Public Poll: Are FATES a good idea for FFXIV?

This poll is pretty meaningless. I have nothing against FATE as an alternate means of gaining experience points. But I hate the horrible NM FATE system with an undying passion. What am I supposed to vote for?

I think they are relying on the FATE system to fill too many roles right now and so a good portion of FATE are really lack luster. But I think rather than scrapping the whole idea they need to step back and re-evaluate what the FATE system can and can't accomplish and then tweak what they try to do with it.

Fates are no fun they are horrible, bored etc. If they really want to do something they need to do besieged from XI and not make it easy mode but where players can and will die.

Seems like SE REALLY loves their FATES. 1.0 had bells, 2.0 has FATES. Seems like every single event since 2.0 launched was a FATE. We get it SE, you really like FATEs, but come on, enough is enough. If the Gilgamesh fight is a FATE.....ooooh boy.

I haven't voted yet. FATEs are good if you're running around and happen to come across one. They're good if you need that last little bit of oomph to level, but like others have said, I dislike how they are (were?) the go-to leveling method.

I love the idea of FATEs, but I feel that they are done poorly in ARR. They need to do a better job at scaling enemy number and stats based on the number of players participating.

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Originally Posted by Thriar

edit: Also nice contradiction in your post. Invasions were threatless yet they took over your quest hubs. Hmmm....

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No contradiction. They were not threatening, they were an inconvenience at the best of times, i could solo them as a Tankspec Warrior dipping into Reaver but it was more productive to ignore it and let it go away on its own. The 'rewards' were a joke anyway.

Hmm, invasions
I wish they bring garlean invasions again, like in 1.21 ^^

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlTL9i97UZM

Just wanted to state my opinion on this matter in case this thread does get reviewed by a Forum Rep...

I chose not to select either vote. I like FATEs and the idea behind them, however I do not like the way SE implements them into our game play.

I think it's cool to see instances pop up in the overworld, and to have the ability to choose whether or not you participate in them. Sometimes, I am farming hunting logs, see a FATE pop and decide to join. Other times, I am busy gathering and choose not to join , and the fact of them being there doesn't affect what I am doing if I choose to ignore. They are a fun way to kill a few minutes while waiting in a dungeon queue, and does add a little bit of life to the bland overworld experience.

What I disagree with, is that SE puts FATE's into quest progression far too much. By 'far too much', I mean it shouldn't be done at all IMO. From my standpoint, a FATE should be something that I choose to do, or not to do. I don't like having to wait for a quest progression FATE to spawn, with umpteen other people there waiting to zerg it down in 15 seconds. It takes all sense of adventure and difficulty out of the encounter. Regardless of 'scaling difficulty', no FATE in Eorzea is hard. The HP pool of the enemies either increase or decrease and that's about it. There aren't new mechanics that happen if the player count surpasses 20, for instance.

Just to throw my 2 gil in, I would love to see the Guildhest system used more for these encounters. For example, the Lightning FATEs. If they could have scaled the difficulty of an encounter to 4 players and let us go into instanced hests to progress quests, I feel like it would be a much more enjoyable way to participate in these. If it's too much trouble to code a Hest for a seasonal event that will be gone after a certain amount of time, so be it. At least utilize the Hest system for something static like the Crystal Tower FATEs. In the hest system, you have all types of possibilities to play around with the mechanics of the fight to make it more engaging, rather than just stand there and spam your hardest hitting moves. Give us some variety!! I fear that our Shantotto instance we will get soon (that numerous people are excited about) will get degraded into another zerg fest because SE chose to make it a FATE. The higher level hests have some really cool mechanics that force players to pay more attention to their surroundings and obstacles, rather than just zerg zerg zerg.

TL;DR I like FATEs when they are my choice to participate, not when we are forced to progress story/quests with them. Please leave FATEs as they were meant to be and as you advertised them to be before FFXIV:ARR released; one-off instances that you can choose to participate in or not.

Thank you!

I'm sure FATEs looked great on paper, but their actual implementation sucks. GW2 got it mostly right....they should go take some notes.

I selected Like, but that comes with quite a few reservations. While I do enjoy FATEs, both from a gameplay and lore perspective (they throw in a lot of nice lore in some descriptions, which is always appreciated), they're not particularly well implemented right now. These are just some problems and solutions I'm coming up with off the top of my head, so take out of 'em what you will, but frankly, anything may be better than what we have right now.

1.) The FATEs where a large number of normal enemies spawn have always felt incredibly arbitrary. Yes, there's this massive outpouring of Grenades near the Amajina Mines in Northern Thanalan, we need to do something! ...or not, since they just kinda disappear. Why not increase the number spawned and their spawn rate at night/day? By actively changing the spawn rate, and the amount that spawn during certain time periods, you're making the world seem more 'alive.' You're giving observable patterns to the monsters, and us players can actually take advantage of that. Maybe during the night, monsters of the Peiste-species have their levels increased by 5, and the amount spawned doubles, whereas during the day they retain their current spawn rate and strength. This would tell us that Peistes hunt at night, and if we're lower level we might want to avoid them at night, or if we're higher leveled, that we may want to hunt them at night for exp or materials. This could be applied to many different monsters, even have some that spawn only during the day or only during the night. Heck, some FATEs mention monsters migrating during certain seasons--why not have that be the case? Perhaps certain birds can be found in different maps depending on the season? In the Summer they're in the Shroud, and in the Winter they're in Limsa? The possibilities are endless here!

