Poll: Gear progression, horizontal or vertical?

[kyuven]

If you put it like that.

Or you can put it like this.
Would you want 1 thing to do every 6 months that progresses your character at top tier? Or 12 things to do that progress your character at the top tier?

If you start from launch, you'll be finished with those 12 things in less time than it takes them to be developed. In addition i can't think of a single game that actually HAS "12 things." Even the infamous FFXI really only has 6 or so at a given time that are actually worth doing. And a lot of that design is so clearly for padding it's insane (such as requiring 30 items that drop from a single NM, meaning you have to kill that NM about 30 times)

Would you want the option to do 1 of 20 pieces of content? Or have to choose between 2-3 peices of content every 6 months?

We have over 20 pieces of content, they were just staggered. Thanks to the relic quests, MSQ, GCs, and various other objectives, they're all still relevant, just for different purposes. Also, releasing them all at once means we need to wait 6 months to a year for new content. People are slowly trickling away from the game with a THREE MONTH desert of content, can you imagine how many people would leave if it took 6 months between content updates?

Would you prefer all your work to be negated every 6 months? Or would you prefer it to last 1-2yrs?

Would i rather use the exact same equipment for 1-2 years rather than be able to get something new every 6 months? Even EverQuest realized this was a bad idea and had new paid expansions every 6 months until they overdid it. People want new shinies. You either stagger your content, make it ungodly hard/monotonous, or release it all at once and have people burn out after 3 months when they run out of things to do.

DO you want 8hrs of relevant content per week or do you want 60hrs of relevant content per week to do?

Um...we technically HAVE 60 hours of relevant content a week, but 60 is really overkill if you mean post-MSQ content like raids. This goes back to "encouraging people to No-Life the game." Which is bad and approaching illegal in some territories.

FFXI you could do the same content many times, but they added new content it is not like horizontal = no new content. It is just more content added to the already existing content pool.

Yyyyyyeah um hate to tell you but FFXI is a bad example. It doesn't really have horizontal progression, so much as just having more armor and weapon sets than XIV (due to being 5x older) that are just upgraded. It's vertical progression with a farm instead of a houseplant. But that farm started from a houseplant.
Also the way they're acquired and upgraded would make someone annoyed by the Zodiac quests in this game scream in agony just READING about it.