Would Horizontal Progression Help this Game?

I remember back in FFXI during the ToAU days, the amount of things to do at endgame was staggering.

-Sky
-Sea
-Dynamis
-Salvage
-Assault
-ENM
-HNM
-Limbus

It got to the point that my endgame guild couldn't fit it all into a schedule and we had to drop certain things. Thanks to horizontal progression, the content was able to keep building upon itself, all remaining relevant. This also combined with the ability to level every job, so that if you geared up a main you could do sky on an alt to get gear for the harder content. Gear itself had unique and interesting bonuses that even made old gear relevant, creating for several complex gear switching algorithms depending on the situation.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a FFXI wank thread. But I think most MMOs have their merits, and the horizontal progression in FFXI was, in my opinion, one of the things that kept the game interesting.
So I now come to its successor, FFXIV. The combat is more fluid, I actually like the dancing mechanics of boss fights. However, I can't help but notice a great many people seem to be bored of this game as of late. Why is this? I believe the answer lies in the pattern. The expansion followed the same pattern as 2.0 did, and it's predictable.
-Start with story
-Grind dungeons for tomes
-first raid ends up being the hard, 8 man raid.
-second raid in the next patch ends up being the casual 24 man raid content.
-relic weapon with monotonous grind is implemented.
I suppose that Diadem was something they implemented that deviated from this pattern a tad, but a lot of the people I talk to seem to be bored of this as well. The gear, besides the designs in and of themselves, are dull. There is nothing that makes one piece unique from another statswise. Every one of them has the raw stats without any bonuses, resistances, or latent effects attached. Was this really a good decision? Are the majority of players really so averse to depth when it comes to gear and stats? Elemental resistances and strengths on enemies was also not implemented, again along this same line of reasoning. I feel this is selling even the casual players short with this simplistic design.
FFXI had horizontal progression, but it also had a much smaller playerbase. Now was that because of the archaic combat style, the insane grind, or was it really too complex for most players? The one thing that would have to be sacrificed for horizontal progression is the abilities that come with new levels.
The Coil of Bahamut and Crystal Tower has now become irrelevant thanks to vertical progression. The amount of things that will fade into obsolescence as the amount of expansions increases will only rise. While I admit SE has done a decent job of keeping some content relevant with their roulettes, vertical progression certainly makes it more difficult.
Either way, this endgame pattern that repeats itself constantly needs to find a fresh new deviation, to revitalize people's interest in this game once again. If not, then this game may lose a decent sized chunk of its playerbase at this rate.

This is a thing bought up quite a lot.

I agree some horizontal progression could be quite good for the game. However horizontal progression has as many potential pitfalls as vertical progression and if done wrong it can make things really messy. I know as sure has hell there are things I don't want to see happen personally. If they are going to do something like this it would be something I would want them to take some time in and implement probably during an expansion.

I don't think any system used in another game will necessarily translate well into FF14 since it will have to gel with both the player base and games existing progression systems.

The other thing is that content like Coil and CT will fall out of favour anyway. Even if Coil and CT offered rewards usable at max level they wouldn't hold the popularity among the bulk of players compared to newer content simply because most players have already run Coil and CT a lot unless it was easier/more efficient in which case people would mindlessly spam it and complain about SE reusing old content.

Horizontal progress only works in the days before BIS web sites and theory grinding.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by jomoru

Horizontal progress only works in the days before BIS web sites and theory grinding.

---

I've never played this game before but I've been told that Guild Wars 2 has Horizontal progression and it works out pretty well. I can't verify this though as I've never played the game myself but if it's true then the formula can still work in modern MMORPG's it would seem.

I just find it odd that they give veteran players motivation to run level 50/lowbie dungeons through the roulette but give no such benefit to running old raids. Is this because the raids aren't needed for new players to level up? But then, any new player who wants to experience these raids has to get their FC to do it for fun, with no benefit to them.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zabuza

I just find it odd that they give veteran players motivation to run level 50/lowbie dungeons through the roulette but give no such benefit to running old raids. Is this because the raids aren't needed for new players to level up? But then, any new player who wants to experience these raids has to get their FC to do it for fun, with no benefit to them.

