So anyone else tired of grinding tomes weekly for gear?

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Originally Posted by Yeol

Oh you'd be surprised by the amount of people that find them very challenging :)

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Indeed. Even HM primals are still wiping parties. Trust me, they are my main source of exp free Poetics. Dead bodies everywhere.

This game is extremely bad between patches. I unsubbed before 3.5 as there was nothing to do, did all of 3.5 content in about a week and unsubbed again from now until SB, if it actually changes from the current formula otherwise im out.

Weekly tome caps has become stale, or the whole gear system is stale.

Don't get your hopes up. In 4.0 we'll do daily repetitive things for new 450 tomestones of X a week so we can purchase temporary, quickly replaced gears. The same thing we were doing for 3.5 years.
I'll enjoy 4.0 main scenario and probably take a break till 5.0. You can do the same things over and over again only so long before losing all interest.

Yeah, while I stay busy E in the game I have S been finding new O sources of mmo entertainment lately. (but I can still cap my tomes with little to no effort)

Ones that are not just standard dungeons crawlers, are fully voiced and have side quest story lines that are much more interesting than go to over there and collect that thing then run to that place then back to over there then to that place then over there again. Not to mention better housing, better character customization and better most everything. Plus give subscribers free money for their cash shops when they pay a sub instead of being incredibly greedy, offer the same sort of items for their physical expac at half the cost and have much more open and reliable communication with their player base.

And basically just do common sense things and don't toot their own horn when they introduce content that's the same as last months or pretend something as basic as jumping, flying or swimming is new and something only they are doing when other companies have been doing it better for 10 years now.

Originally I wrote this as a response to the “No Community” thread prior to seeing this thread. I am new to the forums and didn’t notice dates on the comments. When I read all the comments on this thread from pages 1 - 41 I was shocked at how many more pro-XI players had commented on here as apposed to the “No Community” thread.

Then I realized that this was a resurrected thread and that all of the pro-XI comments were from quite a while ago (probably given up and left). Reading through here another disheartening trend I picked up on was all the people pointing out that these kind of topics have largely been ignored by SE.

This is will probably be my first and last post here, so for what it’s worth:

Cultural Mechanics

I think game mechanics should be solely used to empower cultural mechanics.
IMHO a lot of what is happening in XIV is that the human mechanics are largely being ignored.

FFXI as a standard:
I don’t think using nostalgia as a way to discredit legitimate claims about XI’s game mechanics is being fair to the people trying to explain their experience. It’s just an emotional component within the assertions about mechanics and doesn’t disqualify the latter.

Many of the arguments against XI are predicated on how people experienced it’s grind. I’d like to reframe how people think about grinding in regard to game satisfaction.

Most games have to strike a balance between effort (pain) and reward. In an MMO the grind is the pain that allows there to be rewards (progression, item acquisition, social status, etc). What makes a grind bad? If the reward does not justify the pain (effort).

In our case with XIV I think a good example is status-symbol gear becoming obsolete too quickly (i.g. this thread). The effort to acquire Tomes isn’t being sufficiently justified by the reward (in this case gear).

I’m reminded of the saying: “when everything is special nothing is.” If you can never stand out: 1. it removes that from the incentive table and 2. it removes “icons” from the games internal culture. Not only do I think it’s OK that there are items not everyone can obtain but I actually think it’s quite beneficial to have those items be very static and identifiable.

Generally we see with XI fans the sentiment that the game was very hard but the rewards were commensurate with the effort. In XI things were hard even at level 1 and not just in the advanced content. So what was it that kept people going? I think one example is because people stayed in level ranges for long periods of time you could compete with your (level) peers as well as enjoy superiority to someone who was 5 or 10 levels below you. This created equally rewarding milestones to that of reaching the level cap.

Another thought I had about aesthetics in regard to culture was social class (level range). I think allowing people to modify their appearance a lot early on removes upward mobility as an incentive. In XI you could tell immediately what level someone was just by what they were wearing. I think social class as a mechanic in the game is important to have. I think having the sagely level 50 helping the level 15 greenhorns is a valuable dynamic (mechanic) for both parties. Of course none of that means anything unless progression is slowed to allow people to become immersed in a class identity (i.e. I’m a lvl 20 Thief).

Role (job) identity as a cultural mechanic. By imposing limits on when someone can change classes you allow them to fully own the role they’ve chosen in the game society.

I’m reminded of a quote: “I’m only free to expand myself within boundaries”. Given to much freedom people will generally flounder with indecision.

This week I did my weekly Frontline Roulette. Thanks to event and freelancer it was a 5 minute wait. Did some extra Frontline matches and then some Feast matches. Maybe like 4 Feast matches. I did an A rank hunt here and there and finally did some A1S in Duty Finder when it was on bonus, maybe 6-8 times, and capped my tomestones.

