Job-specific rewards for Jobmasters.

[Stompa]

[1]

I understand and agree with the recent statements by the Dev Team, that the reason Jobmasters can not transfer their 500 extra Jobpoints to other jobs, is because of Lore, ie. Jobpoints represent a mastery of a given job. I do agree with this, because one of the reasons why I love FFXI so much, is that the Devs try to be strict about Lore whenever possible, while so many lesser games just allow huge gaps in the believability of the lore structure.

[2]

I also understand and agree with the Dev Team, in their earlier statements about why the final tiers of Gifts are rather mild. The reason is that it would be unfair for players who have limited Play Time, if the higher tier Gifts were totally incredible and essential. I think it is good that many of the best Gifts are in the lower-mid stages of Jobpoint progression, as this allows casual players with busy working lives, to obtain useful Gifts, and not feel they are losing out so much, if they can't get Jobmaster quickly.



So I have a suggestion, which ties these two things together ; would it be possible for us Jobmasters to spend our 500 extra Jobpoints on some Job-specific Novelty Gear.


Requirement ; Jobmaster.

Process ; a NPC similar to Emporox, who currently takes your Merit Points and offers you various fancy novelty gear in return.

This new NPC would only talk to you if you are Jobmaster.

He would offer you Job-specific treats that are only for the Jobmaster job you are currently on.

Job-specific treats would be largely cosmetic. Not game changing. This is to comply with point [2] above, where we don't want to upset casual players and make them think that incredibly powerful gear is unavailable to them because they don't have enough free Play Time to farm Jobmaster plus another 500 Jobpoints.

As we know, Dev Time is limited, and they are already pouring their hearts into keeping the game interesting, with only limited time and resources.

So I would suggest two Job-specific treats per job.

Each treat costs 500 Jobpoints, and is only available when you are already Jobmaster.

Suggestions ;

1) Novelty HATS.

We had Maat's Cap in the old days, to signify Grand Mastery status. So I would suggest a unique HAT for each job. To comply with point [2] above, the hat would be decorative and fun, not an essential game-changing battle gear. Wearing it as /lockstyle would show the world you are a Jobmaster, even without the yellow stars switched on.

2) Jobspecific earrings.

These would have some quite nice stats, but again nothing too powerful, they would be useful and functional, but mainly they would be something you could wear to show that you really love your job.


I hope people will suggest other Jobmaster JSE gear that could be purchased for 500 Jobpoints.

My main reason for posting this is that I love my main job, and would like to spend my post-Jobmaster +500 Jobpoints on something nice, maybe something quite useful, or simply decorative and stylish.

I like to have goals to work towards, even if they are just earning a nice stylish lockstyle hat or cute earring!

[Zeldar]

Not a bad idea. Perhaps they could add this to Emporox and offer things like RME upgrade materials as well. I would dump extra job points into buying things like plutons, heavy metal, riftcinder and dynamis currency.

[Zeldar]

Again though, it should only be offered while on that job that you have mastered. You shouldnt be able to dump job points into the pool from a job you have not mastered.

[OmnysValefor]

I would like a method to use excess JP somehow but I'd like it to have value in the game and personally don't want more novelty gear or more inventory -1s like the Ambuscade capes (currently inv-4 for pld capes,inv-2 for blu, etc). Earrings might be acceptable if they were all jobs. IE - Mastering WHM gives an all jobs Cure Potency II 3% earring, Mastering RDM gives a buff duration + 3% earring again for all jobs, Mastering RUN gives a +10 magic eva earring, Small stuff like this, not game breaking.

And yeah, I authored the thread asking them to allow us to spend JP on other jobs but I disagree with using lore as a reason: They wrote the stuff, they can do whatever they like. Merits are basically the same but not job-specific which thank god, because my ToAU era PLD would have never capped a single category.

[Fae]

I feel people should spend a lot of time with the jobs they master, so spending job points on other jobs isn't something I agree with.

