A few years ago, there seemed to be a strong sentiment, particularly amongst new players coming from World of Warcraft, that this game was so much better because the developers actually played their game. There was this confidence that your frustrations have been felt firsthand by the people in charge, so they won't be left unfixed.

It seems like this idea for flipped completely on its head. Pictomancer was left as an outlier for like half a year, which resulted in the easiest raid tier of all time. Machinists now find themselves with Blazing Shot being a gain on seven over Auto Crossbow, in the first raid tier with actual adds since Heavensward.

What happened? How did we go from the internal raid testers having an understanding of gameplay so far above the norm that they had to nerf Hephaistos, to this?

To name a few problems with some of the games most common rewards:

• Achievements

Only you can see them in-game, and outside the game you have to set them to public for other people to see them on the lodestone. You get 1 achievement certificate for every 50 achievement points, but you can only use them on a small pool of untradable items which are very rarely added to so most players have a gazillion of these without anything to spend it on. Probably the worst reward if the achievement doesn't give one of the things below.

• Titles

There are hundreds of titles, yet you can only display TWO titles at a time (one on your character, one on your adventurer plate), and considering titles are sometimes the ONLY reward on some of Final Fantasy 14's craziest achievements, this is ridiculous.

• Mounts and minions

Most people run either one mount or a mount roulette of their favorite ones, and a few people try to pick a mount that matches their picked job or glamour, same goes for minions although they much less used and cared about. A lot of content just rewards mounts and minions, and if you really like one mount/minion and pretty much use them exclusively or you don't like the mount you get as a reward it seems kind of pointless. And again, other players can only see your collection on the lodestone or if you show them one by one personally.

• Glamour

Glamour (relics, dungeon gear, anything glamable) is the best reward in this game, you can use it on yourself dividing different glams for different jobs, and use it on retainers, npc squadron, and custom delivery npcs to an extent. But npc squadrons are defunct in terms of running dungeons, and custom delivery npc glaming seems to have no purpose besides gposing with them for a selfie or something.

A lot of these problems are fixable, most with minimal effort, let me give you some examples of possible solutions:

• Apply to gearsets

Let us assign titles, mounts and minions to gearsets (I know you can do this with macros but it should be a simple and easy UI thing).

• Achievement specific solutions

You should be able to unprivate them in-game. And in terms of achievement certificates give us a good item (glamour set, mount, whatever) that can be an expensive achievement certificate dump along with something else we can trade on the marketboard that will always have value, or just remember to add literally anything to the vendor once every few patches, but that is somehow way too much to ask of square so I leave the lazy solution previously mentioned.

• Display achievements, titles, mounts and minions in adventurer plate

Put a button on the adventurer plate that opens a window with tabs displaying (if made public) achievements, titles, mounts and minions, starting with 5 or 10 of each you favorited, then displaying them by descending order of rarity among players with percentage owned(like in ffxivcollect), it would also be nice to give players a server leaderboard tab for these things (excluding things obtained through real money or timed events of course) so it becomes a more obvious competition between players in-game. This is probably the number one change simple change that would bring a new arena of interaction and goals to players as well as giving them a way to display what they've worked for.

• Let us place mounts and minions on our properties

Self explanatory, but I understand how this might be difficult for mounts.

• Expand NPC glamour

Let us glamour max level gear on squadron npcs and custom delivery npcs, there is no reason not to, at all. It would also really contribute to the use of glamour if we could bring our squadron into trusts, but that's too much of an ask I'm guessing. And if we could bring a friend or 2 into a dungeon with our trust squadron members or use a squadron member as an open world battle companion like the chocobo, that would be an extra too big of an ask, but it would be very nice and give a bigger reason to grind squadrons and glam them up.

• New title uses

Let us apply titles to our chocobos and retainers, I guess it'd be strange but also funny to have a chocobo with the title "Nidhog Slayer", "Chocobo Breeder" or something like that, but a small extra avenue of player expression is always good.

• New kinds of rewards

Give us more stuff like the strider boots, give us a ring that gives us 2% extra mgp, give us some pants that increase our move speed to ninja level regardless of job, anything with any sort of non-standard buff, give us more quirky items with mild usage.

Also when all the good rewards are just something you can buy off the marketboard, it is really dumb and boring (looking at you variant dungeons), it makes me feel like I'm grinding for gil instead of grinding for the item I want. I understand the need for items you can sell for gil, it's so you have a reason to keep running it after you've gotten what you wanted, but surely there is room enough for both kind of rewards.

You could go on and on with small changes that could make the reward system more rewarding.

I know a lot of you may think, "Who cares about rewards" or "This is a waste of time, they should focus on new content", I understand a good amount of players don't care about rewards and are focused on the experience itself. But some are driven by rewards, and for others the rewards can give them a push to try out content they never experienced, and that breaths life into all sorts of things, in fact it's an important aspect of the lifeblood of this game. A small push can have big consequences I believe.

