More Horizontal Progression please

[Yggberry]

I feel horizontal gear set only has its own problems. Such as the amount of storage space won't allow it. Rather than true horizontal, having best of both worlds would be better. I didn't really enjoy the gear progress with Heavensward though. I feel it is too much. And many of my friends were very disappointed because the hard earn gears they had had became obsolete when 3.0 came around. To me, this is very bad design. Furthermore, it makes content before the expansion pointless.

[Gardes]

Did you guys somehow forget or decide to just conveniently omit the bcnm drops of the exact same boots with a different name (and other good items). You get the currencies to buy the orb to access a mini boss fight by the boat load and you can try it over and over until the loot you want drops. IIRC it was already there by the latter half of toau (when I came back after having to quit just before cop due to irl issues) and the drop rate wasn't even low.

I don't even get how horizontal progression == low random drop rate. Like vertical progression can't have that too? One little adjustment and vertical progression can be stupid too. Here: dungeons and ex roulette now only have 7% chance of actually giving you the tomes you're running it for. Normal and savage alex now only has 10% chance of dropping anything at all, upon clearing.

[Zarzak]

I think too many of you want XI-II.

This is not and hopefully never will be XI-II.

I think too many of you want WoW: Final Fantasy Edition.

This is a WoW clone and hopefully will move in it's own direction before it is too late.

[Ibi]

RNG and random are words used to describe different things. Random (the old way used to calculated mmos) decided drops based on an average number specific for that item.

The SD on items would be very small, getting higher as the items drop chance decreases, but still only growing to be somewhat small.

Let me see if I have this correct.

You're suggesting that loot in FFXI was determined SE setting an average drop rate (in the case of Leaping/Bounding Boots, likely 6.5% or 7%) and rather than a completely random number being generated (which, as the bolding indicates, would be RNG), the loot system calculator generated a number (presumably based around the current actual drop rate over some range) in such a way as to ensure that the actual drop rate doesn't stray too far from the average over large samples?

Edit: Okay, I see how you're saying you think it works.

Leaping Lizzy has 100 (or 1,000) possible straws you can draw when you kill her. 7 (or 70) are red straws, and if you pull a red straw, you get the boots. 93 (or 930) are plain straws, and if you pull a plain straw, you don't get the boots. Every time a straw is pulled, it stays removed from the pool until all the straws are pulled. Once all 100 (or 1000) have been pulled, they all go back in and it starts again.

Do you have any evidence at all that FFXI worked this way, or is this speculation on your part?

More to the point, did it work this way for a particular person (people going 0/200+ on things like Thief Knife would suggest no), a particular zone (11 straight months of not seeing particular drops from certain Dynamis zones would suggest no) or for a particular mob?

Was the pool of straws 100? 1,000? 10,000? 1,000,000?

[Welsper59]

I feel horizontal gear set only has its own problems. Such as the amount of storage space won't allow it. Rather than true horizontal, having best of both worlds would be better. I didn't really enjoy the gear progress with Heavensward though. I feel it is too much. And many of my friends were very disappointed because the hard earn gears they had had became obsolete when 3.0 came around. To me, this is very bad design. Furthermore, it makes content before the expansion pointless.

There are, indeed, MANY problems associated to horizontal gear. The grand majority of it derives from how the system is set up, rather than any form of subjective enjoyment. Inventory is certainly a huge problem in a game where we don't have a whole lot of free inventory to use for the specific way that horizontal gear sets work. Other problems include how stats, abilities, AND how combat itself is designed. Had FFXIV not been designed the way it is and was in the planning stages, it could certainly be worked in. Right now though, those things absolutely work against effective distribution of horizontal gear.

