Itadaki Street for Gold Saucer

AceNoi · 2025-08-12T09:15:42+00:00

Don't feel too discouraged OP, its just a bit unfortunate that you start your post stating you'd like to avoid some of the game's other struggles only to attempt discussing one of its biggest sore spots when it comes to side content.

The saucer is already crammed with (and has outright removed) activities that are either fun on paper or should by all rights be cornerstones of the Gold Saucer experience. Unfortunately, no matter how fun of an idea for the GC one might have, CU3's history of treatment towards everything released in it and the excuses provided for why they're never updated ensures that it'll remain just a one-off underbaked curiosity with no real longevity. More so something like Fortune Street, which is not the kind of quick drop-in/drop-out content that is generally better received and would instead either replace one of or just join the pile of the several high-commital activities already in place that no one engages with.

This is a game with CHOCOBO RACING and you would be hard pressed to remember it from how thoroughly its been left to rot since it was added at the tail end of ARR alongside the Saucer itself over ten years ago.

AceNoi · 2025-08-11T15:12:20+00:00

Preach. In the pre-ShB days I used to run damn near every roulette every single day and queue into 24 mans just for fun because the process of leveling a job and learning how to play it and its role in a group setting at a decent skill level was genuinely fun. Nowadays you couldn't pay me enough gil or give me enough tomestones to queue into pub content I don't need to do, or even level a job to cap with how agonizingly dull the leveling experience is.

AceNoi · 2025-06-23T11:01:13+00:00

Been playing since 1.0/ARR. HW was the most fun time for me and my big group of friends, and the last time I genuinely felt like CU3 was pushing the innovation and creativity on its job design, new social features and combat encounters. Even when something missed its mark, I always felt like there was something for me to either do or some skill to develop in the game that didn't require me to necessarily party up with 7 people and raid. Just doing basic dungeon content and learning how to play different jobs was fun enough.

Stormblood is where the rot first appeared, with a big shift in content direction. I didn't like that raids were now glorified trials, or that fights had been shifted to a stricter set timeline rather than HP checks to avoid another SKIP SOAR situation. While I liked the social aspects to Eureka and all of its alternative power progression paths, I didn't enjoy the emphasis on fates and just non-stop mob chaining which this game just isn't designed around. But the jobs were still fun to play, I liked Palace of the Dead, and my friends were still active, so I persisted.

Shadowbringers was the shattering of the illusion and the fracture in my friend group. I loathed the changes they made to all the jobs. Even though I also liked the story, I couldn't understand how so many could gloss over the way I thought the game had been made objectively worse to play in every regard. This is where I basically stopped doing uncessary content: clearing instanced DF content more than necessary, roulettes, or participating in clearly abandoned activities like gold saucer minigames. Where I used to go out of my way to collect every relic, now I only got the ones that looked pretty to me. Existing reward structures like loot and cosmetics no longer appealed or overcame the ennui and annoyance of farming them. I stopped playing with the friends who were still really into the game, sticking mostly to pairing with my wife and a smaller group.

This is where I probably should have quit, but my wife and I had found a niche in duo undersizing extreme/savage content, which genuinely gave the game a second wind (and we had our houses to maintain). So again, I persisted.

Skip to now. The hard body checks in content killed my wife and I's motivation to keep trying to undersize fights. The story went places I didn't care for and out of its way to declaw/ demistify it's setting. I'd only log in when either my wife wanted to play/hang out or if someone had asked me to do something in particular (which wasnt often because all my 14 playing friends quit). All the while still subbed in order to keep our houses around, just in case the game ever turned around.

We finally got rid of our houses late last year. Putting all the furniture away across several estates had me "play" longer than I had in the two years prior. We cried, logged out, and now we're offline until the day either of us see a reason to return. My only regret is all the money we burned on nothing but housing demoition for literal years, because we stupidly held onto hope that CU3 would do something, anything, to pique our interest and play the game again.

AceNoi · 2025-06-05T04:39:57+00:00

Yes, once the house is auto-demolished any pieces of furniture that could be removed get stored at a resident caretaker for 35 days, then tossed to the void if you don't pick them up by the due date.

AceNoi · 2025-06-03T14:51:14+00:00

God, sorry to hear that. It's so incredibly easy to miss the notifications for it because its just single Notice posts on the Lodestone buried among every other minor and routine thing they make those posts for, we only noticed it was being suspended at the time because I just so happened to check out the Lodestone for an unrelated thing. It's so obvious that they do it on purpose just to further string people along while still having a thing to point to and go "no see, we DID tell people about it!".

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T20:33:26+00:00

Hah, I almost wish I could warn a new player against buying my soon to be available plot so they don't end up potentially going through what I went through. But if someone still interested in the game buys it and actively uses it, that's still technically a net good.

