Gamer Retention: what does FF14 really need?

[ViolentDjango]

Ok, I will play this game again. In the spirit of XIV I copypasta:d this from a post I made in a similar topic.

Ok here are some minor things which would go a LONG way (in no particular order):

- A REAL LFP SYSTEM (please).
- A REAL PLAYER/AREA SEARCH SYSTEM (in the style of /sea [area] [levelrange] [job] [inviteflag])
- No more teleportation to ether camps for party members who have not visited the location earlier. -> Make players work for their progress.
- Skirr up's for weapons (Let's revive the social function of creating and playing in a skill-up party).
- Draw from the overall experience of developing XI (no, not copy it).
- A sense of genuine exploration and achievement.

I am certain that some of these will give a noticeable boost in Eorzea's social life.

[Edit] On the topic of the game not yet having a real zone/world search system: I should probably add that the reason for this is most likely that squeeenix does not want anyone to be able to establish any kind of usage statistics over FFXIV. Hovever, I still hope they come up with a way to improve player searching. [/Edit]

Thx.

I agree with the above for the most part, though I feel that a sense of exploration is something someone can get out of FFXIV even with transportation systems. One, there are things that you can't see/can't get to by teleporting, and the number of things on that list are going to increase as the world expands. Two, you can't force people to enjoy traveling if they don't enjoy traveling. Removing teleportation wouldn't make people who don't care about traveling and exploration explore, and would ultimately just serve to piss them off -- those systems are there for people who can't be bothered.

Real world example: you don't "unlock" cities, in the real world. You just travel to them. Some people travel and like to sight see, some people travel and like to explore. When I lived in Paris, France with my sister for a short time, I did very little sight seeing but I roamed around the city and explored a lot -- found cool dive bars and places to hang out and the like. People who want to explore are going to explore, people who want to get from point A to B will just take the bus.

The problem with most MMO RPGs is that they feel they have to support one side or the other, I think supporting both is a good thing for FFXIV. Example, I knew about Lil Ala Migho long before they marked it on the map, because I like running around maps and seeing the interesting side stuff.

Plus, you can't teleport people to sub-crystals, like the Mawana(sp?) Mines one, last I checked -- so that's one thing to look forward to -- being forced, one way or another, to explore to get all of your subsidiary teleports.

Skill ups == No. Fuck that. Skilling up in FFXI is the most painful and ridiculous element of the game. Unless they revamp the system to make it a lot more common sense based, which would make it so easy it wouldn't be worth doing in the first place. Besides, if the only weapons you can use are the ones that set your class -- your skill is always going to be capped anyway. There would never be a reason or need to skill up.

Parties will become more common place when they add search functions and party mechanics anyway, we don't really have to worry about that.

- more lively world, not so copy and pasted terrain
- faster dynamic combat, auto attack every 5 sec is so freaking boring.
- completely different battle UI + different menu UI, less lag in UI
- different retainer UI, maybe an AH
- PvP
- more content and so on...

Yeah, we're past that. If "copy and pasted" terrain really bugs you -- you're probably going to want to not play any game that's come out in the past 5 years or that will be out within the next 5... because copy and pasting elements of maps isn't unique to FFXIV and FFXIV definitely isn't the only game where it is painstakingly obvious.

As far as faster combat, they're working on that. And they are making auto attacks more unique too. There's not much they can do to turn trash/basic mobs into anything more exciting or amazing though without over complicating the game.

Tsukino, thanks! I had no idea about this. Now I have to admit... even though I thought I could not get any more surprised by the poorly designed and developed software behind XIV this probably is another dent in that perception.

Would you happen to have any relevant links to sources for this information?

Yeah, the problem ended up being that they treated FFXIV too much like an outside, stand-alone project and didn't treat it as a sequel to FFXI (i.e. drawing from the core structure of FFXI) like they should have. The new development engine used, i.e. Crystal Tools, was another problem because they couldn't use any of the key development/programming things they learned from FFXI in the development of the game.

That's why there's the blaring gap between things that are perfectly function-able and seemingly transferable in FFXI to things that make no sense in FFXIV (starting off with no search functions, for example, when FFXI can tell you everything short of a person's current HP and equipment without you even being in a zone with them)

Lodestone, oddly enough, seems to have more access to the game's character database than the ingame functions seem to.