Unofficial Census 2016 for FFXIV

[zosia]

That I can understand; I'm not trying to say raiders should get nothing special. I think I was a little miffed at the opinions of certain other posters with regard to casual players' value. I appreciate the reality check.

To address the grist of the topic at hand, would the raiding community accept a fixed, rare achievement that was less universally desirable than a mount or a special crafting item? Someone earlier suggested a reader board of some kind for world firsts, or perhaps we could have a unique title reserved for the first 100 people to clear a raid which can't be earned after the nerf patch. Those are things which are visible to everyone and prove your accomplishment. As long as the reward is a "thing" I fear people will always complain about the difficulty of obtaining it, which causes more strife between casual players and raiders. I'm sure there's a way to make raiders feel valued and recognized without breeding too much resentment from the casual playerbase.

I honestly don't care what happens to old raid content and gear once I have a new tier to work on. The entire reward structure needs to be redone in this game. Stuff like Niddhog ex, Thordan ex, Ravana EX should always drop raid ilvl gear and VA/WC should actually be relevant to gear progression.

I think that stuff like that fauslet and gordias mount should have like a 10% drop rate come 4.0. But other than that, I am not a fan of ahead of the curve achievements. I am not a fan of removing access to anything because it became outdated content. Maybe a feat of strength for server first clears would be nice, but that does not address the majority of raiders.

I simply think that gear should be meaningful and come from many different types of content.

If you want to be BiS, just like in FFXI, you should have to do many different forms of content. I have no issues with non-raiders getting 240 gear from something as innocuous killing a hunt mob. What I have a problem with is that the non-raiders can get an entire set of 240 gear from killing hunt monsters.

If I could change the game with the snap of my fingers, I would make two immediate changes followed by a host of smaller changes.

The very first thing that should change is the cycle of patches. Rewards are less impactful because of the pacing of gear upgrades in this game. Three months is just simply too short for any upgrades to feel special or powerful. I would change the pace and size of content patches to run on a 4-5 month schedule instead of the 3-4 month schedule they have now. This would allow for the game to slow the pace of gearing down slightly.

The next thing I would do is revamp gear completely. I would actually add bonuses to items, make mini sets, like two to three items sets. For example, Garuda, Titan, and Ifirit EX dropped rings, earrings, and bangles respectively. If you have all three, in addition to their normal stats, they would give you a bonus effect like TP refresh (1 TP per sec). Now not all set bonuses would come for raiding or ex primal content. I could see bonuses coming from gear that comes from different sources, like maybe a primal ring could have a bonus with a weeping city ring.

Either way, to be BiS you will need to play with all types of players across different types of content.

Furthermore, content like PotD, Diadem, Aquapolis, the 24 mans, will all be different sources for your BiS set in addition to having minor upgrades along the way to help you get to your BiS. Imagine if you had to go into diadem to get the best belt in the game made from killing giant dinosaur bosses? Then, to get the best ring in the game, you have to slay a lich lord and his army of minions in palace of the dead? To round out your set of interesting BiS gear with item effect, you have to kill Thordan EX for the best helm in the game. Do you kind of see what I am saying?

Now these ideas could be worked on obviously, but if I could snap my fingers now and make a wish, that would be the changes I would make. I would also make monsters tougher, dungeons harder, and hunt monsters more like world bosses. This would actually make these gear upgrades meaningful other than just stat sticks to stand around town with.

And there could still be tome gear at the end of the day with a lesser ilvl for people who don't want to bother with BiS. They would obviously be a little less powerful, but the inferior tome gear would keep them relevant to the current content. Better yet, crafted gear could be in-between BiS and tome gear, so even players that just want to tome farm can strive to upgrade their gear with better crafted pieces.

[Thayos]

Love that entire post, Zosia.

[Chalbee]

A lot

It almost sounds like you're trying to create a broad and interesting endgame or something. If squenix did even half of what you're suggesting, this game would be worlds more fun, and I hope the someone on the development team sees this post.

[Vantol]

Yes, very good posts, Zosia. Can we have JP person compile them, translate and post on JP forums?

[BrevisLevis]

I just don't understand why Square Enix doesn't fire all of their devs and hire the top posters in this forum. It's clear that the players posting here would make a vastly superior product. If they would just revamp their staff and fly in a couple dozen players who post here, I bet FF XIV would actually have 5 million active players -- maybe even more...

[Vantol]

I just don't understand why Square Enix doesn't fire all of their devs and hire the top posters in this forum. It's clear that the players posting here would make a vastly superior product. If they would just revamp their staff and fly in a couple dozen players who post here, I bet FF XIV would actually have 5 million active players -- maybe even more...

To fun part of this sarcasm is that Yoshida team make such horrible game design decisions (all the time, needless to say), that even person who didn't play a single game in his life could do better.

[Alexander_Dragonfang]

>>> Deep Dungeon is at this moment, starting to see a decrease in players, basically we have hit the point where:

1.- Hardcore people got all their weapons they wanted.
2.- Midcore people got 1 or 2 of them.
3.- Softcore people doesnt care anymore since next week dark gobdip will be aviable from Mhach, making the i235 weapons (Nid EX and Padjali) completely irrelevant.

>>> Rip Palace and Nid EX.

And thats the mayor problem with this game. Gear gets irrelevant basically as soon as it comes out, everything is given away a patch or two later anyway, so there is no real incentive to do anything and thus, content dies out for most people really quick. SE needs to seriously rethink the following:

Gear Adquisition and Relevance vs the time they take to patch. Basically content is coming out of the oven dead, Either patches take too little time or gear takes too much. Either patch every 5 months or reduce the time gear is required to get across the board in half. Not only Gear will be relevant for much longer, probably all content across the board will see an influx of players wanting to play things as they know they are much more likely to be rewarded instead of having to smash their heads into a grind wall.

