FFXIV is in a Prime Position to Make Some Drastic Changes

[silentwindfr]

How can they make something challenging and not require a dedicated practice group to do it. I don't know what standards you have, but if something can be cleared in the first day it was released, then it's not challenging.

you can have dedicate group of different size you know?
i'm not against dedicate group, i'm against only 1 format for the endgame challenge.... more option is better. you have guild with a lot of people and can't really do a raid at 24 challenge since it don't exist. same you have guild of smaller size that can't really gather 8 people for do content. irl is like this.... but that don't means they don't want to do challenging content, simply they can't have them friend at the same time together. do that means they must abandon them friend?

what i'm saying is they need to add content for dedicate group of 4-8-24 player! more option it's always welcome!

[Nektulos-Tuor]

I like how people are saying: "Cookie Cutter" when comparing no brain choices like Parry and Critical Modifier.

[Klamor]

snip

If you have question with my play history, feel free to do the research and look my character up. I'm on a Legacy server, with the tattoo, and played a lot during all stages of the Beta. That said, I spent a lot of time at sea during 2.xx so I may or may not have the best recollection of how or when the events occurred; specifically if I was deployed when the major changes occurred. However, I do my best to provide the most accurate information I can with regards to the facts. My opinions are clearly marked as such, and viewer discretion is advised.

I will, however, go back and edit my original post with the quotes from individuals who have already caught and informed me of the information I was lacking.

[Terribad]

Why dont you compare the sub numbers for the mentioned games to the subs numbers of FFXIV ?

P.S remember SWG and how it died

A lot of those games no longer have subs but I know when Aion released it hit 1million active subscribers (And it's still going very strong in Korea). FFXIV won't release active subscription numbers, which is strange. But someone on reddit mined the lodestone for an estimate and currently it's estimated to be around 750k Active subscribers. GW2 I believe is number 2 for the healthiest mmo currently out while FFXIV is number 3. ESO is number 4.

Now take that 750k and compare that to the million of accounts made. Their retention rate is awful. Besides the games mentioned are all still up and running, so if they were that bad no one would play them and they would be shut down.

On the topic of cookie cutter builds. I agree there will always be one. However the point is to try and make it so the others aren't irrelevant or not an option. I believe that can be done. We focus too much on the negatives of stuff and shoot everything down.

[RiceisNice]

That said, while I don't remember hunter very well as it was a long time ago, I remember most classes had very very different feels depending on your main tree--and often fulfilled completely different party rolls (like shadow priests being DPS). So picking a marksman hunter was basically like playing a different, but related, class, compared to Beastmaster/Survival. And that's completely understandable.

However, I have to ask, did you pick your talents in the marksman tree based on which would be most effective?

My point was in regards to picking the specialization and the talents in general (which means I'm referring to playing a hunter post-cataclysm expansion, where they had already done away with the old talent trees). Even I agree that something like their pre-catacylsm talent trees were a bit outdated, because everyone always went for the same build. However, you still had some horizontal character progression and choices in the form of specializations (cataclysm and onward), and somewhat more limited in the talents themselves (which have undergone tremendous change) and glyph.

Had I played a hunter during WoD release, I would have taken something like exotic munitions to add as secondary effect to my ranged auto attacks. On the other hand, I believe that lone wolf was a better dps increase for marksman hunter, since EA didn't benefit from their mastery.

Also, for the record, when I played a WoW hunter last (aaaaaages ago, around the release of BC I think? Maybe?), a Marksman/survival hybrid was best if I remember right.

Like right here, we probably have two completely different perspectives. As I mentioned above, I was playing a marksman hunter during MoP, at that point they had done away with talent trees and specializations were more-or-less a "job route" for each class. Marksman has always been behind BM and SV as far as dps was concerned, but I still prefered using physical shots as my source of damage. Not enough of a difference to prevent htem from being able to clear the top tier content, mind you, just comparatively lower.

They've done away with a lot of fluff and pointless numbers (like 0/5 rank talents that give % damage increase), but still give some resembelence of horizontal progression. Sure there's going to be some that's better for the extra 2-5% dps, but I could always mess around with my talent points if I wanted to change my pacing for a dungeon, raid or dailies. I can't necessarily say that I have the same luxury on FFXIV when it comes to raiding due to gear being job specific...and the fact that my role is the "support dps" of MCH/BRD, the two having gameplay that's been homogenized as hell.

[UBERHAXED]

you can have dedicate group of different size you know?
i'm not against dedicate group, i'm against only 1 format for the endgame challenge.... more option is better. you have guild with a lot of people and can't really do a raid at 24 challenge since it don't exist. same you have guild of smaller size that can't really gather 8 people for do content. irl is like this.... but that don't means they don't want to do challenging content, simply they can't have them friend at the same time together. do that means they must abandon them friend?

what i'm saying is they need to add content for dedicate group of 4-8-24 player! more option it's always welcome!

