Interim Report – Sorry to keep you all waiting!

[Ceinwyn]

This debate is so pointless so I'll keep it short!
I forecast this:
SE is bored of this game, this is clear!
The uptades and the team put on the game are/is and will stay at a rock-bottom level to keep it barely alive!
New Expansion will be downloadable and offer minimal content, oh and it's relase will be delayed to 2014!
They shit on the economy of the world and encourage speed-lvling because it's easy mode
and probably most do like EASY-MODE!
They know the game will suffer and that they can't keep up with the content since everyone is 99 in a day
but they just don't care because it doesn't matter at all.
People will move on to FFXIV anyway, old players will go there anyway and new ones also if they are done with maxing all their jobs, thx to speedlvling yeah! and have finished or are bored of the poor endgame content what is all the game has left now, we're genius!!!
So let's hope ffxiv will be any good my fellow players because i don't belive in this game anymore.
I really recommend everyone to move on to something else and leave the actual poor playerbase alone and let em enjoy their left time we had ours i guess (: ,
with the release of FFXIV: A realm reborn. This game will take another serious drop on poulation and because of that mister, accompanied by other factors, I'm pretty sure it will go to hell.

[Eyeballed]

This debate is so pointless so I'll keep it short!

It's not pointless though. Do you love playing MMO's? When was the last time you picked one up that you didn't touch another video game for years, period? That was me and FFXI in 2005; For 4.5 years I did not play a single game outside of it. It was exactly what I loved and the game was a success and I refuse to believe the only reason it was a success is because secretly there was a majority of players that despised backbone of its content. Bullshit, I say.

[SpankWustler]

As well, I feel you're also attempting to objectify your experience in an even more acute sense with regard to a single job for a span of 15 levels. I'm referring to all jobs from levels 1-75.

I tried not to, but my feelings probably bled through a bit because my experiences are from the opposite end of the spectrum. I just wanted to provide an example that lots of people had lots of different experiences.

There were some people who did little other than level back when leveling had a much slower pace, and enjoyed it. Others leveled jobs as quickly as possible, hanging out with Shiva in Korroloka Tunnel rather than leveling normally when possible; they wanted to use a certain job for end-game, to fill a niche within their linkshells, or just to equip the armor they had accrued for that job via free-lot. I mostly met the latter kind of player, given that I was the latter kind of player, but I have no idea which group made up the majority at the time.

I don't think anybody else has any idea which group made up the majority, either. I also doubt the player base could be divided neatly into groups. It's so hard to collect data on the mental state of large groups of people that there are statistical tactics for using normally problematic sample sizes to get representative results in the social sciences.

Basically, I have no faith in my ability or anyone's ability to have knowledge of what's good or bad for FFXI players as a whole. If somebody tried to make the point that almost all players hated leveling more than my racist uncle hates brown people, I would find that dubious as well.

It's cool that some people liked leveling at the slower pace. I'm glad somebody really liked it to balance out how much I hated it. I just find any implication of a "silent majority" to be very, very, very suspect and one or both sides always make that implication when this topic comes up.

PS: Your sig is the best I've seen in a long time.

Thanks! I saw the image and it's dimensions seemed perfect for a signature.

I would post a link to the maker's Tumbler but there's some NSFW stuff there. Typing "Paul Robertson" into Google and checking out his Tumblr should do the trick, though. Again, there is some NSFW stuff there.

[Ceinwyn]

It's not pointless though. Do you love playing MMO's? When was the last time you picked one up that you didn't touch another video game for years, period? That was me and FFXI in 2005; For 4.5 years I did not play a single game outside of it. It was exactly what I loved and the game was a success and I refuse to believe the only reason it was a success is because there was a majority of players that despised backbone of its content. Bullshit, I say.

I can understand u bc it was the same for me but things are like they are.
I don't belive either that it was a succes bc of people who didnt like it at all but lots of people don't even check the forum and i can't blame em for it.

[Eyeballed]

I don't think anybody else has any idea which group made up the majority, either. I also doubt the player base could be divided neatly into groups. It's so hard to collect data on the mental state of large groups of people that there are statistical tactics for using normally problematic sample sizes to get representative results in the social sciences.

