Allagan Tomestone of Astronomy should have a seasonal cap, not a weekly cap

I would totally support it. I've never been a fan of daily/weekly stuff, because it makes it so that you can't allocate your game time however you want. On busy weeks you'll be behind, on free weeks you won't be able to use that time to catch up.
But truth is, they don't really want people to not play every day and week, unlike what they say.

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Originally Posted by technole

Keeps people subbed and having to login do content versus taking a break months later and expecting gear to be spoon fed..

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well actually, months later you will be spoonfed, since that gear will be no longer relevant and there will be new one, and the old one will be dirty cheap. Problem is only if you take a few weeks break, instead of dropping the sub.
I actually have a few weeks vacation planned in Februaru and I'm here worrying about the missed tomes, which is very dumb.

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Originally Posted by JamieRose

I don't really understand the point of the cap. Why is it so important to keep people away from gear that they clearly need?

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Because without the limitation, people burn themselves out to get everything in a single day.

But mostly it's to pace out upgrades to match the weekly lockout on Savage and Normal Raids.

The world first raiders will use crafted gear, overmelds and off the wall strats to achieve a week 1 clear.
For the masses, the weekly upgrade of item level means each week they get closer to pushing through that same content by overgearing it.

It's nothing to do with padding out content. It's just upgrade pacing.
You technically do not need any of the weekly gear to clear the hardest content currently in the game.

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Originally Posted by technole

450/weekly during most of expansion has been the normal course of action since 2013, not going to change. Keeps people subbed and having to login do content versus taking a break months later and expecting gear to be spoon fed.

Savage raiders need to cap every week to make use of i600 tome upgrades that drop from the floors, the majority do.

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Tbf, it used to be 300/week. The 2000 caps, likewise, used to be far less. So, numbers can change. They already have, after all.

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Originally Posted by Evergrey

It's only FOMO if people are afraid of falling behind those that can keep up with the weekly cap.

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It's FOMO so long as people believe they will have less content available to them as a result of getting the rewards of the weekly cap later than others, such as by being locked out of parties in Week 2/3, when they have next have time to really play, because those parties are now asking for over i580. We see this most tiers, so that fear isn't unjustified.

I'd argue that we should definitely still have caps, but I see nothing wrong with having seasonal caps instead of punishing players for having to take a week off from hitting their 5+ Expert Roulettes quota.

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Originally Posted by IdowhatIwant

I wouldn't call the cap a FOMO mechanic that doesn't really make sense cause all the content and stone gear is always available.

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It is a FOMO mechanic because if you miss the weekly cap once then you have never the chance to catch up the missing tomestones in the future again. It is mathematically impossible to get the missing tomestones because the next cap will stop you. And that is the reason why i strongly dislike those artifical caps. They do add nothing positive to the game.

Cheers

FF14: "We respect the player's time"

Also FF14: "Better do this irrelevant trash 0 challenge content that you have no use for every day so you can get these weekly tomestones for BiS gear!"

Personally I don't mind, but I'm just amused people buy into this motto so much when it's such a blatant lie.

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Originally Posted by Michieltjuhh

FF14: "We respect the player's time"

Also FF14: "Better do this irrelevant trash 0 challenge content that you have no use for every day so you can get these weekly tomestones for BiS gear!"

Personally I don't mind, but I'm just amused people buy into this motto so much when it's such a blatant lie.

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This, since SE cannot come out with a decent long term goal, they just make you run the same dungeons over and over.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

It is a FOMO mechanic because if you miss the weekly cap once then you have never the chance to catch up the missing tomstones in the future again.

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As long as you can obtain more tomestones than what is required to get everything, there is no real issue though. It just puts you 1 week behind until you got a full set of gear. And the rest of the time you can still collect everything.

But i think a buffer system would be better. So instead of just 1 week, it buffers 3 weeks. Giving a casual player more time to get the tomestones.

