Chinese FFXIV Producer gives his thoughts on the game - Arthars translates 

Note that the video only includes Arthars' translations. If you would like to watch the full VoD or even the origininal Bilibili video, check out the video description!

The fact that they call xeno "big beard" is hilarious 😂

When trick was 1 min during asphodelos I, a RDM, had a NIN in my static. I fucking loved that raid tier. Holding my melee combo was simple but it felt good. Then mug became the raid buff and that murdered the fun of raiding for me bc I didn’t have to think about anything. Just pool resources for 1.45 and then mash all your shit. And that’s every job in the game now. If nothing else, I want that to change in DT. I’d be satisfied with half of raid buffs being 1 minute, half on 2 minutes and maybe one or two on 30 seconds. That and make healers fun again. Just given SCH and AST their stormblood kits.

Thanks Arthars for translating. I particularly like these topics: 11:25 On game balancing 23:40 Make new cosmetics than races 31:37 Pay per minute model in China

Saying "its dynamo or stack because you've boiled down mechanic to their optimal movement" is such a great take holy. It's true. Anything, with enough practice and expertise, can be reduced to such a simplified strategy, in any game, period. It's not fair to hold a mechanic against it's most optimized solutions. That's a backwards approach. You should reverse it - how many layers did it take to get to such a simplified solution and then you'll see that there's been growth in complexity and challenge.

It is very interesting that CN users feel the same as NA players.

I play PLD and before they realigned PLD to fit 1 minute cycles, I never knew when 1 or 2 minutes were happening even though FoF kinda lined up but it was lined up in a scuffed way being PLD anyway so I just knew to drop x amount of atonements or HSs dependent on when in the game it was

The chinese playerbase are lucky to have a producer like that, he knows whats up and keeps it real. But we all know JP Squeenix will not change their ways unless the japanese playerbase makes the noise. EN players and CN players are basically talking to a wall :/

One thing about the 2 min meta that people don't talk about is that it puts more pressure on being consistent than if we didn't. It goes without saying that your group's dps spikes every 2 minutes. If a fight is say 8 minutes long and the dps check is super tight, that puts more emphasis on your 2 mins because you only get 4 of them. If they create more fights where there's a lot of shit going on every burst window, on top of having a tighter dps check, that means you NEED to not die or take a damage down before that, and know how to hold your gauge and burst. Having someone die during a burst window could be the difference in beating or not beating the enrage. If we didn't have raid buffs at all, that basically makes every fight easier because it's less punishing to die at certain points of a fight, and we know there are spikes in difficulty with fights as well. With the 2 min meta, if we were to make the mechanics more challenging alongside them, it adds to the difficulty of the fights because now there's an even heavier emphasis on consistency which imo is the hardest thing in raiding. Fights like P11S is a good example of a poorly designed fight because the boss just stands there auto attacking during half the burst windows. If every fight was like P11S then I agree having 2 min buffs is useless.

China's subscription model sounds really amazing! I wish the main one can be like that too.

i do think a big reason endwalker doesn't seem to have as much content as previous expansions is because they spent a lot of time essentially redoing the older story dungeons sure it's not as much effort to rework a single dungeon to work with trusts than it is to make an entirely new one or something like eureka/bozja but i imagine doing that for all 32 pre-shadowbringers dungeons would probably take up whatever dev time they had 'left over' after stuff like eureka orthos, variant/criterion and island sanctuary so i am hopeful that dawntrail will have more content again compared to endwalker

I feel like the changed was major when TP went away and the MP became a raw 1,000. I feel like because of this people where able to focus less on resources and more on rotation and mechanics.

Arthars, we talk about Kaiten not because of it just being removed, but because of what removing it represents. How is it that Kaiten: A skill that had 0 issues, 0 problems, decent scaling, great community feedback and good communication on what to do with it get removed, but BRD STILL has Repelling Shot: a 100% 0 use case skill that almost no one uses, DRK still has Enchanced Unmend: A waste of a trait because of clear laziness/unwillingness to change TBN/Dark Arts interaction and SCH still has issues with Dissipation and Seraph clashing with the identity of the job/not really adding anything to it all get to stay for years? I just gave several things that need changes but they target things that aren't needing to be fixed, that is the issue

I agree for most of the games you listed except Dota 2. The fact that over 90% of the Hero pool is played at TI every year doesn't necessarily mean it's balanced, true, but it does allow for more outside the box thinking and as Dota is the furthest from being homogenized.

