Interim Report – Sorry to keep you all waiting!

[Eyeballed]

What she said.

Reducing the need for open-world one instance at a time. Spam-grinding out for that next gear just to get a little better. And for what? - to kill the next one in line just to get a little better. No adventure, no story, no need for anything but your epeen and glory.

[Eyeballed]

So, to summarize the last 10 pages or so of this thread:

Some people think everyone that power levels a job are lazy for not "doing their time" like a prison sentence and serving an arbitrary minimum term before they are let out on parole to join endgame.

Furthermore, they complain noisily when they can't find a bare minimum of people to do community service with them.

So, because they can't find anyone to help them pick up trash, they feel it should be mandated everywhere.

ITT: Having an aversion to boring repetitive "content" and choosing to skip it makes you lazy, and MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Repetitive Psychotic Grind.

No.

Until you can stop being cynical, don't expect a serious response. If all you've gathered from this side of the fence is what you've stated, then you're better off seeing yourself out of the discussion. Just a suggestion.

[Demon6324236]

Reducing the need for open-world one instance at a time. Spam-grinding out for that next gear just to get a little better. And for what? - to kill the next one in line just to get a little better. No adventure, no story, no need for anything but your epeen and glory.

Sounds alot like xp, killing 1 crab to get a little stronger to kill another crab and so on, nothing really getting done along the way except more of the poor crab people dying at the hands of adventurers. Just to inform you though, Abyssea has a story, even if not great, VW has a story as well, SoA is sure to have a story, SoA sounds like exploration will be a big part, VW forces you to goto nearly every area in the game at some point for at least 1 fight. Xp parties had little exploration, it was the same camps, you went there, you killed things, you left, you didn't walk around for 3 hours with your party moving from place to play killing things for xp, you sat in a corner, had someone pull a nearby mob to it, and kill it, and kept doing that for hours.

At lower levels you had to get gear, use that gear for some time, and discard it in most cases because it became outdated and worthless. In todays game, any gear that is worth while will basically always be, it will over time be out done, but its never some trash gear, unless it was always trash gear. You talk of exploration, adventure, story, yet I remember none of this that existed being taken away really. The story is still there, I for the life of me can not recall a story part that involved my character magically becoming a weakling by compare to his normal abilities because he stepped into a certain area to fight a minotaur. I think exploration is encouraged when there is something to find which you do not know where it is, which means there isn't much in this game or many MMOs in my opinion, story does encourage it a bit with all the running around missions have you do.

I honestly do not see what this game lost that xp is gone other than the xp grind died, and the gear grind came to be, the advantage of the gear grind is many of my jobs can use the same gear, xp however is tied to a job. In the old days I could level up my RDM, but my DRK was lv1, now my DRK is 99, and if I ever finish leveling my DRG, it has alot of good gear to grow into as soon as it hits those levels.

[Byrth]

And what when the grind doesn't exist at all, as Arcon would have it? What when you can cap a job in 1-2 days if you put enough effort in? Do you think developers casually create lasting endgame content and toss it into the game on a whim? No, it takes a lot of time and a lot of work. There has to be a way to buffer the time between, or what you get is a whole lot of players standing around after a month shouting, "OK guys, I'm all done! What's next? Guys? GUYS?!?!"

*cricket*

.....

-log out-

Old-style EXP is a boring event that's basically just using the battle system to kill monsters, because the game had a battle system on release so that's something they could make people do. Now that we have 10 years of content releases behind us, I'd hope that you can find something to do that isn't repetitively killing crabs.

[Caketime]

Repetitive is not necessarily boring, if it's a challenge, or some sort of excitement involved. This is why I don't randomly bash pro-EXP people, because excitement can be subjective. Maybe you really enjoy these pointless boring fights? Who knows. It sounds strange to me, just as it sounds strange to most people that I enjoyed camping NMs. Personal differences. Only I know when I'm being subjective, and I know that objectively camping NMs (or at least HNMs) was a shitfest. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, and if I was a game designer I sure as hell wouldn't implement it. Same goes for massive EXP grinds like FFXI had in the past.

Are you drunk again? I never said any of these things and I'm not sure why you insist on trying to imply that I randomly attack people and that I enjoy repetitive gameplay for the sake of opposing others on the internet.

[Arcon]

Are you drunk again? I never said any of these things and I'm not sure why you insist on trying to imply that I randomly attack people and that I enjoy repetitive gameplay for the sake of opposing others on the internet.

I wasn't talking to you.

[vienne]

i dont agree with you arc but you already know that... and you also know that there are more people like me who think the old exp way was more fun then book burning or aby burning. this discussion is pointless. SE has taken a turn with abyssea and there's no way they can change it back to the old days, although i preferred it more then the way the game is played now. the thing which annoys me the most about the new exp way is that lvl 99 players who burned their jobs ask the dumbest questions about job and game mechanics in general (and yes i know i also ask stupid questions ) and imo they have less understanding bout the game then someone who has "grinded" his way to 99.
But yes we've crossed a line and there's no going back so better make the best of it and hope SE gives us some more challenging content in the future.

[Mirage]

Stuff

It is just unrealistic to expect lots of people to want to do level capped promyvions with new players that they don't know. It took ages to put together promy parties even back when I first did them, years before the level cap was increased, and that was while lots of people still needed to clear them. In today's game, it would take even longer, and probably put people off even more than just soloing it themselves. I hate to point this out, but I think you're looking at the old game through rose-tinted glasses.

The old level capped fights were cool and exciting when you actually did them, but the wait you had to often go through before you could actually fight was really, really annoying and boring. While I tell new players that they would probably need to solo the earlier group content, I also tell them that they can start doing this way before reaching the level cap. A level 50 character could probably beat the promyvions solo if he really wanted, and I actually do encourage them to try. If it's too hard for them, they can just try again a few levels higher.

You can't force old players who have done everything multiple times to help new players that they don't even know. That would just piss them off even more. The main problem in today's game for new players is simply that S-E went about with the increased leveling speed in an annoyingly repetitive and boring way (amass buffs in dungeons, lose them all if zoning = stay in the same area forever because you're whipped across your ball sack if you want to try out a different area).

The low-man leveling process could have been made a lot smoother and exciting if S-E just put a bit more thought into it, without it having turned out any slower. Additionally, there is a severe lack of low-level gear because there are so few low level players around and because we only have 7 AH slots. Selling low level gear is simply too expensive, because it occupies AH slots that could have been used on selling gear that is 10 times as profitable. As a counter to this problem, SE has done just about nothing at all. Because the current most efficient non-abyssea leveling method does not give people conquest points, they are also unable to use CP on gear to make up for the lack of player sold gear. Without decent gear, players are again stuck with killing EP mobs, because they at EM will start to notice how terrible their gear is, and get their asses handed to them.

[FrankReynolds]

You can talk and talk and talk. It will never change the facts. The old low/mid-level content is all still there. If you can't get people to do it, they either don't like you or they don't like the content. I think it's a little of both at this point.

[Eyeballed]

Sounds alot like xp, killing 1 crab to get a little stronger to kill another crab and so on, nothing really getting done along the way except more of the poor crab people dying at the hands of adventurers.

...And that's the real kicker: This new mindless grind is your endgame. It's all you have to look forward to, but as I've said before, for some reason the lot of you embrace it as something new simply because you're not going to a particular point on the map and killing the same mobs over and over again to progress. It's different! Gotcha!