Effort to reward ratio for job point categories

[Demonjustin]

I'm not saying make all goals short term, but there's a large disparity between the short and long term goals of this game. Almost all goals that don't fall into one of the extremes are luck based, not slightly luck based, but severely. I'm talking about things like Skirmish gear or Dring, things that could take one attempt, or one thousand attempts. I believe the longest goals in the game that are made for the most diehard people should be the vanity items like Afterglow, next up should be the top tier gear like Mythics, then Relics, and so on. Job Points aren't something I'd put anywhere near that class, but as they are a background accumulating point system I think they should be faster than they are by far. The primary issue with long term is how long you want long term to take, if you leave it as it is then in my opinion it's far too long. That's not to say take out the fact it is long term nor to shorten long term goals in general to an extreme degree, simply enough so that long term and short term goals aren't such extremes and one can feel like they're making progress more easily.

I understand this is a MMO but honestly I don't understand why people want to keep goals in this game that literally take a minimum of 3~5 months to complete per weapon no matter how much you work on it or how much you've put into it already. I'm all for long term goals, but really, I think this is a bit too long term. Job Points as they are currently fit this as well. Focusing on Job Points and nothing else I think my old rate was 2 points per hour. 55 points per category currently and 6 categories total means for a single job to cap you need 330 points. That's 115 hours at my old pace. Assuming Afania's average rate of 22 hours of play time per week you're looking at around 3 hours 10 minutes a day, that means about 37 days of spending your entire play time for the average player doing nothing but Job Point farming from start to finish from the time you log in assuming you are farming at the rate I used to in Dho without competition. One month for a single job to be finished assuming you play no other jobs and do no other events. That's too long.

[Afania]

I'm not saying make all goals short term, but there's a large disparity between the short and long term goals of this game. Almost all goals that don't fall into one of the extremes are luck based, not slightly luck based, but severely. I'm talking about things like Skirmish gear or Dring, things that could take one attempt, or one thousand attempts. I believe the longest goals in the game that are made for the most diehard people should be the vanity items like Afterglow, next up should be the top tier gear like Mythics, then Relics, and so on. Job Points aren't something I'd put anywhere near that class, but as they are a background accumulating point system I think they should be faster than they are by far. The primary issue with long term is how long you want long term to take, if you leave it as it is then in my opinion it's far too long. That's not to say take out the fact it is long term nor to shorten long term goals in general to an extreme degree, simply enough so that long term and short term goals aren't such extremes and one can feel like they're making progress more easily.

I understand this is a MMO but honestly I don't understand why people want to keep goals in this game that literally take a minimum of 3~5 months to complete per weapon no matter how much you work on it or how much you've put into it already. I'm all for long term goals, but really, I think this is a bit too long term. Job Points as they are currently fit this as well. Focusing on Job Points and nothing else I think my old rate was 2 points per hour. 55 points per category currently and 6 categories total means for a single job to cap you need 330 points. That's 115 hours at my old pace. Assuming Afania's average rate of 22 hours of play time per week you're looking at around 3 hours 10 minutes a day, that means about 37 days of spending your entire play time for the average player doing nothing but Job Point farming from start to finish from the time you log in assuming you are farming at the rate I used to in Dho without competition. One month for a single job to be finished assuming you play no other jobs and do no other events. That's too long.

It's not too long with the current life span of content though, unless you only want to play this game for 1 month and quit. Also if you get bored/unmotivated because you do too much job point farm, then you need to change your mentality - -

I don't force myself to finish all category 1 month after release, I just do it when I wait for ls/friends to pop. It's nice to have something to work on that isn't going to be done after a few hrs then toss it next update.

[Demonjustin]

It's not too long with the current life span of content though, unless you only want to play this game for 1 month and quit. Also if you get bored/unmotivated because you do too much job point farm, then you need to change your mentality - -

Afania you're one of the reasons I stopped posting. You're one of the people who take everything to the extremes I'm talking about hating. I'm sorry but honestly look at what I said and then look at what you're saying. Tell me how making it quicker would turn this game into a game you play for a single month and then quit.

