Kabanaw

I was thinking about Endwalker, as I do, in particular about how lonely the expansion feels. When my friends actively playing, I'm alone in the world. And that's weird for an MMO, right? The FFXIV team has made attracting players interested in a single-player experience a priority to the point that it's hurt the social aspects of the game. Let's compare what was added to Shadowbringers and the respective content for Endwalker:

• Shadowbringers had the Ishgard restoration, Endwalker had Island Sanctuary
• Shadowbringers had Bozja, Endwalker had variant dungeons and Eureka Orthos
• Shadowbringers had Delubrum Reginae savage as extra difficult content, Endwalker had criterion dungeons

See the pattern? Basically everything in Shadowbringers had huge player caps - Bozja had 90+ person instances with events that could accommodate 48, DR Savage needed 48 players, and Ishgard restoration had a hilarious number of people involved for the restoration events and fetes. Compare that to Endwalker - both Eureka Orthos and variant dungeons are 1-4 players, criterion dungeons are 4 player, and island sanctuary is a solo experience. Instead of high player caps that draw the community into a space together, people are shunted into small individual instances. There's no feeling of community in anything that Endwalker's added.

On top of that, there's also cross data center travel. On the surface it seems like great to allow players to play with anyone in their region, but it's had a horrible effect on party finder. Aether is known as the raid server, and before data center travel, it had the highest raid population. Primal had pretty healthy numbers before data center travel was added, though, you could find PF listings pretty easily during peak hours. Post data center travel, the Primal PF is barren. When there aren't any listing, people go look for them on Aether. That means people don't start making parties on Primal, which means more people go to Aether, until eventually nobody is making parties on Primal, even during peak hours. From what I can tell, that's the case for basically anything 8 player now.

And that sucks! If you want to farm for mounts, or do blue mage stuff, or raid, or learn ultimates, or anything, you need to data center travel. You need to cut yourself off from a ton of features and any social groups on your data center in order to find people to play with. Despite it making it possible to play with more players than ever, it makes the game feel so, so much more lonely for anyone not native to Aether.

I think something extremely important to MMO design is giving a reason to do content that feeds back into the game's macro loop. Players will do content because it's fun at first, but they will keep doing content because it gives them a worthwhile reward for completing their goals.

There's three categories of casual MMO content. First, boring content that gives good rewards. The Grind. A good example is daily roulettes or tribal quests - the same thing over and over, but the rewards make it worth your time. The second category is good content that gives bad or limited rewards. EO or criterion dungeons can be fun for a while, but since their only really solid rewards are cosmetics or feed into themselves, the fun dries up. The third category is what makes MMOs worth playing: Good content with good rewards.

For me, Bozja is the textbook example of this. I thought Bozja was a blast, but I didn't do it because it was fun. I did it because I wanted to level up all my characters to 80 and get relic weapons. (It also helped that there were long-term goals to complete for Bozja.) My objective-addled brain wants to check items on a list, and a good game will make checking things off that list fun.

So I think that's why I'm finding Endwalker lacking as I try to finish up my main goals. I really want to do new content, but that doesn't fill my progress bars. It's just more effective to do the old stuff I've done a million times already.

It's bonkers to me that Eureka Orthos is already basically impossible to queue for at any level. It's been out for 6 months and you can find literally no other players on a data center running it??? What did they do to make something that's supposed to be good for grinding characters so barren?