---

Right now is probably the best time for newer players to clear the old Raid content like Coil because of Poetic bonuses. The endgame players who are Relic grinding will be more than glad to run new players through Coil/Primals for the bonuses. It's not quite the same thing though as doing it the old fashioned way (level sync'd) but it at least gives new/old players a common goal and gets them into old content again.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by seraf

I've never played this game before but I've been told that Guild Wars 2 has Horizontal progression and it works out pretty well. I can't verify this though as I've never played the game myself but if it's true then the formula can still work in modern MMORPG's it would seem.

---

I was going to say that most games that I have played which incorporated Horizontal Progression have had reasonable success, with the notable exception of Guild Wars 2 :|

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kaurie

I was going to say that most games that I have played which incorporated Horizontal Progression have had reasonable success, with the notable exception of Guild Wars 2 :|

---

Then I was lied to. :P Like I said I couldn't confirm it but maybe the person who told me how great it was is just a huge fan of the game.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by seraf

Then I was lied to. :P Like I said I couldn't confirm it but maybe the person who told me how great it was is just a huge fan of the game.

---

In terms of horizontal progression, they made it very very easy to choose your gear build; however, they designed the content around no healing and no tanking - so it made most support/utility builds not viable (speaking PvE atm). Further, they designed the stats of Power, Precision and Ferocity to multiply by each other. Every other gear set didn't have this advantage, making 1 point in power more valuable in Berserker gear than 1 point in power in any other gear (for example). So, it became the PvE meta to stack Berserker gear and DPS stuff down as fast as possible, if you didn't wear berserker you were doing it wrong.

I would say my main issues, and what I think resulted in this issue is:

1. Too many 1 hit kills in higher level end-game, meaning vitality was fairly useless - you just had to learn to dodge.
2. As I said above, they made 3 stats multiply by each other, but no other 3 stats worked this way
3. They removed healing and tanking
4. Support stats scaled very weakly with skills (i.e. you could stack up a skill to up your healing abilities, but your heal would still be very weak, on a long cooldown and virtually useless because everything is one-hit-ko).
5. All the stats were very 'basic' in design, as in this raises your attack power, crit power etc - and there weren't really interesting stats to experiment with (i.e. +Fire Damage that you could put on your Elementalist, even though Elementalists stance dance among the elements).
6. Most bosses had CC shields making the use of a lot of cc/utility less viable

Further to all of this, they made gear way tooo easy to obtain. Shortly after launch, you could be in max stat gear within 5 minutes of hitting level 80. It was fairly absurd.

Anyway, I would love for Horizontal Progression to be in this game, but not with the basic stats we have. We'd need stats that aren't (add this much to have all of your attacks do x% more damage).

Short answer, yes.
It has to be quite demotivating for devs to spend hours on creating a content knowing it will be obsolete in 3 months.

The day this gets added is the day I stop building a 1:1 replica of Dalamud to crash into SEHQ... I mean what?! I'm not doing that! <goes back to playing Katamari Damacy.... to practice... <insert evil laugh>>

Honestly seems like the perfect Horizontal Progression-Lite! to either just extend the shelf life on gear/content, or bridge us over to something more substantial. Plus, you know, Final Fantasy IX is the best Final Fantasy...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by StrejdaTom

Short answer, yes.
It has to be quite demotivating for devs to spend hours on creating a content knowing it will be obsolete in 3 months.

---

Actually lots of people play content 1 patch after its out. Even 2 or 3 patches after. But rarely 1 expansion after (and that's 2 years) if you had a level increase.

It really depends. The downsides of horizontal progression are likely what keeps it out of XIV ARR/HW.

Those of us from FFXI should know the downsides of horizontal progression. Have you ever been kicked out of a party or denied entry into one solely because you didn't have a specific piece of gear? I have. It's not a good feeling especially when you weren't going for anything endgame at that point. And some of the gear they expected was a bloody pain to get (with the worst cases being you needed to kill an NM for the piece which only had a 1%-10% drop rate, and unless you were a RDM/NIN or something with super solo abilities you [PRE Abyssea, 99 lvl cap, ilvls above 120] needed to form or join a party to have a chance to kill it. On top of that you needed to possibly be "waiting in line" for the kill and the NM was on a 24 earth hour respawn timer).