If floors 30, 40 and 50 all gave +1/+1 and silver chests have their upgraded chances increased, probably even after the coming update, players would still do Palace and will probably do it much more, more often and for much longer, since getting weapons like that would not be a matter of RNG, but of player activity. We want to be rewarded for playing. Not for wasting time. This is why, for the most part, the game fails to keep attention of players for more than the first month or so of each patch.

A serious rework of the reward system in this game needs to be done. Content dies too quickly, everything gets irrelevant too quickly.

Alexander Savage 12 weapons should be capable raiding weapons for 4.0... Not get replaced as it happend by NPC weapons...

[Ametrine]

http://www.mmorpg.com/mobile/feature...ame=446&ismb=1

Yoshi-P's recent interview with MMORPG, he had this to say:

MMORPG: What hasn’t worked as well as you would have hoped?
NY: For the most part, a lot of things fell within the range of expectations. However, adjusting the difficulty of high-level raid content always requires trial and error, and on top of that, balancing that content while taking the level 60 job actions into account can be difficult, so it’s always quite a challenge. This point is a big takeaway for us when we create our next raid, or when designing for the next expansion pack. We would like to make sure we leverage these learnings, and create future content that people can enjoy even more.

He knows what Savage is doing, it seems.

[Alahra]

Diversification of the endgame is going to be absolutely necessary for the game to retain players in the long run, yes. I've been saying for ages they need to make 24-man gear upgradable to the maximum item level, for instance, as it makes the content relevant not just in the sense of catch up, but actual progression. There's actually one area of the game where they are handling non-raiding progression, at least on the endgame end of things, fairly well, and that's weapons, and part of why is because there is a third option outside of Weekly Tomestones and Raiding, the Relic/Zodiac/Anima, and alongside that third option, there is a 4th path that is has a built in progression chain: EX Primals.

We can go round on how well the various RZE quest stages have been designed, but what they do unquestionably succeed at is providing something on which non-raiders can progress, and on top of that, the weapon has lasting value because you can always continue to improve it.

In an ideal world, there would be similar chains of progression for all gear. The framework for this exists most clearly at the beginning of the level cap's patch cycle (whether 2.0 or 3.0), when there are two sets of Tomestone gear and dungeon gear actually has relevance to players interested in progression (because they hit cap and actually, for the only time will ever be the case, have gear that isn't automatically better than dungeon drops).

This was the case at level 50 in 2.0 ARR. For those that were around back then, it was vitally important to get full or nearly full Darklight to tackle endgame encounters like Titan HM (which was tied into a questline that had very high relevance!). That progression was in addition to progressing toward Mythology (i90) and potentially Allagan gear, for folks interested in Raiding. What Patch 2.1 did was create more steps between initial level 50 play and high end raid play, with the addition of Crystal Tower and three EX Primals, all of which remained relevant for the entirety of that patch thanks to end-game level accessories and weapons through Primal Focus. The EX fights also served to make it easier for folks to take the step into raiding by helping them learn and become more comfortable with more difficult content. (It also probably helped that BCOB's fights were a lot more approachable than all future raid tiers, though, to be fair.)

Part of the progression disappeared in 2.1 since dungeon gear wasn't relevant any longer, but it was still largely in tact. However, as soon as patch 2.2 hit, any and all sense of progression vanished for any player who had already been interested in progression and was therefore collecting gear and probably had i90 gear. This meant that the new dungeons introduced in Patch 2.2 didn't matter to them, and the weapons introduced in Leviathan probably also didn't matter to them. From that point forward, their only form of progression was Soldiery tomes, since the i90 Mythology gear (now unlocked) was something they already had. That's markedly different from initially hitting level 50 and seeing i70 tome gear that you don't have (on unlocked tomes) and i90 gear that you also don't have. The first set of the gear helps you get the next one, but after the first raid tier, you no longer have a two-tiered stage of progression as a non-raider.

This pattern happened again in HW. 3.0 had two sets of relevant tomestone gear at the start (well, not immediately at the start, since Esoterics were delayed until the release of Savage), again allowing for non-raiders to have at least some degree of actual progression. And that sense of progression disappeared entirely once 3.2 hit for anyone who focused on gear acquisition in 3.0/3.1. Dungeon gear was made completely irrelevant, just as it had been in 2.1 before it.

Raiding progression still has a sense of progression since you're still literally progressing against the boss fights themselves. But as of right now, non-raiders only have a real sense of progression at the beginning of an expansion/game launch.

There need to be ways for non-raiders to actually progress throughout the expansion, not just at the start of it. It's understandable that there need to be ways to for folks to catch up, as well (new players joining the game on a friend's recommendation, folks who have to take a break for work or school or whatever else, and so on). I don't have answers for the best way to arrive at that, but between the RZE weapons, and the two-tiered Tomestone progression present in both 2.0 and 3.0 (but essentially, not later, since the lower tier tomestones are irrelevant except as a catchup mechanism) show that such things can exist.

[Istaru]

http://www.mmorpg.com/mobile/feature...ame=446&ismb=1

Yoshi-P's recent interview with MMORPG, he had this to say:



He knows what Savage is doing, it seems.

Knowing what it is doing is one thing. Actually fixing it is another altogether.

Diadem take 2 may tell us a lot about their ability to learn from their mistakes since they have said Diadem 1 turned out to be an oopsie.