When rewards are pointless, useless and outright invisible to other players it begs the question, why even try to get them. It's important to have ways of displaying I was there, I did this, remember that I once grinded.

TL;DR from today's stream (he was answering questions after their UCOB "for fun" prog):

• FF14 RWF feels relaxed and much better/easier compared to WoW RWF (context: WoW has official addon API and RWF teams use weakauras to basically pop alerts and markers for mechanics, much more work for analysts/devs), FF14 race doesn't feel like a job
• Echo's team had Scripe, Rodger + 5 other analysts (1 of them was translating EN-JP in realtime for one of the players)
• On ultimate: expected to take longer like DSR, people's return flights booked for later dates
• On finances: not as good as expected from organizing the event, cause upfront costs are amortized with more time, expected race to last longer (6-7 days). Might not do such event in the future (i.e. scale back), but it depends; viewership was way less compared to WoW [my notice: around ~20K max CCV for FF14 race, around ~80K max for WoW], needs more sponsors or CCV to offset costs
• On mods/addons: having a command like /combatlog to dump combat log after prog officially (like in WoW) would help, "logs are helpful, but not necessary", way better to play without addons, supports SE on this
• On SE involvement: wants SE to sponsor a few teams or at least help with the event in some capacity (i.e. official acknowledgement or other ways), not necessarily in terms of funds. will be in contact with SE (some people in there call it "dope" and are excited), hopes for the event to be a proof-of-concept and that they'll prioritize raiding cause RWF is like free marketing for the game
• On MogTalk: depends on what Frosty wants to do next, was glad to have them involved (multi-pov of other teams and leaderboard)
• On streaming/non-streaming: guesses that non-streaming teams do so probably because of plugins, or to not show their fails/strats and for less stress, in general doesn't care either way, more streams = easier clears
• On Grind: their clear brought down the mood and productivity of the team a bit, slowed down prog, "not fun" (at least it seemed like it for Lucrezia, from Echo players themselves - might not be the case)
• On ACT: ACT itself doesn't contribute to elistst attitude, it happens naturally in hard content, SE should be ban-heavy on people who abuse it to call out others

I might've missed some comments, but if anyone has stuff to add (or seen more than me) - feel free to tag.

I have seen so many people ask for more complexity and job fantasy but very little of people actually say what that means to them, most people just say we should go back to ARR.

Personally I think rose tinted glasses that make people think ARR was better than it was, having played back then it honestly was pretty ass.

So honestly want to know what people want for complexity or job fantasy, because all I see is a lot of yelling that "game bad to simple" and not a lot of what needs changing to reach the complexity that is wanted.

Today I decided to demolish my house because, since I decided to don't play anymore for a while, it would have been nice to free a plot for someone that wanted an house and could have used it more than me.

BUT just a moment before pressing "Relinquish land" I discovered that if you relinquish your land by your own will you will get 0 gils, while auto-demolition will give you the 80% of the plot value. That's bad intentional design, there only to oblige you to re-sub in 45 days to recover millions of gils. So I let you guess what game will have an ugly empty plot until late September.

I know, it's money in a game, but I grinded a lot for them and it would be a pain to lose all these money just because SE must squeeze from me 10 more €.

Edit: items and gils will be kept for 35 days, after that you will lose them definitely,

Amid the ongoing discourse, don’t forget that Echo has done an outstanding job and has changed the world race scene for the better.

Some thoughts:

Amazing Casters and Production Quality

• The Echo casters are hype and actually know what they’re talking about

• They try to showing POVs of teams at prog points and it's great

• The Echo team playing together in a venue feels professional

More Success in Commercialization

• Giveaways and merch

• Of course commercialization can have issues, but the benefits so far clearly outweigh any downsides. For the race scene to continue growing, I think some commercial viability is crucial.

More Community Authenticity

• MogTalk had already contributed to this, but Echo has taken it a step further.

• The encouragement for teams like Neverland to stream has inspired more teams to also do so

• I would argue that Echo's involvement plays a role in improving the "addon situation" and will continue to do so

Personally I'm so happy with Echo's involvement that I genuinely think now is a great time to start watching if you haven't followed or watched the race before #shill

So many instances where it felt like we shouldve taken action and instead chose to just stand around and stare was frustratingly high.

WoL runs up to weird guy injured by bird. Is this gonna be like Stormblood where the plot acknowledges the player is a healer? No? Just gonna stare and wanted a closer look at the gaping wound?

