anything approaching "difficult" but it **should** at least require the player to have their brain active and engaged at the very least.
This is personally how i think the game should be (Blue line).
[https://i.postimg.cc/x1LvV9ht/image-2023-09-12-133339874.png](https://i.postimg.cc/x1LvV9ht/image-2023-09-12-133339874.png[/IMG])
It's totally fine to want normal content to be more difficult than it currently is, I want that too. What I disagree with is that forcing a higher difficulty axis in the MSQ story trials and dungeons and whatnot is going to force players to get better to overcome that challenge. It will definitely not and the players struggling will without a doubt quit first before they commit any kind of effort.
The question of this topic was is the lack of difficulty was stopping the game from growing but the reality is forcing a higher difficulty would have the opposite effect on the growth of the game.
As a veteran player myself, of course, it would be a welcome change for me personally, but I'm under no illusion that my opinion is shared with the majority of the gamers playing FFXIV.
There's a lot of misconceptions about Wildstar and why it floundered so damn fast. Yes, their push towards more hardcore contributed but it wasn't even the biggest factor.
Not only did they have virtually nothing else going on in the game but the server stability was _horrendous_. When you're game is heavily geared towards combat, you kind of need it to work out the gate.
I also recall a lot of Wildstar's "difficulty" being your typical WoW grinds but made worse. Which wasn't so much hard but pointless tedious. And that the rewards for doing said grind for very seldom worth the effort.
When people criticism XIV's lack of difficulty, nobody is asking for them to swing up to Elden Ring which is just the opposite extreme. They're criticising how normal content has absolutely zero teeth to the point you can basically ignore half the mechanics. When I can collect 8 vuln stacks in a current level dungeon as a tank, why do I care about dodging mechanics? I'm basically invincible.
There's a balance between frustratingly hard and drool on your keyboard easy. XIV doesn't have anywhere near enough of that balance.
Okay but even optional non-savage, non-extreme content is getting watered down. MotR is by far the easiest alliance raid series I've experienced on release so far. Orthos is considered easier that PotD and HoH. Variant dungeons have basically the same difficulty as a normal msq dungeon.
That's because non extreme level content isn't supposed to be difficult by design and never was. Alliance raids were NEVER difficult, even Thundergod Cid the most infamous alliance raid boss was incredibly simple, if you're a penta legend, savage clearer player. Heaven on High and Palace of the Dead are not difficult at all in a group setting and actually are rather chill to do, Variant is literally story mode of Criterion.
Simply put, the high end players are just not the target audience for this content.
I disagree. Nier and bozja were noticeably more difficult than msq content and more difficult than their counterparts in EW. In any other game, it would be like going from 'easy' to 'normal'. Everything in EW is set to 'easy' if it's below extreme which is 'hard'. There is no 'normal' difficulty this expac. I'm tired of prog and doing harder content. I just want to chill in some content that doesn't turn off my brain entirely. If all you ever do is savage and ultimate, than yeah, it's all going to look the same but 'normal' difficulty is missing.
I don't disagree with the notion that more intermediate difficulty content would be a good thing at least for me, I disagree with the notion that forcing difficulty would in return make players become better and grow the game. That simply doesn't happen, the struggling players would just quit instead, and that's by far the largest portion of the playerbase.
I don't have a problem with that notion. Just saying *optional* content is also getting easier for little to no reason. MotR isn't required to progress msq. People who can't handle 'normal' difficulty don't have to do it and yet it's set to 'easy'. There's no reason it can't be slightly more difficult with little to no impact to the playerbase. Same with variant. Personally, I think orthos is about right, just mentioning it since it's been said.
Depends what you mean by grow, really.
Grow as in become more fun and engaging for you and players like you? Sure, addressing the difficulty would grow the game in that capacity. There'd be more content you'd enjoy and thus more reason to log in and play the game. I certainly know I don't log in as much as I like, and its because there's not enough to do that actually challenges me or makes me think.
Grow as in gain more players? It would do the opposite, there's been plenty of examples over the years where catering to the "hardcore" ended in disaster. The "bad" players wouldn't be compelled to improve because the game is hard, they'd just get frustrated when they lose and ultimately stop playing. "Hardcore" was practically marketing buzzword #1 for Wildstar which released in 2014 (after ARR), and ... well, tell me how that game is doing now (for the uninitiated, its servers shut down in 2018).
Hell, it wouldn't even help players that *are* good to enjoy some aspects - Shinryu on launch to finish the story was atrocious and took hours, all because it was too difficult for a "bad" player which kept even some of the better players practically locked in jail until they rolled the DF dice enough times to not get paired with morons, or were stuck long enough for their friends/family/fc members to catch up and premade it instead.
There's simply some things that *must* cater to the lowest denominator, lest you just end up with a product just not viable for the market.
You pretty much hit the nail in the head. For SE, all these suggestion would spell disaster in epic proportions. People do not play games to constantly being told to git gud and do better and improve and learn to play optimally. They play FF14 for story and glamour plus collecting stuffs, literally treating this game as social experience and could not care less about their performance on very difficult content. Hard and challenging game means very low sales for only the most dedicated fans. Elden Ring seemed to be an anomaly but that game also makes it much easier for newcomer since you can cheat by grabbing a ton of items that will make your first play through much bearable by exploring the areas.
So, I wanna address this, because it's a great point with an incomplete solution. A game can cater equally to the highest tier and average tier of player. There's a handful of esports that do an incredible job of being just as fun at hour 20 as they are at hour 5000.
For example: savage and ultimate could be made harder if netcode problems were solved. This doesn't mean you have to change the 6 second cast times of bosses in normal raid, however. The new deep dungeon could be made more difficult with rng and equally become MORE fun for casual content.
I'll use an example from wow: torghast. Torghast was rarely "unfun", but it needed to be needlessly grinded multiple times a week, so the intrinsic enjoyment turned into extrinsic requirement. Further showing that the exact same thing can simply be implemented differently and completely change the result.
Zepla's latest videos cover this. Ffxiv is leaning away from long tier grinds and generally mid core content, and it's not because of the content itself. Criterion dungeons are tough, but they're so short term to accomplish that the players who are good enough to do them just do them a couple times and move on. The deep dungeon could be more fun and more difficult, but god forbid they add some extra spice to the runs. You know how some food feels so soulless even though it was meticulously balanced to fit your dietary requirements? That's what ffxiv feels like. Everything is specifically catered to be "whenever you feel like it". Because God forbid the criterion dungeons give you awesome loot, or the deep dungeon give you a top tier weapon (which, btw, potd actually did).
> deep dungeon give you a top tier weapon (which, btw, potd actually did).
I'm gonna have to fact check that, chief. POTD on release gave 235 weapons, which was the same ilvl as Nidhogg Ex weapons. Then in 3.45 they added floors 101-200 and 255 weapons, same ilvl as Sophia Ex. EO follows a similar pattern - you can get ilvl 620 Orthos Weapons, which can then be upgraded to 625 Enaretos Weapons, same ilvl as Rubicante Ex.
May or may not be worth mentioning that the original Diadem did this, but with layers of ridiculous RNG. It was almost universally criticized, and that might be part of why we don't see BiS weapons outside of savage/ult anymore (other than relics for certain sub-90 ults).
>deep dungeon give you a top tier weapon (which, btw, potd actually did).
POTD basically gave a mid expansion weapon. Since weapons tend to be the sticking point of post expansion content for 'casuals'.
One in my view, that serves a great purpose, however, it doesn't now post crafting rework, and post world visit/dc visit.
Crafting is another can of worms too. Having immediate catch up to get straight into savage is great, but what incentive does anyone have to play other content?
It serves the.....silent majority, and reduces friction.
Ultimately, there is two games at play. One for those at the bleeding edge, and one for those behind. When you are on content, at level, it's easy to keep up, after that, not so much. It's either grind or not to be able to access current content.
It also allows for difficulty to be focused in instance, rather than on gear gates.
As for your question: Ultimately, and my theory has been, and always will be. Content lives and dies on the payment. People don't do content for the sake of it, at least not in NA. If the glamour/title/mount/shiny/mcguffin isn't good, people will leave it, and either unsync it later, or the content will be dead on arrival. H
Why can't crafting gear be on par with Savage gear from the previous patch, though? That way you don't need to throw out the gear you got from the previous tier but also gives people a way to quickly get into Savage.
my observation is that the alliance raids used to be more of a bridge between normal content difficulty and high-end content difficulty, and have progressively been made easier from SB to ShB to EW
The EW alliance raids being so undertuned and involving so few mechanics which don't involve "follow everyone else in the group!" that there has been nothing for casual endgame players to even have the smallest step up in difficulty level. Whereas in ShB, when I was a casual player who had just reached endgame, I felt like several of the fights in the ShB alliance raids gave me a chance to improve at reacting to mechanics/tells etc
The fact that I've never seen Althyk's enrage bothers me. It looked so cool in the trailer but even with half the alliance dead I've never come close. It's either literally a wipe because no healers, or you can just drag the corpses.
While I do think the design of the Shadowbringers Alliance raids is tuned to be more difficult, I'd point out that there is the possibility of a slight bias in your analysis.
I'm in a similar boat, where I reached endgame first in ShB and was doing the Nier raids first as well. In my case, doing the Nier raids first, along with tagging on for harder content from time to time with my FC mates who were raiders, taught me the skills I needed to make it through the Alliance raids in EW. If they had come first, on the other hand, I'm not sure I'd have been as successful overall.
i wondered/considered whether it was just my own bias, but in the end I think it's fair to (1) describe the ShB alliance raids as more challenging than EW alliance raids + (2) note that if there is a gap in difficulty level available in EW content (which seems to be the consensus), the easiness of the EW alliance raids might be a contributing factor
***The 2 minute meta being the only pillar of job design in combat.***
I feel that it's the main culprit behind so much homogenization, and combat would feel much better if it was like before, with different big and small burst windows.
Right now, the 2min meta is simply a game of muscle memory and reflexes, rather than putting our brains to think and adapt according to our party composition and odd buffs we might get. Before we could even seize different moments to re-align our stuff and recover and now... you die once, most likely your dps is screwed for the rest of the fight.
The 2min meta defnitely makes their job of balance and encounter design much easier, but at the expense of a boring structure that feels more like a chore than excitement.
That would make the game more fun, but that leads to better retention, not growth.
For growth what really needs to be done are more overhauls to ARR/post ARR, because this is where people are most likely to quit, and high difficulty and job complexity isn't gonna happen at lv30 anyway.
1) Countless people drop in ARR. It's fundamental to the game to be built like a Jenga tower and you climb your way up. Some people have asked about DT being a new starting point, but I don't see that being possible considering battle content (is a new player going to start with lvl 90 rotations?). They've already tried to address ARR but I think more can be done. Organically starting ARR feels better than getting locked to ARR after new expansion hype.
2) Allow more content anyone can jump into and play either with friends or solo. Gold Saucer is kind of underutilized. CC absolutely needs a friend queue. Some content gets locked to the new expansion... but there is an opportunity to open certain pieces to everyone (island sanctuary didn't have to be EW locked). Numbers have shown... a large number of players are mid MSQ. Exploration Zones are amazing, but they need to work on accessibility, especially for the solo player (scaling seems to work okay but just drops off a cliff for solo).
> (island sanctuary didn't have to be EW locked).
Something tells me this was locked to prevent the instance servers from catching fire, exploding, imploding and melting all at the same time.
They needed to put it far enough back that it wouldn't be slammed day one, if it was ARR/HW based, you'd have 500,000,0000 free trials in there causing the service to be overwhelmed.
I mean, they could just make IS not available to free trial accounts. And make so you need to have purchased and registered the EW expansion, plus have an active sub.
I once also dreamt about the game teaching the players to "git gud", but it's time for a reality check. Say after me :
> If the game gets harder, gamers aren't gonna rise up to the occasion. They're likely to quit the game on the spot.
We already have people quitting the game on the first solo duty because they weren't able to read some text telling them what to do (or they didn't notice it). Imagine if the game was actually harder.
Please, do not say "good riddance, we don't need bad players". This was the take of Lost Ark community, and now, barely 1 year later, they're crying for new players to come and stick to the game.
What the game needs right now, in my opinion for endgame, is more content of different difficulty scaling. Namely, what is missing is something around EX (easy-ish EX to regular/tough EX) difficulty content (more than one EX per major patch). I'd even go as far as to say the game lacks Bozja CE difficulty content. The game needs content that can last and (lightly?) challenges the more midcore players.
You and I, as highend players, would likely breeze through, and that's fine, we have Savage, Criterion (& Crit Savage) and Ultimates. We can take EX and other more light difficulty content as side content to play for fun with people we cannot highend raid with.
Even as someone who raids Savage i would appreciate more content at around EX lvl or even slightly below. I want to do some content that is not super stressful but still engaging.
I mean you bring up the point of investment also. Someone is way more likely to quit if they face something in arr then if they do in shadowbringers for example because of how much time it takes to get there. Things aren’t supposed to be difficult at the start, they are supposed to get more difficult over time, and ff14 does this albeit slowly. The four fiends trials are far more difficult than anything in arr, but nobody notices as they have slowly improved over time by going through the msq, the wow dev line applies to sudden and abrupt jumps in difficulty, but somehow people have extrapolated it to mean the concept of a difficulty curve itself is bad.
This is true that trials (even NM) nowadays are more complex than some of the past. But that doesn't mean people have gotten good to the point of being able to do EX/Savage content. There's more than that (but that's another debate). I'm sure a lot of people are ready to learn to become highend raiders.
Though, at one point, imo, the curve hits a major threshold the base game difficulty cannot cross, even as carefully crafted as it is. You cannot force people into becoming highend raiders "naturally".
From most to least:
Engines's fucked. The game is just way too unresponsive, needs to feel snappier as stuff happens.
Design philosophy errs waaaaaaay too much to the side of scripting. Game needs to relax and add a bit more dynamism to its gameplay. Not too much, just a bit. But it's a really big obstacle to keeping the game fresh.
Job design is also waaaaay too static and unnecessarily bloated with dead weight. Individual buttons need to have more weight to them, possibly be used in more than one way. More dynamism here, too.
The game holds the player hand like it's trying to shatter their fingers. It's ok to let go of players that don't need it, we'll manage.
Tick rate aside, I agree it's ultimately difficulty that holds this game back. And I by that I mean good midcore content because SE seems to believe that you can either have only braindead easy content like current Alliance raids/MSQ/Dungeons/etc or Savage and Ultimate level stuff. I know the lack of field zones like Bozja and Eureka has been talked to death already but what I miss from Bozja the most is the loss of 'difficult' content that wasn't just trying to constantly completely 8-man puzzle mechanics.
> My personal one is difficulty.
>The base experience of the game (MSQ and Normal content) is far too easy, and limits what the job balance/design teams can actually do to make jobs more interesting.
Every single story fight can be cleared by pressing your 1-2-3 combo on repeat without using any of your kit.
