servers way more empty now? Still doing the linear gear climb?

[leorez]

Really to me its more like... Sidegrades sustained FFXI for 10 years, vertical progression crashed FFXI in around 6 months.

do need to say it like an opinion, its a flat out fact at this point.

[predatory]

I hate the vertical gear climb as much as anyone else, but, imo, they need to do one more vertical climb, then they need to go back to horizontal gear upgrades. The vertical climb they actually need to make, but have completely overlooked to this point is the respective JSE sets for our jobs. I'm sorry but this whole sea of red that's going on is becoming tiresome at best. Before SoA was released you could tell a persons job by simply looking at them. Each set had stats appropriate to that job, but now its just one big amalgamation of bleh

[Demon6324236]

That's the only saving grace of it all in my opinion. All of my AF/Relic/Empyrean gear sounds like it will be upgraded, which means, my RDM gets to wear real RDM gear and be good with it again. I like that. I also like that it seems my worthless RDM Mythic I am currently making, might not be worthless, because with the skill thing, my RDM using a Sword is actually good for Enfeebling, meaning Mythic should be the best Enfeebling Accuracy weapon in the game. But in the end, the overall idea of vertical was horrible for this game, a few small good things don't change that, and had it never happened in the first place, our AF/R/E gear could have been upgraded to level 99 all the same had they wished it so.

[Sapphires]

Game isnt worth playing anymore, sidegrade+situtational gear is being killed off and myself and most of my friends got tired of waiting on the RME update that they were going to eventually throw under the bus again with more mindless vertical gear progression.
The gear and progression model that made XI cool is gone, I hope their 'game designers' feel great shame in killing the game off for a lot of people.

[Damane]

Seeing as it worked, and I have seen more people leave after their change to vertical progression than ever before, yes, I think that it would do good by compare to what we got.

sidegrades like in the lvl 75 definitly WONT work either. Vertical progression is fine, however they were pushed out since the release of SoA too fast. do vertical progression every 8-10 months, fill in the gaps with horizontal progression. Thats a good balance. the REM update will bring alot of people back i think, to some degree at least.

[Afania]

sidegrades like in the lvl 75 definitly WONT work either. Vertical progression is fine, however they were pushed out since the release of SoA too fast. do vertical progression every 8-10 months, fill in the gaps with horizontal progression. Thats a good balance. the REM update will bring alot of people back i think, to some degree at least.

No it's not, name me any MMORPG that's not wow with vertical progression that has the staying power of pre-Abyssea FFXI.

Vertical progression limited the choice of content you can do in a game, I played 14 and endgame in 14 is horrible. Farming ifrit/garuda 100 times for a weapon never drop, or prae speed run 100 times JUST so that I can do titan(and those gears are pretty much useless after you reach coil) is terrible design. After I ding 75 in XI years ago, I did ein/dyna/limbus/Nyzul/sky/ToAU NMs, pretty much every endgame right after 75. It's not limited by what gear I have, simply because most gears are sidegrade and doesn't make or break you, and doesn't make X gear required to do Y content.

In XIV you can't do X if you don't have Y gears, and you pretty much toss that gear after you finish next content(i.e, toss your primal weapons after you beat titan and get relic). So I'm limited to only a few content I can do, and it got extremely boring after 3 days. Major gear difference= gear become a requirement to do said content, and limited the content you can do.


I want to be able to do 10 content at once in endgame, so I can do different thing everyday. I don't want to do only 2 content after I hit cap, spam same old content 100 times so I can do 2 more next tier content.
Vertical gear progression is boring and lacks staying power. Just because there's one title WoW being successful, doesn't mean it's good for every other game.

Don't have high hope for XIV endgame too, by the time they release crystal tower everyone would be rocking in ilv 90 gears 5/5 and laugh at lv 80 crystal tower, same shit dev been doing since SoA.
Completely agree with OP, XIV lacks staying power, unless dev change game direction, it's probably going to face same fate as SoA FFXI.

[Afania]

You guys really think that more years of sidegrades would make any good to this game? The servers would be shutdown by now if sidegrades were still in place. Yes, feeling strong in a MMORPG isn't a problem, being able to kill gods isn't a problem. The problem is that those who rushed content always complain at having nothing to do.

