How will new players perceive this game? (A pessimistic outlook)

[Azurymber]

To start off I want to point out that I enjoy this game a lot and I want to see it succeed because I don't ever intend on quitting. I've done nearly every quest, killed every NM, and been to every leve and node. I really love this game.

The problem i see however, is that most new players will find this game to be a convoluted mess, without any proper instructions on what to do, and lacking a functional database to look things up on. Here are some reasons why:

1. The world seems dead.
Anyone starting this game in Gridania or Limsa will experience what feels like a single player or -dead- game. Even with its last store expansion, FFXI had decently populated main areas, and once you hit level 10 you could head to the dunes which was almost -always- populated by at least 2 parties. In FFXIV there are almost no people in gridania or limsa and their surrounding areas. Further, the wards in the 2 cities are pretty well empty. I know i can never find -anything- in gridania, even for the guilds and jobs that are centered there. The degree of this centralization around Ul'Dah may differ across servers, but from what i've experienced and read, it seems to be the common occurrence.

2. The Quests in this game make this game seem inferior to other games.
So far i've completed 50 sidequests and believe i'm missing 3 or 4 from the small villages (yes the villages have sidequests).
None of these sidequests has had a useful reward. None have been useful for SP'ing, and you are able to kill the mobs without being on the quest. Most of the stories are pointless and don't contribute much to the game (ex. "i baked cookies, omg, give everyone in the city my cookies cuz i wanna make them popular" run to 5 ppl in the city and give them cookies and do /cheer... or something like that). There aren't any epically dramatic stories for the quests like FFXI had. And the quests are essentially useless gameplay wise (sp, gil, good items, etc). So what will a new player think of quests that are boring, repetitive, and essentially pointless? It seems to make the game feel more rushed and more cheap.

Now don't get me wrong, some of the quests are really cute or fun (goblin quest in limsa, 2 opo opo journal quests in grid), but the majority kind of fail. The even worse part, is that you get nearly identical quests in each city.

However, some of the guild quests (R20, 30, 36) are -amazing-. Like the botany quest, while kind of annoying, had a great storyline, great music, cute characters, good mini cutscenes, etc. On the other hand i found the mrd storyline to be fairly boring with confusing quests. So SE seems to be really hit-and-miss quest wise. Whereas in FFXI, they tended to be a lot more hit than miss.

3. Lack of direction
You start the game, solo to 20, have no idea if your supposed to party (which almost no one does), have no idea how to get a party because the party search system goes unused, have no idea if you're supposed to be only sp'ing on leves or how to get a low level leve party. FFXI had 1-10 near starter city, > Dunes > Qufim > Yuhtunga or other... etc. Like there was an established direction, you could get parties fairly easy, etc. When the game was first released, i wrote a guide for soloing 1-30. At the time you could choose from a bunch of mobs to fight and solo on. The guide got well over 30,000 views across the main forums and a lot of people seemed to be going to the multiple camps. However, with the SP system change none of the variance is viable any longer. If you're going to solo the only real choice you have now is Coblyns + behests. This is probably a huge factor as to why ul'dah became so popular. But the point is, this lack of variance in choice of what to do really makes the game seem inferior to other games. It also reduces any reason for exploration and new discoveries, making the game seem really bland.

4. Lack of Economy + Incentives.
I'm an economist so i'm really biased here. To me, an economy WITH INCENTIVES is essential to any MMO. This gives something for players to work towards, makes gil (or in game money) a desired good, and forces people to apply values to items in order to generate fairly constant short-term prices for all goods. This game currently lacks any incentives. In other words, there are no "really good" items for people to save up for or work towards. As a result, people often overpay for things, or undercharge for things. This has created a very unstable economy, prevented any trade in "rare" goods (since theres no incentive to go out and farm anything rare) and flooded the economy with gil.
Now imagine a new player joining the game. For all of us, we have had months to amass gil via leves (leading to most people averaging around 10mil or so). A new player would take months to reach this point. And since no one who has 10 mil has an incentive to craft low level gear and sell it for 5000-15000 or so (which would be affordable to a new player), low level characters lack a selection of equipment and gear. Now this really isn't a huge problem, but this game seems to have been designed around having all this choice in different gear and colours. And the economy has kind of erased that choice and the benefits of having so many different types of gear. In other words, new players will probably get frustrated fast and give up on the game. Now take it from an economist (and if there are economics majors out there i'm sure you will back me up on this), implementing a gil sink this late in the game is almost guaranteed to be ineffectual. This is because a lot of people who have already amassed gil and have taken a break will not partake in the gil sink and thus keep a certain amount of money around. Futher, there is no guarentee everyone will participate, and many intelligent people will realize that if they hold the money and others use it in the gil sink, they will have a huge advantage a year from now if prices do drop. In FFXI the only way SE seemed to pull money out of the economy was through mass-bans, and not in-game gil sinks. So balancing out the economy will be -very very very- difficult. And if anyone actually knows economics (like the actual models and math behind it) i would love to hear what your thoughts on it are.

So my overall point is this:
New players will be faced with a lot of useless and poorly implemented quests, a complicated and non-straight-forward leveling process, a fairly empty world, a problematic economy, at a huge disadvantage compared to current players, and with a lack of readily available info (ex. no quest lists or quest info in databases yet).
Most of these issues are -not- ones that will be fixed by future updates, but are inherent problems due to how the game has advanced.

As such, do you think that this game will face some serious problems in both attracting and maintaining a new player base, either in the near future or when it is released on PS3?

