How would you feel about end-game gear only being useful for 3 months?

[Konachibi]

They should make the game appeal to anime fans. There aren't that many japanese anime mmo's out there (don't mistake them for those godawfull grind-fest korean mmo's ) and from my experience anime fans tend to be more friendly and co-operative.

Heck, they already do appeal somewhat to anime fans, 'cos the game has catgirls.

@Azurymber: you forgot Amy Winehouse = Drugs, drugs, drugs, more drugs, then die from drugs. Fans say "she was such a good person" whilst intelligent people go "Good riddance!"

[Hikozaemon]

They should make the game appeal to anime fans. There aren't that many japanese anime mmo's out there (don't mistake them for those godawfull grind-fest korean mmo's ) and from my experience anime fans tend to be more friendly and co-operative.

Heck, they already do appeal somewhat to anime fans, 'cos the game has catgirls.

@Azurymber: you forgot Amy Winehouse = Drugs, drugs, drugs, more drugs, then die from drugs. Fans say "she was such a good person" whilst intelligent people go "Good riddance!"

she died from alcohol poisoning not recreational drugs...... even the official autopsy reports showed that. Though alcohol is a drug in my book and should be illegal

[Konachibi]

she died from alcohol poisoning not recreational drugs...... even the official autopsy reports showed that. Though alcohol is a drug in my book and should be illegal

That's kind of ironic, all those illegal drugs and she gets killed by one of the few that are legal.

Kinda like how Steve Irwin tormented all those snakes and crocodiles for years then got killed by a stingray... I mean seriously that's just plain weird.

[Murugan]

That's kind of ironic, all those illegal drugs and she gets killed by one of the few that are legal.

Kinda like how Steve Irwin tormented all those snakes and crocodiles for years then got killed by a stingray... I mean seriously that's just plain weird.

Alcohol kills far, far more people than all illegal drugs combined. It is both more widely abused than all, and has a higher toxicity than most. It isn't that ironic, maybe you are just conditioned to think those other drugs she was doing were more harmful when in reality they are not.

[elreed]

yeah i feel like they need to leave gear a little longer before adding better gear, keep the dificulty high so we can feel the achievement of getting that gear, especially with jobs if they release AF's they should leave it as one of the best gear at least for 6-9 months minimum giving bonuses for equiping the whole set and leave the quest difficulty high enough to make people to take their time to get it.

other games made the gear obsolete pretty soon and wasted the achievement, i hope they dont give a mediocre good enough easy to get gear in the future, best gear should be the best by far from other pieces of gear.

[ZachCero]

The hardcore players get it first. They get it before anyone else. All the casuals gaze upon them in towns as they flaunt their brand new shiny gear only hours to a day after content release, and fill with aspirations of obtaining such gear themselves... eventually.

3 Months later Yoshi adds a new carrot on a stick for hardcore players to foam in the mouth trying to get, while casuals by then have an easier time getting the previous set.

Hardcore players are being rewarded by always being a step ahead. Casuals are not being punished by not being able to get gear ever because they don't spend massive amounts of time on a game.

I don't see a problem.

Also, anyone that is still going on about gear becoming obsolete every 3 months is reaching new levels of ignorance. New content = new gear =/= better gear. Variety is good. Alpine War Jacket is the newest of the new. I still prefer my Buccaneer's Shirt on PGL.

Yoshi-P clearly acknowledged he wants to address player uniqueness and how everyone looks the same with all the same gear. Making new content always have better gear would be quite counter-productive to that don't you think?

I like you ^^b

[Krin]

The issue with that is gear being devalued. Rather than escalating gear value with each additional content, it should be the goal to add variety. Different optimal gear for different styles of play. New content should not make previous content obsolete - the same goes for its gear.

Good thing nothing suggests that we will face such a scenario in FFXIV. The only scenario we have possibly ahead of us that would devalue gear is difficulty adjustments. If they allow the difficulty of content to decrease naturally simply by means of community pioneers sharing strategies then that is fine. However if they reduce difficulty of previous content upon the advent of newer content, then all the gear obtained thus far will become devalued.

