Revamp the way we gain experience points

[Yinnyth]

Making exp parties an acceptable pasttime in FFXI again would be a very difficult task. The suggested system of campaign-like exp rewards sounds nice on paper, but craps out in practice. There has never been a good implementation of such a concept. It always winds up being most profitable to figure out which actions net the highest reward, then max out your actions per minute spamming those actions.

In the old days when I actually did WoE, we always had random ass-hats enter our linkshell runs with us (which sometimes prevented some of our members from entering). They were terrible and made the whole thing harder for our linkshell, yet they would still manage to get one of the ending reward chests to themselves.

It is extremely difficult to quantify with a number the value of an action a player takes. Creating even a slightly good ranking system would require an immensely complex set of calculations. Even assuming that it would not result in the servers getting bogged down with all the extra workload, it would be a large investment in programming time. A large investment ultimately designed to slow the exp you receive. I assure you, players would cry bloody murder for "wasting dev time on a nerf".

[Myo]

The faster every player caps their experience points/merit points/jobs, the faster the game will die. This game isn't being flooded by new players, and if all the old players start to leave because they FEEL like they have nothing to do (even if they might have stuff to do but don't want to do it), the game will start to depopulate. I'm not going to argue the fact that this game has survived 10+ years and if it deserves to live or die... But from a logical standpoint, that's what's going to eventually happen. We've already had serveral threads from people who have capped out their characters experience points and feel bored/plan on quitting, this isn't something unheard of.

[Yinnyth]

The faster every player caps their experience points/merit points/jobs, the faster the game will die. This game isn't being flooded by new players, and if all the old players start to leave because they FEEL like they have nothing to do (even if they might have stuff to do but don't want to do it), the game will start to depopulate. I'm not going to argue the fact that this game has survived 10+ years and if it deserves to live or die... But from a logical standpoint, that's what's going to eventually happen. We've already had serveral threads from people who have capped out their characters experience points and feel bored/plan on quitting, this isn't something unheard of.

There was an MMO I played before FFXI called Asheron's Call. Out of the box, its level cap was enormous (126, I believe?) It was a massive grind to get to that level, and even after you got to it, you could keep racking up experience points to dump into your abilities. Around the time I started playing FFXI, they came out with an expansion for AC which increased the level cap almost tenfold. From what I understand, the game is still alive with a barebones crew and small number of players, but it is nowhere near as popular as it used to be, even though its level cap would take you years of active play to reach.

The need for exp is not the only thing that keeps players attached to a game. It certainly helps, but there are other aspects.

[FrankReynolds]

This game isn't being flooded by new players, and if all the old players start to leave because they FEEL like they have nothing to do (even if they might have stuff to do but don't want to do it), the game will start to depopulate.

I felt like I had nothing to do back when the level cap was 75 even though I only had like 5 jobs leveled on my main. The reason? Because getting the jobs that I was less interested in up to level cap seemed like a giant boring, tedious grind. After they released abyssea, I went and leveled a bunch of jobs that I had previously ignored just because it was easy to level them. Guess what? It turns out that some of them are fun, so I started gearing and practicing playing them. Now I have tons of new job quests to do, AF sets to build and gear to chase because I actually like some of these jobs that I had previously ignored due to the effort required just to try them out.

For example, when I leveled Ninja to 45 for a subjob many years ago, I hated it. But after I leveled it in abyssea while my LS was farming chests, I started to like it. Now I play it as much as I can. If I had been stuck playing RDM, BLM, BRD, WHM, MNK and THF all this time, I would have p[robably lost it a long time ago.


TLDR; a lot of new players never got into the game because leveling took too long. Can't win em all.

[Rustic]

I felt like I had nothing to do back when the level cap was 75 even though I only had like 5 jobs leveled on my main. The reason? Because getting the jobs that I was less interested in up to level cap seemed like a giant boring, tedious grind. After they released abyssea, I went and leveled a bunch of jobs that I had previously ignored just because it was easy to level them. Guess what? It turns out that some of them are fun, so I started gearing and practicing playing them. Now I have tons of new job quests to do, AF sets to build and gear to chase because I actually like some of these jobs that I had previously ignored due to the effort required just to try them out.

For example, when I leveled Ninja to 45 for a subjob many years ago, I hated it. But after I leveled it in abyssea while my LS was farming chests, I started to like it. Now I play it as much as I can. If I had been stuck playing RDM, BLM, BRD, WHM, MNK and THF all this time, I would have p[robably lost it a long time ago.