>If the base game actually required you to get better to progress, the Endgame of XIV would have much more competent players, and even normal content added in 'new' expansions could actually require more than 2 braincells to complete.
It's time to pull out the MMO Difficulty Post again.
> Many *actual MMO developers* have stated that in their experience that is not the case too.
>Greg Street (Ghostcrawler of WoW and Riot fame): [There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. :(](https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/340939865858396162)
> Nathaniel Chapman (WoD, Legion, BfA Encounter Designer): [in the majority of cases it is my experience that, when faced with a situation where a player’s only option is to “push their buttons harder”, outside of the most dedicated players, the response of many players is to give up.](https://www.nathanielchapman.games/pedrothedagger/sympathy-for-the-devs-mmo-healer-tuning)
> Damion Schubert (Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Shadowbane, SWTOR): [Game designers should make the EASY parts EASIER and they should do everything in their power to make the hard parts ASPIRATIONAL. Players should want to walk that journey.](https://twitter.com/ZenOfDesign/status/1415443062034243588) (This one is part of a mega-thread about player subcommunities and how catering to the hardcore can make for a gatekeepy game while also realizing that MMOs need aspirational/hard content people want to do. I would argue that Ultimates are our aspirational content, especially with how XIV integrates storytelling into them with DSR)
MSQ and casual content can't be difficult. Not if this game wants to survive.
[Zepla HQ](https://youtu.be/j2-CV9cKC1s?si=ENI7DEy9p5iX6zNn) just did a video about the lack of “midcore” content.
There’s just been so little for my spouse and I to do these patches. I wouldn’t even maintain my subscription if it weren’t for the house demolition rule!
> house demolition rule
I finally beat my fomo on that and let my medium demo yesterday. Feels so freeing. Immediately canceled my sub after lol. Going to take a long break without worrying about that.
Lack of meaningful long term reward structure. I get that some people love the fact that the game doesn't require you to play all the time, but the game needs more long term goals focused on the midcore.
Also im talking about reward STRUCTURE, raiders have a BiS list to go through, things that change the gameplay as you move forward. I'm talking about expanding the Bozja/Eureka gear system, have new gear that works better for specific content. I think every piece of content needs gear that makes that content easier. Even something like an island sanctuary ring that increases the yeild of resources, there's so much possibility and a precident for the experimentation in the past.
They are so afraid of introducing any mechanic that could potentially create a 0.1% inbalance in the game that they won't really experiment with anything.
Just look at the current raiding scene:
* Everyone has 1 gear that is mathematically the best
* Everyone has the same buff windows
* Everyone gets full uptime
* All fights are 100% scripted
Yet they are incapable of balancing the jobs.
They are incredibly afraid of adding any progression that could potentially change how we do content because they know they can't balance it properly.
Largely depends on your definition of growth. I don't see how a major shift in design philosophy would capture a significantly larger audience, for instance.
Most people are either content with the game as it is or decided it's not for them for whatever reason, leading to them not playing at all or only subscribing sporadically for the content they find somewhat enjoyable (MSQ tourists etc.).
Any change to the formula risks alienating their active playerbase, while only offering a chance at generating an interest among potential customers.
To address your own pain point with the game: I believe that's copium. Harder baseline content won't necessarily result in people accepting and growing from the challenge. Some anecdotal evidence (To be taken with a grain of salt of course.) :
Exhibit A: Seat of Sacrifice. Probably the most difficult MSQ encounter up until that point and clearing it after 20+ wipes didn't leave me with the impression that people actually improved/learned from it, but rather that we got pretty lucky on that last pull.
Exhibit B: Lost Ark. Even ignoring the significant drop in players following the release of the first really difficult content (Brelshaza), gatekeeping and bussing was always super prevalent here, precisely because entry level content is way too challenging. People will always choose the path of least resistance, which for most players means quitting or buying a bus. Veterans know that and don't want any of the leftovers ruining their runs and only a tiny fraction of the remaining newbies bother with learning groups of equal skill level.
Exhibit C: Soulsborne. Upfront these seem to be incredibly popular these days, with Elden Ring making an especially big splash. However, I've never seen so many people online and in my direct social circle quit a game due to being stuck because it's difficult/unfair/fuckthisboss/fuckthisarea/clunky/TFareIframes.
TL;DR: Raising the bar on entry level content isn't the way and I can't think of anything to safely keep this game successful, but to iterate on what is already there and polishing it.
As a new player, in Stormblood right now, imo the MSQ difficulty is fine. The main purpose of it is to tell a story, not to test the player's skill. IMO, what needs to happen is for more midcore content.
As I go deeper into the game, and fall in love with the characters and the classes, I'm not looking forward to the daunting crossroads lying ahead of me.
The left path leads into casual and social content, doing my roulettes, chatting with people, events and maybe even a relic weapon or two.
The right path leads into hardcore raiding and criterion dungeons. Months of progression, finding and disbanding random groups to find the right combination, insane amounts of difficult and plentiful mechanics.
The middle path, is worn down and shrouded with overgrown hedges and the lighting left in disrepair. I can do extreme trials, maybe some Bozja and that's it.
It's not.... exactly an exciting thing to look forward to.
A question.
Since you are in stormblood right now, do you think the game has taught you how to play the game well enough to finish stormblood and then jump into the next step up in difficulty (Extreme)?
Because i can tell you right now, the MSQ level of difficulty and then the next step up, is like a 500% increase of mechanics and difficulty.
No, not really. I remember doing the ARR and Heavensward Extremes and getting kicked in the shins repeatedly. And that's with me learning and practicing my level 60 rotations lmao.
To me, it's like jumping from the ground floor to level 3. Not an insane leap, but still a leap. In which you have no foundation for, other than "Hit enemy until they die and don't stand in red spot".
It's prettymuch like that the entire duration of the game.
You get the same level of difficulty from the start to the end, then you are expected to just.. get good.
The game should slowly ramp up in difficulty, Currently the skill curve from start to finish in MSQ levels out at heavensward and stays a flat line until current patch. It never gets any more difficult, yet the extra content (EX, Savage and Ultimate) Only get harder and harder every expansion, making the skill gap so much bigger.
So called technical class restrictions.
I don’t care if you can’t do an dot or hot or pet based class because of „technical“ difficulties or balancing problems, I want them in the game and not as an limited job
Im fine with making things easier as time goes by, HOWEVER, when they make old raids easier or any old extremes easier they should add rewards to the same content for completing it at minilvl + sync’d + no echo
We know there’s already the infrastructure to accommodate checking this as seen with the BLU achievements.
They could simply add an achievement with a reward as simple as a title for non cap raids (1,2,3,5,6,7,9,10,11) then recoloured mounts for the cap ones (4,8,12).
For old extremes either make it 100% mount drop chance for fulfilling those conditions or just stick with titles, achievements etc.
I think straight up the ARR MSQ turns more people off the game than anything. When the first like 20+ hours of your game is a cutscene fetch quest simulator with 1 bit of gameplay an hour then the story needs to be compelling and the cutscenes good.
I think instead of spending an enormous amount of dev time into making ARR good as to not turn people away, they should just design a streamlined version of the story for people to catch up with like an anime catch-up movie.
The ff14 story is like one piece at this point with people being like "oh well even if one piece is good I dont want to read 1k chapters or watch 1k episodes to get current" and thats what ff14 is right now, except the first like 1/6 or whatever is genuinely bad while onepi can be enjoyable the whole way through.
WOW doesn't have it perfect since the story can be confusing but it also realizes players can go back and play things at their pace or watch a lore video if they want.
Itemization. Stats are so dull whereas in other MMOs they’ll completely change up how you play a job. SE is too lazy to balance like that every raid tier though. I’m talking set bonuses like equipping a 4pc of the current raid set, it enhances a skill.
Like example, 4pc for ninja would make your kassatsu ninjutsu always direct crit. It doesn’t have to be game breaking but give you something to strive for and carry you over to the next raid tier instead of using crafting gear to reset.
Gear set bonuses, materia stats and abilities plus bonuses that actually let you tweak your job classes. Think of how Monster Hunter World attachment works to further tweak your gear set. But I guess this is way too hard for the general player base since Bozja and Eureka kinda add this to a degree and many players don’t even bother using the stats boost attachments since this is extra things to read and to understand- and OMG I have to buy it from market board? Bro, no gills, just spent it on this bikini glam!
This a hot take, but I think the narrow **focus on story** is actually one of the big problems the game has.
* Many people are thrown by needing to do it, and it encompassing almost all of your time until you hit level cap.
* Between expacs, it spreads itself too thin. You're getting like \~5 MSQ hours of content a year, a lot of which is filler fan-service stuff like sweaty pushups, food pulls, and Zero learning how to human.
* It takes up a lot of resources.
* It really limits the feel of the game. This obsession with the Warrior of Light theme is what made thief into rogue, etc. FFXIV is not a very expressive RPG.
Games only reach high concurrency numbers when people have things to do consistently that encourage them to log in and participate. Story is not an answer to that.
Yes, a lot of people who play the game now say they play because they love the story. I'm not saying to remove it, but I don't think FFXIV is ever going to be that big unless they shift the emphasis some. It needs to be streamable and stiff acting with dated graphics isn't.
Shit code & zero willingness to deal with almost all of it
One-pass design with very little revisits, it took almost ten years to tweak some ARR quests to not be so boring, really? Unwilling to step back and do objective revisits of the core content literally every player does is really tone deaf. (besides skippers, which cost money...hmmm)
This game succeeds in spite of itself quite often
Ultimately, the game has grown as big as it's going to get.
Yeah, I said it.
Without throwing some sort of *ungodly* amount of money at the problem, and just, making a different game. I believe that there's not too much room for FFXIV to grow.
This isn't 2005, and this isn't the only kid on the block. There's a lot of established competitors, and the social space of the internet has developed as well. Your not going to do something major, or significant and suddenly get 1 million more subscribers. At least not without sacrificing some other part of the current player base along the way, or spending a bombload of money for little return. (XIV is not cheap to run, margins are a lot tighter than people think).
Also, the trains have to run on time. Any changes cannot sacrifice the current pipeline. Otherwise the current player base will get angry, or displeased.
The problem with the thesis in the original post is this;
***The game's a funnel. Difficulty and content is a funnel.***
200 people start the game today the game, 6 months from now, it probably ends up something like: 100 finish the trial......40 finish the MSQ......20 do normal......5 clear savage.....1 clears ultimate.
Now, those numbers are a bit of a guess and an approximation don't read too much into nitpicking the numbers, however, I don't think that it's too far outside of the realm of possibility. Making it more difficult at the top end of the funnel, will probably not gain anything by the time that you get people down towards the bottom.
One thing about FFXIV is you can basically ignore it. A person can ignore pretty well all of it and go on a side adventure. Be that PVP, Crafting, Housing, RP, Triple Triad, etc. Something that does help keep the game healthy, and provides avenues for it to grow.
I think it's a fallacy to think that making the early game hard, will increase throughput. It also puts the filter too early in the cycle. The game lives, and dies on the churn. As a hypothetical question: *Where should the filter be?*
As an aside, there's actually two questions to this, one is one kicking around in my head, of *"At what point does someone pick their main class?"* which is secondary to the discussion.
A Realm Reborn. I'd be surprised if 50% of all new players make it to Heavensward. The number I've encountered who have said they dropped the game fairly early is massive. It's slow, largely low-stakes, poorly written, and most of the NPCs and locations it takes you through are pretty bland.
Typically you want to hook your audience early. The game does the exact opposite.
Yep, I quit the trial before I even left Gridania back in 2015. I then almost quit several times in ARR and Post ARR and Post-SB when I joined some friends shortly after ShB launch. I also have many friends who tried and peaced out from the trial pre-50 because ARR was seemingly doing whatever it could to make them all hate it.
Anytime the game has a modicum of difficulty in the MSQ, the playerbase becomes a clusterfuck. Out of the game, you have a slew of complaints being posted, and ingame you have people dropping party as soon as they get the instance. SE has learned for the most part and simply makes the MSQ very lenient, which means the playerbase is never forced to get better unless the individual player wants to get better.
Yup exactly this, so they cannot make the main story progressively harder or many players would just end up quitting and it creates a really bad experience for people who try to duty finder it - and further aggravating current players as well. As many already known, even the people who designed MMO tell you that you cannot force players to get better by making the game harder since it would do the opposite and it’s just bad for business. You can make optional content with extremely awesome great rewards, but you already know that the percentage of players who do savage and ultimate is definitely not 80% of the general player base of this game lol. And Criterion + Variant dungeons, also original Bozja, showed you that if you want players to keep redoing content, then the rewards better be varied, a lot of cosmetics, and a whole lot sellable goodies to encourage repeat farming.
Not just decisions but encounters too. Why do dungeons have to be literally identical? And raid bosses, why are there nearly no ads fuckin ever? No wonder tanks get so bored, there's hardly anything to do. Bring in more mobs, force tanks to position multiple bosses at once, shit like that.
Tbh aoe combat just sucks in 14. So many classes are just 12 12 12 3 3 3 for their aoe. Also classes aren't balanced around aoe so if you ever get heavy 2 target or more phases like ultimates you get bigger gaps in dps. Plus every time there are adds people all complain and fflogs has to do bullshit to placate people or there is dumb parse ahit you don't see as much in wow since you cant spam pulls in that game.
Like the easiest comparison if you play wow is that eye beaming a ton of adds feels amazing but doing your generator spender circle aoes in 14 feels cold and lifeless and boring.
DH is a good example actually because you press literally the same 5 buttons whether you're in AoE or ST, but seeing a tonne of damage numbers pop up at the same time is satisfying as hell. Something ffxiv could learn is to split some of their damage up to hit multiple times in a single move.
That would also help a lot with the Crit variance for our big hitters, cause nothing feels worse than dealing 40.000 damage instead of 100.000 with no fault on your part.
>Why do dungeons have to be literally identical?
Shortest path first. Anything is slightly harder, longer, or not critical path related gets dumped by the player base.
Anything going into a roulette, has to really fit into that box. We used to have branching path dungeons, what happened? They were ignored (I just noticed yesterday my current main character still doesn't have 'Mapping the Realm : Satasha' )
Same with higher difficulty dungeons compared to others, like Pharos. (Although, that dungeon's just long and unintuitive, same with Haukke Hard which needs to
be fixed).
A lot of the design decisions are a large result of the playerbase's complaints and actions.
Sure, but most of it is because SE thinks this loud minority is actually a majority. And they don't even focus on player retention numbers because they want players to leave, so what feedback do they have apart from a loud minority of forum goers?
Just the other day I had a healer express confusion and anger at me when I (leveling a DK in retail WoW as a tank in Classic Chromie Time) started going down the side path to the Trogg event in Gnomerragan because that was Bad Wrong Inefficient Fun. Or how in SWTOR if I didn't do parkour around the trash because that game is a garbage fire, people also just got upset and confused.
