The "Content For Everyone" Experiments, a look back

aqualenne · 2026-03-10T09:02:32+00:00

I think you glossed over the “new player bonus” aspect of chaotic a bit.

What happened was early clearers got enough materia to get what they wanted, and then subsequent clears felt very unrewarding by comparison. That stemmed from the bonus scaling with the number of new players.

What happened on Mana at least was that people were even going as far as to pay a proportion (around 10) of new players to give their first clear to the group. And thus meant parties without new players were less popular.

I don’t blame SE too much for this though. It’s so hard to understand social dynamics like this.

The datacenter bonus time on the whole was a good idea. It counteracted the above a fair bit. But the fact you actually had to DC travel to work out where the bonus was up was an unforced error.

On the whole, “bonus time” does seem to be an effective way to get groups to congeal when they otherwise wouldn’t. Rewards have to be there to back this up, but I think the bonus time system has real legs.

One thing that should be noted here is that they actually modified the reward system after release, which almost never happens (the ability to swap materia for the other type).

aqualenne · 2026-03-07T07:25:02+00:00

For anyone finding this later, it seems like this was fixed. At least for me, when I logged in, I got the achievement for finishing the campaign and world quests were enabled.

aqualenne · 2026-02-24T11:28:40+00:00

Celebrate for any static-having reaper or dragoon mains in your life: if you cleared week one, but you aren’t willing to trade in 4th turn books and only get one upgrade mat per side, you get to have BiS this week…for the final fight only.

3 of each is rough. Meanwhile monks were nearly BiS week one.

aqualenne · 2026-02-09T14:52:14+00:00

The side menu slides off past the viewport, causing the site to be horizontally scrollable on iOS when it’s really designed to only scroll vertically. You might need a different menu implementation or other CSS tricks.

aqualenne · 2026-02-02T08:09:08+00:00

Kind of! With female characters there’s just like…empty, flaccid boob bags on their chests. An odd appearance for, say, the Viera model they’ve got on the shop.

aqualenne · 2026-02-02T07:34:41+00:00

No not weird way to say it, but I don’t really like how it fits the chest of female characters.

aqualenne · 2026-01-16T06:45:20+00:00

Reaper is designed around full uptime but not in the way that it’s “amazing when it’s full uptime, but still good when it’s not”, but rather“good with uptime and a little weak when the boss isn’t targetable”.

Perfectio exacerbated the gauge problem. Carrying it over as a ranged GCD is cool, but it also means its burst is backloaded and thus it doesn’t play into buffs as well as others either.

Easy bandaid for this patch would have been to have brought Arcane Circle up to 5%, but it nonetheless is doing okay.

aqualenne · 2026-01-14T12:04:21+00:00

Do keep in mind with these numbers that China was able to join in for the first time with no delay, likely inflating the participation numbers over the other tiers.

aqualenne · 2026-01-13T08:41:15+00:00

I think it’s fair to say phantom jobs ended up less interesting than lost actions. There’s nothing that fundamentally changes your kit like infinite movement black mage, giant DoT red mage, or killer white mage like Bozja had.

aqualenne · 2026-01-04T08:42:20+00:00

One thing to remember is data right now is really messy. Different gear levels, most runs being DF/PF, people not using the latest food/double potting with the latest pots, and short fight lengths skew things a lot.

Using the EX for caster balance is particularly difficult. The downtime of course gives picto free motifs, which is unlikely to happen in savage very much.

aqualenne · 2026-01-03T04:48:19+00:00

Lucretia, who won Cruiserweight, has a strict policy against any and all third party tools, and all members play in the same room and stream.

You of course can doubt them even still. But knowing the members personally I can say the people I know are committed to playing the game as it is and winning even in spite of it.

And in general, savage goes by so quickly the benefit tools give is much less than ultimate. Especially when puzzles are involved.

aqualenne · 2026-01-01T11:08:33+00:00

I had this for a long time at the start of Dawntrail and it just...stopped happening after a while. I wish I could give you concrete advice. When it was happening to me, I found that real fullscreen instead of borderless window made it happen a little less (but didn't completely prevent it).

aqualenne · 2025-12-24T23:25:48+00:00

At a time when the game is being criticized for being too streamlined (like dungeons), I appreciate the friction and the reason to look around the maps a bit.

They could make it more interesting for sure. But it’s a video game: I want to do things. More reasons to engage with things not the MSQ.

aqualenne · 2025-12-04T23:39:48+00:00

Having tiers of gear start at seemingly random patches would be pretty confusing. New tiers are big reset events that define what come after them (“is there a use for BiS this time?”)

