Yoshi-P on Character Growth

[Frederick22]

This poor excuse of a response is getting so old now.

The answer of someone who says total noncensses and doesnt know the difference between a badly desing content and a personal taste.

I just cant believe how many is complaining and what they can only bring are just poor excuses.

[Nalien]

Heaven forbid XIV appeal to a wider audience... Everyone who isn't happy with progression as it is should just quit! Losing subscribers can only be good for the game!

A model that encourages playing for one month out of six gets SE far more subscription fees than a model that retains players interest and subscriptions for the full six months!

[Reynhart]

I feel that he's only trying to appease the hardcore Final Fantasy fan's and those that play simply "because its Final Fantasy" in hopes they stay till the bitter end no matter what.

But, aren't "hardcore FF fans" the kind of players who discorevered the series very young ? Those that started at VII or sooner ? Those that belong in an older era, where dedication is not an unreal expectation for an MMO design ?

Suddenly, the target audience makes even less sense...

[Sandpark]

I don't understand the big deal with bringing iconic stuff into XIV. Star Wars, Lord Of The Rings, Elder Scrolls, every big IP does it. Do people give Stars Wars crap for putting Bounty Hunter or Tie Wing fighters in games? If no iconic stuff was a rule we would have no jobs only classes.

Your argument could be that every offline Final Fantasy has it's own story and world but they also have iconic features. Warrior in XI is more DPS than tank, Warrior in XIV is more tank than DPS. Quite different from each other.

Gold Saucer in any game is a place to do minigames to take a break from the traditional game. So any building designed for that will strive for the same goal. Call gold saucer casino royale if you want. It just seems more iconic from a FF standpoint to be called Gold Saucer and not Death Star Land.

[Musashidon]

Heaven forbid XIV appeal to a wider audience... Everyone who isn't happy with progression as it is should just quit! Losing subscribers can only be good for the game!
A model that encourages playing for one month out of six gets SE far more subscription fees than a model that retains players interest and subscriptions for the full six months!

but is the audience actually wider? if you give people a way to get stronger the whole six months that is a pretty big grind, let alone if you make it so any part of that six month grind stays relevant in the next six month grind.


in theory people subbing 100% of the time would be more beneficial IF they actually got more players but what does it matter if only 200k people stay subbed 100% of the time (this is an example) when you can continue this current model and at your worst drop to 500k subs and during better times even come close to 1mil?

now changing they could always not lose all that many players or even go up but I personally believe other wise. which is where all the argument comes from. you say *this way is better* but no one will ever know unless they do that and if they do and it flops, then what? go back to the one that made them more money? they will look even worse to players who already believe they are money grubbing.

Losing subscribers can only be good for the game!

losing the casual playerbase that doesn't want to/can't do the grind isn't good for the game either.

[bass9020]

The answer of someone who says total noncensses and doesnt know the difference between a badly desing content and a personal taste.

I just cant believe how many is complaining and what they can only bring are just poor excuses.

I understand you and many many others enjoy a no substance, stale, super easy mode game(JUST MY OPINION). Its fine I get it. No need to attack anyone who doesn't agree, like you have been doing.

[Alahra]

There's a very important historical reason that Yoshi is reluctant to change the game's core.

As many forum-goers know, FFXI is commonly considered a horizontal progression game. From 2003 to about 2009 (maybe 2010, I don't recall exact dates), it had no level cap increases, and content gave horizontal progression rewards (usually with one or two pieces per class that were sufficiently better than what was previously available to encourage people to do the content). The game remained fairly successful for much of that time, maintaining this core structure.

But with the release of the Abyssea content packs, the team decided to "change things up," and suddenly, FFXI wasn't strictly a horizontal game anymore. Over the next year or two, FFXI was a vertical progression game with regular jumps in character level and corresponding jumps in the strength of gear, up to a new, 99 cap. The change proved very harmful to the game as a whole and the game's subscription numbers never really recovered. Following this, the team spent the next couple of years re-establishing the old core content model toward more of a state of horizontal progression (updating old content and the gear associated with it to level 99 and so on), and things reached a point of equilibrium once more.

However: prior to the re-launch of FFXIV, the team tried again to reinvent the game's core content loops with Seekers of Adoulin, this time not adding new character levels but instead porting over the concept of item level from more modern games (WoW but, naturally, FFXIV's model was likely what they paid most attention to, as the game was getting close to re-launch). Regular content updates would release jumps in item level much as we get here in XIV, and once again, the sense of horizontal progression was largely lost. The same thing happened that happened with Abyssea: subscription numbers dropped, and long time players were furious. They then spent the couple years following reinstating horizontal progression yet again. (Whether the team has learned their lesson, I can't rightly say: I haven't kept up to tabs on the new patches, but last I saw, they recently did an insane doubling of the maximum item level, so...I'm guessing probably not).

