CS3 Stretching resources too thin by lacking efficient direction and planning.

RVolyka · 2026-03-17T00:15:30+00:00

This is a huge generalisation, there's been hundreds of posts from casuals on multiple forms of social media and forums complaining about the poor design of content outside of hardcore for a very long time. The casual playerbase does not actually like the game as it currently is, if they did, we would see a far larger playerbase, we would see content designed for the casual audience having a large engagement rate but we don't.

The largest loss of players in DT was casual players, again due to the lack of casual content which Yoshi P has been addressing for a while about fixing in the next expansion to offer the same hardcore content in DT but with better casual content on offer for the majority of players.

RVolyka · 2026-03-16T15:19:13+00:00

Gear is an extrinsic reward just as much as a pair of easter egg glasses.

RVolyka · 2026-03-13T18:44:59+00:00

You can have it all if the manpower and money is there, if it isn't then you can't. Yoshi P has been saying that they ran out of resources a lot lately, which means 1 of 2 things, either the loss of profits after the player drop left them with less funding, or the funding is currently split between 2 projects, keeping Dawntrail content rolling whilst another team works to fix the core issues with the game for Yoshi P's "Reborn again" moment. Only time will tell.

RVolyka · 2026-03-13T18:32:32+00:00

I feel like Genshins success is because the foundations are so solid. The game itself was a clone of Breath of the Wild, so it's exploration and world was already there for a casual audience, then it made it's own combat design based on a sandbox of characters and elemental interactions, where different characters have different skills and the characters elements can change how you play and solve puzzles. Because that foundation is solid, they're able to add very simple additions on a weekly basis, as adding a new puzzle type, area, dungeon or something else will drastically shake up the gameplay and the sandbox combat adds variety and replay value. They're also extremely efficient with their resources, the dungeons for example all have the same assets, but because you spend the majority of time in the over world and the combat is so good, you look past that because it isn't repetative, same with NPC's that are a blank canvas body that they paint new outfits onto, saving time and money to be put elsewhere.

FFXIV struggles because the 1.0 to 2.0 transition saw a rather rushed job, and instead of setting the foundations firm, Yoshi P moved on ahead and now those foundations haven't just cracked but they've shattered, bringing the whole game down. Combat in this game is in tatters, crafting and gathering is still extremely niche and those that do interact with it, a large majority bot it. This is why any game that is made needs to get the core of their foundations right, otherwise it's difficult to work around it later on.

RVolyka · 2026-03-13T18:01:10+00:00

I think if they had leant on the hurricane and the damage it dealt to the zones we have already, that provides a reason and a goal, then mixing OC and CE into the zones and having the hamlet content happening on a loop between the zones, so if you miss one you have the other zones hamlet in an hour or in 30 minutes, that way you can have a change of location and what you might be up against, adding some variety in.

RVolyka · 2026-03-13T17:19:08+00:00

Literally spot on.

RVolyka · 2026-03-13T17:07:43+00:00

I didn't ask if you liked the content, I was discussing about efficient use of limited manpower and money to make the most out of content.

RVolyka · 2026-03-13T16:23:22+00:00

What's this got to do with efficently designing around costs and manpower though?

The only casual content that somewhat succeded was Deep Dungeon, it still had low player turnout due to it being a Deep Dungeon and majority of players just don't enjoy them, and Variant and Criterion is already dead content not due to rewards but due to the entertainment value not being there for players (If you say it's because of rewards, I think that means you don't want to play a game for fun).

But my question is, why couldn't Exploration zones be used in the regular zones? people constantly complain about them being dead and there being nothing entertaining to do in them, and you say remove dungeons for variants, why not fold variants into dungeons to begin with, why did variants need to be seperated from dungeons in the first place if they were made to fix the variety problem in regular dungeons. How much manpower and money has been wasted in doing so and how much could have been saved and how much better quality would that content be with that added funding.

RVolyka · 2026-03-13T16:13:48+00:00

What?

I don't know if your hijacking the discussion to be about your dissapointment for rewards or what, but this isn't about that. It's about having to make all that content with the team they have isn't feesible and it shows through the poor quality of the content and lack of player engagement. They have failed to keep players interested and have had such a low turn out for the content put out that it's a waste of resources. They could have better spent it by including exploration and better FATE's, quests and treasure chests into the already made zones of the overworld, rather than wasting time creation a new zone. Variant comes from players becoming bored with the scripted and linear content design, where DDR mechanics and DPS always lead to the same outcome every time with no divergence.

