Never Make Your Players Have to "Find the Fun"

[Alahra]

This game simply does not let players "jump into content" whenever they want. It's a major, major design flaw.

But this is objectively untrue. The whole existence of the Duty Finder is to allow players to "jump into content" whenever they want. Yes, some content rewards are gated by time and in the world, some things have respawn timers, but the largest majority of the game's content is meant to be consumed whenever you want.

No, you can't farm Esoterics until your eyes bleed, but the alternative is a lot more RNG (or massively increased costs for items that are currency-based). In order to maintain challenge for raid-difficulty content), the developers need to have some ability to anticipate the power level of the player characters. If we could gear up as rapidly as we want to, the developers would need to balance that content essentially always assuming maximum-level gear, which would create a lot of problems progression-wise for players that can't play twelve hours a day, making the game far more difficult to balance.

Other content that has spawn timers, like Hunts and FATEs, are in party designed that way to help break monotony so that grinding aspects don't become too repetitive.

And quite frankly, I like that the game has things that don't always involve jumping right into content because the game's GCD-based combat system makes it rather difficult to socialize with my friends when I'm actually engaged in combat. The periods of downtime are welcome because they help keep the "massively multiplayer" part of the game alive.

I do think the developers made mistakes in adding another aspect to the game that is time gated (the whole Crafting/Gatherer Red Scrip system), but in general, if I wanted to have total control over my content consumption, I'd play a console RPG, personally.

I'd be happy with just having tomes tied to class, rather than character, so we could choose to gear up multiple classes per lockout

I would like to see them do this eventually, but it would need to be done per role rather than per class, unless they move to making all gear job-specific (which, at least at this point, doesn't seem likely).

[Lexia]

So OP you want all time gates gone, SE most likely increase the grind then, that body piece on tome lockout that cost 825 tomes remove the lock out now cost 10,000 tomes while still getting no more then 100 tomes at most per run. Want no cap on scrips ok instead of 5 favors for 1 scrip now 5 favors for 100 scrips. The current day gamer would be even more upset with that type of set up though I think so the current system works for most people that play the game.

[Purrfectstorm]

But this is objectively untrue. The whole existence of the Duty Finder is to allow players to "jump into content" whenever they want.

Duty Finder let's you queue for content whenever you want, not play the content whenever you want. That relies on being matched with a group. Loot restrictions remove players from the pool of people you could be matched with. And incentives determine whether players are willing to add themselves to the pool of possible players to be matched with. SE could improve matching by removing restrictions and/or adding incentives.

So OP you want all time gates gone, SE most likely increase the grind then, that body piece on tome lockout that cost 825 tomes remove the lock out now cost 10,000 tomes while still getting no more then 100 tomes at most per run. Want no cap on scrips ok instead of 5 favors for 1 scrip now 5 favors for 100 scrips. The current day gamer would be even more upset with that type of set up though I think so the current system works for most people that play the game.

This is a false dichotomy. You're presenting it as if there are only 2 systems - lockouts or ridiculous grinds. I'm sure there is a middle ground, the body piece you mention costing 1600 tomes instead of 10k.

My argument is that the game should not be based around the players that can and will grind 20 hours per day. Sure, there will be those players and they will "get ahead" of other players in a way they can't now, with lockouts, but they will be a minority of players. I think those who want to preserve the lockout system mostly want to preserve the small gap that exists between players' ilevel (they can be just a few ilevel different from someone who is actually clearing the raids). But what they don't realize is that gameplay will improve in almost every way with lockouts removed. For example, there will be more people doing more content which equals faster group matching and formation.

[Alahra]

Duty Finder let's you queue for content whenever you want, not play the content whenever you want. That relies on being matched with a group. Loot restrictions remove players from the pool of people you could be matched with. And incentives determine whether players are willing to add themselves to the pool of possible players to be matched with. SE could improve matching by removing restrictions and/or adding incentives.

