>get first ever warning for housing demolition
>login just for christmas event
>fc all offline for weeks
>even Limsa is empty but for the gil seller bots
>go to christmas event location in gridania and nobody is there
>try queing for roullettes, nothing
>party finder just bot nightclub posts
>housing wards are half demolished and empty plots
I have been subscribed to FFXIV every day for over ten years now. I am not exaggerating to say i've never seen the game as empty as it is now. While i don't doubt most will be back day one of Dawntrail to make queue's a nightmare as usual i've never seen an expansion struggle to keep people. Hell the night before Endwalker people were still packed in Bozja doing relic shit. Is it possible caving to the complainers who got filtered by Delubrum Reginae and putting in Island Sanctuary instead was really that catastrophic a design choice when everything else was business as usual? Like some were expected to jump off with the end of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark story but 6.0 rolled credits on that story two years ago, its the people who kept going that have vanished in the last two months.
Whats your take on it? too many little let downs like the relic currency dump, no bozja, island letdowns an so on all at once just making people burn out or lose interest or what?
There was a spike a while back where everyone flooded to XIV for whatever reasons, they added more servers / worlds, then the hype died and the population went back to normal - but with more worlds.
It was asmongold unironically
People are disgusting.
>asmogold
who cares about some shitty youtube reactor
yes but he's a streamer and he has thousands of viewers, so yes who cares about some shitty youtube reactor but he still has a following and thats why things happened.
Millions of people do.
Thats why there was a spike in popularity for FF14 to begin with.
FF14 didnt suddently get amazingly better one day its just that a streamer played it so all his fans flooded the game and then when he left they left with him for whatever other game hes playing right now.
It didn't suddenly get more popular one day when he played either. It was already on an upward trend when he joined. He quit way before the release of the expansion, didn't even finish Stormblood. He played on the NA datacenter which doesn't explain the expansion in other regions. How are you going to play with your boy Asmongold if you're in the wrong datacenter? Point is he was a bump that hasn't been relevant to the game in years.
I just wanted to say that I hate eceleb israelitetubers and grifter streamer homosexuals
Thank you
He played it in the summer of 2021 for a few months until his mom died. His streamer friends played too but all quit, and the one that played the longest quit content creation after getting charged with rape. Only the rapist actually got to Endwalker but quit shortly after. I doubt any of them had any impact on FFXIV over the last year or two.
No it wasn't.
BfA was a terrible extension and players were sick of it at the end. They started looking at other MMOs and FFXIV shills were very loud.
Asmon played it a few months after the hype started because his chat kept pestering him about it. By the time he started playing half of his viewers were already on it and the rest hated it.
>XIV for whatever reasons
The reason was that Asmongold quit WoW for FF14 so all his fans quit with him and went to FF14 but he eventually went back to WoW and so did his fans.
>Is it possible caving to the complainers who got filtered by Delubrum Reginae and putting in Island Sanctuary instead was really that catastrophic a design choice
Yes-
-but
>when everything else was business as usual?
Nope. Not really business as usual.
The replacements for activities this expansion are largely solo or instanced based. Even on the business as usual front, the trials were integrated into the MSQ, the design teams for raids have shuffled around which is how we got the snoozefest alliance raids that dropped in difficulty again.
Hildy doesn't even have a piece of battle content yet.
Variant & Criterion are some group content pieces, but variant can be soloed, is soloed and dead in PF and crtierion dies off too and sits with savage/ulti. They also designed fights around being soloable and with no tank.
On the PVP side we got CC but we've got a worse version of shatter and we're still missing a map.
The closest thing to business as usual this expansion is EO, which is the same flawed deep dungeon, again.
Then there's something else to consider alongside this
They changed patch length and they lagged. So you have longer to do these mostly solo activities with the rewards systems not really changing.
This is a raid log expansion. Login, do your weeklies, get a token from alliance/normal raid and dip for another week. If you don't even get on that gear treadmill or are ignoring the relic then there's even less for you.
BOOBA!
