Rate of Leveling and the New Player Experience

[bungiefanNA]

The thing is, it doens't have to be such a large amount of running between the fights in CoP and Zilart. Geomagnetic Founts and homepoint warps will get you to nearly all of the zones. I did the tuns for those missions in January, and it was never much more than 10 minutes to run anywhere I needed to go from the new teleportation points. Voidwatch warps help a bit if you have done the starting cities. Running on chocobos between the crags was the slow way to reach Promyvion. There's a teleportation landing point in nearly every zone nowadays. It's a little work to unlock them, but once you do, you can go nearly everywhere from Jeuno/Adoulin in a matter of minutes.

[detlef]

How much of the game would you miss if you were stuck having only one or two "main" jobs? It's glossed over far too often, but it's a lot easier to get things done when people have many jobs leveled. If you have 6 people with a good spread of jobs, you can do almost anything. If you have 6 people and 3 of them only have PLD leveled, you're probably going to have issues.

I'm glad SE made leveling easier because it let me play many more jobs than I would have been able to otherwise. I would've been stuck with just BRD and RDM, and jobs like SCH and DRG would be things I could only read about.

A guy like Crevox kind of went against everything FFXI is. Level one job and try to use it for everything. Rather than level multiple jobs and use the best tool available for whatever needed to get done.

[Lordkyron]

I just wish we could use trust in abbysea so. We can experience that story. All you find there is worm partyes

[Calatilla]

Agreed. Or they should at least make the Double Exp Campaign a monthly thing. That way new players can always look forward to a time when they'll get a huge boost in levels. But really, yeah, it should be the norm. And skill gain rate should be doubled all-around.

As for Genkai, yes, they should remove it or make it much easier. The last thing we want is for people who're interested in the game to hit a wall and quit along the way (thereby losing their subscription and inching us one step closer to "FFXI is dieing" for real). They can still force a visit to Maat to raise the cap, but let new players spend beastman seals or geodes or whatever other junk they got while leveling to unlock the level cap. Remove the testimony requirement for players who have to fight Maat for the first time, that way they can just stroll in and challenge the fight as often as they need to. Stuff like that.

Everyone should be seriously concerned by the lack of new blood in this game. Sticking to the same old draconic bullshit we had to suffer all these years isn't healthy.

The level cap quests would be a road block if you had to do them for every job, which you don't. They don't slow down your leveling by much at all. If new players don't have the patience to do a couple of level caps on their way to 99 how do you think they'll react to endgame content. Wah I dont have 20 merits to do AA fights, please make meriting easier.

[Pixela]

The level cap quests would be a road block if you had to do them for every job, which you don't. They don't slow down your leveling by much at all. If new players don't have the patience to do a couple of level caps on their way to 99 how do you think they'll react to endgame content. Wah I dont have 20 merits to do AA fights, please make meriting easier.

Leveling has no relevance to Endgame,

A) There are players in WoW and FFXI that never did any serious endgame at all but just leveled and were part of the community. They still played for years, heck you can look at players right now and can you honestly tell me the majority of them are end-game geared? (as in not serious endgamers with all 119 gear).
B) Leveling is supposed to be the hook, once a player is addicted they will put up with far higher levels of rubbish later on. This is why you don't start by annoying people if you intend to keep them long-term.

In the past the community was a major part of what kept players around on FFXI, that is NOT the case anymore. I can speak personally that when I had problems with my AF quests, getting party invites, getting optical hat, getting missions done it was the other players and community, the living breathing world that made me put up with those annoying road blocks. There is no living breathing world anymore so it's more down to the developers making content work properly and flow well enough to keep you interested.

Also almost every single endgame player needs baby feeding, you know when almost all the endgame players started doing endgame on ffxi? When BG forums became a hub for sharing strategies. You know what would happen to endgame linkshells if the wikis and bgforums ceased to exist? You think all these endgame players would talk to every npc in the game, and try all different strategies to see if things work?

[Calatilla]

Who do you think makes these strategies? When a new event comes out people go out and try it using current strategy, if that fails they try something new until they figure it out. Also there is more than one way to beat content.

End game isn't for everyone I agree, back at 75 cap I didn't do endgame at all because standing around for hours waiting for an NM that may or may not spawn, wasn't my idea of fun. But you're making it sound like getting to 99 is a chore, if you think it's a chore now, then you obviously didn't play at 75 cap. It took me a year to get my first lv75 job back then, now you can do it in less than a week, even with the level caps to slow you down. SE even made the level caps easier to do. Leveling isn't hard, SE don't need to make it any easier.

[Damane]

How much of the game would you miss if you were stuck having only one or two "main" jobs? It's glossed over far too often, but it's a lot easier to get things done when people have many jobs leveled. If you have 6 people with a good spread of jobs, you can do almost anything. If you have 6 people and 3 of them only have PLD leveled, you're probably going to have issues.

I'm glad SE made leveling easier because it let me play many more jobs than I would have been able to otherwise. I would've been stuck with just BRD and RDM, and jobs like SCH and DRG would be things I could only read about.

A guy like Crevox kind of went against everything FFXI is. Level one job and try to use it for everything. Rather than level multiple jobs and use the best tool available for whatever needed to get done.

haveing lvld and haveing it geared are 2 total different things. it doesnt help if my sch that nukes tier 1 spells for 2k+ gets replaced by a blm that is barely scratching 400 on his t1 nukes.

[detlef]

haveing lvld and haveing it geared are 2 total different things. it doesnt help if my sch that nukes tier 1 spells for 2k+ gets replaced by a blm that is barely scratching 400 on his t1 nukes.

Of course that's true but you can't gear it if you don't level it.

Obviously in a situation I described, you'd try to get people on their best jobs and the trash BLM person would hopefully have other geared jobs like BRD, COR, or something depending on what is needed. Trying to shoehorn a person into the group with one poorly geared job isn't what I was recommending.

[Camiie]

A guy like Crevox kind of went against everything FFXI is. Level one job and try to use it for everything. Rather than level multiple jobs and use the best tool available for whatever needed to get done.

I have problems with the view that jobs themselves should be situational. I understand it with gear. I understand it with abilities. I think a job should have far more value than that. Barring something like a Mythic, a job played well requires more time effort than any single piece of gear. Someone who puts forth that effort deserves better than to have their job shelved in the vast majority of relevant content.

[detlef]

Are you suggesting that every job should have a place in a 6-man PT (as an example) for every event with no exceptions? I'm not sure that's possible unless the remaining PT members make serious concessions. I mean, you can fit a SMN into any PT if you want. But if SMN doesn't make sense for the event in question, the rest of the PT is going to have to either do more damage, heal more, or provide more support in order to compensate. However, there are other times when bringing a SMN makes a great deal of sense, particularly in an alliance setting where you can fit many more jobs in.

Sometimes you really want to have a PLD for what you're doing. Sometimes you don't. If I can get away with it, I think it's preferable for a player to switch jobs rather than to switch the player out.