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

[Duelle]

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.

3-5 days is too short a period, IMO. 7 days is about right because it could coincide with maintenance/grand company tally (provided they are in XIV like conquest tallies were in XI).

I won't be against open world mobs, provided there equivalents that can be earned through instanced boss fights. As someone who has a limited amount of time to play, I could run all the raid dungeons in the world and get the drops im looking for, but I can't camp an NM and then try to outclaim other people.

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.

There's also this, too.

[Firon]

3-5 days is too short a period, IMO. 7 days is about right because it could coincide with maintenance/grand company tally (provided they are in XIV like conquest tallies were in XI).

I won't be against open world mobs, provided there equivalents that can be earned through instanced boss fights. As someone who has a limited amount of time to play, I could run all the raid dungeons in the world and get the drops im looking for, but I can't camp an NM and then try to outclaim other people.
There's also this, too.

I agree with you BUT people like to hunt NM's why should that be taken away from them. If you can obtain the same item from a instance event why have both unless its like XI how they did the emp hairpins and such. But their should still be some big game mobs that spawn open world like Tiamat for instance.

I always felt the open world nm's gave life to the world.

[Duelle]

I always felt the open world nm's gave life to the world.

And created huge gaps between the haves and have-nots. Which boiled down to not skill at playing the game, but free time and a good claim bot.

[MeowyWowie]

Ok so I've been brainstorming for a bit now and these are some of the ideas I've come up with. It's kind of long, but I'm sure many of you will like them.

Open World Content

XII's Mark System +1

Take XII's Mark system and improve upon it. Give each City State a Mark board, listing various NMs and hints to their locations (Please, don't tell us exactly where they are, we'll find that out on our own eventually.) Each NM will be unique to its own City State (gives us reason to travel more.) Have each NM have requirements and cool down times. The cool down times are self explanatory, can be anywhere from an hour to 7 days.

For the requirements, add certain loot to all the mobs in the open world. Give us a big variety of them and don't make them take up inventory space. For each NM make us trade this "special" loot in order to flag the NM fights, maybe even charge us some gil (we need more gil sinks lol.) Have some easy ones only require a small amount of maybe just 1 specific item, and the harder ones require a larger variety of loot and maybe some rare loot as well.

If they want to expand on it even more, make the loot tables from each mob family fluctuate. Make it random, and reset once a week or so. As an example, Gobs drop Item-A one week, the following week they drop Item-B and Item-A is moved to Ahrimans' loot list. This way a certain family isn't always heavily camped for the best loot.

Accessable to all, keeps us busy, and overall I think it sounds like it would be a lot of fun.

NMs that claim you

This idea was taken from a post I made a few months back. A number of people showed interest in it. I will just copy and paste my original posts.

We could have rare NMs that give an hour warning to the population of Eorzea before they are about to spawn. Such ways to implement this could be the skies becoming blood red while the city of Uldah's citizens begin screaming and running in panic as the legendary fire dragon Tiamat begins his rampage and is headed their way. They can even add a short cut-scene before its attack if they wanted to. At such a time the heroes of Eorzea can then opt to sign up to battle this fearsome creature in an attempt to halt its attack on the city. This can be done with a small popup on the screen, similar to how we have the NPC Linkshells. When you sign up for it you will have a chance at your LS/party/alliance be given the opportunity to vanquish this foe. But here's the catch, you can't claim it, instead he claims your party and will do so randomly. They can disable invites for those signed up after its attack so people can not abuse the system and have multiple solo characters signed up for the fight then form a party afterwards.

The hour waiting time (theoretical) is plenty for our casual player-base to put up a party recruitment for the upcoming battle. This would also be nearly impossible to bot, effectively ending claim bots, at least on these types of rare spawns. The rewards can be quite impressive, fit for those skilled enough to defeat it. If one party is unable to emerge victorious, Tiamat will choose his next target as long as they are still signed up for the fight.

I just used Tiamat as an example, but I think you get the general idea. If they add a number of NMs like this, it will be a normally occurring thing and yet again keeps us busy.