Honestly people, look at what's going on here. Either we have goals like Mythics and JPs that take months upon months, literally goals that would take 6+ months to finish doing just those two alone if you played for 4~6 hours a day, or the game takes under a month and you quit? These are the extremes I'm talking about. There is no moderation.

Delve takes hours or days, Skirmish takes days or weeks if unlucky, expansions take a week to do all of them together once you hit 99 if you really want to bang them out quickly and JSE is often a matter of hours or a couple days. The rest of the game can be boiled down to a matter of a few merit point fights and meriting. After that you hit Relics, Mythics, Job Points, Afterglows, and other extremely long term goals. The majority of the current game and content can be done in a matter of weeks and under a month if you're experienced and care to do it. If people are going to quit after a month, it'll happen, Mythics and Job Points aren't stopping them.

My point in this is that it's not a slightly increasing curve as you see time required going up, I'd make a chart to show the insane amount of time differences if I cared to take the time. Once you get passed the basic 119 gear from Delve, Skirmish, and MPNMs the time required for reward shoots up exponentially. This same thing happens when someone goes from doing XP & Merits to Job Points, the amount of time required shoots up an insane amount and the reward? Ha.

I don't force myself to finish all category 1 month after release, I just do it when I wait for ls/friends to pop. It's nice to have something to work on that isn't going to be done after a few hrs then toss it next update.

Right now it's 37 days by your own numbers, for a person who you said is the average MMO player to finish this for a single job, not multiple, and this is on top of their full time job. You're basically making this a second job, something I'm sure people would love to come home and do after working for 8 hours.

Am I saying people will do this? No, it'd be stupid to do it, but if you were to do it all back to back that's the time required for such a task right now. You are someone who doesn't care to finish it all instantly and you only do it when you are waiting for things, awesome, I often did it the same. The problem is it's a system meant to happen over time in the background as you normally play and if you go out of your way to do it then it should be quite a bit faster. The problem is having it accumulate in the background isn't working at all.

Assuming you only play one job even it's still far too slow to get very far. My RDM has one category at 8 and 27 points ready to spend, nothing else has been spent thus far and it's the only job I play. In what I think was 4 months since the release of Job Points my only job I play has obtained only that, which mathed out is 63 points I believe. I've not been the most devoted person to obtaining them but I've done plenty of Skirmish and Delve since the release as well as plenty of parties both during and outside of double campaigns and I've used rings every time including my anniversary ring. All of that stacked up and that's all I have to show.

In the end it comes down to simply being too slow, no matter how you go about getting these points it's not fast enough for you to get a good deal of points as it is without absurd amounts of time spent. To this day the only person I know who has capped their points in even a single job is someone I know who wasn't even at their keyboard while they did it. So while I'm not against it taking long enough we don't all finish every category of every job in the first week after they're released, I'd like to be able to actually make some progress doing other content or be able to focus on this specifically and bang out 5~10 points a hour in a good party on a constant basis.

Keep in mind, 5 points currently is only 1/66 of what you need to cap all categories, so even at 5 points a hour it would take more than two and a half full days nonstop to finish. I think that's sufficient, since it would be 11 hours of farming devoted specifically to this for each category and they are meant to be earned in the background. Assuming it's earnt in the background rather than direct farming I'd assume a rate of more like 2 per hour, meaning 22 hours of active playtime required to cap a category, which equals out to roughly 45 Delve runs per category, that's fair to me.

[Zhronne]

Just curious, did you really farm CP on BRD or are you joking? Lol >.> I was just guessing and using it as an example >.>

Stop offending my DD Bard, it's awesome, you're making me cry Q___Q
Well, I got Horn99, Daubla99 and a Carnwenhan119, I kinda love my Bard.
ddBRD is much better than people think it is. Especially for solo. You get 4songs permanently on you, it makes a huge difference when soloing.
For instance, I'm getting way more points on BRD than on my RUN. Probably more than my MNK as well lol.

