Yoshi-P on Character Growth

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

Interesting analysis of FFXI.

However, the reaction to this analysis should be exactly the opposite of what Yoshi-P does. FFXI players were not furious because everything changed. They were furious because everything they did was made irrelevant.
After spending a lot of time to earn the most powerful lvl75 weapon, you're pissed because a new player can buy a lvl85 weapon better than yours.

That's exactly what happens in FFXIV for every content...

It seems more likely that they were upset about the change. Reaching top level in XI takes forever... Or at least it did, so all the effort they put into reaching the top level was made worthless.

[Nalien]

The end result is that the i250 crafting gear is likely going to have plenty of value, especially for hardcore raiders, who are going to want to get the sets as soon as possible without fighting against the RNG of Wondrous Tails.

Honestly, I'm just irritated that they've taken an already niche market, and pretty much taken away from it... I can make the best i220 gear... That isn't saying much, i220 was very quickly irrelevant, pretty much only to hardcore raiders at the start of 3.2, but I could make the best version of that niche level... Prototype Midan gear was inferior... Now? Not the case with i250... Prototype Creator gear is still inferior, but I'm no longer making the best i250 gear... If I put some HQ i250 up for sale, and someone gets lucky and puts the same gear up off Wondrous Tails... Why would anyone buy my piece over the one with 100% success on penta melds?

I don't even have a reason to make i250 though... The market will be the same as it always has been, albeit with the rare Wondrous Tails sale taking a buyer away... Why do I care though? I've already got more Gil than I know what to do with... Savage is the only place item level and Gil seem to matter, and I just have zero interest in that... I can get i270 earlier than everyone else? Yeah, I don't care... I'm struggling to see a point in anything beyond i220 at the moment, and the game is very quickly going to be forcing i260 on me the same way it forced i230 on me... I have issues with Aquapolis and Palace of the Dead, but aside from PvP, they're two of the more enjoyable additions I can think of recently... All three of those have one thing in common though; Item level is irrelevant for them... Palace of the Dead out right omits item levels, while Aquapolis and PvP have fairly low item level caps... Heck, dungeons are starting to get item level caps...

It's a shame Diadem was a complete and utter flop... It could perhaps have justified higher item levels... The rewards just completely suck though, get a higher item level so I can farm i235 gear easily? Or maybe I want the minions and mount... Sigh, I really don't know what Yoshida was thinking with Diadem... I just don't think this development team has any idea how to do sandbox content... It's very apparent in PvP, where we have game modes like Secure and Seize, that people miss and want to do again, but the developers have taken a theme park approach to things, and Shatter has decommissioned the previous rides...

[Reynhart]

It seems more likely that they were upset about the change. Reaching top level in XI takes forever... Or at least it did, so all the effort they put into reaching the top level was made worthless.

You said "more likely" but then point out exactly what I said...pick a side

Magian Trials were the change. The fact that you could obtain better weapon than relic was the problem. Once the relic received their Magian Trials, everyone was happy.

[Alahra]

FFXI players were not furious because everything changed. They were furious because everything they did was made irrelevant.

These are, for the purposes of discussion related to FFXIV, functionally the same thing. The reason why players would be angry if they changed the core model in FFXIV would be different than they were in FFXI, but the root cause—that the game's core model was now drastically different—would be the same.

I can assure you that there are players who are happy with the current model, who like having regular updates with new gear to chase, and they would probably not be happy with spending a year at the same item level (which is largely what requests to make gear last longer like FFXI would mean), just as one example of how making the game more like XI could cause problems.

Moving to a model where gear had significantly lower obsolescence would necessitate either more grindy content, or more content that was dubious in value, with incentives to run new content being there only for the players most dedicated to optimization (those players are a relatively small sample of the population, for what it's worth).

Some players would be okay with that and enjoy it, but XIV's new content is already seen both as too grindy and frequently not rewarding enough, so it would be difficult to not make that worse. When you throw in the fact that there is resistance to the idea of more avenues for players to get max-level gear, the team has to walk a very delicate tightrope here.