2.) I really enjoy boss FATEs. However, I think those could be implemented a little better. Perhaps taking a page from FFXII's book would help. In order for a high-ranking Ixali preist to appear, maybe we need to have a lot of players defeating Ixal in Natalan within a certain timeframe (100 in 1 hour, for example). What I loved about FFXII was the way you had to hunt down the Marks or rare monsters--you had to perform certain tasks or show up during certain weather before they could appear--and I think this game could really use that right now. Maybe to summon the Ice Sprite boss in Coethas, it has to be during a blizzard, and an interactable spot will appear on the ground where you need to offer X# of Ice Shards/Crystals/Clusters to make it appear. When it does, the FATE will pop, and defeating it will return all of the Ice etc. that were offered to the proper players, as well as a chance to drop a rare weapon or armor that boosts Ice Resistance, or a crafting material to make a piece of furniture--whatever it is, something to make killing it worth it.

3.) Chain FATEs, I feel, are the best implemented so far, given that there is either an on-going story behind them, and/or they end up affecting the world in some way. That being said, I think they can still be improved. Perhaps by giving them triggers like boss FATEs, or simply increasing the consequences for success or failure. Maybe if you lose Highbridge in Eastern Thanalan all of the soldiers will relocate to Camp Drybone, while the Qiqirn are now blockading the bridge. Talk to the Captain in Drybone, and you'll begin a FATE where you go and storm Highbridge, pushing the Qiqirn back to their camp. Just adding that extra little bit of world-changing events can help.

4.) Odin and Behemoth...everyone's already said their piece and I pretty much agree. Rather than have the FATEs pop for 30 minutes every other day, make them appear for a prolonged period of time (maybe three or four hours) where you can enter an instance with a party to fight them (or maybe even form an Alliance when you queue up for the fight?). Win or lose, you get that one-shot to fight them, then you've gotta wait for the next opportunity. It'd give more people the opportunity to fight them, and the fights wouldn't be such a mess with entire servers crashing, attacks not registering, etc. And just give one token for a victory instead of three or however many there are for a Gold-rank.

This went on a lot longer than I intended, but I wanted to put that all out there, haha!

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Originally Posted by Sylve

No contradiction. They were not threatening, they were an inconvenience at the best of times, i could solo them as a Tankspec Warrior dipping into Reaver but it was more productive to ignore it and let it go away on its own. The 'rewards' were a joke anyway.

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Actually no they weren't. If you completed enough zone event of your level range, you could buy epic planar equipment that would last you a good 5 to 10 levels. Those zone events were also another gear upgrade path for those that did not raid. You could get almost raid equivalent gear if you did enough zone events. The rewards were not a joke and clearly you did not research enough on it. I never went down that path because I could clear all the raid content but it was definitely a viable option and I sure as hell used that option when SL released to get into the first tier of raiding.

The rewards were there, you just chose not to participate in them and that's fine but don't say that invasions were pointless and meaningless.

Fates as they were IMHO were fine. The problem came as we are all lazy gamers and as Fates were THE best way to level up to 50 as fast as possible (as SE seems to nudge us in that leveling speed). SO pretty much everyone jumped on the fate bandwagon to grind out exp. Jump to 2.1, pretty much no one does FATES as the exp gain just isn't there anymore as compared to random dungeon and other activities that got a boost. Fun or not, if the exp isn't there, my feeling is that the community will ignore it =/

Now that fates are not spammed to level like before I think they are great. There might need to be some adjustments to how the difficulty of the fate is determined though.

Its so difficult to run fates now in lower levels. Very few people do them, and most aren't exactly soloable.

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Originally Posted by Thriar

The rewards were there, you just chose not to participate in them and that's fine but don't say that invasions were pointless and meaningless.

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In the time it took you to save up for the one epic planar piece, you outleveled its usefulness and needed to start saving for the next one. Unless you got lucky with a string of events with a dozen people around, you were getting minimum rewards due to the time taken to solo them.

So yes, for the most part, they were an inconvenience. FATEs are a choice, and i like that i can choose to participate or not. Rift never gave me the option of continuing to do normal quests around the event, it forced them down my throat.
Also, there was no variety whatsoever in the Rifts. Pull a rift down, you get a spawn of some weak mobs, then some slightly less weak mobs, then a lolboss. If you had enough people to beat the timer, you got the bonus waves... Which was more of the same.
never said they were meaningless. I said they were without threat, and mostly an irritant on low pop Shards.