Hardcore is not a dirty word

[Jynx]

I don't get people who are so against Time sinks, without them the game would be over in moments. Everything is a time-sink to a extent.

Walking around in a dungeon?
-Time sink

Teleporting
-Time sink

Riding a chocobo
-Time sink

Crafting
-Time sink

Fighting
-Time sink

Going to the lev counter
-Time sink

Walking to levquest destination
-Time sink

You act like anything you deem a "Time sink" had no system attatched to it to make that "Time sink" a reasonable part of the system. It takes time to fight things, developers have stated they have ideal battle times so you can expect to sink a certain ammount of time into a battle for a expected reward. Longer battles will reward more for the most part due to difficulty of the monster.

Dungeons that take longer to access *Rank restrictions* Will have better loot in them due to the time you spent ranking up making it a requirement that the harder to get to dungeon drops better stuff than the easier to get one. Harder dungeons *Of the same rank* Will for the most part probably take longer to complete and the rewards will be greater.

The more you invest in leveling your character the more powerfull he becomes because you invested the time, making him not grow for your investment would be pointless and yes your time is part of that investment.

The second you turn the game on your participating in a "Time sink", the entire game is created to never end, to last forever, never be finished, always have something new to do. If you remove all the "Time sinks" it wont be long before you are standing around with your thumb in your ass wondering what to do next, everything didn't take time to do so it was done fast.

The Darkhold didn't have a time restriction on it, you could walk back in 10 seconds after you finished, result? It took a few days for the dungeon to be mastered and people were pretty much done with it. Let's say they even just let you run the dungeon 4 times a day, every 24hours you got 4 tokens to spend on the dungeon. Just stop crying for a second about your precious time on saturdays only and look objectively at it.

You can only enter it 4 times a day, you can only refine your strategy 4 times a day, you need to be carefull 4 times a day, you will spend less time throwing things at the wall until they stick and actually start thinking, hell maybe you might actually talk about the "Plan" before you run into the darkhold. The dungeon would take longer to master because you can't do it as many times as you want in a day, the content would last longer and the rewards would be harder to get *even if they were 100% drops or something*

You can't tear out all the time sinks in the game without making it a bad game. Every good game has time sinks, even single player games use it to make the game last. Ever "Grinded" your characters in a RPG sure you have, ever walked around town not knowing exactly where to go for a while? Sure you have. Ever taken time to learn how to pull off that Hadoken into shoryuken combo in streefighter? Of course you did.

Time sinks are all a part of "Investment versus Reward" party of what any game uses to make something "Fun" or "Rewarding" it's not "Fun" when there is no challenge to it, it's not as rewarding when it's easier to do it becomes cheap and pointless.

I think I need to fine this idea elsewhere and come back to it, but I feel it's one of the big things missing from XIV right now, you don't have to invest much to see amazing returns, if I was investing money I'd love it but I'm investing my time and not getting anything substantial back. Those amazing returns feel pointless when I did next to nothing to earn them.

[Aenarion]

I don't get people who are so against Time sinks, without them the game would be over in moments. Everything is a time-sink to a extent.

It's not an issue of people are against time sinks, after all as you say, without any time sink most games would be over quite quickly. Much of the disagreement is in the degree and amount of time sinks, whether real or perceived, between the different camps.

From what I've seen, a lot of the "casual" camp are under the impression that the "hardcore" camp's idea to improve the game is to throw as much time sink as they possibly can at it, and then tack on a few more for good measure. Whether that's true or not, only those posters know, but that's how the casual side perceives it as. Of course, the casuals then says that RL commitments and other things makes such things impractical for them, and the hardcore crowd counters by claiming the other side only wants instant gratification and nothing else.

Basically, it's starting to turn into what the democrats and republican's are doing these days, fun :P