Had a pretty fun week in game so not really tired of getting tomes.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Indeed. Even HM primals are still wiping parties. Trust me, they are my main source of exp free Poetics. Dead bodies everywhere.

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Only time I see this (on Hard or Extreme mode primals) are people that forget to attack adds. You'd be surprised how many people still do this.

Running the same faceroll easy content each week and you're getting bored? I can't possibly imagine why.

Since 3.0 and seeing all my hard earned 2.X tome gears being useless. I stopped to cap weekly tomes <,<
I only get gears to enter those new content o_o
Now its like end of the line and in 4-5months its 4.0 and all tome gears gets worthless again because NPC shops and story quests has way better stuff <.<

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Originally Posted by Mycow8me

ffxi things like sky, dynamis, znm, hnm, sea,... etc... these were all creative farms and grinds.

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Were they though?

Sky - Farm for a NM, get item. Farm for another NM, get item. Use items to spawn NM, get item. Repeat. Use 4 items to spawn big NM.
Sea - Farm for a NM, get item. Farm for another NM, get item. Use items to spawn NM...
HNM - Sit around and wait. (Changed to farm item from BCNM. Use item to spawn. Possibly get another item. Use item to spawn other NM.)
ZNM - Use worthless system to take pictures of monsters. Use items to get item. Use item to spawn NM. Get item. Use item to spawn another NM. Get item. Use item to spawn yet another NM. Get item. Use item to... well, you get the idea.
Limbus - Get item. Go into Sea. Get another item. Go into Limbus. Farm farm farm until you get... item. Collect enough items, and you can use items to fight a boss.

The only different event was Dynamis. But it was essentially farming a bunch of mobs for... you guessed it, items. (Later changed to match the above, with forced-spawning NMs.)

To make matters even more frustrating with most of FFXI, was competing over a single monster, with several other linkshells. Most of which were using cheats to get faster claims. I won't even get into lockouts, and arbitrary time delays for most of XI's content. Oh, the good ol' days of creative grinding...

It's going to be rather sad on their part if SE had to drop PS3 support to give us a replacement activity to replace tomes.

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Originally Posted by MiaGrey

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XIV did have this, but unsync destroyed it. I really do think that certain items should be gated behind sync (savage coil titles, savage alex mounts, certain orchestrion rolls, anima grind actually being worth it). The sole reason that I was against Alex NM back in the day was that the only reliable reward that raiders got was the story, and now the reward system in the game is completely ruined.

Then again, appeasing casual players = money more than making a well designed reward system apparently. INB4 can we get it on the cash shop

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Originally Posted by MiaGrey

Most games have to strike a balance between effort (pain) and reward.

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And the good games stop thinking about this and care primarily for one thing:
"Is what we're offering here a fun and engaging experience or not?"

Because a grind is only a grind when it feels like a grind, i.e. is not enjoyable. There are thousands of League of Legends players who have several thousand games on their account, but I can guarantee you that none of them is going to complain how much of a grind it was and that the reward isn't worth it (Hint: There is none) and that the game sucks 'cause of it. They just enjoy the game and amass games and IP in the process naturally. That's pretty much the ideal for games and unsurprisingly, it's the most profitable game currently on the market - despite being entirely free to play.

The hard part is replicating that in an MMORPG and one of the big issue is that you need a high degree of repetition, but PvE does not have the same replay value as PvP due to it being necessarily scripted. And while we do have PvP, the gameplay doesn't appear to be the most compelling, the reasons for which would well be worth an entire own thread.
Moreover, the difficulty isn't as modular - While in LoL, everyone will eventually settle on a game difficulty that's "just right" for them via MMR, PvE content is delivered with a set difficulty, leading to some people considering it "too hard" and others considering it "too easy", which in turn leads to people not being properly engaged.
Further, progression is necessarily slow and small at endgame, because it doesn't get repeated. Many people enjoy progressing and getting stronger and in MOBAs, you get to level from 1 to max and gather up to six items that make you considerably more powerful not just once, but every game and in a mere 30-40 minutes to boot. That's fun, so much that people don't even mind it being reset afterwards and the different builds only add to the replayability. In that regard, the armory system has a lot of potential, but thanks to weekly caps and the slow pace of MMORPG progression, it unfortunately remains largely untapped, PotD being a notable exception. Here, PotD does a lot of things right, but I at least unfortunately do not find trash mobs and invisible traps very engaging.

Overall, game design is quite the difficult beast, but I feel that players and devs put way too much emphasis on controlling people with rewards already and way too little on whether what they do is actually something fun.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

"Is what we're offering here a fun and engaging experience or not?"

Because a grind is only a grind when it feels like a grind, i.e. is not enjoyable.