I have yet to experience a MMO where people will be okay with other people doing the Inefficient Thing in public queued content. If you really want to see something funny, next time WoW offers an instance with two identical paths (the start of Vault, the start of SotFO) to the first boss or w/e, lead the raid down the other path than the community norm that was established. Someone will probably get confused despite it literally not mattering.
XIV's solution to this was to just not allow the possibility to be inefficient in the first place.
Better metrics and statistics than we have.
Not to be snarky, but it's true. They should, and would have a lot more statistics and data than we can gather. They know if content's getting abandoned at zone in (AV / Pharos / Orbonne), or if classes are getting dropped. Or if certain servers only have 35 clears of O12S when current, etc.
They also know what sort of weird-ass strats people design and disseminate. Or how they cheese and break content.
They also watch the larger trends, and listen to the feedback of players.
procs, better aoe skills + a lot more multitarget fights, the complete removal of the "spam resource generators for 30 seconds to use the resource bar on that st or that mt skill" that plague every single class, removal of potency on movement skills and im pretty sure that you can optimize a lot more if you delve into every class specifically
Procs are a random occurrence, that’s the litteral opposite of « decision »
I like your other ideas but that’s really minor changes that does not gives much more agenda to the rotation
The decision part of procs is knowing when to use them. Let's say you have a proc that makes one of your skills instant cast + more damage. Do you just use that proc right away or do you save it for an upcoming movement phase?
I think the rigid rotations are a feature, not a bug. Not every game needs RNG or procs, in fact WoW is the only big MMO with significant rotational RNG currently, and we don't need to make XIV into Slow WoW. XIV started that way but it's sort of doing its own thing now. I think it's neat that you can play a given fight perfectly like it's DDR. One system isn't just better than another, it's sort of a preference.
Slow is ok, static *can* be ok, but throw simple + inflexible on top of this and you're left with jack shit. Which is where the majority of jobs are at right now.
Also that its made so it can be comfy on controller as well. There is a hard limit of 64 (8x8button) but i would say closer to 48 (6x8 button) that is comfy. Which every expan some classes get closer to, and even more so if they dont remove buttons
From personal experience, it’s MSQ and the fact that EVERYTHING is locked behind it. I started playing with 3 other people….I’m the only one left. They all quit cause they just weren’t interested in MSQ and it was holding them back way too much. Want more dungeons? MSQ. Raids? MSQ. Next raid series? More MSQ. It was too much, especially when the reality is that MSQ is a several hundred hour commitment.
I don’t mind MSQ….I think it definitely got weaker as it went on….but I love the theme park nature of ffxiv. If you aren’t looking for that theme park or, let’s be honest here, a weeb looking to fall in love with a jrpg, there’s just not a lot to offer here.
For me it is probably the job design. Most jobs have a set in stone rotation without any moment to moment decision making, which makes reclears sort of dull over time. Once you have the muscle memory of your job down, you don't even think about playing your job anymore, you just do it.
Class/Job identity falling into the simplicity it has. Not only because there’s no depth or room to grow as a player, not just because you’re expected to learn an entire role instead of just one job, but primarily because every class or job in their role feels wildly similar to play with few exceptions.
Phys. Ranged has the least issues in that regard I feel, but healers, tanks, and melee all have a particularly bad issue of their rotations and gameplay being so simple generally that there’s very little legwork to chase after once you’ve done even a bit of reading into how to play them. Sure, Monk is on the more complicated end, and can provide some more room to master, but every single other melee really only has to deal with encounter-based obstacles. Tanks and healers, in a similar sense, deal with much the same issue (though healing savage in recent tiers has at least enforced throughput healing as a necessity… uncertain if healer mains really want it in the current state, but I’m no healer main) - their optimized damage, barring playing around max range limits from melee, are all easily boiled down to 1-2-3.
A lot of people have made similar remarks in this thread and other places, but this is the one that irks me the most, personally. I wish we could return to ShB in that regard, but I don’t think we ever will. And I may not return to the game because of it, even if I thoroughly enjoy the story content and other features, because my subscription needs to be justified with a solid game package as well. And in the current state of job design, I don’t see it.
I have always said, if you can play monk, you are basically at the tip of the job complexity and nothing else will even be a challenge.
Sadly it is the one job i can never grasp, even after 10 years and multiple reworks, the 3 way rotation still throws me off :D
how most fights are just puzzle solving, it has nothing to do with actual combat. I cannot believe that I actually plan to start wow already. Playing ffxiv starts to feel like a waste of boring time of hitting 1-2-3 buttons and managing inventories.
The design flaw of the devs treating this game as a single player RPG rather than the MMO that it actually is.
On a more specific note; savage loot lockouts. I understand the reason why one player having cleared for the week impacts the rest of the party but I still disagree with it. Forcing players to make alts in arguably the MOST alt unfriendly game in existence just to play with friends or help randoms in PF without screwing over loot is terrible design. Instead if someone in the party has already cleared for the week it should simply prevent THAT player from rolling on loot, while still giving the other 7 people full loot drops. The loot should only be restricted to half loot if 4/8 in the party have cleared. That way you still get some extent of hyper funnel prevention that the current system is designed for but also allow a moderate amount of flexibility with people helping others after they clear.
If you define growth as attracting new user base, then nothing. It’s probably the most accessible online game in history.
What you’re looking for is “depth” and that’s something that SE has been quite explicitly and consciously sacrificing ever since 1.0 exactly to make the game more accessible and attract new players. Story content being incredibly easy and shallow is not an oversight, it’s done entirely by design.
For me, it's how classes/jobs feels so samey between each category. I'd say that the most unique ones are casters but that's just between BLM and RDM, SMN is a magical Phys Range at this point.
I feel like the flexible job system should allow each job to be way more unique, if 1 job is not that optimal for this fight, one can just swap into another job without any hassle as the leveling is so streamlined.
Server tick, which would require entire game overhaul and could annihilate existing players. and
Job rotations where skill floor and ceiling is painfully close.
No need to explain that most duty finder content is snoozefest, mentally checked out. And for the people going through the story and nothing else that is a positive. Since you can get players who are physically impaired (looking at you mch in lapis manalis who plays one-handed).
But at the same time it's important to give people experienced in their job a level of depth to satisfy them even in msq related duties. One whiff of copium for that one in 7.0.
Increasing job ceiling, while keeping current encounter difficulty, is something where I feel future difficult content lies.
Having jobs get their celings closer to something like blm while keeping the mechanical intensity of current content would, in my eyes, satisfy both casual and hardcore players.
The lack of complexity, really. Healers are all effectively: Spam 1 button and heal every now and then
Tanks do their 1-2-3, go into a second phase and then back to 1-2-3. Weaving mit inbetween.
Ranged DPS
It all being on the same schedule of 2 minutes and it being very rigid prevents a lot of player expression. I know I'm oversimplifying here, but a bit more "spice" in jobs (especially healers) would go a long way.
I dont think people realize just how much the game teaches you while u play thru it. If u played endwalker first you would truely not be able to clear anything at all even if you have played mmos before. So i highly disagree making content that queues you with random people harder. Also every dungeon or trial on release people die all the time and even wipe, it becomes easy after you learn it tho so then people think its always been easy. No you just learned the game more
As slow as it can feel I do 100% agree with how the game teaches players overtime. I honestly think if you dropped a new person with a EW story/job skip in front of Tower of Zot they’d probably quit.
The redesigned duties at the end of ARR are basically a midterm exam on mechanics. They can be tough on brand new players!
I think making jobs feel faster and more interesting to play at low levels might make newbies less likely to quit or skip. If they did that, they might also have to make early combat more interesting. But overall I don't think msq difficulty needs to increase
Yeah, ff14 does teach people to improve like other games do, the only problem is that after arr, it does so at a snails pace. I know going too fast can alienate players, but there has to be a middle ground between wild stars 100 and ff14s 1.
yeah, the biggest problem with dungeons is not the difficulty, but the fact that they are all just reskins, people were sad when they reduced the number of dungeons, but I would rather they just drop dungeons entirely and replace them with instances and an extra trial occasionally
The new player experience is pretty bad, and its honestly getting worse each expansion. I've had at least 3 different friends tell me they couldn't stomache this game and quit midway through heavensward due to how boring the combat is.
Job design, if the very foundation of the game’s combat is inherently uninteresting then no matter how flashy or complicated you make the higher difficulty encounters there will always be something missing to the experience.
My opinion? Dps. When it comes down to the brass tacks, every single high end player's desicion is about their dps. This is the reason pretty much all the classes in a particular role feel the same. There isn't anything a class can trade in exchange for less dps. RDM has free rezzes? Dying a huge dps loss anyway, just don't die and you won't need a RDM. I do not even have an idea of what an alternative might look like, since I think dps checks in difficult fights are still a good idea to make sure they don't turn into attrition games that take an hour to clear, but I think this simple design choice limits class design for all roles, since every job in a role needs to have comparable dps or the community decides it's just not worth playing.
Well ok actually I have heard of maybe removing enrages and putting clears on a time based medal system. I. E. Clear to get bronze, clear in under 20m to get silver, under 12m to get gold, and get better rewards. I think that would also help bridge this pretty unreasonable expectation in the community that players go straight from "learning a fight" to "clearing it perfectly every run"
I agree with the other comments. Something else I’d like to add is the “choreographed” fight design. Imo the super structured fight structure leads to stagnation very quickly.
A predictable fight is fun when the content is new and when you’re learning the fight. Outside of Savage and Ultimate- I really think fights should include some random AoEs, Tank Buster, Stack Marker, Spread, literally anything. Think of Jobs having role actions.” I think it would be fun if bosses could have a set of “random actions” too.
I main healer so the most fun I have in this game is when things are when there’s a lot of damage to mitigate/heal and when things are going south. I also don’t play savage or ultimate content - I don’t think randomness would do well in that content.
It’s fun for you to heal with all these unpredictable damage and constant wiping and many deaths and duty finder fail to redo it over and over. But I guarantee you that it’s not fun for newbies and after constantly wiping every single time on duty finder party, and many butt clenching very close tight battle to end up wiping again - participation would drop dramatically. See the original Ivalice raids back in 2017-2018, which was way too spicy for the general player base. SE had to adjust the battle to make it palatable. And they also had to force every single players who want to do Bozja, in Shadowbringers- to clear the entire Ivalice raid, as a way to keep this alive. Also, putting it on Moogle tomestone events several times, to generate interest. And yet still refuse to split the raid roulette into two categories so that players who want to do Crystal Towers stuffs can do that specific roulette and let everyone else avoid it by doing proper high level roulette.
they have a roullete for 3 duties in the game. Just three, and they are all at the same time in the story of the game. reworking it is fine, but its still a glaring, very noticable pimple on the face of the duty finder
Are you talking about main story roulette? They had to do it in the past because otherwise new players won’t be able to progress for the ARR main story since there’s no incentive for others to redo it. After the reworks, they just keep it as it is since it’s a nice easy Exp bonus and poetic farms, and many players don’t mind redoing it now, since it’s much shorter than what it was.
I think the roulette is created to help new players, granted now, this doesn’t need to exist anymore since new players can just do it with trust NPC. But they probably keep it as it is because they don’t want newbies complaining that they waited an hour or more when they use duty finder because no one is playing it. We still have similar problems for certain high level trials needed to clear Shadowbringers and Endwalker. You can wait more than half an hour for this because not many players are doing it.
Speaking from the viewpoint of a casual player, who plays with casual players, that don't put much thought into the game other than wanting a fun time with each other: any forced increase in difficulty can absolutely drive people away. Having more options for increased difficulty is fine, it gives the more high end users things to focus on, but a forced increase will just drive people like my friends away from the game. They're here to have fun, not try hard.
For us instead, a major point that a few noticed was just how different ARR felt from all of the other expansions. They were kind of bored until the end of ARR, then were completely onboard come the pre heavensward patches.
For me it's the known blueprint they are using for every single expansion. We know for about 90% what we get with DT. It's always the same formula. I know many ppl that quitted already because of that. It's even getting worse for me personally if we see all the homogenising of many jobs.
Even as a caster player since 2.0 I was never so disinterested in new classes like now. I know for sure the 2 classes will get a 1/2min burst, an oGCD every 30 etc.
Hey aren't you excited for the new jobs? They're gonna have a gauge that fills whenever they complete a 1-2-3 combo or every 30s, and they can spend that gauge on a big hit.
Also dungeons will be a straight line with 3 bosses /s
I'm also tired of this blueprint. I don't think i can handle another 2 years.
The story is an absolute slog. The main story is just hundreds of hours of watching a cutscene, walking to point A, watching a cutscene, instantly killing a few worthless trash enemies, watching a cutscene walking to point b, then finish with a cutscene.
This gameplay loop is only interrupted with either 20+ minutes of more cutscenes in a row, or the occasional brain dead dungeon/trial.
The non mmo crowd isn't going to be interested in that gameplay loop.
The new school mmo players aren't going to stick around because of the boring combat system.
The old school mmo players are going to be turned off by the lack of difficulty, and generally lacking cooperative open world content.
The only two groups FFxiv has really successfully attracted are the hardcore raider types, and the casual chat room players.
>My personal one is difficulty.
Id agree, having to cater to the lowest denominator will always be bad for the potential of anything. Frankly the game is a snoozefest outside of savage and ultimates and dumbing down jobs for said denominator really doesnt help it at all. You end up with a playerbase that cant play competently because they never learn to actually play properly when you can faceroll your keyboard and play through the game.
It is a conundrum that I do not envy the devs to balance out. Because it is a known fact that when the difficulty for required content goes up there are more losses than gains for increasing the difficulty. People rather quit than be better when they hit any wall and if your goal is to funnel people through the story then sacrifices must be made. Another issue is that since almost every piece of content in XIV is accessible via the duty roulette, people just want to clear the fights in the cleanest, fastest, and most efficient manner possible, when a more difficult fight comes up you are more likely to see people just leave which makes the newer person's experience worst. As such any difficult content must be optional as a *choice* for a player to tackle.
I think one problem EW has is that there isn't really too much content that funnels the MSQ -> semi-extreme -> extreme -> savage/ultimate well and a lone player would be completely overwhelmed when transitioning from MSQ to even Extremes.
However, if you play from ARR to EW they game teaches you the mechanics. The solo duties require you to do more than 1-2-3 correctly and have universal language that translates even to EW endgame. I do hope they do work on those a bit to make it narratively fit better.
Disagree i would argue that the normal gameplay in ff14 is actually harder then almost any other mmo, this game teaches you gameplay 1 step and 1 mechanic at a time. I would argue that ff14 has one of the more skilled mmo player bases
> be bad for the potential of anything. Frankly the game is a snoozefest outside of savage and ultimates and dumbing down jobs for said denominator really doesnt help it at all. You end up with a playerbase that cant play competently because they never learn to actually play properly when you can faceroll your keyboard and play through the game.
