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

[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.

[Afania]

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.

If they want to make XIV vertical progression they should have just leave XI the way it was like pre-SoA, and various new content to upgrade old gears, most of the old content can be solo or lowmanned, so its' good incentive to keep players around without big LS.

And whoever interested in doing primal fight 100 times for a weapon or farm 600k(that's a lot for a new ARR player with no craft/DoH leveled btw) for an ilv 70 weapon just to do one Titan fight can play XIV.