What you end up getting is 4-man raid, 8-man raid, 24-man raid. How is this any different than raid? If they made Void Ark (etc.) as hard as 2nd coil (at launch, not the trash that it is nerfed to now) then no one could do it because you'll have a hard time practicing with the same 24 people. Might as well skip the obvious misstep and just have 8 man raids that are challenging. Anything that can be pugged and cleared the first day is not challenging so there's no other way they could provide "challenging" content in the format you want.

[Shurrikhan]

I want to use an example of why I think this topic is important: Red Mage.

We all want it. Yoshida even teased us with the idea this past Rising. After thinking about it though, I wonder how it could even function in this current system...

Now, I've thought long and hard about how it *could* work, but I want to focus on one point, that Red Mage is really supposed to be a swiss-army knife class, say like Druid in WoW, and such like it. But such a class only works in a system with horizontal progression, where you can modify/self-personalize your job's path. We don't currently have that...how's that going to work?!

To be honest, I don't see why horizontal progression would be required beyond the obvious--different (healer, tank, and DPS) gear sets. Naturally, if it could do everything with the same set of gear (tank, heal, and DPS), then it would give it an overwhelming advantage in flexibly gearing up compared to gearing one job of each type. But being gear-locked into a particular role is as close as horizontal progression really has to being relevant here. (At best that gear-locking occurs more subtly, such as for ideal secondary stats for a particular role or two, while the primary stats are already shared among all roles.)

To take the druid example further, a druid has only ever really been, in practice, as much a swiss army knife as a (Wrath) Blood Death Knight or Retribution Paladin. Once gear- and talent-locked, they perform a particular role very clearly, and the hybrid flavor of the class only shows through off-role procs, be it Predatory Swiftness (for Healing Touch) or Art of War / Eternal Flame (on Ret). (Feral previously being mostly shared gear- and especially talent-wise was the closest they've gotten to being truly hybrid (particularly with its self-healing benefits and caster/cat/bear synergy), though again almost identical in that aspect to Blood DK.) Horizontal progression really has surprisingly little to do with "hybrid" functionality. And of course, it doesn't help that talents do not progress beyond the level cap, where you will undoubtedly spend the majority of your time anyways... Doesn't really warrant the term "progression", when it doesn't progress. (Gear did, but mostly vertically. Key stats, mixed with tier artifact gear bonuses allowed for new rotations and priorities, but not that they were scarcely more multi-stated even back in Wrath than we are here in XIV. They simply had far more rotational matters dependant on secondary stats and managed each tier to get enough of said stats to slightly adjust gameplay, capping crit chance (75%) with their crit specs by the end of the expansion, while we'll likely never exceed 45%. A vertical difference, not horizontal. And a difference in ability/passives design.)

Edit: Don't get me wrong; I like the idea of horizontal progression. I just don't like seeing the idea of it misplaced / mis-attributed.

[Belhi]

A lot of those games no longer have subs but I know when Aion released it hit 1million active subscribers (And it's still going very strong in Korea). FFXIV won't release active subscription numbers, which is strange. But someone on reddit mined the lodestone for an estimate and currently it's estimated to be around 750k Active subscribers. GW2 I believe is number 2 for the healthiest mmo currently out while FFXIV is number 3. ESO is number 4.

Now take that 750k and compare that to the million of accounts made. Their retention rate is awful. Besides the games mentioned are all still up and running, so if they were that bad no one would play them and they would be shut down.

On the topic of cookie cutter builds. I agree there will always be one. However the point is to try and make it so the others aren't irrelevant or not an option. I believe that can be done. We focus too much on the negatives of stuff and shoot everything down.

Retention rate on any MMO or online game tends to be pretty small percentage wise. WoW I think was said to have had around 100 million accounts made during its lifetime. Comparing concurrent to accounts made isn't a great rating of performance.

Also I wouldn't read too much into not listing active subscriptions. Most game don't. Even Blizzard has stopped doing it now. You list GW2 as a very healthy MMO at the moment but I cant remember ever seeing anything beyond it listing accounts made.

The issue with customisation and horizontal progression will always fall down into a balance between variety and sustainability of content vs complexity and inaccessablity.

Complexity can be very offputing. GW2 is a perfect example of that where the game designers even suggest you go to third party sites to find a build that works well. GW2 is also an example of broken balance as the 'freedom' it offered effectively killed the value of support(healing) and control(tanking) builds. Literally if you were using such a build you were playing the game wrong and gimping your allies. There is vast amounts of 'customisation' in that game which is completely useless outside PvP and all builds are variations of dps.

Accessibility is also important cause all MMOs have player churn. They will keep a core number of players but the rest are those who come and go for whatever reason. I big risk with complexity and horizontal progression both is for a new or returning player the game can feel too overwhelming, difficult or requiring too much work to get back into the more social endgame.

