A decent MMO plagued by some serious problems that make it unplayable in the long run

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Can you get progress the MSQ without doing them, yes or no?

The latest portions of the MSQ, the Shadowbringers dungeons and trials, have an ilevel requirement that can only be met by either 1. doing your daily dungeon roulettes to get tomestones to buy gear, 2. buying gear off of the market board (costs a lot of money that you're unlikely to have if you're a casual who has only been doing the story), or 3. progressing through the Eden raids and then farming the last tier over and over again and hoping you win the rolls for the gear tokens, but you can only win one token per run and it might not be the one you wanted and you need multiple tokens for turn in to get the gear item and you're competing against 7 other players for the rolls, many of whom are there for transmog/glamour, so good luck.

To be fair to FFXIV, you can get geared to meet the ilevel requirements to do the latest stuff way, way faster than in WoW, but there is still a grind/timegating in place.

[Katchii]

I think you don't get to claim objectively anything, as we have seen.

What have I said that is OBJECTIVELY wrong?

You don't have to just wait while in a queue. You can go do other things. For example, do the hunting log for another job, level a crafting job, level a gathering job, do some beast tribe quests, do some fates, do some hunts, do some triple triad, do the hildibrand chain, etc.

And I have never claimed otherwise. Not once.

If you don't have the time to be on the queue, do other activities. If it didn't pop fast enough for you, try another time when you can. Easy.

It is easy, that doesn't mean it's enjoyable or what people want to do.

It's great that there are options, I'm not trying to downplay that at all, but if what you REALLY want to do is play and see the story, or worse, just get to end game to see and play the latest content with friends who are already there, the dungeon and trial queues that are practically a mandatory part of the MSQ that prevent you from accessing those things are far from ideal.

- - - Updated - - -

The latest portions of the MSQ, the Shadowbringers dungeons and trials, have an ilevel requirement that can only be met by either 1. doing your daily dungeon roulettes to get tomestones to buy gear, 2. buying gear off of the market board (costs a lot of money that you're unlikely to have if you're a casual who has only been doing the story), or 3. progressing through the Eden raids and then farming the last tier over and over again and hoping you win the rolls for the gear tokens, but you can only win one token per run and it might not be the one you wanted and you need multiple tokens for turn in to get the gear item and you're competing against 7 other players for the rolls, many of whom are there for transmog/glamour, so good luck.

To be fair to FFXIV, you can get geared to meet the ilevel requirements to do the latest stuff way, way faster than in WoW, but there is still a grind/timegating in place.

The question was specifically whether you can progress the MSQ without queuing for dungeons or trials.

The answer is no, UNLESS you have friends on call to carry you through them all whenever you get to them. Which is not a reasonable expectation to have for anyone and everyone trying to make it through the MSQ.

You do bring up a secondary issue connected to the same problem though, which is ilevel requirements for MSQ required content when the MSQ itself doesn't equip you for it. There are a couple points throughout the story where there's a sizable ilevel requirement jump from patch to patch that requires you to use the options you mentioned above.

[kaintk]

So to fill the downtime created by completing most of the activities in 8.2, as well as to clear the bad taste playing wow classic has left in my mouth, I decided to jump in and try out FF14. I've always been a great fan of FF games, so the thought of playing those old school jobs in an mmo setting and riding chocobos seemed kind of cool to me. One of my mates also plays it which gave me an additional incentive to try it.

I'm a person who gets a kick out of leveling things up, collecting stuff and all that, so every game that allows you to do that will provide me with some sort of entertainment. And I had a fair share of fun playing FF14 btw, about 3 weeks of fun to be precise. There's a lot of good things in the game, and overall it is an mmo, and everyone who enjoys that kind of gameplay will enjoy it to an extent. In this thread I will be focusing on the negatives, but that does not mean I hate the game. I wanted to make this very clear because fanboys are often unable to understand that.

At some point however, all the gameplay problems started to mar my experience to the point where I no longer feel the need to log in to play anymore. I stopped playing the game 5 levels away from the cap (at 75) because it's just unpleasant to play it now. It also made me realize how much I value some aspects of a game, ones that I normally don't think about. With that said, let me enumerate the biggest problems I encountered.

1. The combat

...is awful. Much like Rift, Swtor and all the other usual suspects in the past, it just feels clunky. It's one of those things that are hard to put into words. It's just not as smooth and fluid as you'd like. It feels like there are unnecessary delays between you using a skill on your keyboard and the character actually executing the command.