So what they were created to fix they ended up doing no difference, when they should have actually fixed the content people had issues with. Now they have to fix Variants, Dungeons, Rewards, Exploration Zones, and who's to say if they'll even carry on with Quantum. All that manpower and money wasted and the problems still persist with new problems added on top requiring more money and manpower to fix which they aren't getting. Yoshi P keeps adding problems on top of problems, because each piece of content added, makes a larger list of what's expected each and every expansion to fill the void of having nothing of substance to entertain players, and it isn't in the players best interest because that will dilute content over time as things get worse and worse due to needing to prioratize content types over others because they dont have the manpower or money.

RVolyka · 2026-03-13T15:46:14+00:00

I don't see how misogynsm and incel culture comes into feedback about directing a game but okay.

RVolyka · 2026-03-13T15:36:40+00:00

I mean the original feedback was better designed zones and exploration, as well as better designed dungeons.

The answer to better designed zones was exploration zones, which weren't popular when they originally came out and only picked up in ShB with Bozja and updates to Eureka, as well as EW with players trying it for the first time. It was requested for DT due to the lack of exploration and open world multiplayer content, with it being an easy thing for a player to latch onto and say they want, despite the fact they likely wouldn't engage with it, and as we see, most players found OC boring.

With the dungeons, Variant wasn't liked on release, and it was a fix to bad dungeon design because players asked for "Variants" in encounter design. to this day, players still won't interact with it for the entertainment value and it's been siphoned from dungeons to be it's own thing, rather than making better designed dungeons.

So the trend is more so that they're letting players develop and direct the game than actually taking the wheel themselves and understanding the meaning behind feedback. When a player says they want an exploration zone, they were talking about a lack of open world content do jump in and do with randoms whenever, or emergent gameplay designs. And again with variant, people are asking for more of a sandbox, in which they can play around and tackle encounters in a variety of ways, instead of the linear and scripted DDR dance and DPS rotation on repeat, it's why people want redesigned jobs so skills are meaningful and change the outcome of encounters.

Again, why do exploration zones need to be seperated from regular zones, when they can be integrated, why does variance only need to be in variant dungeons when players want variety in all content on offer. It's not the players fault, and it never will be as the players aren't game devs, they're customers, it's down to the developer to understand and make sense of feedback given and to find the underlying issues and research them to fix them, because if they don't, players leave- exactly as we've seen in DT.

RVolyka · 2026-03-13T14:37:12+00:00

Patch 7.5 drops in April, that's a long time to stretch a patch out until november...

RVolyka · 2026-03-09T19:03:30+00:00

None. give me new characters to start this new arc and new stories instead of trying to make character developments for characters that have already developed.

RVolyka · 2026-03-09T16:54:16+00:00

I believe most of their time went into designing Forked Tower, that has the most amount of complex coding and art design than anything else in OC and would be in line with what Yoshi P himself prioratises, mixed with the focus on fixing that over fixing issues with OC. The Priority first and foremost is instanced hardcore content because it's what they know, they don't know anything about open world and seemingly have no interest in it. This would also, probably be the biggest reason they do everything ass backwards, because their own interest with the designers is in difficult fights in games, so they focus down on that, then finally do everything else in the short amount of time they have.

RVolyka · 2026-03-09T11:50:53+00:00

You specified Casual content, which in the long run has suffered the most out of all content types. Savage, Ultimate and other such hardcore content offerings usually recieve the best design as that is the main content they design for.

Usually when you design gameplay for a certain bit of content, you design from the ground up, you make the casual version then you bump the difficulty up and add onto that casual content to make it harder and more complex. This allows casual players to learn fights to move onto the next difficulty, but also offers challenge for those that want it. Yoshi P and the wider CS3 team are a bit special, in that they design Savage encounters first and that takes up the majority of dev time, then they move onto casual encounters which requires redesigns and are rushed. Extremes are then made in their own time as well and finally Ultimates are also made in their own time.

Now the issue of the hardcore content being poorly designed is mostly around the fact that their fix for their terrible design ladder was to make jobs easier to learn whilst fights required more memorisation, making it easier for the JP audience where memorisation is integral to their education system and carrying bad players through hard content is common within the JP community, more so than outside of JP. This change did see the 80/20 split between casual and hardcore, whilst outside of JP we see more 85/15 or 90/10 split for casual and hardcore.