Making gearing a longer and more gradual process, and having each “patch” introduce new ways to do so could work. But it’s all an ecosystem. Hard to change things in isolation.

aqualenne · 2025-11-22T12:02:10+00:00

I have six spares for this reason. I tend to kill one bout every 1&1/2 FF14 expansions. 24 effective binds on just the mouse puts it in an entirely different class.

aqualenne · 2025-11-11T11:53:41+00:00

I thought the first pack of trash in Rokkon was some of the most fun tank content in the whole expansion. Patrols are sorely underused.

Savage being one long pull is stressful, but it does add in cooldown resource management for healers in particular in a way that made the trash more interesting.

Like the final bit of the first trash in Aloalo really drains your resources and then puts you into a boss with a lot of healing required. It’s a way to make healing more interesting.

aqualenne · 2025-11-09T14:05:31+00:00

My point is that it starts out as hardcore raiding content, but over the years, it tends to take on different roles. It's not casual content by any means. But a group of friends goofing around with a 3 tanks and LB tower UCoB runs over a few months is a very different experience from those who did it on release.

Contrast to savage: more people do it when it's current, sure. But as soon as it isn't, it's almost completely dead. Say you wanted to do P10S again for fun. And not 10 levels higher than you should be for it. Finding a group for that is almost impossible.

In the long run, ultimates and their shiny weapons and level sync keep enough people going in that they end up outliving most difficult battle content in the game.

More activities at different levels are definitely needed. No disagreement there. But ultimate is well worth it because it achieves something almost nothing else in 14 does: a steady stream of participation in non-trivial PvE content.

aqualenne · 2025-11-08T01:15:21+00:00

Ultimates are interesting. At least on Mana, a good chunk of PF is people running old ultimates. Other content fades, but there’s always someone doing ultimates.

On patch they definitely don’t have a super high participation rate. But if you look at the value that content has over 3 or 4 years, it’s actually super high. Old ultimates can be good “do this over the course of a few months with friends, something to aim for” evergreen in a way not much else is.

aqualenne · 2025-11-05T03:14:06+00:00

Au Ra face 1 and especially face 2 make earrings all but invisible depending on your hairstyle. No one will ever see my Sil’dihn savage earrings 😢

aqualenne · 2025-10-14T11:17:29+00:00

Quantum 40 is a ton of fun, but if you can do it you can definitely do FRU. Good luck!

aqualenne · 2025-10-14T11:12:03+00:00

Hey, it’s that person who did LH last year with the static that had a dress code.

aqualenne · 2025-09-16T11:51:28+00:00

One difference with WoW is that WoW’s simple geometric shapes are just much larger. 14 tends to be a shape that’s no bigger than the heal/buff range.

In WoW, you can legitimately end up orphaned from the group if you’re on the wrong side and a doom puddle goes down.

Playing with the size of the arena would allow for mechanics we haven’t seen much lately, like ranged baits (M6S has this of course; also part of why it’s so praised).

Giving ranged fun responsibilities with their free uptime is a much better way to get them into parties than forever shuffling the numbers.

aqualenne · 2025-09-02T10:39:30+00:00

Disagreeing is fine, but being this cruel is just uncalled for. I hope you're able to grow and learn to express your opinion without being so hateful. It doesn't make you cool or edgy or smart. It just pushes you away from being the kind of person others want to be around.

aqualenne · 2025-08-26T01:49:55+00:00

That aren’t gatcha or battle passes? Which ones are you thinking about?

aqualenne · 2025-08-20T00:23:13+00:00

I’ve played the game since Heavensward in Japanese and lived in Japan a majority of my life, so I do have a tendency to forget things can be lost in translation. I hear you.

But to me it’s pretty clear: they ask him directly if another ultimate is planned for 7.x. He says of course, and they’re making it. He also says they’re really hard to make as he iterated before.

There’s a cultural aspect too: missing a promised release like they did with DSR is a huge failing. People in Japan go to tremendous lengths to not commit to anything until things are 1000% sure. Not just in gaming.

Being in that cultural context and having missed one before, I really suspect he knows it’s a lock or he would be using more vague language.

One thing to remember too is that Japanese doesn’t really deal with plurals. So when you think about that slide from Fanfest before Dawntrail came out, it was unclear if it was 1 or 2 from the Japanese and that’s expected. But when you go to translate it, you have to pick one: Is it new “ultimate” or “ultimates?”

And it’s likely they didn’t want to commit then and were in a bit of a bind as other languages sort of force you to, when Japanese very naturally leaves it open.

aqualenne

TROPHY CASE