FFXIV Criticisms

[Aucald]

FFXIV has been in the managed decline phase for years. A lot of the key talent who originally made ARR and Heavensward what they are have left. Content is continuing to be made, but the corporation wants to increase profits by lowering costs, so the new stuff is lower budget. Thus why we have gotten less and less contents and features with each expansion and the release schedule keeps becoming longer and longer, and the milking has steadily increased with more microtransactions.

I don't know about "managed decline," and I actually think Stormblood and Shadowbringers are better expansions than Heavensward itself - so the argument about key talent having left seems pretty left-field to me. One criticism I do have with FF14 is the lack of new expansion before the close of 2023, and unless one is coming in Q1 2024 I think Endwalker is going to be a bit long in the tooth for a lot of people (myself included). The post-MSQ Endwalker stuff has been pretty great all in all, but the delay of the next expansion is starting to feel like a bit of a stretch.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The post-MSQ Endwalker stuff has been pretty great all in all

I've found the Endwalker expansion patches to be very lackluster. Most notably there are no difficult zones to spend a lot of time in like Eureka or Bozja. We get wellfare relic weapons that only cost tomestones, not even having to do FATEs. The Variant Dungeons are theoretically nice, but there are only two of them (one of them looks very unappealing), there is no moderate difficulty level, and no incentive to do them repeatedly. No Garlemald restoration. No side trials. The 5v5 PvP matches are nice in short bursts but there isn't depth and it does not provide lastingly longevity like WoW's RBGs or even GW2's rated 5v5s. So that just leaves raiding, and I dislike how FFXIV designs its raid boss fights, and I do not like how my jobs play at high end and there is no talent customization to remedy that. And the writing leave a lot to be desired.

[Grinning Serpent]

FFXIV has been in the managed decline phase for years. A lot of the key talent who originally made ARR and Heavensward what they are have left. Content is continuing to be made, but the corporation wants to increase profits by lowering costs, so the new stuff is lower budget. Thus why we have gotten less and less contents and features with each expansion and the release schedule keeps becoming longer and longer, and the milking has steadily increased with more microtransactions.

I don't pine after HW, though I do miss how comparatively grounded ARR was (I also miss how WoW was relatively grounded in vanilla, before TBC and Wrath kept upping the stakes patch after patch.) I think ShB was, overall, pretty damn good and deserved the praise it got. I think that's why "midwalker" has left such a sour taste in my mouth. 6.0 was a fine patch cycle, and while I think EW had lower highs and lower lows than did ShB, I still had fun with it. But the patches in EW have just felt really lackluster compared to ShB, and it's not from lack of trying - Island Sanctuary, PvP revamp, criterion dungeons, etc are all amazing and wonderful ideas... but it feels like they didn't bother to *finish* them.

Like, this is an MMO. Players are going to expect a carrot to chase. They are going to need a carrot to chase. And Island Sanctuaries would have been your silver bullet for the worst parts of the housing shortage (not everyone needs a "public house," but with how much is invested into furniture and other stuff as rewards/things to chase, being *entirely* locked out of the system is a problem.) Fix the housing availability issue, and you can then make furniture a meaningful reward for doing content in addition to pets, mounts, glam sets, etc.

I don't know. I lost interest in WoW after a month or two, but at least from comparing the two, it sure seems like Blizzard is more in tune with the wants and needs of their players in Dragonflight than Square-Enix has been in Endwalker.

Which is a *weird* fucking thing to say.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't know about "managed decline," and I actually think Stormblood and Shadowbringers are better expansions than Heavensward itself - so the argument about key talent having left seems pretty left-field to me. One criticism I do have with FF14 is the lack of new expansion before the close of 2023, and unless one is coming in Q1 2024 I think Endwalker is going to be a bit long in the tooth for a lot of people (myself included). The post-MSQ Endwalker stuff has been pretty great all in all, but the delay of the next expansion is starting to feel like a bit of a stretch.

Fanfest is in a few weeks I think? I'd have to check the dates. I'm sure that will be their big announcement of the next expansion and a proper look at the "new" engine. But I wouldn't expect 7.0 before Q1 2024 at the earliest - I'm thinking mid to late spring. We've got about another month til 6.5 right? And then another six to eight weeks through to 6.55, which is usually the final patch of an expansion barring fix-patches.

