FFXIV Criticisms

[Arlette]

Damn dude. You are something angry as hell. Might I suggest you take some time from the video games and go outside and roll around in the grass. Maybe Pray, or go swimming or something. It makes no sense to get all riled up over a video game. just breath.

I swear when someone has nothing to actually add they just go, 'lol ur so angry'

...????

Sorry I broke your little hatefest I guess with logic?

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I don't know why the mods haven't permabanned them considering 98% of what they post is obvious flame bait. I stopped bothering reporting them since apparently the mods don't care.

Oh sorry I forgot that this subforum exists only for you and the other 3 people to mindlessly complain about every single tiny niche detail they subjectively dislike regardless of if its actually true or not and that any disagreement with that is flamebait.

[Xilurm]

Honestly, glamours shouldn't even have a limit.
I know, I know. Spaghetti code.

But come on

They are slowly fixing all that stuff. FFXVI seems to be running on an even more customized FFXIV engine and they are backporting things to it. I am hopeful they will announce new QoL stuff at fanfest for 7.0

[Val the Moofia Boss]

FFXVI seems to be running on an even more customized FFXIV engine

Source?

[Xilurm]

Source?

Got none, just theories. But we already know it's not unreal or luminous engine. That was confirmed during the media tour few months ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZTNoV2Iey0&t=925s - 15:25

[Shinchi Migi]

It's probably not funding, it's the labor pool. Yoshida has talked about before how hard it is to add people to the team, or even find people to do things outsourced. Joining a nearly 10 year old MMO project isn't really good for your resume and portfolio, people want to jump onto new projects. Add a potential need to be fluent in Japanese or live in Japan, depending on position and... yeah. Even with unlimited funds, they'd still have staffing problems.

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I don't know why the mods haven't permabanned them considering 98% of what they post is obvious flame bait. I stopped bothering reporting them since apparently the mods don't care.

Sadly. I think they are here to stay just like the Karens. Kinda sucks cause WE ALL have to deal with them being angry and pissed off in the forums here

[MsSideEye]

Its very obvious that XIV's content cycles are a downside of the game, they even increased the amount of time between patches but have not added new content to make up for it. Releasing two Ultimates is a good improvement, but even that isn't enough, an Ultimate should release with a new Alliance Raid Wing every odd patch at minimum.

Most of the content they release on patch doesn't even last an entire month of sub, there is no reason for the rest to be staggered for weeks at a time.

Which again is the reason why I say the best time to play XIV is at the start and end of expansion. It removes this downside entirely and leads to quite a fulfilling experience.
.

The problem you've got here runs into a couple of things.

1) What qualifies as 'New content'. New content is stuff that they add to the game. Period. Doesn't matter if it's a single quest, or a beast tribe, or a blue update, or what have you. Content is content. The way you phrase things, it feels like you're saying 'Oh, I've got no interest in Island Sanctuaries so it's not content.' And yeah, if you're focusing solely on, say, the MSQ? You've got a few hours worth of story, a dungeon, and probably a trail. For those who are super into the game, you can probably knock that out in a day or so. But that's ignoring that new beast tribe you're going to be grinding on for a month or so, the crafting gear set that you need to farm materials for, the new raid tier that only gives you one week of loot at a time, the new stuff at the side quests that are ontop of all the other quests you've not actually done in the game (because lets be honest, you've likely not gone and done them). There's always a lot of stuff in each patch, it's what you consider for YOU that's more of the problem here.

2) XIV has always been a game about building for longevity, not for getting in all the people for every patch content. Not only have the devs themselves say 'Go take a break, unsub, we'll be here when you get back', but the way things are designed is for there to be things that are constantly available for players to do. A person can wait until the end of the expansion and have a huge amount of content to consume by no lifing it, or they could take it in the bite sized chunks it's offered in and then go spend the time on other things. Outside of Coils, the entire game is made for people to get to the content when you're ready. Blue Mage and all of it's stuff will always be there, even for someone who hasn't touched it. The Gold Saucer will always be there. ARR dungeons that are side quest stuff will always be there. Putting in more content to just make a 'bigger patch with more things to do' has never been their goal. It's always been about adding one more scoop to the already massive sundae that we've got to eat.