Of course, even if this very day we said NO SOUP FOR YOU and locked Abyssea to 75+ characters...people would STILL be leveling faster than they did in the bad old days. You could sit there on your I-don't-want-you-in-my-exp-PT-forever-alone job of choice from that era now and be guaranteed a steady rate of exp gain.

I don't care what job you are. Given baseline equipment, you can kill EP mobs. If you can kill it and it gives exp, all it takes is a GoV/FoV page and you're looking at advancement at a pace that isn't grindingly agonizing. For anyone.

That's good. It's the overwhelming mass exp generation that is Abyssea that's broken, where players literally don't have to move for 69 levels straight from one place, in perfect safety while the guy with the great axe and his healer lulz their way through for you. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't just bot the healer and auto-level 17 people with one guy twoboxing his computer (yes, botting illegal. Someone should tell all the fishers I keep seeing that.). No threats. No worries. Just dingdingdingding hey I'm 99 now, YAY I R TEH SPECIALZ!

Abyssea's exp system wasn't a "fix" for grinding. It was the death of the exp system, period, reducing the process to something of a zero-risk proposition for 16 people at once. GoV/FoV was the fix.

Abyssea was like having the human race become immortal and invulnerable, followed by GoV/FoV's discovery of the cure for cancer.

[Caketime]

Quitters quit, that's just what they do. What I don't get about it though is when you have every job at 99 there's a huge amount of stuff to be done, not to mention having the option of attending every event as a different flavor of derp each day.

[Zarchery]

That sounds needlessly complicated. If you wanted to stop leeching, just make it so that you get zero experience points unless you either take some action (ANY action) on a teammate or monster.

[Myo]

I only posted here because I am in this position personally. I no longer benefit from experience points in any fashion. Which is kind of depressing if I'm honest. Yeah, there are plenty of events... But once you have all the gear you can get without selling your soul to one of the only 3 linkshells on the server that even DO Legion or Neo Odin or other high end alliance content/events on a regular basis (If you even have the right jobs, gear, and merits to please them and join to begin with, which usually includes the correct emp/mythic/relic). You get bored... the game eventually just becomes an endless grind of daily dynamis, maybe some emp weapon farming, helping your friends with things you don't get anything from, or waiting around in jeuno half afk for the correct voidwatch shout. Lets face it, most people avoid starting their own voidwatch alliances, and for good reason. You need to be experienced with the monster you want or at least VW in general to make a run. Not to mention most people are just lazy/shy, and not charismatic enough to start their own shout groups.
Point is that relying on events alone for entertainment at any random time of the day, isn't really around-the-clock fun for most people. Seeking a party is easy in comparison (if equally boring at times) and leveling up new jobs and meriting certain abilities and stats feels consistantly productive.
In my opinion an MMO needs both experience point character enhancing and endgame events, to please the majority of it's fanbase.
Experience points should never be completely useless. It's a giant waste of a perfectly good game activity. The two options are slowing down the rate at which experience and/or levels are gained, or, for Square Enix to add more things to do with EXP after capping out your job. More merit catagories or higher catagory caps. A way to change EXP into something else more useful, like points to use as currency for purchasing special types of gear. Or better yet, customizing gear that's already in the game, as an alternative to the expenses of synergy.

Sorry for the long post...

[Ezikiel]

for future reference how many times is this thread gonna be recycled?

[Horadrim]

I don't know about you, but I do kinda miss grinding jobs up to 75, playing my job, and learning how to play. It was repetitive and infuriating at times, but it reinforced the use of the job and n00bs, though they still existed, were hard to create. You had to really work at being a n00b.

Now all one has to do is level to 30 then pay a fell cleaver 300k gill to power level them to 99. As a result, our game is flooded with n00bs power leveled mostly by RMT's and the basic xp system is meaningless.

But I have an idea. Change the way xp is attained by relating it to the effort you contribute to the fight, such as how much damage you've done, how much hp you healed your party, and how many buffs/debuffs you put on/take off. This would force everyone to engage in the fight. Hmmm... This sounds familiar... Campaign! Implement the same xp mechanism in campaign for regular xp. This would force n00bs to go play their jobs if they want decent xp.

Like this post if you agree so the devs will take notice.

No.

Shitty players are shitty players regardless of how long it takes them to level up.