FFXIV Criticisms

[Fasruhdah]

Expansion is not available on amazon because square enix continues its practice of being an adversary towards its customers. Cannot use my discover card because too many 3rd party tool users were getting hacked and doing chargebacks. They got banned from multiple large payment processors. Cherry on top is that they required my phone number on their own store before they would process my payment. I decided to opt out for now; no thanks Jose'. How does the game expect to survive with antics like these? Square Enix is down 70% in profits from the prior year and I doubt the paid shills (which they really need to cut back on given their losses - but I bet the astroturf central Reddit loves them paychecks and under the table payments) and hardcore fans are going to keep the game afloat for another expansion. It feels like there is very little problem solving taking place at the developer end. I may wait to buy the expansion until I see something new and refreshing to try out in the game. I don't want to give them my phone number given their reputation with the payment processors.

[Tech614]

Square Enix is down 70% in profits from the prior year

Tell me you don't know how to read their financial report without telling me you don't know how to read their financial report.

Most of the profit loss was because they cancelled $140 million in projects. XIV had jack shit to do with this, nor is XIV going to make up a loss like that. It's just accounting for cancelling a bunch of unannounced shit all at once. That's more than 50% of the 70% if you wanted numbers on that for the record.

Like sure the MMO profits are also "down" but not 70% down and obviously they're down in the middle of EW lasting almost a full year longer than it should have. Their biggest issue outside of the cancelled projects is actually their mobile profits, not MMO and their AAA SP releases didn't do well enough to offset how bad their mobile division is tanking.

Also your discover card issue is a non issue since you wanted to use amazon, I assume you have access to amazon and guess what?! You can use amazon pay to pay for anything XIV related! Or where you just making a fake outrage post and didn't expect someone to call you on it?

[Fasruhdah]

Brother. You cannot buy subscriptions from amazon. Technically I could use amazon-pay or paypal, but both failed to go through the last time I tried (for subscription). They rarely work. It is a known issue for years (googlefu). Only non-debit Visa cards work. Using different methods is a pain to setup and a hassle. Should I thank SE for doing that because they are allergic to refunds?. Brother those projects were cancelled because their games are not up to speed with the current times, and gamers just do not enjoy playing them. Forspoken was universally disliked and XVI only sold 3 million copies at launch. Compare it to something like New World which sold 18 million copies at $50 each. That is the power of creativity and innovation. Square Enix handing cash to reddit mods creates this fantasy land where a game is critically acclaimed, but the game's total number of copies sold including all expansions 12 years later sit at 26 million; barely above New World's initial launch. Projects in the pipeline effect future guidance, if they saw anything other than abject failure in their projects they would not have scrapped them. The 70% loss was net profit loss. I think the only reason the company has not been acquired by something larger is because nobody sees a good future for it. Joining the microsoft family and xbox was a good idea though, could end up saving the company.

[Tech614]

Only non-debit Visa cards work.

Considering I have paid for a sub with a debit visa and a debit master card cool story bro, it's still false. Also never had paypal fail either for the record. I'm glad we're just making things up.

Nobody cares about your useless rant about other Square Enix projects. Last I checked this thread was not "Square Enix Criticisms". I don't know how you read my original post explaining how this shit has nothing to do with XIV and double down and bring it back up again?

[Skildar]

it is true that in France you cannot pay for subscription time because they have an issue with Carte Bleu system. The only exsting alternative is to buy Crista currency through amazon service. It is very badly explained by the assistance team that I have contacted. And I almost gave up on playing the game because of this.

A fix was announced as coming out in late July, despite the fact that the latest expansion is getting released before this date.

Square Enix is not the only one having an issue with Visa and Carte Bleu but clearly is the only publisher that didn't push for a fix sooner or had any clear idea how to prevent the issue from messing up payment for their player base.

