[byr1001] Uncapping the Merit Point Categories

[Yinnyth]

Basically, we know that right now the diversity thing doesn't really work, keeping the cap for diversity is kinda stupid, but if you remove it, you are only removing the cap, not gaining or removing diversity really & you give people more to do in the game as well as making xp parties more worth doing for players. If you look at places like Worm parties they are dying down, or at least on Phoenix it seems they are, they often run on only 6~12 people, making it harder for newer players to catch up, so doing this would mean players need xp again, people would go back to Abyssea, GoV, and other ways of leveling, making it easier for everyone to level because of it.

Once you break the cap, putting it back on is a hundred times harder than keeping it on the whole time. To abandon the cap now, is to abandon forever the hope that they can be fixed.

[Demon6324236]

Thats when adding new categories with caps, or adding a new form of points, actually comes in & works well. Merits wouldn't have a cap but new ones could, and a new points system could, both of which would easily make a new form of merits with a cap and real choices!

[Damane]

Ok bro so you are the kind of player to level all job, and all you can do is exp every job, we got it. The real players want event to make their main job progress (gear or new merits-type progression). Do I need to pull the chart of what job sucks and what job doesn't suck ? You leveled every job and don't use any lol, faceplam. Allowing my monk to caps its CHR wooot ? Since you guys like achieving useless things why don't you cap AF2+2 on every job ? I mean it's certainly better of an upgrade than the ability to cap your VIT. I think too many people have been used to the cokcblocking-less grind fest that was abyssea. EXP or MERIT no longer have value, that's why allowing for more merit wouldn't introduce character diversity.

your comment makes no sense and absolutly missed my point, pls use your glow on another topic that comes out of your after.

[Yinnyth]

Thats when adding new categories with caps, or adding a new form of points, actually comes in & works well. Merits wouldn't have a cap but new ones could, and a new points system could, both of which would easily make a new form of merits with a cap and real choices!

Now there's a suggestion I actually like.

[FrankReynolds]

ARe people really still calling the ws merit cap a choice? It says cap right in the name. As in "Handicap". Not choice cap. It's a limitation to what you can do. Not an opportunity to do what you want.

A choice would be "Hey guys, we added all these ws's and you can merit as many as you want to their caps for the low price of 100,000,000 merit points. Choose wisely.".

That's obviously an exaggeration, but you get the point. Instead of setting the bar at a point where it was possible for you to merit them all, but unlikely that most people would actually do that (the smart way in my opinion), they set the bar where anyone could do it in a day and then capped them (the lazy way).

[Arcon]

The current merit system offers two choices: suck or don't suck. There is no customization aside from that. I don't see how anyone can defend that.

What FrankReynolds said sums it up quite nicely. If everything was uncapped, you would actually have to choose what you merit. I don't think people realize just how many merits it would require to cap everything. It's unrealistic that anyone would actually do everything. It would allow you to focus on what jobs you want to play, instead of just meriting everything the best way, which is what people do now.

If someone actually wants to sit through months of grinding EXP in Abyssea to cap everything, good for them. Then they actually deserve to have everything merited. Otherwise you'd have real specialization, unlike what you have now.

Even if the current system offered real customization, I would still be against it, because customization through limitations sucks. People should not be excluded from content based on their preference. Why should someone have to give up Aura Steal for Feint, or vice versa? This game was designed to allow people to play everything, that's why the job system is set up as it is. FFXI is literally the only game with classes I know which allows you to have multiple classes leveled and switch between them at will. Merits go against the entire design philosophy of the game, which happens to be a philosophy I'm attracted to.

I don't see why people value distinction so highly at all. It seems like a completely arbitrary desire.

[Tanama]

I have a simple suggestion that would help the game, would not be difficult to implement, and would not cause any serious balance issues.

Remove all the merit point category caps.
Please let us hold more merits as well ; ;

(Category Caps are the limits on a group of merits. So the category cap for Tier 1 merits is 10. The category cap for Combat Skills is 30, etc.)


A. Will this cause balance issues?
No, because:
1) The strongest players pick one of their jobs and merit for it.
2) If they are perfectly merited for one job, it presents the biggest balance threat when given more merits because you have to assume that they would be on that job in situations that require high performance, the hardest events.
3) If they are perfectly merited for one job, any future merits that they obtain from having the cap increased will necessarily be less valuable to their job than the ones they already have.
4) Optimally-merited jobs barely benefit from increasing the caps.

Example:
Warrior is in some ways the greatest threat for this kind of adjustment because they are so versatile, so the limitation on combat skills/stats stands to benefit them the most. Still, what happens if you uncap a perfectly merited WAR?
- They gain 12 DEX and VIT.
- Their Warcry and Aggressor recasts drops 50 seconds.
- Instead of meriting three of Upheaval, Resolution, Ruinator, and Stardiver, now they can merit all four.
- They gain 14-15 accuracy (0-8% hit rate) with some of their proc weapons.

So you have barely made Warrior stronger. The other jobs benefit even less than this. Plus, at a time when people complain about the difficulty of events (like Legion, Provenance Watcher, etc.) this gives them an opportunity to help themselves. I mean, what do you want our failure rate to be on these events? Is it really too low at the moment?



B. Why should we do it?
1) This will give players nearly-unlimited potential for character growth. - It would take 6706 merits to cap out. Players currently have ~2000 or less. Even with an epeening "I get 250k/hr" Abyssea party, it would still take them almost 80 rl 24-hour days to cap out from 2000 merits.