Artificial caps are however needed! Without caps some players will rush and have everything far earlier than everyone else. And this will cause a major gap in gear between players. That is a problem as it can cause players to reject other players because they dont have the gear yet. Restricting the content keeps those players together and a missing piece of gear is not going to matter as much as a full set. Toxic players will still make an issue out of this, but most realy wont care at that point.

FOMO is only a problem if you cant reach the weekly limit, and this purely depends on how long it takes to reach the limit (this is usualy where the true issue lies, and not FOMO itself). If it only takes 1h a week, then sure, it still forces you to play. But at that point... you are paying to play the game anyway. As soon as a system forces players to login daily, or spend a lot of time to complete a task, then it starts to feel like a grind, rather than just a balancing mechanic.

FOMO is however always personal per player. And if you want to go extreme, i could complain that i cant get any of those tomes in the first place (dont have EW). But i already know that later on catching up becomes easy. The only real thing im missing out is the phase in which players are trying to find out the new mechanics of bosses. And i dont even complain about that.

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Originally Posted by Michieltjuhh

FF14: "We respect the player's time"

Also FF14: "Better do this irrelevant trash 0 challenge content that you have no use for every day so you can get these weekly tomestones for BiS gear!"

Personally I don't mind, but I'm just amused people buy into this motto so much when it's such a blatant lie.

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Additionally: All jobs on one character! (But not if you actually want to gear them simultaneously since Savage lockouts and weekly currency caps are character-based, not job-based, forcing you to have a character per armor class and do n times the grind if you wanted to progress on each at the same time.)

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Originally Posted by Escalon

This, since SE cannot come out with a decent long term goal, they just make you run the same dungeons over and over.

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The sad thing is even just offering upscaled old content for variety's sake would make hours-played systems like tomestones far more bearable. Yet 3 expansions' worth of requests to have more than just 2-3 dungeons available for said grind have gone ignored in entirety.

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Originally Posted by lezard21

It's called Content Padding, and it's important when you don't develop enough content to prevent your playerbase from unsubscribing

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I hate the cap, but it's quite literally impossible to create content faster than players can consume it.

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Originally Posted by Michieltjuhh

FF14: "We respect the player's time"

Also FF14: "Better do this irrelevant trash 0 challenge content that you have no use for every day so you can get these weekly tomestones for BiS gear!"

Personally I don't mind, but I'm just amused people buy into this motto so much when it's such a blatant lie.

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This is such a laughably bad take.

If you don't like the content, then you don't like the content. Do you and by all means have an opinion, but to suggest that running expert 5 times a week to the accumulation of at most 2 maybe 2 and half hours of dungeon content a week is some how disrespectful to a players time, falls a little short of it being a joke.

Try playing WoW in it's era of Warforging and Titanforging; basically a High Quality drop and Higher Quality drop that exists for ALL gear including highest end raid gear that have nightmarishly low drop rates. Two hours a week is nothing in comparison to that type of torture.

To the topic at hand...

The cap is fine as is imo. It exists to both slow players burn through content and also allow those with the skills to clear the tier some glory, while those without as much get caught up with weekly nerfs in the form of further access to higher ilvl gear to help boost them through said tier.

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Originally Posted by Makeda

Actually caps like this first started in WoW back in late Burning Crusade when they started seeing people stay logged in AND active for days at a time - playing until they passed out or (as in the case of one couple playing in an internet cafe - which I think was from EQ before WoW came out) the police showed up because their kids had died of starvation back at the house and somebody called in the smell...

Thus we have limits on dailies, weeklies, and so on, to get people to log out...

The tomestome cap may limit some casuals like me that aren't logging in a lot, but it ALSO keeps the super hardcores from pushing so hard that everyone else feels pressure to keep up or get left behind.

And anyone can just buy the crafted gear instead anyway...

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Lol it's not because kids were dying, SE is a business and they understand what it takes to get people logging back in to keep playing. Sure Yoshi P may say "Take breaks, play other games" But you and I both know that's not how people play MMORPGs and SE knows it as well. lezard was right, it's because they need to pad out their content. FF14 launched with hardly anything to do at max level, we got two EX bosses that were some of the easiest fights in this games history, and now a raid where again the bosses are insanely easy and dumbed down.

