Patch 2.2: Let's Copy the Worst Practice of MMOs From the Last 10 Years...

[Cegiana]

... Didn't they learn from the mistake they made with raising the level cap in FFXI?.

Ummm, so you wanted FFXI to stay at lvl50 like when it was first released? You might be alone in that mentality. The game got better once the cap was slowly increased until it stayed at lvl75 for a long time. People kept quitting/leaving so they had to fix FFXI and they slowly brought the cap up to lvl99 and introduced Abyssea. Remember Abyssea was made because people were leaving the game, not the other way around. That's when FFXI got a 1000x better and better until it is now no longer abusive and most things can he soloed so it's no longer a pointless timesink. You can now have a life AND play FFXI, something that was nearly impossible for it's first 6-8 years.

Memories are tricky like that, you remember things in a better light than they actually used to be in. FFXI was an abusive timesink, do we really want FFXIV to be like that again (Legacy FFXIV was abusive and it went away, did you learn nothing from that?)

[Starrywisdom]

HEY GUYS LETS ALL HAVE THE EXACT SAME GEAR FOR THE NEXT 10 YEARS

Said no serious gamer ever.

[ROOTFayth]

wow that OP reeks of insecurity, you really care about what people think about ur ilvl95 weapon?
you alone know what you have accomplished and it should be enough

[kokorozashii]

With all that said, what do you propose SE should do? Regardless or whether you believe players should "get good" and beat content on their own, it's clearly not in SE's best interests to roadblock the majority of their players, even at the cost of losing a few thousand players on the other end of the spectrum. Would you be happy with an achievement or special reward or a bonus effect to your Allagan weapons or what have you to signify you beat Twintania at original difficulty? It's easy to say, "SE needs to stop doing this and start doing that" but I'm not seeing any concrete examples or ideas here.

Would be nice to see some solutions, rather than opinion presented as facts, at best what we have so far is opinions that may have once worked in the past. I've been there with a previous mmo where previous dungeon gear mattered all the way until the end and being at the end meant you were at the top 5-10%. Was nice feeling "special" this last for about a bit over a year and then they raised the lvl cap which meant the gear was now useless and honestly who gives a crap? Those days remain to be a fond memory i still remember very well how nice it was to finally down roadblock boss and nothing will change that.

Doesn't this sound.. wrong to you? I'm always curious about people who go against the "everyone is a winner" mentality and then cite the only problem is that it diminishes their own self-worth. Something that is, funnily enough, only determined by -themselves-.

This isn't about them diminishing you, it is about you diminishing yourself. No one can go into the past and change your accomplishment or what it meant to you when you did it. However, you can allow yourself to make if worth less. Others simply can not do this, only you, yourself, can make your own accomplishes diminish in this respect.

Now, if someone could go back and say.... erase your achievement dates, take the gear away, wipe any evidence that the raid/win ever took place, wipe if from all memory.. Then I might put a little more credence in your lament. Sadly however, all I see is a poor evaluation system for self-esteem.

[Ilenya]

You must be one hell of a scrub.

So by your definition, I'm a scrub, because I've been level 50 since October and am only i76, nevermind the fact that I actually take my time and don't rush things. It doesn't matter that I am playing at my own pace, because clearly I'm a scrub. Got it.

[SIXTYONESIX]

Yeah, progression is terrible. If people aren't whining about their gear being outdated, they will just be crying about having full inventory because "shit is situational".

Give me a game with ever increasing progression over ever expanding side-grades any day.

[KiriA500]

HEY GUYS LETS ALL HAVE THE EXACT SAME GEAR FOR THE NEXT 10 YEARS

Said no serious gamer ever.

Have you met XI players?

[nocturnal84]

Meh I'm going to unsub doesn't bother me, what bothers me is finding another mmo.
I don't know how the term progression applys to some of these types of games. There is no such thing as progression when the starting point keeps being moved closer to the finishing post.
It's preety much hey every1 is a winner have free stuff.. Whatever cool I don't care I'll move on .
Really a substandard mmo anyway with a laggy combat system..

[Kiara]

Yoshi P seems hellbent on copying his beloved World of WarCraft in seemingly every way possible. For all the good you've done in this game, there is nothing worse feeling than to have all our hard work *invalidated* every 4 - 6 months with a new patch that raises the Level Cap or Item Level.

For MMOs, there is Horizontal Progression as well as Vertical Progression. No one is asking for you to keep all of our max gear for multiple years like FF XI's old days, but your current time frame of ~6 months is a joke.

Another good facet of FF XIV is that you allow us to play multiple Jobs on the same character, and encourage it, so I'm still hunting for gear for my secondary / tertiary / etc. Jobs and gearing those up. But when Patch 2.2 comes out, it will all be for naught.

A big part of the problem is that you put FF XIV in this situation: You've controlled every single major Stat on our gear, so that it's impossible to diverge at all from the Stats you want us to have. You control exactly how much VIT or STR or INT, etc. (our core stats) that we can ever gear for.

You've marginalized Materia and Crafted Gear, and ultimately, we get extremely boring Gear Options (Allagan vs. AF +1): All the *same* VIT and (Main Stat), but one has more Crit or the other has more Skill/Spell Speed, etc. With no other stats to adjust, of course your only recourse is to keep bumping up the Item Level or Level Cap every few months.

Why not consider more meaningful, additional stats on our gear to allow for Horizontal Progression? (Same Level, Alternate Gear.) Or also consider exactly how many people have actually fully geared up their 2nd, 3rd, 4th+ Jobs and the time it takes to do that? Ultimately, it would be nice to see the fruits of our labor (our max level gear we've earned) actually be relevant for longer than a few months. Or else, all we're doing is one giant Hamster Wheel, every 4 - 6 months. No thanks.

[Kazahashi]

Kiara, I totally, one hundred percent agree with you. If the patch after this one is more crap like this, I'm just going to bounce I think....I'm not going to continually play the vertical gear progression game. I like horizontal progression with vertical coming out with an expansion every couple years or so....XI made it to where old content was relevant WAY passed when it was released. Which was nice, cause when you go to WoW, everything that's not "new" is a ghost town. Waste of resources on top of being just a crappy development model.