So call it maybe early October through March or April with no content updates? How well did that work out for Blizzard when they tried that move?

- - - Updated - - -

I've found the Endwalker expansion patches to be very lackluster. Most notably there are no difficult zones to spend a lot of time in like Eureka or Bozja. We get wellfare relic weapons that only cost tomestones, not even having to do FATEs. The Variant Dungeons are theoretically nice, but there are only two of them (one of them looks very unappealing), there is no moderate difficulty level, and no incentive to do them repeatedly. No Garlemald restoration. No side trials. The 5v5 PvP matches are nice in short bursts but there isn't depth and it does not provide lastingly longevity like WoW's RBGs or even GW2's rated 5v5s. So that just leaves raiding, and I dislike how FFXIV designs its raid boss fights, and I do not like how my jobs play at high end and there is no talent customization to remedy that. And the writing leave a lot to be desired.

The raids are still good, but I think the game suffers a lot from the 2 minute meta. I don't think it's entirely on them, though, as a lot of the problems that we've found are definitely from hindsight analysis. The healer dichotomy was also a complete failure, and that I *do* place entirely on them, because if they played their own fucking game they'd have realized how stupid the idea was - the content most players engage in only has a single healer, so all healers must be capable of sufficient raw healing, and the most effective way of doing so is through regens. What happened was you have healers with strong oGCD shields and weak oGCD regens, and healers with strong oGCD regens and weak oGCD shields - there is practically no difference, and at the hardcore level, SCH+SGE is pretty much the de facto best healer pair to run due to how absurdly strong chaining sacred soil buffs (which are also regens!!!!) one after the other is.

EW definitely ruined parsing though, IMO. Crit variance has become even more of a determining factor in parses than ever before, due to the 2 minute meta and due to them continually stripping more and more granularity and nuance from rotations. I also just don't find it as fun as it used to be, because a lot of soft skills like tanks being good at repositioning the boss or avoiding AOEs without wiggling the boss, melee being able to effectively judge when they need to move and when they can wait that last tenth of a second for an extra GCD before needing to move, BLM and WHM needing to identify the best places to go where they can turret spells without losing uptime to unnecessary movement, etc were largely removed.

The raid design is schizophrenic. It's like they're trying to simplify everything so that even the "casuals" can play it, but in doing so they have made a raid environment that is more toxic to casuals than anything that came before, or at least since HW. Someone dying or eating a damage down 10 seconds before the next 2 minute window is a *huge* DPS loss, even moreso if that person is supposed to be providing one of the group buffs, and adjusting for that is much harder - it essentially requires the entire group to, on the fly, make an assessment on whether or not they should delay the next window (how long? Just until they're back up, or do you need to wait until weakness falls off?) and then remember to stick to it. That is *far* beyond the typical Party Finder group...

[MsSideEye]

One criticism I do have with FF14 is the lack of new expansion before the close of 2023, and unless one is coming in Q1 2024 I think Endwalker is going to be a bit long in the tooth for a lot of people (myself included). The post-MSQ Endwalker stuff has been pretty great all in all, but the delay of the next expansion is starting to feel like a bit of a stretch.

To be fair, this was part in thanks to them pushing back Endwalker as it was to make sure things went right, part in thanks to them having larger cycles between patches because they didn't want to overwork themselves, and the fact that a LOT of the same team was also working on Final Fantasy 16. Especially since this expansion was about trying out new content (Islands, the new dungeon style), expanding old (Reworking the old dungeons for Duty support/Explorer Mode, Summoner class rework, Ishguard housing, Glamor Dresser increase), and lets not even forget the fact that this was the expansion where we had the Stat squish.

We already know we're going to get hints of the next expansion when we see the Live Letter/Fanfest start up in tenish days and how soon or far away that is will probably be at least hinted there. I honestly expect to hear a lot of talk of what they plan to do and maybe even some major features about what to expect from the expansion there. And let's not forget that we've still got the last third of the 24 man coming up, at least one more major expansion to the Islands, and they even said that they were going to get one more of the Criterion dungeons out as well ontop of the normal dungeon/trail set up we normally have. There's a lot to look forward to, though probably not as much if you no life it.

As it is, I'm more anxious to see what they've got planned for us expansion wise, regardless of how long it'll take it to become live.