Endwalker just doesn't have anything to retain interest once you reach level cap and beat the story. Stormblood had the four Eureka zones that could keep you occupied for a year, and Shadowbringers had the two Bozja zones that could keep you occupied for months, but Endwalker has no such endgame grind zones to progress through. So I only logged in on patch day to check out the story and that was it, but the story has become so mediocre I haven't even bothered to check out the 6.5 story yet. Only reason I'm still subbed is because I fell into the housing trap and don't want to lose my house and have to spend another afternoon having to move hundreds of items across retainer inventories and glitching decorations up into the air. Also looks like the next expansion won't have any endgame grind zones either so I'm seriously considering just unsubbing altogether and wait until Yoshi-P decides to add in real content again.
In the meantime, I resubbed to WoW earlier this year and had a blast progressing through mythic+. Not only did I reach 2,000 rating and get my first every mythic keystone mount, I went further and got 2,500 rating and got keystone hero. Also got a vicious saddle mount from rated battlegrounds.
And there's roughly the same stuff listed again.
On that subject of soloing and playing other games.
XIV became more soloable but I don't think that's it's only thing. Yeah they dumbed down content for it but it's the activities are all spinning out to being solo focused atm.
With XIV you rush rush rush to endgame to not get spoiled & unlock everything and that's it. It's back to old expansions to do what you liked and if you already did the trials, normal raids, crafting etc along the way then you're onto timegated activities and then nothing.
XI is very soloable but there's no big rush to endgame, you're not going to get spoiled on the stories or quests, you get to unlock things as yo go. You can do expansions out of order for missions.
There is an endgame there that's limited but you know what you're getting in terms of updates & stuff to do at endgame.
That games more about the journey (even if mostly solo). It wastes your time and is happy to do so.
XIV is all about the destination. Does that even really work when you've boiled the game down to soloing matchmade lobbies to fund a currency for a gear treadmill?
>XIV is all about the destination. Does that even really work when you've boiled the game down to soloing matchmade lobbies to fund a currency for a gear treadmill?
I loved XIV story and I got some actual RPG fun out of tricking out my bots to run dungeons with (preferred the customizeable ones that sit in your room to when they stuck you with the premade npcs)
Roguelike towers were also a ton of fun to gel with randos real fast over a few hours, you don't get that in raids where it's mostly just an angry pissing match.
Unfortunately both bots and roguelike towers are side modes compared to the almighty no lifer raid that breeds hostility and false ideas of superiority among the bottom rungs of society so I could not continue with FFXIV. I side with the people that condemn Tigole and Furor for this more and more as MMOs become less and less relevant over time. Then I boot into something like Remnant 2 and have fun with randos again for a bit.
I loved POTD, HoH and levelling squadrons too, loved Eureka, Bozja and loved doing the older relic quests.
>Unfortunately both bots and roguelike towers are side modes compared to the almighty no lifer raid that breeds hostility and false ideas of superiority among the bottom rungs of society
This is the part of XIV that stings hard. If you do like POTD/HoH/EO. That's it, you've got 3 sets and it's progressively less new as you go.
You also have to get used to the content you like existing then getting no updates.
Squadrons were abandoned, eventually the AI was retooled for duty support & trusts but there was no more rank expansion, hunting logs changed from static challenges to slightly less static daily bills that really don't do anything but reward a hunt currency that will eventually....be useless.
That extra content canabalises each other and the playerbase turns as yoshi decides they won't employ new staff or have a dev pipeline that allows for updates past an expansion. And to fit in an honourary food analogy: that extra content in XIV is similar to a buffet where you pick and choose, but that's all there is, it's all on display.
That raiding playerbase isn't entirely bad either in the sense they've really done nothing wrong.
They're engaging with the game on a level others don't, except they go through the same VN questing sections and in the end the reward is cosmetic and temporary power.
>This is the part of XIV that stings hard
>Squadrons were abandoned,
>That extra content canabalises each other and the playerbase turns as yoshi decides they won't employ new staff or have a dev pipeline that allows for updates past an expansion.
