Would you want the Firmament to be a feature for future expansions?

Alright, The Ishgard Restoration arc has quite a few interesting qualities. the first being a perpetual hint towards a new housing distric, the eponymous Firmament, but it also seems to serve otherpurposes besides.

1. The most obvious being giving the Disciplines of the Hand and Land something to do besides script farming...while adding another type of script to farm, butthat's besides the point. In essence being a form of endgame for crafters and gatherers, which is helped by them having Relic Tools associated with the Restoration (but not requring engaging with it)
2. However it also served as a sequel to Heavensward, showing what has happened in Ishgard since the content that debuted there, which is further strengthened by cameos of charterers such as the Defarm and the adventurers/fanclub first seen around the Vishap battle, not to mention the family reunion of sorts.
3. They also used the opportunity to bright forth some new glamours and even new dyes.

So with all that said would you like this model of content to be repeated for future expansions, like a say 6.0 brings the Firmament as a new district while having a follow-up to Stormblood that is working towards housing in Ala Mhigo. Followed by 7.0 bringing out housing in Ala Mhigo followed by an arc towards housing on the First? All of which while advancing the storylines of the associated locations?

Personally I would like progression of areas to be mostly based around my own actions, but I think locking the maximum progress around the community would be neat (such that the community has to work together to improve the area, and those participating live would just be moving the area along as natural, but those coming in later could experience the area growing as is natural to their own story / journey). Like if the area progresses with the story it would feel better than if I first came into HW and Ishgard is in ruins but 'hah look at this spotless pretty area'.

Beyond that comment though yeah I think progression is cool. I do hope they continue and improve the Ishgard concept, and if they don't join the personal with the community then I do also hope they will do a Doma concept again sometime (and ideally bring it closer into the main content, maybe not 'required' but be more of a center and pushed piece).

I've this feeling that there could be an interesting and valuable restoration (/expansion of the area) project for that one final zone in ShB, where you're tasked with creating and maintaining a great museum / library. Perhaps linking it with Archelogy (/chocobo hot and cold) content. Someone in that final area following their 'previous' calling to catalog and record history, meanwhile you having to help maintain the stability of the area in general as well (else the area's strength may wane). Remembering us. May also be able to bind it to another loot and glamour system alternative I had suggested, the crystal library and forge, (sort of a functional compromise) where when you complete a catalog of a certain area you unlock the glamours of that area (turn in X essences of a specific dungeon unlocks the glamours of the whole dungeon, this means instead of storing ~20+ items per content SE only has to store 1 boolean variable).

Also going back to the first point if they combine the personal with the community aspect then they can combine resources for content like Doma Reconstruction into community efforts (meaning it can be even bigger scale, since it would be taking two concepts and empowering them together). Of course some people will prefer changes that go on without them, but my bias is not to that (not that I'll rage if it is the case, never raged about Ishgard- just stating my bias modification of it) and that I think it's more fun when "I" do something in the game world than if "you" did it (unless we're in a fight together, then shine one mate lol). Also means it can tie in with the story better, since it could take queues off the story (and of course they can always have both types of content separate, they don't need to be blended together).

Unless it is streamlined and made a lot clearer than it currently is, I wouldn't care.

I mean, clearly enough other people engage with it just fine so I wouldn't just want to say none of them should be allowed to have similar content in the future just because I don't get it, but it also means I'm just not going to bother with it, which is already what I do with multiple sorts of content in this game (current ex/savage, hunts, a lot of Gold Saucer stuff, etc...)

You know how one of the Firmament NPCs themselves, while explaining the system, basically lampshades how convoluted it is? When I heard that I was basically telling myself "yeah, no kidding" and knew I couldn't be bothered to try to figure it out.

Krile made a similar comment in Eureka with regard to its magicite system, which I know a lot of other players harped on.

Generally speaking, if the game/developers themselves feel like they have to throw in a dialog line about how overly and unnecessarily complex their system is, it's usually a good sign I won't find it enjoyable to engage with.

Balanced a bit better, sure.

The xp rewards are absurdly high, and the competition needs... work.

But the alternative methods to acquire materia, dye, ect is solid.

I wouldn't mind similar content in the future, though I feel like it should just be used as a "catch-up" option for DoL/H classes as opposed to the absolute best way of leveling up through the current level cap.

I'd really like to see the Derelicts in Eulmore get built up into a proper town so the poor can have a place live like the Firmament did with Ishgard.

While I personally don't care for the region, a similar location for Ala Mhigo would probably be nice. Kinda bothered me that we got Doman Restoration, but nothing similar for the likewise decrepit Aldenard.

A mix between the doman enclave and Ishgard would be ideal where its a combination of solo progress but with server-wide progress there to help those who aren't really interested or struggling, but at a slower rate obviously compared to solo turn ins. I imagine town building content similar to dark cloud or even animal crossing would help engagement metrics in this game.