We are kind of in a rut at the moment for gear rewards and it is a problem SE will have to solve to keep the game alive. Novelty gear isn't something that motivates people enough to do content, look at the current master trial for example. Most have a LOT of other stuff they'd rather do. The fight itself is challenging and fun, but it's missing the half of the fight where it has a usable reward. Even as a lockstyle piece, how am I going to ever make use of that as a SMN?

Vertical progression means all content becomes easier for players that obtain that gear, we feel the repercussions of this even now on things like VD avatar fights, where some very well geared and knowledgeable BLU can solo Leviathan now, on VD, in less than four minutes. This was not possible before sky, reisenjima and afterglow upgrades to RME. Now group content is becoming solo content, and that is a huge problem because then SE has to manufacture more content that is challenging and has rewards enough to motivate people to do it. This is a very hard problem to solve for any game, but even more so with a smaller dev team.

Sideways progression isn't an answer either, the only thing most players would even be interested in for sidegrades is something that combines multiple items into one item. This though has the effect that the content players did to get those two items is no longer done in favor of getting one item that does both in order to save inventory so this too kills off old content.

Novelty items are not a solution either. People have fun with them sure, but inventory is eatten up and people tire of it. Items only used a bit or for lockstyles are not going to be able to contribute much to game longevity or interest.

The only actual solution is to either design and create more content, or make old content usable again by upping it's difficulty and rewards. Salvage becomes salvage II for example, Einherhar II, or even easier, just upping the sliders for difficulty on things like BCNMs, adding an "intentense" difficulty to say Avatar fights, which the victory from grants one more personal coffer than VD. This would only require adding another tier and set of higher stats.

The last problem with adding vertical progression though, is Aeonic weapons. I think I understand why SE left these for last. Now if they increase player power level, they make access to and number of players with Aeonics more, which again makes all content easier. Which then makes more content dead (no one is going to bother with any other path to returning for weapons if the fights become too achievable due to more vertical gear progression).

So questions and issues and desires like this can't even be brought up and solved without addressing these larger issues. How will interesting content with interesting rewards be brought into the game with all these things as they are? It seems like without a bigger dev team or at least the willingness to revamp/add difficulty tiers/new versions of older content vertical gear progression will be taboo and we'll be stuck running around collecting novelty items people don't want and sidegrades that devalue old gear even more. So what then is the solution? I'd even bet some sort of kickstarter or something could get more Devs. I'm not sure what to do but I hope SE has discussions on this and plans for my favorite game

[Stompa]

Novelty gear isn't something that motivates people enough to do content, look at the current master trial for example.

I can't speak for Master Trials, as there may be a final reward if you collect the sword plus new drops from the next Master Trials. Maybe you have to collect the set or something. Maybe the reward for beating those Master Trials is just the sense of achievement, given how hard they are lol. I don't know.

However, regarding lockstyle gear. Jobmaster status gives you some yellow stars, which are only a visual effect, just like /lockstyle gear is only a visual effect.

When I wrote my original post here, I was building it around point [1] and [2] which are the rules we are working with. Point [2] is especially relevant, as SE deliberately made your final jobpoints Gift some yellow stars, and this was to say to casual players "hey you can join any event even if you are not Jobmaster, because Jobmaster is just a visual effect."

This makes sense to me. I would hate to live in a world where Jobmaster gives such a huge powerful bonus, that only Jobmasters are allowed to join events. Today, if you have 200~600 jobpoints you are going to have a lot of useful Gifts, and you are useful and accepted in events.

So I tried to strike a balance, based on these two things [1] and [2] that we already know.

Regarding inventory space, I personally would always have Moghouse space for a visually-unique JSE WAR helmet, which is Jobmaster only, costs 500 Jobpoints, and is just a nice lockstyle piece.

Maat's cap was also a vanity piece, it had a Warp function, it had some quite useful WS-macro attribute boosts, but really I was able to do weaponskills effectively without Maat's Cap. I still wanted it though, to wear as a stylish visual piece, because it represented Mastery.