3) Staggered release has always been a better way of getting content. It's the reason why XIV changed how they've done raids. They saw that instead of actually enjoying the story, going through the content they've made for people, anyone who was into Extreme raiding would just flat out skip everything entirely in their race for world first. Thus the week delay for that. Same thing with their release for the rest of the other content. They're not wanting players to rush through the MSQ AND Hildibrand AND the new Raids AND Leveling the blue mage, etc, etc. It goes along with the reason why players like myself say that the game respects your time so much more than other MMOs. You're never made to feel like if You don't do all the content at once right when it comes out, You don't matter as a player. Take your time, enjoy the game, there's a huge amount of things you can do in there and there are even players who've been around for the decade+ XIV has existed and haven't done EVERYTHING the game can offer.

In the end, just because you've done a lot and are up to date on every little thing doesn't mean that the XIV patches are lacking. It means you either got to pick up something you've not done in the game yet, take a break and play something new, or just continue plugging away like you have already.

[Arlette]

The problem you've got here runs into a couple of things.

1) What qualifies as 'New content'. New content is stuff that they add to the game. Period. Doesn't matter if it's a single quest, or a beast tribe, or a blue update, or what have you. Content is content. The way you phrase things, it feels like you're saying 'Oh, I've got no interest in Island Sanctuaries so it's not content.' And yeah, if you're focusing solely on, say, the MSQ? You've got a few hours worth of story, a dungeon, and probably a trail. For those who are super into the game, you can probably knock that out in a day or so. But that's ignoring that new beast tribe you're going to be grinding on for a month or so, the crafting gear set that you need to farm materials for, the new raid tier that only gives you one week of loot at a time, the new stuff at the side quests that are ontop of all the other quests you've not actually done in the game (because lets be honest, you've likely not gone and done them). There's always a lot of stuff in each patch, it's what you consider for YOU that's more of the problem here.

2) XIV has always been a game about building for longevity, not for getting in all the people for every patch content. Not only have the devs themselves say 'Go take a break, unsub, we'll be here when you get back', but the way things are designed is for there to be things that are constantly available for players to do. A person can wait until the end of the expansion and have a huge amount of content to consume by no lifing it, or they could take it in the bite sized chunks it's offered in and then go spend the time on other things. Outside of Coils, the entire game is made for people to get to the content when you're ready. Blue Mage and all of it's stuff will always be there, even for someone who hasn't touched it. The Gold Saucer will always be there. ARR dungeons that are side quest stuff will always be there. Putting in more content to just make a 'bigger patch with more things to do' has never been their goal. It's always been about adding one more scoop to the already massive sundae that we've got to eat.

3) Staggered release has always been a better way of getting content. It's the reason why XIV changed how they've done raids. They saw that instead of actually enjoying the story, going through the content they've made for people, anyone who was into Extreme raiding would just flat out skip everything entirely in their race for world first. Thus the week delay for that. Same thing with their release for the rest of the other content. They're not wanting players to rush through the MSQ AND Hildibrand AND the new Raids AND Leveling the blue mage, etc, etc. It goes along with the reason why players like myself say that the game respects your time so much more than other MMOs. You're never made to feel like if You don't do all the content at once right when it comes out, You don't matter as a player. Take your time, enjoy the game, there's a huge amount of things you can do in there and there are even players who've been around for the decade+ XIV has existed and haven't done EVERYTHING the game can offer.

In the end, just because you've done a lot and are up to date on every little thing doesn't mean that the XIV patches are lacking. It means you either got to pick up something you've not done in the game yet, take a break and play something new, or just continue plugging away like you have already.

Careful now, you're going to be accused of just being a troll or posting flamebait for daring to disagree with the same 4 people saying the same 4 things every week.

Also their whole problem seems to be a WoW-brained mentality where if there isn't something FORCING you to stay online every day (Otherwise you fall behind) then there "is nothing to do" which is just such a...both incorrect and also toxic way to approach any kind of game.

