[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[Graeham]

My lack of motivation (and yours IMO) definitely stems from boredom. In your case you're not bored of the game, but moreso the people in it, and I'm bored of the content available to me.

You're right. Upon reflection...I ended up having a discussion with my partner and we realised we're not actually enjoying the game all that much these days. So we decided to take a break from FF14 for a while.

[Wrecktangle]

Got all 4 of the roles leveled and completed the role stories and the bonus one you get at the end. Lost all desire to log in and play. I have no desire to play the Savage content, grind tomes or play through the raid over and over for gear that won't matter next patch anyway. With no additional story content to consume there's really nothing keeping me interested in playing.

Same thing in WoW, completed Part 2 of BfA pathfinder last night and immediately logged off. The thought of leveling another class is not appealing at all, even starting from 110 (which is where a lot of my characters are) because the heirloom ilevel jump doesn't happen until 111 so 110-111 is a HUGE headache on most classes, after that it's a cakewalk but it's still content I've already seen with no "ending" to speak of...I'll just get the class to 120 and...stop? No point IMO. The classes I enjoy playing are already 120.

I've been chipping away at my huge back log of games. Currently working through my free game library from PS Plus with Tomb Raider and Deus Ex Mankind Divided first... we'll see where it goes from there.

Sympathize. All my WoW buddies are like come play classic with us and I'm like dudes, listen I was there in 2004. It was a fantastic time and I enjoyed nearly every second of it back then, but classic isn't better from a gameplay or functionality standpoint and the "mystery" is long gone. Maybe if it was perfectly stable with no queues and I had literally nothing else to do and it was dead of winter I'd play it out of boredom, but that's it.

That's kinda how I am now.

Back when I cared a lot about being the big wig top dog raider sitting on top of the server rolling around in loot and achievements and stuff, that was an easy goal to focus on so I never really questioned why I was doing things.

Now I resub to an MMO and do stuff without really knowing why I'm doing it. Oh, sure, I level stuff up because I want to "have" classes at 80, or I just want to try different classes to see how they play and whatnot. And I like how XIV does story quests and such, so I always go through those. But I'm never really sure why I'm doing most of it, so I generally finish up a few short term goals and then unsub again and rotate to another MMO.

I'm quickly reaching that point in XIV (Finished MSQ, close to having a few 80s of classes I want, broke 100 million gil) so who knows what I'll do next. :O

I like the feeling of MMOs and the social collaboration. Very few games offer an engaging cooperative PVE experience (many offer engaging PVP) which is why I like MMOs. I love my PVP games too though.

You're right. Upon reflection...I ended up having a discussion with my partner and we realised we're not actually enjoying the game all that much these days. So we decided to take a break from FF14 for a while.

Oof. I haven't unsubbed yet, but it's likely coming soon.

[Graeham]

Oof. I haven't unsubbed yet, but it's likely coming soon.

It's a combination of factors for me. I'll be keeping an eye out to see what 5.1 brings but ever since late Stormblood a lot of the things I've been looking forward to have either been a case of 'bait and switch', extremely limited or just dismissed outright by the development team.

[Katchii]

Sympathize. All my WoW buddies are like come play classic with us and I'm like dudes, listen I was there in 2004. It was a fantastic time and I enjoyed nearly every second of it back then, but classic isn't better from a gameplay or functionality standpoint and the "mystery" is long gone. Maybe if it was perfectly stable with no queues and I had literally nothing else to do and it was dead of winter I'd play it out of boredom, but that's it.

I'll play Classic in a few weeks after all of the excitement settles down and the starting zones aren't jam packed full of people. Made a couple characters the other day after a relatively short queue (10 minutes), started playying and saw everything dead and people EVERYWHERE and had flashbacks to TBC launch and the Blood Elf starting zone.... ha was not an enjoyable experience for me.

I like the feeling of MMOs and the social collaboration. Very few games offer an engaging cooperative PVE experience (many offer engaging PVP) which is why I like MMOs. I love my PVP games too though.

I enjoy that too, bu my main draw is the sheer amount of content there is on offer most of the time. After that content is consumed though, there's just nothing there....but that's the same as any other game.

You're right. Upon reflection...I ended up having a discussion with my partner and we realised we're not actually enjoying the game all that much these days. So we decided to take a break from FF14 for a while.

It's a combination of factors for me. I'll be keeping an eye out to see what 5.1 brings but ever since late Stormblood a lot of the things I've been looking forward to have either been a case of 'bait and switch', extremely limited or just dismissed outright by the development team.