If we get to rebuild Ala Mhigo and make it a real city state, yes. Ala Mhigo got blindsided by Kugane in Stormblood.

The type of content? Yes.

I would only want it, if its like the Doman one but instead of selling them rubbish we create the items. (So kinda a combination of Doma and Ishgard) So with that you are truly seeing the changes you do by yourself instead of maybe taking a break or starting the game later and never seeing it..but getting the quests for that..

While I like the idea of crafters/gatherers having an "end game", I don't know if Firmament is the way to go. And I especially don't trust them to come up with something that would work.

The "Expert Recipes" in the Firmament were insurmountably tedious, requiring far too many steps and still relying almost entirely on RNG in order to succeed. Those are not fun.

Both yes and not really.

I like the server wide reconstruction and how it will eventually end in a new Housing area. It's a nice idea and they put effort into it. But the execution is poor. Basically it's been a free ticket to lv80 crafters, a glorified scrip grind, a rather unhealthy ranked mode and a bot heaven.

Experts were a nice idea, but ultimately serve as something to shut the veteran crafters up and keep them quiet in the corner long-term. A few titles and 500 hours grind for a rather boring small dinosaur is all we really get until 6.0. Everything else, Master Recipes, endgame gear, the DoH/L relics, both Beast Tribes, Skybuilder scrip rewards, it's all free handouts to casual crafters who didn't even like crafting in the first place.
If they're going to repeat that in 6.0, I'm just not that interested. It's week-one-and-done throwaway content, then a long dull grind on the same craft.

It's absolutely fine if others disagree, this is just my own personal opinion.

Honest answer? No.

I hate crafting/gathering in this game and would rather have the dev time spent on combat content that we seem to get less and less of.

Nothing against crafters, I respect that they want some sort of endgame and they should have it. But it shouldn't come at the cost of the main meat of a mmo, combat content.

In ShB we have had Diadem, Ishgard Restoration, and Ocean Fishing which for me were all dead on arrival content for me, but we are going to lost out on having a new PoTD for example.

I prefer Doma completely. Now, if there was more to it than simply monetary donation, I think it would be better. If they allowed various avenues towards progression, or required different types of disciplines, I think that would be neat.

I really don't think it's asking too much to have 1 DoW/M, 1 DoH and 1 DoL at max level for any current patch cycle. Perhaps require the services of all to progress (specifically, DoW/M to "Clear out an area", DoL to gather the mats and DoH to make the things towards whatever progression.)

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Originally Posted by Thi

...but we are going to lost out on having a new PoTD for example.

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Bozja specifically was meant to replace HoH/PotD/Eureka in the same way Eureka replaced HoH/PotD. So correct, you're not getting a PotD, but Ishgard has nothing to do with that.

It would be more accurate to say Ishgard replaces the gradual upgrade of town zones that we saw in Idylshire, Revenant's Toll and Doma, granted 2 of those just "happened" regardless of player input.

NO thx we dont need more bot content

I'd love to see a district in Ala Mhigo get the same treatment.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

I prefer Doma completely. Now, if there was more to it than simply monetary donation, I think it would be better. If they allowed various avenues towards progression, or required different types of disciplines, I think that would be neat.

I really don't think it's asking too much to have 1 DoW/M, 1 DoH and 1 DoL at max level for any current patch cycle. Perhaps require the services all to progress (specifically, DoW/M to "Clear out an area", DoL to gather the mats and DoH to make the things towards whatever progression.



Bozja specifically was meant to replace HoH/PotD/Eureka in the same way Eureka replaced HoH/PotD. So correct, you're not getting a PotD, but Ishgard has nothing to do with that.

It would be more accurate to say Ishgard replaces the gradual upgrade of town zones that we saw in Idylshire, Revenant's Toll and Doma, granted 2 of those just "happened" regardless of player input.

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Eureka didn't replace HoH though? Eureka didn't get you experience points, at least not during Stormblood not sure if you can level jobs there now. Eureka didn't really serve the same purpose as HoH/POTD and came out in the same expansion as HoH.

Bozja though is a replacement for both, being the source of relic weapons (Eureka) and leveling jobs 71 to 80 (Replacing POTD/HOH)

The leader-board didn't interest me one bit. I know people were worried about bots before it was implemented and it appears their fears were well founded. I also heard a lot of people who were placed mentioning health related issues arising from the intense grind. So, I didn't try for a ranked position and I'm not sorry. If that didn't come back I wouldn't personally care.