[Skepticalpeepo]

[Important][NA] An Issue with Visa Debit Card Transactions (May 1) lodestone post

/ffxiv/threads/497804-Unable-to-use-either-of-my-credit-cards-on-Mogstation-SE-website-%28visa-mastercard%29 official forums

[zealo]

Considering I have paid for a sub with a debit visa and a debit master card cool story bro, it's still false. Also never had paypal fail either for the record. I'm glad we're just making things up.

Nobody cares about your useless rant about other Square Enix projects. Last I checked this thread was not "Square Enix Criticisms". I don't know how you read my original post explaining how this shit has nothing to do with XIV and double down and bring it back up again?

Depends on when you did. If you kept a sub rolling it didn't need to re-authenticate itself to keep drawing money for game time, but if you tried to register a new Visa Debit after they did their payment processor change back in April there have been substantial issues with exactly that for many people, the fix to which Square Enix says won't be rolled out until sometime in July.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...2906d71c19064c
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5bdd7d4a041d0e

[Tech614]

Depends on when you did. If you kept a sub rolling it didn't need to re-authenticate itself to keep drawing money for game time, but if you tried to register a new Visa Debit after they did their payment processor change back in April there have been substantial issues with exactly that for many people, the fix to which Square Enix says won't be rolled out until sometime in July.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...2906d71c19064c
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5bdd7d4a041d0e

So attach card to amazon or paypal and buy crysta with either of those like the article says. Or buy gametime on amazon or square enix store etc.

Literal non issue. We're digging real hard to res this thread if this is the current criticism.

[Skildar]

Literal non issue.

I'm pretty sure the financial team at Square Enix does not share your opinion as it took me a couple of hours (as a new player discovering the FF xiv websites, and had no idea where to find help) before I could find a working solution and all the error message tells you on the mogstation is that your credit card is unavailable (which basically means nothing). I pushed through and managed to find a working solution, I can bet you that a lot of players just gave up. When you have this payment issue existing at the same time you're releasing a new expansion, you're shooting yourself in the foot pretty hard.

[zealo]

I'm pretty sure the financial team at Square Enix does not share your opinion as it took me a couple of hours (as a new player discovering the FF xiv websites, and had no idea where to find help) before I could find a working solution and all the error message tells you on the mogstation is that your credit card is unavailable (which basically means nothing). I pushed through and managed to find a working solution, I can bet you that a lot of players just gave up. When you have this payment issue existing at the same time you're releasing a new expansion, you're shooting yourself in the foot pretty hard.

That in itself were even a separate issue to the Debit one in the US

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...f8bbe58cd4cbea

Following up on the feedback from our customers, we are pleased to announce that we will be implementing adjustments to our payment options which will once again enable CB Visa/Mastercard as an option for our French customers.
The adjustments are currently targeted for release in July 2024, and we will provide a more specific date as we move closer to implementation.

In the meantime, we would like to take this opportunity to remind customers that other payment options are available, such as Crysta (which can be purchased via Amazon Pay or PayPal), Amazon Pay (for online store purchases), or game time codes available from various online retailers, including the Square Enix Store.

We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience this issue has caused and appreciate your patience as the teams work to test and implement the required adjustments.

So yeah, if you're in France and tried to use a CB french Visa, things should hopefully improve soon, but that's on the same schedule as that whole NA issue seemingly for a fix.

[Byleth]

I get that some people are having issues. But I added my Visa debit no problem a week ago.

Back to the healer stuff though. This strike is a total non-issue in Oceania. I mentioned it to a few healer FC buds last night and they laughed their assess off.

[Skepticalpeepo]

[Important]Important Notice About Purchases and Subscriptions

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...b33ab5011e7752


Furthermore, some of the existing payment methods will no longer be available following the change. While we hope to reintroduce some of the discontinued payment methods over time, we recommend considering alternate payment methods in the meantime. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please see below for affected payment methods.