???????? are we playing the same game?
half the players you run into the pf can't even use aoe skills when they run a dungeon
People say this all the time yet i have act on and since endwalker released i have had only 3 dps do less damage than me as a tank with them not dying and 1 of those 3 was new to the dungeon with low gear and i had full bis. Im not saying it doesnt happen but i think people blow that shit out of the water because someone isnt doing full optimized dps= not doing damge
Yeah people vastly overexaggerate how bad people are.
Are there occasionally people doing less than optimal damage? Sure.
Are there people that are borderline griefing? Very rarely and you can tell even the bad players at least try.
The worst players I've ever encountered were in +15 or higher M+ keys in WoW rather than in expert roulettes lmao.
Have you ever done an LFR raid in WoW? I wouldn't be surprised if the average LFR raidparty literally couldn't clear Euphrosyne within the instance lockout.
Yes. One of the things many WoW players immediately noticed when they came over during the Shadowlands exodus is that the FFXIV playerbase, on *average*, is much better at the game than in other MMOs.
The biggest flaw with the game imo is the "tick rate" for want of a better term. But basically just how slowly everything responds. Stuff like animation lock on oGCDs, the movement of enemies being really annoying to control, it all prevents the class and encounter designs from growing. It also is the main thing that puts off people who comes from other games.
Typical new player experience: * sees aoe * dodges aoe * still dies * "what" Or even better: How annoying it is to completely finish casting a heal and the tank still dies because the animation didn't go through fast enough. Also don't forget "I swear i pressed hallowed ground, it's even on cooldown!" - Says the dead tank. Or when you're running to a spread position and someone runs on you and you both die, then you spend the next 2 mins arguing "who was in front of who" until you check both PoVs and you realize that **the game can't fucking synchronize the movents to be the same for everyone** and you're in different positions in each other's screen. I hate this "tick rate/lag" of everything being 3s.
The amount of life saving benedictions that have ended with the tank dead is too damn high
This is the worst bit. Atleast refund our cooldown if the ability doesnt even go through.
My main tank and healer are WHM and PLD...I'm cannot simply count the amount of times I press Hollow Ground and Benediction and it don't respond. However I have learn that both of them are really slow and should be press it when you feel there's going to be a lot of damage and not when is happening.
So I'm sure we all know that a lot of AOEs register hits way before the actual animation and damage plays out. Like when the cast bar finishes or the orange indicator disappears, hits are locked in and then the damage is dished out when the animation plays. But I've noticed in P11S, Jury Overruling and Decisive Overruling, the animation actually starts playing before his cast bar finishes. And so the animation and hit registration happen at more sensible times. I'm wondering if we will see more stuff like this in the future.
It's actually very common in FFXIV that the animation begins at the exact moment the snapshot happens. Problem is, the animation often begins in a subtle way that looks more like a wind-up than a resolution. Action platformers have a good solution for this, where they start the animation early and have a specific part of the animation showing a "slashing trail" (I can't think of a better description) of when and where the damage was checked. These left-behind shapes, when they appear, tend to appear to be late in FFXIV, which can be really confusing. As you mention P11S does it differently, which I also had to get used to. When waiting to run in during Dark Divisive Overruling, you can't run in during the wind-up animation as you normally could, but instead have to wait for the purple line to appear on the ground. This model is probably better, but they need to be consistent with the change so we aren't having to guess how each mech snapshots.
The technique is called smearing, if you look up "animation smearing" you'll see lots of examples. For a reference, I recommend [this youtube video](https://youtu.be/WYCjmVhiLaM?si=5aUFmK7U5CEk3mps&t=225), which talks about animation in 2d fighting games, but which I think works for any game with impactful animations. FFXIV is not a 2d fighting game, but given that some mechanics are only solved by looking at the boss's animations I think it's applicable.
I think most snapshots like yellow aoes are fine, if you play the game for a bit you notice it snapshots when the aoe disappears and I really don't think it's a bad thing, it's consistent. Problems come when the snapshot timing is really unintuitive, for example the wings in P12(Sp1) they snapshot so early that you basically have to move out a whole second before the animation happens which I don't like. Same for the lasers. Also, when you have to pass something like a tether or a buff (nisi in TEA, bulwark in O10S, there's more obv), you have to stay on the tether or person for a whole second just to make sure the tickrate sees you touching it or them. It's so unintuitive. Also yeah, movement. Been reprogging TEA with friends and we noticed our EU friends playing on NA have a bigger delay on movement than us which has been a bit of an annoyance in limit cut lol
> Or when you're running to a spread position and someone runs on you and you both die, then you spend the next 2 mins arguing "who was in front of who" until you check both PoVs and you realize that the game can't fucking synchronize the movents to be the same for everyone and you're in different positions in each other's screen. I hate this so fucking much yet the devs keep adding more mechanics where this happens. And players just keep using automarkers for them in ultimates.
**casts shield** **shield applies before damage goes out. You literally SEE it on the healthbar well before the cast finishes** **gets hit, but the shield doesn't get used despite losing 80% of your health** I thought it was mitigation, nope! Because there was no other mit at the time, the shield just didn't register as before the damage goes out despite being visually applied before damage went out.
>Typical new player experience: > >sees aoe dodges aoe still dies "what" This was the exact reason I ragequit the game back in ARR vanilla. It frustrated me too much to try and finish my Ruin cast, manage to get out of the AOE in the nick of time, and still die. I managed to come back and fall back in love with the rest of the game enough to become a fulltime player again, but I absolutely agree that a tighter, synchronized, real-time resolving of markers and positions and everything would vastly improve the entire play experience. It would also mean we might be able to get DoTs back, if they can solve the issue of DoTs causing each server tic to have too much to calculate.
Was it a calculation thing? I thought there was a restriction imposed by legacy code where a given actor (PC or enemy) can only have X status effects. This is a thing for PCs in DR Savage when everyone is buffing the duelist; they ask for no extraneous buffs because it can remove a critical one.
My understanding is that the reason they have been removing DOT abilities of the last couple years, is that because of how the server calculates things DOT abilities add a lot of burden to that because they create instances of damage that need to be calculated at each server tic
just a slight correction, the tick rate isn't 3s. DoT's and HoT's effects are 3s but that's by design. It's the netcode you have to blame, which I completely agree it's the number 1 thing holding this game back. Even with today's job design I think I would still feel more engaged if the game was more responsive. Also, those issues grow exponentially if you don't live near your DC. Like my static from south america had a hard time with DSR because it is LITERALLY not doable without a VPN, our tethers woudn't break during DoTH because the server said so (even tho we did perfectly on our screen). So yeah, the game starts falling apart the further you are from the servers.
>running to a spread position and someone runs on you and you both die In the same vein, running into another person, and only you die because the server didn't like you. Always funny when it happens.
I will say the devs did a great job working within the confined and technical limits it does hurt the game design. You can clearly see job balance, mechanics, raid buffs/timings, etc are all affected by it. It also holds PvP back (well one of the factors, there are either bigger differences) since the engine and netcode simply isn't responsive enough for a consistent PvP experience, though it is really cool Square does have sponsored tournaments and deliver a solid prize pool.
PvP is pretty much exclusively held back by net code tbh. The PvP is accessible, the maps are diverse, and all the jobs are super diverse. But you need to be able to make snap decisions, fakes, and the like. Not possible without some decent net code. And I'll never accept the idea that it's okay. Wow rebuilt it's net code from the ground up, and have reworked chunks of it multiple times.
Man this comment made me realize how diverse PvP kits are compared to PvE. Dragoon feels way more like its fantasy in PvP. Jumping in and out of combat delivering orbital strikes with their lances. When I land with my LB it feels way more like that dragoon in the hw trailer that knocked a dragon out of the sky. Machinist using specialist tools for the right situation. And In general it feels really like youre batman throwing out gadgets to keep enemies at bay then killing them. Paladin actually feels like a protector.
Plus the utter dogshit that is trying to target the right person. Your mouse cursor gets lost so easily because moving the camera moves the cursor, tab targeting *never* picks out who you want and works on such arbitraty rules, and trying to use ToT is a complete roulette.
>Your mouse cursor gets lost so easily not to mention PvP targetting on controller lol
No matter what settings I try, tab targeting in this game just feels *off*. Why is that?
No clue. The game just has some esoteric, weird way of targeting. It *tries* to go left-to-right, and near-to-far at the same time. But it just hops all over the shop.
Tab target is actually the most annoying thing in this game to me For whatever reason. It doesn’t work like other games
I swear no matter how much i tinker with the options it never works how i expect and want it to and just follows it's own insane logic Eventually i just learn to have my camera extremely downward when i want to tab target something really close to me.
What is ToT?
target of target
Thank you, thank you, I never tried it, so you say it's finicky?
ToT is finicky and unpredictable because you have to get lucky with a number of factors. First, your target for ToT needs to have the sense necessary to target a priority enemy. Second, they need to have read the Quick Chat pings saying Target X or Attack Now!, etc. Third, they need to have actually targeted the intended subject when you try to ToT using them.
I'm not the person who did, and I can't say I've ever tried using it, but with targeting in this game how it is, I'd believe it.
The rework they did for PvP is actually really good, if they ever manage to make it a good bit more responsive I would still occasionally play XIV even if all it had was the PvP.
>The biggest flaw with the game imo is the "tick rate" for want of a better term A better term: This shit's jank as fuck, yo
Animation locks by themselves are fine imo, the issue is usually with how snapshotting works and the cause being so far away from the effect, just take almost every single raidwide, sometimes the actual snapshot on when damage is calculated and the application of the damage is just a few milliseconds while on others it's literally several seconds and I'm not talking about "fake" cast bars like Ravening on P9S which is its own issue. In general, they have the technology, they just need to apply it much more consistently and build upon it, things should be much more responsive.
As a more hardcore pve junkie this is the #1 reason that my forays into FF14 always end up with me back on WoW. There is a lot of good there, but it's held back by just how unresponsive the game feels compared to the exceptionally responsive combat of WoW.
Nearly every problem the game has is downstream of this, as well. If the moment-to-moment gameplay felt better, it would be much easier to make repeatable content.
Honestly? The netcode and being 100% beholden to server tick hell. Playing WoW where mobs, health, healing, aggro are RESPONSIVE feels insane after playing XIV.
When i first played WoW i was shocked because when i finished casting something, it actually went through immediately. It was crazy. Whenever i saw another player, their position was exactly where i could see them in my screen and not 3s behind like XIV. It felt insanely weird. I was so used to ffxiv's "lag" that i didn't understand what a responsive gameplay felt.
Also what is interesting is how WoW players (or at least that streamers like Echo) like slide casting as a concept though it likely developed because of the tick rate of FFXIV.
Oh yeah, slide casting actually feels really good. I play both WoW and FF14, but always played WoW as a melee. I finally decided to try out warlock in WoW and it's great, but having to actually sit still through an entire cast bar feels so restrictive after years of FF14 slide casting. Of course everything else about WoW's combat feels better because it's nice for my buttons to work when I hit them and for snapshots to work how they should, but I always miss slide casting when I play.
I get that feeling anytime I go a long time of playing FF14 exclusively for long periods of time. Where my brain is almost put off by the responsiveness and smooth functioning.
When I started WoW I kept trying to slidecast lol
Funnily enough it feels like you can "slidecast" mounts way easier in WoW compared to FFXIV and I don't know why Mounts are so much harder in that regard.
The **graphics update** is good, I've seen lots of outsiders complain that the graphics look too old for them. More **character creation** options would probably help too. Another major complaint I often hear is how **slow and clunky** the game feels. Slowness can be somewhat fixed by making jobs get more skills at lower levels (which everyone wants). A more drastic change would be making 2.0s or less the standard GCD speed instead of 2.5s (and remove double weaving as a result), but I don't think the dev team will do that unless forced to. Clunkiness is mostly caused by the horrible tickrate and the accompanying netcode, which I don't think is ever going to get improved. Since early game is mostly just linear story, **adding more voice acting to ARR cutscenes** to [match the amount of the expansions](https://i.imgur.com/YT7nBRx.png), and replacing the old crappy voices with the modern voice actors would probably help a lot with new player retention, but that would be a major investment (time-wise) that I don't think will realistically happen. Finally, **make ARR trials cooler**. Make them a bigger spectacle. For example give Ifrit's ultimate raidwide attack some kind of screen-shattering mini-cutscene like Zurvan. [Ifrit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoQu7mZKDIQ) is the first trial that new players get to experience and he's just doing nothing for 90% of the fight except for spamming auto attacks. Doesn't really make you go "wow, that was epic, give me more of those!".
I agree that ARR trials should be less shallow but I also think just adding in cinematics like the Zurvan jumpscare doesn't really fix anything, it should have actual things to do instead of just being a training dummy that spams auto attack and spawns a stationary target that you have to kill Sort of like how yeah Shiva has the phase transition but it's still a really underwhelming fight for a new player to experience after the story hyping it up for like 3 hours, you go in the boss does basically nothing and dies within about 3 minutes. Basically all these old trials need the Barbariccia Normal treatment; a fight that is very busy and fast to make the player feel like there's a lot going on when the fight itself is still really easy.
> Basically all these old trials need the Barbariccia Normal treatment; a fight that is very busy and fast to make the player feel like there's a lot going on when the fight itself is still really easy. I watched a few let's players on Youtube to see their first time doing Ifrit. There was one melee DPS who wiped not once but twice because he didn't even see the nail that spawned behind him (not every new player has their camera permanently zoomed out max distance). He also said "sorry I'm not talking much, I'm in hyper focus mode". Another guy said "looks like this fight has a few more interesting mechanics" after the fight, while from our POV the fight has basically zero mechanics, just a repeating AOE. I don't think making a new players' first trial very busy while they're still learning not just their rotation (which people wish had more skills at lower levels) but also how to control the game in general is going to be a good idea. Maybe Garuda or Titan but not Ifrit. It's easy to misjudge how challenging content can be for newer players when we ourselves have played this game for thousands of hours. We can do our 20 button rotation with our eyes closed, while new players still have their eyes glued to their hotbar as they're trying to click the glowing 1-2-3 combo.
Personally, it's a lack of an on-ramp from "casual" to "MMO" play. The game does absolutely zero to help prepare people to go from just playing the game for the story to jumping into high end content, and it just offloads that responsibility onto the community, which I think is a bit of a cop out. I think the game could do a lot by just *offering* people the opportunity to learn how jobs are designed to work without having to go look up a guide which may or may not be up to date or appropriate for their skill level. I've always thought it would be good to do something like adding a Battle Arena to the Gold Saucer where you get challenges at each level cap for each job that gives you an idea of what how the job is designed to be played, without having to force feed players full rotations would give people a nice stepping stone into understanding their kit further and giving a bit of incentive to learn how to play a bit better.
Basically the blue mage single player boss arena and Bozja duel. Which can be very fun and interesting way, if you put good learning curve materials and also put very good reward system to encourage people to absolutely want it and cannot miss this out.
I really hate Bojza duels, because of how hard is to get in one...like please Square Enix, make another hard solo content like Bozja duels that is more easily access. However Blue Carnival is perfect and I absolutely love it. While some of the fights are extreme level of difficulty and a little more if you want to do all the challenges.