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Not necessarily, its best not to use non MMO examples when talking about MMO gameplay, because the two don't necessarily equate, but what you should say is "Is what we're offering sufficiently and justifiably valuable to the player, while also not causing them to burn out and/or devalue the reward?" because grinds are nothing but long carrot on a stick goals (unlike LoL matches, which are self contained experiences that accumulate over time, not a goal), and the reward has to match the lengths to get it.

Your example is more akin to calling investing 500 hours in skyrim a grind, or calling the veteran rewards a grind, they aren't. Whereas increasing longevity of an MMO by setting a task that is supposed to be time consuming (without using too many resources) is a grind, and like any chore in the real world, the job looks much more appealing with a bigger, juicier carrot at the end.

Edit: I am not justifying grinds that aren't fun, varying the activity is important (as is not cheating players with RNG too much), but it is still ultimately a to do list of chores for a shiny carrot, that is the core design of MMOs, and is completely different to the core design of LoL (which is more akin to real life sports).

I realize what I'm saying is a bit philosophical but I think the nature of the problem requires this kind of approach. "What is fun right now" has proven an unreliable measure for producing game mechanics that foster long-term satisfaction in an MMO.

By what then do we determine which new mechanics to introduce as solutions? If we have to orchestrate some immediate measure of pain to produce a lasting and greater good downstream then I think delving into the weeds of existing XIV mechanics is premature and ultimately just treating symptoms.

The observation was made earlier that in XI rare items were never phased out by new items. I really enjoy those subtle points which is why I preface most of my examples with “this is one example”. There are no doubt hundreds of micro mechanics which lent themselves to the “community” so many XI-fans refer to. I only wish I could catalogue them all.

I agree with the Lambdafish’s response to the LoL comparison. They’re entirely different genres and incomparable in terms of why and how people enjoy playing them.

I would explain it like this, if you limited the definition of grinding to say something like a repetitive task, then Candy Crush could be said to have a grind, but we all agree it doesn’t. That’s because it’s incentivizing you in other ways, it’s instant feedback / gratification. If you removed the real-time incentives from that game and shifted it to an aggregation model that payed out when milestones were reached, you’d have a grind and then you’d have the problem of striking the effort to reward balance.

Most of the people I know played FPS’s while playing XI. Why didn’t they just play the FPS? There was no grind, it was instantly gratifying and free. I think the answer is as simple as that they realized the big dopamine hit of delayed gratification was often superior to a thousand small ones. A grind being hard doesn’t mean it has to be unpleasant but it has to be sufficiently less rewarding than the carrot itself.

Speaking of this really base human reality in a game mechanics way is so obtuse because why on earth would you build something to punish yourself with? There is no confusion on the principle when it comes to contributing to your 401k or going to the gym. Here you have to build your own treadmill in a sense - to extend this metaphor if you do it right you wind up with a community full of healthy people.

“but it is still ultimately a to do list of chores for a shiny carrot”
I think that is the characterization of grinding that is causing so much grief. The “chores” are a prerequisite to the carrot. In an MMO you cannot have a carrot without the chores.

I realized this the first time I hosted & admin’d my own UO shard. When you can equip anything in the game they’re not carrots at that point they’re simply pixels on a screen. I truly understood in that moment the value in the struggle and the value to rarity. I’ll never forget the feeling I had when I equipped this one weapon that was virtually impossible to obtain, something akin to the Kraken Club from XI. I felt like a kid who just found out Santa wasn’t real - I immediately wanted to unequip it and go back to dreaming about what it would feel like to have earned it.

UO was nothing like XI in terms of game mechanics but if you asked people who played them both they would probably say something to the tune of “Yea they were both brutal but always worth it”. That’s because irrespective of specific mechanics the balance between effort of reward was harmonious.

UO had a very different kind of in game community. The systems for things like chat and friend lists were barebones compared to XIV. Yet, I remember having some of the most deep and meaningful social encounters of my MMO career there. Mechanics are irrelevant in the face of true value. I wrote peoples names down on paper all the time and never gave it a second thought, in fact in retrospect I think it greatly deepened the immersion to physically write names down. Again, another example of how mechanics need to be subservient to the larger experience of the game.

Edit:
Retrospect is one of the most useful tools I have in explaining my experience. I think most people (myself included) would have characterized in the moment that running from Sandy to the Dunes to party was massively not fun; however, in retrospect I'm able to appreciate that it made arriving in Valkurm a massive reward in itself.

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Originally Posted by MiaGrey

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Reading your analysis of grind reminded me of the clicker game sub-genre (a much better example than LoL). This would be a good one to reference, as they are wildly popular despite being nothing but reward generators. The player literally clicks, for hours, thats the entire game, but the robust reward system makes the experience "worth it". The evidence is there that grinding work as a device to keep people engaged, but the reward system in place needs to support the grind itself, and I don't think the dev team fully understand the importance of a well balanced reward system as opposed to making sure everyone gets equal share.

yes, I am.

