So, pretty dead lately....

[Aramina]

So basically you're telling us to do stuff in game that we don't like to do just so we have something to do?

how about no?

Edit:

I play this game to kill monsters and save the planet.

not kill other players trying to interfere with my grand company's plans.
not to outfit other adventurers trying to do the same thing.

I'm here to kill shit and take their loot.

Capice?

No, but I do expect you to act like the adult I assume you to be and clue into the fact that putting in more content that YOU want means putting in less content that someone else may want. Your wants do not supersede mine. My wants do not supersede yours. They have to spread development time and money to make content that various groups want.

[Duuude007]

I have the time to commit to it, I just find crafting boring as piss and not fulfilling. I want character progression. Crafting doesn't give me PvE character progression.

I see, so without crafters supplying your static/party with food and pots, without crafters helping your static/party gear up with melded i180 gear, You have amazingly managed to already clear A3 Savage. Let alone A4S.

uh, huh. They don't help with PvE progression AT ALL </sarcasm>

[Colorful]

snip

I'd kill for something like the relic right now! It's a long term goal, resulting in a shiny weapon that I can log in everyday and work on it. We need more content like that in the game, not something I log in for 30 minutes a day, and then repeat that every day for 6 days to cap because of some weekly limit.

But if it's locked behind crafting or gil, I'm gone after I complete my Void Ark set (if I like the glamour) in 4ish weeks until 3.2.

[adn]

I have not noticed any significant drop in people. I main on Behemoth and have an alt on Leviathan, both servers are very active. I actually got a queue on Behemoth the other night.

S-E already gave one alternative way to grinding expert roulette dungeons for gear: Frontlines, go do it, it's fun. If you're stuck on a GC with a long queue time then just hop GCs to one with shorter queue times. On Primal data center, my alt on Leviathan is on the Immortal Flames which gets 5 minute queues, games last 15 minutes and you get 50 law/20 eso. Fun, efficient, and a refreshing break from dungeon grinding. You get PVP ranks too!

I'm sure there will be even more gear sources in 3.1 because you will have Void Ark gear, I imagine they will start offering some way to upgrade Eso items for non-Savage raiders, and maybe even airship exploration will give gear.

It is just a matter of fact that endgame is going to be anemic at the start of an expansion because a MASSIVE amount of resources go into the leveling experience, leaving only so much for endgame. Which was the situation at the start of 2.0 when literally the only way to gear up was by doing Ampador Keep speed runs, until they nerfed it, and then the only way to gear up was doing slightly slower Ampador Keep speed runs. Trust me, it wasn't fun.

[Intaki]

Actually, SE has been giving us less. [B]We're asking for more ways to cap eso

Expert dungeons.
Alexander.
Treasure maps.
Pvp.

Next patch you'll likely be adding the 24-man raid and possibly airship content to that as well.

[Mykll]

... Snipped...

Congrats you rushed from 50 to 60. That is how you picked to do content from he new expansion. Me? I leveled up one of the new jobs to 50 first. Then the next job. Then the third new job. So, no, I didn't rush straight from an already level 50 character straight to 60. And when my Arcanist has hit 60 doing the quests and what not? 11 more jobs to level up.

Why else am I not 60 yet? Let's look at my job levels. 53, 53, 55, 53, 53, 53, 54, 53, 52, 53, 54. Sure if I would have picked one of my 50s, and marched on, that job would be 60, and then went to the next 60, and marched forward, one by one, like you, would have multiple 60s. I choose to play it differently this expansion. So, it is going to be a quite a bit of time to get 13 jobs to level 60, 8 crafters to level 60, and 3 gatherers to level 60. And, I have not even touched upon Gold Saucer.

Let's go before HW expansion. I had all DoW and DoM at 50. For quite a while. Guess what? I still had plenty of stuff for me to do.

Not to mention all the crafting and gathering off-ramps I have taken along the way. Which, I know you hate so you completely dismiss that entire part of the content of this game.