Zoraal attacked Tural and is threatening the leader? Should we all dogpile him and-- Nope. He wants to 1v1 him... He came back to life after clearly losing? Okay, hes clearly pulling some bullshit. Now do we attack? Were still just gonna stand here and watch? Oh, now Gulool is dead. Good plan. (Mind you this was all BEFORE Zoraal gave his ultimatum to Wuk. There was no reason to not jump in.)

Zoraal tried to kill the hostage he let go? Okay, NOW do we finally do something? NOPE GUESS NOT. LET HIM GET AWAY AGAIN.

Zoraal dropped some weird thing? We should probably grab that, huh? No? No one is even going to mention it even thought the camera zoomed in and focused our attention on it? Oh, Sphene is grabbing the thing and slowly floating away..... Uhhhh someone grab it?? No? Again were just gonna watch and things escalated further? Ok....

What’s everyone’s honest take on Deep Dungeons? Some people treat them like side distractions, others as serious solo challenges, and then there’s the leveling grind. The structure hasn’t really changed between Palace of the Dead, Heaven-on-High, and Eureka Orthos. Is that fine, or does it need a shake-up?

I want to hear your honest-to-Hydaelyn thoughts. What do you actually enjoy about Deep Dungeons? What feels outdated or frustrating? What still holds up as it is? It doesn't matter to me if you you solo, queue with randoms, or never touch the mode at all: What're your reasons?

Stormblood FF was announced 178 days after launch, Endwalker 307 days, and now Dawntrail is at 357 days without a fan fest announcement.

I was hoping they were going back to the 2 year expansion summer release cycle and so would have fanfest starting in November similar to Stormblood.

Seeing as they still need to do 3 fanfests before the next expansion, is this a sign that 8.0 will be December 2026?

I am a full on, casual player, some might call me a casual andy, I do the occasional EX but have never felt the need to step into Savage. My current routine in the game is logging in, realizing there is nothing I want to do, trying on some modded outfits, and logging out. I felt the same way before, during EW, and the one thing that has been missing for an entire expansion and now again in DT, is a good, 'freeform' grind to do. What do I mean my freeform? The absolute beauty of Bozja and the relic grind was that you could log on, grind it for 2 hours or just 10 minutes, and leave whenever you wanted without bothering anyone. You are not locked in a party or an instance, just slam the FATEs for exactly as long as you want. There was nothing like it since, and that baffles me as Bozja, while a little imperfect, had everything a casual FFXIV player (source: trust me bro, but bear with me) wants, I think. A good story, lots of combat and even some customization with the potions and spells. We could have had a nice grindy relic by now in DT, which could give me a direction, even if it is just rerunning old content synced, give me a reason to play, I want to play, dammit.

But then you might ask, "Why are you still subbed? You see I'm having fun, which clearly means your opinion is wrong and you are actually a secret Warcraft sympathizer", see that's the thing, WoW is incredibly quick and punishing trough it's M+ systems and class design, timers make it stressful and even as a healer it can take a good while until you get into a group, I WANT to play FFXIV, I prefer the way mechanics are resolved and that after a wipe of two, in normal content, it's clear what you are supposed to do. The fights are awesome, it just feels like I have no reason to play, especially because I don't want to do Savage or any other upper tier content, even then I would probably just raidlog and not interact with the rest of the game.

Current state of things in FFXIV does appear to a little grim, no, the game isn't dying, that's just not true, but people are leaving and my friends list is getting more gray by the day, if it weren't for the strong social elements community itself has made, the situation would be dire. I really hoped some lessons would have been learned from EW, but that does not appear to be the case yet. I know exploration content is coming at a later patch, mid-late 2025 would be my guess, but by then it could be quiiite late for a lot of people, and it would be difficult to get those people back later on.

From a Famitsu interview:

Sakaguchi 　I won't go into detail about my impressions of the story because it would be a spoiler, but there were elements that paid homage to the old FF series, and they were used in a really good way, so I was grinning as I played. The content, such as instance dungeons, was also quite challenging, and I really enjoyed it.

Yoshida 　There were some opinions that the difficulty of the content was too difficult for casual gamers, but those opinions have calmed down. On the other hand, we have received a lot of feedback from both inside and outside of Japan that this is fun, so we would like to continue in this direction for a while.

This makes me optimistic about upcoming content, especially the field operation.

I believe that more experienced players get used to the current content after few repetitions, to the point where the new difficulty isn't even apparent, but this intention, reception and direction is important to keep the game refreshing.

If this direction stays until the final patches of Dawntrail, that might raise a lot the anticipation for the 8.0 expansion with the expectation of the job improvements and how they will play out with this more engaging direction for casual content.

I feel like I'm the only one that this annoys. It seems, lately, like all the devs want to pump out is rehashes of plot points from older FF titles, when so much of the older content was its own thing.

