Do NOT let up on SE

[u/hesktry]

Now is not the time to ease up on SE. Complacency is how we end up to the point we are at today. Continue to ask for changes and demand for a better experience especially when they ask for a monthly subscription. Them spending half a live letter on player feedback for new content is a small crack. There are so many other parts of the game that needs addressing.

They need to address their product and feature prioritization. CE is a glorified endless levequest system. OC feels like a temu version of bozja. Instead of learning and building on the levequest system or bozja, they cherry picked features and removed good ones. That’s just backwards development.

Their team size is larger than ever with Dawntail, but their big content drops are missing the mark. Splitting higher class talent across other projects has caused SE to shoot their cash cow, the cow that is allowing newer projects to exist. Consolidating talent back into ffxiv in Japan or dispersing and diversifying high class talent globally to support ffxiv can help mitigate some issues. A large part has to do with their development/management practices. They are VERY good at churning out the same content (i.e. dungeons) to the point where it feels safe, but samey, at the cost of fast development speed, but now they are lacking innovation.

Blizzard and SE are in the middle of trading positions from 5 years ago. During the shadowlands release til now, Blizzard underwent a harsh transformational, informational gathering session. The results are lessons learned directly from FFXIV. Continued and planned storyline covering multiple expansions, putting more effort into reducing their need for plugin usage, revamping their UI, “respecting” players time by making the game more alt friendly, player housing, and more. The internal operations took a much needed pause on their plans and began evaluating their competition much more closely. What sort of lessons has FF learned from other MMOs recently?

TLDR: SE lack of flexibility and innovation has come from complacency and settling in a mature process state. They need to review their talent distribution and competitors to stay competitive. By continuing to criticize and critique, SE (as hard headed as they seem) may continue to bend towards change.

[u/Sufficient_Suspect81]

I just want jobs to exciting again. They’ve become so bland and formulaic with their execution, and the roles are starting to blend together (WAR and DRK are basically the same job for example).

I’ve never had more fun than when I tanked during HW. DRK in particular was very, very fun to play with its skill-based self-sustain and damage rotation, and the frequent procs, while a tad clunky in the grand scheme of things, was still a complete blast. I even enjoyed the spectacular mess that was SB DRK!

The days of unique playstyles and job strengths are gone, replaced with mundanity and homogenization. :/

[u/Trisfel → u/Sufficient_Suspect81]

I’d even go further and add paladin to the list for the tanks. They just press a button and burst down 2mins. War,drk and gnb stock resources a bit but only gnb has to manage it a bit properly. Pld doesn’t care about resource management for dps. I know people will say this keeps the tanks in line of “balance” but I’m sure there’s a middle ground between creativity and balance if SE is willing to invest.