Large scale Company vs Environment fights

Again, taken from the same post. This one is a similar system to the one mentioned above and may remind you of Beseiged from FFXI. Copy & pasted again.

Other forms of large scale battles can take place in a similar way, but more focused on your city of allegiance. This is where I think Grand Companies can have a huge effect on content. Same scenario, obviously under different circumstances, but instead your whole nation can battle these most notorious of NMs. These NMs do not have to be tied to their "parent" nation, but will randomly attack one nation at a time in which only members of that nation can engage it. Rewards can be given to all parties partaking in these events, the chance of which increases with your party size. Again, casuals will be given the time to recruit people for the battle and hardcore players can rest assured that the best drops will remain rare enough to keep them occupied for months, or years to come.

Again, another fair concept for both casuals and hardcore alike. This also promotes people to spread out evenly between the 3 Grand Companies.


Instanced Content

Tiered Dungeons

I loved the way XI did their dungeons and I think they should take a lot of the good parts and put them in XIV. I won't go into specific detail about dungeon designs or anything but just general things.

First off, keep the tiers similar to how XI did it. I don't want to see linear tiers (1 leads to 2 leads to 3 and so on.) As an example I'll refer to Limbus. There were 2 seperate "master dungeons," Apollyon and Temenos. Each master dungeon had a number of wings in it and one boss room. At the end of each wing was a boss which dropped one of the boss room's keys. You could complete the wings in any order you wanted to, one part I loved about it.

Within each wing, during your advancement to the boss, you also got mini rewards (AF-1 armor.) So even if you weren't interested in the main boss you could still farm for these. I used to love soloing there lol.

Again, keep time restrictions on it, though maybe not as sever as XI's. I'd much rather see a tiered dungeon system like this than one where once you complete the first tier you never have to return. It gives us reason to keep coming back, an effective time sink.


Long term Quests

Collect and turn in XXXX amount of an item

This has been mentioned already in this thread. And also, as I commented on them before, these types of quests will likely be best suited for top of the line gear because of the immense amount of time involved in completing them. Again, I won't go into detail, because XI already has perfect examples of they would work.

Relic weapons were the ultimate quests. They took months or even years to complete, and by nature were not intended for everyone, not to mention they were extremely expensive. The same goes for Lu Shang's rod. While I would love to see XIV's ultimate weapons take a similar amount of dedication to complete, they can give us smaller scale quests of similar nature, something accessible to everyone.

The satisfaction of finally completing quests like these does not compare to anything else in the game. Its something you dedicate many hours to, no matter how long it actually takes you to complete it. For me, when I started working on my first relic, it was my labor of love. I loved farming in general already, but this just made it more worth while. I would love to see casual players get the same satisfaction as I did when completing something like this.

Tactical fighting quests

This idea takes its roots from XIV's enemy incapacitation system. Similar to the previous long term quest suggestion, these types of quests will require you to incapacitate a certain number of enemies. It could be something like "Break 1000 crab shells" or in more extreme cases "Completely incapacitate 10000 Ahrimans."

Quests like these should probably be implemented for mobs that would not normally be sought after otherwise they would seem to be more like achievements than actual quests. I haven't really thought much about this idea so I'm sure some of you may have better ideas of how it could work, but the general idea is there.

To cap, all of this content is available to everyone, regardless if you choose to devote some of your time to completing them. All of it has the potential to keep us occupied for long periods of time. All of the rewards from content like this could leave you with a sense of satisfaction.

When we say we want hardcore content we don't necessarily mean 72 hour re-spawn NMs with 37 10 second windows over the course of 36 hours. We want something to invest our time into, and we want you to enjoy the same content as us. Keep an open mind and don't automatically think "Oh god, not another HNM thread." We don't claim to be better than anyone else, many of us just want to be the best we can be and we enjoy content like this. We don't care if the entire game is centered around hardcore players, but we'd like some of the content to be worth while for us.

Yoshi-P, if you happen to read this, keep making casual content like you are. The game was advertised as casual and you should stick to it. But you still have plenty of hardcore fans that would love to see content that gives them a reason to keep playing. Find the balance between the two and this game will flourish with casuals and hardcore alike.