[zealo]

EWs problem with it's post MSQ patches isn't really the budget allocated to it in itself, but that the structure of what they've been putting inside of the more experimental slots in the schedule have been misfiring fiercely.

Island Sanctuary is a major resource hog for development for them that at the same time fails to capture why people even like the game genre it is trying to ape after, and then devolves into a 10 minutes a week mobile game, and Variant/Criterion dungeons fails to have any staying power because there's very little reason to keep playing them for their own sake after an initial romp of a week or two through the alternate routes and doing the criterion one.

Without those we could've had another iteration of a field expedition zone put into the game for a similar expenditure of dev time, which would have helped this expansion immensely in providing more midcore battle content.

[MsSideEye]

Island Sanctuary is a major resource hog for development for them that at the same time fails to capture why people even like the game genre it is trying to ape after, and then devolves into a 10 minutes a week mobile game, and Variant/Criterion dungeons fails to have any staying power because there's very little reason to keep playing them for their own sake after an initial romp of a week or two through the alternate routes and doing the criterion one.

Without those we could've had another iteration of a field expedition zone put into the game for a similar expenditure of dev time, which would have helped this expansion immensely in providing more midcore battle content.

Island Sanctuary was, definitely, something that was more of an experiment then anything else. Something for the devs to offer to the fanbase to allow them to have a nice, relaxing pass time thing that offered some decent rewards. Is it 100% perfect? No, but I also feel like it's a decently fun pass time that they added into the game and, with them implementing the outdoor furnishing as something you can set up in there, allows for much more player expression. And now that they've got the bulk of it set up, it'll be much easier to offer something better in the future.

Variant/Criterion dungeons I think run into the a twofold problem: Not being on the Roulette as an option and the rewards being strictly cosmetic. The first is something that'll be solved as more and more of them are added into the game, to where I could see a Roulette being added onto things for people to que up into being an option. The second, I feel, might be an option for them to add in the future. The cosmetic options are great and all for what they are, since Glam is the end game, but having another option outside of the Raids and trails to gear up your character is very attractive, especially since it means we aren't running the same two dungeons in expert roulette over and over for poetics to fill in the gap.

As for the expedition zone, I honestly consider those more failures in time and effort then anything else, if mostly because by the end of the day, you pretty much need to join a Linkpearl/Discord server to get ANYTHING done in Eureka or Bozjda. When you've got content that's so removed from the rest of the game and doesn't have ease of access like the rest, it's probably just going to get ignored.

[Arlette]

The intense uhhh...if not hatred then at least dislike that some people have for the Island Sanctuary for existing confuses me a bit.

I don't really like it so I just...don't play it? And I dont feel like I've run out of things to do in the game by not doing it either. I haven't touched it since I hit max rank on the very first incarnation of it and haven't gone back there in any update. I haven't really noticed an absence of anything in favor of the Island Sanctuary either. If you had to force me to pick something under duress I'd say that there's not another Bozja or something but that's realllllly stretching it.

It's just one of the multiple things that I choose not to do because they don't interest me that the game offers, which I always feel is a positive compared to other MMORPGs that try to mandate that you do every single feature or you fall behind.

I'm sure there are criticisms of the system itself that are valid but pointing to its existence as a blemish on the game is just something I don't understand. Some people really love the Island Sanctuary and I'm happy for them, I have a friend who has meticulously figured every single thing out about it and she constantly is there tinkering around and good for her.

Same with Blue Mage, honestly. A lot of people have said they really like it but I tried it out, got to about 55, and then just stopped because I wasn't really enjoying it much. Masked Carnivale was fun for a little bit but its just not a feature that I personally enjoy. And even though it was updated yet again in 6.45, me not doing it doesn't feel like I'm missing out on things to do.

Also once again the .x5 patches are never advertised as big .x patches so I wasn't going into Tuesday expecting to log in to 5 different new things to do. Anybody who does either has never paid attention to how these patches work or are just being dishonest.

I got my new weapon (The Reaper scythe is absolutely sick btw), tried out the new Criterion dungeon for a bit (Feel kind of the same as IS/BLU with that system too tbh, I think @MsSideEye's suggestion is a good one and I agree with them) and then have been just doing the new crafting stuff and enjoying it.