[Alzelia]

I am somewhat knowledgeable in economics (9 credit hours) but I don't think that this game is in need of a Gil sink. The current taxes on the market wards provide this quite effectively. The higher prices get, the more Gil is taken out through taxes. However I agree that incentives to purchase items need to be added. I think the economy will start to be more stable with 1.18 as hopefully fixes to the battle system will create these incentives.

[Azurymber]

While the taxes do take out gil, the problem is that every 8 rank 30 or 40 leves gives on average 100k, and if everyone is doing that every 2 days you have huge amounts of gil entering the economy. The taxes take some out but no where near enough to make up for the amount put in. And the problem with that is that prices will keep rising and rising and rising non stop. A good economy (at least for a game) needs to have approximately the same amount of gil in the game at all times. This game essentially has constant inflation. At this rate, 2 years from now, items would probably cost more than 10 times as much as they currently do. For current players this isn't a huge problem. But it makes it nearly impossible for new players to "catch up" and be able to afford anything or purchase "incentive" items.
However what will likely happen is SE will move towards a game not focused on gil but focused on untradeable items. Not sure if thats good or bad.

[Alzelia]

I would also like to point out that there are currently a lot of items that you can purchase from a vendor that are cheaper at the market wards. If prices get to high, people will just buy from these vendors and Gil will leave the game.

[darkstarpoet1]

se could also make it to where the vendors carry more items in their shops and make them at a reasonable rate. there's no reason for a npc to carry flax, but charge around 20k per piece. at least more of the basic materials which would cause people to lower overall prices or people will go and spend more of their gil with the npc's and that in itself will be somewhat of a gil sink.

[Kilta_Firelotus]

I'm a new player, been playing a week.
1) even on the "smallest" server I'm always seeing someone out in the field. Think only the land around ishgard is empty and that is prob cus most mob levels are highter then 50, and there are a ton of aggresive mobs so exploring is a hazard.

2 my guess you truely never did quests in ffxi. That game had tons of pointless quests that had nothing to do with the story. BUT they are part of the lore you learn about the npcs and how their day to day lives pan out. Much like the moss quest in ffxi or the cornette quest.

3 This is a player ran economy. We hand gil around to each other from buying and selling gear to each other. The issue is people only do guildleves so they earn more then they spend. And it don;t get handed around. This is due to peoples need to be rich in a video game.

A lot of people became self sufficant, that way they do not need other players help. This in turn kinda ruins our economy, since we make and repair our own gear and do not buy it.

[Alzelia]

I don't think you got the point I was making at all. If prices go up 10x Gil taken out of the game increases 10x by taxes. There wouldn't be infinite inflation, it would reach a balancing point. However I do think that Gil from leves should be halved. What I'm more worried about is rare items becoming common after time as more and more get added to the economy slowly over time and loosing their value

[Joeking]

“A pessimist is never disappointed.”
-Jack Cleary

[Azurymber]

in regards to purchasing from vendors:

that is true. but at the same time that ruins gathering jobs for a fairly long period by making them unprofitable. And from what i gathered, gathering jobs are meant to be a "main" job in the game. Further vendor items for crafting and use only create an inflationary cap. Like once the prices of goods exceeds the price at NPCs people will buy from NPC vendors, some money will exit the economy, and it will be viable for players to sell goods just under the NPC prices once again, in which case money will stop exiting. As a result the economy would average out at that point.
Put another way, 1 week you would be buying stuff from NPCs, then the next week from the wards, then the next week from NPCs, then the next week from wards, etc. NPC prices will determine the "limits" of monetary expansion, but it will not fix an inflated currency.

And that will still make it very difficult for new players to catch up because NPC items are overpriced on purpose.

One solution i can think of would be to release really good items that are sold by vendors, or have a dynamis-weapon type thing and sell the currency at vendors. But the problem still remains that a lot of people who got like 10-20 mil at the start and quit temporarily will come back and constantly cause inflationary spikes.

Also on a note: I think SE attempted to drain gil from FFXI via NPCs in CoP for end game gear. It didn't seem to work well and again, the economy didn't fix itself until there were mass bans. Doesn't mean its impossible to do, just probably difficult.

in regards to taxes:
10% per sale tax still doesn't drain massive amounts of money out of the economy. FFXI is the proof behind this, since it experienced hyperinflation and the AH tax did nothing to correct for it. Possibly a 40% tax on sales would work, or some kind of incentive to sell things -A LOT- more than currently. But right now people don't buy enough for taxes to be a gil sink. I rarely buy anything from the wards, and for high priced items i trade to avoid the tax. Now if they taxed trading as well, thats another story.

[Kilta_Firelotus]

I don't think you got the point I was making at all. If prices go up 10x Gil taken out of the game increases 10x by taxes. There wouldn't be infinite inflation, it would reach a balancing point. However I do think that Gil from leves should be halved. What I'm more worried about is rare items becoming common after time as more and more get added to the economy slowly over time and loosing their value

guess your not a big mmo player. Items NEVER stay rare once people know how to get them. Also the current trend of thing is people are leveling up nearly all their craft classes and gather classes to be seolf sufficiant. Meaning they do not buy anything, they never spend any gil. Gil isn't getting moved around as SE hoped. Honestly I've seen the prices og gear both from np and players. As a newbie I can't buy anything. Even if I do levequests. People barely make items to sell, so people just level up crafts to make their own items. Which is the issue.