So, basically all you care about is maxing Level and Item Level of Disciples of War and / or Magic. Let's say there was no weekly cap on any tomes or gear drops. And instead of 2 dungeons there were 10. Great, you bought and upgraded max ilvl to one of your level 60s in a week. Next week? You would be complaining that you would have to run the same 10 dungeons, but would do it, and get your second character max ilvl. Third week? You'd come back to these forums and say yet again that there was nothing to do in this game.

Every... single... MMO... suffers from this. You hit max level, you get best in slot everywhere.... Then what? No more progression until next path or expansion. You keep commenting about the old MMOs like EQ. Been a few years since I logged in there, but they didn't have duty finder. Nothing could really be done solo. There were no quest logs. They had raid lockouts. You were forced to build a community on your server, to get anything done. Oh, and in those glorious MMOs of yesteryear that you love so much? You could still hit max level, could still get best in slot everywhere. Oh, and there were still crafting and gathering which you would ignore. But, max level, best gear... then what? You are in the exact same situation. Whether DDO, EQ, UO, DAOC, WoW, FFXIV, etc....

Am I blindly following Yoshi around and just in awe of everything he has done or that is in FFXIV? No. Plenty of small gripes to be had. Today's gamer overall is just different from those that were willing to grind out things in EQ. No quest givers on map? No quest log? Actually had to remember stuff or write it down? A tremendous amount of steps to get attunement or whatever it was called to a raid? Getting relics required a LOT of help? Yes, SOME people still enjoy that. Judging by the number from WoW and others, it was evident that gamers wanted to get away from some of that. They wanted easy quest givers. They wanted to know exactly where on the map to go kill things. They didn't want a bunch of steps to get attuned to something. They didn't want to set up camp like in KC and mindlessly grind the same respawning mobs for hours. But, what did we have back then? There was also more of a community. Dungeon Finders, cross server, a lot of that has killed off a lot of the community factors, as well as some aspects of games where you never really had to leave a city to get stuff done because of those DFs.

What long lasting content did EQ give us, that built a community? Or because of the (compared to today's MMOs) lack of features, that required you to build a community?

Absolutely, there are still some things that EQ and UO has done better than yes FFXIV. EQ Guild list. You can edit notes. You can export. Sort. That is just ONE thing. Send tells inside dungeons. I am not blind to the shortcomings of FFXIV. Nor do I think that EQ, OR WoW, OR FFXIV is the best MMO ever made. Are there some parts that have been done better in each MMO than in others? Sure.

You comparing a variety of content to hanging out with friends and such is flawed too. You want to level up, and you only want your Eso gear. You don't want to do PVP, crafting, gathering. Great, you don't have to. But wanting your Eso gear is like going to your job. You only get your money, from going to your job. You (usually) don't get to pick different jobs to go to. You go to one job, you go to one office, you sit behind one desk. Again, usually. You want to instead hang out with friends (social RP stuff in game) you can do that. But you won't be getting paid (Eso) to do so. You want to go to the movies (crafting) you can. But you won't get paid (Eso). You want to watch TV (gathering)? Once again. You can. But you won't get paid. You only want to get paid (Eso) and that does limit you on what you can do in order to get paid (Eso).

And again, if there were no caps, or weekly lockouts, then what? All your 60s would be in Eso. Ok, then what? You would be in exactly the same situation, except now you no longer need to get paid (Eso) because all of your bills (gear) have been paid off, and any extra money (Eso) is now useless.

[Kaurie]

Varied? >_> Riiiiight lol The reason people get bored is because there's no variety. We get 2 dungeons to get eso, because SE doesn't want us to have variety, there's no other viable way of gearing up besides those two dungeons.

I feel that you're either unaware of what varied means, or you misunderstood me (or both).

Varied content does not mean a lot of any single type of content. It means that there is a diversity of content. 5 Expert dungeons is not more varied than 2 expert dungeons. What I am saying is they added a little amount of a bunch of different types of content. I personally find most of the non-dungeon/raid content to be very boring.

I am leaning towards unsubbing and moving to F2P Wildstar. We'll see how 3.1 goes I guess.