The only thing I want is for all raid buffs to be personal only. They'd have to rework embolden to buff all damage, though

Oh they are definitely putting lots of emphasis on mechanics. There's a reason why your first 2-min burst window occurs in the middle of Zeromus Void Bio. XD

I tried 14 during early 5.2 and I couldn't wrap my head around it and it felt like a deus ex machina trying to really dig my heels in during 5.45. couldn't imagine the jump from 2.0 to 4.0💀

I wonder how they calculate the pay to play costs? do they assume 11$ per month and then just divide by the minutes you actually play? Because nobody is online 24/7, even though you technically could, right? so everyone would save money if they would do it for the regular servers and lose money. BUT it would be pretty awesome tbh.

Regarding the patch cycle everyone raves about - no one even talks about how second part of .5 patch takes 4 months instead of like 1 like all the other expansions

I think more facial options would be great.

If they remove burst alignment people will complaint that the game is dumbed down and how alignment is more fun lol. Honestly 😂

Based China producer practicing Mass Line in FFXIV.

"90 seconds were the worst" me, remembering when BRD had a 80s rotation:

too many people, including this dev, fundamentally misunderstand balance. balance is a means, not an end. the ultimate end to a game is to have fun. to a certain extent, an unbalanced game will have aspects that is negative fun, such as players possibly being excluded from group content, so it's not like an unbalanced meta is something that should be left alone. a lot of times, balancing the game leads to new options that weren't used before, which makes the game more interesting and long-lived however, it's possible to hyperfocus on balance so much that you lose sight of the big picture, and your obsession with balancing the game actually makes it less fun. just because a game is well-balanced like ffxiv, doesn't mean the game is well-designed. to give a very extreme example, if all dps jobs had the same dps rotation as sch (1 buttom spam, 1 dot, 1 raid buff) with the same potencies across the board, the game would actually be more balanced than it is now, but it would be mindnumbingly boring. ffxiv isn't close to being this extreme, but it's leaning towards that end of the spectrum especially with healer design this is why i don't really accept the argument that 'ffxiv is better than xyz game because it's more well-balanced'. balance is good, but if it gets in the way of fun, you need to reevaluate your priorities

Does China have any botting problems? With the pay-to-play model, I bet it would be like x2 more expensive to keep a bot on 24/7 than vs a monthly sub, maybe even more. I know there would still be some crazies that would still bot but maybe it would help mitigate it a lot.

the rest of the topics, yes. island sanctuary is super mid and when you think about how 6.0 's exploration/field content died for this? no, thank you. i'd rather play animal crossing.

90-180s cds is bad yes, 60s and 30s would be a lot better, especially for some buffs. However, the recent fights we've had were designed to have some big mechanic going on every 2min, which I think makes it fun. Keeping 120s raidbuffs where everyone has a big burst and having 60s/30s buffs/cds would make it a lot more fun to everyone because they can align their cds and ressources with those buffs, rather than doing nothing for 2min, spending you extra gauge because you have to, and then burst.

8:41 Brazil mentioned

I'm 22 minutes in and i really agree with him on frontlines, they made WHM so boring to fit the 5v5 mode that it's extremely unfun in FL now, you don't even feel like a healer anymore. Yeah it was broken, but who cares ? As he said, most people are in for the rewards anyways...

I'm sorry but as a lover of mmo pvp, I've never had fun in a frontline

Glad to hear the opinion about min maxing was brought up. If people want true min max culture they should play something like POE or WOW where gear is important to achieve higher and harder content long with understanding the quirks of your class and specs. Balanced or not 14 was always going to end up a more casual experience since 4.0 and savage becoming easier from Alexander. Straight up i hope these people try other mmos to see how vastly different the skill ceiling is and truly understand 14's design issues.

"Pay per minute model in China" this is what i dont like with the current subs method.... i pay for 1 month... but i can't enjoy the most of it... the only thing that kept me away from subbin back again... knowing that i only gonna play the game on the weekend... and felt guilt about it. good for China... actual good system.

That Chinese paying model sounds amazing. Makes me feel scammed. I'll unsub till I have a full expansion worth of content to actually make it worth. Over 88€ per patch is insanity

I’m a noob and maybe my opinion don’t matter, but I really think they should get rid of party buff abilities (the ones you need to press off cd on EVERY job). It’s not interesting gameplay-wise and it probably limits the way they design fights. I’ve leveled multiple dps jobs and all of them have abilities that are basically the same as the other jobs so I have dedicated hotkeys for them. Also it’s hard to gauge how much dmg you’re making/how good you are playing so it would be good to have some feed back from the game when you are doing good. One example that I found good and satisfying was when I played DRK and using TBN correctly triggers a free usage of Flood of Shadow. Would be nice to have more abilities that gave similarly some kind of feed back when executed correctly.