I think just tweaking it so the cap period is two weeks while keeping tomes at 900 would be a decent enough change. That way the pacing is still the same (still able to get 900 tomes every two weeks as it is now..), but it gives more flexibility to the player.

If for some reason someone can't play as much during the first week, they could then push a little harder and still get the max tomes during the 2nd week. Or they can farm up their tomes right away, buy that left-side item in a single-cap period, and focus on other things for the remainder of the time. But again, the pacing would still be the same as the amount of tomes/gear you can get in two weeks would remain the same...just with extra freedom added.

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Originally Posted by ApolloGenX

Honestly, the caps just contribute to why I unsub after story complete and would come back at the end of an expansion... I could get all the goodies... do all the things, and then move on to the next expansion. Totally bypass the farming/gating mechanics.

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I see you're a gentleman of culture.

This also helps with the story too... having a lot to do at once makes it much more fun than being drip fed little by little.

The caps are there for a reason so players dont burn themselves out. It is also there as a balance pace for savage. Can you imagine if there was no cap. People would just dungeon spam the first day and then jump in savage in full 590 gear.

You have to consider the cap from all aspects of the game not just from a casual perspective.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

It is a FOMO mechanic because if you miss the weekly cap once then you have never the chance to catch up the missing tomstones in the future again. It is mathematically impossible to get the missing tombstones because the next cap will stop you. And that is the reason why i strongly dislike those artifical caps. They do add nothing positive to the game.

Cheers

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In that sense, it's not FOMO because tomestones are fungible. Those missing tomestones are no different than the tomestones you can still get.

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Originally Posted by Kyuuen

This is such a laughably bad take.

If you don't like the content, then you don't like the content. Do you and by all means have an opinion, but to suggest that running expert 5 times a week to the accumulation of at most 2 maybe 2 and half hours of dungeon content a week is some how disrespectful to a players time, falls a little short of it being a joke.

Try playing WoW in it's era of Warforging and Titanforging; basically a High Quality drop and Higher Quality drop that exists for ALL gear including highest end raid gear that have nightmarishly low drop rates. Two hours a week is nothing in comparison to that type of torture.

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Speaking of bad takes, acting like it's not disrespectful to the player's time to make them do the same 3 dungeons they've already been doing for weeks on the same incredibly low difficulty for a new reward that isn't as efficient to farm if you want to get it all over with in one session so you have to spread it out across multiple days, is definitely up there.

As for warforging and titanforging - you entirely miss the point as to WHY it was unhealthy. For people that enjoyed the game - no matter what type of content - this was probably the best time they ever had. The problem was that it turned the game more into an Eastern grindfest, since no matter what you did, your time would be spent gaining more power, but in no way shape or form were you forced to do content you did not enjoy - unless you did not enjoy anything at all, because everything was rewarding. Since when is playing what you want to in the game and actually getting rewarded for it torture?

Support op, no reason the cap can't increase over time.

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Originally Posted by Michieltjuhh

Speaking of bad takes, acting like it's not disrespectful to the player's time to make them do the same 3 dungeons they've already been doing for weeks on the same incredibly low difficulty for a new reward that isn't as efficient to farm if you want to get it all over with in one session so you have to spread it out across multiple days, is definitely up there.

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You can do more than the same 3 dungeons. The entire roulette system as well as possibly other contents like hunts can give tomestones.

It's probably hard to imagine for people who can play consistently every week. But there are people who can't. When I was in the military, for example, I was often unable to come home for 10-15 days at a time, but when I get to go home I would get 3-5 days off at a time.

What I adovate for, though, is to abolish the currency cap concept and use an allowance instead.

Each week we are given 450 tomestones allowance (if we have an active subscription), and as we earn tomestones, the allowance is reduced. Yes, like how Leve allowances are handled. If you must, cap the allowances at 2000; it will still be worlds better than the hard 450 per week disappearing if you don't clock-in consistently.

