Meiteron
02-15-2012, 01:39 AM
This was going to be posted into the Nyzul thread but on a reread it turned out to be far more general in scope, so I decided it warranted it's own thread. Warning: Words! Lots of words.
*
Less than 48 hours into release and we already have a thread filled with mostly negative responses to what is essentially the central piece of the latest update. This forum is not alone in this, either: in that same thread we can find links to other FFXI sites with similar responses. I think that is slightly depressing for all involved, player and dev alike.
What I have realized is that Nyzul and by extension a lot of the content released in the past few months is just a repetition of a cycle a lot of long-time players are probably familiar with.
If you look at the history of FFXI there is a repeating pattern. People lived in Sky, in Dynamis, camped 3 Kings long after CoP released content equal to those events, which was vastly less popular on the whole(Limbus was, perhaps, an exception). People were getting sick of old content and starting to pack up when ToAU revitalized the game with a lot of stuff to do, and reasonably easy to acquire gear.
Then WotG comes out, and we see the same thing happening again with the expansion names changed. Campaign is not really a group activity. ANNMs were alright for about a month and then people lost interest. SCNMs were almost the same. Sandworm and Ixion were locked out content to anyone who did not have half their linkshell running bots. Years, years into WotG's release the playerbase was still living in Whitegate and doing ToAU content which had been in the game for even longer. Once again over time they tired of it and the game started bleeding players. People were starting to quit and then Abyssea comes along and revitalizes the game, again.
So that's three times now over the years where people focus on the content which is fun, and/or is rewarding over newer, less fun content. Now in present day, even the people that enjoyed VW (and there are things to enjoy) are getting tired of it. WoE has never been popular, despite a lot of effort on the Dev's part to stick cool things in there. We are well into the "ignoring the bad content" stage of the cycle and have all been spinning our wheels for months, going back to Abyssea while we wait for something new and fun to play. That isn't cutting it anymore. People are leaving.
What the game needs, desperately, is a massive influx of content that gives us stuff. There's no other way to say it: if content with an effort::reward ratio equivalent to Abyssea doesn't come down the pipeline nothing is going to change, people are just going to keep leaving. A lot of people I know are pinning their hopes on Legion. I tell these people ToAU was a lot more than just Einherjar, no matter how fun Einherjar was.
*
This has been a lot of complaining. So I will end on a positive note, suggestions for the devs on what can be improved:
1. Fast-track the ticket system for VW drops, and allow people to buy voiddust with Cruor. Drop rate is, as I'm sure you know, the most vocal complaint people have about VW. Less vocal but still considered an annoying problem is how fast people who do enjoy VW run out of voidstones for fights. 16 hour recharge on stones doesn't cut it when one stone is a 5 minute fight, and not everyone has the time for a few hours of campaign or the cash to buy 12 voiddust a day on the AH.
(ok well what i really wanted to write here was "increase drop rates on rarest VW drops for each fight by a factor of 10" so that my 0.1% coruscanti chance becomes a 1% coruscanti chance but i will stick to things i consider halfway possible)
2. Start talking about this "New Dungeon Crawl System" that is listed on the roadmap. It was scheduled for February, and hey look what month it is! Even if it's in an unfinished state, even if there's not a lot of screenshots or media to provide, start talking about it. How it will work. How often can we do it. What kind of challenges are in there. How's it different from previous raids?
3. Address the new Nyzul content. Tell us what the rationale was! Is there some trick for progression to 100 that we have missed and are all freaking out unnecessarily? Say we missed something and call us names! If we already have a good scope of how this content was supposed to work, I would strongly consider changing it. Here: increase the time limit from 30 to 45 minutes. That alone would probably fix it. Congestion is not going to be the problem you thought it would be.
4. Release a new, or updated roadmap. The last one covered October of last year to March of this year. Even though there has been some schedule slip it was always a good thing to see the overall plan of what the devs were working towards; in a month we'll have hit the end of that plan. What sort of things are being planned for 2012 now?