It's just a very bizarre to see the exact same 'the sky is falling' on this subforum by the exact same 2-4 people every time anything comes out about the game.

[Grinning Serpent]

As for the expedition zone, I honestly consider those more failures in time and effort then anything else, if mostly because by the end of the day, you pretty much need to join a Linkpearl/Discord server to get ANYTHING done in Eureka or Bozjda. When you've got content that's so removed from the rest of the game and doesn't have ease of access like the rest, it's probably just going to get ignored.

I'm lukewarm on expedition zones (like you said, being limited to linkshell/external communication with them is a *huge* black mark against them in my book), but without them you can *really* tell how empty EW feels for players that want battle content that's outside the rigid dungeon-raid hierarchy. Blue Mage traditionally also assists here, but apparently they couldn't bother to support it worth a shit this time around - I know a lot of us were stoked for BLU SoS, and apparently BLU isn't allowed in there at all. Coding Diamondback to count as LB3 status was too much effort, I suppose (boss LB4 in there is instant death unless you specifically and explicitly have the tank LB3 buff up when the cast finishes, it completely ignores any mitigation effects.)

Criterion would have been that stopgap measure, easily repeatable midcore content with an optional hard mode (sort of like how Delubrum Reginae had the savage version) with carrots to chase. But criterion is arguably too hard for most players (it's somewhere between a difficult Ex and a mild Savage) to really enjoy, the savage mode is *actually challenging* (yay!) but without rewards worth pursuing, so the players you'd need to do that actually challenging content aren't going to waste their time in PF on it.

Similarly, Island Sanctuary could have been this expansion's Ishgard Restoration - something for crafters and gatherers to while their time away on. Not integrating it into the existing crafting and gathering systems was idiotic in the extreme, as was not allowing spaces for players to set out interior and exterior furnishings. FC rooms require an FC with a house, apartments are limited in quantity for some stupid reason, and houses... heh. Even Dynamis eventually sold out. Island Sanctuary would have been the obvious use-case to test true instanced housing, or at least test expanding it beyond apartments and FC rooms. And it also makes furniture a carrot players can chase, since otherwise there's literally no point to any of it if you don't have a place to put it.

I don't buy the FF16 excuse. The people who shifted to that project did so back in HW and SB, not during EW production. I don't know why Endwalker has felt like ultimate "safe mode" development but it's depressing. Hell, I don't need them to do anything different - you can straight up clone the release cycle of Shadowbringers and I'm pretty sure most people would be happy. Sure, you'd get accused of not being innovative, but who fucking cares? BLU mage got a pretty great patch with the lvl 70 update, Ishgard gave people a reason to level crafters and gatherers and offered buckets of rewards for engaging in it, Bozja was an improvement over Eureka in most respects and Delubrum Savage was a welcome surprise that ended up being way more fun than I think anyone expected to come from that zone.


I dunno. I know I'm really frustrated with them right now. I was quite literally planning on returning with the BLU patch, but after checking through datamining and the patch notes, I know it wouldn't be worth the effort. It's honestly a huge let-down for me. I'm *really* hoping that 7.0 is gonna knock our socks off.

I don't want to be "done" with FF14. I really do love the game and the setting, and I've had thousands of hours of fun socializing with other players there. But I can't justify playing a monthly fee for something that I might play for a few hours a month at most. And I know there's no friggin way they'll cut the subscription service model, or even implement "FF Tokens" or whatever.

[Wrecktangle]

A lot of the key talent who originally made ARR and Heavensward what they are have left.

Do you have a source for this statement? How do you know this so matter of a fact? Who are these key talent personnel and what did they do?

I've found the Endwalker expansion patches to be very lackluster. Most notably there are no difficult zones to spend a lot of time in like Eureka or Bozja. We get wellfare relic weapons that only cost tomestones, not even having to do FATEs. The Variant Dungeons are theoretically nice, but there are only two of them (one of them looks very unappealing), there is no moderate difficulty level, and no incentive to do them repeatedly. No Garlemald restoration. No side trials. The 5v5 PvP matches are nice in short bursts but there isn't depth and it does not provide lastingly longevity like WoW's RBGs or even GW2's rated 5v5s. So that just leaves raiding, and I dislike how FFXIV designs its raid boss fights, and I do not like how my jobs play at high end and there is no talent customization to remedy that. And the writing leave a lot to be desired.

