Possibly. xD I just find it so funny, it’s almost like watching Blizzard’s covenant crap. “Hey we know we ignored feedback from players going back to when we announced the feature and angered a lot of you, but we finally did it a year later. We did you a favor, but we’re still going to say we did the right thing early and achieved our goals with the system being needlessly frustrating to deal with.”
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Speaking of grinds, one of the best things about the the tomestone grind in FFXIV is that once you finish it you’re guaranteed to get exactly the piece of gear you need, because the grind is for a currency to purchase the item and not for a random chance at something you may or may not need.
Once upon a time, many years ago, WoW’s gearing functioned under a similar premise. I guess they thought spending 8 hours a week in mythic+ for 3 chances at a C-tier trinket or a ring with garbage secondaries you’ll never use because you already bought the 262 with your best stats was better game design.
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Man, ngl that is 100% one of the reasons I like tomestones and the fact that crafting over there is valuable to not only the crafter, but the actual players as well. My Neo Ishgardian set is still one of my favorites.
The only favor they’ve done me is letting me playing with my friends on the Alliance soon, that’s it. lol
Not sure if you raid Savage or know the workings of Savage loot exactly but it’s also very similar to that. When you kill the boss it drops coffers which give you that slot for whatever job you are when you open it. So you’re not fishing for one of six cloaks off the same boss and just screwed until next reset.
The second best part is when you kill a boss in Savage, you get a currency item (usually a book) and after 4 weeks of killing the boss if you haven’t gotten what you want, you can use those books to just outright buy the item from the boss you want at a vendor in town. There is no “I’ve killed P1S 7 weeks and no rings ever” because you’re guaranteed to have it by week 4 unless you bought some other piece.
Same with P4S, except the items on him are 8 books, but he also drops a random weapon, plus a weapon coffer. No matter what if the same 8 players kill Hesperos each week, by the end of the second month everyone in that group will have their chestpiece, and weapon. In addition to having 8 books they shouldn’t need to spend on their main to buy a weapon or chestpiece for an alt job they maybe want to play.
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Blizzard has been showing that they lack in the inspiration department. This expansion has been about using same design of, time-gating then grinding to make any achievement. They have used this with thinking that it is the easiest way to keep player retention and investment in the game. Many will say, “well that how the games always been”, and that the issue. If your always repeating the same mold then players now what to expect each expansion and it just feels like your replaying the last expansion a gain. It becomes stale and just more of a chore than a game.
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Which is why you should vote for me for creative director. I will lead the game in the true direction it was meant to be, straight into Bolvar’s pelvis…or something.
True, but the thing I said much above I feel is at play here. The exodus to FFXIV last year’s big threat wasn’t players not returning. Players actually engaging enough with XIV to see endgame, then coming back was going to be the issue and we see it with Echo’s raid team, and most certainly with Scripe.
Players who made it to that point see that being fit to raid doesn’t need to be this agonizing chore with heroic splits, chores, weekly checklists all to stay optimal. WoW is the only game that forces this kind of requirement on its players.
So when people see both, they have a frame of reference for how unnecessarily obtuse Blizzard is being in their game design. Prior to the exodus, people probably figured it’s par for the course in MMOs, now they realize that isn’t the case and Blizzard is a very extreme outlier. Eventually they’ll reach a point and say “I don’t need to put up with this crap, in fact I LITERALLY do not need to because of all my other options available, NONE of them require this kind of BS that Blizzard does just so I can play the damn game and have fun maybe when my chores are done. Other games let me have fun while I do the one or two chores they have rather than the 13 here.”
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mhm, all it took was a lot of people going “hey there’s something else out there. No really, follow me.” And here we are now.
Granted some of those things that were out there were…well…no good, but that happens.
Can you have a rough draft of that by next week?
This is why more chances of loosing players is a good change for Blizzard. It forces them to come to the realization that they are not the only place customer can go. They need to step back up and show why they deserve our time and attention. They have proven they can be the top MMO but they need to work for it once again.
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Straight up, people will never give them credit for it, but in the best possible outcome of all of this, Zepla and Asmongold probably saved the MMO genre. Zepla was the one who finally got Asmongold to give the game a try, then when Asmongold came over it was a massive flood and people realized the grass actually was greener on the other side for once.