The best thing I ever realized as a long time WoW player who swapped to FF14 was that I could leave and come back whenever I wanted and I wasn't stuck grinding for weeks at a time. At best, I would spend a day or two doing roulettes for gear if I was behind on ilevel for the new dungeons/trials. But even then, I enjoyed the content every time it came out so much that I'd play for a few weeks anyway and get all the new trial/raid series gear and/or tomestone gear so I was never behind.

Respecting your time and all that, as you've said. It's even given me more time to try out other MMOs and see how they compare. I bought New World on a sale and enjoyed that for a good month. I tried out GW2 and was having fun for parts of it. I went back to SWTOR for the new story content. I never felt like not being on FF14 was hurting me.

And that sentiment is the biggest compliment I can give 14.

[Ghost of Cow]

Careful now, you're going to be accused of just being a troll or posting flamebait for daring to disagree with the same 4 people saying the same 4 things every week.

Also their whole problem seems to be a WoW-brained mentality where if there isn't something FORCING you to stay online every day (Otherwise you fall behind) then there "is nothing to do" which is just such a...both incorrect and also toxic way to approach any kind of game.

The best thing I ever realized as a long time WoW player who swapped to FF14 was that I could leave and come back whenever I wanted and I wasn't stuck grinding for weeks at a time. At best, I would spend a day or two doing roulettes for gear if I was behind on ilevel for the new dungeons/trials. But even then, I enjoyed the content every time it came out so much that I'd play for a few weeks anyway and get all the new trial/raid series gear and/or tomestone gear so I was never behind.

Respecting your time and all that, as you've said. It's even given me more time to try out other MMOs and see how they compare. I bought New World on a sale and enjoyed that for a good month. I tried out GW2 and was having fun for parts of it. I went back to SWTOR for the new story content. I never felt like not being on FF14 was hurting me.

And that sentiment is the biggest compliment I can give 14.

I mean, other MMOs are pretty much the same way now anyway. Other than the dumb Azerite farm era in WoW, you can leave and come back and catch up in no time, too. GW2 of course has no real gear grind at all.

This isn't some novel distinction that only XIV has. In fact, I usually feel much more "gated" by the XIV community when coming in late, just because of the the way fights are designed and the "community chosen strat" aspect.

And yes, XIV's content cycles tend to be a bit slow. Not absurdly slow by MMO standards - the entire genre tends to be slow, which is frustrating for subscription based games - but the fact that many people will log on at patch day and log off having finished the content (except Savage, usually) and be left waiting 4-5 months again is no fun.

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A person can wait until the end of the expansion and have a huge amount of content to consume by no lifing it

I've always felt like this was the most fun way to play XIV - at least as a solo player. It's much more fun to go through all the post-patch content as one big cohesive experience and then go right into the full next expansion all at once.

The slow post-patch trickle of story content makes it feel much less immersive and cohesive. At least in my opinion. Sadly, I can't really do that anymore since I made silly choices like buying houses.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Sadly, I can't really do that anymore since I made silly choices like buying houses.

Yeah. As much as Yoshi-P touts "oh you don't have to play FFXIV all of the time, you are free to leave and go play other games!", there is a real penalty for leaving. You lose all of those millions of gil invested into buying and furnishing a house and all of that time spent trying to float up items, and it is very difficult and time consuming to try to get another house again given that you can only place one bid per week but there are 12 bidders on every plot.

[Ghost of Cow]

Yeah. As much as Yoshi-P touts "oh you don't have to play FFXIV all of the time, you are free to leave and go play other games!", there is a real penalty for leaving. You lose all of those millions of gil invested into buying and furnishing a house and all of that time spent trying to float up items, and it is very difficult and time consuming to try to get another house again given that you can only place one bid per week but there are 12 bidders on every plot.

Well, in fairness, getting a house is a choice and not mandatory at all. You can always just get an apartment for most functions.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Well, in fairness, getting a house is a choice and not mandatory at all. You can always just get an apartment for most functions.

I upgraded from an apartment to a house because the 100 item limit in the apartment was too stifling.

[Sharby]

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In my following post I recognized it was more of my personal desire for specific content (ultimates/savage) not being fulfilled so that's on me.