Just out of curiosity, what DO you like?

[Arlette]

Of course Val has no proof. He's just making shit up, as usual, so he can use the absolute top tier most possibly hyperbole imaginable.

He seems to hate literally everything about the game but still constantly talks about it and plays it. I don't know a single thing he actually likes about the game.

He comes across as the dude on the WoW forums who was freaking out during the mass exodus of Shadowlands and screeching constantly about how bad the game people were moving over to was, while exposing that he had no idea wtf he was even talking about in the process while doing so.

I have no idea why him and a few others are so obsessed with this subforum for a game they clearly despite in every possible way. I don't even believe they're currently playing it at this point, honestly, with what they keep saying.

[zealo]

I've never understood why people seem to think you need to be on some discord to do anything in Eureka or Bozja, at it's absolute most that only really applies to BA and DRS, and both of those are a tiny fraction of the whole thing.

[Aucald]

Do you have a source for this statement? How do you know this so matter of a fact? Who are these key talent personnel and what did they do?

I was actually curious about this myself and was looking at the composition of Creative Business Unit 3 for Heavenward and later, but didn't really notice much difference in the core creative staff itself. Obviously some differences here and there, but the team seems to be a mostly stable roster.

[Ghost of Cow]

Criterion would have been that stopgap measure, easily repeatable midcore content with an optional hard mode (sort of like how Delubrum Reginae had the savage version) with carrots to chase. But criterion is arguably too hard for most players (it's somewhere between a difficult Ex and a mild Savage) to really enjoy, the savage mode is *actually challenging* (yay!) but without rewards worth pursuing, so the players you'd need to do that actually challenging content aren't going to waste their time in PF on it.

I kinda feel like XIV swings a little too far in the, "Don't 'force' people to do content." direction with the end result being that there ain't shit to get from a lot of things.

And as sad as it might be, the impetus for most people to do content at all is to get the shiny. Yes, content can also just be fun to do, but lets be honest here.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Do you have a source for this statement? How do you know this so matter of a fact? Who are these key talent personnel and what did they do?

Off of the top of my head, Kazutoyo Maehiro, the MSQ writer from ARR through Heavensward, and the tonal shift after is obvious. Hiroshi Takai, assistant director from ARR through HW. Lead game designer Nobuaki Komoto left after Stormblood. The lead battle content designer was replaced around ShB, the same time when the fights started being designed around one shot mechanics and everyone having to perfectly execute every mechanic or wipe with no in between and etc. There is also the statement from Yoshi-P on job design on how they replaced the healer main of the test team because they were too good at the game.

Just out of curiosity, what DO you like?

Occasionally logging in to do Eureka.

Bozja was an improvement over Eureka in most respects

Really? I wasn't a fan of how Bozja was designed around zerging from one skirmish to the next. They give so much EXP that there is no reason to be farming mobs. You only farmed regular (tier 3 and above) mobs in Bozja for clusters, during the first two weeks when you could make a lot of money off of selling the robot mount and the hairstyle on the market board. The zerg design means that there is no time to stop or chat. You're always either AoEing or you are rushing to the next skirmish spawn to tag in time. In Eureka, you mainly levelled up via mob farming, so it was much more relaxing to be able to go at your own pace, and people wait at FATEs spawns rather than immediately pulling. You had time to stop and chat, or to scroll through the internet in another forum, or walk away to go get food out of the microwave and not worry about having missed something. Racking up big kill chains was fun. Eureka's element system and mutations also makes you pay more attention to the mobs in the world. People are more social in Eureka and care more. If it looks like you're dying to mobs, a passerby will dismount and help you out. I don't see that happen in Bozja. Aesthetically Eureka is more pleasant to spend hundreds of hours in than Bozja, which were flat brown wastelands (Zadnor had slightly more fantasy elements going on but it was not enough, and it is still colorless and flat. And no, war a zone does not have to be drab and boring. Alterac Valley is a pretty nice place to chill in for a long time). Eureka's music is much better, not noisy and much more pleasant to listen to for a long time.