Basically, I have no faith in my ability or anyone's ability to have knowledge of what's good or bad for FFXI players as a whole. If somebody tried to make the point that almost all players hated leveling more than my racist uncle hates brown people, I would find that dubious as well.

It's cool that some people liked leveling at the slower pace. I'm glad somebody really liked it to balance out how much I hated it. I just find any implication of a "silent majority" to be very, very, very suspect and one or both sides always make that implication when this topic comes up.

You could say it's because the game's old, outdated graphics, what-have-you and that's the reason the game is 'dying'; But on the other hand, you could say that (Your sig is really distracting! haha) it's just as likely that the game changed in a few major ways (Abyssea/99 cap) that OG players weren't keen on and those facts are equally responsible in the decline of player numbers and re-subscribers.

It's a given to say that the game had aged by the time WoTG released, but it had aged gracefully. So much that when FFXIV released, many, many players migrated over expecting more great things from SE. Unfortunately we all know how that went, and you had (and still do) their players wanting to recapture the gameplay they had known for years only to realize that it was nowhere to be found.

[Prrsha]

The majority of the current player base (which is a very low number compared to old ones) that favor speedleveling are who stay with the game. The people who don't like what the game has become, have tried it for a few months, then left without a word. The simple fact is because the game is tailored that way, then those people who like speedleveling stay, have access to the forums and as such a vested intrest in the game. Those people are the "vocal" minority (due to their ability to post here).

What if SE was to take a poll to all of those players who LEFT due to the current state of the game. I am sure you'll agree that number FAR outweights the current numbers of the playerbase. Heck the people in my LS above are a prime example of that. A good 80% of them quit the game due to the changes. Will they ever return to be able to post here? Doubtful. What you have here is the great silent MAJORITY.

In order to see the numbers SE saw way back in the golden days of 2005-2006 they should at least consider their thoughts (Maybe a mass e-mail poll to ex-players would do the trick) to get an unbias poll.

Arcon has stated that levels don't matter anymore, and they should be removed. As crazy as that sounds, I'd have to agree with him if SE treats the road to level 99 as something that is an unwanted after-effect of the game. If this is the case, make every player level 99. You might as well make the test server, the "player server", so they can have access to every spell, set of gear etc. What you have now in FFXI is not a level progression ladder, but a set of ability/gear progressions... but you know what... it's the same thing. Both are time sinks and what is worse... some forms of obtaining gear is entirely luck based. At least with levels, you are guaranteed to get them. SE has just about removed the risk of leveling down (since exp is so plentiful).

So yeah same progression and time sink... different names.

Edit: clean up

[Eyeballed]

I've been thinking of deleting my character and washing my hands of MMO's, but I read on the XIV forums that a group of them started again at Phoenix. Are you part of that group? Entertaining the idea of hopping over.

[Caketime]

You know what I haven't had in awhile? Big League Chew.

[Chocobits]

How did this derail from a dev update post to a full on horse corpse abuse session?

Prrsha/Eyeballed:

The reason the Devs don't allow feedback from nonpaying current customers is because they have this funny mentality that the game should be shaped by the current playerbase, which is usually to the detriment of the game.

I'll say that personally there were aspects of the exp grind that I loved. And as much as I agree with (and have argued siding with) people that say exp parties don't teach a player how to do anything meaningful but exp; there are a small handful of jobs that I think really did benefit from it. I know I was a much more adaptive, reflexive and resourceful WHM from having grinded exp the old school way with complete idiots and with limited resources.

Mostly though, it was repetitive and it sucked. The party seek function sucks; level sync came out way too late in the game's lifecycle and was poorly implemented, ushering in terrible parties that were terribly geared due to syncing mechanics, as well as exploitive options such as SMNburn.

The reason it was repetitive and sucked, and which is really the core of the problem, lies truthfully in the unimaginative way SE plotted mob spawns (mostly 1 type of mob in an area), battle mechanics that penalized lower level players by virtue of lack of stats, gear and spells/abilities (and the fact that accuracy SUCKS at low levels no matter what you do), a homogenous leveling experience from 1-30 because most jobs didn't obtain their job defining abilities and traits until the 30s, and the fact that despite the myriad of fauna available to hunt in Vanadiel, most players focused on about 5 of them throughout the course of leveling, due to terrain, surrounding mobs and party friendliness. The ecosystem wasn't sufficiently balanced to healthily support leveling on any type of mob you desired, and still isn't.