The other thing is that the rotations are extremely bloated as you advance your level. FF14 is a good example of what happens when you don't do the so called "ability pruning" that all the elitist players criticise so much in wow. At max level, or even slightly below the max level, your rotations include about 20-25 skills. And that is not including AOE skills, utility skills etc. It's just the single target rotation. I'm sure someone will argue that using 25 skills in a rotation is fun, but to me it's really not. It makes it hard to pick up a class because unless you're a gaming professor you will have a hard time learning it. It also makes it ridiculously hard to optimize your gameplay, let alone min-max, which is downright impossible. Using your actual rotation on anything outside of a dungeon boss? You wish. You'll just have to settle for using a couple random skills, using a fraction of your potential on those non-boss things. As far as the number of skills, combat below level 50 at best feels okay, afterwards it's just too much filler stuff in your rotation.

The funny thing is I didn't even think combat would matter so much, because I am mostly interested in other areas of an mmo, but it turns out that a bad enough combat system can turn you away from a game even if you aren't combat oriented.

2. Leveling and alts

MSQ Leveling is a bit weird, but it's fast and varied, which is good. Myself I am not a plot-person so I don't care at all what the game's story is about and thus I skipped every cutscene ever. Somewhat enjoyed all the leveling of my main job still, because at least it took me around the world, through all the zones, and it was close to the questing/leveling experience I know from other games. No problems here.

However, the real problem is the leveling of your alt jobs. Now some people will probably scratch their heads and start telling me how fast it is and all that...okay, I don't disagree, it may be fast, but fast does not equal entertaining or interesting. Quite the contrary, leveling alt jobs is pure pain in FF14. You use your main character for all of the jobs, and you can only do quests once per character, which means that you are pretty much left with the following methods for leveling up your alt jobs/classes:

-levequests (incredibly boring repetable quests, which are also capped hourly to make it even worse and stop you from doing them all the time)
-doing dungeons over and over (only really viable for tank and healer jobs)
-a dungeon crawler mini game that you can do over and over for levels

While those methods may be quick, they are an absolute and complete pain. I managed to level an alt tank job to a level of about 40 or so through dungeons which is where I felt I am done with it and can take no more of the same dungeons over and over. The whole system seems to be designed with blocking grinds in mind. You are supposed to just do a daily roulette once per day and level your alt job that way, over the course of like 100 days.

3. Queues are ridiculous, even during the peak hours.

It's no surprise that playing DPS results in long queue times, but even trying to queue up for a trial from the current expansion, that is required for a MSQ quest can take up to an HOUR. The game is only playable if you have a friend who can tank/heal for you, otherwise you have to wait for like an hour, and your best bet is to just do something else (but that something else can't be playing an alt job, because the best way to level that up is doing dungeons, and you can't queue for another thing at the same time).

It's pretty funny, because while I never believed all the talk about FF14 killing WoW, all the voices make you think and consider the possibility that the game is pretty active. Again, reality turns out to be different than the forum rhetoric. If you have to wait up to 1 hour in queue as a dps for current obligatory MSQ content, that means barely anyone is playing it.

4. Professions are done horribly

So with this one I don't have much hands-on experience, because after researching how those things work in FF14 I decided not to even try. Profession skills such as mining, cooking etc. work as a separate class, so they lower your level to 1. It is an interesting concept, but also means you have to switch jobs whenever you want to partake in those activities (because you will get one shot by any mob otherwise). To pile up onto that, you have mining rotations, which you have to use correctly, or you risk failing the mining activity (I mean really?).

There were some other minor things that got on my nerves, many of those probably more subjective so I won't be talking about them too much. Dungeon encounter design, un-obvious boss mechanics, UI bugs, the horrid TRUST system (doing dungeons with NPCs which takes like 1 hour longer than a normal party), retainers instead of a regular deposit place, market interface, confusing housing system.

In the end...it's just one of those games. It's fun for a while to take a break and play it. It will just make you appreciate and enjoy the proper MMORPG more once you go back to it full time.

Well this game is about RPG and story and you skipped everything ? Why not just boost then?

You say that profession are bad and you did not really tried them?

You song like a wow fanboy , ff14 is not wow , it is a story game with a few contents of high end contents

Im sorry for you but rpg dont seem for you

[TheRevenantHero]

Can you get progress the MSQ without doing them, yes or no?