I tried to include JSE earrings, because they would be more of an actual effective useful item, with some nice (but not game-changing) stats for your favourite job, that people could obtain if they didn't want a /lockstyle hat.

I personally would farm both the lockstyle hat and the JSE earring, if they existed.

[Stompa]

I would like a method to use excess JP somehow but I'd like it to have value in the game and personally don't want more novelty gear or more inventory -1s like the Ambuscade capes (currently inv-4 for pld capes,inv-2 for blu, etc). Earrings might be acceptable if they were all jobs. IE - Mastering WHM gives an all jobs Cure Potency II 3% earring, Mastering RDM gives a buff duration + 3% earring again for all jobs, Mastering RUN gives a +10 magic eva earring, Small stuff like this, not game breaking.

And yeah, I authored the thread asking them to allow us to spend JP on other jobs but I disagree with using lore as a reason: They wrote the stuff, they can do whatever they like. Merits are basically the same but not job-specific which thank god, because my ToAU era PLD would have never capped a single category.

I understand and sympathise with your reasons. I am basing my posts on the responses we have already got, which are those I listed earlier. I am trying to offer alternative suggestions, for what we can spend our 500/500 points on.

However, currently the options are ; look at a status reading where it says 500/500 Jobpoints, or don't look at it, lol.

I am suggesting that instead of looking at this 500/500 status, I could be looking at a flamboyant and visually exotic JSE Jobmaster hat, /lockstyles. Or a prittee JSE earring with some nice stats.

I think about the Cap dropped from WKR Hurkan. It has feathers and flamboyant style, it is unlike any other caps from the old game. I know people who farmed that WKR for many months just because the hat looked stylish, lol. Or the big pointy event hat with the Raise enchantment. The PUP AF3 hat is another one, totally unique and fun. These are all novel and fun and visually exotic hats in completely new styles.

So I believe there could be the possibility of a unique Jobmaster JSE hat for every job, stylish and flamboyant, each hat reflecting the authentic style of that particular job. This would comply with SE's wish for Jobpoints to be based on Lore, reflecting the identity of each individual job.

I know people who spend months farming gear just because it looks pretty cool. And again, people spent years farming Maat's Cap, basically a warp item with some ws-macro uses, people farmed it for years because of the Lore, because it looked stylish and represented their job mastery. So I see a history of enthusiasm for this kind of thing.

[OmnysValefor]

I know what you're suggesting and I do know that different people play for different reasons but I also know that there's a lot of disdain in the community that SE introduces hard content like the Job Master fights and the rewards are vanity items.

I have 50 free inventory slots on a good day, and that's with about 18 storage slips. I could drop some of those, probably, but there's no telling when SE might make me regret that decision. I'm still afraid to drop my bst Astolfos or my blu magian swords just in case SE decides to reward the invested effort ever again. I don't want to be back in obscure zones camping weather ><.

[Stompa]

I'm still afraid to drop my bst Astolfos or my blu magian swords just in case SE decides to reward the invested effort ever again. I don't want to be back in obscure zones camping weather ><.

Every time somebody throws away a completed Magian Trial Weapon, somewhere in the world a small fluffy baby kitten starts to cry.

Nobody is there to dry the kitten's tears, so it goes to bed with its fluffy fur all wet with tears, and it shakes with cold all night, alone and shivering.

Every action has an equal reaction, this is the scientific law. We must think of the fluffy kittens, before we choose to throw away our Magian Weapons.

I still have 28 completed Magian Weapons, in my Mog Locker. That is 28 happy kittens somewhere in the world, sleeping safely in their fluffy dry fur, dreaming happy dreams about mice and custard.

[Catmato]

I still have 28 completed Magian Weapons, in my Mog Locker. That is 28 happy kittens somewhere in the world, sleeping safely in their fluffy dry fur, dreaming happy dreams about mice and custard.

I know this is veering completely off-topic, but I really wish SE would check to see just how many of us are holding onto magian weapons and tell us one way or another if they'll ever let us 119 these weapons we worked so hard on.