Yeah at least now I don't feel like I'm the only one that liked that stuff and noticed. They couldn't keep it too popular since it splintered their main raid playerbase apparently and putting a ceiling to only the lower dungeons wasn't enough apparently.
>That raiding playerbase isn't entirely bad either in the sense they've really done nothing wrong.
Fair enough I just don't believe raiding environments are healthy long term. You can't really be friends with as many people as social media attempts to fake relationship on you, let alone faceless guest starts in raids. Mythic + type of environments is what I look for in MP games now but gave up on wow long ago.
Most recently Apocalypse difficulty in Remnant 2 co-op, waiting for EDF 6.
>XI is very soloable
Retail FFXI isn't fun to play. Unloess you're doing the latest endgame content, then you're traversing through an empty world and the gameplay by yourself isn't fun enough to stand on its own. And if you do play endgame then it's the same mercenary mentality as in every other current MMO where there is no community; people only view each other as cogs in a machine to be replaced at will and as an impediment keeping them from getting the loot they want. Not playing the meta job? No invite. Playing some weird build? Kicked.
Level 75 FF11 was and is fun to play, since the focus is on playing with other people from the get go, be it a 3 hour long level grinding session in Valkurm Dunes or Rolanberry Fields or Yuhtanga Jungle, or 2 hours of farming magicked skulls in the dungeon, or travelling across the world and journeying into huge orc base with your party to get keys to raise your nation rank or travelling across the world with a party to Xarcabard to kill a fearsome tiger to raise your level cap. And you were shooting the breeze with other people while at it. Unfortunately this experience only exists on private servers which are ephemeral, and without the niceties of modern MMOs like transmog wardrobes or 20+ years of cosmetics to choose from.
I was coming at it from the RPG &solo game side more but I get what you're saying as an MMO for RT.
>Level 75 FF11 was and is fun to play, since the focus is on playing with other people from the get go, be it a 3 hour long level grinding session in Valkurm Dunes or Rolanberry Fields or Yuhtanga Jungle, or 2 hours of farming magicked skulls in the dungeon, or travelling across the world and journeying into huge orc base with your party to get keys to raise your nation rank or travelling across the world with a party to Xarcabard to kill a fearsome tiger to raise your level cap.
This still kind of exists in retail and you can stick it out at 75 while you do those other nation missions if you like a challenge.
I've been doing just that and ye, you still go to the orc base, still do the puzzles, still gotta deal with those NMs to raise your cap. Although mounts make that easier, as do wikis.. The questing and pre-reqs are all still there too.
That social side is gone but the RPG is persistent, the battle system is serviceable for an FF and the skill system is good too. If you're looking for an FF game to solo, it's a pretty good choice and it'll take some time even with the vast resources of wikis.
That thing where you said you had to set aside time, it's still very much there if you're new and playing with trusts or with friends. I can login to XIV atm and knock out a few MSQ quests on a F2P account and did in some downtime. To go back to where I was in XI and continue off? I need a good couple hours for that, and I'll set aside one or two more in case I fail.
>And you were shooting the breeze with other people while at it. Unfortunately this experience only exists on private servers
I've had a few times where I've grouped up with others so far to do a bit of dungeoning etc. It can still be found, but you very much have to initiate.
Ironically it was Eureka and Bozja that taught me to group up, and it was there I was recommended XI.
>the battle system is serviceable for an FF
I mean I only played a little FFXI, but I've played all the others and can say outside of party control XI has either the best or second best battle system/mechanics in the series, it seems to combine the Job System which is FF's best feature with a SaGa style mechanical layering which is way more involved than any other FF.
I don't see how you can call it "serviceable for FF" when it clearly blows every other entry out of the water on that front
>I don't see how you can call it "serviceable for FF" when it clearly blows every other entry out of the water on that front
I was doing so out of respect to some of the other battle systems like XII's gambit system which I really love and just raw ATBing in IV & V.
I also am in the category of "only playing a little XI" camp where I've only played a few jobs up to 75 and have not pushed past that so I haven't had the chance to really explore the depths of skill-chains but yes, it's more than serviceable.