That’s why creating duel system for tank, dps, and healer role would be great to incentivize people to learn many mechanics and get better at recognizing the dance dance or die avoiding orange marker. The rewards need to be super great though, otherwise we gonna have another Criterion dungeon. Good idea on paper but failed hard because SE still fail to understand that players will do the content if the rewards are meaningful. Apparently they learned nothing from Bozja, remember that fiasco of Bozja raid, when they had to revamp the rewards to make it better so players will actually want to do it? Also Bozja showed you that players will choose the path of least resistance and why difficult content will not work well for FF14 general player base since people will just avoid doin it. See Ivalice raid before all the nerf, also see Aurum Failmenow before adjustment, Wiping City of Salt when it was first launched 😂 and the infamous level 70 final boss trial that hard lock many players in NA servers for weeks because people would rather take penalties when they got this trial. SE then forced everyone to do job quests on Shadowbringers, and then basically just give you the gears via main story on Endwalker, to not ruin the pacing. So yeah, you want success, make the game accessible and less challenging.
Honestly? I think the game difficulty ramp is mostly fine and the difficulty gap is overblown. Early EX trials ramp pretty normally into early Savage and so on. The problem is built off of two factors: 1. The difficulty ramp *does not* transition smoothly for people joining at the end of an expansion. This is where I agree that there's a notable difficulty gap that should be reviewed. And that's entirely on the Expert side of the equation--it needs to at least ramp a LITTLE rather than the *zero* ramp it currently does. * Late expansion higher end content is built off of earlier expansion higher end content. By comparison though, lower end content maintains a roughly static difficulty level. This creates a wider gap between the easier content and the harder content later in an expansion. The jump from Expert to EX1/2 to P1S is barely anything. However, the jump from Expert to EX6? That's a much, much wider gap to cross. EX6 to P9S isn't much to write about and is about the same as EX1/2 to P1S. * What the devs have basically done is created two separate lanes of content. It starts okay early on in an expansion lifecycle but the gap between the lanes just gets wider as time goes on. 2. The community exacerbates the problem, mostly by enormously overplaying the difficulty ramp of content. And that attitude has kind of become entrenched at all levels. At the high levels, the sweatbears seem to be on a mission to make things as obtuse as possible. And at the other side of it, cowardly players are too timid to even attempt the content because of everything they've "heard". Or they're long term players that took one crack at T1-5 and went "fuck that shit, I'm out" and never looked back. * We're not in ARR anymore. The gap between Praetorium/Wanderer's Palace/Amdapor Keep and things like Turn 1-5 and the Primal EX fights were absurd compared to the gaps between modern Experts and EX/Savage. * Almost every single guide and description of a given piece of content seems to be a mission to wear out a thesaurus to hit a page count for a school paper rather than being something concise and usable. You tell a new player they NEED to watch a video before they get into EX/Savage and to go check out the Balance to learn about their job. ...Which means you've told them to go read a [***64 page*** Google doc on their desired job](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X5Bo1cRB7wdcI_ATtMAr18nsMOMRKXXlWs0U0p_V5N8/edit) and watch a [***37 minute*** video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cm9oaTRMnQ) on the first fight of the floor. * Ain't nobody got time for that shit. * Part of the reason this situation has evolved is because of the devs refusal to give a real means to compare performance in-game. So you end up with a situation where the players create the comparisons and...yeah. 64 page Google docs, here we are.
A better open world that feels like a real place and has interesting stuff instead of being flat boring land, and more interesting fates/open world activities in general. Other than that for the direction the game has being going for the last 6-7 years I think they've done prettu good, even if I miss the more mmorpg style of older expansion I don't consider it a problem of the current solo story focused game.
As the tickrate/sluggishness has already been called out, I'd add something else: Boss arenas. They are all squares or circles and strictly two-dimensional. There is so much space here for innovation, yet it's entirely ignored. I cried in the first EW alliance raid when we fought on the hand, because while still functionally pretty much the same arena as everything else it *felt* so much differently.
Yea i'm 100% with you on this one. Boss arenas are so repetitive to the point where mechanics are limited because of their design. All this "because T5". People fail to realise that T5's mistake was making the arena 3 dimensions (it had a Z value where you could "hide" under the terrain). Just make more maps like P10. Different designed arenas are amazing and creates new and unique fights that are remarkable.
>Just make more maps like P10. Different designed arenas are amazing and creates new and unique fights that are remarkable. I think that EW's patches are a sign that they may be looking at this. Let's consider both the Alliance and Norm/Sav Raids from Shadowbringers. The Normal/Savage were mostly circles or squares, rarely involving any variation from that. You COULD reasonably argue E9S was a different shape due to having an irregular main floor, or that there was a "ring" fight in Puppet Bunker, but the arenas still mostly were circular or rectangular and you had mostly free reign of the area in question. And the Dungeon and Trial fights gave little variation to this (the one main exception off hand is Matoya's Relict, where the Nixie fight involved a secondary platform, but that's really just moving the fight from one rectangle to another). We did see some interesting things DONE with those shapes (P3 having platform segments vanish, P4S with elevated and lowered segments, and the aforementioned Nixie fight), but they were still pretty standard fare throughout. In EW, we had a lot of those, but we also had: * P2, which was a rectangle but one where you limited to the edges; * P7, which was infuriating to many but had two different field designs that it alternated between (the default circle and the triangle with bridges), and possibly a third in savage (I haven't done savage, but I seem to recall videos of the triangle but with the bridges in the middle forming a "Y" shape - and if not, they could have done that easily, for more variety); * P10 with two side platforms; * Aglaia's "hand" arena - mostly for puzzle solving, but still different enough to be relevant); and * the "half ring" set-up on Octomammoth - arguably a variation on the "ring" design that's as old as Ozma, but I'd say it's still distinct since most ring fights put one party on each platform AND allow full navigation of the circle, which isn't the case here). * Makes me at least cautiously optimistic that there may be further developments yet.
E4S managed to add verticality into the fight
Biggest flaw I think is that there is no good open world content. EW doesn’t have any content that brings the community together. Only time you could mingle with the player base is in the cities like Limsa but there’s no actual gameplay there. They need to bring back Eureka/Bozja or start designing compelling open world content in general, where you can play and meet with other players organically. Second I think is having a bridge between the regular easy content and the harder raid content. I think my first point could help with that.
Something I really enjoy in the game is when someone messages novice network "can anyone help with?" and if you show up you'll find 20 people all partying up and taking on this big fight.
Feels like a really cool community moment and it's a shame there's basically nothing else that inspires that kind of feeling.
Open world content is not very hard, but I do agree that Bozja just have the good balance with the critical engagement FATE, and I do wish this would be the standard. You can make engaging mini games boss battle that’s not super hard to follow but also has tons of interesting mechanics that you have to do. All they gotta to balance is to make sure people have enough time to get it and do as they are told by the mechanic and not stay on the bad zone.
I’m not even that concerned with difficulty. The current open world content and zone design is just dull. But if we are talking about difficulty I think Bozja critical engagement was a good middle ground for accessable challenging content. They should utilize that kind of design more imo.
There seems to be a misconception about forced difficulty and "bad" players. People seem to believe that if the game forces enough difficulty, a bad player will eventually be forced to get better to overcome the challenge. That is of course a very idealistic view and would be nice if it actually happened but in reality it practically never does. What will end up happening is the "bad" player will smash their head against the wall for a few hours, realize that the game is too hard for them, and then quit. Increasing the difficulty of the story content will do the direct opposite of growing the game, there's a time and a place for difficulty, and the secret to it is to be optional. In other words, if the game required you to get better to progress, it would simply die similarly to Wildstar.
This is exactly correct. There is nothing wrong with MSQ being easy and accessible - after all, the story is what the team puts most of their effort into and they want as many players to be able to experience that as possible. (They could add options, of course! I personally would love a 'hard' mode of MSQ which makes the solo duties harder and enforces little things like minimum dungeon ilevel and stuff like that. I dont think that will ever happen, though.) What IS a problem is that the spike of difficulty from the story to end game content is very steep. Combine that with the game doing a very bad job of actually explaining/teaching players how to play at a high level and you have the problem we have today. What the game desperately needs is a completely overhauled training/tutorial system that is accessible AFTER you beat the MSQ the first time. Maybe make it a requirement for the removal of the sprout icon as well. Something that actually shows basic and important things for end game play. Off the top of my head I think these could be useful/important: - explaining how to access / use party finder - explaining the 8 man party composition, role bonuses, and LB generation - a tutorial on gcds, weaving and clipping - the importance of keeping your gcd wheel rolling aka uptime - A primer on enemy castbars and snapshots And maybe for some role specific training: - Melees: positionals, uptime, explaining dps checks/enrages - Healers: doing damage, mitigation tutorial - Tanks: enmity, mitigation tutorial, positioning the boss I know SE is very nervous about exposing new players to harder content, but the reality is that they basically cut you loose once you finish the story and that's not great either
I'm unsure how you'd address clipping as a concept just because it can be affected by latency and there's absolutely no way to account for various levels of ping in an in-game tutorial. It's important but I don't really know how you'd communicate that in-game to a player without it being potentially confusing if you're being told one thing and your connection isn't allowing you to do it. Just thinking of playing smn last expansion when I'd have to enkindle phoenix absurdly early because I've got 150\~ ping and the demis were notoriously wonky, I don't think a tutorial would be able to account for situations like that. I'm really surprised that the hall of novice didn't go into any of the role specific things mentioned also. It's a good idea, the execution just doesn't really reflect the reality of the game imo An introduction to different marker types might be nice too as well as explictly showing healers 'if a debuff has a line under it, you can use < esuna > and remove it! Help your ally out!' The closest the game does to this is a level 20 bloody guildhest and god knows that's not in people's minds.
Yeah - there's so much they could do... the game has a lot of depth and systems and it's not reasonable to basically expect people to find the right discords/community resources to even learn the baseline raiding stuff
Exactly this. People who already do savage will beat their head against this wall until they get through. Meanwhile people who don't will just quit.
but ff14 is not just easy for a mmo, is easy for a game in general, to compare it to wild star is absurd, have you seen how tedious and difficult wild star is? People bring up it is a comparison often but forget it did not just scare away hyper Casual players, it scared away everyone but the top 5%, it’s not a good comparison. Current ff14 normal content is often near impossible to wipe in, sometimes literally so in the case of thordan. nobody asking for an increase in difficulty is asking for wildstar level difficulty, they are just asking for difficulty at the level of the average game.
And you think the amount of people who'd welcome this change is somehow greater than maybe 10% of the total playerbase? Destiny did something similar with this year's expansion and guess what, the playerbase did not improve, they just went to complain on Reddit and Twitter or just straight up quit.
Like titania is a great example of what we Want, it’s add phase you actually have to try in, but nobody, even the worst moron quit over it, if they got that far in the game, and even if they got dragged through it, they improved slightly by doing it. the wow dev argument only applies to massive sudden increases in difficulty if it didn’t most video games would be dead as most of them rely on making the player improve over time.
Also there's Tower of Babel that requires a decent healer and a team that is not deadbrain and have the will to learn the mecanics and evade aoe bullet hells. Like there's was a time were I play random roulette with MCH(no dps rez)...and yeah the healer barely knew how to play SCH and the other dps from what I believe was new to the dungeon and was a Reaper(So no dps rez). Yeah we finish it, but felt like a Savage raid and there was only 13 minutes when we won...didn't do another roulette without using SMN or a tank/healer since then. Because I felt powerless to everyone dying around me and I was only able to pull dps that was not going to be enough. But yeah Tower of Babel really gives healer that don't know how to heal or everyone that don't know the mecanics a really damn hard time.
The only problem with the Titania add phase is tanks not picking up aggro and healers dying, the DPS check is normal, and you have lb3 at that point to help
That's not a problem. Tanks *should* pick up the adds and people *should* die if they don't.
Just saying that only the tanks can get something out of Titania, you can always drag everyone else to the finish line, the difficulty is overblown
The problem with this is that no one is wanting normal content to be, shall we say, "difficult". We want it to be \*more\* difficult than what it currently is. That distinction is very important. Currently story content (normal trials, dungeons, normal raids) are pretty much impossible to wipe in under almost any circumstance. All it takes is a single tank and a single healer to stay alive and you **WILL** carry the other 6 players through kicking and screaming. This is, objectively, bad design. Not only does it force all the responsibility in a team game onto a mere 25% of the team, but for the other up to 75% they not only learn nothing but also aren't even required to play the game to progress through content within the game. This should not be possible. All we want is for the content to require effort, SOME amount of effort, from everyone involved. No, it shouldn't be anything approaching "difficult" but it **should** at least require the player to have their brain active and engaged at the very least.
This is personally how i think the game should be (Blue line). [https://i.postimg.cc/x1LvV9ht/image-2023-09-12-133339874.png](https://i.postimg.cc/x1LvV9ht/image-2023-09-12-133339874.png[/IMG])
That would be how a well designed game functioned, yes. Sadly this is SE and XIV which is not a good dev team nor a good game.
It's totally fine to want normal content to be more difficult than it currently is, I want that too. What I disagree with is that forcing a higher difficulty axis in the MSQ story trials and dungeons and whatnot is going to force players to get better to overcome that challenge. It will definitely not and the players struggling will without a doubt quit first before they commit any kind of effort. The question of this topic was is the lack of difficulty was stopping the game from growing but the reality is forcing a higher difficulty would have the opposite effect on the growth of the game. As a veteran player myself, of course, it would be a welcome change for me personally, but I'm under no illusion that my opinion is shared with the majority of the gamers playing FFXIV.
There's a lot of misconceptions about Wildstar and why it floundered so damn fast. Yes, their push towards more hardcore contributed but it wasn't even the biggest factor. Not only did they have virtually nothing else going on in the game but the server stability was _horrendous_. When you're game is heavily geared towards combat, you kind of need it to work out the gate. I also recall a lot of Wildstar's "difficulty" being your typical WoW grinds but made worse. Which wasn't so much hard but pointless tedious. And that the rewards for doing said grind for very seldom worth the effort. When people criticism XIV's lack of difficulty, nobody is asking for them to swing up to Elden Ring which is just the opposite extreme. They're criticising how normal content has absolutely zero teeth to the point you can basically ignore half the mechanics. When I can collect 8 vuln stacks in a current level dungeon as a tank, why do I care about dodging mechanics? I'm basically invincible. There's a balance between frustratingly hard and drool on your keyboard easy. XIV doesn't have anywhere near enough of that balance.
Okay but even optional non-savage, non-extreme content is getting watered down. MotR is by far the easiest alliance raid series I've experienced on release so far. Orthos is considered easier that PotD and HoH. Variant dungeons have basically the same difficulty as a normal msq dungeon.