Lets not compare WoW classes and specs to FF14 class balance. And here's why: YP has to deal with 19 jobs with no spec differences that all pretty much do the same 2 min burst/ 1-2-3 combos and builder spender with no procs or rng. 3 tanks that pretty much have the exact same kit with slight difference on sustain. WoW has to deal with 39 different specs across the board, talents in each of those specs, % proc rates and values, gear sets that augment that then balance encounters around that level of change. Its literally Night and Day for what FF14 has to deal with and we still give YP the golden pass to make classes simpler/easier/ homogenized. With such a tiny base of classes and the amount of "reworks" they invest into the game, we shouldn't be having to suffer a lack of balance, fun or in-depth for any of the classes. Yet somehow the game gets simpler every patch cycle.

I MISS KAITEN. It doesn't do much, but man it made me feel powerful. Euphoric release.

I really want my warrior deliverance stance again.

3.x DRK was cracked. Decision making every GCD the job. Even the low lows of 3.x DRK (Dark Dance) wasn't as bad as Enhanced Unmend. I'm willing to bet Enhanced Unmend lasts in 7.x for no discernible reason. 4.0 DRK was DRK's darkest hour, couldn't hold AoE threat to save their lives, which is why we had sudden knee jerk buffs to threat in 4.01 that completely destroyed threat as a consideration when tanking.

I'd kill to pay based on time played vs sub, hate sub model

its all yoshiPs fault

After listening to this I'm going to be really disappointed in the 14 team if 7.0 is another repeat and we still have no horizontal progression

As a rather new player, the class changes in ew felt very uninspired. As a Samurai you got an easier opener and 2 gcds for your burst window and thats it. So they removed kaiten "because samurai had too many buttons" and replaced those with 2 gcds youll press every 2 minutes. It arguably hurt the class design more than it helped. Also i dont think jobs are homogenised at all, they are all just too easy to play. Go to a target dummy as a monk in BIS and press your 1-2-3(4-5-6) with act on and look at the dps. Its 6 buttons you get at lvl 50 and you can almost clear the entire tier with it. Mechanics in fights are just a hurdle that you have to clear once. Making classes boring kills all replayability.

They never said the extra weeks of patch cycles was for content. It was for the Health of the Team and the Game > Director Naoki Yoshida has informed the gaming community that the studio wants to focus on the health of the whole team behind Final Fantasy 14. They want to be able to address issues that have the team feeling overwhelmed with their work load. Sources: Live Letter with Time Stamp: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-WRpdIL7_NII.html Additional implementation and fine-tuning are NOT new content. We got the extra week of patch because the had Summer vacation (extra week) Do not spread misinformation like that.

While I do agree with a good amount of the points both Arthars and the producer here bring up, I do have a couple that I gripes with. For one thing, whenever people talk about the increased patch cycle and then say that we get less content I tend to find they're hyper fixating on the content THEY do, rather than what we actually get. They're not looking at the bigger picture. In Endwalker we got: Island Sanctuary with expansions to it, including of course placing furnishings on it, Adventurer Plates and all of the customization involved with it including another types of reward to get due to it, an entire PvP revamp with brand new skills and animations to accommodate AND an entirely new mode with new maps, variant in which each dungeon has three paths that could be different dungeons entirely, and criterion itself with incredibly unique mechanics to the game, bringing back Deep Dungeon which got entirely axed in Shadowbringers completely. Let's not pretend that isn't substantial and isn't equal or even more than just Bozja and Zadnor as a whole. Not only that, we're STILL getting that stuff in 7.0 along with new forms of content to boot, AND the graphics update(Although Island Sanctuary is getting rolled into something else.) That argument in general leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it almost sort of implies we're getting less overall, it's just that we're getting more varied content instead in different areas. The other thing I had a problem with was his comment on PvP. Frontline guys are in it for the free chicken 7/10 times, I wouldn't necessarily balance an inherently competitive game mode around those guys. PvE you can get away with, but it's like if you balanced a fighting game around the arcade mode. Or balanced league around the casual queue or bronze queue or whatever. Not that CC is the pinnacle of competition mind you, but its catered a very dedicated and a lot larger following than the Feast simply lacked because of jobs that are much more specialized and cohesive to the mode. Every other mode can just develop around that imo. Lastly, the chinese subscription model has it's benefits, but like the one we have here it definitely depends on the culture and type of player you are, and it heavily depends on how you play and how much you login. With our current model, it's actually more beneficial to play for longer stretchs of time more frequently, while a play by minute model does the opposite, it encourages you to log in less to save more money. That depends on factors like free time and what type of content you do (like if you raid log versus someone who does roulettes, checks their house and crops, maybe do gold saucer, grind extreme, etc.) personally with the way I play I wouldn't want such a thing but the grass is greener on the other side and all that.