All of this undoubtedly plays into why Yoshi is cautious about making major changes to FFXIV's core content model: by and large, long term subscribers stay because they like a game, and naturally, the majority of people playing a game like its core, and as he suggests, those players are normally silent. I'm all for a greater sense of horizontal progression and indeed character progression in XIV and have written before on here about ways I think the team could create a sense of those things. But they need to do so carefully, as any massive shifts to the game's core structure run a very real risk of alienating the game's largest majority of players (those who pay their subscription and like it; those who pay a subscription and don't like a game's core structure are going to generally be a smaller subset of the overall subscription base).

Heavensward has taken what we might call baby steps and cautiously experimented with ways to expand the overall scope of the game's content. Not all of their efforts (Diadem) have been successful but others have been more so (Deep Dungeon—which looks like it's going to be getting better with tweaks to how it works in the future as they take in feedback). Diadem in particular could have been a third way for progression that the game does sorely need—but due to some design oversights in its implementation, didn't work out that way. That doesn't mean it can't be important in the future, though. But Diadem also (very importantly) still functioned within the game's core structure.

Those desiring changes to the game's overall structure are probably going to be largely disappointed, as changes to the core structure of a game essentially mean that it's a different game, since games are, naturally, built on fundamental principles, and everything flows from them. When the FFXI team changed the core structure of their game, it resulted in a lot of backlash and the loss of many core consumers of the product, and Yoshi, working in the same company (and indeed, with some of the same people) who made FFXI, is no doubt aware of this history.

That's a big part of why he has been cautious. The other part is that ARR is something of a miracle: it has succeeded beyond the company's wildest hopes in the face of the basic failure of FFXIV 1.0, and so he needs to be cautious. Given the game's shaky start in 1.0, Yoshi is undoubtedly under a lot of pressure to maintain the game's current level of success from the "suits" at Square-Enix, and substantial changes involve a lot of risk. If the team oversteps with more radical changes and the game loses its core subscription base, it's very likely that SE would cancel the project entirely, given how much they've already put into rescuing it.

Now, again, I'm in agreement that the game needs to expand beyond its core model at this point (and thankfully, we're beginning to see their attempts at that, flawed as they may have been in some cases), but any expansion to that core model is likely going to occur within the same general framework of the core because of all this (and of course, other factors, like time, resources, and so on). Yoshi's caution is, in essence, pretty necessary at this point.

[Nalien]

losing the casual playerbase that doesn't want to/can't do the grind isn't good for the game either.

That's why I tend to balance my suggestions such that they're essentially optional and by no means a hard requirement. Heck, whenever topics like this come up, it's practically a certainty that I'll drop by to parrot a suggestion that's over three years old now, just because I think it perfectly provides what I want from gear progression, and nobody has ever really managed to explain how it would be bad for new players... At least, not how it would be so utterly terrible for new players that they cannot even play the game...

Still, the main complaint I see coming up again and again is that there is really no reason to subscribe for more than 1 month out of 6. If that's true, SE is potentially missing out on 5 months worth of subscription fees from a portion of its audience, that's an issue as far as I'm concerned... My suggestions may not solve that, but I would argue that SE should look into addressing the issue all the same... They should want to retain players, not only does that earn them more money through subscription fees, but it also functions as free advertising... That's how WoW because the monolith it is/was, people kept playing it and they drew everyone around them in... If I quit while waiting for a new patch, that has either no effect, or the opposite... I wont be selling people on a game I'm not actively playing, because I'm not actively playing it and thus wont be talking about it... For those remaining it can also have a negative impact, I've certainly seen plenty quit the game for some of the reasons presented throughout this thread, and the result is a less enjoyable game for me, pushing me ever closer to joining them...

As I said in this thread a few days ago, the idea is a game that is "easy to pick up", but "hard to put down". Right now XIV is so easy to pick up that it's easy to put down; I could quit tomorrow, come back for 4.4 and catch up fairly quickly.

[Lewtskie]

The answer of someone who says total noncensses and doesnt know the difference between a badly desing content and a personal taste.

I just cant believe how many is complaining and what they can only bring are just poor excuses.

To be contemptuous towards other's opinions and berating them for their ideas, claiming them nothing more than trolls, and telling them to leave or shut up is the worst kind of attitude. Discussion and debate, even simple arguing, is healthy to a game's existence and growth than just silence. Every idea, even the ones considered bad or just general complaints, can be shaped into something complete.

[Musashidon]

that's an issue as far as I'm concerned

but how do you retain all players? or do we only want to retain specific players?

As I said in this thread a few days ago, the idea is a game that is "easy to pick up", but "hard to put down". Right now XIV is so easy to pick up that it's easy to put down; I could quit tomorrow, come back for 4.4 and catch up fairly quickly.

but is that really a problem for the majority? yes they can put it down pretty easy but do they?

how do you give people real progression without making it mandatory? how do you give the people who want to get stronger stronger but without making the people who play little weaker than them?