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In response to 1:

To me and my personal scope of enjoyment, challenging PVE content is what I enjoy most in MMO's. Prog gives me a reason to stay subbed. Naturally, this means that XIV is lacking in that department, but it makes up for it in other ways.

In my three year stint no-lifing the game, there was plenty of stuff to keep me busy, I did it all just because I liked playing it so much. That doesn't mean I didn't always have this issue with the game though, and while its not what ultimately made me quit, it definitely is a big deterrent in me resubbing, though I do plan on playing again in the X.5 patch.

Since you're not the other guy, I feel like I can bring up WoW, and in WoW, there's pretty much always something to prog. So to me WoW always has a lot of content whether it be PVP/Raid/M+, so it suffers way less from this issue.

In XIV, beast tribes are capped by daily progress and you only progress their story once per level. I've done all the beast tribes except the Endwalker ones, I know what they're like and I enjoy them, but they aren't really content to me, I can't spend hours thinking about them, it takes me at most 20 minutes to finish them for the day and move on.

I know that was only one of your examples, but that's how I feel about most of the casual content in XIV, I don't hate it or think its poor quality, but I like things I can sink my teeth into and get my fill, only Savage/Ultimate meets that hunger for me. I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.

I don't think XIV is bad because it doesn't specifically cater to me or at all, it is a good game, but I can't be the only one that feels this way, so I think that specifically for hardcore raiders, XIV doesn't do enough to satisfy me which is a flaw in my opinion.



In response to 2:


I've seen this said a lot, pretty anytime I mention my issue with the game's pacing, but I always felt like that game doesn't really lend itself to being a late starter unless you always have a premade group to play with or are doing solo/casual content.

From a PVE perspective, tomestones never get uncapped, there are 0 catchup systems until the very very end of a raid tier, and there is a lot of timegating. It will take a very long time to be able to be bis and go do an ultimate on-patch even if you get funneled gear. The later you start the more likely zones are empty/content isn't being done as much as well, their megazones like Bozja/Eureka def suffered from this unless it was a content drought. I don't envy anyone trying to do Bozja Castrum atm and that stuff was dying even when I did it during Shadowbringers for the relics.

This isn't an issue from a vanity perspective of course, because 0 time constraints.

Housing is also extremely annoying in my opinion, it takes way too long to get a house unless you're lucky, and having to stay subbed to keep it from going boom is pretty awful. You could make a good argument that if you don't play you shouldn't care, but in my opinion it just adds another reason to not want to play again.

Fortunately I have FCmates that log in to circumvent this issue.


In response to 3:

Waiting a week is fine, my issue is waiting 3 weeks or more for something that will stop being relevant in a few days if that.


In my opinion it isn't that XIV goes out of its way to respect your time, but more that there is just too little in the game to do to feel disrespected. I don't think its very fair to say that unless you've 100%'d the game you cannot feel like its lacking. While there is a lot of content that is good, a lot of content, especially in the earlier stages of the game like ARR, is just outdated and boring and thus I have 0 interest in going back for it.

This also doesn't account for players that don't unsub and do things as they release, even if you didn't no-life, I personally feel you just hit a wall way faster in this game than WoW. You can tell me to unsub, but I like playing the same game a lot and I don't think that's a bad thing. I've never forced myself to play a game I don't like, but I also can't justify paying monthly for a game where there's little to do, which is why I unsubbed in the end. If anything players that hardly ever break their sub should be rewarded, not told that their loyalty is unneeded and they should play other stuff, it just feels like a cop out from putting more in every patch.

WoW has had similar issues, sometimes even way worse, but it can get away with suffering from this because I don't have to pay money to play it, I haven't paid real money for WoW or any of its addons since the token came out, that's insane value. If there was an XIV token, I'd def still be playing the game.


The game has done a great job in modernizing and streamlining itself, even in the few years I've been playing. But there is still a ton of stuff that feels like a product of archaic philosophy, it just happens that these issues are usually things only a tiny minority of players like myself care about, so there's no pressure for them to be consistent in fixing it.