This would mean that we can catch up even after a week or two away from the game, but our progression is still capped just like it is now.

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Originally Posted by linayar

You can do more than the same 3 dungeons. The entire roulette system as well as possibly other contents like hunts can give tomestones.

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Yes, you can do Main Scenario Roulette where you get 50/450 per day, which is basically a 30 minute to 1 hour long forced low quality commercial break from playing the game where you occasionally have to try solo mobs as downscaled level 50 with 3 abilities while the rest of your party is afk. Or you can do Alliance Raids Roulette for 50/450 which will also take 30 minutes to 1 hour, full of people who consistently die to mechanics that the boss doesn't even have, or are afk in the back, or both, while you are again downscaled to a level where many of your abilities are unlikely to be accessible. Of course, you can use the Trial Roulette or the Normal Raids Roulette which consist of the same aforementioned problems but are generally faster. They, however, only give 15/450 and 20/450 respectively.

And god forbid you'd do it on a low level job so you still get experience - nope, have to do it on a level 90. And lets not forget that unlike those 3 dungeons, this is way older, more worn out content, too.

Or you do zergfest hunt bosses with 2 mechanics that you have to fail to understand then never fail again, that are basically just there to remind you that this game is an MMORPG and not a queueing simulator (even if half the time spent on those is teleporting from zone to zone), but offer no actual substance otherwise. And in order to even participate you need to go out of your way to find a method of getting invited - generally Discord, which is third party software and therefore, technically forbidden.

Yep, that's respecting the player's time!

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Originally Posted by Zfz

It's probably hard to imagine for people who can play consistently every week. But there are people who can't. When I was in the military, for example, I was often unable to come home for 10-15 days at a time, but when I get to go home I would get 3-5 days off at a time.

What I adovate for, though, is to abolish the currency cap concept and use an allowance instead.

Each week we are given 450 tomestones allowance (if we have an active subscription), and as we earn tomestones, the allowance is reduced. Yes, like how Leve allowances are handled. If you must, cap the allowances at 2000; it will still be worlds better than the hard 450 per week disappearing if you don't clock-in consistently.

This would mean that we can catch up even after a week or two away from the game, but our progression is still capped just like it is now.

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I think this is a good idea.

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Originally Posted by Michieltjuhh

Speaking of bad takes, acting like it's not disrespectful to the player's time to make them do the same 3 dungeons they've already been doing for weeks on the same incredibly low difficulty for a new reward that isn't as efficient to farm if you want to get it all over with in one session so you have to spread it out across multiple days, is definitely up there.

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Again, you are entitled to your opinion, but liking and disliking content is not the same thing as respecting the players time. Two hours out of your week is far from disrespectful. And if you WANT a challenge fine, go farm your tomestones from Savage clears only. The challenge is there.

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As for warforging and titanforging - you entirely miss the point as to WHY it was unhealthy. For people that enjoyed the game - no matter what type of content - this was probably the best time they ever had. The problem was that it turned the game more into an Eastern grindfest, since no matter what you did, your time would be spent gaining more power, but in no way shape or form were you forced to do content you did not enjoy - unless you did not enjoy anything at all, because everything was rewarding. Since when is playing what you want to in the game and actually getting rewarded for it torture?

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I know plenty of people that enjoyed the game for multiple reasons. However end of the day, if you are one of those people that want to feel as though you're done with gearing up, you may never know the feeling simply because of bad RNG and poor game design. The few that would probably stand for your argument I can guarantee are far outweighed by those that felt screwed over and punished by that design.

The entire currency to obtain gear system has always been bad.

I'd rather have rare drops in dungeons and dungeon grind to acquire gear.

