It’s becoming clearer to people that FFXIV is in a bad place. Now the player base is beginning to dwindle.
FFXIV: Online is property of Square Enix. I have no claim to it.
LINKS
The Gamer.com Article: https://www.thegamer.com/final-fantasy-14-active-players-large-drop-below-1-million/
Wuk Lamat Critique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fdIcjviRFo&t=1614s
Why We’re Still Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0FrMB7ceEs&t=304s
Timestamps
1:19 The Story
5:05 The Characters
7:24 Content Release
11:15 Class Simplification
13:53 Nostalgia Baiting
15:33 Duty Finder
17:50 Conclusion
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Ugh. I said the Stormblood Raids were based on 11. It was 12. I done goofed with that one.
I one a bid when the houses first had the lottery system and I just don't care anymore. I'm so tired of playing games that don't respect my time, I can't fucking take it anymore, so take my house, who cares, if they can't even pump out a decent story let alone fix all the issues with Hrothgar and hats, then they don't need my money…
This video hits every single point as to why i let my sub go.
I loved the game and cleared the current tier, was gonna run the ultimate but couldnt find a group that made it fun. Finally got my large plot but honestly might lose it cuz i have no interest in resubbing atm. There's nothing to do outside of just wait in queue for a low level dungeon that i can clear in my sleep
I was not aware they were. All the servers are still full. If they are bailing its a small amount.
after i lost my mid house because i was not in a good place to be playing i was kinda done with the game ..
Also the mobile game is not so positive thing…they are using the ff14 dev team aswell to develop essentially ff14 classic but for cellphone and with much better stuff ( THEY' HAVE GLMAOUR TAB/ CATALOG, THE FEATURE WE BEEN ASKING SINCE HW BUT THEY SAID IT WAS GONNA BE HARD TO DEVELOP)
I just got back into FF14 last month after a 2 year hiatus….
Im having fun but this sucks it’s plummeting. Still tons playing. Hopefully it can get a comeback.
I think the issues with the story are overstated, and that the problem XIV is having right now is pretty obvious: If you're not interested in a raid, there isn't much for you to do. It doesn't get much more complicated than that.
nostalgia baiting is such a lazy easy thing to do its no wonder they rely so heavily on it
I have a scholar friend and legit i felt bad hearing that they remove shadow flare abd the spread of aoe which im like wtf that help them
For me was the same Scholar from ARR to ShB and then after the 1st dungeon I realized the class was so different that i was not able to heal anymore, and lets not comment on Astro and summoner that get a total rewrite on every expansion.
In ShB they simplified the crafting that was something for interested people and made it like "get a macro on internet and run that" and also they started to give chests with HQ crafted items making the leveling items useless and now the MB economy is a disaster.
With a bad story all the other issues appear so blatantly and as you mentioned the time between patches has been more than doubled with less contents and also much more ephemeral.
I use the trust to skip the queues for all DPSs but repeating a million times the same dungeons gives me nausea now, while roulettes except for Alliance raid and Frontline (super unbalanced but super rewarding) are the only worthy for exp not even the leveling anymore.
Drop system also favors new players to make it seem it is rewarding but as an old player when in every content I roll a maximum of 60 and lose all the drops feels I am doing them for nothing.
Also playing the game with friends that use the PS5 and we noticed the porting is not that efficient so players with Mouse and Keyboard spend their life clicking on a billion of menues (Custom deliveries 100-110 clicks for 6 deliveries).
There is so much to fix but the perception is that they are not willing to they just want to continue exactly with the same patterns patch one had this content patch two has that other one and patch 3 the same one every cycle.
The easiest way to solve the malaise with regard to getting into lower level dungeons is to just… let us have all of our abilities.
The largest excuse I hear is "But, it'll make the dungeons go faster! That's sad for sprouts." and honestly… brother, who cares if the dungeon is 2 minutes faster because you have a downscaled 200 potency AoE, and you can burn down bosses quicker? Dungeons are interesting set pieces and set dressings but doing them in 10 minutes or 40 minutes doesn't impact the story, at all. And even if it did, the Trust and Duty Support system exist for a reason — players can take it at their own pace with "lore appropriate" NPCs that make it feel more like a traditional RPG.
Their not? At least on my server xD still have a queue to wait no matter what part of the day you play
EH they are not fake. They are still memories of the real person that are alive.
I'd like to play devil's advocate here, because I strongly disagree with a lot of the points brought up in your video. I'm also disappointed with the current state of FFXIV but I'd argue that's because that's normal for someone with 3k hours in any game.
