So, pretty dead lately....

[Obysuca]

I'd love to learn how people with less time are able to do all the things I do with more time, as I'm apparently being punished for being this way.

45 mins a day and you cap eso by Saturday / can get all 4 alex look in an hour >_> Leveling/high lvl roulette take 5-10 mins to get into and under 20 to clear, most dungeons 51+ only take ~10 mins to get into, so you can still level to 60 with only playing an hour a day. That's how they're doing all the things with less time. They can gear up and get the same gear as you for 1/10th the time/effort you put in, which isn't right.

When you say "punished", you're implying that they are taking something away (literally and/or figuratively) from you and, through this action, is causing harm to you in some way.

And "punished" doesn't always mean actual harm. People with more time are being punished for playing more because once they cap alex/eso/scrips, theres nothing else to do until Tuesday, even if they want to keep playing.

And yes, they are "taking something away". They're taking the ability for people to stay entertained. They're taking away the chance to actually gear yourself in more possible ways / more jobs, rather than forcing you to play how they want you to play.
If someone wants to grind out eso/alex loot for all their jobs and has the time to do so, they should be allowed to. Sure, you can say they'll run out of things to do and get bored, but that's also the fault of SE for adding a tiny amount of content and expecting it to keep people entertained for 4-5 months, when it doesn't.
How would you like it if there was something you enjoyed doing and could do it for hours, but after 40 mins of doing it, someone comes out and tells you that you can't do it anymore, even though you have the time to continue to do it? That's pretty much what XIV's like now for people who play more than an hour a day.

weekly caps for example are bad design and a proof that your mmo lacks endgame stuff to do hence why you have to limit your players by such caps. daoc didnt have weekly caps on anything. aoc didnt have weekly caps either. it had only raid ids but it needed those since raiddungeons contained lots of bosses there.

^ This. XI didn't really have weekly caps either, in a way. Most of the lockouts were only 2-3 days, so you could do it more than once a week. XI also let you gear up all of your jobs, rather than being forced to pick a main and guess what, people still grinded the content as much as they could and still kept players busy for years. XIV went the weekly cap route and lost a good portion of its playerbase by 2.1 and its further been dropping steadily since then.

The worst part of weekly caps is when you cap on reset day and have absolutely nothing to do for a whole week, that's just bad game design. Weekly caps make players bored and quit. The point of a mmo is to keep people subbed for as long as possible and to play every day and every month, not "play once a week, cap, probably unsub the month after an update." No idea why modern mmos consider this a good idea, it's just less money for them.

[Welsper59]

And "punished" doesn't always mean actual harm. People with more time are being punished for playing more because once they cap alex/eso/scrips, theres nothing else to do until Tuesday, even if they want to keep playing.

And yes, they are "taking something away". They're taking the ability for people to stay entertained. They're taking away the chance to actually gear yourself in more possible ways / more jobs, rather than forcing you to play how they want you to play.
If someone wants to grind out eso/alex loot for all their jobs and has the time to do so, they should be allowed to. Sure, you can say they'll run out of things to do and get bored, but that's also the fault of SE for adding a tiny amount of content and expecting it to keep people entertained for 4-5 months, when it doesn't.
How would you like it if there was something you enjoyed doing and could do it for hours, but after 40 mins of doing it, someone comes out and tells you that you can't do it anymore, even though you have the time to continue to do it? That's pretty much what XIV's like now for people who play more than an hour a day.

That's not what "punished" means lol. Here, you're being limited (not punished) to their rules that they set in place for a new system of currency. What you're trying to imply is along the lines of how having to drive on the right side of the road in the US is punishing people that might want to drive on the left. Would you honestly say they're being punished for that law? I hope not lol.

They are not taking away anything from you, simply for the fact that it's impossible to take away something that never existed in the first place. IF, in the case of red scrips, that currency already existed and was freely available without limitations, then you'd have a stronger argument on feeling punished. Given that red scrips did not exist in the game until what we have was introduced, and we did know ahead of time what this entailed, there's no punishments involved. It's simply following the same limitations that has ALWAYS existed in this game. Punishment is issued under the intent to instill the idea that outcomes are a consequence of actions, to steer people away from something that can be done immediately but not wanted... like punishments for harassment or hacking the servers. Yoshi-P and the devs would have to have created these limitations under the direct purpose to make you feel bad and suffer for your intentions in order for it to be punishing. I guess you COULD warp reality to look at it that way, but you'd essentially be classified as something along the lines of a sociopath. Given how quick people are to assume companies are out to get them these days, I guess I shouldn't overlook such a possibility here lol.