The quests and the actual building I've enjoyed a lot and I'd love to see something similar in the future, with one reservation. Since the firmament is going to be housing, I'm not sure I'd want that in a ShB area. I moved our FC house to Shirogane in SB and I've regretted that decision a little since as the SB areas have nothing going on in them this expansion. The house isn't used as much as it was before the move and I'm sure this may be due to newer players having no easy way to access it. Now the story has moved away from that area, the house feels a bit cut off from the rest of the game whereas there are still things happening in the ARR cities and they feel far more connected. I think a housing district in one of the ShB areas might suffer the same fate.

I enjoyed both the Doman Reconstruction and the Firmament though I prefer the latter since there is much more to actually do. Doma was a little dull by comparison. I don't mind missing some of the progress if I'm absent personally, but can understand people wanting to see things happen for themselves. I'm not sure how a new player would feel about the Firmament if the quests were still there but they only saw it after it was completed.

If it's improved upon, sure. I think the exp is absurdly high, the ranking is stupid, and the FATE system should be something more like GATEs.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

Bozja specifically was meant to replace HoH/PotD/Eureka in the same way Eureka replaced HoH/PotD.

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Eureka did not replace HoH. We got both Eureka and HoH in the same expansion. We also got Doma and more dungeons in that same expansion too.

Bozja so far has been far smaller than Anemos, being an hour solo instance and nothing else. For all its faults in gameplay, Eureka is still 4 decently sized zones with a large number of rewards, including minions, mounts, barding, gil, housing items, glamour and has a large scale raid added on top.

Bozja will have a very hard time being an equal to Eureka in terms of volume of content and is off to a weak start already, never mind being equal to Eureka and HoH combined. The cuts this expansion haven't really been replaced with anything. They're simply cuts. That said, I don't feel the devs are being lazy, they seem to work flat out. There's just some sort of problem with budget or resource management which I hope they can overcome or be honest with us on.

Bozja seems much improved over Eureka though. I'm fine having one less if it is actually fun. Taking pieces of Pyros and Hydatid if the map leaks are to be believed we might get a BA style content early.

I've loved the concept of a server coming together to help rebuild a broken zone, and hanging out inside the instance between gathering runs this past ranking was fun. I would like it more if they allowed different means of contribution in addition to craft X/gather Y 3729832839 times. Some means of personal progression a la Doman restoration would be nice too, the focus can stay server wide but more little 1 to 1 quests where you can help fix this little spot over there would help keep it more personal with your wol.

I don't craft/gather regularly, but eh... Certainly wouldn't mind it. I like seeing the progression as things are built.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

That said, I don't feel the devs are being lazy, they seem to work flat out. There's just some sort of problem with budget or resource management which I hope they can overcome or be honest with us on.

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the fact that its implied that stuff like the primal weapons were made off the record already implies that resource management issues are the case

What worries me is that by making crafting easier, of which the Firmament played a part, has slowly rotted the in-game economy with hyperdeflation. Ultimately there's no point in crafting content if crafting is useless.

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Originally Posted by Edax

What worries me is that by making crafting easier, of which the Firmament played a part, has slowly rotted the in-game economy with hyperdeflation. Ultimately there's no point in crafting content if crafting is useless.

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But everyone can't craft everything all the the time though.
This is true free market, you choose your niche. Hyper-deflation is always better than hyper-inflation.
I approve of making crafting more accessible, the HQ end game crafting is still not an easy feat. It just allows the "ok" crafters to make some money as well.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

But everyone can't craft everything all the the time though.
This is true free market, you choose your niche. Hyper-deflation is always better than hyper-inflation.
I approve of making crafting more accessible, the HQ end game crafting is still not an easy feat. It just allows the "ok" crafters to make some money as well.

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What does it matter if the endgame market is flooded with goods? If endgame goods are as accessible as buying from a NPC vendor, then there's no point in crafting. What makes crafting profitable is because the endgame consumer goods *aren't* supposed to be extremely accessible. I myself used to craft all the time, now I almost never craft because it isn't worth my time. When supply vastly overwhelms demand, there's no profit to be made.

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Originally Posted by Edax

When supply vastly overwhelms demand, there's no profit to be made.

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Not true, you're acting as if the market is not growing? The more and more patches we get the more unique things there are to craft. Sure, you might not be making as much as before but that's balanced out with the lower expense of "living" that comes with deflation.
Furthermore, you can still make a healthy amount by finding your niche. You just want to be the grandmaster crafter whom the peasants sell their kidney to buy from. When you could be making similar money or a little bit less by adapting and finding your niche. It's ok to adapt, you don't need a system rigged in your favor.

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Originally Posted by Edax

What worries me is that by making crafting easier, of which the Firmament played a part, has slowly rotted the in-game economy with hyperdeflation. Ultimately there's no point in crafting content if crafting is useless.

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This is certainly true, and it has noticeably damaged the in-game economies, and opened the floodgates for bots and bot-users to control most corners of the economy.

I mean yes, stuff is cheaper. But crafting is no longer a reliable way to make money.