Let me start by saying that your points about the story and characters are moot points to a lot of the playerbase – which you acknowledge in your video. I'm someone who's always skipped the story but not for lack of trying. I watched some of ARR, Stormblood, and Endwalker. I watched all of Shadowbringers and all of Dawntrail. To be frank with you, as a big fan of RPGs of all kinds, Final Fantasy just has predictable, boring story beats. Nothing about Dawntrail is lower quality than the previous expansions. Shadowbringers aside, nothing really happens in any of the stories I've watched or attempted to watch. I had to drop the first 3 because they were such a waste of time. It is all very linear and unsurprising politics, 'slice of life', and helping random folks with no tension involved. Once there is tension, it doesn't feel very cool. It's all high fantasy stuff you've seen before but executed in a worse way. You could blame the very stale and stiff presentation of an MMO for this but as someone who enjoyed Visual Novels I don't think that's quite it. The quests associated with MSQ are even worse. All of them easy as hell, they only exist to pad your playtime, and the few that aren't are just annoying to get through because they're preventing you from the fun parts of the game. That's classic MMO, but if the game wanted to be player friendly that would not exist. Tl'dr on this point – Dawntrail is the same as ever. But with much more engaging dungeons, raids and trials. The meat and popotos of it all.
When you bring up people wanting to desperately keep housing, I don't understand that. I've bought 2 homes and lost all my furniture and their entire existence twice for not paying. I do think Square is horrible for doing this, but I'd never encourage it by paying them. Ultimately the gil is easy to remake and the existence of bidding wars, while annoying, make houses much much easier to attain than previous expansions. If you want one, you will eventually get one.
Now gameplay, I'll give you that. The content slowing down sucks and I, personally, think their obsession with appealing only to raiders and endgame players is unfortunate. I don't enjoy savage/ultimate/etc. etc. Things like the island sanctuary, crafting and gathering content such as the Diadem, more things to spend gil on that aren't just ugly golden mounts, treasure hunts, dungeons of all kinds, hunt trains, POTD, Eureka and Bozja… these are the kinds of things I love about the game. I wish they drew more attention to the collectors out there that just want to build an empire, make the game into sort of a farming/merchantlike game and really focus on glams. The 'more customization for combat classes' point isn't something I am personally interested in but I'm also not opposed to it. I just want more rewards for doing weird side content. That's the meat and popotos for me. (EDIT: Also the class rebalancing and streamlining absolutely sucks. No two ways about it. Maybe we want some challenge in our rotations lmao. I miss Cleric Stance. I miss tank stance-dancing.)
But with all that said what do we expect? Our human brains to not get bored of the same thing for thousands of hours? We are meant to experience new things, and constantly be in motion. Even if you're disabled as I am, even if you fear going out of your comfort zone and desperately want that homey feeling a game like FFXIV provides, sometimes life just has a way of telling you its time to move on and find new trails to blaze. I hate saying that because it's against every part of my personality that I'm used to – I'm someone who loves comfort and stability. But eventually this happens to everyone who's enjoyed any live service game for a long time. It's amazing that we've made entertainment mediums that can last someone so long in the first place. Now its just time to accept that it's over you know?
Anyways. That's just my opinion. FFXIV is in the same old state it's always been, it's just as good as it's always been, we're just too used to it now. It's too predictable. And even if they introduce new stuff, we'll eat it up fast and get bored of it quickly. We can never be new players again where we have an entire world of thousands of hours to explore fresh.
This expansion took me forever to get through. I kept taking weeks long breaks for the MSQ because I just wasn’t attached to the story for the first time. I was even more invested in Stormblood than this one. The trials threw me for a loop rather how spaced out they were. Instead of the level x3, x5, x9 trials having a trial at level 93 and not another one until near end game was painful.
Everything is being homogeneous to the point jobs are mostly copy/paste with a different paint . Don’t get me started on healer jobs.
This was the 1st expansion where my first runs of dungeons when I would die at a boss or the healer dies rather and the WAR finishes the entire fight by themselves making the rest of us wait 15 mins for them to finish , progress to the next boss die again, and sit 15mins again while we wait for WAR to carry us through the dungeon again. They really don’t even need dps or healers. A WAR(and even PLD) can solo entire dungeons by themselves.
Definitely some issues here.
For issue #4, perhaps ironically, I think the best solution to the class simplification is to take inspiration from FF14 PvP and implement button reduction by consolidating 1-2-3 combos. Then this frees up new button slots for brand new gcds and ogcds, and hopefully used fairly often.
well uh, I got in with Shb, and was in until about half a year before EW. I got back in with EW, and then I got back out after the 11th SPEAK WITH WUK LAMAT quest.