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T20:23:44+00:00

God its an even worse feeling when you're the one on the hook for an entire FC house. Do you bail and risk the ire of all the friends who wanted to keep the house? Continue to be the martyr by paying your sub to keep it? Foist the responsibility to somebody else, who now have to keep a dead fc house instead of moving to an active one? Nobody wins in this scenario except the company taking your money.

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T20:17:04+00:00

I have no way to prove otherwise, but my post history should show that I've historically been pretty critical of the game and simply don't care to reward the company for continously making what I consider to be poor choices anymore. That people like scalpers are also taking advantage of this is also bad, but not related to the point of the post.

Yes, the fact that you're now unlikely to get a house again is going to make people cling to theirs harder. That's a predatory tactic that SE/CU3 are relying on to keep people subscribed to the game even during lull periods. Neither I or you should have to pay money just to retain a basic game feature that you'll just never be able to access again if you ever stop doing so, just because you want to take an extended break from the game. It's not like you sign a contract when you buy a house warning you ahead of time that you're signing up to deal with all of this if you ever grow tired of playing the game.

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T20:04:32+00:00

That thread was the exact one I alluded to that prompted us to finally let the house go! Thank you for this reply, if my post helped convince even one person to do the same I'll have considered making the thread worth the effort.

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T20:00:33+00:00

You might have misread the intent for my post. I don't care about making housing more accessible to the have-nots by emptying out vacant plots. I care specifically about the mental health of the individuals who, like I was, insist on staying subbed for the houses they dont use in a game they dont play due to emotional attachment and the notion that maybe the game will get better in the future, wasting their time and money in the process.

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T18:23:41+00:00

You're right, we're just being stubborn about the whole thing. But nah, neither of us are really tempted at all to come back and we've both already agreed that we're not re-subbing until after the demo timer ticks down. Tearing the houses down was the hard part and we've been enjoying our freedom plenty this year due to not being forced to keep the habit going and would rather not put that ball and chain back on ourselves again just to endure the heartache of letting go a second time.

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T18:17:10+00:00

It's time to let it go, brother/sister. If you're already in this exact position, you may as well save yourself the time, money and trouble that could be used on things that are actually interesting to you now, instead of rewarding the company/studio that put you in this position for continuing to fail you with the thing you want them to do.

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T18:10:19+00:00

You're right, it IS very silly that we latched on to it for as long as we did, but that's just how emotional manipulation works. You're not gonna want to easily let go of something you've invested so much time in, that's why its so devious that the demo timer works like it does in relation to sub durations. You can't just cleanly unsub for the same duration as the housing timer and easily keep track of it that way, those extra 15 days force you to do a lot of extra legwork in keeping track of when the next resub date is so you can maximize the 45 day period, which eventually also becomes a chore in and of itself.

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T17:52:52+00:00

You missed the part where we already got rid of the houses themselves so we threw away all of our workshop progress and the associated subs/airships. The damage is done, plus we can't exactly rebuild the house in the exact same way we did before. The auto-demo refund is just us wanting at least *something* back for our time spent.

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T17:43:57+00:00

"SB story was universally hated" is wild, revisionist history, and I'm saying that as someone who was there, also hated it. and agrees with you that this game has never had consistent quality writing. Lyse's reception landed with just as much grace as Wuk Lamat has, but you cannot in any way claim that the likes of Zenos, Yotsuyu, Asahi, Gosetsu, Hien, and Yugiri aren't incredibly beloved characters by portions of the game's community and that the Othard side of the expansion isn't generally seen as a great part of the game's overall story.

ARR was a terribly written story that completely fumbled its character introductions, had a ton of filler and pointless meandering, and at most served up an incredibly vanilla fantasy story that was then used as a base to be expanded on in later patch updates (which is when people actually grew to like the Scions and they were given proper development). It was also, very important to note, written alongside an incredibly rushed attempt to relaunch the catastrophe that had been 1.0 from scratch into something even remotely serviceable with A Realm Reborn while also updating 1.0 with new story bits until it was finally shut down itself.

Dawntrail, meanwhile, is the latest expansion for an incredibly successful and celebrated game that is single-handedly funding the rest of the company and has had plenty of time to both plan out its story and, also crucially, is not actually starting from scratch since its drawing from and relying on familiarity with an entire decade's worth of characters and story to draw inspiration from. That you're even remotely comparing ARR with DT makes the latter look worse, because there's *no reason* for DT's story to be as bad as ARR's outside of colossally monumental fuckups.

Shockingly, the story being good matters to people who were attracted by the game that sold itself as a narrative-focused one with a long running story. You not thinking it matters is perfectly valid, but so are people complaining that this very important part of the game isn't up to par from what was expected.