*
And that's about everything I had to say. Time to look for VW shouts before heading back to Grauberg. AF3 doesn't build itself!
*
Less than 48 hours into release and we already have a thread filled with mostly negative responses to what is essentially the central piece of the latest update. This forum is not alone in this, either: in that same thread we can find links to other FFXI sites with similar responses. I think that is slightly depressing for all involved, player and dev alike.
What I have realized is that Nyzul and by extension a lot of the content released in the past few months is just a repetition of a cycle a lot of long-time players are probably familiar with.
If you look at the history of FFXI there is a repeating pattern. People lived in Sky, in Dynamis, camped 3 Kings long after CoP released content equal to those events, which was vastly less popular on the whole(Limbus was, perhaps, an exception). People were getting sick of old content and starting to pack up when ToAU revitalized the game with a lot of stuff to do, and reasonably easy to acquire gear.
Then WotG comes out, and we see the same thing happening again with the expansion names changed. Campaign is not really a group activity. ANNMs were alright for about a month and then people lost interest. SCNMs were almost the same. Sandworm and Ixion were locked out content to anyone who did not have half their linkshell running bots. Years, years into WotG's release the playerbase was still living in Whitegate and doing ToAU content which had been in the game for even longer. Once again over time they tired of it and the game started bleeding players. People were starting to quit and then Abyssea comes along and revitalizes the game, again.
So that's three times now over the years where people focus on the content which is fun, and/or is rewarding over newer, less fun content. Now in present day, even the people that enjoyed VW (and there are things to enjoy) are getting tired of it. WoE has never been popular, despite a lot of effort on the Dev's part to stick cool things in there. We are well into the "ignoring the bad content" stage of the cycle and have all been spinning our wheels for months, going back to Abyssea while we wait for something new and fun to play. That isn't cutting it anymore. People are leaving.
What the game needs, desperately, is a massive influx of content that gives us stuff. There's no other way to say it: if content with an effort::reward ratio equivalent to Abyssea doesn't come down the pipeline nothing is going to change, people are just going to keep leaving. A lot of people I know are pinning their hopes on Legion. I tell these people ToAU was a lot more than just Einherjar, no matter how fun Einherjar was.
*
This has been a lot of complaining. So I will end on a positive note, suggestions for the devs on what can be improved:
1. Fast-track the ticket system for VW drops, and allow people to buy voiddust with Cruor. Drop rate is, as I'm sure you know, the most vocal complaint people have about VW. Less vocal but still considered an annoying problem is how fast people who do enjoy VW run out of voidstones for fights. 16 hour recharge on stones doesn't cut it when one stone is a 5 minute fight, and not everyone has the time for a few hours of campaign or the cash to buy 12 voiddust a day on the AH.
(ok well what i really wanted to write here was "increase drop rates on rarest VW drops for each fight by a factor of 10" so that my 0.1% coruscanti chance becomes a 1% coruscanti chance but i will stick to things i consider halfway possible)
2. Start talking about this "New Dungeon Crawl System" that is listed on the roadmap. It was scheduled for February, and hey look what month it is! Even if it's in an unfinished state, even if there's not a lot of screenshots or media to provide, start talking about it. How it will work. How often can we do it. What kind of challenges are in there. How's it different from previous raids?
3. Address the new Nyzul content. Tell us what the rationale was! Is there some trick for progression to 100 that we have missed and are all freaking out unnecessarily? Say we missed something and call us names! If we already have a good scope of how this content was supposed to work, I would strongly consider changing it. Here: increase the time limit from 30 to 45 minutes. That alone would probably fix it. Congestion is not going to be the problem you thought it would be.
4. Release a new, or updated roadmap. The last one covered October of last year to March of this year. Even though there has been some schedule slip it was always a good thing to see the overall plan of what the devs were working towards; in a month we'll have hit the end of that plan. What sort of things are being planned for 2012 now?
*
And that's about everything I had to say. Time to look for VW shouts before heading back to Grauberg. AF3 doesn't build itself!