Quote Originally Posted by SQBoard View Post
That's why mmo have shifted away from 5+hour raiding or having a leveling curve that takes years to hit cap or 20min wait on boat rides just to get to travel to another zone. Also things like duty/party/dungeon finders instead of camping in a specific area and wait for people interested to show up, quick travel options like teleports and even solo-oriented gameplay alternatives because having your game progress completely stopped if you can't find people to party with is a problem for people with only 2 hours to play.

(Played old EQ and believe me, having the possibility of doing nothing but waiting for a team or get into a camp waiting list and end up not getting in before logging back out happened way too much for my taste back then...sorry old gripe)
Believe me, there was some fun in "taking forever" to get back to something, because that left your corpse lootable, so you needed to get back ASAP or abandon it. Largely though the entire "wait around for something to do" is awful, and it's something that "business interests" don't care about. Businesses are more than happy to let players login, do 1-2 hours worth of play and logout, because it costs them less money. However RMT completely takes advantage of this. So the less "Active players" on simultaneously can cause instances where 50% of the active players sit around one zone, and all the remaining zones are filled up with RMT bots because nobody is actually watching. I can't tell you how often I've seen this outside of FFXIV.

"New feature" is announced, Bots immediately occupy all capacity for doing it (ugh the "public farms" in Mabinogi were completely free money to RMT because of this) and thus players then demand it to be nerfed or made "harder" thus destroying any incentive to actually do it.



Quote Originally Posted by SQBoard View Post
You're comparing the wrong things in reference to that excerpt when you mention weekly caps and dailies and such since it has nothing to do with that. The 1-2 hours a day description has more to do with being able to "finish" a dungeon run in 30minutes instead of 3 hours and other such design considerations.
I'd rather have a "3-5 hour" dungeon experience broken up where the "boss rooms" are broken up like Alexander/Coil is, but 2-3 hours of it is actually "Solving" the dungeon (Wizardy Online did this) the first time as a form of progression. Think "The sunken temple of Qarn" but you have to find segments of the map, unlock floors by completing 1-2 "boss" rooms (Wizardy had as many as 8 "boss" rooms on a floor, and you weren't solo'ing any of it when it was new content.) This allows you to either form a party and solve it quickly, or play it solo and use traps/dungeon-mechanics to deal with the mobs.

But overall, the pace of existing dungeon "party" content is fairly good. I miss the "outdoor dungeon" aspect because it made the dungeon's seem larger and less empty seeing other players trying to solve it too. FFXIV V1.0's dungeons actually were seamless (Shposhae was an "outdoor" dungeon, and was replaced with Satasha in V2.0, both being level 15 content.)