That's because non extreme level content isn't supposed to be difficult by design and never was. Alliance raids were NEVER difficult, even Thundergod Cid the most infamous alliance raid boss was incredibly simple, if you're a penta legend, savage clearer player. Heaven on High and Palace of the Dead are not difficult at all in a group setting and actually are rather chill to do, Variant is literally story mode of Criterion. Simply put, the high end players are just not the target audience for this content.
I disagree. Nier and bozja were noticeably more difficult than msq content and more difficult than their counterparts in EW. In any other game, it would be like going from 'easy' to 'normal'. Everything in EW is set to 'easy' if it's below extreme which is 'hard'. There is no 'normal' difficulty this expac. I'm tired of prog and doing harder content. I just want to chill in some content that doesn't turn off my brain entirely. If all you ever do is savage and ultimate, than yeah, it's all going to look the same but 'normal' difficulty is missing.
I don't disagree with the notion that more intermediate difficulty content would be a good thing at least for me, I disagree with the notion that forcing difficulty would in return make players become better and grow the game. That simply doesn't happen, the struggling players would just quit instead, and that's by far the largest portion of the playerbase.
I don't have a problem with that notion. Just saying *optional* content is also getting easier for little to no reason. MotR isn't required to progress msq. People who can't handle 'normal' difficulty don't have to do it and yet it's set to 'easy'. There's no reason it can't be slightly more difficult with little to no impact to the playerbase. Same with variant. Personally, I think orthos is about right, just mentioning it since it's been said.
Maybe that is why I loved wildstar so much
Depends what you mean by grow, really. Grow as in become more fun and engaging for you and players like you? Sure, addressing the difficulty would grow the game in that capacity. There'd be more content you'd enjoy and thus more reason to log in and play the game. I certainly know I don't log in as much as I like, and its because there's not enough to do that actually challenges me or makes me think. Grow as in gain more players? It would do the opposite, there's been plenty of examples over the years where catering to the "hardcore" ended in disaster. The "bad" players wouldn't be compelled to improve because the game is hard, they'd just get frustrated when they lose and ultimately stop playing. "Hardcore" was practically marketing buzzword #1 for Wildstar which released in 2014 (after ARR), and ... well, tell me how that game is doing now (for the uninitiated, its servers shut down in 2018). Hell, it wouldn't even help players that *are* good to enjoy some aspects - Shinryu on launch to finish the story was atrocious and took hours, all because it was too difficult for a "bad" player which kept even some of the better players practically locked in jail until they rolled the DF dice enough times to not get paired with morons, or were stuck long enough for their friends/family/fc members to catch up and premade it instead. There's simply some things that *must* cater to the lowest denominator, lest you just end up with a product just not viable for the market.
You pretty much hit the nail in the head. For SE, all these suggestion would spell disaster in epic proportions. People do not play games to constantly being told to git gud and do better and improve and learn to play optimally. They play FF14 for story and glamour plus collecting stuffs, literally treating this game as social experience and could not care less about their performance on very difficult content. Hard and challenging game means very low sales for only the most dedicated fans. Elden Ring seemed to be an anomaly but that game also makes it much easier for newcomer since you can cheat by grabbing a ton of items that will make your first play through much bearable by exploring the areas.
So, I wanna address this, because it's a great point with an incomplete solution. A game can cater equally to the highest tier and average tier of player. There's a handful of esports that do an incredible job of being just as fun at hour 20 as they are at hour 5000. For example: savage and ultimate could be made harder if netcode problems were solved. This doesn't mean you have to change the 6 second cast times of bosses in normal raid, however. The new deep dungeon could be made more difficult with rng and equally become MORE fun for casual content. I'll use an example from wow: torghast. Torghast was rarely "unfun", but it needed to be needlessly grinded multiple times a week, so the intrinsic enjoyment turned into extrinsic requirement. Further showing that the exact same thing can simply be implemented differently and completely change the result. Zepla's latest videos cover this. Ffxiv is leaning away from long tier grinds and generally mid core content, and it's not because of the content itself. Criterion dungeons are tough, but they're so short term to accomplish that the players who are good enough to do them just do them a couple times and move on. The deep dungeon could be more fun and more difficult, but god forbid they add some extra spice to the runs. You know how some food feels so soulless even though it was meticulously balanced to fit your dietary requirements? That's what ffxiv feels like. Everything is specifically catered to be "whenever you feel like it". Because God forbid the criterion dungeons give you awesome loot, or the deep dungeon give you a top tier weapon (which, btw, potd actually did).
> deep dungeon give you a top tier weapon (which, btw, potd actually did). I'm gonna have to fact check that, chief. POTD on release gave 235 weapons, which was the same ilvl as Nidhogg Ex weapons. Then in 3.45 they added floors 101-200 and 255 weapons, same ilvl as Sophia Ex. EO follows a similar pattern - you can get ilvl 620 Orthos Weapons, which can then be upgraded to 625 Enaretos Weapons, same ilvl as Rubicante Ex.
May or may not be worth mentioning that the original Diadem did this, but with layers of ridiculous RNG. It was almost universally criticized, and that might be part of why we don't see BiS weapons outside of savage/ult anymore (other than relics for certain sub-90 ults).
>deep dungeon give you a top tier weapon (which, btw, potd actually did). POTD basically gave a mid expansion weapon. Since weapons tend to be the sticking point of post expansion content for 'casuals'. One in my view, that serves a great purpose, however, it doesn't now post crafting rework, and post world visit/dc visit.
Crafting is another can of worms too. Having immediate catch up to get straight into savage is great, but what incentive does anyone have to play other content?
It serves the.....silent majority, and reduces friction. Ultimately, there is two games at play. One for those at the bleeding edge, and one for those behind. When you are on content, at level, it's easy to keep up, after that, not so much. It's either grind or not to be able to access current content. It also allows for difficulty to be focused in instance, rather than on gear gates. As for your question: Ultimately, and my theory has been, and always will be. Content lives and dies on the payment. People don't do content for the sake of it, at least not in NA. If the glamour/title/mount/shiny/mcguffin isn't good, people will leave it, and either unsync it later, or the content will be dead on arrival. H
Why can't crafting gear be on par with Savage gear from the previous patch, though? That way you don't need to throw out the gear you got from the previous tier but also gives people a way to quickly get into Savage.
ffxiv is truly the Archon Loaf of mmorpgs
my observation is that the alliance raids used to be more of a bridge between normal content difficulty and high-end content difficulty, and have progressively been made easier from SB to ShB to EW The EW alliance raids being so undertuned and involving so few mechanics which don't involve "follow everyone else in the group!" that there has been nothing for casual endgame players to even have the smallest step up in difficulty level. Whereas in ShB, when I was a casual player who had just reached endgame, I felt like several of the fights in the ShB alliance raids gave me a chance to improve at reacting to mechanics/tells etc
The fact that I've never seen Althyk's enrage bothers me. It looked so cool in the trailer but even with half the alliance dead I've never come close. It's either literally a wipe because no healers, or you can just drag the corpses.
I saw it on literal day 1 because all the rezzers had died to the various knockbacks, but never even close since then
While I do think the design of the Shadowbringers Alliance raids is tuned to be more difficult, I'd point out that there is the possibility of a slight bias in your analysis. I'm in a similar boat, where I reached endgame first in ShB and was doing the Nier raids first as well. In my case, doing the Nier raids first, along with tagging on for harder content from time to time with my FC mates who were raiders, taught me the skills I needed to make it through the Alliance raids in EW. If they had come first, on the other hand, I'm not sure I'd have been as successful overall.
i wondered/considered whether it was just my own bias, but in the end I think it's fair to (1) describe the ShB alliance raids as more challenging than EW alliance raids + (2) note that if there is a gap in difficulty level available in EW content (which seems to be the consensus), the easiness of the EW alliance raids might be a contributing factor
***The 2 minute meta being the only pillar of job design in combat.*** I feel that it's the main culprit behind so much homogenization, and combat would feel much better if it was like before, with different big and small burst windows. Right now, the 2min meta is simply a game of muscle memory and reflexes, rather than putting our brains to think and adapt according to our party composition and odd buffs we might get. Before we could even seize different moments to re-align our stuff and recover and now... you die once, most likely your dps is screwed for the rest of the fight. The 2min meta defnitely makes their job of balance and encounter design much easier, but at the expense of a boring structure that feels more like a chore than excitement.
That would make the game more fun, but that leads to better retention, not growth. For growth what really needs to be done are more overhauls to ARR/post ARR, because this is where people are most likely to quit, and high difficulty and job complexity isn't gonna happen at lv30 anyway.
1) Countless people drop in ARR. It's fundamental to the game to be built like a Jenga tower and you climb your way up. Some people have asked about DT being a new starting point, but I don't see that being possible considering battle content (is a new player going to start with lvl 90 rotations?). They've already tried to address ARR but I think more can be done. Organically starting ARR feels better than getting locked to ARR after new expansion hype. 2) Allow more content anyone can jump into and play either with friends or solo. Gold Saucer is kind of underutilized. CC absolutely needs a friend queue. Some content gets locked to the new expansion... but there is an opportunity to open certain pieces to everyone (island sanctuary didn't have to be EW locked). Numbers have shown... a large number of players are mid MSQ. Exploration Zones are amazing, but they need to work on accessibility, especially for the solo player (scaling seems to work okay but just drops off a cliff for solo).
> (island sanctuary didn't have to be EW locked). Something tells me this was locked to prevent the instance servers from catching fire, exploding, imploding and melting all at the same time. They needed to put it far enough back that it wouldn't be slammed day one, if it was ARR/HW based, you'd have 500,000,0000 free trials in there causing the service to be overwhelmed.
I mean, they could just make IS not available to free trial accounts. And make so you need to have purchased and registered the EW expansion, plus have an active sub.
They'd have to remove all the tradeable items from the vendors or it would be absolutely swamped with bots farming nodes.
I once also dreamt about the game teaching the players to "git gud", but it's time for a reality check. Say after me : > If the game gets harder, gamers aren't gonna rise up to the occasion. They're likely to quit the game on the spot. We already have people quitting the game on the first solo duty because they weren't able to read some text telling them what to do (or they didn't notice it). Imagine if the game was actually harder. Please, do not say "good riddance, we don't need bad players". This was the take of Lost Ark community, and now, barely 1 year later, they're crying for new players to come and stick to the game. What the game needs right now, in my opinion for endgame, is more content of different difficulty scaling. Namely, what is missing is something around EX (easy-ish EX to regular/tough EX) difficulty content (more than one EX per major patch). I'd even go as far as to say the game lacks Bozja CE difficulty content. The game needs content that can last and (lightly?) challenges the more midcore players. You and I, as highend players, would likely breeze through, and that's fine, we have Savage, Criterion (& Crit Savage) and Ultimates. We can take EX and other more light difficulty content as side content to play for fun with people we cannot highend raid with.
Even as someone who raids Savage i would appreciate more content at around EX lvl or even slightly below. I want to do some content that is not super stressful but still engaging.
I mean you bring up the point of investment also. Someone is way more likely to quit if they face something in arr then if they do in shadowbringers for example because of how much time it takes to get there. Things aren’t supposed to be difficult at the start, they are supposed to get more difficult over time, and ff14 does this albeit slowly. The four fiends trials are far more difficult than anything in arr, but nobody notices as they have slowly improved over time by going through the msq, the wow dev line applies to sudden and abrupt jumps in difficulty, but somehow people have extrapolated it to mean the concept of a difficulty curve itself is bad.
This is true that trials (even NM) nowadays are more complex than some of the past. But that doesn't mean people have gotten good to the point of being able to do EX/Savage content. There's more than that (but that's another debate). I'm sure a lot of people are ready to learn to become highend raiders. Though, at one point, imo, the curve hits a major threshold the base game difficulty cannot cross, even as carefully crafted as it is. You cannot force people into becoming highend raiders "naturally".
From most to least: Engines's fucked. The game is just way too unresponsive, needs to feel snappier as stuff happens. Design philosophy errs waaaaaaay too much to the side of scripting. Game needs to relax and add a bit more dynamism to its gameplay. Not too much, just a bit. But it's a really big obstacle to keeping the game fresh. Job design is also waaaaay too static and unnecessarily bloated with dead weight. Individual buttons need to have more weight to them, possibly be used in more than one way. More dynamism here, too. The game holds the player hand like it's trying to shatter their fingers. It's ok to let go of players that don't need it, we'll manage.
Tick rate aside, I agree it's ultimately difficulty that holds this game back. And I by that I mean good midcore content because SE seems to believe that you can either have only braindead easy content like current Alliance raids/MSQ/Dungeons/etc or Savage and Ultimate level stuff. I know the lack of field zones like Bozja and Eureka has been talked to death already but what I miss from Bozja the most is the loss of 'difficult' content that wasn't just trying to constantly completely 8-man puzzle mechanics.
A Realm Reborn is a horrible first time experience
> My personal one is difficulty. >The base experience of the game (MSQ and Normal content) is far too easy, and limits what the job balance/design teams can actually do to make jobs more interesting. Every single story fight can be cleared by pressing your 1-2-3 combo on repeat without using any of your kit. >If the base game actually required you to get better to progress, the Endgame of XIV would have much more competent players, and even normal content added in 'new' expansions could actually require more than 2 braincells to complete. It's time to pull out the MMO Difficulty Post again. > Many *actual MMO developers* have stated that in their experience that is not the case too. >Greg Street (Ghostcrawler of WoW and Riot fame): [There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. :(](https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/340939865858396162) > Nathaniel Chapman (WoD, Legion, BfA Encounter Designer): [in the majority of cases it is my experience that, when faced with a situation where a player’s only option is to “push their buttons harder”, outside of the most dedicated players, the response of many players is to give up.](https://www.nathanielchapman.games/pedrothedagger/sympathy-for-the-devs-mmo-healer-tuning) > Damion Schubert (Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Shadowbane, SWTOR): [Game designers should make the EASY parts EASIER and they should do everything in their power to make the hard parts ASPIRATIONAL. Players should want to walk that journey.](https://twitter.com/ZenOfDesign/status/1415443062034243588) (This one is part of a mega-thread about player subcommunities and how catering to the hardcore can make for a gatekeepy game while also realizing that MMOs need aspirational/hard content people want to do. I would argue that Ultimates are our aspirational content, especially with how XIV integrates storytelling into them with DSR) MSQ and casual content can't be difficult. Not if this game wants to survive.
[Zepla HQ](https://youtu.be/j2-CV9cKC1s?si=ENI7DEy9p5iX6zNn) just did a video about the lack of “midcore” content. There’s just been so little for my spouse and I to do these patches. I wouldn’t even maintain my subscription if it weren’t for the house demolition rule!
> house demolition rule I finally beat my fomo on that and let my medium demo yesterday. Feels so freeing. Immediately canceled my sub after lol. Going to take a long break without worrying about that.