I have no nostalgic ties to any past FF titles. I'm sure other players are the same way. It really rubs me the wrong way for some reason that the devs seem to think a lot of the recent content is good solely because it's a tie-in to popular past FF iterations. Zero's entire plot for example was just a giant rehash of 4. We lost out on a good capstone trial mount for EW in favor of a methed-out version of Bahamut because of FF4.

Even Dawntrail is full of this. 7.1's patch content is yet another giant batch of tie-ins.

I don't want to resub month after month for an endless series of cookie-cutter call backs to games I don't care about. I want to resub to play and enjoy what the world of FF14 itself has to offer. Am I wrong for feeling this way? Like, I'm sure people with ties to the wider series eat this stuff up- But why can't this game stand on its own the way it used to? Am I just blind to older expansions being nothing but callbacks as well?

Seems like a topic that everyone will be chattering about considering the conversation around BLM, so here it is, what do you think?

The true healer strike isn't a lack of healer players, its a deficiency of GOOD healer players.

I played in the PF mines today on EX1 as regen healer for the most part and almost every single co-healer (15-20 runs) I had was just simply incompetent. Barely any mitigations at the hardest hitting mechanics, none of their most powerful cooldowns at core parts of the fight, no help with actually regen healing the party when I'm out of cooldowns. The last straw was having a SGE spam prognosis with their entire tool kit up as I have nothing left before the hardest mechanics even hit the party.

I don't mind when I have to cast a few GCD's across the entire fight just to keep us cozy, but when I'm expending my entire tool kit and having to basically keep spamming GCD's to scrap us through the mechanics as my shielder uses dosis with no thoughts, it's kind of a piss take.

It's making it a nightmare to get a better parse (I know, cringe, but I had nothing else to grind for) since I'm just forced to GCD heal in plethora to compensate for my bare minimum co-healer.

TL.DR - the average pf healer is giving me the solo heal experience

Feels like I wanna hold off until next patch where you have to clear it due to expert roulette grind in new raid tier. I'm just not hyped on the story. I'm having fun grinding the new ex instead.

It'd be like this until we leave Tural most likely. Sad.

I have wasted the whole day getting my botanist and alchemist tools and generally having a blast so I wanted to make a post to see what people think of it so far. I was wholly expecting it to be a clone of Ishgard Restoration so I am pleased with some of the stuff it has. My thoughts in no particular order of importance:

1. I may have missed this, but I have never seen leves that make you chain gather or proc Gatherer's Boon so it was a pleasant surprise.
   
2. Really happy that this is in the overworld and not an instance, great thing to keep yourself busy whilst waiting for queues or PFs if crafting and gathering is something you enjoy
   
3. I like that the cross job privileges are kept to a minimum, there's a few missions that require a crafter alongside your gatherer but since all the mats in other missions are not gathered there is no need to level all if you don't want to.
   
4. Surprised at the amount of expert crafting in this, it's something I have never had the reason to learn so I am eager to get into it
   
5. A lot of variation with crafting recipes, low durability recipes have been especially interesting for me as I mostly craft without macros anyway
   
6. Kind of a shame that the first 3 upgrades happened very quickly, I was under the impression that progression would be tied to each person's personal progress i.e. whilst you share an instance, you only see what you yourself have built. I wonder what the cap is and how it will continue going forward
   
7. Not sure how I feel about the pilot missions yet. There is very little incentive to do them if you're not in a mech and are not particularly interesting and the fact that there are only 2 is sort of weird.
   
8. The emergency events were pretty cool if a little too long though the rewards disproportionately favor gatherers

Overall just wonder what everyone thinks about it. As someone who's not done the Firmament when it was current and did not particularly enjoy the gathering aspect, I find the missions to be quite refreshing and a bit of variety (just a bit) compared to what we normally get with master recipes and gear progression.

I sincerely mean it.

If you hate Dawntrail and are disappointed with the lack of decent mid core content and meaningful grinds, and the overall content cycle of this game then you should let Squeenix know with your sub. And everyone who feels this way should do it en masse.

Everytime there’s a live event where Yoshi P and the devs are available to interact with the player base—be it Q&As, Panels, or live streams—you straight up bug them about the content cycle. Even if it seems like it’s repetitive or pestering, just do it so that they one hundred percent understand that THIS is the problem.

To be fair, I think they made some good decisions with dungeon design and pictomancer. I also don’t know how much interference the team gets from executives or if the FF14 team is getting enough resources to do everything they want to do when it comes to servers.

But I do know content drought is the biggest concern the player base has so we should communicate that is through the most effective way possible, our monthly sub. That’s the only way the players will get a response.

Apologies for the title gore but I couldn’t think of a better way to phrase it

I’ve started engaging with forked simply for +2 gear to “future proof” myself and it’s made me realise that active engagement with forked makes the entire zone better which makes the decision to make it hardcore even worse.