Unavailable Payment Methods: Discover, JCB, Carte Bleue, SEPA (Sofort)
Available Payment Methods: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Amazon Pay, Paysafecard

[Polgara]

I get that some people are having issues. But I added my Visa debit no problem a week ago.

Back to the healer stuff though. This strike is a total non-issue in Oceania. I mentioned it to a few healer FC buds last night and they laughed their assess off.

I struggle to comprehend the people who are upset roulette content isn't hard enough for healers, but don't want to engage in harder content. There is some frustrations in the DPS rotation of healers being a bit too braindead and easy, but that's not healer optimization and challenge, it's low piety 0 heal gcd optimizations. I dunno, roulette content is for story enjoyers, and healers are never REALLY going to be hard challenged in that content, neither are tanks nor dps (half the time I just cop avoidable mechanics just for uptime because even 1 stack of twice/thrice come ruin is nothing).

[Byleth]

There is some frustrations in the DPS rotation of healers being a bit too braindead and easy, but that's not healer optimization and challenge

I agree also that healer could use an extra DPS button. But that's it. A singular button. The last thing I want to be worrying about when I'm dodging everything and the kitchen sink in Savage while keeping slow ass lazy DPS* alive is a DPS rotation.

As it is, coming back to the game after a break, I'm struggling enough to remember of the mechanics and interactions of the healing spells.

*I realize of course, that these are specific people, not everyone in general. There are many excellent DPS.

[Grinning Serpent]

Depends on when you did. If you kept a sub rolling it didn't need to re-authenticate itself to keep drawing money for game time, but if you tried to register a new Visa Debit after they did their payment processor change back in April there have been substantial issues with exactly that for many people, the fix to which Square Enix says won't be rolled out until sometime in July.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...2906d71c19064c
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5bdd7d4a041d0e

Correct. I couldn't use either of my cards (both of which had been used for subscriptions in the past) when I came back. I ended up being able to get Steam to process the subscription fee for me.

SE's back-end and websites have been dogwater for like a decade at this point. But unless the JP community pitches enough of a fit about them (and they won't), SE ain't gonna care. Especially since that stuff is probably outside the wheelhouse of CBU3 in any case, and Yoshida is only a single voice on the board.

- - - Updated - - -

I agree also that healer could use an extra DPS button. But that's it. A singular button. The last thing I want to be worrying about when I'm dodging everything and the kitchen sink in Savage while keeping slow ass lazy DPS* alive is a DPS rotation.

As it is, coming back to the game after a break, I'm struggling enough to remember of the mechanics and interactions of the healing spells.

*I realize of course, that these are specific people, not everyone in general. There are many excellent DPS.

The problem is that healers are fun during prog and horribly dull during reclears. You have so many buttons to use, and will use almost all of them (sometimes even cure 2!) during prog when people are fucking up and *especially* if you are progging blind and don't have reliable strats to copy. And then you get some gear, and you have a solid grasp of the strats, and you're just hitting your healing oGCD's at the scripted times while mindlessly mashing 1, tapping 2 every 30 seconds, and every now and then hitting 3 (your toxikon/ED/blood lily etc button.)

It's why I'm firm that SE needs to pick a direction and start moving. If they want healers to spend more time healing, then drastically increase damage in non-MSQ content - probably in frequency, because raidwides already hit extremely hard on min ilvl as it is (to the point they will definitely kill range, healers, and casters if not properly mitted.) Make bosses just slap the shit out of tanks like Bahamut does in t13. Add weaker raidwides that come out frequently between the big ones and other major mechanics. Whatever. In this sense, healers really do need to optimize to get as many of their boring 1's in as possible, instead of the 1's being essentially free with gear and practice.