In all probability, the impact that having no lockouts would have on queue times would be fairly small, as queue times are far more impacted by data center populations and overall role distributions than they are by the fact that people can only get 450 Esoterics per week. The weekly tome lockout was originally 300 per week, and queue times didn't lessen by any noticable margins when they increased it to 450, nor did they noticeably improve when the cap was 900 tomes of Poetics toward the end of ARR.

The reason for this is largely that the population of players who would farm content for tomes/etc beyond the lockout to any particular degree is a pretty small subset of the overall population. There are probably more players who already don't cap tomestones every week than there are players who would farm 1000 or 2000 of them a week simply because the majority of the playerbase doesn't play that much.

But what they don't realize is that gameplay will improve in almost every way with lockouts removed.

This isn't necessarily true. Even with content locks as they currently are, the latter half of every raid cycle already sees a drop off in player engagement, lengthening queue times for everyone. If content were all lockout-free, more players would be finished with the available content sooner, and thus engagement would taper off earlier in a raid tier's life cycle, which would increase increase matchmaking times except in the early stages of a raid tier. You can see this pretty clearly with content where we can farm to our hearts content: namely Hunts and EX Primals, which have massive engagement early on in their cycle of relevancy and largely die out not long after that.

The only way to get around that would be more rapid production of content, something we're not likely to see anytime in the near future since the development team for the game is already strapped for both manpower and time.

[Purrfectstorm]

In all probability, the impact that having no lockouts would have on queue times would be fairly small, as queue times are far more impacted by data center populations and overall role distributions than they are by the fact that people can only get 450 Esoterics per week. The weekly tome lockout was originally 300 per week, and queue times didn't lessen by any noticable margins when they increased it to 450, nor did they noticeably improve when the cap was 900 tomes of Poetics toward the end of ARR.

You're judging the impact on 300 vs 450, which is only 2 ex roulettes. So obviously the impact will be small. When the limit is 450 vs. infinite, one would expect a MUCH bigger impact. Look at what happened when SE added this new relic quest - queue times for Alexander normal increased tenfold. We can't act like incentives for running content doesn't make a big difference as outside of helping the occasional person people aren't running the content for any other reason.

[Lexia]

This is a false dichotomy. You're presenting it as if there are only 2 systems - lockouts or ridiculous grinds. I'm sure there is a middle ground, the body piece you mention costing 1600 tomes instead of 10k.

My argument is that the game should not be based around the players that can and will grind 20 hours per day. Sure, there will be those players and they will "get ahead" of other players in a way they can't now, with lockouts, but they will be a minority of players. I think those who want to preserve the lockout system mostly want to preserve the small gap that exists between players' ilevel (they can be just a few ilevel different from someone who is actually clearing the raids). But what they don't realize is that gameplay will improve in almost every way with lockouts removed. For example, there will be more people doing more content which equals faster group matching and formation.

What are you talking about? Only minority of players would grind everything out? The people that wouldn't grind everything out would be the minority not the other way around. I don't know about your server but least on Balmung there be ton of people that would just grind all day long.

[Alahra]

You're judging the impact on 300 vs 450, which is only 2 ex roulettes. So obviously the impact will be small. When the limit is 450 vs. infinite, one would expect a MUCH bigger impact. Look at what happened when SE added this new relic quest - queue times for Alexander normal increased tenfold. We can't act like incentives for running content doesn't make a big difference as outside of helping the occasional person people aren't running the content for any other reason.

Back when the tome cap was 300 and increased to 450, you could only get at most, 40 tomestones per run (and more typically, 30, since WP was preferred to AK), which is a difference of 4-5 runs, not 2. Even doubling the tome cap didn't noticeably impact queue times, though—it's unlikely that making it infinite would do so either. And even if it did, it would only temporarily increase queue times, because, as I mentioned later, players who got all the tomes they need would eventually stop doing the content entirely, as they already do for Hunts, the unlocked tomestone, and EX Primals once they've gotten what they need.

