Feedback: Mog Garden (and its Campaign)

[Aysha]

I know there's a thread about campaigns in general, but I feel that thread is getting a bit cluttered, and I wanted to talk specifically about the Mog Garden Campaign, and even the Mog Garden itself.

So, from POL:

Mog Gardens will undergo the following modifications throughout the duration.
- The number of shining stars received when entering a Mog Garden will be doubled.
- The coastal fishing net will provide different special items.
- Items may be harvest from Monster Rearing twice per day.
- The following items will be sold in the gardens specially throughout the duration.
Golden Seed Pouch / Chestnut Tree Sap / Monarch Beetle Saliva
Bronze Bed / Mahogany Bed / Noble's Bed / Goblin Stew 880

#1, the stars: This is good, I guess? It'd be nice if there were more things available to do with Stars, but meh. I'll take more of them since they don't clutter up my inventory.

#2: Really? I've not seen one single item on any of my characters come out of the coastal fishing net that was out of the ordinary yet. Is this even working?

#3: This would be nice if, you know, my monsters would actually allow me to harvest items from them. They are never in a perfect mood, ever. Even with me applying "Enjoying the Moment" parenting style, they still won't get into a perfect mood. It's been what, 5-6 days since the start of this campaign, and I've been able to harvest twice? What we needed here, was a "During this month, harvesting from your monsters will never degrade their mood AND you can harvest twice!" or some-such.

#4: I suppose this is good for the newbies who need to get their item storage quests done, though the pricing of these is a little steep. I don't know too many newbies who have excess of 500,000+ gil laying around to use these things to get their quests done, and the people who would have such money probably already have it done or have access to the things required.

Other Feedback:

1). Can we make monsters not move around so much in the rearing grounds? Seems like every time I attempt to interact or worse, feed a monster, it teleports 50 feet away from me and the dialogue box closes and I have to go run the thing down to try again, and this can happen sometimes 2, 3 times in a row. How about making a "thing" in their AI where they stop moving for 60+ seconds once they've been poked? And reduce the frequency and speed at which they decide to move?

2). The item collection from some monsters could use a serious tweak. If you raise a sheep, any player would be expecting what else, sheep wool. But no, sheep don't give you sheep wool, they give you...... milk. The same milk that you can buy from most shops that sell similar items for, what, 30 gil a piece? You spend all that time trying to get a sheep raised, and all you get is 30 gil items from it?

3). The prices of things you can buy from the Green Thumb Moogle is just out of this world ridiculous. Giant Femurs for 2,000+ gil per? lol. Even the Seashells... bonecrafters' guild sells them for 90. The moogle rips you off at 144.

4). Flotsam. Could we add a sale price to mannequin parts and the Shrimp Lantern, please? I hate getting 100% worthless items (and the annoyance of having to drop said items manually one-by-one because there is no sale price on them). I think something like 3-5k sale price per item would be fair. Also, Ambrosia is missing a sale price too. I would have to say that Mannequin Parts, Shrimp Lantern, and Ambrosia comprise 75% of all Flotsam items I've gotten thusfar on my 6 characters since the campaign began, and it really doesn't feel like much of a "bonus" or "campaign".

[Domille]

#1, the stars: This is good, I guess? It'd be nice if there were more things available to do with Stars, but meh. I'll take more of them since they don't clutter up my inventory.

Agree stars total waste of time, unless you're dumb enough to change your cheer daily, that's their only use. Jumbotender takes TEN STARS to equip. LOL

#2: Really? I've not seen one single item on any of my characters come out of the coastal fishing net that was out of the ordinary yet. Is this even working?

Don't even bother with flotsam anymore, yeah one guy will get something amazing. not worth my time.

#3: This would be nice if, you know, my monsters would actually allow me to harvest items from them. They are never in a perfect mood, ever. Even with me applying "Enjoying the Moment" parenting style, they still won't get into a perfect mood. It's been what, 5-6 days since the start of this campaign, and I've been able to harvest twice? What we needed here, was a "During this month, harvesting from your monsters will never degrade their mood AND you can harvest twice!" or some-such.

Classic case of "doing it wrong"

#4: I suppose this is good for the newbies who need to get their item storage quests done, though the pricing of these is a little steep. I don't know too many newbies who have excess of 500,000+ gil laying around to use these things to get their quests done, and the people who would have such money probably already have it done or have access to the things required.