2) A limiting merit system has always been the antithesis of the job system. - One of the major draws to FFXI is that the game lets you play through with only one character, which you are free to become attached to. There are certainly times when you need to change your role, and the job system accommodates that. It is silly to suddenly reverse this at the level cap, which is where players spend almost all of their time these days. When the cap was at level 75, you go 1 to 75 as a Red Mage playing however was convenient in any type of party, but Tier 2 merits forced you to decide whether you wanted to use your Red Mage to solo or do Salvage.

3) Programming-wise, this almost has to be possible and reasonable. - The category caps have been increased before several times. You could either remove them from the interface (clean) or increase them to the maximum amount (dirty but definitely possible).

4) At a time when content is sparse, this would give a much-needed boost to activity. - People want to play, but don't have anything that they can do to improve their character. This would make it so there is almost always something they can do.

5) Increased participation in events/systems that yield XP. - More people would do Grounds of Valor. More people would do Campaign. More people would do Besieged. More people would do Dominion Ops. More people would do Voidwatch. etc. If you increase the incentives, you increase the odds that people will partake in an event. Giving XP value serves as an incentive.





Fellow posters, I challenge you. Come up with a situation where the above proposed change would alter the way we do any event. Where it would make something noticeably easier. Where it would affect the "balance" of anything. Try!

The current merit system offers two choices: suck or don't suck. There is no customization aside from that. I don't see how anyone can defend that.

What FrankReynolds said sums it up quite nicely. If everything was uncapped, you would actually have to choose what you merit. I don't think people realize just how many merits it would require to cap everything. It's unrealistic that anyone would actually do everything. It would allow you to focus on what jobs you want to play, instead of just meriting everything the best way, which is what people do now.

If someone actually wants to sit through months of grinding EXP in Abyssea to cap everything, good for them. Then they actually deserve to have everything merited. Otherwise you'd have real specialization, unlike what you have now.

Even if the current system offered real customization, I would still be against it, because customization through limitations sucks. People should not be excluded from content based on their preference. Why should someone have to give up Aura Steal for Feint, or vice versa? This game was designed to allow people to play everything, that's why the job system is set up as it is. FFXI is literally the only game with classes I know which allows you to have multiple classes leveled and switch between them at will. Merits go against the entire design philosophy of the game, which happens to be a philosophy I'm attracted to.

I don't see why people value distinction so highly at all. It seems like a completely arbitrary desire.

I completely agree with Byrth, Arcon and the rest of the people supporting this thread. They have all explained it a lot better than I would.

The development team would do us a great service by uncapping the merit point categories. Camate and company continually say that they take all suggestion into consideration, well here we are. The majority of us strongly believe in this change. Uncapping the merit point categories will not break this game in any way shape or form as explained by various posters in this thread.

177 'Likes' is a ton for the English Forum and that's not counting the other Likes from supporting posts on this thread.

Mr. Matsui, community members, development team, please make this happen!

[Raksha]

Someone should translate the op and post it to the JP forums with a link back here.

[Terasan]

Great idea for a change, Byrth, liked and wholeheartedly support the removal of unnecessary limitations like this. As it stands now, there's very little room for true customization and specialization due to terrible merit choices (job-specific merits) like many have said previously. This would open up a bit more room for true uniqueness, as many players would never touch the true depths of the merit system (Pchan not meriting CHR for his MNK, for example) but others would.

Removing, or even relaxing the caps on the merit system would reduce the amount of "cookie-cutter" builds we see, where for a certain job, it's x/5 this, x/5 that and must have this WS 5/5 or GTFO.

A thought I had, sort of in line with this, is instead of having the options laid out for us in the form of 4-8(?) merits per category per job, we could actually choose what we'd like to merit for each job, in sort of a tree-like structure (Merit such and such to unlock further upgrades but locked into that tree). Keeping unlockable spells/abilities intact of course, but for example:

WAR Merits, current (10 upgrades available for each area):
-Berserk, Defender, Warcry, Aggressor Recasts, Double Attack Rate
-WAR Charge, Tomahawk, Savagery, Agg. Aim effects.

WAR Merits, my suggestion (Separate trees for each JA, split to potency or recast):
-JA effects and recast (Including JAs like Retaliation, Blood Rage, etc); Choose one tree per JA, additional effects possible in each tree (Blood Rage re-adding a small crit damage increase, for example)
-DA Rate or damage increase
-Unlockable JAs/Trait changes (Warrior's Charge having the current Triple Attack chance or increased damage much like the AF2+2 legs augment)

Didn't really mean to hijack your post with my idea, Byrth, but wanted to show support for a change to the current merit system of some form, in order to promote even more unique character builds in some way; either by removal of the current merit category caps, or by an "overhaul" of the system.

[Byrth]

Yeah, no problem!

I've noticed that many people seem to suggest other merit system alterations. The reasons that I focused on uncapping as opposed to some other option are:
1) They've shown themselves to be capable of raising the category caps and have done it multiple times.
2) Making a more complicated system (like here, here, or here) would require effort and resources that the FFXI team seems unable to afford at the moment.

If they wanted to invest a lot of time and effort making a merit system that encouraged specialization, I would disagree with them philosophically due to FFXI's character development model (See point B2). I mean, regardless of how complicated a system you make (paths, well-balanced abilities, etc.) there will only be one optimal set of merits for a given situation. For me, the absolute worst possible case would be if the merit system was balanced and important enough that people were actually re-meriting between events. It would be like getting an XP buffer at 75 so you can keep doing Dynamis, except it would be getting a merit point buffer so you can keep switching your merits around for your Legion night and then Voidwatch night and then Odin v2 night. I'd hate it.