Look at players that chose to live inside a game instead of real life. Have all jobs 99, all empyreans/relics. What's left for those ppl to do? Nothing. So stop crying about finally being able to kick ass in MMORPG and quit if you wanna be weak again and struggle against DC mobs like in 2003.


The old FFXI has gold memories for us veterans but that non forgiving model would not be viable on todays standards. SE doesn't want to have servers up for 15-50k players. Accept that and stop crying.

It seems you have 0 idea about how to manage an MMO.

Yes, players will always climb super fast, whether they have a life or not is none of your business. There will be hardcore players beating content as quickly as possible, no matter what title it is, and dev's job is to keep them busy and stick around.

Also, I'm not interested in playing a game that can "kick ass", if I do I'd play single player game and use cheat code. I don't see major gear difference as "make you a god and feel good", I only see it become requirement to do content and give everyone less content choice to do, gears in XIV makes quit a bit of difference, if you pt with relic DPS in full ilv 90 v.s ilv 55 DPS in AF you'd notice the difference, that made relic a requirement for nearly everything, including speedrun. Can't join speed run without X, can't do primal without Y. If the difference is only 1% or 2% it won't be an issue. A player just ding 50 in full AF can't join any /shout besides ifrit in XIV because every /shout pt ask for relic(or even +1) DPS, and it just make that much difference in terms of kill speed.

[Afania]

Really? You completed coil of bahamut turns 1-5 already? Interesting seemings that the coil has a climbing difficulty factor such that no one has completed it yet...

One major issue with vertical progression is, if someone isn't interested in Coil, he has nothing to do after relic. And if someone isn't interested in primal, he can just cancel account after main story done.

In 75 era FFXI, if you don't like dynamis, you still have sky/ein/Limbus/ZNM and everything else. I've met someone with full limbus armor, runs limbus LS and hate dyna with passion, it doesn't stop him from doing everything else he want.

[Sparthos]

sidegrades like in the lvl 75 definitly WONT work either. Vertical progression is fine, however they were pushed out since the release of SoA too fast. do vertical progression every 8-10 months, fill in the gaps with horizontal progression. Thats a good balance. the REM update will bring alot of people back i think, to some degree at least.

There was plenty of room to push horizontal progression while inching on the vertical progression through the continued improvement of the armor that was already commonplace pre-Seekers. As in all expansions Adoulin could have had its signature pieces that added to the armor glut but with regards to endgame it should have been about improving those pieces that people spent alot of time improving. You know, things like Mythics, Magians, pulse weapons, Salvage II loot etc etc.

Requiring people to go through the old base content, which you could make easier as part of the move away from stress would not only have kept the idea of needing pieces from old content to be the best but also have been used in conjunction with new pieces or items to improve your Nyzul II gear further or made those burning fists from Paramount Botulus that much stronger. Instead we get the worst kind of vertical progression where gear comes out nowhere to topple that which you spent years to obtain. It just leaves a bad taste in the mouth of players who have been sculpting a sand castle only for the game to suck it away with the tides.

It's ok though, you can get a sand castle+1 by running some lazy and mindless content like Reives though! Cmon...

All Seekers was tasked with doing was being an improved Campaign system and it fails miserably on that front. Reives are worse than WOTG's campaign battles, colonization is composed of boring ops that feel detatched from the game, wildskeepers are just glorified public arenas where people leech EXP for hours killing useless adds that idle in the arena if the col. rate isn't high enough. Then if that wasn't bad enough, Delve shit on everything lol.

And here I thought we'd be able to finally mega digivolve our Ridills into a glowing Ridill+2.

[leorez]

The biggest problem with the vertical slice as it is with a game this old is how few people will be doing the lower stuff. If a newer player wants to jump into SoA endgame now...well for the most part they are screwed. Its not a giant spread out community anymore, almost everyone left is at the newest endgame so if you get left behind, you might as well stop playing, next to no one does the lower end stuff because there is no need.

That in general is what i hate about the gear climb, it makes content worthless after a short time and since no one needs it, no one is gonna come help you catch up (unless you have a bunch of friends to help, but not everyone does).

2 of my friends that cam back, they are nowhere near that stuff, ones starting fresh because he hasnt played for ages, the other stopped at ToAU...i have no idea how me and a couple LS mates are gonna handle bringing them up to speed.