In the most ideal of circumstances, Blizzard sits down and actually sees what the hell Square is doing, and why, tries to actually understand the merit of just making a game people love to play rather than a game that’s all about metrics and player engagement and unscrews WoW’s game design.
In the worst possible outcome of this, the worst MMO of the current crop dies a painful death, and long overdue death, then serves as a warning for other MMOs to engage with, cater to, and appreciate the players they have. See them as players, people you are wanting to enjoy what you’re putting out and making them happy, not dollar signs.
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I got it right now actually.
Well are you going to tell us?
The funny thing about the entire premise of this thread is that ARR came out 9 years ago and has enjoyed a pretty steady level of popularity using its formula since then. People in FFXIV have been doing their thing and will continue for as long as SE keeps things fun. A bunch of streamers getting mad and going to the game didn’t make the game ‘live’ anymore than those streamers going back to whatever they were doing before made the game ‘die’. A weird myopic loop some WoW players live in.
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It’s sad how desperate people are for a mediocre game like FF14 to be #1. Classic probably has more players than retail and FF14 combined.
True but in all honesty, I genuinely do not think modern Blizzard is capable of this. The developers who made World of Warcraft the name brand MMO are no longer at the company.
You’re basically dealing with the game developer equivalent to a kid of one of the wealthiest people in the world. They do not understand the value of a dollar because they never had to earn one. Then they find themselves bankrupt and are utterly incapable of fixing the situation because everything they had they didn’t create, they inherited and then proceeded to squander.
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Gotta love people who use woke. Being “woke” is just being decent. I love people who admit they are terrible human beings by getting made at “woke”.
It’s sad when the anti-society person understands this when you clearly don’t…
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This is false. I’ll disagree with that paladin on many things, but this is not one of them. People may think the idea of being “woke” is solely about being decent, and at a very basic level it is. The problem is people use that as a bludgeon on others and get sanctimonious in their purity spiral crap.
There’s a stark difference between “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t use racial slurs to address people of other races or treat them badly” and “This person is of a different privilege tier than you therefore you disagreeing with them is racism and you are a bad person.” Like I’ve literally been called “racist” for telling a black girl on Twitter that she knew nothing about economics because her solution to inflation was to print more money and give it out to people.
It wasn’t people disagreeing with the point I was making, it was people fixating on the fact that I would dare to correct a black woman on Twitter and the ONLY reason I clearly would have corrected a blatant falsehood such as that had everything to do with her skin color and not ANYTHING remotely associated to the fact she made a horribly uneducated and moronic statement publicly.
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After waking from the fever dream that was Shadowlands, and discovering that we never actually traversed past the end of Wrath, Bolvar approaches us and tells us that “There is no long a greater evil to fight Heroes. Go forth and rebuild and live.”
After this point Sylvannas, who is already dead inside, yeets herself from ICC again but this time is eaten by feral werewolves, who become Worgen after eating her Banshified body…allowing undead and whatever else to contract the worgen curse. However no one knows this yet as everyone has left to go do farming or something.
Some time later, Varian Wrynn appears with Garrosh (who saved him with the help of Khadgar), and WoD happens…but instead of the Iron Horde attacking, it’s Dreadlord and Orc bred monstrocities, that begin pouring through the dark portal. Around this time we as PC’s are off hunting down this Worgen strain that has gone awry, and after completing the situation we unlock Worgen playable on either faction…oh and Genn is dead as Godfrey shanks him with a spoon in the eye.
Flash back to the portal, we’re there with the combined might of the Alliance and Horde with their undead doggos and such. We go through, it’s basically the same as alternate Draenor except winged orcs and such. Illidan is also there, but he’s like 100 times more awesome. Demon slaying commences, and soon we’re dealing with Giga Blackhand and co.
THENNN Velen pops up out of nowhere (almost like Magni) and wants us to go into the sun well to find something. Turns out Arthas did in fact die, but his essence got mixed with the Sunwell and so he’s back because of space goat magic. Now the Combined power of everyone pours into Argus, etc…the Forsaken have an actual King, they rebuild…something something, sunwell reverses undeath, you can now make upright undead that are only slightly less dead and can procreate.
Don’t need a sunwell to do that. I just need a few shipments of grain and me and the boys from our Cult of the Damned will have you an army of undead in two nights tops. Just keep a certain prince out of where we choose to ship the grain.
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Nah, they needed Arthas, instead of Lightforged Dreinei the Horde get Sunbirthed Walkers.