I see some of the comments in this thread took a real tangent. At no point did I ask for the cap of 450 tomestones per week to either increase or removed. The actual pace of acquiring tomestone gear, in my opinion, is acceptable and doesn't need changing. All I ask for in a seasonal cap is the removal of a punishment for players that either start this process late or have to miss a week from the start of a tier. Everyone gets their 590 gear (current tier) tomestone items in the end, there's just freedom in how you earn that average of 450 a week.

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Originally Posted by Haseno

The entire currency to obtain gear system has always been bad.

I'd rather have rare drops in dungeons and dungeon grind to acquire gear.

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The problem is also how only the most recent stuff gives the tome and also only on a cap level job... unlock the tome once you did story and reached cap level with any job. Just let us keep unused caps, so you can catch up after 3-4 weeks, at least...

The reality is ppl WILL always no life grind the highest gear anyways, be it exodus or craft. Just like back then during the Anima where some ppl ran aetherochemical like 200x for fast tome and could never see it again lol

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Originally Posted by Haseno

I'd rather have rare drops in dungeons and dungeon grind to acquire gear.

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A post made by someone who has never tried to get dungeon gear for glamour.

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

As long as you can obtain more tomestones than what is required to get everything, there is no real issue though. It just puts you 1 week behind until you got a full set of gear. And the rest of the time you can still collect everything.

But i think a buffer system would be better. So instead of just 1 week, it buffers 3 weeks. Giving a casual player more time to get the tomestones.

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OK, maybe i see this thing too technically ... :confused: :confused: :confused:

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

Artificial caps are however needed! Without caps some players will rush and have everything far earlier than everyone else. And this will cause a major gap in gear between players. That is a problem as it can cause players to reject other players because they dont have the gear yet.

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You are right. And your answers show also how fundamentally flawed this kind of currency is. :) The tomestone system is an almost one-to-one copy from WoW's heroic badges system, which they introduced in Burning Crusade. And it has exact the same problems. It is way too effective that one can ignore it and it overwhelms everything else at the moment. And because you get so good items for so little efford they have to limit it. This currency system has only one advantage: you do not really waste your time when you do some content.


Cheers

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Originally Posted by RobynDaBank

Ehmmm... what?!

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https://kotaku.com/the-story-of-a-co...hei-1611995782
The correction I need to note is that it wasn't Everquest, but another lesser known MMO.

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Originally Posted by Kyrj

Lol it's not because kids were dying, SE is a business and they understand what it takes to get people logging back in to keep playing.

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Daily caps predate FFXIV. As I think I noted in my first post, they came around during the Burning Crusade expansion of WoW. And yes, they were put in place to combat player addictive behavior that was leading to growing issues both inside the community and with it's perception by the outside world.

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Daily_quest
- That predates FFXIV. FFXIV just copied WoW on this issue as by the time of FFXIV putting these limits had become a norm to combat the issues that had been seen in earlier MMOs (see linked article above).

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Originally Posted by Diert

A post made by someone who has never tried to get dungeon gear for glamour.

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Doing so for Glamour is nowhere near comparable. There's nothing more thrilling than getting a rare drop on a powerful item to make yourself more powerful.

Grinding dungeons repeatedly to farm currency sucks the soul out a lot of what made MMORPG's great.

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Originally Posted by Haseno

Doing so for Glamour is nowhere near comparable. There's nothing more thrilling than getting a rare drop on a powerful item to make yourself more powerful.

Grinding dungeons repeatedly to farm currency sucks the soul out a lot of what made MMORPG's great.

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It still sucks to grind for a specific gear in BiS, only to constantly not have it drop because RNG was not in your favor. Glamour is in the same category because it ultimately depends on what that player values more in a gear piece. I remember people grinding for Skalla pieces and never getting the specific drop they wanted after 20 attempts. 20 attempts to not even get a guarantee for the thing you want? That's even worse than just being able to buy it after a certain amount of time IMO.

The only change I'd want for currency caps is if you didn't cap your tomes in one of the weeks, the weekly cap can extend in your next week based on how much you didn't cap the previous week, up to 2000 (assuming you're subbed for those weeks). That way you aren't forced to constantly login and grind to be at the same level as everyone else, but you aren't punished if you aren't able to login for a long period of time due to real life commitments.

