Please, stop making new content!

[DarkStoneDragon]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you don't want more content, but put in what they promised, isn't that still "adding more stuff"?

[Garota]

Yeah, and there's stuff from old content such as Meebles and Legion that I'm not gonna be able to get now.

[svengalis]

This I do not agree with. There is almost nothing to do in aldoulin after you have done reives, delve, skirmish but repeat it all over again. They need these new areas etc because as far as an expansion goes aldoulin is barebones. I do feel they need to adjust old content but not at risk of not getting any new content. Still don't know why they released the new jobs with no af though.

[Demon6324236]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you don't want more content, but put in what they promised, isn't that still "adding more stuff"?

Yes, it is adding more stuff, but its stuff they already announced months or years ago, they would do a lot better in the eyes of the players if they did not drag it out. If they keep adding new things, at what point will they go back and work on Cait Sigh, Atomos, Inventory, UI, Job Adjustments, new SPs, new Merit Powers, and so on? The simple fact is, they need to go backward right now, complete what was talked about before, fix what needs fixed, then continue working on the things they are right now. If they keep working forward, we know how this will turn out, they say it is being worked on or they are doing something, but even after all this time we get very little in the form of updates. When was the last time we heard about the UI? Why was Cait Sigh shown in a video which a .dat mod could have done? Its simple, while they have worked on their new things they put no man power on old things, and unless they stop and do these old things first, I doubt they will ever be finished.

I admit, in the title of this topic I named it a little wrong. I should have said...

Please stop making brand new content

Because many of the things we are asking for, or have been announced, are not brand new. Like I said earlier this thread, in the case of something like Cait Sigh, there is already a lot of work done both in game and in the actual work SE would have to do. No matter if its the lore around Cait, the animations, the models, the way of talking, all of this stuff has a lot of work, we even fought Cait Sith Ceithir, a Cait who used a few attacks they can put into Cait Sigh. So much work is done without even thinking about an Avatar that I can not call it brand new content. On the other hand, many other things they are doing now have little to no relation to what we currently have. To build on nothing takes much more work, time, and effort, than for them to simply build on what they already have. So while it is adding more stuff, I think it is stuff that has already been half done for them, it makes more sense to go back and finish these things before moving forward, and it would stop us from having to use against SE every time an update is talked about once, then never again.

[Demon6324236]

This I do not agree with. There is almost nothing to do in aldoulin after you have done reives, delve, skirmish but repeat it all over again. They need these new areas etc because as far as an expansion goes aldoulin is barebones. I do feel they need to adjust old content but not at risk of not getting any new content. Still don't know why they released the new jobs with no af though.

That's part of the problem as well though. Right now when they add the new areas what do you think will happen here? There will be new Reives, new Skirmish, and new Delve, they have shown no signs of giving us anything different. We get some new missions and quests, a few things like that too, but for the most part the same content you are talking about repeating will just be coming back for another round it seems. So even if they add new areas, you will bash another target, this time it wont be some rocks or some roots, now it will be, say, a log, or something like that, the content wont be different, only the target and the location. If I am wrong, so be it, but so far as your reasoning goes, I find it hard to believe that anything will change with the new areas. If anything, Monstrosity seems to be new content for old areas, Mog Gardens seems like HELM redone to be more personalized and possibly more enjoyable, which is not hard to imagine. But the new areas, I find little hope in, even if Adoulin now feels somewhat small, making it bigger with only 3 pieces of content will still leave only 3 pieces of content, and your complaint will not be addressed anyways, right?

[DarkStoneDragon]

Yes, it is adding more stuff, but its stuff they already announced months or years ago, they would do a lot better in the eyes of the players if they did not drag it out. If they keep adding new things, at what point will they go back and work on Cait Sigh, Atomos, Inventory, UI, Job Adjustments, new SPs, new Merit Powers, and so on? The simple fact is, they need to go backward right now, complete what was talked about before, fix what needs fixed, then continue working on the things they are right now. If they keep working forward, we know how this will turn out, they say it is being worked on or they are doing something, but even after all this time we get very little in the form of updates. When was the last time we heard about the UI? Why was Cait Sigh shown in a video which a .dat mod could have done? Its simple, while they have worked on their new things they put no man power on old things, and unless they stop and do these old things first, I doubt they will ever be finished.

I admit, in the title of this topic I named it a little wrong. I should have said...

Please stop making brand new content

Because many of the things we are asking for, or have been announced, are not brand new. Like I said earlier this thread, in the case of something like Cait Sigh, there is already a lot of work done both in game and in the actual work SE would have to do. No matter if its the lore around Cait, the animations, the models, the way of talking, all of this stuff has a lot of work, we even fought Cait Sith Ceithir, a Cait who used a few attacks they can put into Cait Sigh. So much work is done without even thinking about an Avatar that I can not call it brand new content. On the other hand, many other things they are doing now have little to no relation to what we currently have. To build on nothing takes much more work, time, and effort, than for them to simply build on what they already have. So while it is adding more stuff, I think it is stuff that has already been half done for them, it makes more sense to go back and finish these things before moving forward, and it would stop us from having to use against SE every time an update is talked about once, then never again.

This is how I see it, when they add what was promised, its not going backward, but moving forward, they need to make sure the balance is right before they add it or the player base will complain about them sending out content that's broken, and then the players won't be happy with what they did get that was promised, so if the case is they are ironing out the kinks before they bring it out, then it's work the wait IMO.

[Demon6324236]

It should not take 2 years to iron out kinks in the content. I do not mean its really a step backwards, but more or less picking up what they left behind and bringing it out finally. It is going backward in the timeline of the game to finish that, then moving forward with truly new content, not backward meaning that they are reverting to an old way of doing things which are bad instead of advancing. In either case, at this point they need to finish what was started before rather than leaving things half done and never finished.

Another thing that comes to mind since it came up in here was Meebles, they seem to have forgotten that event, they said there would be a KI to lower the time between sacks, never happened, a second expansion to it, we got 1, never a second. When is this ever talked about? Never, and they probably never will at this rate, to much content to do with Adoulin, so they don't touch the things outside, not except for adjustments at least, nothing new added to them. This is the kind of update which got left behind, and they have shown no signs of continuing to support them, truly sad and problematic to me since this is one of the most fun things they brought out in recent times imo.

[Yinnyth]

It should not take 2 years to iron out kinks in the content.

SE could find a way.

[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.