The missions of Adoulin

[Trisscar]

New expansion, new battles, new guilds, new enemies, new content... These are the things that Adoulin promises to being with it, likely with new story lines and new missions to complete.

So I started this thread to make a suggestion to Square about said missions and storyline: Start it off being able to be done solo.

Yeah, no doubt there will be some idiots who no sooner than I post this will shout about easy modes and that its an MMO and what not, but think about this for a second.

It has been a short time since the level cap has hit 99 and now that virtually everyone has unlocked that cap, people who still need it are finding it harder and harder to get help for the final battle because (as far as I know) it can't be done solo and no one is willing to help with it.

Wings missions, despite having been out for years, can only be done solo via a small handful of very well geared jobs. No one helps with those.

Nation missions couldn't be completed solo beyond a certain point because of level cap outside of a couple jobs. Until more recently, that is. And no one helped with those.

Chains missions... Well I think I made my point.

[Demon6324236]

I agree, as another reason to add onto it, it seems kinda right that you can solo them because all of the NPCs and CSs act as though you are doing it alone or with the story characters, they almost never mention the other players you go with, and other players are never seen. While I understand this is due to the game likely being unable to show the others in your party, it feels more right to me when I solo old missions because I at least feel like the story is a bit more accurate, when doing it with a party, 5 people who just help me just vanish, and the NPCs act as if I did everything in the first place.

[Trisscar]

Indeed, there is that. But I believe that creating the missions to be done solo from the start will provide a more reasonable challenge as opposed to requiring a very narrow, pre defined party.

[Demon6324236]

I know, and I agree, I am just saying from an in game stand point too it would make sense because unless something changes we will be talking to NPCs which act like my 5 friends either watched, or didn't exist in the first place. Basically the story makes a bit more sense when solo, and the CSs make sense why they only show you and the NPCs rather than showing your party who you went with as well.

[Imakun]

If anything, make more mission BCs with story NPCs that actually fight with you.

I never liked how the battle starts, me and my party kill the boss/es and then during the final CS some random NPC is like "Oh woa that was hard."

Dude, you weren't even in the battlefield.

[Zhronne]

So I started this thread to make a suggestion to Square about said missions and storyline: Start it off being able to be done solo.
How about a big, redundant, echoing, endlessly reiterating N O?
I'm against this personally.
And either way it doesn't matter, at this point in the development the mission/story part is already complete.
I expect something easy, tedious and full of artificial doors to slow down progress, kinda like WotG or ToAU to a certain extent.
No way it will be as hard as CoP used to be back in the days, or as fast as RotZ.
Hope it won't be as slow as WotG where, if you divide cities stories from main story, you actually got an update every 6 months which is way too fucking long.

Talk about watering down content...

[JouriStarz]

The main issue here is the mentality of the players wanting the easiest strategy for every battlefield there is. Everyone wants an easy time and when SE tries to make legitimately challenging content the players become too narrowminded to actually think outside the box.

My suggestion to get people to help with missions they've already done is to give rewards of some sort like the first 3 add ons did but make them worthewhile and exclusive to each battle in the story.

[Teraniku]

I'm kind of hoping for 2 story arcs: 1 that can be done solo, and one that's done with a group of 3-6 people.

[SpankWustler]

Wings missions, despite having been out for years, can only be done solo via a small handful of very well geared jobs. No one helps with those.

In defense of a future expansion...

It felt like the Wings of Goddess expansion was purposefully designed to be annoying, combining the myriad waits of Treasures of Aht Urhgan with the exclusivity of nation missions. I can't imagine anything ever being that bad again.

I can, however, imagine the conversations my character had while I was trying to plow through another nation's stuff just to help someone else out.

"I have a tedious fetch-quest for you, bro!"

"I'm a war-hero. I kill demons with my bare hands! I stuff their young into juicers and drink the stuff that comes out!"

"That's cool. Take this disturbingly stained Prince Trion body pillow to the Young Gryphons to teach them about the horrible loneliness of being an adult during wartime or something."

"But...but...I was at the battle of so-and-so. I strangled a dragon using its own guts! Your own general can vouch for me."

"Every few moment you stand there trying to avoid this task, I shall spend adding another stain."

...

Bubblemonkey obtains a Horribly Stained Prince Trion Body Pillow.

Bubblemonkey loses All Self-Respect.

