I wake up and click on FFXIV logo...

[Lambdafish]

Actually that's how you train dogs. People are different in that they are able to learn something regardless of whether or not there's a tangible treat at the end of it. People also have the amazing ability to create their own incentive and create their own rewards.

I recommend you look up player psychology and conditioning sometime, its a fascinating subject. You are right that dogs are easier to condition than people, but people still respond to it much the same. Look at the amount of Bismark farm parties you see compared to pony farm parties, people don't run content without a reason, and for the masses, it takes a bit of carrot on a stick to engage a player in said content.

And everything I said IS part of the game. That's the essence of an MMORPG. The game IS family and friends. The game IS finding fun in even the most mundane circumstances. If you think otherwise, you are sorely mistaken, and are setting yourself up for incredible disappointment down the road. I'm not saying it's not without its problems, but ignoring everything I said is ignoring what it means to play a social game.

Actually the essence of an MMORPG is the way its designed, your perception of an MMORPG is a place to play with family and friends. In my opinion, XIV give lackluster control over this, and the controls that FC are given to organise events like you suggested. People play for different reasons because people are different, which makes it hard for SE to cater to everyone, which makes developing content expensive, and hence here we are complaining. What isn't hard is making the game that we already have rewarding to play, and to slow down how quickly content becomes irrelevant, SE know this because its the entire point of the relic quest, however there are unrelated problems there to do with reward balance.

Again, this isn't a bash at you for the way you play the game, you are a certain categorisation of player (look up the Bartle test), and you enjoy the game your way.

[Maxilor]

Im sorry about your illness, but there is plenty of things to do!

Level a new class. (Thats what I mostly do while waiting)

Play Triple Triad! (or Pet Battle next patch. I can't wait!)

Or even....I know this might sound bad but...Start a new Character of a different race!
(Ive been mulling it myself, might make either a Lala or Roeg.)

[Ksenia]

Roll an alt. Heck, roll a few.

It's the corner they are painting them selves in to. If everyone rolled 8 characters and completed gated content on all 8 they would never run out of end game and throttling us would be moot.

[Tapasan]

Roll an alt. Heck, roll a few.

It's the corner they are painting them selves in to. If everyone rolled 8 characters and completed gated content on all 8 they would never run out of end game and throttling us would be moot.

Hmmm good idea. Just need to level 4 class to 60. 1 Dow/Dom, 1 Doh and 2 Dol.

[PROBOUND]

Hmmm good idea. Just need to level 4 class to 60. 1 Dow/Dom, 1 Doh and 2 Dol.

Only to 58! As soon as your battle class reaches Idlyshire your good to go. Heck u could even ditch the DOL class since most people cant be bothered to do 1 characters worth of weekly favors. Red Crafting Scrips are the real gate. You can have all the money in the world but ur still gated at 9 Crafting tokens per week (unless your buying them from other players). 1 Crafter at 60 (ALC best option) and 1 Gatherer (Miner) and 1 DOW to 58 is all you need.

Be warned however, going this route essentially makes you a slave to the game (3 Gather/Craft Red Scrip ready alts). Some people have a hard time capping weekly's on 1 character. Multiply that by 1,2,3 and you'll soon realise this isn't something for the faint of heart. Hardcore Omnicrafters will go this route to give SE the middle finger because lets face it, U CANT GATE US! Nice try tho! But asside from that small minority of players, most people wouldnt even consider this.

[Tapasan]

snip

Yeah feels like a slave already T_T leveling my alt. Capping red script so far im okay since i pre-harvest most the materials, e.g. You can do two thing in one run such favor in sea of cloud while collecting birch log, ooid and aurum sand etc. tbh im pretty much bored and worn out with these planning and pre-harvest everytime log in. subs end in 2 week, i guess a break from playing is good too.

[Iromi]

Why does everyone say that? Rushed through the game? I mean. Wasn't Heavensward released 5 months ago? Not 5 days ago? Stupid thing to say, people are not rushing the game, people are bored to death. GATE GATE GATE! All they know!!