Either way, getting back IT.
I don't think removing the job restrictions would be the right solution for this problem.
The easiest/fastest solution? Probably so, but the right one? I don't think so.
As I said previously in my opinion there are pros and cons in a system that has job-specific pools compared to the general cross pool of Merit Points.
Some examples:

• It forces you to play that specific job. One of the thing that a lot of players whined about in the post-abyssea FFXI compared to the pre-abyssea one, is that you could leech all the way to cap and find yourself already geared, full of merits etc. There was hardly a way to show "dedication" to that certain job. JPs offer this, because you are forced to slowly grind on that job to achieve Job Points. From this perspective, I consider this a pro.
• Since the system is currently unbalanced/flawed, some jobs have it easy and everything else does not. Some jobs in particular would have quite a hard time soloing JPs and good luck finding a pt. This is so bad that it makes you wish you could farm JPs on another job. It would be cool, faster and more efficient, but it would kinda completely defeat the purpose with which the system was created to begin with.

I don't mind if CP gain rate is even for all jobs, but I don't see a way to make it even for all jobs. Some jobs will always grind CP faster regardless.

I agree with this, I think it's utopistic to expect anything different.
At the same time though, I think they can surely work to close the gap.
What they need to do is offer alternative ways to efficiently ("efficient" up to a certain degree, of course) to farm CPs.
That way people who can already farm at 60k/hr or more atm will keep doing that, but other people will have different ways to farm CP and still obtain decent rates, at least 40k/hr would be decent enough with the current caps (different story once they unlock the cap of course)

I forgot to reply that 2014 post of yours, so I'll reply here. 2014 pace is faster than 2006, which is fact, I didn't say it's not. But I think without afterglow/JP/mythics, current pace is TOO FAST for a MMO that it's bad for the game.

I'm not sure about this, I kinda have mixed feelings myself.
I mean, if we're talking about my personal tastes then yes, absolutely, this game is way too fast from the "sweet spot" where I'd like it to be. Maybe not in every single aspect but in the majority of them for sure.
But too fast compared to other MMOs?
Hmmmmm... not sure about that. Which MMOs were you thinking about when you wrote that?
If I think about WoW or FFXIV for instance, they don't really seem slower than FFXI.
Altough it's hard to make a 1:1 comparison since those games play so different than FFXI.
But it seems to me that even after all the huge changes FFXI has been going through as of late, they're still more focused on speed/instant gratification than FFXI is, and that is clearly one of the (many) keys in their success among a wider range of players.


And to end the topic, I welcome slowed paced content with open arms.
But that doesn't change the fact that the overall (i.e. not for a couple of specific jobs) situation of the JP system is not quite where it should be, yet.

[Afania]

Stop offending my DD Bard, it's awesome, you're making me cry Q___Q
Well, I got Horn99, Daubla99 and a Carnwenhan119, I kinda love my Bard.
ddBRD is much better than people think it is. Especially for solo. You get 4songs permanently on you, it makes a huge difference when soloing.
For instance, I'm getting way more points on BRD than on my RUN. Probably more than my MNK as well lol.

Nah, I didn't make fun of your DD BRD, I was just surprised that I pulled out a random none DD job and it's really the job you've been using D:

4 songs could have been awesome before trusts exist, now that with BRD trusts the gap between BRD solo and another job is a lot smaller. I'd probably have less CP/hr than you if I don't have haste+march buff from trusts.

I think RUN may have to rely on fell cleave for faster CP farm, but I haven't try that personally nor know how to pull that off efficiently.

Either way, getting back IT.
I don't think removing the job restrictions would be the right solution for this problem.
The easiest/fastest solution? Probably so, but the right one? I don't think so.
As I said previously in my opinion there are pros and cons in a system that has job-specific pools compared to the general cross pool of Merit Points.
Some examples:[list][*]It forces you to play that specific job. One of the thing that a lot of players whined about in the post-abyssea FFXI compared to the pre-abyssea one, is that you could leech all the way to cap and find yourself already geared, full of merits etc. There was hardly a way to show "dedication" to that certain job. JPs offer this, because you are forced to slowly grind on that job to achieve Job Points. From this perspective, I consider this a pro.

I don't agree that JP farm is the right way to force the player to play specific job. IMO it'd just make players farm JP harder on specific job due to the fact that content is often selective.

For example, if a content offers 100k/hr a run, but it's a PLD+RNG setup content, then the only job that can get 100k/hr are PLD RNG RDM BRD or COR.