Integrating buff timers and extending the ranges on buffs are good recent examples, these are amazing changes, but why did it take the game so long to put it in?

That's where I take issue with how the game is ran and when I start to feel disrespected. It gets even more grating when people tell me it doesn't matter because only a few hundred people do high-end raiding.

[MsSideEye]

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ReRe 1:

Never said you can't have a focus as to what you love for a game. There are some things that are just going to appeal more to some folks than to other. Good example in the game itself is how I've mostly avoided Blue outside of just getting it out of the way Via levels and haven't really done much else for it. But there's a difference between preferring certain content the game offers and saying that the game should be criticized for not offering more of that content when it's never focused on that entirely.

Unlike WoW, which has almost always focused on high end raiding, pvp, heroic/Mythic content throughout the years, XIV has never dedicated itself to just that alone. They've done the crafting, the blue stuff, and more. You can be frustrated that they've not given us more stuff that fits your desires, and that's perfectly valid, but XIV has always encouraged the side stuff to be just as important as raiding and Ultimates. And the future of Ultimates are in question considering that the last two of them have had addons used on them despite the devs wishes.

I feel like calling it a flaw might fit better if the game was all about raiding, but that's never been the case.

ReRe2:

In this prospect, you're focusing entirely on the aspect of getting into raiding and geared up for that, which I already said in the previous ReRe isn't the entire focus of the game. When I was talking about respecting your time, I was going on the fact that the content for XIV is always there for the players and you're not expected to just rush through everything to get some magical end game where everything supposed to get better. Contrast this to WoW, especially back in the day, where there was always this expectation from players to just grind up to level cap as quick as possible to get into the 'real' part of the game. I know for me, I'm generally more excited to get story in FFVIX than I am a new raid tier and I could legit have a patch with no raid or even no dungeons and I'd be happy.

As far as Bozja and Eureka are concerned, you really only need to do those if you're wanting to do relics and while they're a great deal harder to do just casually now because there isn't the same driving force there used to be, there are still dedicated groups and Discord servers that get together just to knock those out. Data Center also might decide how popular those are as well, since I'm fairly sure that the raiding focused data center still has their Bozja still pretty populated.

Housing is always going to be a sticking issue for folks, because of how hard it was to get. The new system of lottery is a bit more fair than what we had, though. As for losing it should you not subbed, I've said this in another thread, but considering that you're legitmately denying the space for other players by owning it, you should be expected to actually be playing to keep ownership on it. I do think that they could extend the timer a bit so you could have a month of unsub and still have your house, but anymore is just unfair to other players.

ReRe 3:

While I do agree that a lot of ARR is outdated, considering you're basically comparing Vanilla WoW level quality with Legion level quality stuff with Endwalker here in terms of comparison, I also feel like you're comparing it as someone whose gotten to the end of the game. Yeah, if you're at the end of the story in Endwalker and have done eveything along the way, the game does feel a little lacking... but I feel like that means you're ignoring the other 4 expansions worth of content that you've played through and that a new player has to look forward to. Even for some no lifers, that's a LOT of content to go through.

WoW has also had the problem, especially in the past, of the endless treadmill. Sure, that means there was always something to do, but I don't feel like logging in to do daily chores or I end up being behind everyone else makes for good content. The freedom to unsub, hell, even for the develops to say that they're ok with you doing that, felt like such a freedom compared to Blizzard going and dangling another six month mount in my face just to make sure they got my money, regardless of the actual quality of the game itself at the time. You might think of it is 'saying our loyality is unneeded', but I think it should be more viewed as 'We respect that you've got other interests'.

The WoW Token, honestly, is more a source of problems from what I've seen than anything else. Mostly because it was there for WoW to get a piece of the pie that goldfarmers were making. Last I recall when I saw it in action, it had kinda f-ed up the economy of WoW. Is it awesome that some players are basically able to play for free because of that? Sure. But I've also got friends who still haven't updated their FFXIV accounts past the Heavensward trial because they're wanting to do every tiny little thing in the game and are able to play up to the end of that expansion without paying a cent or grinding up the money to pay to continue.