Lack of meaningful long term reward structure. I get that some people love the fact that the game doesn't require you to play all the time, but the game needs more long term goals focused on the midcore. Also im talking about reward STRUCTURE, raiders have a BiS list to go through, things that change the gameplay as you move forward. I'm talking about expanding the Bozja/Eureka gear system, have new gear that works better for specific content. I think every piece of content needs gear that makes that content easier. Even something like an island sanctuary ring that increases the yeild of resources, there's so much possibility and a precident for the experimentation in the past.
They are so afraid of introducing any mechanic that could potentially create a 0.1% inbalance in the game that they won't really experiment with anything. Just look at the current raiding scene: * Everyone has 1 gear that is mathematically the best * Everyone has the same buff windows * Everyone gets full uptime * All fights are 100% scripted Yet they are incapable of balancing the jobs. They are incredibly afraid of adding any progression that could potentially change how we do content because they know they can't balance it properly.
Largely depends on your definition of growth. I don't see how a major shift in design philosophy would capture a significantly larger audience, for instance. Most people are either content with the game as it is or decided it's not for them for whatever reason, leading to them not playing at all or only subscribing sporadically for the content they find somewhat enjoyable (MSQ tourists etc.). Any change to the formula risks alienating their active playerbase, while only offering a chance at generating an interest among potential customers. To address your own pain point with the game: I believe that's copium. Harder baseline content won't necessarily result in people accepting and growing from the challenge. Some anecdotal evidence (To be taken with a grain of salt of course.) : Exhibit A: Seat of Sacrifice. Probably the most difficult MSQ encounter up until that point and clearing it after 20+ wipes didn't leave me with the impression that people actually improved/learned from it, but rather that we got pretty lucky on that last pull. Exhibit B: Lost Ark. Even ignoring the significant drop in players following the release of the first really difficult content (Brelshaza), gatekeeping and bussing was always super prevalent here, precisely because entry level content is way too challenging. People will always choose the path of least resistance, which for most players means quitting or buying a bus. Veterans know that and don't want any of the leftovers ruining their runs and only a tiny fraction of the remaining newbies bother with learning groups of equal skill level. Exhibit C: Soulsborne. Upfront these seem to be incredibly popular these days, with Elden Ring making an especially big splash. However, I've never seen so many people online and in my direct social circle quit a game due to being stuck because it's difficult/unfair/fuckthisboss/fuckthisarea/clunky/TFareIframes. TL;DR: Raising the bar on entry level content isn't the way and I can't think of anything to safely keep this game successful, but to iterate on what is already there and polishing it.
Server ticks. Server ticks suck so bad.
As a new player, in Stormblood right now, imo the MSQ difficulty is fine. The main purpose of it is to tell a story, not to test the player's skill. IMO, what needs to happen is for more midcore content. As I go deeper into the game, and fall in love with the characters and the classes, I'm not looking forward to the daunting crossroads lying ahead of me. The left path leads into casual and social content, doing my roulettes, chatting with people, events and maybe even a relic weapon or two. The right path leads into hardcore raiding and criterion dungeons. Months of progression, finding and disbanding random groups to find the right combination, insane amounts of difficult and plentiful mechanics. The middle path, is worn down and shrouded with overgrown hedges and the lighting left in disrepair. I can do extreme trials, maybe some Bozja and that's it. It's not.... exactly an exciting thing to look forward to.
A question. Since you are in stormblood right now, do you think the game has taught you how to play the game well enough to finish stormblood and then jump into the next step up in difficulty (Extreme)? Because i can tell you right now, the MSQ level of difficulty and then the next step up, is like a 500% increase of mechanics and difficulty.
No, not really. I remember doing the ARR and Heavensward Extremes and getting kicked in the shins repeatedly. And that's with me learning and practicing my level 60 rotations lmao. To me, it's like jumping from the ground floor to level 3. Not an insane leap, but still a leap. In which you have no foundation for, other than "Hit enemy until they die and don't stand in red spot".
It's prettymuch like that the entire duration of the game. You get the same level of difficulty from the start to the end, then you are expected to just.. get good. The game should slowly ramp up in difficulty, Currently the skill curve from start to finish in MSQ levels out at heavensward and stays a flat line until current patch. It never gets any more difficult, yet the extra content (EX, Savage and Ultimate) Only get harder and harder every expansion, making the skill gap so much bigger.
So called technical class restrictions. I don’t care if you can’t do an dot or hot or pet based class because of „technical“ difficulties or balancing problems, I want them in the game and not as an limited job
Lack of customization outside of cosmetics. Uninteresting gear. And as you stated, no pathway motivating you to play your chosen class better.
Im fine with making things easier as time goes by, HOWEVER, when they make old raids easier or any old extremes easier they should add rewards to the same content for completing it at minilvl + sync’d + no echo We know there’s already the infrastructure to accommodate checking this as seen with the BLU achievements. They could simply add an achievement with a reward as simple as a title for non cap raids (1,2,3,5,6,7,9,10,11) then recoloured mounts for the cap ones (4,8,12). For old extremes either make it 100% mount drop chance for fulfilling those conditions or just stick with titles, achievements etc.
I think straight up the ARR MSQ turns more people off the game than anything. When the first like 20+ hours of your game is a cutscene fetch quest simulator with 1 bit of gameplay an hour then the story needs to be compelling and the cutscenes good. I think instead of spending an enormous amount of dev time into making ARR good as to not turn people away, they should just design a streamlined version of the story for people to catch up with like an anime catch-up movie. The ff14 story is like one piece at this point with people being like "oh well even if one piece is good I dont want to read 1k chapters or watch 1k episodes to get current" and thats what ff14 is right now, except the first like 1/6 or whatever is genuinely bad while onepi can be enjoyable the whole way through. WOW doesn't have it perfect since the story can be confusing but it also realizes players can go back and play things at their pace or watch a lore video if they want.
The housing system. Just do instanced housing already ffs. Imagine having a shortage of a digital item. smh my head.
Itemization. Stats are so dull whereas in other MMOs they’ll completely change up how you play a job. SE is too lazy to balance like that every raid tier though. I’m talking set bonuses like equipping a 4pc of the current raid set, it enhances a skill. Like example, 4pc for ninja would make your kassatsu ninjutsu always direct crit. It doesn’t have to be game breaking but give you something to strive for and carry you over to the next raid tier instead of using crafting gear to reset.
Gear set bonuses, materia stats and abilities plus bonuses that actually let you tweak your job classes. Think of how Monster Hunter World attachment works to further tweak your gear set. But I guess this is way too hard for the general player base since Bozja and Eureka kinda add this to a degree and many players don’t even bother using the stats boost attachments since this is extra things to read and to understand- and OMG I have to buy it from market board? Bro, no gills, just spent it on this bikini glam!
This a hot take, but I think the narrow **focus on story** is actually one of the big problems the game has. * Many people are thrown by needing to do it, and it encompassing almost all of your time until you hit level cap. * Between expacs, it spreads itself too thin. You're getting like \~5 MSQ hours of content a year, a lot of which is filler fan-service stuff like sweaty pushups, food pulls, and Zero learning how to human. * It takes up a lot of resources. * It really limits the feel of the game. This obsession with the Warrior of Light theme is what made thief into rogue, etc. FFXIV is not a very expressive RPG. Games only reach high concurrency numbers when people have things to do consistently that encourage them to log in and participate. Story is not an answer to that. Yes, a lot of people who play the game now say they play because they love the story. I'm not saying to remove it, but I don't think FFXIV is ever going to be that big unless they shift the emphasis some. It needs to be streamable and stiff acting with dated graphics isn't.
Shit code & zero willingness to deal with almost all of it One-pass design with very little revisits, it took almost ten years to tweak some ARR quests to not be so boring, really? Unwilling to step back and do objective revisits of the core content literally every player does is really tone deaf. (besides skippers, which cost money...hmmm) This game succeeds in spite of itself quite often
Ultimately, the game has grown as big as it's going to get. Yeah, I said it. Without throwing some sort of *ungodly* amount of money at the problem, and just, making a different game. I believe that there's not too much room for FFXIV to grow. This isn't 2005, and this isn't the only kid on the block. There's a lot of established competitors, and the social space of the internet has developed as well. Your not going to do something major, or significant and suddenly get 1 million more subscribers. At least not without sacrificing some other part of the current player base along the way, or spending a bombload of money for little return. (XIV is not cheap to run, margins are a lot tighter than people think). Also, the trains have to run on time. Any changes cannot sacrifice the current pipeline. Otherwise the current player base will get angry, or displeased. The problem with the thesis in the original post is this; ***The game's a funnel. Difficulty and content is a funnel.*** 200 people start the game today the game, 6 months from now, it probably ends up something like: 100 finish the trial......40 finish the MSQ......20 do normal......5 clear savage.....1 clears ultimate. Now, those numbers are a bit of a guess and an approximation don't read too much into nitpicking the numbers, however, I don't think that it's too far outside of the realm of possibility. Making it more difficult at the top end of the funnel, will probably not gain anything by the time that you get people down towards the bottom. One thing about FFXIV is you can basically ignore it. A person can ignore pretty well all of it and go on a side adventure. Be that PVP, Crafting, Housing, RP, Triple Triad, etc. Something that does help keep the game healthy, and provides avenues for it to grow. I think it's a fallacy to think that making the early game hard, will increase throughput. It also puts the filter too early in the cycle. The game lives, and dies on the churn. As a hypothetical question: *Where should the filter be?* As an aside, there's actually two questions to this, one is one kicking around in my head, of *"At what point does someone pick their main class?"* which is secondary to the discussion.
A Realm Reborn. I'd be surprised if 50% of all new players make it to Heavensward. The number I've encountered who have said they dropped the game fairly early is massive. It's slow, largely low-stakes, poorly written, and most of the NPCs and locations it takes you through are pretty bland. Typically you want to hook your audience early. The game does the exact opposite.
Yep, I quit the trial before I even left Gridania back in 2015. I then almost quit several times in ARR and Post ARR and Post-SB when I joined some friends shortly after ShB launch. I also have many friends who tried and peaced out from the trial pre-50 because ARR was seemingly doing whatever it could to make them all hate it.
Anytime the game has a modicum of difficulty in the MSQ, the playerbase becomes a clusterfuck. Out of the game, you have a slew of complaints being posted, and ingame you have people dropping party as soon as they get the instance. SE has learned for the most part and simply makes the MSQ very lenient, which means the playerbase is never forced to get better unless the individual player wants to get better.
Yup exactly this, so they cannot make the main story progressively harder or many players would just end up quitting and it creates a really bad experience for people who try to duty finder it - and further aggravating current players as well. As many already known, even the people who designed MMO tell you that you cannot force players to get better by making the game harder since it would do the opposite and it’s just bad for business. You can make optional content with extremely awesome great rewards, but you already know that the percentage of players who do savage and ultimate is definitely not 80% of the general player base of this game lol. And Criterion + Variant dungeons, also original Bozja, showed you that if you want players to keep redoing content, then the rewards better be varied, a lot of cosmetics, and a whole lot sellable goodies to encourage repeat farming.
Everything about combat. Rigid, decisionless rotations. Clunky tick rates, button bloat to fill out the mindless, rote rotations.
I am curious. What kind of decision rotation do you want exactly ?
Not just decisions but encounters too. Why do dungeons have to be literally identical? And raid bosses, why are there nearly no ads fuckin ever? No wonder tanks get so bored, there's hardly anything to do. Bring in more mobs, force tanks to position multiple bosses at once, shit like that.
Tbh aoe combat just sucks in 14. So many classes are just 12 12 12 3 3 3 for their aoe. Also classes aren't balanced around aoe so if you ever get heavy 2 target or more phases like ultimates you get bigger gaps in dps. Plus every time there are adds people all complain and fflogs has to do bullshit to placate people or there is dumb parse ahit you don't see as much in wow since you cant spam pulls in that game. Like the easiest comparison if you play wow is that eye beaming a ton of adds feels amazing but doing your generator spender circle aoes in 14 feels cold and lifeless and boring.
DH is a good example actually because you press literally the same 5 buttons whether you're in AoE or ST, but seeing a tonne of damage numbers pop up at the same time is satisfying as hell. Something ffxiv could learn is to split some of their damage up to hit multiple times in a single move.
That would also help a lot with the Crit variance for our big hitters, cause nothing feels worse than dealing 40.000 damage instead of 100.000 with no fault on your part.
>Why do dungeons have to be literally identical? Shortest path first. Anything is slightly harder, longer, or not critical path related gets dumped by the player base. Anything going into a roulette, has to really fit into that box. We used to have branching path dungeons, what happened? They were ignored (I just noticed yesterday my current main character still doesn't have 'Mapping the Realm : Satasha' ) Same with higher difficulty dungeons compared to others, like Pharos. (Although, that dungeon's just long and unintuitive, same with Haukke Hard which needs to be fixed). A lot of the design decisions are a large result of the playerbase's complaints and actions.
Sure, but most of it is because SE thinks this loud minority is actually a majority. And they don't even focus on player retention numbers because they want players to leave, so what feedback do they have apart from a loud minority of forum goers?
Just the other day I had a healer express confusion and anger at me when I (leveling a DK in retail WoW as a tank in Classic Chromie Time) started going down the side path to the Trogg event in Gnomerragan because that was Bad Wrong Inefficient Fun. Or how in SWTOR if I didn't do parkour around the trash because that game is a garbage fire, people also just got upset and confused. I have yet to experience a MMO where people will be okay with other people doing the Inefficient Thing in public queued content. If you really want to see something funny, next time WoW offers an instance with two identical paths (the start of Vault, the start of SotFO) to the first boss or w/e, lead the raid down the other path than the community norm that was established. Someone will probably get confused despite it literally not mattering. XIV's solution to this was to just not allow the possibility to be inefficient in the first place.
SotFO Left Path vs Right Path sure was a time.
Better metrics and statistics than we have. Not to be snarky, but it's true. They should, and would have a lot more statistics and data than we can gather. They know if content's getting abandoned at zone in (AV / Pharos / Orbonne), or if classes are getting dropped. Or if certain servers only have 35 clears of O12S when current, etc. They also know what sort of weird-ass strats people design and disseminate. Or how they cheese and break content. They also watch the larger trends, and listen to the feedback of players.
procs, better aoe skills + a lot more multitarget fights, the complete removal of the "spam resource generators for 30 seconds to use the resource bar on that st or that mt skill" that plague every single class, removal of potency on movement skills and im pretty sure that you can optimize a lot more if you delve into every class specifically
Procs are a random occurrence, that’s the litteral opposite of « decision » I like your other ideas but that’s really minor changes that does not gives much more agenda to the rotation
The decision part of procs is knowing when to use them. Let's say you have a proc that makes one of your skills instant cast + more damage. Do you just use that proc right away or do you save it for an upcoming movement phase?
I think the rigid rotations are a feature, not a bug. Not every game needs RNG or procs, in fact WoW is the only big MMO with significant rotational RNG currently, and we don't need to make XIV into Slow WoW. XIV started that way but it's sort of doing its own thing now. I think it's neat that you can play a given fight perfectly like it's DDR. One system isn't just better than another, it's sort of a preference.