Unless the content gives equal opportunity for every job, in the end every job would still ended up having a gap.

I'm not sure about this, I kinda have mixed feelings myself.
I mean, if we're talking about my personal tastes then yes, absolutely, this game is way too fast from the "sweet spot" where I'd like it to be. Maybe not in every single aspect but in the majority of them for sure.
But too fast compared to other MMOs?
Hmmmmm... not sure about that. Which MMOs were you thinking about when you wrote that?

I can't think of any MMO that allows the player to obtain the highest raid gear in 20 min~2hr of grind with ZERO cooldown time....can you? >.>

It's a lot harder to obtain the highest raid gear in FFXIV back when I still play, even if you leeched in an elite LS and beat the content 1/1, there's still a pretty big chance that you won't win lot/stuff won't drop, then you'd have to wait for 1 week to try again.

In FFXI you can farm delve2 none stop and cap everything in a very short time....it's just not right.

IMO a MMO either needs cool down time or longer grind to keep players around, personally I HATE weekly lock out in ARR with a passion, because I'm paying a monthly fee but only get to play a few hr a week. I'd like to play as much as possible if I pay for a monthly fee, that's why I support longer grind. If I'm a no-lifer with 40hr a week of playtime, I should be able to invest 40hr of my time to make progress, instead of having artificial weekly lock out telling me "no, you can only play 6hr a week because we don't let you make anymore progress after 6hr of playtime"

[Zhronne]

4 songs could have been awesome before trusts exist, now that with BRD trusts the gap between BRD solo and another job is a lot smaller.

Kinda depends on your definition of "lot". It is smaller for sure, absolutely, but you have to keep in mind that atm Trusts have no song potency. Take Marches for instance, theirs give 15.7 haste (both together), mine give 31,3 haste.
And that's not considering the small factors like choosing the "right" songs 100% of the time, being able to put 3 ballads on healer Trust (that's like what, 21mp/tic?) and never dropping.
If I feel like I'm not gonna lose attention I can keep up 5 songs for a few hours as well.

I don't agree that JP farm is the right way to force the player to play specific job.

I think it might be a matter of subtle perspectives.
I don't know how the system will evolve through time of course, but I'm pretty confident when they thought it they meant it to be something to stimulate and promote playing on different jobs, not to "force" them.

The reason why I think your proposed solution would be very simple to implement and it would "work" but it would be the "wrong" one is because at that point everybody (or the majority of people) would level those 3 jobs that have it easy for CP and farm CP on them only and then spend them on whatever job you like.
Quite a sad perspective, wouldn't it?

[FrankReynolds]

Kinda depends on your definition of "lot". It is smaller for sure, absolutely, but you have to keep in mind that atm Trusts have no song potency. Take Marches for instance, theirs give 15.7 haste (both together), mine give 31,3 haste.
And that's not considering the small factors like choosing the "right" songs 100% of the time, being able to put 3 ballads on healer Trust (that's like what, 21mp/tic?) and never dropping.
If I feel like I'm not gonna lose attention I can keep up 5 songs for a few hours as well.



I think it might be a matter of subtle perspectives.
I don't know how the system will evolve through time of course, but I'm pretty confident when they thought it they meant it to be something to stimulate and promote playing on different jobs, not to "force" them.

The reason why I think your proposed solution would be very simple to implement and it would "work" but it would be the "wrong" one is because at that point everybody (or the majority of people) would level those 3 jobs that have it easy for CP and farm CP on them only and then spend them on whatever job you like.
Quite a sad perspective, wouldn't it?

If they keep the JP system as is and raise the cap to 30 or 45, eventually I will be forced to earn cap points on jobs that suck at earning cap points just to keep those jobs up to par.

If they make JP transferable between all jobs, I'll end up playing some other job I don't want to play all the time in order to earn points just to keep my other jobs up to par.

I'd rather get it over fast on a job I don;t necessarily like than do it slowly on one I do like. Bonus points because if they make them non-job-specific, I can still opt to do them slowly on the job I choose if need be. So if I choose to go grind them out on BST instead of getting them quick on BRD, I can.