As for the game itself feeling old a points, part of this comes from design philosophy, part of this comes from spaghetti code, and part of this comes from them planning on how they want things to work for the future. A lot of older companies, ESPECIALLY in Japan, are heavy in the 'if it isn't broke, don't fix it' style of how they run their systems. You add this between the lack of new blood who are skilled in code AND speak Japanese into the mix also means they're slow to adapt. Heck, you can see this also in the buff timers, as the entire reason they added that is because they wanted people to stop using addons, so they're like 'fine, we'll add them to the game, stop using it'.

I can more than understand that these are irritating to you. And I'm not going to say it doesn't matter because you're a high end raider. But I'm also going to tell you that what you want has never been the most important focus above everything else in XIV. The most important focus has been the story, followed by making sure there was always something for players to do. And Endwalker has added more of that than we had before with the Islands and the new Variant dungeons. And while those features don't feel fully fleshed out just yet, I only see them getting better as the devs learn, try again, and maybe even get fresher ideas for what they've done.

All that said, I wouldn't say no to getting more hard, super end game content, but I also know that FFXIV isn't the game that I'm going to be playing that if that was my focus and nothing else.

[Arlette]

This isn't some novel distinction that only XIV has. In fact, I usually feel much more "gated" by the XIV community when coming in late, just because of the the way fights are designed and the "community chosen strat" aspect.

There are so many examples in this thread alone of you or Val just...making something up to be upset about that is just not reality. Here's another one. I don't even know what you're talking about regarding "being gated because of community chosen strats" ....what? lol

Did somebody come up with some strat for an Ultimate that you dislike or something so you invented this strawman to complain about? Also not sure you want to make this argument about the hardest content in the game, if that is indeed what this strawman is about, to pretend that the hardest of the hardcore raiders only use a single stat that turns out to work only with FF14. That's the case for every single MMO.

It's a very bizarre thing to try and pretend is unique to this game.

"The game is gating me because of something a member of the community did"

[Mordin Solus]

personaly atm id say the whole "positivity" part of the community is its biggest detriment since you can't call out any1 for sucking when they are even doing it on purpose.

Had a guy throw out the oh its my first time in the 2nd 24 man pirate raid as an excuse for "sucking". Basicly he would get a mechanic on him and just not do anything. he would stay on the boss dpsing it (he was a rpr) and hit the whole party with the mechanic which considering it was ozma then made 90% of our party die. I obv call him out on it and im the bad guy and oh its old content why you complaining yada yada.

Honestly wish they made all those fights be min ilvl so people were forced to learn to "git gud".

Im tired of level skip people and others that get carried through fights never having to learn shit cause the rest of the overgeared party just makes it a cruise control for them but considering SE keeps making changes to previous hard trials to make it simpler (lahabreah fight in hw notwithstanding) i doubt thats their plan...

[Ghost of Cow]

There are so many examples in this thread alone of you or Val just...making something up to be upset about that is just not reality. Here's another one. I don't even know what you're talking about regarding "being gated because of community chosen strats" ....what? lol

You know, it's not mandatory to lead every post this way. Just sayin'

Did somebody come up with some strat for an Ultimate that you dislike or something so you invented this strawman to complain about? Also not sure you want to make this argument about the hardest content in the game, if that is indeed what this strawman is about, to pretend that the hardest of the hardcore raiders only use a single stat that turns out to work only with FF14. That's the case for every single MMO.

It's a very bizarre thing to try and pretend is unique to this game.

"The game is gating me because of something a member of the community did"

We've discussed this thing many times, it's a side effect of how the fights are designed.

In WoW - just for example - I can jump into nearly anything by being a decent player and generally understanding the fight I'm going into. In XIV it's not usually that straightforward, there's a lot of "person 7 stands exactly at X13, Y36 or else we blow up" or party member pairings that have to be planned out beforehand, etc. Often these strats come from - and are even named after - youtubers, so they're very specific and referenced by PF groups.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means that coming in late and not knowing those specific strats beforehand - strats that largely can't be altered or done on the fly - means that interacting with groups is that much harder. Bonus points if you get people in the group who have used a different strat, because you generally can't mesh strats. I've seen groups break up over that very thing - two sets of people who have both cleared but used different strats, and it just didn't work out.

