this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Final Fantasy 14
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I was surprised to see how many complaints about how negatively their gaming experience was affected. As a fairly enfranchised player that has thousands of hours in the game doing content at various levels up to hardcore Savage raiding, the FFXIV subreddit being unavailable did not affect my experience nearly at all. In fact I only ever really go there to occasionally browse if there are interesting posts or answer questions in the Daily Questions thread.
I am wondering about the resources that people rely on the subreddit for. Island Sanctuary is posted on their Discord, which is not ideal but personally I find the Discord formatting easier to understand than the Reddit post, and Fashion Report is just an image posted all over elsewhere.
For active, ever-changing and/or temporary information, such as Island Sanctuary or Fashion Report, I find Discord is just about right. You can just follow a feed that displays the current state. Since no one cares what the Fashion Report was three months ago, historical data is not needed. Sure, a website could do this, but it would just be another single-purpose site on the huge list of other single-purpose FFXIV sites (fishing data, anyone?). Either way, a Reddit post is less than ideal.
From my perspective, if I'm looking for something on Reddit, it's usually for something like a post where someone asked some esoteric question I also want to ask. Lore questions, furniture glitching, UI questions, things like that which are not covered by the normal sites because it's too specific.
That said, I was using the Reddit posts for IS and FR before the blackout, and moved to Discord to get that data only when I couldn't get it from Reddit anymore (and found I like it better for that specific data), but for a lot of people, they may not want/know how to get that info from Discord, or prefer to have a central source for everything.
My guess is that we are hearing from people who don't use Discord for whatever reason (and there are multiple legitimate reasons to not do so) to get their weekly data, people who had those esoteric questions and were banging their head against a wall trying to get answers, or sprouts who didn't know where else to turn.
(Honestly, a central source for all this data would be the ideal solution, but what a herculean task that would be. Many have tried, though.)
That's largely reasonable!
I can get not wanting to use Discord for a particular reason if someone already isn't using Reddit, but I feel like if you use Reddit, you're running out of reasons to not also use Discord.
For the esoteric or specific questions, I guess that doesn't come up too regularly for me, and I struggle to understand how someone can have enough questions in say a week where the loss of Reddit access would severely hamper their ability to engage with the game. I'm not saying it's impossible either, but if it ends up being a specific question that wasn't already asked or you can't find on Reddit anyhow, your ability to ask in a Discord is about as effective as asking on Reddit (once again looping to the fact that if you use Reddit, I feel like your reasons to not use Discord are limited).
The only other thing I can think of static information for content that minimally changes but is commonly requested. That would be the purpose of older threads that you would look up and find, which is very much better served in some other format. While I understand the FFXIV wiki and Gamerescape aren't ideal due to the lack of these content, there's nothing to stop someone from putting info there rather than making a Reddit post.
I think the only thing that wouldn't fit in is the kind of informational blog posts that come up on occasions. For example, the one that sticks to memory is the person that dissects the dragon language as a conlang. It's more blog post than Wiki resource, and I would struggle to find a better alternative than a place like Reddit or similar short of a personal blog.