Yeah, I love how people are all U RUSH UR OWN FAULT DKFSADFJKS when in fact if we don't "RUSH" we end up doing content with gimps who can't play and expect carries and can't clear AND it gets nerfed...SO WE HAVE NO CHOICE you either do it when it comes out along with everyone else or you get stuck with the bads. PLEASE STOP SAYING TO STOP RUSHING its contradicting to what SE does with the nerfing!

[Nutz]

Sorry about your situation there. All I can say is that the game is balanced around the idea that most people can't play quite that often and they've designed gates as a means of keeping the majority of the player base together, rather than a small portion rocketing far ahead of everyone else.

Personally I've kept up on capping red gathering scrips lately and that's it. Still haven't managed to dedicate time to leveling any crafting class to 60, only a single combat class, usually wind up with 200-350 eso tomes at the end of the week (240 this week I think), and haven't had time for a single Alexander run in 2 weeks. Hell, I even have several maps waiting to be run that i just don't seem to be getting to.

The game always has loads for me to do and I hate that I can never seem to catch up. I guess what I'm saying is 'the grass is always greener.'

[Eul]

I put all my DoH and DoL to 60 and I just... Don't know what to do other than red scrip. I don't like making gear for 51-59 since those material is really annoying to get.

I really hope this new patch gives adjustment for red scrip (or maybe no more limit) so I could trade for AF2 gear.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

Actually that's how you train dogs. People are different in that they are able to learn something regardless of whether or not there's a tangible treat at the end of it. People also have the amazing ability to create their own incentive and create their own rewards.

The ugly truth is that the human reward signaling pathway is pretty darn similar to other mammals. We, however, differ ourselves in other things like self-consciousness, high lvls of cognition and mental time-travel etc, including "the abilities to generate fun on our own" as you proposed.

I agree with you that we have "the abilities to generate fun on our own", and there is so much joy in enjoying the game with friends, family, FC members. Not many of us can deny that our wonderful FC provided us much incentive to log on each day. But these should not be the "only few reasons" for us to log on. Hell, many games out there can provide these anyway. Why this game then? This is DoH section of the forum here. If you are reading and even posting here, you must love crafting in this game. That is MAIN reason that's keeping most of us here - we love crafting!

And because we love crafting, we do our best to remain positive concerning existing problems in the crafting world. But we all have different limits of toleration (and for many of us, this limit is 3.1). It is UNDENIABLE that something is very wrong with the crafting world at the moment. All we can do is hope and believe in SE to resolve them all in 3.1.

Whether you are doing naked runs like you mentioned, playing Triple Triad like Maxilor, or whether you are leveling DoW/DoM like me & Maxilor, it's all the same... We are just buying time for SE to fix the mess. Like the OP and Iromi said earlier, no one is really rushing here now. It's been 5 months, and i have been casually doing some favors and massively buying favor mats, yet i am not even close to gearing up 1/4 of my DoH. Face the iron fact, the current 2 star crafting is too gated. Stop denying it!

Incentive and reward are the key to keeping people engaged, not content

The idea here is true. Content is something great that can keep people engaged. But like you said, content gets rolled over in days, while it takes months for the dev to create new content.

I assume the "incentive and reward" you meant refers to certain "goals" or "aims" like acquisition of a BiS mainhand tool like Supra or Lucis. But in my opinion, even that is not necessary. For instance, in Patch 2.4, many of us reach BiS and obtained Master Recipe II very early (Ok, I rushed back then). So you would think we'd be bored to death after that. But we ENJOYED REPETITIVELY crafting those 4 star items (and 3 star too, in earlier patches!). This repetition didn't give us any further "progress" or reaching any "goals". But we, crafters, enjoyed the crafting! The items were pretty, they were useful, and they sold well. Now, how many God damn favors do you need to do before you can do 1 or 2 items? Having a carrot (reward/goal) in the front is a good incentive to keep people going, but it's not the only thing that keeps crafters crafting! Currently, what's preventing us from enjoying crafting are the GATES! And of course, there is also the Core Problem that there are currently TOO FEW DoL i170 gear to sell, and all those i180 DoW/DoL gear are pretty useless to raiders.

The OP's ranting has been going on for quite awhile... and they are getting a bit overwhelming. But hey! It's what the forums are for, right? XD