Frontline either needs a whole rework, or deleted and reuse the maps for a Overworld instance for a PvP Exploration Zone like the Wilds in OSRS. Good stuff to gather, farm for out there(in XIV terms, maybe some repeatable random objective quest to earn Crystals, Wolf Marks, Collars, or something else) and when you encounter/defeat an enemy-player you earn bonus Crystals/Wolf/Collars & EXP. Can go all out with it being Solo or Teams of 3(give a defense/str buff depending on how many people arn't in your party) and create FATE/Hold the point zones throughout the area. Basically give us a new PvP Hub outside of just the Wolves Den. They could do so much with PvP. Would love to see a seperate leveling system with prestiges(doesn't need to give out anything fancy, and maybe tie it in with the Season via if you get all prestiges with-in a season you get a Portrait or Emote or Minion or Mount), more traditional PvP Modes like Capture the Point, TDM, etc., a Battle Royale, adding the CC Casual and Rival Wings modes to the Duty Roullete/Daily(as well as any other future game modes), or/and 1v1 Duel Request in the Overworld if no new pvp exploration hub I was explaining above haha. I don't raid anymore because Gearing & Gear Longevity in XIV just isn't my cup of tea...I like my stuff to last like in FFXI era. So my hopes for the game's future is in them expanding on the game's Overworld & PvP and its systems. Job Identity would be a nice thing brought back into the PvE job's kits, but I'm not holding my breath any longer. I'll at least keep my fingers crossed for those who do still care though.

hi chat

I think raidbuffs need to go entirely. Make everything self reliant and then bring back cool unique ways to burst for each job. As a Wow refugee I never understood why this even existed. I WoW raiding you often assign dps cool downs to nuke priority targets or hold until it's more convinient to do so or save for aoe cleave. FF is boring single target sandbagging without pushing phases. It's all a 8-18min scripted time line which you can spreadsheet for optimal dps or healing.

100% agree with his argument about the 2 minute meta. People are definitely bandwagon hating on the 2 minute meta without really understanding why it's so bad. Sure, dying at a 2-minute window in raid feels bad, but that's just parse culture. Parse culture is awful for a game. The real issue, in my opinion, is that you make job design feel too samey by making sure that every single one of them can burst at 2minutes. Endwalker is the first time I haven't played multiple jobs because... well, they all just feel the same to me.

so little glamour...? Little? What?

I don't find Frontlines fun anymore because the classes and kits got changed so drastically that it just isn't the same. Alot of changes were just too negative for my tastes. Alot of ppl play it now because shiny limit break, or afk then press limit break or this job's limit break is "more op" or this job is brain off. Just wasn't doing it for me and that won't change in 7.0 so for me frontlines is dead content now. Side tangent, Myths final boss is the most disappointing alliance boss I've seen for a final boss lol

Desu

Since they've removed Kaiten from Samurai, I expect the devs remove Jump skill from Dragoon

The problem is most of the game mechanics are simple but alot of people just watch guides and not understand why a spot is safe, why people are going to a spot, why the mechanic is being resolved in a certain way, thats why you get a lot of people watching hector guides even even though his strategies are dogshit and there are alot of better ways to resolve the mechanic.

its easier and you save resources as a company to keep it as the "2minute" window. than spend it on making classes unique. thanks to ACT/fflogs/midmaxers(which are the tools that made the devs lazy) and why most fights are now body checks. you can feel the classes are all smooth brain now(revolving around the 2min garbage ).. DAWN TRAIL will be worst. the happy medium doesn't exist anymore. sadly this game is leaning now more into CASUAL players not ACTUAL players.. it is what it is.

playing a japanese game? emperor winnie is not going to be happy.

SAM mains complaining about Kaiten triggers me too lol. I'm going to continue my campaign that they deserve to have Kaiten as the DT capstone ability.

Agree with the Island Sactuary thing, people had their expectations of it being Animal Crossing despite that being its own standalone game with a whole big development team. Of course it wasn't gonna be Animal Crossing level.. Also they sucked any of the potential fun out of it with gathering macros and treating it like Fashion Report, only thing I ever looked up was rare animal spawns. Is it perfect and my favourite content? Hell no, but its fine for what it is.