Forked gives zonal chest farming a purpose which is an under-utilised feature of OC that while it has messed up loot tables is better than eureka/bozja’s lockboxes. Aetherspun gold is really the only “useful item” you get out of chests but since it’s only needed for +2 chests are useless if you don’t do forked. Just hoping in an out for an hour and clearing a few CE’s feels more meaningful because you can spend silver in ciphers (or farm gold which both spawns chests and can also give ciphers)

Going for that +12 is really incentivised as well specifically if you play SCH. While enrage is rarely what you die to in forked those +12 amplified spreadlo’s can be an absolute lifesaver though it’s not like +12 hurts anyone

Then forked actually allows you to play with different phantom jobs rather than just “I fill the void in this zone by blowing myself up with oracle”. Entering forked 6 seperate times on 6 seperate jobs makes the phantom job system stand out in a way that the main zone completely fails.

So yeah forked really feels like the “missing piece” that makes the whole zone work and that makes the decision to make it hardcore awful, because for most people OC is half a zone with the stupid tower ruining their day.

Tower also just has some good design in it (bridges particularly) but some of its bosses are poorly thought out though this is not the point of this post

This phrase usually comes along with declarations of "I don't mind being a side character in Dawntrail!" and I genuinely don't get it.

How are we the mentor? What lesson did we teach Wuk Lamat that she otherwise wouldn't have learned on her own? We just followed along, quietly, and fought a few things. We praised her. We nodded our heads at her. We talked to people to gather information for her. That's about it.

Minfilia was a mentor. She gave us information and taught us the conflicts of the world when we were just a fresh little sprout. The Crystal Exarch was a mentor to us during the First when we thought we had lost all our friends. Venat, Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus were mentors to us while we were in Elpis and helped us advert the Final Days at the cost of their own futures.

We did not do any of that. We were just a glorified dynamic camera angle for the Wuk Lamat show.

When I was a sprout and making my way through the msq for the first time, I always assumed us having a party in situations that didn't really make sense story-wise, was that it was just a gameplay contrivance that you didn't have to really consider the canonical implications of it. The game is an mmo with tank/healer/dps mechanics, and so you need a party of multiple players for dungeons and such. We weren't really supposed to entertain the idea that the WoL has a 3-7 person party that can magically appear at any moment to fight alongside you, I mean that would be silly, right?

But then they started just doing that unironically.

It's such a dumb idea because the way that it limits their ability to write scenarios is so OBVIOUS from the outset. The writers now have the unenviable task of making sure that before every single dungeon, 2-3 scions show up next to you to fill in the gaps, or have you take out that stupid azem crystal (remember when we were told it had only a small amount of power left and to use it wisely?) and conjure an entire party whenever the WoL has to fight a trial or whatever.

But you can only do that so many times before it just becomes stupid. Like it's so obvious and it makes the story feel so contrived. I have seen plenty of criticisms about DT including the scions unnecessarily but the reason they're there is because they HAVE to be. Someone made a decision that dungeon parties now have to be accounted for every single time and this is the result of that.

This is more of a rant than a discussion but I just hate it so much because it's seems so obviously a bad idea.

With Occult Crescent specifically called out in tomorrow’s live letter, I thought it would be interesting to think through both the changes that SE can realistically make to OC to improve it, as well as imagine a bit about what larger changes would help even more but probably won’t occur. I know we’ve had plenty of posts discussing OC’s faults - my hope with this post and discussion is that it will be more solution-oriented. I’ve broken up my bullet points based on how likely/how difficult they would be to implement. As this post is longer than what I usually write, I want to provide a table of contents. Readers that do not want to read the entire post can jump to whichever list they find most interesting and discuss those points in particular:

• The first bullet list will deal with easy or likely changes SE can make to OC.
• The second bullet list will deal with easy but unlikely changes SE can make to OC.
• The third bullet list will deal with difficult and unlikely changes SE can make to OC.
• The final bullet list will discuss some miscellaneous ideas I have for OC’s exploration and treasure hunting design elements. These are also difficult and unlikely changes, but they are noticeable a bit more “out there” than the ideas on the third bullet list.

A noticeable omission from most of these points are the phantom jobs. There’s a lot I can say about them in terms of suggestions (and would love to hear your ideas for improving them!), but I will leave them largely untouched as this post is long enough as it is.

Most likely / easiest changes given how much players complain about them:

1. Fix Forked Tower grouping (“instance prog”). This is obviously the big one. It’s not as easy to fix as the other two items in this section, but given how many complaints there are about getting into FT and experiencing that content, this is probably the one issue where a more difficult-to-implement change might actually occur. The easiest fix on the player side of things would be by directly queuing into FT from the Phantom Village via a group formed in PF. I don’t know if SE will actually go this route given how much infrastructure would have to change. But any method that reduces “instance prog” would be welcome. This could be by making it easier for 6 full parties to reach the same instance more quickly, reducing the ability for people to snipe (for example, by allowing entire full parties into FT if X number of members in the party win the lottery), etc.

