I just don't get it.

[Jetstream_Fox]

Snip

We haven't changed, the people who make games have changed. There are still tons of games that aren't "instant gratification" games, many hack and slash and standalone rpgs like Fallout still require you to work and progress yourself. Mainly the FPS genre is the main culprit of being subjected to instant gratification because of how easy it is to lock down that market. People in marketing want people to buy those games so they make them look easy and fun to play with their friends, selling you on a product that is less quality then a game that requires you to not just click/push a button and win.

This is why the MMO market has never really expanded and has more or less been on a merge with mainstay games, why waste hours of getting that one piece of gear, when I can grab 5 new pieces of gear immediately in The Division? Why waste a month trying to clear 4 raid bosses, when I can clear 2 other games in that time frame? Developers don't care about things such as skill and ingenuity, if they have a model that works they stick with it as long as it makes them money.

Look at Call of Duty, say Modern Warfare was a mmo and World at War, Black Ops and Ghosts were patches like we get on XIV. They didn't do much in those games from what I heard, just a bunch of reskins, bad multiplayer tuning and a sloppy story, yet they sold millions. XIV follows this exact same format and you're correct by saying if they changed the way they do things they lose money.

The game is on a treadmill, eventually the motor will burn out and it become to costly to fix and it will die, but that doesn't mean SE should continue the same pattern until it dies.

[karateorangutang]

snip

Yet even fallout is tame by all the standards you mention. Additionally, it can be done in your own time. MMO's are not done on your time, updates come and if you want to keep up with your group then your forced to keep pace with their progression.

I don't know how to say it, but games that are more hardcore are generally labelled as such and sold in that light. Dark Souls and Bloodborne are good examples of this.

Even FPS games have gotten easier over time, with regenerating health and shields. Games are easier and faster then ever before. If your not seeing that then go back and play some old games and see how amazingly frustrating they can be.

Honestly, who is the say they shouldn't continue. Games are profitability treadmills, and I have a hard time believing otherwise. We pay them money and they provide a service, the most efficient way possible from wages to equipment costs, to the customer. Gamers are such an entitled bunch really. We expect a company to bend over backwards to make a product that will please us, even at the cost of efficiency on their part. That is simply not realistic.

I find it quite interesting that I don't mind grinding in a single player RPGs, but absolutely loathe it in MMOs.

I find it to be the same thing for me. It's because there is no time limit to do those things in a single player RPG. With an MMO there is a time limit for you to keep pace with your fellows and that pressure can make the game not as fun sometimes. The trade off is that you get to talk to real people while you play.

[Shurrikhan]

snip

By no means do I intend to white knight CoD here, but one of the main advantages perceivable there is that any progression is essentially horizontal. Leveling gives more options, to increase the complexity of how you interact versus other options equipped by other players. You already start off with basically balanced classes from the start. It's less about instant gratification in terms of rewards, etc., as it is about instant action, immediately getting to a position where you can see where you really stand, with a full range of interaction within that environment (your class vs. any other, even if you do not yet have access to every class). The same can be said for mobas like HotS, DotA2, LoL, or FPS-objective games like Overwatch or TF2, or just about any other arena skill-based game. Seems a little bit weird then to be putting that example in line with a vertical progression model like XIV's, where unranked PvP (luckily there at least) is one of the few places where gear doesn't especially matter. They're fundamentally different, especially when so little of XIV, and most notably while leveling, depends on skill far more than gear.

Now, in the sense that a model was proven to work and then gets milked into a dry husk of a corpse, sure, XIV does certainly follow that idea, along with the majority of MMOs released since WoW's success to some degree or another. And like most, they forget that WoW worked as well as WoW did back then because it was WoW, and not especially due to its model.

To be honest, I almost wish that instant gratification action was the case with XIV. I don't mean that in the sense of wanting to be level 60 immediately (it didn't even take especially long to get all combat jobs to 60 as is), but simply that I'd like to be challenged, at appropriate escalation, from the start. Give due support and additional intermediate content for struggling players, rather than glossing over or trimming down mechanics to avoid conflicts.

/rant