Is this the road they will continue to take with items?

[cryptic_angel]

The point of some horizontal progression is keeping older content relevant longer, not making player use the same gear for years. Gear issue can be easily fixed with allowing those old items upgrade into something else, allowing the unique stats on those 'old' gears to be transferrable, etc. Players playing for a long time who already has the base items can essentially just keep going and might come back to older content because the drops can be used to start another item progression for another slot/class (note: i do not advocate atma/animus/novus level of grind/rng progression) while new players wont get to miss out on older content that SE put hardwork into simply because it's not 'hot' anymore and nobody else does them. Right now has a hotfix for this by enticing older players to come back to older content that new players have to finish by offering them a currency that has no cap anymore but has devalued by shoving that currency into any content they come up with and putting exorbitant prices on it (animus books, novus alexandrites, mats for flashy glamours).

An example is coil1. By expansion, there will be new players who will never see turn 1-4 and clear t5 once and have no choice but to move on to the latest gear progression. Might happen to coil2 too, by expansion. Having more content be available for new players is better than cutting out content due to obsoleteness without the new player's choice, I think. You dont even have to force them do all those content if they really want to 'catch up' asap when there's the latest tome gears.

It's exactly because everybody knows that SE is killing themselves over trying to push fast food style content at turbo speed that I and others want SE to think a bit longer and try to build a wider base for gear progression and grow up slowly (but surely) instead of stacking jenga as fast as possible and see how high they can go. Doesn't have to pure horizontal or pure vertical.

Wish this could be translated and sent to Yoshida by hitting the like button so many times it breaks.

All the content of each patch feels like the same cheap grind masked by some sort of vanity reward. Then, SE exacerbates the situation by burning people out by adding grind after grind. To boot, these long gear/progression grinds are being invalidated so quickly.

It sucks when you have to grind for gear non-stop. At least with other vertical progression games you can anticipate long content cycles with gigantic patches that reset all your work. This game is resetting the gear grinds and neck-breaking speeds. The pace of new content is nice, but does SE really need to invalidate raid content three months before your new raid patch?

It's like SE messed up 1.0's launch and hit the jackpot with an MMO reboot. Now that they have the successful Reboot, SE seems to be making rookie game design mistakes. Just look at Ramuh EX in contrast to Levi EX. No one care about Ramuh EX because the rewards suck. When Levi EX was relevant for 12 weeks or so, you could see dozens of pug groups in pf. How many Ramuh EX pugs do you see in pf? I have never seen a company trash it's own content as such fast speeds. It's like SE only wants content to be popular for two months or so.

SE spends months designing a fights that people will only care about for 10 or so weeks. Seems like they don't really know what they are doing.

I really don't understand where Square Enix is going with that in mind.

I am expecting a lot from the Expansion, I hope it won't be as easy as it is right now. Luckily Ninja will sustain me a bit..

There is a limit to how much to cater to new players and thinking it's their first MMO.

First timers can research on this forum and even google for info about the game and gear and skill etc.. and if SE keep thing separated, they will get 2.x content, so they will be fine Yoshi. Trust me ^^

No point of making maps lvl 51-60 if we'll still obliterate them and not having a sense of danger from them.

Sigh.. Come on Devs, its a great game, now it's time to bring the polish and make it shine!

I would not hold your breath. I am holding out for the expansion too but I am afraid this game will continue to hold the hand of every new player and dump max ilvl gear upon them.

This game has no sense of progress, power, danger, or lasting difficulty. Even with brutal coil, the biggest challenge is finding 7 raiders who want to relearn four fights for "bragging" rights.