On another note, you can get esoterics through PvP, Alex and extreme primals.

[Ashkendor]

12+ hours? You must either be taking everything at a snail's pace or choosing not to do the content >_> lol 12+ hours a day and you can go from 50-60 in 3-5 days depending on your job, you can fully finish every single sidequest with your first 60. Crafting/gathering leves can get those to 60 in a day or two and alex/eso are weekly capped, so after a certain amount of doing it, theres no point in doing it until Tuesday. Everything worthwhile in doing has a small weekly cap (450 tomes, 1 loot per floor), so with 12 hours a day, you can actually cap eso and finish alex on a Tuesday.

Unless you count being "on the game for 12 hours" as in having 2-3 hours of afking >_> Because you can play for 5 hours a day and finish everything for the week by Thursday. I really hope you're not counting achievements as "running out of things to do", because I hate to be the person to tell you, but achievements =/= content

That's just it, though. You're getting indignant and trying to tell me that what I'm doing isn't content, but it's just not what you would consider content. A typical day will find me doing a variety of things. Crafting, gathering, leveling, raiding, PvP, hunts, running dungeons, treasure maps, Triple Triad... the list goes on. Crafting and gathering in particular have been keeping me very busy lately because I've been grinding out blue scrips for crafting mats and folklore books. I'll probably go back to leveling soon - I just got off a leveling binge with AST and wanted a break from PvE to work on crafting. When I level, I typically find a friend or two to FATE grind or spam dungeons with; it's more about the social interaction than anything. I spent several hours today doing unsynced dungeons with newer players in my FC to help them unlock their roulettes. Then we did the super FATE out in SoC because 2 friends didn't have the minion, then went around and murdered some hunts (and got murdered by Leucrotta).

I love going back and destroying old raids so players that never cleared can see the lore. I help the new people in my FC farm Bismarck and Ravana EX or even the ARR primals because they think the ponies are shiny as hell and it all gets me DRK tank credits. Hell, one day me and my in-game wife went and destroyed Aurum Vale as a pair of level 60 Black Mages and let me tell you it was glorious to absolutely burn that shit to the ground. I go achievement hunting, I go exploring and looking for places to get out of the map, and sometimes I fly around just admiring the scenery because it's beautiful in all of the different weathers in different ways. This game for me is a lot more about getting together and doing stuff with people I enjoy being around than it is about grind grind grind progress progress progress. If I cap tomes and I get asked to do Expert Roulette, I'll go. if I've got my Alex drops and someone needs help with it, I'll go. Then there's the days that I do nothing but fish while I sit and derp in Mumble with my raiding static. There is so much to do in this game and people wilfully choose to ignore most of it.

Sometimes I think that people have just completely forgotten how to smell the goddamn roses.

[LunaSnowfield]

I don't wanna touch expert roulette again in my fucking life.

Honestly 2 dungeons... the one in the skies is the most annoying.

[Obysuca]

Expert dungeons.
Alexander.
Treasure maps.
Pvp.

Next patch you'll likely be adding the 24-man raid and possibly airship content to that as well.

And guess what. Alex will be useless, the expert dungeons we have now will be useless, so we'll have 2 expert dungeons and void ark. That's it. I really don't see how you think that's more lol Yoshi's really got you wrapped around his finger.

If SE actually listened to our feedback on how we want more of a variety, your list would look something more like

Expert dungeons.
Alexander.
Treasure maps.
Pvp.
24 man raid.
Open world endgame
A secondary raid for more chances at gear
Another unique raid for even more options

All of which would give us a reasonable amount of eso, say, 30 per run. They would all give us i200 ish gear, with different sets of stats, so we can mix and match and actually go "Should I do ____ to get this gear? Or should I do _____ or get that other piece?"

Right now, the only real relevant way to gear up is to do expert and cap eso. Alex is pretty much subpar gear now for your main so all you're left with is "I guess I'll do expert and get eso", which involves zero thinking. I guess you're the type who enjoys having others dictate how and where you get your things from so you don't have to think.