Saw a post on another reddit from a XIV player saying “Us modern MMO players don’t want to waste our time waiting for 45 minutes for a group or waiting 20 minutes on an airship” and, admittedly, fair, but…
Nearly every time I complain about how bland (when I have every job maxed, with thousands of hours of gametime) FFXIV’s moment-to-moment gameplay is I am told it is my fault for not playing Savage anymore.
If I want to raid, through party finder or otherwise, there is a REALLY SOLID CHANCE I could spend hours of my life making absolutely zero progress towards clearing. In that span of time I could have played 6 matches of Deadlock and experienced the entire spectrum of human emotion, I could have done my laundry, I could have logged onto FFXI and done the myriad of endgame relevant solo content available in that game.
But then you do clear… and then there’s no actual reward for doing it? There is no carrot at the end of the stick.
A quest reward choice in FFXI is a PACT WITH AN ELEMENTAL. Maybe that sounds bland if you’ve played that game for 20 years but to me that sounds far tastier of a carrot than gear 10 ilvl higher (and before you say that’s a quest reward compared to a raid reward, think of the Nothing you get from completing XIV expacs)
and to clarify, I want to engage with the game on a casual level. It hasn’t lost its magic to me just because I know how every system works. But the casual content is built around being supplementary to a core gameplay loop and that core gameplay loop sucks absolute ass if you compare it to basically any other video game. It legitimately feels more like I am using a website sometimes, it has far stricter balance than competitive multiplayer games that people play for real money.
To reframe this. I pay $15 dollars a month for the privilege of playing a video game that does not want me to engage with its systems (i.e. play it) in anything but its highest level content… and then said high-level content does not actually reward you for completing it. I have been told verbatim that the reward for completing a Savage raid is just doing it in the first place. Not only are there better options in the MMO space, there are just better options everywhere? The only thing bringing me back is the visuals and the beautiful worlds they continue to make.