FFXI's horizontal progression worked because of the pacing of the game and relied heavily on your luck with the RNG when something couldn't be bought or traded (you waited 5 hours for the pop and got the kill? So sorry, 5% drop rate and no drop). It was a completely different type of grind (but very much a grind). It was a time of patience, a trait which many players lack in XIV. XIV's systems guarantee a drop, even if it's not the piece you want. It's no longer "I have to wait X amount of time before it can pop again asdfwqertuyl;hln" and has become "REPEAT CONTENT 'TIL IT DROPS"

Of course this is never always the case, and the more casual population of XIV are much less likely to lock people out for not having BiS gear. But it still stands that it will happen, and the devs clearly don't want that to happen on a larger scale than it already does for some groups.

Horizontal progression would be very bad for ENDGAME gear. For crafted gear and dungeon gear, however, horizontal progression may not matter nearly as much. You'll still get BiSers telling you which materia you need in said equipment, but it's not raid tier gear, which means you probably won't be booted for having X piece over Y... I think. People will always surprise you lol.

Horizontal progression with only 4 secondary stats? Sound pretty pointless.

Now if they added more secondaries that'd be cool. I vote for "Mastery" from WoW, a stat that does something different for every job.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by File2ish

It really depends. The downsides of horizontal progression are likely what keeps it out of XIV ARR/HW.

---

As someone in warehouse 13, there is always a downside. I don;t look forward to carry 8 different elemental staff to be effectuive as a blm.

It doesn't matter if you require horizontal progression; with websites built exclusively to determine the fastest and most efficient path to completing the endgame, that's all people will follow anymore. The devs seem to be quite aware of this and, with development costs much higher than they were during, say, XI's heyday, they simply can't afford to put in things most people are going to ignore.

The story stuff is very fun and interesting to me, and I do earnestly wish there was more of it. But as for endgame progression, it's just simpler to reduce it to what people can easily understand instead of requiring arcane horizontal progression (that will be deciphered and pulled apart into the most efficient method of progression as soon as it's available to the public).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cilia

The devs seem to be quite aware of this and, with development costs much higher than they were during, say, XI's heyday, they simply can't afford to put in things most people are going to ignore.

---

Funny, they've implemented quite a lot of stuff most people ignore... Gold Saucer, Crystal Tower, heck they have to build Relics entirely around the concept of getting people back into old content...

The thing with horizontal progression is, it doesn't matter that there is an "optimal" set. What matters is that people will want to obtain it. It gives content a longer shelf life as a result.

Doesn't even need to be about stats. The issue they have with horizontal progression is it "prevents" new players catching up. They're afraid new players will see horizontal progression and be turned off, because they can't get to that point within a week. That's why every other update wiped the slate clean. That's why they can't, for example, go "You want this antiquated Iga Ningi? That'll be 825 tomestones and a Fuma Koromo".

The reality is, we have a shallow game as a result. How can you create depth when the board is reset on every even digit update? You can't. Oddly enough, the only thing in this game that has come close is Relics, without a doubt the most popular quests, regardless of how much people complain about it (I guarantee more are interested in doing their Anima weapon than Alexander (Savage)). Progress on them is still seemingly reset with each expansion, but it is quite telling that, for a year or two, the most popular content is one in which a new player is at a fairly huge disadvantage at compared to existing ones... People obviously want this kind of content, yet this is the closest we get to it... The effort they put into Lords of Verminion, or Alexander, that's the kind of effort they should be putting into Relics, or failing that, Relics is the kind of equipment they should be putting into Alexander (though lord knows I don't want Gordian equipment sticking around to 3.5...).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by StrejdaTom

Short answer, yes.
It has to be quite demotivating for devs to spend hours on creating a content knowing it will be obsolete in 3 months.

---

lol, half of the content is obsolete as soon they release them... bismarck ex, all the dungeons... 24 man raids are a bit in between... and then all the story "hard mode" primals you kill only one time and thats it...

...So besides daily roulettes we also have daily threads for the same stuff. This must be like the 2389764823756487234th thread.