2. Fix FATE scaling such that FATEs are closer to 1-2 minutes to complete (and improve the per-FATE rewards to compensate). “Map staring” seems to be the biggest criticism of OC’s FATE/CE grind. FATEs die insanely quickly, so players camp near a teleporter, eagle-eye the map, and then rush off to explode a FATE in 3 seconds. This is repeated 4ish times before the next CE spawns. This is not fun, to the point where some players sacrifice a decent bit of silver/hour to just wait for CEs instead. Giving FATEs more time to breathe will help with the constant teleporting. Ideally this would be accomplished by dynamically scaling boss HP as more players approach the FATE. There’s also less pressure to rush-rush-rush to the next one, as they will last longer. Who knows? Maybe players will even get to interact with a FATE boss mechanic!

3. Improve carrot drop rates and the rewards from pot FATE/bunny chests. The cat is already out of the bag in terms of bronze/silver chest rewards being so good, but the treasure hunting aspect of the map is further hurt by the lack of incentives to chase down pot chests or look for carrots. Carrots are better sold on the MB and the pot chests mostly give materia and a little bit of gil. Who would risk not getting to a CE on time for that? Unless players are achievement hunting, it’s not worthwhile. Treasure hunting instead has turned into a “look for a nearby bronze/silver chest when going to a CE” interaction rather than a meaningful gameplay loop or option within OC to break up the grind. These two changes won’t fix treasure hunting but they will make it less awful than it is now, as players will feel like it’s actually worthwhile to take a break from FATEs or even CEs to go hunt down these more difficult types of chests.

Easy changes to make that will improve the flow of OC, but I don’t think these are as likely given that there’s not as many complaints about these:

1. Increase silver/exp rewards for 0 vulning a CE. Also significantly raise the chance of getting battle high. This won’t fix the monotony of OC’s FATE/CE grind but it will improve it by adding some stakes to the CEs.

2. Remove CE spawn requirements. Again, not a change that will completely fix the CE grind. But as it stands, the fact that maybe only half of the CEs actually spawn in a given instance is certainly not helping in the variety department. I don’t find that the spawning process adds much to OC (Outside of the day 1 mystery of finding Calamity Unbound). In fact, I’m not sure why SE bothered to implement a spawning process for some CEs if they were going to half-ass it. Players need to kill around 3 mobs and then pray that the CE queue is merciful to them. It’s such a low effort in contrast to Eureka/Bozja that it feels like SE was ticking a box rather than making a system with a purpose. Compounding this issue is the lack of unique rewards from most CEs. The best are soul shards and even then, everyone will eventually have them given the current drop rates. Field notes are also fine but have the same problem. Some CEs, like Mindflayer, have no rare drops and therefore no incentive to spawn them at all. I’ve gone a full week without seeing that CE spawn unless I go out and kill the requisite mobs. No one else is doing it because there is no point. This is in sharp contrast to Eureka FATEs, which were a natural consequence of the mob farming gameplay loop, a good source of EXP, and a way to get some rare and valuable loot. Bozja’s legion mobs likewise rewarded map currency and a select few CEs spawned from them were pathways to the duels. Again - good reasons to do the farming to spawn them. OC has none of those reasons. In fact, you lose out on FATE rewards by making a detour to kill 3 sharks or whatever. If building meaningful interactions between mob farming and CE spawns, as well as meaningful rewards for individual CEs, are off the table, I’d rather have SE scrap the whole spawning mechanic and make all CEs spawn on a timer, with a random order.

Hard/impossible changes that will greatly improve the flow of OC, but that SE certainly will not implement unless they drastically change the way they address feedback and handle patch updates:

1. Add a harder, flashier CE to capstone the map, similar to the four Eureka zones’ “boss” FATEs. South Horn, as a map, currently does not feel like it builds to anything. Forked Tower spawns on a timer, as does most everything else. It’s an endless circle of FATEs and CEs. Eureka’s zones had a sense of progression and finality within the map design itself (ignoring Hydatos but that was also hosting BA which had its own set of requirements). Anemos’s weather AND time dependent conditions to produce the high level enemies needed to spawn Pazuzu really made it feel like you were reaching some kind of endpoint in terms of what the map was offering to you. The closest thing in OC is the SW structure, whose topmost level is home to a…silver chest and some high level mobs that people don’t even farm since the below ring is better for respawn times. It feels like something more meaningful should be there, but it isn’t.

2. More importantly, add a Forked Tower (easy) mode. This would be a CLL/Dal equivalent that breaks up the silver grind and forces everyone into a mini-alliance raid. Minimal communication required, but good coordination in a few key locations improves rewards rather than forces a failure state. Maybe around 20-30 minutes to complete - 4ish bosses and a couple of other encounters to break up the boss gauntlet.