Also full patch content is 3 months, give or take a couple weeks. In between these months, we get smaller patches, some of which are game changing or long term additions (like red scrips or the Gold Saucer). Content is certainly there. Players are the ones who are twisting the facts to better suit their own hate. Ever since 2.0 was announced, this game has and always will be a theme park MMORPG. So it's never right to believe that it's a situation of "now" it's like this... it's always been like this. This has always been the design philosophy, more or less. Content will be released to cater to many audiences. This means that there's a very high chance that some folks, maybe you, are not in any way/shape/form, the primary target audience for every single patch of content. Folks like me, on the other hand, LOVE most of the side content they release. The fact they attempt to focus on multiple things is very attractive to me for a game to keep me entertained. I, from that point alone, am often their target audience. I could still get bored though, there's zero delusions about that lol. I just doubt I'll be viewing such content as punishing, even if I might be bored of it. Limiting, sure... but not punishing.

[Blood-Aki]

The worst part of weekly caps is when you cap on reset day and have absolutely nothing to do for a whole week, that's just bad game design. Weekly caps make players bored and quit. The point of a mmo is to keep people subbed for as long as possible and to play every day and every month, not "play once a week, cap, probably unsub the month after an update." No idea why modern mmos consider this a good idea, it's just less money for them.

It's actually the other way around, it would be terrible game design to have everything uncapped, so people just cap out on items in a week, because they don't sleep or do other things, then they will unsub untill next patch, You kind of have that backwards, the game has survived and is even doing well with the current system. Try finding others things to do, Which there is plenty of if you actually play.

[Obysuca]

It's actually the other way around, it would be terrible game design to have everything uncapped, so people just cap out on items in a week, because they don't sleep or do other things, then they will unsub untill next patch, You kind of have that backwards, the game has survived and is even doing well with the current system. Try finding others things to do, Which there is plenty of if you actually play.

Not if SE actually added better content, rather than MSQ that gets completed in 1-2 hours and then being stuck with 2 dungeons for 3 months or so >_> Like I said, theres been plenty of times in other mmos where everything is uncapped yet people continue to stay, even if they grind it all out as much as possible. It also helps if XIV didn't encourage everyone to be solo / not social. A community is staying power too.

So yes, the formula they're doing is a terrible game design. Know why? The proof is in practically every mmo to come out since 2005 doing this same exact formula and dying out in 1-3 years, sometimes less. Now take a look at pre-WoW mmos who followed a different formula, most of those are still up and running after 13-16 years. Take a guess why and tell me which one has "terrible game design", the ones that die in 1-3 years or the ones that last 13-16. I can bet you 100%, if XIV didn't have FF in the title, it would have died out a year ago or gone f2p. A name being the reason a mmo is kept afloat doesn't make it a good mmo.

And guess what, people already unsub until the next patch because of the caps and lack of content. And no, it's not doing as well as SE would have you think. The signs are all there that it's not and perhaps even going towards a f2p model. Remember early on, Yoshi said he'd rather pull the plug than go f2p, then shortly around 2.2? or so, did a 180 and said they'd look into f2p. Then out of no where, cash shop.

And I have actually played, I've played since 2.0. There really isn't much to do, especially considering SE outdates crap as fast as its out, over half the game is obsolete atm and HW didn't really add anything new, it was just a big patch we paid $50+ for. Judging by your join date only being a few months, I can see why you'd say theres other things to do >_> But for people from 2.0 and 1.0, there really isn't.

Let's not forget that a bit after 2.0, Yoshi said they were just setting the foundation, then the real content would come. Well, it's been 2 years. Where's the real content? It's just been rehash after rehash of the same stuff update after update.

[Lexia]

So yes, the formula they're doing is a terrible game design. Know why? The proof is in practically every mmo to come out since 2005 doing this same exact formula and dying out in 1-3 years, sometimes less. Now take a look at pre-WoW mmos who followed a different formula, most of those are still up and running after 13-16 years. Take a guess why and tell me which one has "terrible game design", the ones that die in 1-3 years or the ones that last 13-16. I can bet you 100%, if XIV didn't have FF in the title, it would have died out a year ago or gone f2p. A name being the reason a mmo is kept afloat doesn't make it a good mmo.

Current day players would have a fit if the game was say more like XI a pre-wow mmo. For player base in general the saying "reap what you sow" comes to mind.