What Bozja did well was giving you Lost Actions at the start (the only form of character customization in the game), and having more raid content (as in WoW styled raids, ie not being teleported onto a boss platform with 7 other people, also not braindead easy like Alliance Raids you can queue for). Bozja raids contain the only novel raid encounters in the game, such as Dawon where a small party has to detach from the rest of the raid to go fight Lyon on another platform, or the encounter in Delubrum where you have to fight against chesspiece boss squad, or the penultimate fight of Dalriada where you have to fight two bosses at once.

[Arlette]

Ah of course the one stated thing he enjoys is the thing virtually everybody else was happy went away and was iterated on to become so much better lol

I couldn't have possibly picked a better answer for him.

The only think you like is a feature from 2018? Why are you even still playing the game lol, it's not being updated anymore, they moved onto iterating on that feature.

[Grinning Serpent]

I kinda feel like XIV swings a little too far in the, "Don't 'force' people to do content." direction with the end result being that there ain't shit to get from a lot of things.

And as sad as it might be, the impetus for most people to do content at all is to get the shiny. Yes, content can also just be fun to do, but lets be honest here.

It's an MMO. People need carrots to chase. Hell, people need them even in single player games. People want achievements to chase, skins to unlock, etc. Bozja and Eureka had plenty of carrots to chase. Criterion doesn't - so it's DOA. Similarly, people don't PvP once they unlock the level 25 mount or goodies, plus maybe however many crystals they need to buy glam sets. I think they need to be introducing new sets every patch, but at least they didn't completely ignore rewards like they did in ShB. I think the lack of a rating/achievement chase system for raids and such is also an issue - having a speedrun board or something that's publicly visible, like with deep dungeons (and like how WoW tracks M+ rating, for example) would officially integrate the unofficial parses into something that could encourage people to keep playing. Although, with how milquetoast raid design and class design are in EW, I don't think there's sufficient depth to really make something like that work.

It's probably being a doomer, but JP players apparently feel like it's rude/ungrateful to complain about content. I have a feeling that Square-Enix is going to go "well JP players are happy!" as an excuse to not feel pressured into upping their game. Are we going to have to see Square-Enix hung by their hubris like what happened to Blizzard? Because it worked pretty fucking well for Blizzard - Shadowlands had issues, but was overall much better than BfA and damned near everyone loves DF.

I still think they need to fundamentally redesign classes and emphasize class fantasy. Think of how fun and flavorful lost actions and blue mage are, particularly essences and such that let you bend and twist the traditional holy trinity design. Consolidate buttons in the main class toolkit (all combos consolidated, including "one way" combos such as Continuation turning into the various secondary swings), and take that saved hotbar space and introduce optional abilities. These would basically be MoP-style talents by any other name. Some would be passives, some would be new abilities, and *all* of them would be geared towards letting people do flavorful, cool things in dungeons and normals while not affecting Ex or above balance - maybe WHM can take a passive that triples Holy potency vs Undead, BLM's Freeze spell *actually freezes enemies*, and so on. Give us back all those old, cut actions that lit up after some criteria was met - you parried or dodged an attack, now you can hit this button to slap them for beeg damage. Simply disable these passives or extra skills in Ex, Savage, and Ultimate (personally I think Ultimate needs the PvP treatment where everyone has their stats and toolkit rigidly defined, to avoid power creep "ruining" them, but that's another discussion.)

I think you'd also want to tie this into a total open world revamp. Look at how Bozja handled FATEs (yeah whatever they weren't called FATEs but they were essentially the same thing) and take several pages of notes. Even keep Critical Engagements in the game - these would be part of those chained FATE things you see in some zones. Update PF or DF to automatically list when and where these are about to take place so that people can quickly find and join them if they're interested. Drastically increase XP rewards such that FATE farming would be roughly on par with grinding dungeons - perhaps a little slower.

I think they'd also do well to see about incorporating the treasures and such that have been an increasingly substantial part of WoW's open world since Legion. There's a lot of casual enjoyment to be had from running around and looking for treasures or picking up packs that contain a small amount of relevant currency and have a low chance of something extra.

[MsSideEye]

I've never understood why people seem to think you need to be on some discord to do anything in Eureka or Bozja, at it's absolute most that only really applies to BA and DRS, and both of those are a tiny fraction of the whole thing.

