Quite a few people prefer prog to farm; PFs collapsing can be bad (chaotic) so...

Quite a few people prefer prog to farm.
I'm one of them.
I've got no idea if its a significant number though.
Also... chaotic PF is a complete shower... so

Here is an idea not sure it's mine....
you need to clear a fight to 'unlock' rewards....
and now you get rewards just for time spent helping or hitting prog points with parties. Rewards proportional to the prog point, marginal increased rewards for each further minute spend in the fight's progression,
but only if you're there 30mins. Bail before then.. no rewards.

(Will require some new development.)

Not a game designer. Maybe there is no world in which this idea doesn't have many fatal flaws.

Yes, plenty of people prefer prog in that they do it to have fun and see it as a social occasion, to such an extent some of them get drunk and raid. For many of them, clearing is not a serious goal, so they can come back week after week and be absolutely hopeless, laughing at how they died and the mistakes they made. The whole point for them is the doing it with others and the social banter that happens.

Not personally one of those people. You can also get trapped in a party with such individuals, especially if you are subbing in a static that doesn't see themselves as good and are just drinking and raiding.

Don't get me wrong, I have also done raids with really good players (for example that cleared ultimates) who are social like that and get drunk, make lots of mistakes they shouldn't, then clear. They aren't always necessarily incapable of clearing but sometimes that's the case because of the social aspect being their main reason.

The bigger issue for me is that the rewards themselves are not worth the effort. What's the point of gearing when it only helps for farming the gear you just got? I imagine most people value the mount and even the minion drop from the final tier infinitely more than the gear itself.
This is why people find progging or just screwing around more fun, because at least having fun in a low stress prog is more of a reward than a marginal increase of numbers.

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Originally Posted by RoboticNomad

The bigger issue for me is that the rewards themselves are not worth the effort. What's the point of gearing when it only helps for farming the gear you just got? I imagine most people value the mount and even the minion drop from the final tier infinitely more than the gear itself.
This is why people find progging or just screwing around more fun, because at least having fun in a low stress prog is more of a reward than a marginal increase of numbers.

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The point of gearing is to make up for the shortcomings of individuals in your prog that don't pull their weight. Say, for example, you have a Monk player pulling numbers that would have been bad last expansion, and they've found their way into your Extreme prog party. Additional gear allows you to make up for their shortcomings, inexperience, or willful incompetence, and still make it through the fight. Unleashing that player on duty complete parties is a bit of an issue, but at least you helped that Monk get through their prog.

Also, prog is not as fun as farming (speaking generally). Farming allows you to really dig into a fight, learn its in and outs, and allows for you to discover and implement really cool tech. Prog is the journey to this end goal. But to each their own.

To be honest I don't find either fun. I am motivated by more tangible goals i.e. give me something flashy or cool.
I can appreciate people whose fun are constant improvements and optimizations for a singular fight, but I imagine that's a much smaller amount of people in the player base and they have been getting that every raid tier anyway.

And at the end of the day, isn't making it easier to carry others exactly the same as just making it easier to farm? So you are just getting loot to make it easier to get the same loot for alts so that it's easier on those alts to get the same loot etc. etc.
If you aren't into the optimization side I don't understand the need to complete it more than once or after you get your mount. You're just clearing it for others as a social activity or as a timekiller and there's lots of other better things that meet those objectives.

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Originally Posted by RoboticNomad

To be honest I don't find either fun. I am motivated by more tangible goals i.e. give me something flashy or cool.
I can appreciate people whose fun are constant improvements and optimizations for a singular fight, but I imagine that's a much smaller amount of people in the player base and they have been getting that every raid tier anyway.

And at the end of the day, isn't making it easier to carry others exactly the same as just making it easier to farm? So you are just getting loot to make it easier to get the same loot for alts so that it's easier on those alts to get the same loot etc. etc.
If you aren't into the optimization side I don't understand the need to complete it more than once or after you get your mount. You're just clearing it for others as a social activity or as a timekiller and there's lots of other better things that meet those objectives.

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I find that it helps to, you know, actually do the content with which you'd normally refer to when you say you've "progged" something. Coming into a discussion about "prog" or "farm" is more fun, it's usually pertinent that you've actually progged something before.

Wouldn't want to speak from a seat of ignorance, would we? That'd be pretty silly.

As for carrying players, you never know when you'll get someone doing 40% of what they should be doing in content that is harder than a normal raid. Having gear to meet this occasional occurrence is nothing but useful. Besides. Seeing a small child get their first clear is fun in and of itself! The reward is the satisfaction of knowing that Donny Doton is going to go on to do great--well, not great. But they're certainly going to go on with things!

Sometimes prog and farm parties isn't about the gear. Sometimes it's the friends we make and the fun we have on the way! You should consider trying it sometime. You might be surprised at how much you enjoy the experience.

I did the first tier of EW. I PF progged p1s-p3s and got a static of friends for p4s, but ultimately we started too late in the tier and stopped as the next tier was released before finishing it. We did farm p1-p3 during this time however. I did a little of the next tier but by this point I had realized I didn't enjoy raiding. I had some fun progging in PF and doing it with my static, but it became obvious I just enjoyed doing things with other people and easily found that elsewhere in the game with more variety and rewards than raiding provided me.
I side with progging being more fun as I met more people that way and as frustrating as some groups were, I did meet a lot of nice ones.
While my experience in it may not be as much as an active raider I figured I'd throw in my opinion as more of an outsider and because I have time to kill at work. Plus I can only post in so many "content" threads before I feel like a bot repeating the same things.

This is one of my biggest issues with the way the devs design content. It's always exclusively tailored for the first time experience, but past that point? It's tedious, it's pointless, it has little to no shelf life. See that comment from Yoshida at the live letter on how "I was curious to see first time clears for the new baldesion arsenal and how it had many hidden rooms"? Then what? What happens when it's been figured out? We continue to prepare the instance tediously every time we want to get in? Where is the replay value in that?

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Originally Posted by SubmarineAlt

... But to each their own.

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100%

I suspect my idea has got to have a bad problem I haven't seen, and I don't at all think Square would be brave enough to try it even if they thought it was good, but I feel like its a system that would still allow farmers, optimizers and parse chasers to have their fun. Probably even make it better for them. Allowing each their own.