Please, stop making new content!

[Louispv]

SE should give us less new content for a different reason.

They intend us to do skirmish until we have perfectly augmented skirmish weapons, then sue those to do the Delve NM's outside and get armor. Then they want us to use that armor to farm inside the fracture to upgrade it. Then use fully augmented armor to take out the weapon NM's, then farm more and upgrade those. Then use those weapons to get skirmish 2.0 gear and upgrade that. Then use all that to kill Delve bosses 1.0. Then move on to reives 2.0 and get that gear. Then do delve 2.0 and all it's steps.

But none of this happened. We started with skirmish. But before we could even figure out where the entrance items come from (we didn't by the way, all the theories were wrong, and SE reps had to tell us what it was in their disappointment.) they added delve. So why even do skirmish anymore, when you can skip straight to delve? And it looks like skirmish 2.0 will also be dead on arrival, because they're adding delve 2.0 before skirmish 2.0. Hell why even do delve V 1.0, when you can skip straight to delve 2.0 which will have even better gear than delve currently does?

If you want us to progress up a tree of events, slowly getting better gear to use to get better gear in the next event, they need to be introduced 4-6 months apart, so there's nothing to do but skirmish for a long time before delve comes out, giving everyone time to do it. Then when everyone has several skirmish weapons, add just tier 1-3 delve NM's, and a megaboss-less fracture. Then 3 months later when everyone has delve armor at least half upgraded for their favorite jobs, add the weapon NM's and the mega boss. And maybe the Skirmish 2.0 since it's going to be weaker than delve gear anyway. Then add no mainstream content for another 6 months.

Fill the time in between with other stuff. Job adjustments, monstrosity, moogle islands, RUN/GEO artifact, this is perfect stuff for updates in between to fill space. For the love of god, space this stuff out more. Most people haven't even gotten any delve equipment yet from the current zones, and they're going to be completely dead soon, with the new zone Delve zones coming out and adding gear that makes Delve 1.0 gear look like everything we had 6 months ago, again.

[Vold]

If you want us to progress up a tree of events, slowly getting better gear to use to get better gear in the next event, they need to be introduced 4-6 months apart

Not necessarily. Tacking on 20 minute timers to stuff was their way of trying to police players that wish to skip content for the top tiered stuff. It's not the only measure they can take. They can force people's hands through key items in various ways. Ultimately it doesn't matter when the content is released. What matters is people not being able to skip everything in SoA and start with delve content.

Now I know we loathe KI based content and having to do clears and stuff. But in the case of SoA, with what they are trying to do, it's the only way. Requiring everyone to have KIs to do content is part of the solution, but that still doesn't police gimper players from skipping their tiered farming needs. They need to implement gear KIs. When you have sufficent gear that flags you for the next tier then you can do the next tier. Problem with this is, it doesn't work for a work in progress like FFXI. It needs to be finished content. If this game were more like EQ or WoW you'd have no choice simply because of how upgrades work in those games, though you could get away with skipping if your tanks had the HP gear for it. But it's not like those games. So you have to implement different methods of forcing people's hands to do lesser content and move up the tiers. We have proven time and again we rather do an encounter for several hours and slowly peck away at a monster than farm lesser gear first to make said encounter easier.

So, yeah, you're probably right. The way to go here is to release one piece of content at a time every 3 months. Doesn't mean they won't try something more to force our hands, and we should be prepared for such attempts so we're not blind sided and rage quit as a result. A year from now little Billy isn't going to have the luxury of waiting for updates, he's going to be faced with the full wraith of SoA content levels 1-20 or even higher which it probably will get to eventually. SE will consider that little Billy, whom has recently joined the game to play with his hardcore pals, will consider skipping content levels 1-19 and do content level 20, probably because his hardcore pals said screw doing 1-19 it's a waste of our time. We'll just let you leech gear at content level 20, ole pal.

THEN, the can of worms with this forcing our hand business, as usual, is players completing the content and never going back to it. So if say little Amy showed up late to the party, she'd probably be SoL like so many others before her on past content.

So, you know, pick your poison. There isn't a perfect solution partly because of how FFXI end game is designed, and partly because it is our fault. Our unwillingness to follow the code, so to speak.