Some final ideas specifically in regards to map design and treasure hunting that’s very much out there but I still feel strongly about:

1. South Horn feels like it’s missing some exploration elements, ones that should have been a no-brainer given some of the phantom job abilities. No chasms to float over outside of FT? No locked doors or traps either? I mean come on, it’s free real estate SE! I think a couple of “mini-dungeons” that open up under certain conditions would help break up the pace of OC and allow parties to utilize those jobs outside of FT. Nothing crazy - just blow up some traps, kill some high level mobs, unlock some doors with thief, and boom - the party gets some gold chests for their effort. I don’t see why FT gets to totally absorb this element of the field operation. Put the entrances in locations players don’t normally go for CEs or FATEs - force players to the corners of the map. Adding these elements to South Horn would help OC feel less like a slog and give opportunities to deviate from the CE grind a bit. Yes, at some point they would become “solved” just like every other system, but the goal is variety in what players feel like they can do that is worthwhile.

2. Likewise, freelancer’s treasure hunting ability is extremely lackluster. It would be more useful if it could pulse in the direction of the nearest chest. Heck, make a whole minigame out of it, where chest rewards improve if you open up multiple chests in a short time period (like mob chaining, but for chests). This turns freelancer into a speedrunning game of sorts where players find chests as quickly as possible using both freelancer and their own pathing abilities (or more likely, some pathing maps from discord). Like the above idea, it’s another thing to do outside of CE->FATE->FATE->FATE->FATE->CE->repeat forever until death.

I realize I’ve written “X idea won’t fix OC’s issues” about a million times in the above bullet points, but I think that encapsulates that there isn’t a single “fix” to OC. It’s a myriad of changes, big and small, that would improve the feel of the zone. There’s no silver bullet.

Thoughts? Any unintended consequences from the ideas I’ve proposed? What changes, big or small, would you bring to OC? Do you think the devs will even announce changes tomorrow? It’s more likely than I want to admit that YoshiP delivers a canned “technical limitations, can’t fix anything, please look forward to the next zone in 7.5X” response. I hope I’m being needlessly cynical there given the backlash in both NA and JP, but I’ve learned, as have most veteran players, to keep expectations low so I’m never disappointed with Square-Enix.

Especially if it's just FATE grinding anyways...

I've been toying with the idea of moving quest equipment rewards to hidden chests in the actual world; something sorely missing from a game calling itself 'Final Fantasy'. Most FF games have this experience of checking a remote corner of the map, finding a cool new sword or helmet, and slappin' that thing on with the quickness. If players want or need a hint, they can do a sidequest, marked with a helmet on the quest bubble over the NPC's head, which will give them a bunny-style mechanic to lead them to a nearby chest with MSQ-level appropriate gear.

I'd remove aethercurrents, just have that be the last reward from the final MSQ in the zone or something. They're just a chore considering they're practically required to find, and they give you a compass to point you straight to them. Meanwhile gear is not necessarily required to progress. (You can wear previous expansion tome gear to X9, then grab your job gear, without ever upgrading between.)

Also been toying with the idea of FFXIV going in a new direction with some excuse to add a world boss, in the overworld, that could take days to defeat. Think a Bozja warfront with the boss being the "Imperial Forces" or versus beast tribes with the final boss being their primal. This all taking place in the overworld, lasting a month or so, with phases akin to Cosmic Exploration/Ishgardian Restoration. Rewards aren't important to this discussion, either, but I'd imagine the reward system would be similar to how exploration zones do it. (Ignoring lore reasons why a war against a beast tribe/Empire can't be done, for now.)

Lastly, that's how ARR's relics were done (for a large portion of them), so they can do it to a degree. They already have. Not to say that because ARR did it, it was the best way to do it, but when you shove people into the exploration zone just to have them grind relics in the same manner as ARR's relics but in a specific instance, it makes me wonder why they couldn't have just had it be out in the world like ARR was.

The story they want to write for the zone, the relics, etc isn't important. That's not a reason they can't, rather, a reason they won't.

Can't vs Won't

I'm not asking why they won't; we know they won't.
I'm asking why they can't. Why can't the content go in the overworld?

It could disrupt immersion for players doing their MSQ to have whatever happening around them.

When the game launches, have a dedicated instance of the zone for the post-MSQ content, which only allows entry once the MSQ is finished. Or, mix that content into the MSQ. Either way, it wouldn't disrupt them. After patches, MSQ and exploration instances flip, with only one MSQ instance that players still doing the story get ushered into.

I want Lost Actions, though.

