[DEV] Time sinks and satisfaction, a plea from one of your hardcore fans

[Gramul]

Give us goals, long term goals. Give us a reason to continue playing, something that is rewarding in both an emotional and material sense. We want to feel like we actually accomplished something sometimes.

Yes!
That's exactly what we need! That's the stuff I liked best about XI. Attaining far away goals that expanded the game and your character. Chocobo and Airship licenses, AF armor, fantastic new regions, and deep storylines all served as reasons for me to keep playing. XIV doesn't really have any of that at the moment so there really isn't much point in playing it besides the story quests which really just feel like an introduction to the story than anything else.

[MeowyWowie]

HOW FUN AND EXCITING. I really hope they keep that kind of stuff away from FFXIV, what did you REALLY accomplish? You wasted a week doing absolutely nothing but camp an NM that is easy to kill, i'd rather see NM's that are DIFFICULT TO KILL - not be a major waste of time.

I was just using those two as an example because just about everyone knew what they were. I loved camping NMs and beating people to the claim, even if I didn't get the drop. Many others loved it too. These same players would likely agree with me that we HATE the way NMs were implemented in XIV. So whatever argument you have about XI's NMs, we share the same frustration with XIV's, but on the opposite end of the spectrum. There's NO reason we can't have both. Nobody's saying delete all the quick-to-beat content. We're simply asking for something we can also enjoy, to keep us entertained.

Content is only difficult when it's first released. Over time people develop strategies and it slowly turns into a routine. This is inevitable. So, while they're designing "hard" content, they should also be looking at the replay value of that content. This is where time sinks come in. If they want to turn a profit with XIV, SE needs us stay subscribed for as long as possible, period. That's what it all comes down to.

[Delmontyb]

I really like how you separate both hard to get and easy to get items, when I started reading this, at first I was worried this was another thread that was so hardcore for the sake of being hardcore it thinking players who aren't, shouldn't play. But after reading the whole thread I have to agree, that you raise some good points...

I hope that there will be gear that takes a lot of work to get, and by a lot of work, I mean it... I guess you could "tier" items (colors seem to work from other games) - but I'll use numbers in this case:

T1 - Normal Items, very common
T2 - HQ versions of Normal items, common
T3 - Rare Items - not very common, but still available with enough work put into it - 10% drop rate
T4 - Very Rare Items - not common at all, lots of time and effort put into getting these items. Drop rate varies with weather/day and items drop around 1% of the time.
T5 - Ultra Rare items - items that have a less then 0.1% drop rate - players might have to meet special requirements to have a chance to have the item drop. Quests, Company Rank, etc...
T6 - Impossibly Rare - items that have a less then 0.00001% chance of the item dropping. Mostly these items would be so rare that special events might increase the chance of getting the item in and of itself.

With more and more harder to obtain items working off of drop rate, jobs like thief would really come into play if they had traits that increased the drop rate of items on mobs.

Anyway, the above is just some random examples, so take it for what you will.

[Physic]

I really like how you separate both hard to get and easy to get items, when I started reading this, at first I was worried this was another thread that was so hardcore for the sake of being hardcore it thinking players who aren't, shouldn't play. But after reading the whole thread I have to agree, that you raise some good points...

I hope that there will be gear that takes a lot of work to get, and by a lot of work, I mean it... I guess you could "tier" items (colors seem to work from other games) - but I'll use numbers in this case:

T1 - Normal Items, very common
T2 - HQ versions of Normal items, common
T3 - Rare Items - not very common, but still available with enough work put into it - 10% drop rate
T4 - Very Rare Items - not common at all, lots of time and effort put into getting these items. Drop rate varies with weather/day and items drop around 1% of the time.
T5 - Ultra Rare items - items that have a less then 0.1% drop rate - players might have to meet special requirements to have a chance to have the item drop. Quests, Company Rank, etc...
T6 - Impossibly Rare - items that have a less then 0.00001% chance of the item dropping. Mostly these items would be so rare that special events might increase the chance of getting the item in and of itself.

With more and more harder to obtain items working off of drop rate, jobs like thief would really come into play if they had traits that increased the drop rate of items on mobs.

Anyway, the above is just some random examples, so take it for what you will.

abysmal drop rate is a bad mechanic for ff i think

[Zantetsuken]

Monster Hunter did a fantastic job with gear.

Balancing attributes in order to get bonuses meant that every piece of gear had potential use depending on what setup you were going for.

I'd like to see a similar approach taken in FFXIV.

[MeowyWowie]

abysmal drop rate is a bad mechanic for ff i think

Abysmal drop rates aren't new to FF at all. From their older games, I can recall 2 items that were EXTREMELY rare, as well as the enemy encounters that rewarded them.