Not sure if I mentioned this already... but the only thing I would change is the weekly caps. I would make it a rolling cap instead of resetting it to 450 each week. That way on week 2 the cap is 900 instead of being reset to 450... week 3 would be 1350 and so forth. That way you're not penalized for not capping in a week. For example, in week 2 if you capped week 1 then you're tally would be 450/900. Let's say you didn't cap week 1 and only got 180 tomes... well you're week 2 tally would be 180/900. You don't play at all until week 3? Tally would be 0/1350. Makes more sense to do a rolling update than a cap reset.

Even if they kept the cap and made the cap per job it would be better imo.

I stopped farming tombstones a long time ago and I in-fact quit the game 2 times already because I'm sick of dungeon grinding and I only came back because I miss the story, the world and my character. Lucky that Stormblood is around the corner or else I would quit a third time because I cannot progress at my leisure by doing small things on the side other than dungeons. Let's not forget also that equipment becomes obsolete after only 3 months with this type of progression.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't mind the tombstones but what they should do is allow people to farm them however they want and not force them to farm the same 3 dungeons each day for 3 months. Who thought that was a good idea?!? Just give us a fair amount of tombstones for every activity and take into consideration that it should be fairly possible to cap each week by doing a reasonable amount of side quests with no dungeons. That way, the people wanting to cap quick will do dungeons and the people annoyed with dungeons will cap by doing other things such as gathering, daily quests and other stuff like that. Hell, add more open world content for those wanting to cap tombstones and enjoy the open world instead of closed instances all the time.

I mean... We've been doing this for 3+ years. SE is blessed to be able to keep its player base despite this HUGE flaw in design (probably because of the world, lore, a love for their character or simply extremely low standards).

I hope. I HOPE they thought about changing this shitty recipe for Stormblood... Please...

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Originally Posted by Hito-Shura

I stopped farming tombstones a long time ago

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No one in this game has ever farmed tombstones anyway :P

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

Edit: I am not justifying grinds that aren't fun, varying the activity is important (as is not cheating players with RNG too much), but it is still ultimately a to do list of chores for a shiny carrot, that is the core design of MMOs, and is completely different to the core design of LoL (which is more akin to real life sports).

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I'm more inclined to call it the core problem of MMO(RPG)s and part of the reason why the MMORPG genre is in decline in general. I mean, most don't publish their player numbers for good reason, but I couldn't name a single MMORPG on the market that's currently celebrating a large influx of players and even WoWs playerbase is but a fraction of what it was. I totally agree that this is how MMORPG commonly work - but I do not agree that this is a good thing.

As for the clicker genre - It's kinda funny that this is brought up, because it's also commonly called the "idle game" genre. It's schtick is exponential progression: You start out with only 1 cookie, dollar or whatever and go up to billions of cookies "per second". How? Simple, by letting the game play for you. In other words: You get all the joy of progression (I already mentioned progression as something people enjoy) for pretty much no work, because the game does that for you. You just sit back and enjoy the escalating numbers and occasionally decide what to do with those numbers. It goes so far that clicking manually swiftly becomes unfeasible in the genre.
So, uhm...with that in mind, do you really want to call exponential progress for doing little to nothing a "robust reward system"? If you try to translate such a concept to this game, it would mean getting exponential iLvL increases just for for standing around AFK and sending your retainers off ever so often. While I can imagine that to be somewhat interesting, once you try to actually use that i9999999999 gear in content, the game would break horribly.

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Originally Posted by Hito-Shura

What I'm trying to say is that I don't mind the tombstones but what they should do is allow people to farm them however they want and not force them to farm the same 3 dungeons each day for 3 months.

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You can also get tomestones outside of the expert roulette, like PvP

I posted in this thread back in the day to say that yes I am tired of tomestones and wanted something different. I have since reconsidered my position on the matter and came to a new conclusion.

I want the tomestone level gear to drop in higher difficulty dungeons with some sort of lockout, maybe once a day. However tomestones are still earned but rather than the only avenue to get gear, they would function as "rng insurance."

Expert is not the only way to get tomestones.
- PvP.
- Hunts.
- PotD.
- Treasure maps.
- Aquapolis.
- Wondrous Tails.

End game content gets beaten by players who don't /need/ the tome gear in 4 days. The weekly cap only punishes those of us who aren't as good. I dunno.... it's annoying but.... maybe keep the weekly cap but make it class specific. So we could get 450 tomes towards tank/healer/caster/melee whatever you earn the tomes on you can only spend them on that gear. I'd love to gear up my healer too but it's like... 4th on my list. So it's sitting in unmelded crafted gear.