In the end it comes down to what exactly the team is thinking about when they say difficulty adjustments on older content. The magnitude of this adjustment is everything,

This is exactly what I was trying to say, albeit without making as many assumptions and giving some background to support it.

[Krin]

While I understand where you are coming from, having experience in game design is just that... experience in game -design-. and not necessarily what makes a game successful. You don't seem to be aware about much economic or psych/neuroscience theory, since your arguments ignore some very key things about human nature. [*snip* Everyone is biologically wired for having more then everyone else and having it first. *snip*] You may not like that, but it is essentially the reason why capitalism has proven the most successful economic model. If people did not have a general interest in becoming "elitist jerks" then there would be no incentive to take large risks or no incentive to attempt to make as much money as possible.

I challenge you to attend a Game Developers Expo. We often talk about the "Dopamine Drip" and describe games in terms of dopamine surges, what causes them, and how to space them out as far as possible without breaking interest in the game. In the end, people have different buttons wired to the drip. Hit the button, release the dopamine. Wait too long between hitting the buttons, players wander off to someone else who hits the buttons faster. The issue is that different people get different amounts off the drip from the same set of buttons. One person gets massive surges from winning against competitors, others get it from the respect of helping others, even more get it from shiny cut scenes. You need to cover all your buttons to appeal to the masses. You really would be amazed how many panels are dedicated to just this one aspect of the game. There are others that cover massive swaths of psychology. Remember, we also design game AI and need to understand how to present a believable enemy for you to fight against.

In response to your capitalism argument: Yes and no. Remember, there is no rich without poor. Any sort of competition stratifies human beings into rankings and always creates a victim at the low end. In game, there is no best without worst. The difference in the game is that there are people who are willing to voluntarily not be the best players. There are people who truly are content to just play a few hours a week and enjoy the pretty graphics while running a few Leves and chatting in LS. This pads the informal rankings letting those seeking competition to automatically be somewhere in the middle at minimum. You will always be better than me. I will always squeal with joy when I make a silly Bronze Chainmail Armor piece that no one really cares about.

Put another way, people are happier when they can be an "elitist jerk."

You also miss our tribal, almost wolf-pack, origins. We pick people to lead us. We coalesce around an Alpha in several layers of our society. If someone has more, we praise them and admire them. We make them our role model and seek to be like them, even if we know it beyond our abilities. The most successful are those who make people happy to follow. There ARE built in predispositions to not seek to take leadership, to be better than our peers, because we also value stability. These drives are not mutually exclusive either. The desire to be the best is not universal.

In this game...
A) Because people are happy being elitist jerks therefore
B) there is an incentive to become elite, therefore
C) thus an incentive to continue to play the game, therefore
D) thus an incentive to continually pay for the game therefore
C) leading to a successful game.

While I may accept A, I do not completely agree with B. I posit, with my above counters to your arguments, that both of us are correct. My original post I was trying to do a lot of things and probably did them all only half-way.

One of the points I was trying to make is that the entire "Elitest Jerk" and "Casual" spectrum is self-symbiotic. The extreme ends feed off each other. With the casuals providing an audience for the Elite, and the Elite providing a source of inspiration to keep playing to the casuals. The problem is that if you withhold the Elite items too long from the casuals, you see disinterest and even annoyance set in on the casual side. Elite's need new things to show off and brag about to keep inspiring the casuals. Elites need the casuals to brag about that. As I said, this is a spectrum. If you imagine it as a numberline with the perfectly balanced "midcore" as 0, -1 casuals gravitate to +1 Elite leaders, -2 to +2, and such forth. That's why you see "casual raiding" and the like.

To propose a casual game where everyone can get everything easily is essentially going directly against human nature and creating a game that doesn't instill happiness or promote incentives for continuous play.

I directly addressed this when I moved onward to the "compliment your person" section of my second post. I'm just on the casual side of that midcore mark. I would be astoundingly bored without elitist jerks around to inspire me. The game developers need you to drive the game design and reveal weaknesses in the system. I pointed out changes I supported that directly unchain the Elites from us. The game needs World First achievements you can show off. The game needs to let you level as fast as you want and consuming as little plot-based quest content as you want. This is what sets off the best dopamine doses, this is Fun for you.