Now I'm hoping we will see both more customisation and horizontal progression but both can easily damage the game and drive off existing players so I want them to take there time and be very careful about it. The current formula might not be perfect but it is workable and accessible and while individual jobs have no customisation, being able to play multiple jobs allows some variety to players.

[Shurrikhan]

My point was in regards to picking the specialization and the talents in general (which means I'm referring to playing a hunter post-cataclysm expansion, where they had already done away with the old talent trees). Even I agree that something like their pre-catacylsm talent trees were a bit outdated, because everyone always went for the same build. However, you still had some horizontal character progression and choices in the form of specializations (cataclysm and onward), and somewhat more limited in the talents themselves (which have undergone tremendous change) and glyph.

Had I played a hunter during WoD release, I would have taken something like exotic munitions to add as secondary effect to my ranged auto attacks. On the other hand, I believe that lone wolf was a better dps increase for marksman hunter, since EA didn't benefit from their mastery.


Like right here, we probably have two completely different perspectives. As I mentioned above, I was playing a marksman hunter during MoP, at that point they had done away with talent trees and specializations were more-or-less a "job route" for each class. Marksman has always been behind BM and SV as far as dps was concerned, but I still prefered using physical shots as my source of damage. Not enough of a difference to prevent them from being able to clear the top tier content, mind you, just comparatively lower.

They've done away with a lot of fluff and pointless numbers (like 0/5 rank talents that give % damage increase), but still give some resembelence of horizontal progression. Sure there's going to be some that's better for the extra 2-5% dps, but I could always mess around with my talent points if I wanted to change my pacing for a dungeon, raid or dailies. I can't necessarily say that I have the same luxury on FFXIV when it comes to raiding due to gear being job specific...and the fact that my role is the "support dps" of MCH/BRD, the two having gameplay that's been homogenized as hell.

[Iirc, Focusing Shot had the best general dps, but Lone Wolf had the best 80-100% and Kill Shot % dps, especially with guaranteed Aimed Shot crits at the opening phase, often averaging out to greater gains if pure single-target. Easily within 2% in single-target unless movement killed Focusing Shots' usefulness, but potentially much larger bonuses from Focusing Shot if AoEing frequently. Munitions tended to lag behind each unless somehow (usually just in 5-mans), you could cover most of your AoE needs just though the Incendiary/Explosive ammo's AoE component while STing...

Moreover, the talent choices now are even more cookie-cutter in that they each have a near-direct relationship with certain fights or styles thereof and can be individually mixed and matched to the situation ("input"), where before the focus was on the class itself and its rotational dynamics (essentially "output"). If two talents now could perform equally well, there's all the more chance that two similar talent builds (whether Wrath or Cata) could have been even more equal in value, and allowed finer nuances. The change to the current was purely a decision made for development cost. (Even if you disregard said talent nuance / identity, the largest change is that we now carry stacks of 99 tomes so that we can swap our talents out for every fight as needed. Boss talents > Trash talents > Boss (2) talents > etc.])

On topic though: what I liked about those kind of choices was their gameplay differentiation, but at the same time, even talents as 'changing' as the Mists/WoD/Legion ones can go wrong, or provide little/few increased identity, options, or general entertainment. Moreover, at least in my opinion, the job would often be better done by something more subtle, such as the Wrath/Cata talents, that don't simply swap out a major button (e.g. Steady > Focusing, Eviscerate > DFA, TV > FV) but also affect those finer rotational priorities, and more importantly one's breadth of capability. More than the talents themselves, even, that's what I feel was gradually sapped out of WoW -- the versatility, the breadth, of the classes. Had we more dynamically usable abilities, or at least no button space wasted by duplicates like Inner Beast / Fell Cleave, or Whirling Thrust / Fang and Claw, or by abilities than do nothing more than buff a certain other ability (Power Surge), our sheer action count in XIV would practically guarantee that breadth. Not saying it has to, it just feels weird that we have this many actions, yet so few in-combat rotational builds available to us -- the number of options that we have regardless of spec. [Queue popped; will fix this rant later.]

[Kurogaea]

All the games you mentioned. ESO, GW2, SWOTOR, and Wildstar have had less success than FF14

FFXIV has more success since it lowered the entry for new players to a simple easier level, leaving most of the harder content till near end game. The game is also pretty easy (not to mention this is final fantasy aka graphics heaven). I don't know about this "Players asking to make this game faster" unless you mean when most of the players who played when the game started reached end game and were leeching an empty vessel (not including lvling multiple classes) who asked for more content while the devs were on a extended vacation while we waited for a long time for something new.....that something new was few story missions and a minigame, now we wait some more, few story missions, one side mission and a optional quest.