Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[Well Intentioned]

I think a good majority of people who stayed around after 7.0 and 7.1 was deflated as well. I was expecting a Eurkea/Bozja mix and just getting hit with OC and then Yoshida coming out with "we couldn't do normal mode Forked Tower due to cost"; I think that kinda broke me on Dawntrail. Like all the other stuff is decent but OC being shit really just bummed me out and I don't think I've been back since.

What, you don't like farming 1 billion gil to do the carrot achievement?

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

What, you don't like farming 1 billion gil to do the carrot achievement?

I think playing Russian Roulette with a semi automatic would be more fun, just like I would rather do that than 100 FUCKING CEs just get a full set of armor, along with having to chain farm for like 4 hours straight just to get the gold rewards.

 

[RIPRhongoBongo]

I will forever die on the hill that South Horn should have been a 85-100 leveling zone and the North Horn could be the Phantom Job zone

 

[BlazikenLover]

I think a good majority of people who stayed around after 7.0 and 7.1 was deflated as well. I was expecting a Eurkea/Bozja mix and just getting hit with OC and then Yoshida coming out with "we couldn't do normal mode Forked Tower due to cost"; I think that kinda broke me on Dawntrail. Like all the other stuff is decent but OC being shit really just bummed me out and I don't think I've been back since.

I played Bozja for a bit and really liked it, was excited to see another piece of content like that then OC finally drops and is the most boring, grindy shit even. I cannot stomach more than a few critical engagements per play session, even when playing tank (which lets me collect debuffs like it is nothing) I end up worn down.
I gave it another chance after hearing about the chests changes and got pissed after the pot led me to a high level area (TWICE) where I aggroed one mob and died almost instantly despite being lvl 19. Call it a skill issue but I don't see the fun in alt tabbing, stopping what am doing and check a guide to see how to avoid x mob aggro just so I can collect the reward of which I had to rush to the FATE for before (so I could even get credit)
Everything about is is simply annoying, they should have made the CEs less intense or more sparse (and thus more rewarding). And for the love of god if the instance is full spawn more than one CE at the time, sucks missing out because you didn't have your ass parked at an aetherite, it is such a contradictory design choice.

 

[BruhSheep]

At the risk of sperging out, there's a lot about OC that works.

Spoiler: OC mass faggotry

I don't hate the CEs, I think they're very fun content in a vacuum. I actually like the permanent vuln stack per fight (until you die). 14 has always been really shit about punishment for failing the DDR mechanics, so having the stack stick raises the tension of the fight quite a bit as you go along. I wish they could come up with more varied debuffs than just a fucking vuln stack, but CBU3's collective brain cell count is lower than room temperature.

The fact that OC has levels is an aspect they borrowed from Eureka, but they also went full retard and merged it with the Bozja "ranks" when it comes to monsters. That first day OC was out, I genuinely thought it would be like Eureka, where hunting mobs of roughly the same level would be a great way to get stronger. But then came the crushing realization that no, you can just follow the CE/Fate train instead. And even if you're Lv20, those Lv1 mobs still take an eternity to kill as if you were the same level. It's just now they don't pose a threat to you. Why the fuck would suck the fun out of the power fantasy, Yoshi? In Eureka, slaughtering the lower level mobs was cathartic because you had to work to achieve that. But the game being FUN is anathema to CBU3.

And while we're at it, higher level mobs in Eureka were dangerous, sure, but they could feasibly be killed even solo. Not in OC. Get fucked, loser. Go drag entire parties with you on your treasure hunt.

But really the biggest problem was the CE/Fate train. In both Eureka and Bozja, you had to work to unlock your "group" content. In Eureka it was just the fates, but in Bozja it was the CEs. Murdering mobs with people until you popped the content was part of the appeal. Hell, I'd argue it was the entire point of the content; a throwback to MMO days of old. The fact that OC just farts out CEs and Fates every few minutes because the zoomers cannot be trusted to find their own fun infuriates me to no end. Yes, the CEs in OC are grueling and a bit of a slog. But I wouldn't call them unfun. They can feel that way however when you're forced to run them like a damn boss rush.

And the zone of South Horn is visually and thematically very nice. This melting pot of all these lost civilizations we've heard about since ARR, with zone music that nicely transitions to the main theme of each culture is not to be understated. As a lorefag of the world, it's crack to me. But again Yoshi fucks us over by not really giving us anything to discover here. Aside from the POIs for the datalog, there's no other lore bits to discover. No flavor text to digest. It's beautiful set dressing... but it's JUST set dressing. Like so much of 14, a beautifully rendered matte painting so that drama club rejects can pantomime in front of it.