I understand there's FF fans who demand more and they want more action, they want flashy, they want paradigms and hold 2 face buttons.
>it seems to combine the Job System which is FF's best feature with a SaGa style mechanical layering which is way more involved than any other FF.
It's done really well. I'd go so far as to say it's on par with the best game in the series V_. They even managed to work in a bit of II in skill training similar to other MMO's at the time.
The place where it really outshines XIV is the subjob system, meanwhile in XIV land there's no cross class skills. Jobs having that variety and weapon choice is definitely interesting and it makes it feel more like an RPG since it has some form of class & character building.
I don't want to come off as an XI shill when I have still to complete WOTG+.
> They couldn't keep it too popular since it splintered their main raid playerbase
The raiding section of the XIV playerbase is vocal but there's players who like all types like yourself or me, or the afkers in limsa, the event people, the casuals who only do MSQ and their weeklies IF they remember. They make up a muuuch larger chunk and they're less vocal on the content side.
You only need to take a quick glance at twitter, reddit (mainsub) and youtube to see they are numerous while raiders are extremely vocal (and sometimes aren't always wrong with their complaints.
Where the devs at?
The game is increasingly about being a solo player.
The end game is largely about roulette for your weekly loot.
Everything is "viable" from a content perspective because you speed blitz dungeons or take the npcs who trivialise everything except the endgame content you need an actual team for.
This makes FC's an optional thing. There's no pressure to gear treadmill and find an end team unless you want to do the hardest difficulty endgame, and even then it doesn't carry the same rewards as it did in other games as most the time everyone is levelling alt jobs anyway so gear means nothing. Even the cosplay community dgaf these days because every half ass cos is met with praise to avoid hurt feelings.There's little reason to interact outside of need.
The story, which is the main attraction for a lot of casuals, is dripped too slowly. My friend and I literally spent a year casual bro-op from base game to the end of Shadowbringer, were really hyped for endwalker, sweated it in the opening week and then found the end game grind to be so demoralising waiting for the next installment we quit. I genuinely feel Shadowbringers was the "Wrath moment" for FFXIV because it was the hand over expansion to the new generation of players.
Finally the gaming demographic today just doesn't have the same social skills to form and maintain communities. 00's WoW brought in normies who were still used talking and f2f contact to make friends, so it was natural for them just to talk to each other and hang out. Now it's a fricking minefield talking to new people where calling someone the wrong pronoun or a homosexual gets you insta banned, or people are just too autistic to initiate a dialogue with a stranger.
It sucks but really FFXIV is in its twilight hours as the MMO genre is more stagnant than ever because the money is in making the solo experience more accessible so people can drop in, get a dopamine hit and drop out and justify keeping a sub going.
Why are you making a thread for a shit MMO on /vrpg/? FFXIV isn't even an RPG, not remotely. If you want your answer there is absolutely nothing to do and this is the worst expansion in the games history. Everyone has dipped out and might be back for Dawntrail.
No MMO is an RPG, they're just moronic time sinks.
>>>/vg/
No one is going to get a sliver of worth there.
At best they'll get their post silently deleted by a janny after being mass reported. On an average day they'll get shouted down by cultists telling them that they're wrong and a doomposter.
You can't really talk about the state of an MMO like XIV or XI on /vg/ or even on Ganker during certain hours of the day without being censored.
Cultists rule that thread foreverandevermore. The RPG board along with /vm/ is the closest place for it, even if the game is mostly a visual novel; as a chunk of modern RPGs are.
I just came back to game. Limsa/Uldah/Gridania all have a fair amount of people. I don't have any issues doing daily roulettes. Longest was a fifteen minute wait on DPS.
And I'm playing on Sarg from Japan, so my play time should be the low pop time for US servers.
I'm on an alt though, going through Heavensward. Is it really so bad in endgame zones/hubs?
>Is it really so bad in endgame zones/hubs?
Yup.
Your 15 minute queue times are kinda grim too for Aether even as a DPS. At the real dead time of EU daytime on Aether queues for ARR & HW can fill a bit faster on DPS.