In FFIV there was a secret room in the Lunar Subterrane. In that room was an extremely rare encounter of 5(?) Pink Fluffs (1/64 chance to be exact,) which (if you were extremely lucky) dropped a pink tail (1/64 chance again) which can be used to synthesize the BEST armor in the game (I'm talking like taking only 1 dmg from any attack lol.) The fight itself was unlike any other fight in the game. After a few attack rounds you lost control of some of your party members and they started to fight without your input, made the fight harder, but more often than not you'd survive. The plus side to this was you could farm Alarms in The Tower of Babil, which can be used in the room to automatically spawn the encounter, but you only had once chance at farming these as you could not return to the tower at this point in the game. It was not uncommon for people to go 0/1000+ on the drop. Evil, evil Squaresoft XD

In FFV the best whip in the game was again an extremely rare drop from an extremely rare encounter. The Dragon beard, as it was named, was obtained from a bat encounter (Stingray) in a small area on the wold map while you were on your boat. It seemed to be even more rare than FFIV's Pink Fluff encounter, at least from what I remember. And also like the Pink Tail, it was also not uncommon to go 0/1000 on it. Fortunately it was also obtainable from the toughest optional boss in the game, Shinryu. But if my memory serves me correctly, once you got to that point in the game there was no turning back.

But this is extreme, and while I'm really glad Delmontyb understands what this thread is about, his examples are a bit extreme as well. I think 0.00001% is too much and will likely never be obtained by anyone over the course of the entire game. But if you got it, you would be a FFXIV GOD lol. But his example are just that, examples. This is what I'd be happy with, though I'm not really a big fan of tiered gear. I'd be happier if it was completely different gear but with slightly better stats increasing with time and effort required to obtain. Delmontyb nailed it though.

[Burn]

Camping is a bad bad idea especially when the RMT shows up, nostalgia aside, they can make hard to get gear through hard dungeons, we don't need the mess that was FFXI from 2003-2008'ish. It is almost like people forgot what sky was like on FFXI for the 2-3 years RMT controlled Ullikummi spawns, there is no defending the system, it was TERRIBLE.

Getting salvage armor was hard, you didn't need to camp against people unless you were mining your own Khroma ore's. I much much rather the dungeon/raid system route in FFXIV while they build on ideas that they had from FFXI such as nyzul, salvage, dynamis like systems.

The HNM system only worked in early FFXI because only a few guilds were high enough level to camp, as time went on and leveling got more streamlined for being quicker we saw 205 people for day 1 Fafnir's, that was nothing but a ridiculous bot fest.

[Firon]

Again, you can focus on long-term projects like relic weapons (and believe me, I was fine knowing that I would never in my life see Excalibur or Murgleis in my inventory). Make it not require ridiculous amounts of currency but build off drops from dungeons or something like that.
Not necessarily. You can put an HNM in an instance with a seven day lock-out after being killed. All open world mobs do is create needless drama and competition. Instances at least put failure directly on you and your group instead of it being that you had the slower claim bot.

Now i do like that lock out idea on certain mobs that would be cool but it would have to be an instance fight and only allowed to do it every 3/5 days. I still do agree with what MeowyWowie said I am an former owner of an Aegis Shield and when i got it, it was so awesome, but I would still like a few big game NM's in the open world nothing wrong with having both as a lot of people say.

[Firon]

Abysmal drop rates aren't new to FF at all. From their older games, I can recall 2 items that were EXTREMELY rare, as well as the enemy encounters that rewarded them.

In FFIV there was a secret room in the Lunar Subterrane. In that room was an extremely rare encounter of 5(?) Pink Fluffs (1/64 chance to be exact,) which (if you were extremely lucky) dropped a pink tail (1/64 chance again) which can be used to synthesize the BEST armor in the game (I'm talking like taking only 1 dmg from any attack lol.) The fight itself was unlike any other fight in the game. After a few attack rounds you lost control of some of your party members and they started to fight without your input, made the fight harder, but more often than not you'd survive. The plus side to this was you could farm Alarms in The Tower of Babil, which can be used in the room to automatically spawn the encounter, but you only had once chance at farming these as you could not return to the tower at this point in the game. It was not uncommon for people to go 0/1000+ on the drop. Evil, evil Squaresoft XD

In FFV the best whip in the game was again an extremely rare drop from an extremely rare encounter. The Dragon beard, as it was named, was obtained from a bat encounter (Stingray) in a small area on the wold map while you were on your boat. It seemed to be even more rare than FFIV's Pink Fluff encounter, at least from what I remember. And also like the Pink Tail, it was also not uncommon to go 0/1000 on it. Fortunately it was also obtainable from the toughest optional boss in the game, Shinryu. But if my memory serves me correctly, once you got to that point in the game there was no turning back.

But this is extreme, and while I'm really glad Delmontyb understands what this thread is about, his examples are a bit extreme as well. I think 0.00001% is too much and will likely never be obtained by anyone over the course of the entire game. But if you got it, you would be a FFXIV GOD lol. But his example are just that, examples. This is what I'd be happy with, though I'm not really a big fan of tiered gear. I'd be happier if it was completely different gear but with slightly better stats increasing with time and effort required to obtain. Delmontyb nailed it though.

Hunting rare game in XII was also awesome as well.

[Mack]

Hunting rare game in XII was also awesome as well.

{Yes please} rare game was awesome and XII in general had some MMO mechanics or ideas that were implemented well....like gear (weapons) that were hard to obtain. For an offline game it did a much better job than XIV.