I think DT as a whole perfectly encapsulates what 14 has devolved into under the current leadership at CBU3. They've dumped every single possible resource into what they think the playerbase likes most and wants most: combat. And while this is important, they've done so by taking resources from everything else in the game. Shit story, stagnation in virtually every other type of content, outright cutting of content geared towards the masses in favor of never upsetting the vocal minority that is the raiders. The only reason we've gotten QoL improvements is because I'll tin-foil hat they were saving those as emergency upgrades in case sub numbers started dropping.

But I do wonder just how much of the playerbase was lost to disillusionment and apathy this expac.

Edit: And yes, farming silver/gold coins is cancer. They should just make every CE/Fate and mobs all drop both kinds of currency.

 

[$5.3 Million Dollars]

But I do wonder just how much of the playerbase was lost to disillusionment and apathy this expac.

Almost my entire friend group that plays and myself went through pretty much the same thing. I'm an omnicrafter and ranked during the Ishgardian Restoration and was excited for another one via Cosmic Exploration which came out just before OC did, and it was garbage. Sure it was nice they provided the materials this time, but almost everything about it felt worse than Ishgard. At the very beginning there was no retainer bell, no mounts allowed, your GP got fried if you tried to spam the gathering missions, no mini aetherytes for internal travel, and you had to remember where the rabbit parked the truck in Bestways Burrow because there was no ability to simply teleport there from the beginning like there had been with Ishgard and Foundation.

So then when OC came out and fell flat I let my sub lapse and my house auto demo. By then everyone else I regularly played with had already thrown in the towel between the poor story, poor content, and poor communication from Yoshi-P about the future not looking much brighter than the present.

 

[Troon Whisperer]

But I do wonder just how much of the playerbase was lost to disillusionment and apathy this expac.

I'd wager it'd be a good chunk, but I bet the biggest reason for players leaving is simply their friends left for their own reasons and the game get very boring and repetitive when played solo. I was interesting to watch how quickly DT killed any interest my friends had in FFXIV, with most struggling to finish the MSQ in 7.0, and only a handful made it to 7.1 before ditching. They've all moved on now, and show very little interest in 8.0, whereas before we would constantly be talking about the game, watching the live letters and stuff.

Yoshi-p has a huge uphill battle to lure these players back, and I doubt he'll succeed as it'll require massive investment and changes, which he seems allergic to.

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

I bet the biggest reason for players leaving is simply their friends left for their own reasons

and I'll bet the reason they left is a very large and annoying Mary Sue furry that's voiced by a troon. TO THIS DAY I'm still finding people seething about Dawntrail getting a mixed (or if you find it at the right time, mostly negative) review because the average person fucking hates Wuk Lmao.

 

[Kane Lives]

with most struggling to finish the MSQ in 7.0

Normies might not be able to articulate why they found DT trash, but they definitely can feel it. Not even surprising, considering how poorly the worldbuilding was handled for Tural, and the shitty MSQ was downstream from CBU3 not doing their homework properly. (And giving that retard Hiroi the lead writer position.)

 

[Pigeon Enthusiast]

outright cutting of content geared towards the masses in favor of never upsetting the vocal minority that is the raiders.

TBH I don't think they ever mentally recovered from the community crashouts that happened when they cut DSR from 5.5 and delayed it by a full year, until 6.1.

But I also don't think they've done all that well by the raiders, in spite of the fact that everyone blames high end combat content for monopolizing dev attention. Job design is as phoned in as anything else has been, fight design (from what I've seen and heard of Heavyweight) is still pretty stagnant and basically consists of the same stuff as ever (stack, spread, light parties, clocks, raidwide to make sure healers are awake, the odd tankbuster) except faster, and it's not like we've really gotten more high end content at the expense of the normal content we're not getting either.

It's still one raid tier every 9 months, an EX per patch, and an ultimate at the start and maybe end of an expansion.
There was Chaotic Alliance Raid and Forked Tower I guess, but compare to ShB: by 5.4 we had all the same raid stuff (three raid tiers, one ultimate, 6 story EX fights and one "bonus" in MMEX/Windward Wilds) as well as the BSF duels and DRS, and all this on top of a good Field Op zone, with more FATEs/CEs (BSF had 10 FATEs and 5 CEs per zone, for a total of 30+15, compare to OC having 11 FATEs + two bunny ones and 15 CEs), with two large scale normal encounters (CLL and DRN). And they managed to make that happen in spite of the coof absolutely upending their entire workflow by forcing them to adapt their whole pipeline to WFH in the middle of 5.2, whereas they have no such excuse now.
I would also contend that the content they put out then was more interesting and innovative than anything I've seen that they farted out this expansion.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

Yoshi-p has a huge uphill battle to lure these players back, and I doubt he'll succeed as it'll require massive investment and changes, which he seems allergic to.