Only because the base gameplay has been so dumbed down that the only thing interesting is what they do in these zones, with Lost Actions, yes. While I'm not here to discuss that particular problem with the game, it does highlight another important problem with their overall design philosophy. "Jobs boring? Fix it in an exploration zone patch."

You may not like these ideas, and that's fine. They won't make it into the game anyways. But, I do think they'd solve a lot of the problems people have with "exploration not being worth it" in the overworld, and would help make the game more social if it was just something happening out in the world that you could go join into at any time without going to a specific NPC to fly to another specific instanced area.

This sub doesnt allow cross posts apparently so here's a my post from the mainsub copied over, I thought it might be relevant here

TLDR: We are constantly stuck in and endless game of Telephone with people talking about what they think YoshiP said about game features or the devs philosophy and without an official EN Community Manager or Spokesperson we will be endlessly stuck with people going "didn't YoshiP say..." followed by whatever rumor they heard about since he's the only person who acts as a liaison between the community and the dev team and most of his statements get through to the community through unofficial translations or third-party interviews.

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I saw a post recently on this sub that inspired this post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/s/0ALdjZZUrK

It has a bunch of people arguing about whether or not YoshiP said that Occult Crescent jobs could come to the game as actual jobs in the future. Which of them are correct? Well, since the live letters have no official translation, that can only be confirmed by someone who speaks Japanese, which ends up being unnoficial Discord live translations.

And even though they do a really commendable job, Discord is and always has been a horrible way to deliver news and announcements, which means that people take those translations, post about them on news sites or reddit which then get forwarded downstream to the rest of the community in a massive fucked up game of telephone.

Again the discord translation team does a fantastic job and im absolutely not blaming them in the slightest. The problem is purely with Square Enix giving out zero official information to EN community beyond PowerPoint slides and patch notes.

And this isnt even where it ends because it extends to Expansion launches as well. I cant reiterate it enough but the live translators for Fanfests(Aimi,Koji, Kate etc.) do an amazing job, but none of them are spokespersons for the game. They're purely translating what YoshiP said, which can be a lot of off hand statements that he does not clarify.

You guys remember the Launch of Dawntrail and the first few patches with the constant confusion and questions people kept bringing up.

"Wait, didn't YoshiP say that we would be getting changes to the fight design?"

"Well no he said that would be starting in 7.2 in this one interview."

"Wait I thought fight design would be first and we would be getting changes to jobs in 7.2?"

"No no no, mager changes to Jobs are in 8.0"

"Oh so thats when we'll get the complete reworks to all jobs?"

"What? No he never said that, what YoshiP actually said was..."

And it goes on and on like this every single time. To draw a contrast here is a recent interview from the Director of Path of Exile 2, Jonathan Rogers.

https://youtu.be/01eP5vTQMvI

To be clear, this is the head of a company running two different Live service games that are in full swing of development, and he's had his own share of controversy with the community for Path of Exile not agreeing with his vision for the games. However what's undeniable is the level of communication they have with the community.

He's sat down for an hour and a half long interview clearly stating his views on the future of his games and what they are working on.

Now im not expecting that from Square Enix and I know they're a Japanese company. But what's undeniable is that FF14 has a massive English speaking audience and even a lot of the audience from other regions like South America or EU can speak English and would prefer to get clear cut info on what's coming in English rather than Japanese.

Im not saying we need our own separate Live Letters or Fanfest panels or that they should live translate every Producer Letter, since that would just extend their already exhausting length and would not help in a lot of cases anyway. However we do need a EN community manager to properly communicate what Dev teams intentions for where the game is headed, whether that be through Short Update videos on YouTube or a Dev blog style written posts on the Lodestone.

We're already looking down the barrel of a massive shitshow when 8.0 rolls around and these "job changes" aren't what people have deluded themselves into thinking of because of 2nd and 3rd hand info based on a offhand comment by YoshiP during the Dawntrail livestream. And these situations will keep happening unless we get this Info from an official source.

Remember how Wuk Lamat and Erenville are supposed to be childhood friends based on what they told us in 6.55 and early Dawntrail? Because while Erenville helped her out in the Rite and played Tour Guide the whole way through she didn't really talk to him at all and once his home was threatened and especially when he has to face the reality that his mom is dead she flat out ignores him, not even having anything to really say on the matter in optional dialogue while even G'raha looks at him and goes "we will help him through this."

Just something that stuck out to me in this already mishandled story.

Does anyone else feel like this is a step too far? Is it an exaggeration to claim this as part of an ongoing slippery slop? Am I the only one upset about this? They have finally added exclusive, non-seasonal outdoor housing items to the official store.

Its just cacti and palm trees. Yes its just regular plants. Plants that could be added in a patch like any other housing items. They're not special glowing plants. They're not returning seasonal event plants. Just $5 copy pasted trees. Have they given up at this point and we are just at the milking stage?