Communal outcry against sub-prime gear lockouts

SE,

Remember how you got away from the "hardcore" aspect of having to wait hours and hours to get groups together to complete content in XI? Well, it seems to a large section of the community that you have come full circle by locking out gear acquisition for the top 3 tiers of gear which are/will available. You have a portion of your playerbase who plays once or twice a week, complete their weekly lockouts, and wait for the next week. This portion of players will only increase as time goes on and more players reach end-game.

My question here is: How do you plan to address the increasing frustration with all of these gear lockouts?

We understand from your previous statements regarding myth cap and coil difficulty that your direction would be to ease restrictions as time goes on, but currently you have many players who:
A) Want to enjoy secondary jobs but cannot obtain gear for them due to lockouts.
B) Want to play more FFXIV, but have little motivation, due to aforementioned problems.

We get that top-tier gear drops should be mitigated, but preventing us from obtaining sub-prime gear for alternate jobs is really grinding our gears. Would one of the community managers please address the issue of many players reaching the point where they desire to level other jobs but have to sacrifice progressing their main job in order to do so?

i can answer that easily. As time goes on we will have enough content in circulation that gives decent awards in limited amounts so we keep doing different types of content instead of just spamming 1. It sucks now because we are at the early stages of this, but it will be much better in a year. come 2.1 we will have coil, CT and extreme modes as high end content. by say.. 2.4 we will have at least 5 or 6 different things.

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Originally Posted by Hanabira

i can answer that easily. As time goes on we will have enough content in circulation that gives decent awards in limited amounts so we keep doing different types of content instead of just spamming 1. It sucks now because we are at the early stages of this, but it will be much better in a year. come 2.1 we will have coil, CT and extreme modes as high end content. by say.. 2.4 we will have at least 5 or 6 different things.

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A year can be a very long time, especially when there's no guarantee that's where the game is going....

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Originally Posted by Hanabira

i can answer that easily. As time goes on we will have enough content in circulation that gives decent awards in limited amounts so we keep doing different types of content instead of just spamming 1. It sucks now because we are at the early stages of this, but it will be much better in a year. come 2.1 we will have coil, CT and extreme modes as high end content. by say.. 2.4 we will have at least 5 or 6 different things.

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Do people have the patience to wait that long? Based on the comments in this forum, it doesn't look like it lol.

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Originally Posted by Hanabira

i can answer that easily. As time goes on we will have enough content in circulation that gives decent awards in limited amounts so we keep doing different types of content instead of just spamming 1. It sucks now because we are at the early stages of this, but it will be much better in a year. come 2.1 we will have coil, CT and extreme modes as high end content. by say.. 2.4 we will have at least 5 or 6 different things.

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That is fine and dandy when the content is there, but it is not. Your 'solution' would not be viable for half a year or more. As you can obviously tell, tension is beginning to mount in regards to this issue, both on the forums, and in open discussion in-game.

I don't know what kind of viable business model is to tell your customers to wait a year lol.

The things people come out with.

Personally I see lockouts as necessary to prevent content from being depleted faster than new content can be developed, as annoying as a lockout can be.

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Originally Posted by Gucci_Charms

Do people have the patience to wait that long? Based on the comments in this forum, it doesn't look like it lol.

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Keep in mind that the people posting on these forums is the minority, most players are completely oblivious of what's going on here and I know a lot of them are by choice.
Aside from that, we all remember the bad. Never the good.

There's plenty of good things in this game, and I expect 2.1 to bring plenty more good things.
Sure people will disagree, but to the people that can't find anything good in this game I seriously ask; What are you even doing here?

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I don't know what kind of viable business model is to tell your customers to wait a year lol.

The things people come out with.

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Do people have the patience to wait that long? Based on the comments in this forum, it doesn't look like it lol.

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A year can be a very long time, especially when there's no guarantee that's where the game is going....

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Has anyone played a brand new MMO that was loaded with end-game content at launch? ive played alot and i sure havent. even ffxi that everyone keeps referencing.. didnt have much.. sky and dynamis after several years. Expectations need to be realistic. it takes time to get content created, especially when they redirect funds and manpower to buying new servers to fix the flooding. The alternative was keeping the game offline for an extra 6 months to a year to get lots and lots of content options for end-game which was not a viable option.

Now that i think about it, older games this wasnt very noticeable because the leveling process could take close to a year. Nowadays it takes 1 week to level and the need for endgame content happens WAY sooner. It doesnt seem like developers account for this just yet.

To be fair, before Sky & Dynamis were added the EXP system was far far far far less forgiving still and it took eons to reach 75, so I'm sure they had plenty of time to develop their content without too many complaining.