If the new expansion has at least Stormblood-tier writing, the XIV "influencers" will all cream themselves about how "we're so back" and the casuals will flood back to their favorite second life skin. I highly suspect this is going to be their big strategy, because all of the other fixes involve innovating. With Dawntrail being "the beginning of a new era" and being almost nothing but stagnation since its launch (let's give credit to chaotic and quantum for spicing things up for a week or two for maybe 5% of the playerbase), it's safe to say path-of-least-resistance is their modus-operandi.

There's no real alternative for many of these people to flock to. Nothing quite hits that note of high-enough-fidelity character models (to goon to) and "braindead, impossible to fail casual content." WoW might suck a few with its housing away, but I think its artstyle and broader community will be offputting to the 'core' XIV audience.

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

the XIV "influencers" will all cream themselves about how "we're so back" and the casuals will flood back to their favorite second life skin.

They've been trying so hard to do "We're so back bros!" on Twitter and failing, it's hilarious. Meanwhile on more neutral tweets about news about XIV, every time someone ask it's ok to come back to Dawntrail, the answer is overwhelmingly no.

 

[Well Intentioned]

I don't even know about that, with the influencers. Most of them have been pretty meh on DT while trying to avoid the ugly troon in the room. By that I mean Wuk Lamat/Sena Bryer, yes, I'm aware there are many ugly troons (but I repeat myself...) in the proverbial XIV room.

 

[Kane Lives]

If the new expansion has at least Stormblood-tier writing, the XIV "influencers" will all cream themselves about how "we're so back" and the casuals will flood back to their favorite second life skin. I highly suspect this is going to be their big strategy, because all of the other fixes involve innovating. With Dawntrail being "the beginning of a new era" and being almost nothing but stagnation since its launch (let's give credit to chaotic and quantum for spicing things up for a week or two for maybe 5% of the playerbase), it's safe to say path-of-least-resistance is their modus-operandi.

There's no real alternative for many of these people to flock to. Nothing quite hits that note of high-enough-fidelity character models (to goon to) and "braindead, impossible to fail casual content." WoW might suck a few with its housing away, but I think its artstyle and broader community will be offputting to the 'core' XIV audience.

I'm not even sure if Yoshit-P is aware that once people fall off the bandwagon, even for a little while, it gets increasingly and exponentially difficult to get people back into the game, since there are a billion other FOMO games clamouring for your increasingly limited time. At this point it's more or less proven science, and why always-online games like these desperately try to keep you in their ecosystem with FOMO and occasional drip of free shit for continually playing.

Speaking for myself, I finally uninstalled, and will take no further part in FFXIV. And at this point, it'd probably take a brand new game to actually get me to look again.

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

Most of them have been pretty meh on DT while trying to avoid the ugly troon in the room.

I know that one fatass ginger guy keeps on trying to push Dawntrail, and then from time to time, people tweet out shit takes then they follow that up with a second tweet that basically says "oh btw I like Dawntrail"
And yes, they absolutely do their damnedest to avoid the troon in the room, but they really can't. I still laugh at the fact that a raid boss that released 3 days after the popularity poll launched beat that fucking cat. Not one for bias confirmation but seeing JP put that cat in it's place felt so good.

I'm not even sure if Yoshit-P is aware that once people fall off the bandwagon, even for a little while, it gets increasingly and exponentially difficult to get people back into the game, since there are a billion other FOMO games clamouring for your increasingly limited time. At this point it's more or less proven science, and why always-online games like these desperately try to keep you in their ecosystem with FOMO and occasional drip of free shit for continually playing.

Speaking for myself, I finally uninstalled, and will take no further part in FFXIV. And at this point, it'd probably take a brand new game to actually get me to look again.

I still maintain the belief that they should've put it in maintenance mode ala XI when Endwalker finished and let XVII be the next mmo. Even if you disliked EW, it ended on a very high note with (almost) all the loose ends tied. Big bad dead, the BIG BIG bad dead, our "mother crystal" gone and all sins forgiven and redeemed. Lucky Bancho shows that the EW high was maintained, despite player rumblings of discontent starting around 6.25. DT releases and then hits a brick wall.