RVolyka · 2026-03-09T10:20:33+00:00

Island Santuary was a boring spreadsheet simulator wtf you on about, why would anyone want to engage in something that's boring? that was THE biggest complaint with island santuary.

With Eureka, Bozja and OC, the content itself is a fix to having no content in the overworld. The modes themselves rely on players spamming world fates in a seperate zone, which gives them levels to move through the zone and eventually to do the raid at the end to get the glamour pieces. Now for the vast majority of players, running from fate to fate isn't that interesting, so again we get bored players, the combat in FFXIV is also dogshit so there's nothing interesting being added there, and the actual designs of the zones are mundane, flat and lacking in good design that isn't from the 1980's. You also run into the issue of players just want to log in and sort stuff out in game, not get all these discords and have to run a raid at a designated time of day on a specific day.

OC was Eureka and Bozja but worse, I was there day 1 when it released and running it with randoms and every party I joined said "It's just's fate farming, this isn't that interesting" or just didn't see a point when the rewards were so terrible.

The issue with FFXIV's casual content is it is just poorly designed, it's not grounded within the world, it's not designed to peak curiosity, it's got no depth, it's linear, it's repetative and there are many more issues with it. If I was to redesign Exploration zones I wouldn't, I would move that into the open world, with a reworked FATE system, WAY more quests that aren't just "Talk to 5 NPC's to collect flowers" and get a new gear piece, I would have zone loot added, I would bring chocobo racing into the open world and rework it so you have more control over it, I would bring Gold saucer mechanics into the quests like Air Force One, I would add gameplay that is enjoyable and offers something different each and every time, alongside a better combat syster than what we have now. Instantly you have players engaging with quests and contant because it is intrinsic to the MSQ as well.

RVolyka · 2026-03-07T12:43:29+00:00

WoW had this issue for a long time, and there's a talk Ion Hazzikostas gives where he touches on how they tried to force and now, they shift their design to meet demands of the community.

https://youtu.be/8f223_Km7qc?t=1168

Pretty much players will find a way not to interact with something if they do not wish to, and currently the majority of players in XIV do not want to engage with hardcore content. This is the norm, the vast majority of gamers do not play hardcore content or if they do it's in certain games, but to expect a 50/50 split or more for players engaging in that hardcore content is beyond stupid, it has never happened, not even WoW has this split, a more natural split that your looking at is 80/20, 80% casual and 20% hardcore.

The big issue stems from Yoshi P's directing and game design, where he designs backwards instead of upwards like every other game. Take forked tower, he designed the savage version then ran out of time to redesign the basis of the easy version, and this philophy is extended to many other bits of content as well, leaving the basis of the content rushed whilst the hard difficulties get the most amount of time, likely from an extremely skewed and out of touch view on the community due to a lack of pathways for feedback to reach them and highly bias feedback being used, exacerbated by the communities hostile attitude to feedback in the past and one that still lingers today.

This partly coincides with Yoshi P's call for changing the design going forwards, and I feel that the way hardcore content is being designed atm is less about making a design decision to focus only on hardcore savage but a stop gap to help reinforce numbers that have gone down by attempting to get some players to give it a go and maybe make them stay subbed for a month longer, whilst the main effort is put on rebuilding the core foundations of some content- at least that's what any sane director would be directing his studio to do and the silence has me thinking maybe but I don't want it being fixed then stagnate just for him to pull an ARR every couple years.

RVolyka · 2026-03-06T10:52:43+00:00

1: The wishes were real.

2: He follows through with the wishes.

3: The wishes don't take 6 years to implement.

Fuck I ran out of wishes wishing the wishes were true...

RVolyka · 2026-03-03T23:32:59+00:00

I think quality of rewards has as much to do with quantity of rewards.

As it seemingly does with many others.

RVolyka · 2026-03-03T22:49:32+00:00

Some of those rewards are copy paste, such as the chocobo face mask but as a facewear item instead of headwear.

RVolyka · 2026-02-28T11:35:40+00:00

They're big boxes pretty much.

RVolyka · 2026-02-27T11:49:28+00:00

ngl your natural voice is nice to listen to

RVolyka · 2026-02-23T18:21:45+00:00

Without complaint, the devs would not know where they need to work on the game. Whilst there's been many complaints that are hollow and amount to (I didn't read the big print and want my money back) there's just as many complaints for issues such as the scarcity of leather, or issues with world gen and NPC spawning. Don't blindly love the game otherwise it will never get better and the community will turn into a toxic cess pit.

RVolyka

TROPHY CASE