Literally irrelevant. Waiting for, at most a lot of time, 15 minutes for a queue isn't a block. I will repeat this again and read it very slowly. A block is something where you can't progress at all until the next part unlocks in the game. An example of an ACTUAL block is when you weren't allowed to progress the covenant campaign until the next reset.

[shadowmatrix]

Time gating stops me from playing the next part of the covenant story.
The MSQ stops me from playing the next expansion's story, accessing its areas, and learning that areas jobs.

Blocks detected, blocks acknowledged, moving on.

[minteK917]

Time gating stops me from playing the next part of the covenant story.
The MSQ stops me from playing the next expansion's story, accessing its areas, and learning that areas jobs.

Blocks detected, blocks acknowledged, moving on.

By that logic, every single game ever made is blocked. I cant go to the last level of doom, before finishing all the ones before. You can tell how assmad wow players starting to get by how this subsection of another game is on this wow website lol. The more assmad they are, the more the threads here are mad lmao. Cant wait for this subforum in Endwalker. The mad cope is gona be insane.

[Katchii]

Literally irrelevant.

You can say this as many times as you want, it doesn't make it so.

I will repeat this again and read it very slowly. A block is something where you can't progress at all until the next part unlocks in the game.

So...just like the queue you need to wait through when doing MSQ trials and dungeons. Where the next part of the game doesn't unlock until you get through it. Glad we cleared that up.

An example of an ACTUAL block is when you weren't allowed to progress the covenant campaign until the next reset.

So, the covenant campaign just had a 7 day queue.

Again, thanks for the explanation and clarification.

[Echo of Soul]

FF14 is a bad, clunky game with boring, janky combat.

Don't you think it's a bit shallow to judge games by their combat or their graphics. It's 2021, I thought we'd evolved past such superficial judgements.

[shadowmatrix]

By that logic, every single game ever made is blocked. I cant go to the last level of doom, before finishing all the ones before. You can tell how assmad wow players starting to get by how this subsection of another game is on this wow website lol. The more assmad they are, the more the threads here are mad lmao. Cant wait for this subforum in Endwalker. The mad cope is gona be insane.

Yes, almost every game has blocks in them designed by the dev team. Why do you think some games fall under the genre tag of Metroidvania.

[minteK917]

Yes, almost every game has blocks in them designed by the dev team. Why do you think some games fall under the genre tag of Metroidvania.

Then why is that supposed to be a negative again? Could it be possible there are bad blocks and good blocks, like putting an invisible wall in front of an open door or telling you come back in 7 real days without any real reason for it seems pretty bad. On the other hand, mabye you need to find the key to unlock that door by exploring another area as a good block or you need to finish a dungeon that has a story inside in order to progress the story itself, just like in order to understand the story of any game, its unlikely you can start on the last level?

[letgoit]

Are you being sarcastic? It's a game based around combat. How is that a superficial critique?

[shadowmatrix]

Then why is that supposed to be a negative again? Could it be possible there are bad blocks and good blocks, like putting an invisible wall in front of an open door or telling you come back in 7 real days without any real reason for it seems pretty bad. On the other hand, mabye you need to find the key to unlock that door by exploring another area as a good block or you need to finish a dungeon that has a story inside in order to progress the story itself, just like in order to understand the story of any game, its unlikely you can start on the last level?

Are there good and bad blocks? Yes but it is based on personal preference. The MSQ requires group content, it you enjoy group content then its fine. If you don't like or want to do group content then its bad.
Most of the MSQ quests are based on personal performance, group content however is tied to the group. Imagine being told you can't go to Shadowlands until you beat Nzoth normal.

[Schmittay]

Imagine being told you can't go to Shadowlands until you beat Nzoth normal.

TBF, MSQ trials are extremely easy, having levelled through to 80 recently there was never any encounter that couldn't be done in 3 attempts max, and even then wiping is so rare. Also if queue times are an issue, I just ask in novice chat and I get offers to help straight away, depending on the time of course.

[TheRevenantHero]

You can say this as many times as you want, it doesn't make it so.



So...just like the queue you need to wait through when doing MSQ trials and dungeons. Where the next part of the game doesn't unlock until you get through it. Glad we cleared that up.



So, the covenant campaign just had a 7 day queue.

Again, thanks for the explanation and clarification.

That is the dumbest fucking comparison I've ever heard. Did you pull a muscle when doing all this reaching? BY DEFINITION, it's not a "7 day queue". You're just so desperate to avoid saying you're wrong that you'll now just say whatever nonsense comes to mind first.