 

[Well Intentioned]

I know that one fatass ginger guy keeps on trying to push Dawntrail,

I'll preface this by saying I really don't pay a ton of attention to the content creators for XIV because they by and large suck, but I do pick up general sentiments just via osmosis.

If you're talking about Xeno, he's probably just talking about the fights and encounter design cos that's all he really cares about and that's generally been the only really well received bit of content in DT. It's why that guy who is basically the Chinese restaurant guy from South Park is also jacking off in glee over DT.

If it's someone else or if I'm way off the ball here, fair enough.

and then from time to time, people tweet out shit takes then they follow that up with a second tweet that basically says "oh btw I like Dawntrail"

Yeah, the performative 'always positive' shit is why I don't really care for the content creator community. Go against the narrative and you get shit on. One or two dudes have carved out a niche, but if you fall out of line you incur the wrath of the troons, ie, see what happened to Zepla when she dared to play Harry Potter.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

I'm not even sure if Yoshit-P is aware that once people fall off the bandwagon, even for a little while, it gets increasingly and exponentially difficult to get people back into the game, since there are a billion other FOMO games clamouring for your increasingly limited time.

I think he is aware, but there's not a lot that he can do about it. The constant decrease in patch cadence, how phoned-in so much of the design is, and how the 'new' attempts at content either regress in design (OC) or indulge in the worst of their bodycheck 'no one can fuck up DDR' impulses (chaotic, FT)... all point to a studio where the passion has left the building and everyone's settled into murky corporate contentment. Chances are that when the torch was passed in the process of making 16, they really did leave it in what they figured would be the most-capable hands, and the sheer boobery that was put on display has to be demoralizing. There's probably just not many people to hire, to speak nothing of how it's a bad market at the moment generally.

Speaking for myself, I finally uninstalled, and will take no further part in FFXIV. And at this point, it'd probably take a brand new game to actually get me to look again.

I think many people have fallen into this, as the momentum is completely gone and the spell has broken. Why would they pay a couple bucks to log on, do shit for 3-4 days, get bored and leave again? Why pay the price for an expansion to sit through a bunch of go-here talk-to-that fetch-quest design that was antiquated in 2014, which can never innovate because this game is a beacon for the low-functioning, so you can experience a mediocre visual novel whose literary 'voice' is schizophrenic? Why stick around to see how they'll lobotomize your favorite job?

I still maintain the belief that they should've put it in maintenance mode ala XI when Endwalker finished and let XVII be the next mmo.

It's interesting to think that, if they had acted right on the moment of Endwalker's release, they probably could have secured the funding both to roll out updates for 14 so as to phase it out... and to develop a new MMO. The Japanese interest rate was sitting basically at 0 (it was actually -.1%), so if ever there was an environment to load up on debt, that was it. But now it's crawled up to .75%, which is relatively massive considering Japan's low inflation rate. They blew their opportunities by burning a bunch of cash as a publisher on studios that went absolutely nowhere... and by dunking it into retarded crypto-schemes, something their CEO seems to be chomping at the bit to do again. I cannot wait until we see the first results of them doing 70% of their QA with AI.

 

[SnowBall]

You know what’s really fucking wild about Dawntrail discussion? The fact that I’ve seen the day where I’m actually agreeing with the perpetually offended fandom SJW crowd criticizing the bad cultural representation in this expansion. With the exception of the crash outs over the supposedly “racist” dungeon gear designs in 7.3 obviously. But yeah broken clocks and everything.

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

The fact that I’ve seen the day where I’m actually agreeing with the perpetually offended fandom SJW crowd criticizing the bad cultural representation in this expansion.

IMO, It's why you don't put 1:1 analogs of IRL cultures in a fantasy setting. Honestly think Radz-at-Han was done dirty with it being so Indian coded, and Tural being so Latin coded really hurt that setting. Eorzea, Ishgard, Elpis and other places didn't need to be 1:1 analogs for them to be great places.

 

[Übertroon]

IMO, It's why you don't put 1:1 analogs of IRL cultures in a fantasy setting. Honestly think Radz-at-Han was done dirty with it being so Indian coded, and Tural being so Latin coded really hurt that setting. Eorzea, Ishgard, Elpis and other places didn't need to be 1:1 analogs for them to be great places.

The problem is they adapted the worst and most woke friendly parts of the cultures, it's this fucking image in a nutshell.

This is the equivalent to Heavensward being 50% just a wine and cheese tasting event followed by a baroque dance with the nobles while the dragons bring the tea.
Magnifique, mes amis.