1.23 was better than 1.0 yes but it was still a sluggy, buggy mess of uninspired, copy/pasted zones. Current XIV's issues are nowhere near those, this is overall a much more polished experience.
barely. im convinced that yoshida's ideal business model is having a majority of the playerbase unsub for 5-6 months and resub for big content drops because that's exactly the pattern that he has been achieving for years now. i'd even go a step further and say it's only worth subbing for a couple months every 2 years for new expansions so that you get all of the content of the previous expansion to play with instead of having to wait for the clogged IV drip of story and side story updates for months and months at a time.
I consistently have to rewatch 24man raid cutscenes just to remember wtf was going on because it's 6 months in between story installments. It's a real shame for this one too because somehow I doubt this Ivalice collab shit will ever happen again, and so far the opportunity has been mad squandered.
That's actually Yoshida's idea for the game, he said so in one of the interviews or Live letters a while ago. The point is I'd rather have this than 1.0 with exp caps and nothing else to do because they forgot to add endgame stuff (and then release a patch 3 months later with 3 NMs in it lol).
He's ok with the mentality though because enough folks haven't unsubbed to raise any alarms. If say 75% of the playerbase said fuck it and unsubbed next week, there would be corporate pants shitting. Too bad that wont happen, but I'd looooove to see that.
^ That's exactly why they "sped things up" even if its the same because the fallout from 3.0 > 3.1 hit extremely hard. We just need enough people to stop kissing yoshi's ass for any actual change to happen again. Hell in latest gamewatch interview they essentially said "stormblood is over, so the storyline heading into the next expansion is underway with 4.3" so unless we see significant changes to content style in 4.3+, more of the same over this next year
I don't think we're going to see any radical changes in how our battle content is designed. At least not to the level of Mythic+ that you get with WoW (Which required the use of their Diablo 3 team that already had implemented the rift system in their game). On top of that the iLv jump is anything remotely as insane what happened with Legion.
Right now I think FFXIV is current at its peak with its content. However the reward structure is dog shit and dungeons are by far the worst FFXIV has to offer and the way the design team in XIV had gone about shit is through incremental differences (Instead and churn and burn). So far we've only see three additional types of content post ARR with Ultimate Trials in Stormblood and Exploratory Missions [Eureka/Diadem] and Palace of the Dead with Heavensward.
And those definitely don't come close to the bang for buck that Mythic+ did in Legion. I'll say the game is fine as an experience but it does nothing to make you want to come back week after week if you've already experienced everything.
Unless you like playing house.
I can give you a good logical reason why it made sense to implement damage/healing caps in the beginning of ARR and to remove them later.
At the release of ARR Square Enix could have only rough internal estimates about player performance in the most difficult content of the game that were not backed up by actual data, because the game itself was new. For SE it must be very important that players always have an endgame goal, until SE releases new content that sets new goals. Because if players have beaten it all, they are much more likely to stop playing the game in the absence of clear goals. That's why the difficulty of the most hardcore content in each vertical progression cycle is set so high that the absolute majority of players cannot beat it until it gets nerfed (after the introduction of the next progression cycle with new goals). So in the beginning of ARR SE preferred to play it safe and added the hard healing/damage cap.
This hard healing/damage cap, however, has its own negative effects. It removes the incentive for players to gear up their characters further, and to do all the daily/weakly chores for it. These caps didn't have any negative effect on player engagement until players have discovered them, and when some players have discovered them the negative effect was still limited until the presence of the caps has become widely known. When SE has gained confidence in tuning up the content difficulty and the knowledge of the caps has spread among players, SE removed the caps.
Or we can use our brain and they were assigned a 16bit which is why anything over 32767 was rolled over as a negative value.
You really do want to cling on that 14 has no issues and want to believe you know everything dont you?
XIV is and always will be that game I sub for a month, soak up the new content then put down for another couple months. New patch excitement is always enjoyable, as is whatever new music Soken puts out to keep me tided over but the core reward scheme of this game isn't worth the grinding for what amounts to yet another treadmill in a couple of months with zero variation in the formula.
I commend whoever has to come up with all the different names for Tomestones.
I just want to curl up and die sometimes.
BLM who's rotation consisted of using Fire > Fire 4 xhowever many > transpose > Blizzard > Blizzard 4 > Thunder 3 > transpose and repeat from Fire 4.
SAM who did as much DPS as above BLM and decided to start memeing halfway through by LBing a single mob in a pull of 3 and then the same guy says.
[15:48](Raidwiz EqoaMidgardsormr) we coulda LB'd this pile
[15:48](Raidwiz EqoaMidgardsormr) who wasted LB?
I named only one of the reasons that I could think of, why SE might have decided to impose damage/healing caps at the release of the game. Another possible reason could be that they wanted to reduce the load on the hardware at game launch as much as possible. So they went with 16-bit integers at the start to reduce memory usage, and then switched to 32-bit integers or something when the limitations started to show.
I just don't have an easy time believing that people who have developed such a complex and commercially successful game as FFXIV, would be so shortsighted that would overlook such an obvious design limitation that they would run intro so soon after the release.
I'm sure SE knew all about what limitations they were putting on the game at the time and had plans to bump it up to a 32bit intiger before release of HW, however they released Ninja which let us see that there was a flaw in the game with damage values over flowing to negative values with the snakes in T5 w/ Echo
. I don't know where you are getting a damage cap or heal cap in the game back in 2.0-2.55b where people could actually hit it, the current one in place is 999,999 which can be observed in Eureka doing LB2 on a Lv.1 monster.
if I have to fly between Namai and Doma one more fucking time I swear to fucking god you guys
(in reference to the pre-Namazu questlines)
Chair (Savage) lol