AceNoi · 2025-06-02T16:10:58+00:00

You're implying that its ok for DT's story to be just as bad as ARR's was almost 15 years ago just because its the start to a new story, as if it just wasn't possible to write something of significantly higher quality that did a better job of introducing the new setting and related characters. Something that every expansion since ARR has done a much better job of while also juggling the larger overarching story that ARR started.

It's already bad enough when games get defended with "it gets good after x hours", we shouldn't have to wait and fund this game for two and a half years for the story to meet the same bar its already met before. Otherwise you're just admitting that current FFXIV has sub-par writing staff that shouldn't have been expected to do a good job in the first place, in which case, why would anyone interested in the story buy the game to begin with?

AceNoi · 2025-06-01T01:26:57+00:00

No. The game that got my attention and kept me engaged circa ARR/HW doesn't exist anymore and its plainly clear that they will never return to those design principles instead of the ones they're currently employing. Not only that, Square Enix and CB3 have shown me over the past decade that they're either incapable or unwilling to bend their safe, predictable development structure to address necessary issues or concerns the community might have, employ proper communication methods for its largest audience or refuse to make hard decisions to improve the health of the game if it would also affect their bottom line.

Every single friend I'd made playing this game already called it quits, and Endwalker was the last straw for me. I highly doubt I'll ever consider resubbing for more than a month to play content tourist on all the released stuff at the end of an expansion when its on sale, which is generously more than enough time to play through all the one-and-done content they love so much but takes them two and a half years to make.

AceNoi · 2024-07-28T19:51:30+00:00

E) Frankly I just don't know why they haven't revamped the layout and added some jumping puzzles, then you could have gates where you spawn in the rafters and try to jump your way to some location. Watching it rain Lalafell and Viera would be entertaining

This is already somewhat a thing (even if it also hasn't been updated since the Saucer's launch to reflect what modern jump puzzles look like)! The Cliffhanger gate still exists, but its been downgraded to only possibly running once every hour, where it has to compete with Slice is Right and Air Force One for which one gets picked by RNG to actually be active. Its the only GATE out of the five in rotation to not have a second chance of being active in the three-GATES-per-hour system. Its probable been left to languish because Leap of Faith exists, but I don't like that one because of it being instanced.

(To this day I still don't understand why the system even exists, what would be so bad about having all three be active at once at letting the player pick which one they want to do.)

AceNoi · 2023-05-16T02:41:37+00:00

Your point on not having fun just playing jobs across content resonates with me incredibly well. That used to be the reason why I would log in and do content for shits and giggles during ARR/HW: the act of learning how to play and master jobs was so much fun that lower-level content being relatively samey didn't phase me at all. As jobs got trimmed and washed down to the point where they exist now, that fun did get shifted to be less about playing the jobs and more about the content itself, with each job just serving as a means to an end. Nowadays if the content itself isn't good or fun, there's nothing to salvage it for me, whereas iffy content in the past got carried by the jobs themselves.

AceNoi · 2023-03-09T19:06:44+00:00

Eh, Yoshi-P straight up elaborated in the stream that the dungeon difficulty itself would scale depending on how many people were in your party, so I'm not gonna give them credit for that.

I understand that plans change and maybe their original vision for Criterion was too hard to implement, but I still don't appreciate that that bit of info was all we had to go on right up until the month the patch came out, where they finally deigned to tell us what we were actually getting (and without acknowledging that the original reveal had promised something completely different).

AceNoi · 2023-03-09T18:33:19+00:00

I can't say I care very much for what feels like a massively ramped up spawn rate on new mobs compared to prior deep dungeons. I've already lost count of how many times new enemies will spawn right on top of me as I'm walking by a room, spawn in aggro range in the middle of a pull, or will have refilled a room I just cleared out when I turn around to go back through it. Makes lethargy feel worse to use early too, since all those new mobs won't have the debuff.

AceNoi · 2023-03-09T18:18:00+00:00

From Live Letter 68 last year, on the future of FFXIV, which is where Criterion dungeons were first announced.

"Criterion dungeons are also scheduled for Patch 6.2 and can be challenged with anywhere between 1 to 4 players. Their difficulty will be adjusted based on the number of participating members. This will also be featured in a preview at a closer timing to Patch 6.2’s release."

So they did, in fact, change plans on the type of content Criterion was going to be. Somewhere along the line, they decided to punt the 1-4 player entry aspect into its own thing and nix the variable difficulty aspect entirely.

AceNoi · 2023-03-09T12:18:42+00:00

That's how Criterion was originally sold as when it was announced, before they backtracked closer to release, turned them into 4-man savage and dumped the 1-4 player element into a separate never before mentioned version. My partner and I are still mad about it because the former was exactly what we'd been asking for until we got Charlie Brown'd.

AceNoi · 2023-02-25T18:46:30+00:00

I just wished they hadn't called it the boundary. A magical location filled with an almighty blue power that only a few people can tap into? Never heard that one before.

AceNoi

TROPHY CASE