[CalamityHeart]

Literally irrelevant. Waiting for, at most a lot of time, 15 minutes for a queue isn't a block. I will repeat this again and read it very slowly. A block is something where you can't progress at all until the next part unlocks in the game. An example of an ACTUAL block is when you weren't allowed to progress the covenant campaign until the next reset.

I'm not sure why you think that the part that you're dismissing is irrelevant, when it's really close to the actual problem being discussed.

Maybe a more sound comparison will help a little bit more? Take WoW on one hand. Bastion in Shadowlands. The end of the leveling experience in that zone literally drops you right in front of the dungeon entrance, unlocks that dungeon, and then shortly afterwards, you can leave that zone to continue on with WoW's main story as it takes you into the next zone. You don't have to have done Necrotic Wake to advance into Ardenweald. You can start doing the Ardenweald story while you're in the queue for Necrotic Wake. There is no point in that sequence of events where the main story stops progressing.

Now, let's take FF14 on the other hand. The second arc of Stormblood. Right before you get to the major city hub of that expansion, you're on a ship that falls under attack, and that attack is played out through a dungeon, the Sirensong Sea. You cannot progress with any more main story quests until that dungeon is completed. And for Stormblood and prior, that means sitting in a queue.

"Oh, but it's not a very long queue!" That's literally irrelevant. Yeah, it's very likely that you'll have the good fortune of waiting less than five minutes to find a dungeon group. But the fact remains that you are being asked to wait. The main story has stopped, completely, for an indeterminate amount of time, and there is nothing you can do about it, except find some way to keep yourself busy until the red light turns green.

"There you have it, then! Just keep yourself busy!" That doesn't address the main issue someone might have with the system, though. It just looks away from it, ignores it, and in the case of this argument, it calls you stupid for even thinking there's an issue to start with.

Me, personally? I didn't mind that much, having to queue for story dungeons and trials. More often than not, I would just alt-tab and do something else until I heard the queue chime, or get up and stretch. It didn't bother me. But I can easily imagine something like this bothering someone else, especially someone coming over from WoW, and I suspect that you can, too. This isn't that hard to comprehend. I think you might be getting a bit too hung up on what the problem is called, rather than acknowledging it outright, even if it may not be a problem to someone like you or me.

It was enough of a problem for other people that it was addressed and somewhat fixed in Shadowbringers. The Trust system allowing you to immediately take NPCs into the story dungeons without a queue time almost totally eliminates the above issue. It's just unfortunate that it couldn't extend to dungeons prior to Shadowbringers, and that it's still a problem for Shadowbringers trials. But if that's not enough of a sign that maybe the system as it worked before had its kinks, I dunno what is.

[Wrecktangle]

Literally was not. I was talking about Bov, to Bov. I said TO him "Considering this is coming from the guy" - Suggesting I was talking to the person who I was talking about.

There is no scenario in which I was responding about you. The entire post states I was talking about Bov. I addressed your question with that. You didn't respond hyperbolically, and I never said so, because I wasn't talking about you.

You literally cannot tell me who I was talking about, ESPECIALLY not when I had already stated to Bov not more than a page before about how he had been responding hyperbolically to me.



Like... I'm sorry you misunderstood, but I LITERALLY wasn't talking about you. For real.

I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on the rest, but I at least want to make this clear. That post was not about you.

You're right, my apologies. I see where I got confused. The point was about me (remember I switched around your post and you got offended), so the initial point was you talking about me, but then you pivoted to actually responding to Bovine and because I wasn't reading your guys posts intimately I missed your point you highlighted above where it was directed at him and I was only a brief snippet in that response.

[KrayZ33]

Are there good and bad blocks? Yes but it is based on personal preference. The MSQ requires group content, it you enjoy group content then its fine. If you don't like or want to do group content then its bad.
Most of the MSQ quests are based on personal performance, group content however is tied to the group. Imagine being told you can't go to Shadowlands until you beat Nzoth normal.

It's not a fair comparison because you don't complete a raid but a single boss fight which takes like 5 minutes.
When you say "you have to beat Nzoth on normal" a WoW player will connect that to the trash fights and the whole raid - not just the last fight of the raid which a lot of players probably want to see in the first place because they are usually pretty nice and fun to do.