The other direction would mean healing doesn't change much. Damage continues to be primarily dealt with oGCD's and maybe a succor or medica 2 here or there for safety and comfort. In exchange, remove the essentially useless GCD healing buttons - every healer gets a cure 2/adlo and a medica 2/succor button for emergencies and that's it. Replace these deleted buttons with theme-appropriate DPS buttons (extra dots and dot management tools for SCH, some water or earth themed spells for WHM, etc.) You could have some classes be about having a basic filler rotation like RDM or BLM has, while others might only gain 1 filler button and instead gain a couple of oGCD's to juggle. Lots of options here. I'd also have some of these new buttons (the oGCD's or the combo "finisher" buttons, or maybe something that has a per-tick proc chance on your dots, etc) flash some healing to the party in some form as well (SCH, who would have 2 100% dots and maybe a 3rd dot on a cooldown, might have a proc that increases your fairy's next few Embrace/Fey Union/etc spells have increased potency for example) to make up for the loss of niche buttons like Cure 3. In the case of WHM, I'd also add traits to continually upgrade Cure to Cure 2, Cure 3, and maybe eventually Cure 4 simply because having flashier and more potent spells feels cool.

While I'm definitely in the Sylphie camp (I play a healer to heal!), I think the second option would appeal to more players. But either way, SE needs to shit or get off the pot. In general, I would want an expanded healer DPS rotation to be a little bit less complicated than tank rotations (not that tank rotations are complicated) since the healer role during prog and/or when playing with idiots is inevitably going to be a bit busier than the tank role.

[Byleth]

The problem is that healers are fun during prog and horribly dull during reclears.

You 100% nailed the problem with your opening line. And I agree, and I'm fine with that. It's as it should be.

The solution isn't in catering to the top end players at the expense of the masses (i.e. WoW's chosen path), but it's instead to give us more flexibility in raid composition. Healing is boring with 2 healers on reclears? Bring 1 and add a DPS. At least that's my take.

As I mentioned earlier though, Healers would benefit both flavorwise and mechanically from having an extra DPS button, or I could maybe stretch that to two.

[Grinning Serpent]

You 100% nailed the problem with your opening line. And I agree, and I'm fine with that. It's as it should be.

The solution isn't in catering to the top end players at the expense of the masses (i.e. WoW's chosen path), but it's instead to give us more flexibility in raid composition. Healing is boring with 2 healers on reclears? Bring 1 and add a DPS. At least that's my take.

As I mentioned earlier though, Healers would benefit both flavorwise and mechanically from having an extra DPS button, or I could maybe stretch that to two.

WoW can handle both "cater to the sweats" and "keep things accessible to the casuals" simultaneously and has done very well in DF with it, and people seem excited about more of the same in TWW. So I don't accept that SE couldn't handle it, too.

The skill floor for XIV is *extremely* low, by design. It's a single player focused story experience and they want absolutely anyone and everyone with basically any capability to understand and act on game systems to be able to experience the story, and that includes normal tier content. This means that, as long as it's flashy and easy enough to push buttons, you have a *large* amount of design space to work with and you can likely increase the ceiling without affecting the floor very much. Supposedly there's only four people (in total) working on class design/balancing as of EW? I wasn't able to find direct confirmation, so take it with a grain of salt. But if that's accurate, and with due respect to Yoshida, that's just straight up mismanagement and bad direction. We see through BLU and PvP (though the lvl 80 update for BLU was a bit anemic compared to 70) that they are not short on creativity.

Yet classes are so boring and stale. It's ridiculous, and particularly that it takes so long for any changes or updates to classes to happen. Why did it take them until 6.1 to fix WHM, when everyone with a calculator knew WHM was fucked with the 6.0 changes? (Afflatus Misery was a straight DPS loss with the changes to Glare cast time and potency, so it resulted in WHMs refusing to use lilies/blood lily because it was a significant loss every time you did.) That's something that should have been on the first or second .xx patch unless it could be hotfixed (in which case the patch would just update the tooltip to be correct.)