I mean, you COULD do Eureka and Bozja alone, but the grind that you'd get in there makes Vanilla WoW and Old School Runescape look tame by comparison. And the only reason I'd see most people wanting to go in there are for the Stormblood/Shadowbringer Relic weapons, both which if I remember correctly require you to go into their respective raids at least once. So, yeah, you're having to go and do discord/linkpearl to just get these done.

This is honestly the only real criticism I could offer FF14 right now with our current Relic weapons for Endwalker. One of the strengths of the older relics was the option to do different content to get the stuff you needed. You didn't want to grind fates in Bozja? Cool, you could do some of the ones in Heavensward for a less likely chance for them. With it being just a passive grind of tomestones, it feels like we're not really shooting for a goal, it's just 'oh, do I've got enough? Nice, lets upgrade our weapon!'.

To be fair, though, I can understand WHY they're doing tomestones, when you're also having to do Hildibrand (Which some people hate) AND with there being 14+ classes in the game, they aren't wanting to burn people out in grinding for all of them.

Ah of course the one stated thing he enjoys is the thing virtually everybody else was happy went away and was iterated on to become so much better lol

I couldn't have possibly picked a better answer for him.

The only think you like is a feature from 2018? Why are you even still playing the game lol, it's not being updated anymore, they moved onto iterating on that feature.

Let's be honest, Arlette, Val is the kind of person who vastly prefers the likes of Vanillia Wow and Everquest, where there was no story, where you had to grind up potions to even do just the latest dungeon, and maybe 3% of the playerbase will ever seen the final fight in the game. Now that's not to say it's a BAD thing, since there are some people who do enjoy the tedium and work it takes to do stuff like that, but it does make any of their opinions on things matter less when it's so grossly out of place compared to the rest of the playerbase and developers.

[zealo]

I mean, you COULD do Eureka and Bozja alone, but the grind that you'd get in there makes Vanilla WoW and Old School Runescape look tame by comparison. And the only reason I'd see most people wanting to go in there are for the Stormblood/Shadowbringer Relic weapons, both which if I remember correctly require you to go into their respective raids at least once. So, yeah, you're having to go and do discord/linkpearl to just get these done.

This is honestly the only real criticism I could offer FF14 right now with our current Relic weapons for Endwalker. One of the strengths of the older relics was the option to do different content to get the stuff you needed. You didn't want to grind fates in Bozja? Cool, you could do some of the ones in Heavensward for a less likely chance for them. With it being just a passive grind of tomestones, it feels like we're not really shooting for a goal, it's just 'oh, do I've got enough? Nice, lets upgrade our weapon!'.

To be fair, though, I can understand WHY they're doing tomestones, when you're also having to do Hildibrand (Which some people hate) AND with there being 14+ classes in the game, they aren't wanting to burn people out in grinding for all of them.

You remember wrong.

The only thing going into BA (besides an optional mount if you want that) there gets you for the relic and gear is increased elemental stats on the last step for continuing to do content inside of the zones themselves afterwards. If you don't want to do that, both the visuals and the stats on the relics and equipment itself for regular content is identical to the step before BA, and DRS has no relic "upgrade" like that at all for the weapons.

Besides, nobody ever said anything about doing things alone, but there's this thing called a chatbox with a shout channel people can use inside of the game itself to interact with other people in the zone you're in and group up with them that doesn't require any external communication tools.

If you want to grind for exp or crystals in there, use it. Cause god forbid there's content inside of an MMO that requires you to talk to other people right next to where you are in the game...

[Ghost of Cow]

Ah of course the one stated thing he enjoys is the thing virtually everybody else was happy went away and was iterated on to become so much better lol

I couldn't have possibly picked a better answer for him.

The only think you like is a feature from 2018? Why are you even still playing the game lol, it's not being updated anymore, they moved onto iterating on that feature.

So we went from, "You don't like anything, hater!" to "You like the wrong thing, dummy!"

Kinda feels more personal than anything at this point.

[Katchii]

I've never understood why people seem to think you need to be on some discord to do anything in Eureka or Bozja, at it's absolute most that only really applies to BA and DRS, and both of those are a tiny fraction of the whole thing.

In my experience those two things are really the only reason you'd "need" discord. Otherwise as you've already stated in a later post, just using the shout channel to join a random group that's already in the zone or start our own group works just fine and is how I did it all the time.