Revocation and replacement of item level system

[Raydeus]

you are playing the wrong type of game/genre, if gear progression is something that makes you rage.

Yes i love my d.ring, yes I felt rare with it, do i mind that SE gives out KB pops like candy so everyone and their grandmother gets one, at first it singed a bit, but hey lets move on. Gear gets obsolete, move on and do the new content for fun while gearing up with it!!

It isn't that simple.

Yes, gear can become obsolete when new gear is added into most games, but XI is based in the much better concept of horizontal progression. Now, that is completely different from making older content more accessible as time passes and new content is added. Which is a no brainer if you want to give players an incentive to finish content they didn't finish before AND have the new content waiting for them when they are done which means more time playing, which means more time paying your sub.

The advantages that both Horizontal progression and an increase in accessibility as time passes have over the vertical progression system far outweight their cons if you are aiming for a long term commitment from players.

Long story short if you fall in the Vertical progression trap (like XIV did) in reality you will always only have whatever new content you released in the last updates since the new iLVL cap. That is because iLVL requirements mean that except for the hardcore that finishes the content as soon as it is released most people will actively skip as much content as they can in order to obtain the newest gear as soon as possible, because older gear and content are pointless by that point. If you have a lvl cap of 50 (XIV) but your current iLVL cap is 90+, and all new content is aimed at ilvl 90 there simply is no reason for anyone to spend time doing all the ilvl content in between.

Then if you want to find out about the story and whatever you can just got back with your high lvl gear, do the battle once to see the cutscenes and forget about all those zones, mechanics and items that the dev team spent so much time creating. Simply because your current gear is far better.

We saw something like that in XI with Scenario gear ( <---Shameless plug.) That gear is great at lvl 75 but there is no reason to bother with it if you can just get a few more levels and get Aby cruor sets for close to nothing. Effectively negating the appeal of doing those scenarios for anyone that didn't finished them at the time unless they are actually interested in the story. And that's a lot of content rendered useless simply because of an increase in lvl cap, and ilvl power creep effects are far worse than that.

That is what Vertical progression means, disposable content no one will ever want to spend more time than necessary doing. Which coupled with a loss of value of past accomplishments (oh hai Relics) means players wont be as attached to their characters or their time spent playing anymore simply because all content and achievements become disposable every time the new ilvl hits you in the face.

Etc. etc.

/over9000chars