Anyway, rant aside, the issue with "drop a healer and gain a DPS" is that XIV's gearing system is still very hostile to gearing alt classes with the aggressive tomestone cap and the horribly dumb coffer system. Additionally, most raid mechanics in the past several years are role-bucketed, meaning they target players of a specific role regardless of other information (such as "stacks will always target healers"), and removing one of those guarantees can cause issues because normal groups don't have diamondback, avail, or other BLU tools for getting around "group of 8 DPS". For example, if you replace a healer and there's a mechanic that places an untelegraphed stack marker on both healers after a mechanic (e12s has some of these), at least one person is just dead no matter what. You could make sure everyone is spread out while a few stack with the one healer, but there's no guarantee that someone hugging the healer doesn't also have a stack marker. T2 dying while everyone else is up is your absolute best case scenario here, and that's still pretty bad.

XIV doesn't and probably can't have WoW's flexibility with raid design, group makeup, etc. Not without moving from 8 players to 16 or 24 or something. (Extreme alliance raids could be fun, though!)

[Fasruhdah]

I find it ironic that the first thing I hear from my friend about the expansion is that they now require you to waive your right to a refund when you install the new expansion. Imagine a company having this little faith in their own product, or this little respect or dignity for their customers. They went through all these hoops just to reduce refunds. There are mmorpg these days with an insane amount of content yet they are completely free to play, or sometimes at a fraction of the cost that we pay per year for FFXIV. And their store items cost way less too. If they keep lining reddit's pocket with cash then I am sure the company will remain the "good guy company" for now regardless of these indignations.

Another complaint of the day is that the cross server queue had no way to cancel it. So if you wanted to think about transferring server in order to get into the game or to reduce your lag, it was total russian roulette where you could get stuck in the cross server and bar yourself from any duty content. And if you were to log off and try cancelling the queue that way then you would end up in the server queue lol.

[Arlette]

I find it ironic that the first thing I hear from my friend about the expansion is that they now require you to waive your right to a refund when you install the new expansion. Imagine a company having this little faith in their own product, or this little respect or dignity for their customers. They went through all these hoops just to reduce refunds. There are mmorpg these days with an insane amount of content yet they are completely free to play, or sometimes at a fraction of the cost that we pay per year for FFXIV. And their store items cost way less too. If they keep lining reddit's pocket with cash then I am sure the company will remain the "good guy company" for now regardless of these indignations.

Another complaint of the day is that the cross server queue had no way to cancel it. So if you wanted to think about transferring server in order to get into the game or to reduce your lag, it was total russian roulette where you could get stuck in the cross server and bar yourself from any duty content. And if you were to log off and try cancelling the queue that way then you would end up in the server queue lol.

You seem to hear a lot of things from your 'friend' who is making some really obscure, almost always untrue, complaint about something that you then spiral off into extrapolating into a game-breaking issue just to work yourself up into a tizzy to start commenting on the quality of Square Enix and how it views its product or audience of a game.

Also really? Square Enix is paying "Reddit" (Whomever that nebulous group of people even is in this charge) to only post good PR on their website?

- - - Updated - - -

There are mmorpg these days with an insane amount of content yet they are completely free to play, or sometimes at a fraction of the cost that we pay per year for FFXIV.

Here's a suggestion then: Go play those.

Because your entire post history, as short as it is for a totally new account, indicates that you seem to despise every part of the game.

[Fasruhdah]

Brother. How many times you bring up my post history. You shall not compel me to post things my heart does not desire. Duality is not my domain. As a lurker I had a tough time beating the reply requirement already it took me days to get past that. Google is your best friend..Okay maybe this time I will do it one last time okay! gosh dangit. I feeling lazy but I will do it for the peoples! *braveheart*

https://www.reddit.com/r/SquareEnix/...ping_up_for_a/

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comm...e_ad_campaign/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidGami...fall_this_low/

https://www.reddit.com/r/FFVIIEverCr...ombarded_with/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...fxiv_before_i/

https://www.reddit.com/r/dragonquest..._xi_on_reddit/

I have a suggestion. Let people criticize in "FFXIV criticisms" thread or google first before you come out swinging.