I think the way to fix crafting and justify having made it easier is to just implement some Market Prohibited craftable items. Nothing outlandish or OP, just some items here and there that you can only have if you craft them yourself. Meaning you can't then sell them. And maybe to head off the inevitable rebuttal, make the mats either gatherable-only (again, MP), or available from in-game vendors (and again MP). Maybe these items are just glam, or housing items, or minions, or even a mount or two. Things people would want to have, but wouldn't be at a disadvantage without.

That might get more people crafting and gathering for other reasons. To this point there's been little reason to do either other than to make money.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

Not true, you're acting as if the market is not growing? The more and more patches we get the more unique things there are to craft. Sure, you might not be making as much as before but that's balanced out with the lower expense of "living" that comes with deflation.
Furthermore, you can still make a healthy amount by finding your niche. You just want to be the grandmaster crafter whom the peasants sell their kidney to buy from. When you could be making similar money or a little bit less by adapting and finding your niche. It's ok to adapt, you don't need a system rigged in your favor.

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I think she's referring to the fact that there's now like 20-30 listings for something like the Aesthete gear where in the past you might have expected to see 5 tops. And their prices are laughably low because now you have a dozen people all undercutting each other because there aren't 20-30 people buying the gear on the MB. Impossible to profit from if you don't gather at least most of the materials yourself, which can be beyond tedious. A lot of the people crafting and selling that gear, if they aren't bots themselves, they absolutely employ gathering bots at the very least.

I enjoyed the Domain Enclave, but it's a bit too similar to
The restoration was like that but more fully conceived.
If they kept iterating on this sort of thing I'd welcome it.

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Originally Posted by Shougun

Personally I would like progression of areas to be mostly based around my own actions, but I think locking the maximum progress around the community would be neat (such that the community has to work together to improve the area, and those participating live would just be moving the area along as natural, but those coming in later could experience the area growing as is natural to their own story / journey). Like if the area progresses with the story it would feel better than if I first came into HW and Ishgard is in ruins but 'hah look at this spotless pretty area'.

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This is a really good idea, imo. That way, people who come in to the game later on still get to do it, but you also have community involvement at the time.

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But everyone can't craft everything all the the time though.
This is true free market, you choose your niche.

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I made many hundreds of millions of gil crafting several different markets.

On Crystal, about half of those are now less valuable the material cost, and the other half are so low profit, you'd be better served just running around killing snurbles of one variety or another. The only market without significant negative impact is the newer primal weapons, and those still generally cost less than the mats. Some of the highest activity markets (magitek repair mats, certain other consumables) are now sold in bulk at a major profit loss with craft time figured in.

You can get all your crafters and gatherers to 80 with almost no investment in less than a week, which means 99% of all relevant combines are available to make in bulk for the cost of vendor-buyable white gear.

We -MIGHT- see a small bump in housing items again when new wards hit, but other than ~30 housing items you can have the ability to make them by spending 5 minutes a day between now and then.

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Originally Posted by ZattanaWen

I think she's referring to the fact that there's now like 20-30 listings for something like the Aesthete gear where in the past you might have expected to see 5 tops. And their prices are laughably low because now you have a dozen people all undercutting each other because there aren't 20-30 people buying the gear on the MB. Impossible to profit from if you don't gather at least most of the materials yourself, which can be beyond tedious. A lot of the people crafting and selling that gear, if they aren't bots themselves, they absolutely employ gathering bots at the very least.

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That's exactly right. It's almost to the point that you can remove crafting entirely and just put the crafted gear for sale on an NPC and nothing will change.

I honestly think the firmament should be implemented for every new "housing" area in the future so it would give incentive on working to obtain your new housing area rather then just magically getting it. It would also mean that servers that do not complete their firmament for the new housing area would not get the new housing area until they completed it on their server as well, thus providing more reasons to do the firmament content outside of ranking season.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

I approve of making crafting more accessible, the HQ end game crafting is still not an easy feat. It just allows the "ok" crafters to make some money as well.

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It allows the bots to make money.

In stormblood, you could sell basic white HQ gathering/crafting gear for between 100-300k. Many housing items were 200k+. Even in 4.1 and 4.2. That was the sort of thing an "ok" crafter could 1 button macro. In Shadowbringers, the master recipe endgame gear barely sells for 50k apiece. It's much harder to make gil than in the past.

On many worlds, the main sellers of endgame gear are players with 6-9 person FC's consisting of them (a character with 1 lv80 DoW, maxed DoL/DoH and no mounts/minions except basic story) and an collection of bank alts. These 9 person FC's have the top activity ranks on their server.
The reasons for this? The crafting changes have been the perfect bot set-up. It's fast to level. Easy to get mats. Gear is cheap. Materia is cheap. You can sell cross-world to the entire data-centre. This is what the "ok crafter" has to compete with. He has no chance.