> I don't have any issues doing daily roulettes. Longest was a fifteen minute wait on DPS.
The biggest indicator on it roulette wise is queueing as a 90 job on tank or DPS, where previously healer would be instant, you will now wait for a tank. Where tank would usually be 15-30 seconds it will now extend to a minute or two. Times have slowed considerably and alliance raids like YorHa have all rocketed up even with the roulette changes they implemented. Normal raids can be grim too if you don't have others queueing with you.
>Limsa/Uldah/Gridania all have a fair amount of people.
These areas also go through lulls as well on Aether servers and if you do play on a server, you will notice who is afk or a regular AFKer (remember chair icon only shows for players not using the old plugin).
You can still do content but you will wait and side content is at the point you have to sort of schedule things in advance. It's much worse on EU as a Western EU player because the active zone there is much smaller due to timezone drift while NA gets losers visiting from other regions.
>You can never keep those morons happy but eventually even they will figure out there isn't much you can do with these mechanics besides have you move in different patterns. A game should never focus so much on raiding content or it will get burned and used up by refugees from other raiding focused games, moving from game to game like junkies looking for a new hit until they realize it's just the old hit repackaged.
Yup.
The one that's gotten to me recently besides the ShB/EW boss returning to centre stage to cast is the zoomy dash attack they've gotten fond of this expansion. Those designers are very limited and their reused designs bleed through.
>Those designers are very limited and their reused designs bleed through.
It's not like they can do much. Nobody ever said that FFXIV was a well designed RPG or had good RPG mechanics unless they were intentionally wrong. The mechanics suffice for stand-ins for actual RPG mechanics but there is no real choice here, not even basic b***h levels of pick fire attacks or ice attacks depending on the enemy element. There is nothing to decide, just execute the rotation, and learn boss choreography. It was streamlined even more just for raiders that couldn't handle even a semblance of choice left in the game that deviated from the accepted optimum. After successive cycles of streamlining there is no room left in the mechanics design space besides changing how they communicate the need to move to a different spot on a 2D plane.
All that to sell people the vanity fantasy of being pro gamer elite raiders for executing rotations and choreography in the prescribed way. The only "gameplay" in that is figuring out what the choreography is. It's formulaic because they've dug themselves into that corner, because that is what a vocal minority of over-compensating mediocre gamers demanded in lieu of building a more immersive world.
>It's not like they can do much. Nobody ever said that FFXIV was a well designed RPG or had good RPG mechanics unless they were intentionally wrong.
The fight designers did an interview a few months back talking about designing variant & criterion mechanics and how they'd gotten used to tether & stack group mechanics & busters etc.
It's genuinely sad to think how limited they are. They even struggle to implement mechanics with buffs & debuffs because their UI is terrible and they have buff limits.
>After successive cycles of streamlining there is no room left in the mechanics design space besides changing how they communicate the need to move to a different spot on a 2D plane.
One of my buds is bad at mechanics as BLM and gets overwhelmed thinking about them. Especially the endwalker fav where a monster now zooms across the arena in a pattern.
I enabled cammy, unclipped the camera's vertical limit and zoomed out 1.25x past the ultra wide FOV to give them an aerial view of a few fights and how much of it is just stand in place and move to place.
They're learning a bit better now learning to follow the pack or stand in an empty space because that's what most mechs are.
Shouldn't have focused so much on raiding. You can never keep those morons happy but eventually even they will figure out there isn't much you can do with these mechanics besides have you move in different patterns. A game should never focus so much on raiding content or it will get burned and used up by refugees from other raiding focused games, moving from game to game like junkies looking for a new hit until they realize it's just the old hit repackaged.
Island Sanctuary came in a year after release and has nothing to do with replacing any of that other content. There is no Ishgard restoration equivalent either. Unless you think Island Sanctuary is supposed to be the replacement for everything.
Fino Fanto 14
People play in waves, along with content drops.
This is not strange or surprising.
It's dead because the content is dead.
The game focuses on casual simon says arena "raids" instead of actually adventuring and exploring which the main story would claim your character does almost by definition.