Nothing wrong with that. I wish I realized or decided it sooner that just because you subbed doesn't mean you have to play. Better to walk away when you're not having fun than to stay playing too long past that point and end up resenting the game.

[Rogalicus]

Nothing wrong with that. I wish I realized or decided it sooner that just because you subbed doesn't mean you have to play. Better to walk away when you're not having fun than to stay playing too long past that point and end up resenting the game.

It probably means that I shouldn't play at all, because I struggle to find anything to do even within month of sub.

[blackblade]

That sounds exactly like me! Get Heat Blast, think "Aw, screw this, another spammy burst window!"

But if you kept going and enjoyed it after thinking that, then perhaps I might as well. Might as well keep goin'.

Reassembled + Drill is probably the most satisfying combo in the game.

[ExiHext]

Reassembled + Drill is probably the most satisfying combo in the game.

Abso-effing-lutely!

[Katchii]

It probably means that I shouldn't play at all, because I struggle to find anything to do even within month of sub.

That's completely fine, I usually consume all of the major content that I care about in a new expansion within the first few months. From that point on it's whatever new features are added in a patch. Typically it's just the story, but sometimes it's other stuff like PotD or HoH..even Eureka kept me interested for a period of time.

I can see how if you're a somewhat avid player how you could easily cruise through the new stuff in a couple weeks. Even then, ~$15 is worth that to me. That's a pretty large number of hours of entertainment for just ~$15. But that's all it is; entertainment. If you're not entertained, don't stick around, go find something else to do. If you're not entertained/ having fun with your time in-game then you're doing something wrong, or not doing it right. It's a game...if it doesn't feel like one, IMO it's time to move on.

[Dugna]

SAM is almost lvl 77 and, its the only job so far i've lvld in 70-80 bracket where its just boring its visually boring and everything also, like it hits hard at times and such but doesn't seem much was added at all.

[Graeham]

Nothing wrong with that. I wish I realized or decided it sooner that just because you subbed doesn't mean you have to play. Better to walk away when you're not having fun than to stay playing too long past that point and end up resenting the game.

Yeah, it took me a while to make peace with such an approach but I think I'll avoid logging on until my motivation returns. I've done the latest seasonal event so it's not as if I'll be missing out on anything that I can't obtain/catch up on later.

[threads]

Thought i was the only one that was getting insanely bored after the first monthish. Got bored of leveling alts, then got bored of savage, now i don't really want to even cap tomes. Kind of missing a big time sink like eureka, even though I know alot of people hated it. Just kind of over the weekly boss/tome grind that I've been doing since ARR, I'm more interested in the story now. Been taking a break playing classic wow a bit and waiting on 5.1.

[GreenJesus]

She isn't wrong though. I have yet to meet an MMO bossfight that
a) can't be simplified through gear
b) is challenging on a personal level

The difficulty always comes from getting people to do it in concert. Individually, after a few pulls, you know what to do and then start waiting for the others to catch up / random mistake chance to be low enough for a kill.

Mythic Argus or Mythic ghuun (even though I hated this fight)

[Granyala]

Thought i was the only one that was getting insanely bored after the first monthish. Got bored of leveling alts, then got bored of savage, now i don't really want to even cap tomes. Kind of missing a big time sink like eureka, even though I know alot of people hated it. Just kind of over the weekly boss/tome grind that I've been doing since ARR, I'm more interested in the story now. Been taking a break playing classic wow a bit and waiting on 5.1.

Pretty much how I feel. I casually dabble a bit in savage with my group (more due to me liking to play with them than being interested in the bosses) but apart from that Hamster wheel MMO grinds are no longer alluring to me.
Guess 12 years of various MMOs can change ones perspective a bit.

[Baconeggcheese]

Reassembled + Drill is probably the most satisfying combo in the game.

I just wish they'd bake reassembled into drill though, one of those examples of bloat for bloats sake. Drill is a very satisfying button to press though.

Thought i was the only one that was getting insanely bored after the first monthish. Got bored of leveling alts, then got bored of savage, now i don't really want to even cap tomes. Kind of missing a big time sink like eureka, even though I know alot of people hated it. Just kind of over the weekly boss/tome grind that I've been doing since ARR, I'm more interested in the story now. Been taking a break playing classic wow a bit and waiting on 5.1.

I'm still working my way through stormblood MSQ but I already have a feeling that I'm not going to have much motivation to play once I run out of MSQ. The class design in this game is shallow and repetitive, the end game aspirational content is light, there's just not a lot of meaty content to sink your teeth into. I don't really see whats meant to keep me going besides leveling more jobs but frankly that's not fun at all with the way current systems are designed.