I am still stuck on the deleting the fake people stuff. I mean, we have real debate IRL about that stuff, which FFXIV has never shied away from before and I admire that (cue Y'shtola roasting Merlwyb about how Limsa Lominsa were the ones who broke the contract with the beast tribes, or the ala mighan refugee refusing to talk to the WOL because we beat up a bunch of armed and rightfully angry protesters). We even had Emet Selch with that famous line about us being incomplete, and as such killing us not being murder. What the hell? Even if those people aren't real, the Scions have gotten me used to higher standards! Usually they take enough time to at least study a subject before deciding to kill a whole people! Was that too much to ask? Could Erenville's mother even be trusted? Because she was a copy too, not the original and this should really have raised so many alarm bells when we know Solution 9 can and does temper with memory.
That's only part of it.
I did mostly like Endwalker, but I had some beef with it. The revelation in Shadowbringer that Haedelyn was a primal, exactly like Zodiark, and even Zodiark tempered its creators, was never brought up again, even though this was a worrysome thought. Could we have been tempered? Was this the reason other primals couldn't temper us? What does that mean for our free will? Nothing good if you consider what happened to Minfillia. I'm surprised Thancred isn't always lowkey pissed at Haedelyn. It makes no sense.
Maybe she didn't want to control us, but this should have been adressed anyhow! They actually did her dirty by not adressing the flaws of their own writing. We have loved morally dark gray characters before (looking at you Emet), she didn't need to be this all benevolent goddess for us to love her character TT …
And for me the levelling up of class is a chore, a repetitive one (and I don't even have crafting classes, so that's at least that much I don't have to do).
I also don't like how we get more and more buttons for a class, but little options for customization. Everybody plays dark knight the same way, or samurai, or anything… there is no build, no option for creativity, which could solve the problem with some people preferring different version of each class (it could be a dumb idea though…)
Easy fix for post-patch storyline: pattern Sphene after the Allied Mastercomputer. Well, okay, maybe it wouldn’t be that easy of a fix.
They burned the universe down and now there's nowhere to go and nothing to do that feels connected to the core of the story. All of the antagonistic forces have been wasted and even the cosmic stuff was burned out by Meteion confirming the whole fucking universe was dead. Shadowbringers was only good in the context of the things it built on from the Source, mainly the Scions and the Ascians. If going to different disconnected shards is the future of the game I don't want to be a part of it. And that's coming from someone who has played since 2.0. There are only so many times I can see "we call Miqo'te brumblenkotten here, how exotic!" in place of conflict and history in new areas before I get bored. I didn't like it in ShB and DT tried the exact same shit.
Been saying for years their content schedule and them continually simplifying everything was gonna eventually catch-up to SE and it has🤷🏾♂️
I honestly felt sick playing Dawntrail. I was so bored, to upset, i starfed feeling sick. My guildmates witnessed that and had to help me move on in the game.
Ever since I finished the story, i havent played the game. I dont want to raid. I dont want to play my alts. I dont want to get glams or anything.
This expansion is ass.
For me it’s the combat, it’s just not fun. Everyone is expected to follow the same copy and paste rotation to satisfy the stale 2 minute meta. Same with bosses, they follow the same rotation, how is that fun or challenging? There’s no room for creativity as a player in your gear build, and there’s nothing that will keep you on your toes once you figure out a fight.
They leave, they come back, it happened before and it will happened again. lol
The roulette has the easiest fix which idk why it has not been implemented. Cap the stats (i think they already do that) but let players use all their unlocked skills.
Easy win, new players get to see how the class evolves and all their abbilities with help to their runs.. everyone else is just not bored to death.
Yoshi P said the time between patched was extended because of how many more cutscenes, quests, voiced lines, etc were in each patch in Endwalker compared to Heavensward, with each expansion making the patches bigger. This was acceptable at the time especially with how good some of those patches were. Even though the rona extended Shadowbringers, that expansion was awesome and I didn't lose interest. With Dawntrail however, I wish they would give up on making MSQ. There's no point in adding more and more cutscenes just to meet a quota if they aren't worth watching.
Here's hoping Dawntrail will add more variant dungeons, deep dungeons, Eureka/Bozja style zones, a new roulette, anything to keep casual players interest. And here's hoping this is the last MSQ we ever have to do.
Even if Dawntrail's msq was Shadowbringers good, I'd still be unsubbed right now. There just isn't a lot of content, and it's at least partially Endwalker's fault, as all of it's alternate content had little long term value.
