ffxivopinions

A long time ago, before A Realm Reborn came out, I read an article where Yoshi-p said that he was happy that the community was complaining about the state of FFXIV 1.0. He stated back then, that it meant the community cared greatly about the game.

I have spent the last 12 years playing countless MMORPGS, seeing the highs and lows of each one. I believe that FFXIV really has what it takes to be one of, if not the best, but it has many places where the game itself can do better.

I have been playing this game as a healer (alternating between all 3 healing jobs) since I created my current character 914 days ago, I ended up leveling Ninja and Dark Knight because I was curious how the other roles were. As of this writing, my current total amount of playtime is: 657 days, 0 hours, 49 minutes. I have been AFK a lot, but I have spent quite a bit of time in my life playing the game, or trying learn things about it.

Recently, I have been seeing my friends leave my server (Diabolos) for a more populated server (Gilgamesh anyone?) or leave the game entirely. It has gotten to the point where now I go to my computer early in the morning and I am lucky if anyone is online in my linkshells. I understand that as a game community, this happens and will continue to happen. However, I do not believe that it is necessarily a symbol that the game is dying or anything.

In the end, facing this situation, it ended up making me look at the state of the game and what I believe about it. I began to question what could be improved, and what the community at large has been asking for.

Some of my points, have been stated more than once; but I feel it is still good to keep them in mind moving forward. I also ask that you please keep in mind that these are just my opinions, and so you may agree or disagree with those. But I think at the very least they are worth a discussion.