To start with, we have no means of switching gear mid-fight. This means that you are destined to either always fail because you lacked the right specific gear or you found out you don't need it at all (assuming you could beat something without it). In the case of the former, realistically speaking, it's quite a lot of BS to be expected to know ahead of time what sort of gear you need for the job and also knowing exactly where to go for it... or if it even exists. Then comes how our stats work. The variances and application of our stats would need to change, because as is, it's very cookie cutter. Our only variance is deciding between stuff like Crit, SS, or Det. We can already do that in many cases, particularly if you include crafted gear to be melded. Next is how our abilities work. They don't have some hidden complex formula behind their usage, which means gear that modifies them would not be worth our while to either use or switch out of, depending on how good of a benefit it would be. For example, if we had gear that increased a specific ability, like a BRDs Bloodletter, we probably wouldn't use anything but that unless it dropped our other stats significantly (normal gear: +100 dex, Bloodletter gear: +10 dex). As, if it didn't, there would probably be little reason to ever use something else. We'd be back to vertical progression rules, basically. Now if gear swapping mid-fight were possible, then sure... that could work, since other gear would have its time to shine. But can you imagine the inventory nightmare? We already don't have this necessity as far as used combat gear for one job is concerned, so imagine how much worse it'll be if each job needed 10+ slots to fill for gear swap needs. We still haven't even dug into server and other system related adjustments, despite having problems right now that would have to be worked out lol.

[Zarzak]

And that's a pretty good explanation of why the "choice" thing sucks.

Not really a choice when you macro gear swaps to abilities.

Umm.. no? This is a perfect example of what made it great.

Were raids tuned to where if you didn't have leaping lizard boots macroed you would wipe? No. But if you wanted to min/max your potential there were things you could do to do that.

FFXIV has NOTHING TO DO once you are raid ready. You sit lvling alts or getting pretty ponies.

It is a CHOICE if it is not REQUIRED. Leaping Lizard Boots were NEVER required to beat an event.

[Zarzak]

Because you aren't getting western players to run the same bosses for 7 years..

EQ and FFXI players would like to say hi.

Alkabor server hasn't updated for 10+ years and is still active.

Project 99 is such a successful emulation server that Sony officially endorsed their project. Which is a server locked in the 1st couple expansions of EQ and has been for over 6 years.

People commonly demand new servers be opened and locked at certain expansions indefinitely.

[Ibi]

Were raids tuned to where if you didn't have leaping lizard boots macroed you would wipe? No. But if you wanted to min/max your potential there were things you could do to do that.

It is a CHOICE if it is not REQUIRED. Leaping Lizard Boots were NEVER required to beat an event.

That's partly because almost none of FFXI's content was particularly challenging, and even instanced content allowed you to bring far more people than were really necessary to complete the content.

If Alexander Savage let you take in 12 or 16 people with its current tuning, groups would be beating all four floors in i180-190 gear.

[Welsper59]

It is a CHOICE if it is not REQUIRED. Leaping Lizard Boots were NEVER required to beat an event.

LL boots aren't exactly the best example, given that those, at least for a huge range of levels while leveling, are a case of BiS, the same that you'd see here with vertical gear. Likewise, we already have the option in this game to NOT use BiS... that much is also a choice to clear all forms of content (within reason of specific content)... like, you don't need A4S gear to beat A4S. That argument results in a standstill, meaning no significant reason to change anything. Horizontal gearing is only effective and worth development time when they do more than adjust our cookie cutter stats.

In a game like FFXI, gear swapping was imperative to be effective due to how different equips affected your go-to skills/spells. Like with a THF, it wasn't exclusively DEX that affected your weapon skills, as some skills had modifiers like CHR or STR. Gear swapping mid-fight was a necessity, as a result of things like that... along with rarer early gear (or more abundant gear in latter expansions) to help you do things like gain TP or recover HP/MP. It's seriously a much bigger undertaking than most folks think. Then again, that's typically the case for nearly everything. The general populous always believes it's a matter of simply saying something needs to be done and thinking that's all there is to it.

[Zarzak]

That's partly because almost none of FFXI's content was particularly challenging, and even instanced content allowed you to bring far more people than were really necessary to complete the content.

If Alexander Savage let you take in 12 or 16 people with its current tuning, groups would be beating all four floors in i180-190 gear.

Savage mechanically isn't particularly challenging either...

The fact that modern gaming breeds players who are incapable of something as simple as "pick up an add and bring it to a laser before you kill it" or if in normal even the concept of "balance their hp" does not make the event hard. It shows how incompetent modern gamers are.

Making things hit hard and have high hp with arbitrary "enrage timers" just forces gear farming. It does not increase the difficulty.