Even a noobie makes 1mil from sparks in their first day. Prices are high, but justifiable.

Other Feedback:

1). Can we make monsters not move around so much in the rearing grounds? Seems like every time I attempt to interact or worse, feed a monster, it teleports 50 feet away from me and the dialogue box closes and I have to go run the thing down to try again, and this can happen sometimes 2, 3 times in a row. How about making a "thing" in their AI where they stop moving for 60+ seconds once they've been poked? And reduce the frequency and speed at which they decide to move?

Use /follow. But agree, they move too much too fast.

2). The item collection from some monsters could use a serious tweak. If you raise a sheep, any player would be expecting what else, sheep wool. But no, sheep don't give you sheep wool, they give you...... milk. The same milk that you can buy from most shops that sell similar items for, what, 30 gil a piece? You spend all that time trying to get a sheep raised, and all you get is 30 gil items from it?

You get the good items when it's fully raised and let go/killed.

3). The prices of things you can buy from the Green Thumb Moogle is just out of this world ridiculous. Giant Femurs for 2,000+ gil per? lol. Even the Seashells... bonecrafters' guild sells them for 90. The moogle rips you off at 144.

"They can't all be winners now can they" -Bad Santa

4). Flotsam. Could we add a sale price to mannequin parts and the Shrimp Lantern, please? I hate getting 100% worthless items (and the annoyance of having to drop said items manually one-by-one because there is no sale price on them). I think something like 3-5k sale price per item would be fair. Also, Ambrosia is missing a sale price too. I would have to say that Mannequin Parts, Shrimp Lantern, and Ambrosia comprise 75% of all Flotsam items I've gotten thusfar on my 6 characters since the campaign began, and it really doesn't feel like much of a "bonus" or "campaign".

None of the "bonus" campaigns are "good" it's all a con to get you to waste time. Pointless to complain about free is all they'll say.

[detlef]

Practically speaking, enjoying the moment essentially only means that the monster won't evolve.

Items on the moogle are overprices, you're paying a premium to get them all in once place. A lot of those items can't be bought from any npc and are only available from the moogle or as direct drops from monsters. The same goes for the furnishings and gobbie bag item, you're paying a premium to get it easily, in any quantity you desire.

[Yeonan]

Even a noobie makes 1mil from sparks in their first day. Prices are high, but justifiable.

How does one make 1 mill gil on their first day as a noob?

i recently started back up and unless i'm missing something glaring; i am not making 1 mil a day in sparks.

Maybe 50k on a great day of farming sparks.

[Aysha]

How does one make 1 mill gil on their first day as a noob?

i recently started back up and unless i'm missing something glaring; i am not making 1 mil a day in sparks.

Maybe 50k on a great day of farming sparks.

Acheron Shields.

But to get 1mil from Acheron Shields, you need to get ~100k sparks, and a newbie is not going to get 100k sparks "in a day", lol.

Maybe if Gain Experience is up, maybe if you are Lv99, then yes, 100k sparks is possible in a few hours.

But if you're a <Lv99 newbie? Absolutely not. Your sparks income from Lv1-40 is rather slow (I had like 20-30k sparks on a mule from Lv1 to 40).

Practically speaking, enjoying the moment essentially only means that the monster won't evolve.

"Personal Growth" allows a monster to grow bit by bit, day by day but doing so reduces their mood.
"Enjoying the Moment" halts growth, and the monster should NOT lose mood daily.

That means if you set it on Enjoying the Moment and feed/interact with them daily, their mood should go UP because nothing should be reducing their mood.

Therefore, there theoretically SHOULD be a point where their mood should max out because you're raising their mood daily.

But for some weird reason, it isn't actually doing this.

[Nyarlko]

How does one make 1 mill gil on their first day as a noob?

i recently started back up and unless i'm missing something glaring; i am not making 1 mil a day in sparks.

Maybe 50k on a great day of farming sparks.

IF you already know what you are doing, you can go from a fresh lv1 character to 119 in a weekend, (my personal record for fresh 1-99 is 9hrs 01min btw,) and if you go AOE'ing during GainExp, you can farm up to ~300k sparks during the window in my experience, which equates to 3mil gil. I do agree that expecting an actual new player to be able to pull that off w/o someone experienced doing everything for them on the way up might be asking for a bit much, but it is possible.