  • Raid content is too limited: Only 4 of bosses per tier, with mostly the same mechanics we have seen in the past. I feel that if we had a little bit more bosses for each tier, maybe it would allow to have a more streamlined difficulty progression, and keep every busy for a longer period of time. A this moment, the way things are, there is often a huge step between some boss fights and so people either end up clearing one boss quickly and not being able to ever clear the boss after, or end up clearing everything in a week, and not having anything to do for 6 months.
  • Raid more like Main Scenario Raids: I think raid could be more interesting if they were more like Main Scenario 8 player raids where you have to “explore” the castle before reaching one of the bosses. It would feel more like you are doing something grand (like invading an enemy base) instead of just teleporting to the next square or circular room and fighting a random NPC.
  • Housing has a limited amount of furnishing slots: Furnishing a large house is annoying, this has been asked many times. Lets be honest here, I own a small house, and my FC has a medium one, I am probably not very much impacted by this one, however, when I was in an FC with a large house, we were rushing to give a proper amount of detailing on our decorating, and we would always end up with 1 room that is completely empty.
  • Only 2 gear sets per tier: There is really no place for customisation whatsoever in the current gear system, you have 2 sets with different stats on them. A combination of tomestone and raid is required for the “Best in slots”, sometimes you do not even have gear with community accepted good stats for a slot (Sch weapon anyone?).
  • Glamour dyeing: We should be able to alter a secondary color. For a game that emphases on glamour so much, I find it surprising that you cannot do it.
  • Glamour gear colors: Some gear have colors that do not exist in current dye system. Every useful colors should be available to make matching easier!
  • Only 2 New Dungeons : Only 2 dungeons for expert, and so only 2 dungeons are added per batch, it gets boring pretty quickly. 3 was, in my opinion, OK, not great, just OK. 2 is not enough.
  • Dungeon pattern: Every dungeon is basically the same, with only 3 bosses, And generally speaking, the last boss will be fairly close to the second boss, compared to the 2 first ones. I am sure the development team can figure a way to make dungeons more memorable.
  • No DPS meter: No DPS meter is limiting the players who are doing hard core raiding especially thanks to very harsh dps checks. (Especially console players, more on this later) Lets be honest, if you want to improve, you need data, or else, how can you, yourself know, that in the group, you are not doing as good as you are. In turns out that without precise dps data, you can only approximate who is doing what and so you cannot find where you are lacking and where you could be doing better. That’s like telling a company to improve it’s market share in an area, but prohibiting it to conduct any analysis on said market.
  • Boss fights: Most boss arenas are basically a circle or a square, with sometimes the ability to fall off of a platform, or an instant kill wall. It makes fighting bosses with similar mechanics extremely repetitive. Clearly not every room or cavern in existance are a perfect square or circles right? If you want to block off a room, you can do so at the door or entrance… I liked to see some of the arenas were they were more open in a way, for example The Chimera’s arena is it’s lair, not a circle. If you boss in a military base, should boss rooms not look like military bases rooms rather than just empty boss room that’s a circle? In a sense, I feel it make sense for say Ifrit to surround an area with a circle of fire to fight you, but for example Twintania? The circle makes little sense to me, and that is not even talking about Leviathan, which we had the opportunity of having a cool giant boot area with a deck and all, but in the end it was just a square.
  • Game colors: The colors are very hard to see for many area of effect telegraph on the floor, at this point it feels like it is done on purpose. Every patch brings its new hard to see colors. I am color blind, and light blue on white is annoying (Anyone remember Shiva?). Either make contrast better, or give us a color blind mode or allow us to set the telegraphs colors ourselves. I believe that this would make the game more accessible to more players.
  • Duty time limitation: The whole time limit to complete a duty is annoying, especially since it limits things such as soloing Palace of the Dead by taking your time (in terms limiting which class can do what). You should be able to keep going for as long as you want. Should be removed entirely, or at the very least removed for pre-made parties.
  • Duties and Social Menus: Not being able to see linkshells and dungeon interface and not being able to receive/send out tells while in an instance should be fixed. As an MMORPG this game should help “Social Interaction” while playing it, not limiting it. Who here never had someone they were talking in private too tell them “queue popped, lets talk again later sorry” or wanted to see if someone was online mid dungeon to ask them a question.
  • Small Bag Space: Contrary to most other MMORPGs I played in the past, FFXIV allows you 12 battle job, 8 crafting jobs and 3 gatherers. This is a HUGE amount of items for all those different jobs, let alone crafting mats and glamour items. I heard that there is a concern over latency, which would apparently be affected by giving us larger inventory space. While I do not claim to be a programmer, I think our inventory’s content should not be queried while we are not accessing or changing it’s content (opening inventory, looting new items, searching gear). The more it goes, the less we can keep anything, because all our space is filled with required items for our jobs. Please give us more space!
  • Environmental uses in fight: Basically no mechanics involves using the environment, I think if we could use water or walls or rocks or anything really that are already present in the rooms as part of fights, it could allow for new mechanics that have not been done yet. And make new fights more interesting. Your imagination is the limit here really.
  • Rushed content release since Heavensard’s release: Let me explain, when Alexander normal was first released, you had to get 1 item from each of the 4 floor every week, which could take a very long time depending if you had friends or no, and if you were lucky in duty finder. At beast, getting all the items from that would take 5 weeks (if I remember correctly). Well not even a month after the release of normal, now there was Savage too, which meant you had to clear normal, but raid in savage at the same time. Added to that the fact you needed to farm your tomestone for the week. That was very very time consuming, and as soon as the savage raid was released, all of the normal mode gear was deprecated. If that content would have been released with just a few weeks more in between, then we would not have had to rush to get everything in the first 4 weeks, and maybe we would have been busy for a slightly longer period of time.
  • Parsers/Addons: There no transparency regarding the release of promised features such as the addon api, which makes it feel like nothing is being done. This feature could help alleviate the gab in features between PC and Console players. Lets be honest, parsers are there, and they are there to stay. Console players depend on PC players for help in this regard (anyone else ever been asked “Can you parse me please?”). This should be put on a slightly higher priority. Allow the community to help work on the interface of the game, so you can focus on content! In this area, the FFXIV Dev Team implemented Stone Sky Sea. However, it serves no purpose real purpose other than knowing your dps in a perfect situation, aka unrealistic for raid situation whatsoever. Your best rotation while not moving, is not the same as your best dps while doing mechanics. It is a good idea, but it is not good enough to be useful. When it was first announced, it sounded like a mean to practice your rotation while dealing with some of the encounter’s mechanics. Why is it not the case?
  • Diadem was promised as a place to explore and discover, because there is one map only and no randomness whatsoever other than your starting location, it became boring and people found means to use the rules against the system (Dinosaur island anyone?). I think the map should be proceduraly generated in some ways, with maybe some pattern islands or something.
  • The Diadem reward: By giving out grade 5 Materias in other content like weeping city or Palace of the Dead, there is literally no reason to go fight monsters anymore, maybe there should be a system that automatically scale the reward as new content comes? Or maybe there should be something other than Materias and Gear.
  • Palace of the Dead maps: Overall the floors feels too small and too simple. There is no real “exploration”.
  • Palace of the Dead Time limit. Again, time limit are annoying, makes it so you do not really “exploring”, not that there is much to explore anyway. And so you just “rush to the end”.
  • Seasonal events: It feels like there is no effort put into them, you mostly end up doing FATES. With many times little to no reward, other than earrings…
  • Lore: We know almost nothing about pretty much every single boss we fight in this game, they don’t seem to have any reason for being there other than giving us a challenge. There should be more back story in the side quests other than just playing hide and seek with moogles.
  • Raid wipes: this has been asked countless of time, but please, reset cooldowns after we wipe. If a raid like The Cuff of the Son (Savage) can know that you wiped or not, any dungeons should. When a boss resets, because it’s not in combat anymore, just wipe everyone’s buffs and reset cooldown? (Or something like that…)

Overall the game has a lot of benefit, and I spent some of the most wonderful days of my life playing this game, running around and doing glamour and making my house looks great, or when I finally cleared t5 for the first time and we went to t6 and cleared it while also all dying. Those are great moments I will always remember, but right now, all I see is everyone leaving, chats being more and more empty, and my friend list slowly filling with (deleted). If I had the qualification to work on such a great game, I would have put my application right away, because it is the dream of many to actually contribute to the game they enjoy the most.

I do not know if this message will reach anyone, but hopefully it does, because I would really be sad to keep looking at my friends being bored and leaving. I really love this game and I would happily like to see it grow bigger and bigger!

Thank you very much!