It's why I generally don't bother pugging in XIV, it's just so...rigid and structured? (As everyone calls them, a dance)...and people have weird expectations. People were whining about wiping in the new EX the night of the patch, heh.

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Since you're not the other guy, I feel like I can bring up WoW, and in WoW, there's pretty much always something to prog. So to me WoW always has a lot of content whether it be PVP/Raid/M+, so it suffers way less from this issue.

Yeah, M+ alone is a fantastic game mode for people who like progression.

That said, WoW also has a lot of side content that people often forget exists in these discussions. Pet battles, transmog farming, various faction reps, heritage quests, um...probably other stuff I'm forgetting.

It's a shame that I just prefer XIV as a product overall (Setting, characters, locations, music, etc.) because honestly as a "game" I prefer WoW in a lot of ways. I could always play both - I have in the past - but eh. It's a weird conflict to have.

[Moralgy]

Yeah. As much as Yoshi-P touts "oh you don't have to play FFXIV all of the time, you are free to leave and go play other games!", there is a real penalty for leaving. You lose all of those millions of gil invested into buying and furnishing a house and all of that time spent trying to float up items, and it is very difficult and time consuming to try to get another house again given that you can only place one bid per week but there are 12 bidders on every plot.

Well you dont really have to play, just log in to keep it. Technically ur right, but technically so is he rofl.

[Yarathir]

The "housing means XIV isn't play when you want" thing is really inane. It's just the price of scarcity and something you sign up for when you get a house. You know there's a limited quantity and that therefore there is a system in place to make sure that long-term inactive players do not get to hold onto houses that should rightfully go to active players clamoring to engage with the housing system.

Yoshi-P didn't put chains on you. You did that yourself.

And I say that as someone who dearly hopes that instanced housing will one day become a thing to solve these woes.

[Grinning Serpent]

In XIV, beast tribes are capped by daily progress and you only progress their story once per level. I've done all the beast tribes except the Endwalker ones, I know what they're like and I enjoy them, but they aren't really content to me, I can't spend hours thinking about them, it takes me at most 20 minutes to finish them for the day and move on.

Renown in WoW is what BTs ought to be like. I basically skipped WoW from a couple months into Legion until Dragonflight, so I never saw the Renown thing until I encountered it in DF. It's like the old Reputation grinds, but less punishing and just overall less shitty. It's great. It also integrates into the WQ system naturally, as well as the "fly around and find random shit" system. You get a limited batch of daily WQs that get you rep with one faction or another. You can find random knick knacks while travelling around that reward a small bit of rep. You can buy contracts from crafters to get a little extra rep with a specific faction when you do any WQ. You still have rep-gated rewards, but owing to the renown system, they are much more granular than they used to be, and the renown system is frankly a vastly improved presentation of the system than the previous reputation systems. Then Forgotten Reach added additional ways to get renown, and then the 10.1 patch or whatever (I stopped playing last month) added a new faction. Presumably the next interim patch will add a way to accelerate rep gains with that faction, etc.

BTs are just so fucking archaic. Daily resets, you permanently lose rep progression if you can't log in on a given day, etc. It's very much old school "fuck you if you can't log in every single day" design and I have no goddamn idea how the fuck it's survived so long. I don't think they're *bad*, but we just have examples of much better ways of doing the same concept.

I know that was only one of your examples, but that's how I feel about most of the casual content in XIV, I don't hate it or think its poor quality, but I like things I can sink my teeth into and get my fill, only Savage/Ultimate meets that hunger for me. I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.

I don't think XIV is bad because it doesn't specifically cater to me or at all, it is a good game, but I can't be the only one that feels this way, so I think that specifically for hardcore raiders, XIV doesn't do enough to satisfy me which is a flaw in my opinion.

I think XIV's rigidity of design works against it, in terms of giving meat for non-sweaty players. In WoW, you have entire huge ass communities built up around rolling the dice for mounts, pets, transmog, etc every week. You might need to grind old reputations or something.