I guess I don't really mind that though, don't need a single game to occupy all of my time forever. Perfectly fine getting what I'm going to get out of it and then putting it down for a while and catching up on other things.

[ExiHext]

I just wish they'd bake reassembled into drill though, one of those examples of bloat for bloats sake. Drill is a very satisfying button to press though.

Same with DRG's Life Surge, could be baked into Full Thrust. I'm sure there are more examples. Although I have to say, in AoE situations I tend to use Reassemble with Spread Shot.

[blackpink]

I'm still working my way through stormblood MSQ but I already have a feeling that I'm not going to have much motivation to play once I run out of MSQ. The class design in this game is shallow and repetitive, the end game aspirational content is light, there's just not a lot of meaty content to sink your teeth into. I don't really see whats meant to keep me going besides leveling more jobs but frankly that's not fun at all with the way current systems are designed.

I guess I don't really mind that though, don't need a single game to occupy all of my time forever. Perfectly fine getting what I'm going to get out of it and then putting it down for a while and catching up on other things.

I mean the entire point of mmos is to have fun playing with other people. It's never been about the content.

[Baconeggcheese]

Indeed, I just keep coming back to job design as my big issue with...well, everything.

That was exactly what happened to me that ultimately made me quit WoW. I did not at all enjoy what they did to class design in legion to the point where it was ruining the rest of the game for me, it just took waaaaay too long for me to accept it.

With this game, it already comes out the box with a lot of the exact same issues. I swear someone inside blizzard was playing FF14 and thought it would be a good idea to move in this direction. Its odd, every time I talk to people about it even in this thread they seem to just enjoy that there's however many buttons in the rotation. Like they enjoy the bloat for bloats sake even though the rotations are simple, there's not a shred of agency, and homogenization is rampant. It honestly reminds me a lot of systems in PoE right. PoE has all these systems that are very convoluted and bloated but very simple when you start to learn about them and people seem to confuse that with complexity and depth.

I see that same thing with job design in this game, people will list out a rotation for a job and because there's so much bloat it sounds like its complicated since there's all these different names and interactions... but when you actually go to execute it the next button you need to press lights up the majority of the time and there's no thought at all to what you're doing. So much of it could be consolidated and there'd be little to no difference in game play.

Its funny, pvp already does this to some degree. I've been saying that they could easily make these combos into rotating buttons like GW2 and then I pvp on a machinist and there it is, the 3 button combo is a single rotating button. I had almost the entire machinist kit and I barely had anything on my bars because they just consolidated everything.

The worst thing is that there's no hope of things changing for the better any time soon. WoW's making this mistake too by not changing much of anything these last 2 xpacs. There's no hope to cling to that this thing that drags the game play down for this class might improve in a patch or two because apparently they're just doing minor numbers tweaks for the most part. Looking at FF14 they apparently barely change much of anything mechanically ever.


But yeah... if not for me enjoying the story and all that I'd probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere in the game.

I mean the entire point of mmos is to have fun playing with other people. It's never been about the content.

The point is whatever you want it to be. There's a segment of every mmo's playerbase that refuses to play with others and wants a purely solo experience. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people ask for this game alone if they can enjoy it solo. People play for all sorts of different reasons, that's really the point.. you can play it however you want to. I played WoW to hardcore raid for years in one of the top guilds in the US, when I'd talk with other people they were basically playing a different game with how differently we experienced it.

Also its a video game, they're all about the content.

[Baconeggcheese]

That's what so sad for me. I love the setting, the characters, the story. The world is a visual and auditory feast. Encounters ARE fun, such as they are. It's just the core gameplay and such that really drags, it seems.

Yeah... and the worst part about that is it looks like there's basically 0 hope of that changing ever.

[Graeham]

I must be the odd one out, since very little of FFXIV's story is impressing me lately. It has the illusion of nuance, though the writers never seem to actually commit to it other than to use cheap emotional manipulation to make players feel bad for the antagonists as sad music plays during their demise. As for the protagonists? Their hypocrisy is never held to the same standards as that which they hold their enemies to and they're never at any risk of meaningful injury/death. Other than those throwaway secondary characters temporarily elevated to importance.

[Granyala]

Their hypocrisy is never held to the same standards as that which they hold their enemies to and they're never at any risk of meaningful injury/death.

I don't know. I think the game does highlight our shortcomings.
As for dying: well yeah obviously. If we died we wouldn't have a game to play, so naturally our characters have plot armor.