Alienation of Dedicated and Skilled players

[HeavenlyArmed]

This is why I advise my static and my friends against using the forums...

The amount of completely idiotic responses from people in this thread is astounding. Someone asks for just a little depth and they:

• Want to be a special snowflake with content only they can do
• Should just fall in line with the dressup sim mentality of everyone else

However, unlike most people in here, I can talk about my ideas, why I think they would be good, and explain why we shouldn't jut be happy with more of the same all the time. First, as someone who has actually played Wildstar, I want to address some of the comments I've seen about it, and how it's actually a good example of other claims people are making being just not true. So, that game is dying. We all know this. Why is it dying? Well, if you try to claim it's any one thing, you're a moron. At release it was a buggy mess with hundreds of unaddressed problems remaining from the beta, painfully dull leveling and such a monstrous grind to get to endgame content with attunements alongside massive amounts of permanent character improvements you need to make or at least be well into the process of making that it turned a lot of people off. On top of that, PvP was a non-competitive mess arguably even worse than Wolves Den, they had a convoluted stat system and gear drops in raids that were far worse than crafted gear you might happen to be carrying with RNG layered on everything four times over, and on top of all that due to one little video rumors spread that there was no content for any player who didn't consider themselves hardcore despite that video only being about raids. While a lot of the content was difficult for sure, most of it was never as out of reach as the word-of-mouth implied it would be/was. For all thesse reasons, WIldstar flopped. A lot due to failures in marketing, but also due to some very real problems with the game's core functionality and the fact that even now there are still bugs in that game that people reported back in its beta says more about the dev team on it than some might realize. The game didn't die purely because no one could do the content, it died due to very poor marketing alongside a whole host of issues within the game that unhappy players were able to make accurate complaints about for literal years.

Okay, so what does Wildstar actually teach us about people's claims in here? Oh right, that the "if you're not 100% optimal no one will do anything with you" idea is completely false. Not that we even have to look that far, as I'm sure most of us who've raided can say we've run with some less-than-perfect players in our time but kept running with them because they were fun to have around and didn't hold us back to the level where replacement was necessary. But even in terms of having multiple possible builds for a class. In Wildstar, I ran a suboptimal build for many months. Even when new builds became possible that made my own more and more outdated, I kept using this build. How many complaint did I get? Zero. Why? Because the difference wasn't anywhere near the difference you'd see in, say, taking a BLM who uses their full level 60 rotation vs one who role plays an ice mage. And that's the key thing to having some horizontal progression in the game, as long as it's balanced even slightly well, the issues people keep suggesting as inevitable will not actually exist outside of applying for a group trying for server/world firsts. The fact that the dev team in XIV keeps claiming otherwise is infuriating, and frankly, an insult to the amazing community this game has built around it.

So how do you add this sort of thing, where we have interesting stats to play around with and other content outside of raids that means something? Well, the latter part is already on its way to being taken care of. Diadem/Exploration revamps could be coming as early as 3.4 to make that less mind-numbingly boring, and Deep Dungeon is another concept that, like Diadem, has a lot of potential in this regard. So there's the interesting non-raid content, but how do you make it worthwhile? Well, materia as a primary reward is a good start. Though 24-mans and Aquapolis already do a good job of providing standard materia. But, what if new materia were added to these kinds of content as a reward, materia that unlock set bonus effects that actually change how your job is played slightly? Or maybe something else? Maybe it could be something as simple as allowing extra stat allocation for completing the content on that job? Meaning you go in and fully clear Palace of the Dead or kill the highest ranked mob in the Diadem revamp, and it drops an item that increases your stat allocation for the job you're on when you use it from 35 to 37? A small thing that players would have to be insane to require from someone, but something that players can use to meaningfully progress their character outside of the current content options. This is the type of thing OP is looking for, and it's a strawman to claim otherwise. These things wouldn't alienate the casual playerbase nearly as much as most of you seem to think it would, wouldn't be very hard to implement development wise at the simplest end, and would give players other reasons to log in and look forward to it.

Moving forward on the more interesting stat issue, there's a reason it's important to start discussing this now. In a recent interview, Yoshi-p clearly said that the team is considering removing the accuracy stat due to a number of very obvious issues it has. While this wouldn't be happening any earlier than 4.0, it's important for us ass players to talk about as it means there's room for another stat to be added to gear as a standard secondary stat. What stat might they add? Well, in my opinion this is one place where it really is best to look at WoW. I speak of the Mastery stat, a stat that affects each class differently that exists on general gear, and has some sort of effect that may adjust how you play. I think a stat like this would be absolutely perfect for FFXIV, as it would solve the issue of gear being boring that many people complain about, and do so in a way that is accessible due to being a standard stat on gear. How would I have it work? Add new traits for it to affect on each job, such as a trait for DRG where the more mastery you have the less time using a Gierskogul removes from your Blood of the Dragon, or one for BLM where you have a very very small chance to proc Firestarter with a Fire IV, and with more of this stat that chance increases. And the ideas could continue flowing for each different job. In my opinion, if accuracy does get removed from the game in 4.0, this would be the ideal stat to replace it with.

And now, some ungodly number of words later, I've explained my entire position on this debate and given examples of how it could be fixed without alienating the casual playerbase like most people fear. Was that so hard?