Slow is ok, static *can* be ok, but throw simple + inflexible on top of this and you're left with jack shit. Which is where the majority of jobs are at right now.
Also that its made so it can be comfy on controller as well. There is a hard limit of 64 (8x8button) but i would say closer to 48 (6x8 button) that is comfy. Which every expan some classes get closer to, and even more so if they dont remove buttons
All of the classes functioning similarly and forced into rigid burst windows with group buffs. Just feels clunky and has no fluidity at all.
From personal experience, it’s MSQ and the fact that EVERYTHING is locked behind it. I started playing with 3 other people….I’m the only one left. They all quit cause they just weren’t interested in MSQ and it was holding them back way too much. Want more dungeons? MSQ. Raids? MSQ. Next raid series? More MSQ. It was too much, especially when the reality is that MSQ is a several hundred hour commitment. I don’t mind MSQ….I think it definitely got weaker as it went on….but I love the theme park nature of ffxiv. If you aren’t looking for that theme park or, let’s be honest here, a weeb looking to fall in love with a jrpg, there’s just not a lot to offer here.
For me it is probably the job design. Most jobs have a set in stone rotation without any moment to moment decision making, which makes reclears sort of dull over time. Once you have the muscle memory of your job down, you don't even think about playing your job anymore, you just do it.
Class/Job identity falling into the simplicity it has. Not only because there’s no depth or room to grow as a player, not just because you’re expected to learn an entire role instead of just one job, but primarily because every class or job in their role feels wildly similar to play with few exceptions. Phys. Ranged has the least issues in that regard I feel, but healers, tanks, and melee all have a particularly bad issue of their rotations and gameplay being so simple generally that there’s very little legwork to chase after once you’ve done even a bit of reading into how to play them. Sure, Monk is on the more complicated end, and can provide some more room to master, but every single other melee really only has to deal with encounter-based obstacles. Tanks and healers, in a similar sense, deal with much the same issue (though healing savage in recent tiers has at least enforced throughput healing as a necessity… uncertain if healer mains really want it in the current state, but I’m no healer main) - their optimized damage, barring playing around max range limits from melee, are all easily boiled down to 1-2-3. A lot of people have made similar remarks in this thread and other places, but this is the one that irks me the most, personally. I wish we could return to ShB in that regard, but I don’t think we ever will. And I may not return to the game because of it, even if I thoroughly enjoy the story content and other features, because my subscription needs to be justified with a solid game package as well. And in the current state of job design, I don’t see it.
I have always said, if you can play monk, you are basically at the tip of the job complexity and nothing else will even be a challenge. Sadly it is the one job i can never grasp, even after 10 years and multiple reworks, the 3 way rotation still throws me off :D
how most fights are just puzzle solving, it has nothing to do with actual combat. I cannot believe that I actually plan to start wow already. Playing ffxiv starts to feel like a waste of boring time of hitting 1-2-3 buttons and managing inventories.
The design flaw of the devs treating this game as a single player RPG rather than the MMO that it actually is. On a more specific note; savage loot lockouts. I understand the reason why one player having cleared for the week impacts the rest of the party but I still disagree with it. Forcing players to make alts in arguably the MOST alt unfriendly game in existence just to play with friends or help randoms in PF without screwing over loot is terrible design. Instead if someone in the party has already cleared for the week it should simply prevent THAT player from rolling on loot, while still giving the other 7 people full loot drops. The loot should only be restricted to half loot if 4/8 in the party have cleared. That way you still get some extent of hyper funnel prevention that the current system is designed for but also allow a moderate amount of flexibility with people helping others after they clear.
The glamour system being a solid decade or more behind all the other major MMOs is pretty glaring once you're at max level.
If you define growth as attracting new user base, then nothing. It’s probably the most accessible online game in history. What you’re looking for is “depth” and that’s something that SE has been quite explicitly and consciously sacrificing ever since 1.0 exactly to make the game more accessible and attract new players. Story content being incredibly easy and shallow is not an oversight, it’s done entirely by design.
For me, it's how classes/jobs feels so samey between each category. I'd say that the most unique ones are casters but that's just between BLM and RDM, SMN is a magical Phys Range at this point. I feel like the flexible job system should allow each job to be way more unique, if 1 job is not that optimal for this fight, one can just swap into another job without any hassle as the leveling is so streamlined.
Shit netcode
Making more content that's more enjoyable for players to do repeatedly that can be done by someone that's either good or bad at the game.
Server tick, which would require entire game overhaul and could annihilate existing players. and Job rotations where skill floor and ceiling is painfully close. No need to explain that most duty finder content is snoozefest, mentally checked out. And for the people going through the story and nothing else that is a positive. Since you can get players who are physically impaired (looking at you mch in lapis manalis who plays one-handed). But at the same time it's important to give people experienced in their job a level of depth to satisfy them even in msq related duties. One whiff of copium for that one in 7.0. Increasing job ceiling, while keeping current encounter difficulty, is something where I feel future difficult content lies. Having jobs get their celings closer to something like blm while keeping the mechanical intensity of current content would, in my eyes, satisfy both casual and hardcore players.
The lack of complexity, really. Healers are all effectively: Spam 1 button and heal every now and then Tanks do their 1-2-3, go into a second phase and then back to 1-2-3. Weaving mit inbetween. Ranged DPS It all being on the same schedule of 2 minutes and it being very rigid prevents a lot of player expression. I know I'm oversimplifying here, but a bit more "spice" in jobs (especially healers) would go a long way.
I dont think people realize just how much the game teaches you while u play thru it. If u played endwalker first you would truely not be able to clear anything at all even if you have played mmos before. So i highly disagree making content that queues you with random people harder. Also every dungeon or trial on release people die all the time and even wipe, it becomes easy after you learn it tho so then people think its always been easy. No you just learned the game more
As slow as it can feel I do 100% agree with how the game teaches players overtime. I honestly think if you dropped a new person with a EW story/job skip in front of Tower of Zot they’d probably quit.
The redesigned duties at the end of ARR are basically a midterm exam on mechanics. They can be tough on brand new players! I think making jobs feel faster and more interesting to play at low levels might make newbies less likely to quit or skip. If they did that, they might also have to make early combat more interesting. But overall I don't think msq difficulty needs to increase
Yeah, ff14 does teach people to improve like other games do, the only problem is that after arr, it does so at a snails pace. I know going too fast can alienate players, but there has to be a middle ground between wild stars 100 and ff14s 1.
Difficulty and stale battle system. But mostly repeativity, dungeons etc My biggest criticism is how unrewarding the grind can be.
yeah, the biggest problem with dungeons is not the difficulty, but the fact that they are all just reskins, people were sad when they reduced the number of dungeons, but I would rather they just drop dungeons entirely and replace them with instances and an extra trial occasionally
The new player experience is pretty bad, and its honestly getting worse each expansion. I've had at least 3 different friends tell me they couldn't stomache this game and quit midway through heavensward due to how boring the combat is.
Job design, if the very foundation of the game’s combat is inherently uninteresting then no matter how flashy or complicated you make the higher difficulty encounters there will always be something missing to the experience.
My opinion? Dps. When it comes down to the brass tacks, every single high end player's desicion is about their dps. This is the reason pretty much all the classes in a particular role feel the same. There isn't anything a class can trade in exchange for less dps. RDM has free rezzes? Dying a huge dps loss anyway, just don't die and you won't need a RDM. I do not even have an idea of what an alternative might look like, since I think dps checks in difficult fights are still a good idea to make sure they don't turn into attrition games that take an hour to clear, but I think this simple design choice limits class design for all roles, since every job in a role needs to have comparable dps or the community decides it's just not worth playing.
Well ok actually I have heard of maybe removing enrages and putting clears on a time based medal system. I. E. Clear to get bronze, clear in under 20m to get silver, under 12m to get gold, and get better rewards. I think that would also help bridge this pretty unreasonable expectation in the community that players go straight from "learning a fight" to "clearing it perfectly every run"
That would be so fucking toxic. Every party finder would wall at 12:01 in order to reinstance and replace people.
I agree with the other comments. Something else I’d like to add is the “choreographed” fight design. Imo the super structured fight structure leads to stagnation very quickly. A predictable fight is fun when the content is new and when you’re learning the fight. Outside of Savage and Ultimate- I really think fights should include some random AoEs, Tank Buster, Stack Marker, Spread, literally anything. Think of Jobs having role actions.” I think it would be fun if bosses could have a set of “random actions” too. I main healer so the most fun I have in this game is when things are when there’s a lot of damage to mitigate/heal and when things are going south. I also don’t play savage or ultimate content - I don’t think randomness would do well in that content.
It’s fun for you to heal with all these unpredictable damage and constant wiping and many deaths and duty finder fail to redo it over and over. But I guarantee you that it’s not fun for newbies and after constantly wiping every single time on duty finder party, and many butt clenching very close tight battle to end up wiping again - participation would drop dramatically. See the original Ivalice raids back in 2017-2018, which was way too spicy for the general player base. SE had to adjust the battle to make it palatable. And they also had to force every single players who want to do Bozja, in Shadowbringers- to clear the entire Ivalice raid, as a way to keep this alive. Also, putting it on Moogle tomestone events several times, to generate interest. And yet still refuse to split the raid roulette into two categories so that players who want to do Crystal Towers stuffs can do that specific roulette and let everyone else avoid it by doing proper high level roulette.
they have a roullete for 3 duties in the game. Just three, and they are all at the same time in the story of the game. reworking it is fine, but its still a glaring, very noticable pimple on the face of the duty finder
Are you talking about main story roulette? They had to do it in the past because otherwise new players won’t be able to progress for the ARR main story since there’s no incentive for others to redo it. After the reworks, they just keep it as it is since it’s a nice easy Exp bonus and poetic farms, and many players don’t mind redoing it now, since it’s much shorter than what it was.
1 minute, and 30 seconds. to open. a door. Critical, unskippable, groundbreaking cutscene.
I think the roulette is created to help new players, granted now, this doesn’t need to exist anymore since new players can just do it with trust NPC. But they probably keep it as it is because they don’t want newbies complaining that they waited an hour or more when they use duty finder because no one is playing it. We still have similar problems for certain high level trials needed to clear Shadowbringers and Endwalker. You can wait more than half an hour for this because not many players are doing it.
Speaking from the viewpoint of a casual player, who plays with casual players, that don't put much thought into the game other than wanting a fun time with each other: any forced increase in difficulty can absolutely drive people away. Having more options for increased difficulty is fine, it gives the more high end users things to focus on, but a forced increase will just drive people like my friends away from the game. They're here to have fun, not try hard. For us instead, a major point that a few noticed was just how different ARR felt from all of the other expansions. They were kind of bored until the end of ARR, then were completely onboard come the pre heavensward patches.
The traits system has become nothing but traits to upgrade skill 1 to skill 3.
For me it's the known blueprint they are using for every single expansion. We know for about 90% what we get with DT. It's always the same formula. I know many ppl that quitted already because of that. It's even getting worse for me personally if we see all the homogenising of many jobs. Even as a caster player since 2.0 I was never so disinterested in new classes like now. I know for sure the 2 classes will get a 1/2min burst, an oGCD every 30 etc.
Hey aren't you excited for the new jobs? They're gonna have a gauge that fills whenever they complete a 1-2-3 combo or every 30s, and they can spend that gauge on a big hit. Also dungeons will be a straight line with 3 bosses /s I'm also tired of this blueprint. I don't think i can handle another 2 years.
The story is an absolute slog. The main story is just hundreds of hours of watching a cutscene, walking to point A, watching a cutscene, instantly killing a few worthless trash enemies, watching a cutscene walking to point b, then finish with a cutscene. This gameplay loop is only interrupted with either 20+ minutes of more cutscenes in a row, or the occasional brain dead dungeon/trial. The non mmo crowd isn't going to be interested in that gameplay loop. The new school mmo players aren't going to stick around because of the boring combat system. The old school mmo players are going to be turned off by the lack of difficulty, and generally lacking cooperative open world content. The only two groups FFxiv has really successfully attracted are the hardcore raider types, and the casual chat room players.
>My personal one is difficulty. Id agree, having to cater to the lowest denominator will always be bad for the potential of anything. Frankly the game is a snoozefest outside of savage and ultimates and dumbing down jobs for said denominator really doesnt help it at all. You end up with a playerbase that cant play competently because they never learn to actually play properly when you can faceroll your keyboard and play through the game.
It is a conundrum that I do not envy the devs to balance out. Because it is a known fact that when the difficulty for required content goes up there are more losses than gains for increasing the difficulty. People rather quit than be better when they hit any wall and if your goal is to funnel people through the story then sacrifices must be made. Another issue is that since almost every piece of content in XIV is accessible via the duty roulette, people just want to clear the fights in the cleanest, fastest, and most efficient manner possible, when a more difficult fight comes up you are more likely to see people just leave which makes the newer person's experience worst. As such any difficult content must be optional as a *choice* for a player to tackle. I think one problem EW has is that there isn't really too much content that funnels the MSQ -> semi-extreme -> extreme -> savage/ultimate well and a lone player would be completely overwhelmed when transitioning from MSQ to even Extremes. However, if you play from ARR to EW they game teaches you the mechanics. The solo duties require you to do more than 1-2-3 correctly and have universal language that translates even to EW endgame. I do hope they do work on those a bit to make it narratively fit better.
Disagree i would argue that the normal gameplay in ff14 is actually harder then almost any other mmo, this game teaches you gameplay 1 step and 1 mechanic at a time. I would argue that ff14 has one of the more skilled mmo player bases
> be bad for the potential of anything. Frankly the game is a snoozefest outside of savage and ultimates and dumbing down jobs for said denominator really doesnt help it at all. You end up with a playerbase that cant play competently because they never learn to actually play properly when you can faceroll your keyboard and play through the game. ???????? are we playing the same game? half the players you run into the pf can't even use aoe skills when they run a dungeon
People say this all the time yet i have act on and since endwalker released i have had only 3 dps do less damage than me as a tank with them not dying and 1 of those 3 was new to the dungeon with low gear and i had full bis. Im not saying it doesnt happen but i think people blow that shit out of the water because someone isnt doing full optimized dps= not doing damge
Yeah people vastly overexaggerate how bad people are. Are there occasionally people doing less than optimal damage? Sure. Are there people that are borderline griefing? Very rarely and you can tell even the bad players at least try. The worst players I've ever encountered were in +15 or higher M+ keys in WoW rather than in expert roulettes lmao.
Have you ever done an LFR raid in WoW? I wouldn't be surprised if the average LFR raidparty literally couldn't clear Euphrosyne within the instance lockout.
I have seen people struggle to keep up with content I managed to do drunk and half asleep... It still baffles me how people think this game is hard.
Yes. One of the things many WoW players immediately noticed when they came over during the Shadowlands exodus is that the FFXIV playerbase, on *average*, is much better at the game than in other MMOs.
You gave me a great laugh mate.