Even in 2005, we would always comment that leveling in the 50s was like watching paint dry. Those Bibiki Bay parties that could go up to 6k/hr (which was a holy grail to us back then, even though usually we were at the 3.5-4k/hr mark) were constantly interrupted by gobby bombs that could 1 shot people, dhalmel links, and nooby players.

Fast forward to 2013 (yes, I can time travel a few weeks into the future :-) !) None of that is any different now, with the exception of mildly-but-not-nearly-enhanced-enough-exp, except that now doing the same grinds level synced with high level gear results in an even worse experience due to the poor way gear syncs.

I would say that in order for "old school" partying to be effective, FUN, and appealing, the following would have to change:

*Increase in mob density and increased population overall with lower repop timers, which disallows building custom 4 of 1 type of job melee parties, as different damage types would be needed and allows for an uninterrupted grind experience.
*Availability of more refresh options to accommodate faster chains (look at how much refresh we have in Abyssea).
*Higher base experience points (to the order of at least 50% of what is currently being awarded after numerous xp bump patches).
*Modification of basic mob strengths and behavior at < 75 levels to even out the difficulty of several mob types and to increase the number of available camps.
*Fixing the way gear syncs.
*Balancing of job abilities and stats at low levels.

Which would all said and done essentially create the same exp rate outside of Abyssea as inside (GoV notwithstanding).

So, which do you want exactly? A needless time sink by forcing everyone back to 2005 era exp under the pretense of "lurning ur job doods!", an opportunity for legit but efficient exp outside of Abyssea, or level caps and exp restrictions inside of Abyssea? I'm just confused. Is your goal to create a fun, flexible and fair mode of exp with several different paths, or is it just to hop in your Delorean and head back to 2005 when it took unnecessarily long to reach level cap for no reason? What are you trying to accomplish? There's no content at low or mid levels and even SE acknowledges that. There's no reason to want to grind.

But as has been pointed out, the option to grind is still available to you. You can't find anyone to do it because nobody wants to. You say that pro-"new way" people on the forums are a "minority" that are the "vocal majority" because all the sane people have jumped ship. The option to grind was always available and so they if there were that many of them, they coulda teamed up and formed a grind LS and called it "TeamGrindCore" or something and grinded until they were sore from all the grinding. So really, there weren't that many of them right? Cuz the option to grind was never removed from the game.

*edited for some spelling and revision of potentially inflammatory remarks*

[Carth]

Arcon has stated that levels don't matter anymore, and they should be removed. As crazy as that sounds, I'd have to agree with him if SE treats the road to level 99 as something that is an unwanted after-effect of the game.

It's not crazy at all. I humorously made the same remark in another thread very recently.

I don't want anyone to get any ideas: I really don't care about this debate about fast leveling vs slow leveling. I'm in the neutral camp. Fast or slow, as long as I'm enabled to perform missions, quests, and events, I don't really care.

I'm honestly surprised no one caught Sunrider's post. Actually I shouldn't be since everyone was caught up in their "NO U!" argument.

This, I think, is the source of what makes the lower levels (let's say, 45 and lower, maybe even 65 and lower), so unattractive: there's just nothing there. No strong armor, weapons, spells, abilities, or traits. What would you do if you could play with Refresh (even at 2 MP/tic), as early as level 5? What if the armors and weapons with +5/+6 this or that were available at level 10? What if you got Traits like Occult Accumen, Fast Cast, or Double Attack straight out the gate? I think if we had more of what makes the higher levels enjoyable, at the lower levels, people would have never developed the hasty attitude to progress.

I'll take what Sunrider said, and take it a step further: There is sort of gratifying goal in this MMO. This game is a static, uneventful world that never changes, regardless of your level. Literally everything in this game stays the same no matter what you do, and it's a shame because this world is so elaborate, yet so little is done with it.

So really, what is everyone's goal with this game? To get the next level? To get the next shiney? To get the bestest gear in the game? Who cares about any of that stuff if you can't do anything with it? And I feel that's why Matsui keeps everything at level 99. Because what's the point otherwise? Leveling up and getting new gear means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.