Yeah, imagine it, do it - but don't imagine how WoW does it, imagine it with how FFXIV does it.
With a roulette where experienced players help new players experience the old raid/dungeons/bosses, with a system and story telling that is consistent and each expansion is connected to the next and your character is not forgotten once you are done with the current expansion.

If I had to level a character for the first time in WoW and would get to experience the raidboss fights that have a proper story attached to it, I'd be glad - not sad.
The same thing applies to FFXIV.
In WoW, you used to level through 5 expansions, but you never got to actually solve an issue. You just skipped the important parts.
Now you choose 1 expansion, but you still skip the important part.
That's not good.

[Maljinwo]

No in FFXIV you don't just need to wait for a queue. If a new player (or even one who isn't new but hasn't progressed that far in the MSQ) wants to play with friends who are already in Shadowbringers their options are; spend hundreds of hours progressing through the MSQ, which includes dungeon and trial queues, or buy a boost to skip to Shadowbringers and THEN they still have to spend dozens of hours playing through that story.

FFXIV isn't wow
I believe it's story first, MMO second. I already had cases of people that didn't like the game because they didin't want to do the story but "kill stuff and get to max level" and went back to ESO
While I have other people that, to be honest, thought they wouldn't like the slower pace and they made it to Shadowbringers in less than a month because they ended up liking the story and other stuff (housing, gold saucer,etc)

It's not a game for everyone

[Katchii]

Then why is that supposed to be a negative again? Could it be possible there are bad blocks and good blocks, like putting an invisible wall in front of an open door or telling you come back in 7 real days without any real reason for it seems pretty bad. On the other hand, mabye you need to find the key to unlock that door by exploring another area as a good block or you need to finish a dungeon that has a story inside in order to progress the story itself, just like in order to understand the story of any game, its unlikely you can start on the last level?

The idea isn't bad, or wrong, it's the execution here.

Yes, it's just like any other single player story game where you can't see the later story until you complete the earlier story. The issue is, this isn't a single player game, it's an MMO where people aren't all playing for the story. Some are, some just want to play with friends, some just want to do end game stuff, some have other priorities (can't speak for everyone, just leaving it general).

Having the vast majority of the game being locked behind the MSQ forces those people to spend what could end up being hundreds of hours slogging through stuff they don't care about and don't really want to do to get to the stuff they DO want to do. And part of that requirement are several dozen dungeons and trials that can't be done solo, which halts their MSQ progression until they complete that group content that requires a queue.

That means, that essentially by design, the MSQ has "waiting in line" as part of its game play experience. With the length of that wait being extremely variable depending on multiple factors.

Waiting in a queue to do group content isn't a bad thing, necessarily, it's part of the genre at this point and is expected. The issue is how dependent FFXIV is on that group content.

Just looking at these two links:
https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Dungeons
https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Trials

I count a minimum of 51 instances of group content you have to queue for (did not include Shadowbringers dungeons as you can do those solo via the Trust system). Assuming a wait time range of 5-15 minutes (which is pretty normal, but Castrum and Praetorium and some trials take longer than that) that's a total wait time range of at least 255 minutes - 765 minutes (4.25 - 12.75 hours). That's 4.25 - 12.75 (!) hours of waiting to move the MSQ forward.

You can of course do other things in-game while waiting, and I encourage anyone to do so because there's a LOT to do, but that's not the point. The game forces you to wait that long in order to progress the MSQ and unlock content.

That's not fun or engaging design.

[xpsync]

FF14 is a bad, clunky game with boring, janky combat.

Nailed it! After the flash and new car smell wears off one starts to understand how weak the game is at the core.

For some, ffxiv is exactly what they want from a game, totally cool and happy for them. I was quite enamored with the game for first couple months at launch, tried a couple returns, to now, just, no more, please, never again. I don't think a game has ever bored me that much.

Problem with the ffxiv (the second coming) wave is that it's for far too many an easy stab at Blizz and nothing more than that. Which then fuels the lemming players to go oh, everyone is playing ffxiv, so that is the game i should be playing now, whether they like it or not is irrelevant.

I got dc'd, "Welp off to FFXIV", i only got 15 gold reward for quest "Welp off to FFXIV", omg Ven'ari doesn't offer Spatial Realignment Apparatus season 2 "Welp off to FFXIV", i farmed gondria for 15 hours and nothing "Welp off to FFXIV" any little freaking thing, "Welp off to FFXIV" when in reality most of the people saying that are still playing wow and don't even have a Square account.