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Originally Posted by Johners

Capped Tomestones are fine, it just needs to be capped seasonally and not weekly. Under the current model, if you miss a week it's 450 missed Tomestones but if you cap seasonally, you can still keep up with the overall cap.

Let's say, for example, you play week 1 and 3 but can't play during week 2 for whatever reason. On the weekly cap you only earn 900. On a season cap, you earn 450 in week 1 and then a further 900 in week 3 which averages to 450 a week.

This is a much more casual friendly system as you're not required to log in and hit that cap every week. Very handy given the current queueing situation but just handy in general for people with commitments elsewhere. You won't outpace the intended level of progression which is earning 450 Tomestones a week, you just get more flexibility on when to earn them.

Likewise, when the weekly cap becomes 900 per week later in the tier, you just increase the seasonal cap by 900 a week instead of 450.

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just do/join map parties, you'll be up to your ears in tomestones

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Originally Posted by Haseno

Doing so for Glamour is nowhere near comparable. There's nothing more thrilling than getting a rare drop on a powerful item to make yourself more powerful.

Grinding dungeons repeatedly to farm currency sucks the soul out a lot of what made MMORPG's great.

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tying your character power/progression to rng is awful

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Originally Posted by grinkdaboy

just do/join map parties, you'll be up to your ears in tomestones

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Addressing the efficiency does not address that those who are unable to play, at all, for a week+ at a time literally cannot recoup the lost week's tomes. A seasonal cap would. It still limits how quickly people can easily gear above crafted gear levels via grinds (as opposed to Savage), but no longer punishes players for, say, being on a 10-day rotation.

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Originally Posted by grinkdaboy

tying your character power/progression to rng is awful

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Tying your progression to a guarantee of acquisition is more awful.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

It is a FOMO mechanic because if you miss the weekly cap once then you have never the chance to catch up the missing tomstones in the future again.

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If this was "forever", that might be an issue, but there's always an endpoint on any one type of tomes being exclusive. Missed a week of Astronomy farming because you specifically want the Radiant gear? Wait a few months and they'll be the easy farmable tomes, and you'll have something new to pursue. And then it'll all be outdated except as a stepping stone to the next big thing anyway.

It's a temporary missing out, while FOMO is more "do it now or you'll never have the chance again", like preorder bonuses.

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Originally Posted by Johners

This is a much more casual friendly system as you're not required to log in and hit that cap every week. Very handy given the current queueing situation but just handy in general for people with commitments elsewhere. You won't outpace the intended level of progression which is earning 450 Tomestones a week, you just get more flexibility on when to earn them.

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Why would casual require more tomes at once? You can do anything casual in 570-580 gear which is uncapped. Theres nothing broken about the system, its been like since 2.0 upgraded the cap from 300 to 450 weekly. Casual friendly means youre gonna max out one or two class top, at 6.1 that is. So 450 is prefect to have something to chew on if you arent doing anything demanding.

There is no FOMO why do people keep saying that, if you leave for 3 weeks you don't suddenly have extra slots of gear to farm for. By the time new gear is on the vendor the old gear is in the uncapped category. You literally CANNOT miss out. There is an end point to the gear progression someone who farms the whole set 3 weeks ago gains nothing above you while you farm 3 weeks later. Once new gear is available current gear drops to the other tomestone making it not limited anymore. Literally zero reason to have a catch up.

For casuals like me & wife, I actually support this. Maybe this system only works if you stay sub or something. To be fair to SE.

We can actually login once a month and get all the tomes we need for the new gears :D

If this is so necessary, can they at least raise the weekly cap to 900 so I can at least get a chest piece in a week?

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Originally Posted by JamieRose

If this is so necessary, can they at least raise the weekly cap to 900 so I can at least get a chest piece in a week?

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That's a completely different matter, though? The OP is asking to be able to make up for the weeks in which they cannot play, not accelerate gear acquisition.