In XIV? Want the rewards from that old savage? Throw up a PF and you can probably have farmed multiple sets of gear in an afternoon and you get the mount every single time you kill the tier end boss. I don't think making things RNG heavy like in WoW would fix it, either. I think it's just simply a limitation of the game's design, and I don't think there's a plausible way of fixing it.

But that's a *large* chunk of potential "casual" activity removed from the playing field. I stopped playing WoW because I got hooked on other games, but I'm sure I'll go back eventually, simply because there's just so fucking much to *do*! And I didn't even touch M+, raiding, etc - and had no real interest in it. People say XIV is good for casual players, and to an extent I think they're right, but I feel like Dragonflight is pulling a "hold my beer" moment here. I really dislike dungeons and raids in WoW compared to XIV (hence not bothering with M+ etc) and the community... ugh, feels like it hasn't changed in 20 years, which is kind of disturbing to think about. But from the perspective of "casual shit to do," WoW has an absolutely *insane* amount! To the point that Wowhead even wrote guides on how to go through each expansion in turn and start unlocking access to all the goodies, mounts, etc.

In my opinion it isn't that XIV goes out of its way to respect your time, but more that there is just too little in the game to do to feel disrespected. I don't think its very fair to say that unless you've 100%'d the game you cannot feel like its lacking. While there is a lot of content that is good, a lot of content, especially in the earlier stages of the game like ARR, is just outdated and boring and thus I have 0 interest in going back for it.

This also doesn't account for players that don't unsub and do things as they release, even if you didn't no-life, I personally feel you just hit a wall way faster in this game than WoW. You can tell me to unsub, but I like playing the same game a lot and I don't think that's a bad thing. I've never forced myself to play a game I don't like, but I also can't justify paying monthly for a game where there's little to do, which is why I unsubbed in the end. If anything players that hardly ever break their sub should be rewarded, not told that their loyalty is unneeded and they should play other stuff, it just feels like a cop out from putting more in every patch.

WoW has had similar issues, sometimes even way worse, but it can get away with suffering from this because I don't have to pay money to play it, I haven't paid real money for WoW or any of its addons since the token came out, that's insane value. If there was an XIV token, I'd def still be playing the game.

This is really good. I agree pretty much wholeheartedly. Like I said, I hadn't touched WoW in a while so I just assumed it was kind of even with XIV in terms of shit to do - but it really blew me away just how much stuff I could do if I wanted to play WoW that evening, without really touching "end game" stuff. It always bothered me. I'd log in because I just wanted to play XIV, but there was nothing to *do.* People would just say "Yoshi-P says to take breaks!" and that's all well and good, but what if I want to fucking play XIV? His team has made a great game, it's just that it so often felt like there was nothing to *do.* I even made an alt on Dynamis, completely started over, and I still ran out of things to do in short order (especially since I wasn't interested in doing the more grindy things like perfecting my chocobo racing or verminion collection again.)

I was paying sub for WoW but next time I go back I'll probably put more effort into learning how to make gold and manipulate the market. Being able to play for free by buying a token once a month sounds like a pretty good plan. I agree, I wish XIV had a token system as well.

Besides, if you can buy gold directly from the dev (and trade gold for game time), it's effectively a death knell for RMT - why would people buy from a sketchy site if they can just buy a token/gold straight from the dev? As long as gold/gil cannot be used to buy power (and they can't), there isn't much reason I can see to not do it, other than SqEx might worry they'd lose subscription revenue by doing so (they might, but most people I know have like a few million gil at most and are mystified by the idea of me having several tens of millions without putting any real effort in... so I doubt it would be a serious concern if the tokens were like 80+ million.)

The game has done a great job in modernizing and streamlining itself, even in the few years I've been playing. But there is still a ton of stuff that feels like a product of archaic philosophy, it just happens that these issues are usually things only a tiny minority of players like myself care about, so there's no pressure for them to be consistent in fixing it.

That is the exact problem and it's why I have trouble getting hyped for future XIV updates. The writing is on the wall - they will continue to float down the river and continue being the credit card for the rest of the company, even though at least in my opinion, there are several elements of the game that they "need" to put serious work into.