All this talk about community...

[Niamh_Rillemaugh]

But you tried which in essence is enough proof that there is a real community because people try in game as well not just spout stuff in forums we have a LS on goblet 5 for members of the housing district and we go do things or we don't but we are still working together.

That is fantastic. I'm setting up one as soon as I get home for my district (assuming there's not one already). My FC is already pretty social with our close neighbors; it'd be nice to have a dedicated linkshell.

[Welsper59]

While I can support what the OP is saying to some degree, the one thing that I really disagree on is the crafting aspect. Short of restricting the account itself from doing so, those of us that are dedicated enough do still manage to do it all ourselves. Even in a game like FFXI, which imo has the most "challenging" (see stressful) and restrictive crafting system in a live MMORPG, folks like myself would bypass the limitations by having crafting alts. Essentially, we built ourselves up to what we can do here. What makes it unique here, however, is their apparent focus on this fact. You can't reliably craft HQ items without certain skills that you can get from leveling others to 50. With the upcoming Desynthesis, you'll also gain access to certain skills for having these crafts leveled. In the future, there's currently plans to allow FC crafters to build airships. It's actually a rather effective path they're taking.

The idea that people rely on others for crafting needs, that results in building a community, is nothing but a dream. Relying on crafters does little beyond having people look at these crafters as tools to be used. You're essentially a shop that can possibly be haggled with... that's not much of a buildup for a social community. I can't tell you how often I would get tells by people looking for me to craft something for them. Some would think that's a good thing, and it can be... when done on rare occasion. It's a completely different matter when you get constantly spammed for help on crafting stuff. My association with them does little for my income and does nothing for endgame progression (it's not like they'll invite you to do things afterall).

Speak for yourself. My FC is super team oriented and does everything together... It's a matter of choice, NOT poor game design.

This can't be stressed enough. The player base is responsible for how things turn out. We're given the tools we need to build something, but how we use those tools is another story. Unless we need SE to tell us how to be nice and friendly to each other, I don't think it's necessary. I'm going to take a huge leap of faith and put a spec of trust in that I assume we all know how, just many choose not to be.

[Enthy]

I agree with OP.

I made a thread in the User Interface section (but no one ever reads that section of the forums lol) asking if the Dev. team could add something like an icon next to players names in Duty Finder if they are on the same server as you.
As it is now, I feel like "why bother chit chatting if I'll most likely never see these people again" I know I could go all stalker-mode and write down the names of people I team up with in Duty Finder and search them on the Lodestone to see if their on my sever. But that's weird... and takes time XD
I'm lazy, so I actually kind of like Duty Finder (although I bet the game is populated enough to manage just fine without it and only use Party Finder) But it just feels like I'm playing with a bunch of anonymous NPCs.

Or maybe they should add a bonus for parties composed of members that are all from the same server.

P.S. Here is the thread I mentioned earlier in my post: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...server-players

[OSUBuckeye4]

Well, I think that a lot of really good points have been made.

My intent of making this thread wasn't to shout gloom and doom. If it came across that way, I apologize. I'm still actively playing the game, so, obviously I don't hate it (I rather enjoy it). If I did, I wouldn't have bothered to log on and say anything... I would have just left.


The point of this thread was really to critique some issues that myself and a few other longer-time members of my FC (6+ months active subscriptions) have brought up, and start a discussion to see if others feel the same way, and/or are running into FC-mates that are feeling that way.

Thank you to everyone who has, so far, contributed to this discussion.



Regardless of where this thread progresses, I think the one thing that I will take away from it... is that I need to start focusing more on the progress that has been made, and less on complaining about what is still not there.

If I could re-write my initial post, I would include the fact that FF14 has the framework with Grand and Free Companies to incorporate some really cool community elements. The developers have even made mention of a few of these things on the horizon.

I would also shift the tone a bit from coming across like I wanted a complete re-vamp of the entire game (from theme park to old-school open world grindfest), to stating that I was simply looking for a little more variety, and a few "bigger picture" type things that I could do when I got tired of the vertical progression treadmill. I really don't want a game where you need to gather 80 people to complete vital things, I have a hard enough time finding 7 people... let alone coordinating gigantic groups.