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OP: Some non-sarcastic responses for your points:

#2: The "coastal fishing net" actually means "flotsam". I'm pretty sure it's just a long standing translation error that is perpetually copy/pasted. :x If you check during the campaign, you will see that you get 2x items from flotsam right now, and there are special items available atm like dynamis currency.

#3: During the campaign, collecting items does not bother your pets in the slightest. ^^ Just ignore the current mood atm, collect items, and you can see that there is a change in the dialogue.

#4: It's extremely beneficial however since many of the GB quests cost far FAR more than 100k.

2): Sheep Wool is not available as a drop from any sheep mobs IIRC, and it's normally available as a leathercraft synth, so it kind of makes sense that it's not available for collection. Other than thematic exceptions like wyrms giving gemstones, are there any processed materials available from any of the garden residents?

4) There's been some dev post(s) on removing the rare tag from items available from the garden, so there is hope for that much at least. I agree that it would be nice if we could at least vendor them even if the prices aren't that great, just to make it easier to dispose of unneeded ones.

[Aysha]

To reply to some of the points:

1). It might be nice if, you know, they would say that you can collect items regardless of mood? That would be nice, you know? Tho I suppose it is moot because most monsters don't give you anything worth a crap anyways, lol.
2). So basically, they are too lazy to edit the C&P messages. Hey I get they're working with a small team, but seriously? They can't fix the translation error? I knew about the flotsam already (I mentioned the mannequin pieces afterall), but really. You'd think they would have taken the 30 seconds to fix that by now. Especially if the same thing happened last year and probably the year before it.
3). Talking about how fast you can level a mule while powerleveling it with a Lv99 character is irrelevant when we are talking about Honest-to-God newbies (who the campaign is aimed at). The newbie who starts afresh, and has absolutely zero outside help. They are NOT going to be AoEing mobs for 300k sparks in 4 hours.
4). You can steal Sheep Wool from sheep, and it just plain makes sense that a tame sheep would allow you to shear its wool. That, and wool is probably the most annoying type of cloth to get anyways, because it requires THREE steps to make instead of just two like most other cloths (excluding Karakul of course).
5). The "rare" tag is not what prevents the item from being vendored to NPC (you can vendor plenty of other rare items, such as spell scrolls), in fact I don't want them to remove the Rare tag, because at least with it being rare, the game gives you the option to dispose of it in the same dialogue box where you pick the flotsam up. Therefore, I don't bother dropping the mannequin parts for this reason, I stash them until the end of the campaign so I can drop them faster when they inevitably come up again.

[Nyarlko]

For the record, I'm talking about a straight grind, no outside help (other than same level party members and trusts.) I did this 4x in January on mules and am more than confident that it is indeed possible. PL'ing really only shaves off a couple hours on average and really isn't efficient for your first job since you generally need to level up before you can even gain access to the areas that PLers are going to use. ^^;; Plus, the whole LB process causing constant interruptions is also rather annoying.

Also, the MG campaign is not aimed at newbies... It's aimed at longtimers with rearing unlocked who are having problems w/ getting their stupid pets to evolve.. ~_~;;; The extra items for sale and bonus crud from flotsam are just bonuses tacked on.

[Aysha]

There's a difference between a Fresh Character and a Fresh Player.

A fresh Character played by a veteran player is going to know exactly what to do, and where to go and when.

A fresh Player isn't going to get to Lv99 in 9 hours, or anything near that unless they are told exactly what to do (or they are hand-held or PL'd by someone). And I never said the whole MG Campaign is aimed at newbies, I meant just the Mog Safe Expansion/Goblin Stew items were aimed at newbie characters/players.

[Nyarlko]

I did include the disclaimer about previous knowledge in my earlier post. :3 If one stumbles along w/o relying on or interacting with other players, reading wikis, or referencing any sources of information other than npc dialogue, I'm still pretty sure that you could hit 99 w/in a couple weeks. It's just not hard to level anymore (and I'd even say that it's rather hard to NOT level up at this point.)

I can guarantee that I've personally consumed more gobbie stew w/ my accounts than any fresh player would. XD 30x so far this month, and still have a couple mules left that I'm still debating on since they aren't for storage and intended to be only active when campaigns make 'em worth it. ~_~;; So in my