You might argue "but wait, FFXIV will attract a niche market of people who don't fit into the relative-gains category"

I promise you, I would never do that. It would be almost a wet dream come true to see FFXIV go mainstream. I support anything that does that. (See previous comment.)

So at this rate, the game actually alienates the average MMO player (either the 'elitist jerk' or the 'wannabe elitist jerk') And doesn't provide any substance to keep the non-elitist player around.

You are singing to my choir. :-)

So knowing that people like being elitist jerks. who do you think this game will appeal to? The type of people who play games like farmville and the sims?

You have distilled my arguments properly. I don't want it, but it certainly felt like that was where the previous team prior to Yoshi-P wanted. I feel that Yoshi-P is doing his damndest to turn that around. Whether it's code or remnants of the old team, he's got to turn the game around from -10,000 casual to somewhere in the 500 Elite range with elements of -100 casual mixed in to properly balance the game audience.

Game developers cannot dictate human nature. Human nature is genetically coded into us as a result of evolution. So to develop a good game it is necessary to take psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology, etc, into account.

I never said that, though I can see how you construed it that way. If you really want to know the truth, we're closer to puppet masters with live puppets and only pointy sticks to poke them into doing what we want. It's seedy and morbid sounding, but it's the truth. The image I so often get during game design con's is that most designers see you as an addict hooked up a morphine drip with that button. We regulate how often you can push the button and set you free in a world with all sorts of ways to mash that button. We digest human nature and exploit it to make you "happy". Delving into the extreme world of EQ Widows, in a way, compliments the hidden secrets of design.

But the point is, even the casuals WANT to be elite. That's why the FFXI model worked. Items like Byakko Haidate and P-charm were good for YEARS. Meaning even if your a casual you would work towards them and get them over time. Then when you had them, you gained that happiness of eliteness for years, making you want to play the game and "show off".

Excellent! This is what I was angling for. You said what worked and you enjoyed, and you expressed why it worked for you. You also did so in much clearer and much more game related terms. I can see the actual appeal of this. It appeals to me, also, I might add. I have no FFXI experience, so this sort of alternative was not immediately something I'd consider.

I'd be interested in how you counter to some later posts I saw in this thread, where you have people logging in 2 years later doing the same thing. If you go by the 3 month model, and only piecemeal gear (1 or 2 pieces per job per raid non-overlapping), you can probably get a good 1 and a half year rotation out of a "good item". Albeit, as you get to the end of that period, it can get a bit annoying to have the awesome staff only a month later to have a new dungeon released. But I feel that if it took you a almost 18 months to get around to the content, then maybe you should be behind the curve. Again, I'm leaning towards feeding the elites new carrots, but at a much slower pace.

And if you disagree and think most people just want to have fun, then explain why SE shouldn't just create a "cheat" mode and let people alter their levels and choose what equipment they get from all the equipment in the game.

Cheat modes are not always evil, but only if they don't detract from other peoples' Fun. This is impossible in this genre. My partner hated Oblivion till he found the cheat codes for God Mode and Insta-Gold. He's sunk over 100 hours into finding all the quests, plot branches, decorating his 500 houses, and going on random murdering sprees. *shrugs*

[NoctisUmbra]

Krin, your posts are just golden. It feels like you've single-handedly inspired solid discussion rather that pointless banter.

I applaud you.

[Ava]

I like flavor items like FFXI had that lasted for long periods of time. In a game where you have the ability to level every class on 1 character, you may need several different gear sets. If they did a tier system then you'd end up getting locked to one class because linkshells will have to funnel gear more evenly so that everyone remains on the same tier. Those with multiple classes leveled wont have the opportunity to collect sets for all of their classes when they have a 3 month expiration date on them. By making gear last longer, people can collect important gear and use them for long periods of time while collecting loot for their secondary classes without having to worry about their main class becoming expired in the process.

I liked the FFXI loot system as opposed to most modern loot systems, but a tier system appeals to a greater majority of MMO players unfortunately. It just doesn't synergize well with this type of game, imo.