[Sotek]

I wont say this is a horrible idea, but virtually everyone I know, most of whom quit, want a CoP style expansion again, myself included.

I don't actually know why anyone would be against this idea to be honest, the OP gave no indication of how challenging the BCs would be, just that they'd be soloable. Requiring other players to beat something doesn't make something fun or challenging, the only way I manged to enjoy any of WotG was by soloing it. Heck, the OP is only saying start it off soloable, I see no issue with that at all. Why should the first missions require other players? You don't unlock anything requiring parties (endgame) from the first missions (except for WotG where they made WoE require the fourth mission, but WoE was a trainwreak from day one so whatever). You shouldn't require other people just to enjoy the early stages of the expansion. I loved CoP and all, but if it had new jobs which were unlocked in Tavnazia I'd probably have ended up hating it.

The first missions can be challenging and soloable, at this point I don't even care how challenging they are, I just hope they exist. If SoA starts off with a moronic fetch quest before you just get warped to Adoulin, I'm going to lose all interest in the expansion. A Promyvion style mission (although an airship fight would be better) to get to Adoulin would be great, as long as it is challenging I don't care if it requires 18 players or just 1.

[Lokithor]

Solo or with a party, all I hope is that the missions available at first release have more than 1 day's worth of content. I don't want to see WoTG again where they took years to release all the content.

[Mayoyama]

Problem with wotg... I dont think they really had a clear idea how they wanted to end it... and then when they got the idea to up the level caps.. it got even more drawn out so that the content they made towards wotg matched the level cap at the time

[Aeonk]

New expansion, new battles, new guilds, new enemies, new content... These are the things that Adoulin promises to being with it, likely with new story lines and new missions to complete.

So I started this thread to make a suggestion to Square about said missions and storyline: Start it off being able to be done solo.

Yeah, no doubt there will be some idiots who no sooner than I post this will shout about easy modes and that its an MMO and what not, but think about this for a second.

It has been a short time since the level cap has hit 99 and now that virtually everyone has unlocked that cap, people who still need it are finding it harder and harder to get help for the final battle because (as far as I know) it can't be done solo and no one is willing to help with it.

Wings missions, despite having been out for years, can only be done solo via a small handful of very well geared jobs. No one helps with those.

Nation missions couldn't be completed solo beyond a certain point because of level cap outside of a couple jobs. Until more recently, that is. And no one helped with those.

Chains missions... Well I think I made my point.

So you think SE should nerf the content for everyone because a minority of players find it difficult making friends (or paying "friends") to finish up things like the level cap...?

If you make these missions soloable then by definition you make them easy (unless it's capped at 1 person per fight and somehow balance it to be possible for all jobs but not too easy.) If you make them easy then the content is going to last you all of 2 hours (unless SE loads up on those lovely fetch quests to artificially extend the content) before you're stuck waiting 3 months for the next update.

I say make em hard. I want another PM 6-4, because winning that damned BCNM was probably one of the highlights of my FFXI career.

That being said it doesn't have to be murderously difficult from the get go, but soloable? That's a bit too easy, especially with solo gods like BST around.

Hell look at your own example for CoP. It's widely considered to be the expansion with the best storyline mission structuring of all the expansions we've gotten so far (with WoTG being a close second). Why? Because it was hard. Because it pushed you to be a better player. Because when you beat a hard fight and were rewarded with access to a previously locked region, you didn't just have new missions to do, you had a new part of the world to explore.

Now that it's been nerfed to uncap status, doing these missions for the 1st time wouldn't be nearly as meaningful or impactful as it was for those of us who did it "the hard way".

Probably the Dark Souls player in me talking, but that's my 2 cents for what it's worth.

[Ryanx]

i hope these new missions are as hard as CoP used to be i miss the challenge

[Mifaco]

I hope the days of burning through 100,000 gil worth of meds and detailed strategies return.

[Phogg]

I personally would prefer to progress through the content with my group of friends, and most people I know think doing missions solo is just boring. That being said, I'm lucky to have a good group of friends to do these things with and I can see it being frustrating to get content done that requires other people's assistance to progress if they are not similarly situated.

So, why not the best of both worlds, make the battles (for example) scale to the number of members or something. That way it could be solo'd but still provide something more then a too-weak challenge for those who rather do them as a group.