Holiday Events - Why aren't they more varied? Why always FATEs?

One of the things that stands out for me from FFXI was a lot of their more interesting holiday events. For example, the "Test of Courage" in their Summerfest event(s!?), where you were ported to a dungeon as a level 1 and had to sneak around to collect an item. Even the goldfish scooping which was arguably less interesting was also a lot of fun, and really engaged you with the world. There was a sense of awe, going into remote desert towns and scooping for goldfish, watching beautiful fireworks going off at night in the city, etc.

The new Sunshine Seekers event reminded me a bit of this.

http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics...86/detail.html

There were also end of year events with giant trees or whatever that would blow you into another zone? Not every FFXI holiday event was amazing, but many of them were much more varied and interesting than anything we've seen in FFXIV so far.

Pretty much every holiday event in FFXIV is "talk to this guy" or "do that FATE", with very little of value beyond that. It would be nice if the dev team tried to engage the player with the world, especially during holiday events, more than simply redecorating the town a bit. Also, if FATEs are going to be used for everything ever, they should probably be made more interesting than a mindless xp grab.

It's not like the dev team needs to make new monsters or create crazy bosses or something for holiday events, just code something very simple that is also interesting and fun, rather than just shove a bunch of talkies and FATEs into every single event and call it a day. Zerging balloons to death for summer isn't really any more or less interesting than zerging any mob type during any time of year ever.

Because the development team went out of their way to create FATEs and now want to cram them down our throats forever.
Plus the way FATEs work lends itself better to something that repeats each year and needs to respawn. The summer event had some fun games with could play involving mortars and water stuff, so maybe they're just saving the good stuff for events Japanese developers actually care about (hint: Halloween is just an excuse for stores to sell special merchandise in Japan. The summer Obon holiday we got the Moonfire Faire stuff for is a MUCH bigger holiday for them. We might get fried Chocobo for christmas this year!)

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Originally Posted by Hiruke

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Well it took time for FFXI to leave their comfort zone and do something different. FFXIV is trying to do new things like halloween was the parade, Summer wasn't zerg the bomb this time. Honestly I had to check and make sure this wasn't a necro from 2013.

List of FFXIV Seasonal Events

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Originally Posted by Hiruke

It's not like the dev team needs to make new monsters or create crazy bosses or something for holiday events, just code something very simple that is also interesting and fun, rather than just shove a bunch of talkies and FATEs into every single event and call it a day. Zerging balloons to death for summer isn't really any more or less interesting than zerging any mob type during any time of year ever.

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Have you missed summer event 2014?

I don't remember trees warping you, but there was that blitz buffalo event where they would headbutt you to a different city.


I thought the summer events in FFXIV this year were pretty good. They didn't require waiting for FATEs and had some decent little minigames to do. I think the problem is that the events are mostly built off of existing systems, and having FATEs makes it easy for them to just make more of those. Maybe the level cap system in XIV is spaghetti coded into FATEs in a way that they can't just make you be level 1 out in the field for a quest without doing a lot of additional programming.

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Originally Posted by Dyvid

List of FFXIV Seasonal Events

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http://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/im...adies_day2.jpg

Furnishings for housing pl0x

Mechanically holidays can't be that varied. What I'd like to see is deeper elements to events beyond just a questline that finishes the event for you. Hate it as much as you want, but WoW had some decent ideas for holidays. Let's take their Halloween Event, for example.

The event had a meta-achievement for doing a whole bunch of stuff. You had an exploration achievement for visiting every candy bowl in the game (all inns/hamlets had their own candy bowl for the duration of the event). You had an achievement for getting every costume "spell" used on you. There was an achievement for collecting all the paper masks (head slot) during the event; the masks vanished after the event ended so they did not carry over into the new year. There was an achievement for using certain candies during PvP. There's an achievement for eating so much candy that you give yourself a tummy ache. There was an achievement for using a holiday-specific item on certain races. There was a holiday-specific storyline quest with its own achievement (the headless horseman, the set up of which was as close to a FATE event in WoW if there ever was one). And this lasted all through the event. The meta achievement was also required for another meta achievement you'd get for participating in every holiday event in the game.

Some of the other holidays require running through specific dungeons to get the achievements tied to them (Lunar Festival), or traveling with a non-combat companion all over the world--including PvP battlegrounds (children's week). It really gave people stuff to do during the events without making the holiday standalone and turning it into something that people did over the first couple of days and then moved on (which is what ended up happening to our halloween event this year). I definitely would like our holidays to become a little more involved in this way.

Why always FATEs? let's see:

• Dungeons: They would have to make a new instance from scratch. And only for a limited time. On top of that, once the event ends, either the dungeon become inaccessible or those that missed it cannot enter it. And if the dungeons drop unique stuff then there will be problems
• Raids: Same as above with the added problem of having relevant gear
• Guildhests: they are irrelevant once you reach 50 and maybe even before that
• Repeated Quests: the only other alternative to FATEs do to not needing to devote resources to instances and using the Open world

Honestly I want to see FATEs that work like Levequests; having objected added over time, instead of just being "beat X amount of enemies", "beat boss" or "collect items".

This complaint would have made more sense if the last few events actually used FATEs. That and I think you're giving FFXI's events too much credit when you say that the Goldfish scooping event "was a lot of fun" and "engaged you with the world".

They've been trying new thing with the last events. The expansion will probably allow them to do more new stuff.

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Originally Posted by Gilthas

This complaint would have made more sense if the last few events actually used FATEs.

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There was 1 FATE in the last Halloween event ^^