I'd like to see some more ideas from you guys. Ideas that are accessible to everyone but that require dedication. Right now is the time for content suggestions. Let's hear what you got.

[Firon]

MeowyWowie I love the idea's but it's not for everyone but does that mean we cant have it? No, some people will never say yes to both open world HNM's and instance cause they don't wanna be left out on anything and i find this sad tbh. It's almost like me saying don't add casual stuff to the game cause i don't like causal stuff. If its not for you its just not simple as that, even if they have long pop timers everyone has an fair chance to get.

[Lenneth_Valkyrie]

Okay listen.. the target players of the game was always intended to be general..
By the time they start adding too much stuff that casuals cannot possibly take on.. the target playerbase will change, and the casual players will say " f-word this..!" and leave.. get it..?

I want to make the game fun, but adding too much of that hardcore stuff could ultimately bring it to its demise.. let me tell ya..

Once again.. this is not FFXI..

[Bled]

Okay listen.. the target players of the game was always intended to be general..
By the time they start adding too much stuff that casuals cannot possibly take on.. the target playerbase will change, and the casual players will say " f-word this..!" and leave.. get it..?

I want to make the game fun, but adding too much of that hardcore stuff could ultimately bring it to its demise.. let me tell ya..

Once again.. this is not FFXI..

And FF XIV's current "casual player" appeal is obviously helping so much... Leves are a joke and the niche market that plays the Final Fantasy series needs more then repetitive, EZ mode, bland game play.

FF XIV will not become XI for borrowing successful mechanics from said game, FF XIV is all ready its own game.

[MeowyWowie]

Okay listen.. the target players of the game was always intended to be general..
By the time they start adding too much stuff that casuals cannot possibly take on.. the target playerbase will change, and the casual players will say " f-word this..!" and leave.. get it..?

I want to make the game fun, but adding too much of that hardcore stuff could ultimately bring it to its demise.. let me tell ya..

Once again.. this is not FFXI..

Yoshi-P, if you happen to read this, keep making casual content like you are. The game was advertised as casual and you should stick to it. But you still have plenty of hardcore fans that would love to see content that gives them a reason to keep playing. Find the balance between the two and this game will flourish with casuals and hardcore alike.

Perhaps you should read everything before jumping to conclusions. These are mearly suggestions for different types of content that could please hardcore players. Every single one of them is accessible to everyone, regardless of their play style. I don't understand why so many casuals are so selfish. It's a game, it should cater to a certain crowd, in this case casuals, but it should also be fun and worth playing for others.

Seriously, this selfishness I'm seeing from many casual players absolutely disgusts me. Hardcore players will be here for the long haul, if the game is to their liking. But from my experience, casuals tend to jump from game to game. It only makes perfect sense to create content for everyone, while still catering to a certain crowd.

[Raagnar]

Sry had to skip to the end.. My wife and I are just as "hardcore" but dont believe time sink = challenge. I hated the mass time sinks but enjoyed the serious challenge of certain boss fights in FFXI. They can bring difficulty here for the hardcore players without being something retarded like... bring me 10,000 fish....

[Griss]

I think we can all agree that long term goals are exactly what this game needs. I personal do not think placing nms on elongated spawn timers is a good example of this. Long spawn times coupled with low drop rates are just a waste of time. I personally went 1/50+ on mee degi its definitely a higher number then 50 but i just quit counting after that point it was to depressing at that point to think about the time i had wasted going after a pair of gloves. hell i could have farmed/crafted my way to buying multiple pairs in the time i threw away on them. Now i know some one is going to ask me if i felt all warm and fuzzy about getting my o.kote. If i still had my rose colored glasses firmly affixed to my hind sight i might say yes. but in reality no, the only thing i was happy about at that point was only having to go back to castle o if a mission or quest made me go, and shutting people up about me being a "Gimp" for not having them. only to have some start in on the snide remarks about me not having a particular belt.

I think the best example of a rewarding long term goal is xi's Magian trials. A long winding road to a very excellent reward, there are easier routes with in the system but they produce less potent gear, but its still a pretty decent reward. They can be done at the players pace and they generally encourage team work.