It's not that removing lockouts wouldn't have any impact, it's that the impact would largely get lost because lockouts are one of the smallest contributing factors to queue time length, with role distribution, player population, and time of day having far greater effects.

[Purrfectstorm]

What are you talking about? Only minority of players would grind everything out? The people that wouldn't grind everything out would be the minority not the other way around. I don't know about your server but least on Balmung there be ton of people that would just grind all day long.

Only a minority of players would grind everything out within a short timeframe. Example: Relic. The average player working on relic will get a relic just before 3.2 comes out. This is perfect pacing - players aren't getting overwhelmed, they're not falling behind. From a financial standpoint, they're staying subbed. But some people had the new relics in just a few days. And from a financial standpoint, this is okay too, as those players are also staying subbed because there are other things that they want to do.

I'm not going to go back and forth a ton more about this as my time is actually important to me but I would invite you to please read the fixes listed in my original post. Fixes like, for example, having more fun stuff to do while waiting for queues or PF to fill. If you can honestly say these fixes are unreasonable, I don't know how to respond to you.

Nothing in my original post mentioned removing gates. In fact, I stated that my problem is that gates have gotten way out of hand to include much more than tomes. Just about every game system added since the start of ARR has had a time gate attached. You have to wait hours to dye or breed your chocobo, for example. You cannot challenge Triple Triad NPCs whenever you want. Scrips are on 2 different timers - the weekly cap of how much you can get AND having to wait for nodes to spawn.

I feel like I'm in a straight jacket juggling all these timers. Suppose I want to do everything in the game, what would my play routine look like?

- if it's 15 min past or before the real life hour, go to Gold Saucer for GATES
- if it's 8:00ish Eorzea time, go start the red/blue scrip node train that ends at roughly 2pm
- queue for something during or in between that
- try to fit in triple triad challenges in sometime in between that (oh wait, my Idle Imperial timer conflicts with my node timer - I can't do both until/unless I cap scrips)

I mean I could go on but I won't. This thread is not about removing content lockouts (even though I would personally jump for joy), it's about reconsidering time restrictions to every new thing that was added. They even added a cooldown timer to Diadem because Yoshi wanted to "give people a break." It wasn't even to restrict loot access but to prevent people from burning out on the content. Well, if I want to run content until my eyes bleed, that's my prerogative. Yoshi P isn't my daddy and it's time for him to quit acting like it.

[Felis]

The only time based gates that really bother me are the ones for gathering nodes. I found them tolerable in ARR since they were only for max level crafting items for the most part. I hate that Heavensward has incorporated materials from time based nodes into leveling crafts.

You can buy most of them from NPCs as NQ mats, if you mean the lv51-59 timed mats

[Kosmos992k]

A friend of mine summed up the problem after becoming thoroughly disgusted with the many of the end-game players he was encountering in-game. Paraphrasing, he said that some people need to just stop and remember how to enjoy a game, because they have forgotten how. Sadly, few are willing to even consider that simple advice.

An MMORPG is a game that sets a feast before it's players, FFXIV is no exception to that. You serve yourself, you have choice of what to do for enjoyment, it's not a matter of having to find the fun, it's more picking and choosing from what is available around you.

The entire point of an MMORPG with a persistent world is to explore it, and discover things. Along the way there are numerous side tracks you can go down, be it FATE, beast tribe quests, side quests, glamor, alternate classes and jobs, housing, crafting, gathering, helping others, taking awesome pictures, etc... the fun is right there, just open your eyes when you are out in the world.

On the other hand, if you spend your time idling in the ironically named Idyllshire, and 'port from point to point when you do travel, you are depriving yourself of the very thing that exists for you to enjoy.

There is also a great deal of truth to the idea that what you get out of a game depends on what you put in to it. If you approach a game expecting not enough content, content that is just boring, obsolete or pointless, and/or content being a job-like grind; then that is precisely what you will find because that is in effect what you are looking for.