I think it's also a case of the large wave of WoW exodus new players that surged subs back in 2021-2022 have mostly all caught up to current patch, and FF just doesn't provide at lot of motivation to stay subbed once you complete things (housing is for a small minority). As a casual, I feel near zero drive to increase ilvl. Anything you can queue for is comfortably doable at min ilvl based solely off how well you do the mechanics, not the power of your gear. In fact, I usually find things get less fun as the tier goes on and the average player's ilvl increases, making things decidedly faster/easier. Pretty much all my gearing motivation is cosmetic… which will always be faster next patch/tier when timegates are removed. Contrast this with WoW, which has a lot of difficulty strata that are mostly numerical: same mechanics, bigger numbers, new rewards, WITHIN the same patch/season. For gear to matter in FF you pretty much have to be doing savage+ content, which is effectively an entirely different game than normal modes. Maybe this will change with an exploration zone?
As for the state of job design, I honestly think they should not do any new jobs next xpac, and just spend all those dev man hours thoroughly de-homogenizing and adding to the existing jobs and massively improving the down-synced gameplay experience. I think they are running out of unique feeling things they can do with FF's combat systems anyway. Viper is just alt-monk with alt-reaper shroud. Picto's uniqueness is just standing around casting nothing for 3-4 seconds a quarter of the time. I don't want more rewards for doing unfun low level content in roulettes, I want them to make it fun. Right now anything 60 and below feels so bad/boring. 70 content is occasionally tolerable (the alliance raids more so than omega), and not til 80+ does it get somewhat fun. They add new things at max level, then remove things at mid level to compensate. Take dragoon for instance: two new ogcd's overcrowding burst at level 100, so they remove ogcds you used to have at level 70. End result is max level feels sorta similarly ok, but everything below that is worse. And with each expansion they do this, more and more down synced content becomes stuff you dread doing. They REALLY need to spend time/effort maintaining the roulette system and down synced content because it is a huge chunk of the casual player's experience and absolutely necessary for the game to function at all for new players.
I have to disagree with the Living Memory part. It was nice in a way like a personal retrospective about people you have met in life that had vanished. So yeah, sure, you can say it's fake, but in a way the memories are real and together with the beautifully haunting music and the colourful spots tha turn bleak as you shut down everything was a deep and fulfilliung moment for me. A metaphysical, philosophical moment after the massacre and before the final fight. So yeah, I have more issues with the very slow beginning and us being sidekicks etc.
If only there was a certain gatherer quest that dealt with people created from memory of the dead and their right to exist… if only there was a quest like this in Ultima Thule, gathering role quest, Omicron Beast Tribe questline.
Thank God there isn't, so there isn't the precedent for the Warrior of Light feeling guilty about turning off (Killing) fake people.
I quit my SE sub after 19 years (11+14) for the first time in 6.3 i just could not get behind all the nonsense anymore. Threw away my medium house, the pld rework was also a big factor in me quitting.
saying tural was uninteresting is so unneeded and not true lol, probably the only time i cared about a nation since i could actually relate to it for once
everything else tho… yeah, i can agree 🙂↕️
The only thing holding me is my ball of chain house and mods but now that there's a mod that literally made to spy and creep on people I'm losing more and more interest.
It's not just the story that's boring, but the content is all nothing but rinse and repeat crap we've already seen over and over with a new skin laired over it. They teased us with a dodge mechanic with the FF16 crossover only to say "Ya that's not permanent". I felt that alone could have helped boost this expansion's battle content but I'm so over this 2010 gameplay. I'm getting ready to finally let go of this MMO and never touch another MMO again or not for a very long time.
This expansion needs a Link's Awakening Retcon lol
I just don't have money for a sub atm, I enjoyed many parts of dawntrail, yea wuk was a bit mary suey and somethings could have had more time but I also just saw the Warrior of light and the scions as a learned group of mentors during that time, I honestly think many players just ''want to be mad'' and saying Wuk is woke, I dislike all the dei stuff as well but Wuk isn't one of them, the whole point was for the spotlight to not be on the hero for the king trials, You didn't even tell them you were some godlike warrior, While Wuk should have been fleshed out a bit more, the lizards sacrificing their young to get a true saviour, the two heads, the new zones with the giants dealing with the death of their kind, the pelupelu and their merchantile ways, birds, the wild west village and the trains and big hole in time, how emotionally RAW Zoraal Ja and the story around him was and ff9 stuff + ofc the music
there's way more to like than dislike, they just went a bit heavy on the ''power of friendship'' angle but thatw as only certain parts, most of the story was quite fleshed and set up new stuff.
Honestly while I know it's not all players if they disregard dawntrail for Wuk lamat, then I don't think they actually sat down and read and immersed themselves in the story, Might as well ignore ff9, ff10,ff12,ff8, ff7 etc. for the same reasons then.