They also decided to start moderating chat so everyone is afraid to say anything meaningful in group settings.
Nothing is difficult to require a group of people and on the occasion where you're mechanically forced to group with people the community is intolerable dogshit. You're either treated with dead weight that will scream at you because you haven't memorized the scripted mechanic yet so they aren't being carried or they're raid trannies that base their entire existence on the casual 40min/week raiding and expect everyone to parse orange on day one.
No one wants to engage. So you log in when content drops, finish it in 2 hours and go back to what you were doing for 3-6 months.
FF14 died for me when I realized that it was basically never going to have meaningful world content and in fact got rid of the little it had after ARR and HW. Running instances forever feels artificial and fake. I don't like if that's all there is. I want to feel like I'm part of a living WORLD, which is where FF14 fails massively at. You only interact with the outside stuff if you want to do crafting but I don't think I need to explain why that's not a great gameplay element either.
i stopped for months at HW postgame, dreading the horseshit that we all know the game would throw more of at me-
during these months Crystalline Conflict came out and i sort of liked it when i had a good team but then i slowly realised that half of the playerbase can barely fricking play videogames and the entire mode was just a treadmill for morons to grind the rewards on and many of them had no idea what the objective even was.
a short time later after not even opening the game for several subbed months i uninstalled. Its a shame because FFXIV has some of the coolest art and design in the entire series barring anything to do with the WoL/PC due to sheer volume- the entire game just happens to be complete shit unless you like VNs, fake online friendships and timewasting. it really IS becoming a single player MMO because once you complete an activity theres really no reason to ever touch it again other than "because its an MMO" and its required for grinding.
i didnt start out like this, i enjoyed what was actually good but its no wonder that everyone who doesnt Raid is fricking off because the game is actually barebones and shit. Deep Dungeon having a storyline, Squadrons, Dungeons, Raids are all actual content but theyre designed probably rightfully as grind first and foremost. idk if its because im a drawfrick but jesus christ what a waste
I'm debating unsubbing, I've gotten two housing demo emails but the sunk-cost fallacy stops me from letting go. I don't even play the game much anymore
Yeah you're at where I
have been for the past two years. Afraid to lose my house but haven't really played. Damn housing trap.
I barely play anymore but my fricking house keeps me trapped. Had good memories there. In the back of my mind I keep thinking "What if I do play again? What if all my good friends come back despite quitting for good this time (take three)? I'll never get a house again if I lose this." It's so fricking cancerous and I hate it, so I keep my sub running despite barely doing anything, being burned out and having no faith in the future. Just because they might come back and I know I'd have fun playing with them. I may log in sometimes but at this point it's mostly a social thing and because the few people I do know who still play ONLY ever play this dogshit game and they mostly just idle around and erp. I'm questioning whether I should really care to maintain such 'friendships' though. I wouldn't mind if they played literally anything else but nah, all they do is idle in Limsa and flirt with other Black folk. Since that's what this game has turned into.
>that everyone who doesnt Raid is fricking off because the game is actually barebones and shit.
Not just that. Mare, penumbra, glamourer aka mods. That also keeps people around. The erp crowd. It's Second Life v2.0 literally. Ironically raiders crossover with this crowd but it's not exclusive to them. A lot of people play solely to modbeast the shit out of their PC and slap a 12 inch wiener on their Viera because that's so worth paying a sub fee for.
its not a trap if youre actively paying money to keep a digital house you dont even visit in a game you dont even enjoy playing- that dumb dumb behaviour
I have unsubbed and accepted WoW into my heart. I am free
Replacing one shit mmo for another isn't what I'd call free but at least wow is a better mmo. It helps that all the porn sickness isn't waved so freely and in your face.
I resubbed to WoW 9 months ago but let my sub lapse a couple weeks back. I did all the questlines, beat all the raids on normal, farmed the dragonriding customizations and renowns and vicious saddle mounts I wanted, there was nothing left to do. Only thing left is to maybe get the latest GW2 expansion but from what I've heard it was even more lackluster than End of Dragons was. MMOs are just in a bad spot nowadays.