I would just like to see some mini-game type events/content where you could work with an entire Grand Company, or pit FC vs. FC in friendly competition... and have those type of events serve as community-building "distractions" from the primarily instance based nature of the game.

Far too many people in my FC get burnt out with vertical progression. They figure they need to log in and do daliies, complete roulette, run Coil weekly.. and if they don't, they are somehow falling behind. It's just a vicious cycle that I see wearing a lot of people out of this game. I'd like to see SE implement some healthy distractions, and maybe point some of the community down those paths, instead of just pumping out end-game instance after end-game instance with higher and higher gear drops.

As far as crafting, I don't think we'll ever have a concensus. I have my thoughts on it, and they seem to conflict with others. I can agree to disagree on that. The developers are going to pick the path they want to go down, both sides apparently have advantages and drawbacks.



Anyways, I'll sum it all up by saying that I suppose patience is a virtue that I need to apply towards this game. The things I want have been mentioned by the developers. I need to be patient and see if they follow through on their already stated vision. I'm hoping they will, and in the meantime there is no shortage of things to do (even if they aren't exactly the options I wish existed).

Also, I'm not trying to end things here. I just figured this was a good point to jump in and re-vise my mission statement a bit.

I definitely do welcome further discussion on the topic. If it ends here though, I think a lot of good points were made on both sides and I know I have a healthier perspective on the game after reading through a lot of these comments.

[Baneus]

A lot of what you have posted are things that have been proven to be poison for MMOs. There's a good reason that most MMOs are moving away from them.

Rewards for doing things within a FC(guild) leads to an obligation to do those things together and often leads to clique groups excluding other parts of the FC (guild). Which leads to FCs falling apart after vicious arguments start over who is obligated to help out and who is not. In-fact, this happens whenever you tack a reward onto something that doesn't really require one. The core functionality of MMOs has always been Guild>Individual>Community. And there's a good reason "community" comes last. MMOs (and the Internet in general) work best with small groups of like minded people working together.As soon as you move into larger groups, you get ... issues.

Oh, and crafting with single trees simply leads to people levelling multiple alts to fill in the gaps rather than have to rely on others.

[OSUBuckeye4]

A lot of what you have posted are things that have been proven to be poison for MMOs. There's a good reason that most MMOs are moving away from them.

I guess I haven't played enough MMO's...

I don't see how fun little community relkated mini-games with non-game breaking and non-progression related rewards would be poison... but, maybe they would?

[darkstarpoet1]

i disagree with you on the leveling all the classes part. the issue isn't that you can level everything. the problem is that they made leveling everything so easy. when you can level a craft from 1-50 in less than a day without crafting a single item that is your problem. early in 1.0 leveling took much longer and was much closer to the speed in which leveling should have been kept. when you level fast and have week long lockouts on the only content worth doing then you are going to have everything leveled fast without even half trying.

leveling speed needs to be drastically reduced after the cap increase and the number of people with everything to cap will automatically go down. in 1.0 there were very few people with everything capped before the ignorant decision to give people 3k exp per synth and 100k for every few minutes inside the wolf camp. if you want to blame anyone for the fact everyone has everything capped you can look no farther than the developer in charge.

besides if you limit me to only one battle, craft, or gathering past 50 i'll just use my alts that i am already paying for and level those. there's no difference between me leveling them on my main and leveling them on the other 7 characters i am already paying on for my server besides those extra 7 characters will keep 7 individual people from being able to get in the server and play.

[Daragust]

I agree with OP.

I made a thread in the User Interface section (but no one ever reads that section of the forums lol) asking if the Dev. team could add something like an icon next to players names in Duty Finder if they are on the same server as you.
As it is now, I feel like "why bother chit chatting if I'll most likely never see these people again"[/URL]

While I don't think this is necessarily a bad idea, why don't you just ask who is from your server? I regularly ask who is from what server. It gets the group talking and generally leads to a far more lively run.

[Orophin]

Need more server wide events, like large FATEs similar to Behemoth/Odin, or something like Besieged from FFXI.

[KokonoeAiyoko]

Need more server wide events, like large FATEs similar to Behemoth/Odin, or something like Besieged from FFXI.

Besieged/Campaign Battles, Notorious Monsters, Void Watch, Bigger Maps, and Walk of Echoes pls.

That'd give us plenty to do outside of dungeons.