Which, again, underscores the need for caution.

As I've said before, I do think there is room for expansion within the game's current model (I've long been an advocate for more max-level gearsets and can think of several ways the team could achieve that even just using the content we have available to us now), and I even think it would be possible to have slightly longer raid tiers (if they can manage to get a bigger team, at any rate).

Yeah, I don't care... I'm struggling to see a point in anything beyond i220 at the moment, and the game is very quickly going to be forcing i260 on me the same way it forced i230 on me...

I don't mean this flippantly, but rather sincerely: you probably don't really enjoy vertical progression games! And that's actually perfectly okay. There are other games on the market that are more sandbox and/or horizontally oriented. Heck, even FFXI gets content updates just about as often as XIV does and definitely has more long-lasting appeal for its gear and the like.

But I don't really think it's ever likely that FFXIV is going to differ significantly from its present structure—the most I can envision is moving from 6 month raid tiers to 12 month ones (and that would be pretty hard to pull off while also maintaining regular, worthwhile content updates). Even that is unlikely, I think, and at most see 9 month tiers as theoretically possible.

[Reynhart]

These are, for the purposes of discussion related to FFXIV, functionally the same thing.

That's the catch, it's not.
You can't justify "changing is bad" because one change was bad.

This is the same twisted answer that Yoshi-P did recently. When asked if we can have something different, he basically replied "If we give you less, you'll be pissed, so this proves our formula is good"
What ? Of course we'll be pissed if you give us less...what kind of proof is it ?!

The worst part is that he used the "if we give you one dungeon instead of two"...conveniently forgetting that before HW, every patch gave us three. And you can look at the previous patch notes, they were as big as current patches...much bigger, in fact, if you look at 2.1.

[MikeWW]

I think the most important thing in a game is how fun the gameplay is. Not progression, not gear, not graphics, not story. But whether or not it is actually entertaining to do the tasks. There are games that rely almost entirely on gameplay, and have mediocre or simply bad everything else, i.e. many shooters for the PC. I've grinded countless hours in games with fun gameplay, but you can't get me to repeat ff14 dungeons once I've gotten the gear or xp I needed out of them.

[ADVSS]

how hard would it be to have tomegear set some ilevels down, make relic armor and gear which would be the max ilevel when finished, and having raid gear also at that ilevel or higher? I mean you come back from 6 months cause you cant be bothered since world first midas or some crap, you get you some tome gear and automatically back in the game, and good enough. Meanwhile this guy here has been playing the whole time, i think itd be ok for them to let those who are on faithfully get a little further ahead, whether its above the current lowest tomegear i level or something. Raid gear too, should be higher as its an effort-based earning. I digress, this is the model for the next 10 (Two years tops, then free to play) we'll most likely get.

[Alahra]

You can't justify "changing is bad" because one change was bad.

That's not what I'm saying at all, actually. It's not that change is in and of itself bad, it's that large scale changes can have very serious consequences. As another example, from FFXIV itself, look at how poorly the large shift in raid difficulty for Gordias worked out in the end, how harmful it was to the game's community. SE's history with MMOs and indeed, the history in XIV itself, gives the team a lot of reason to favor caution over taking big risks. This does mean that change tends to be incremental and gradual, which I understand can frustrate some folks. Personally, after years of knee-jerk changes in WoW, I like that the team's cautious, though.

As for the answer about less, you're missing something key about why we have 2 dungeons now instead of 3. We have 2 now so that the team can try to introduce other types of content—that is, expand the game in the way so many people want. If we still had 3 dungeons, we wouldn't have Diadem or Deep Dungeon or a second raid difficulty, and while they haven't been perfect (and Diadem far from it), new content types are always going to carry some risk of failure.

If you want 3 dungeons back (and I submit that most of us probably do), we'd have to give up the potential for the team to innovate and introduce other types of content. So long as the team is the size it is, that is the reality of the developer's capabilities at this time.

[Miitan]

If you want 3 dungeons back (and I submit that most of us probably do), we'd have to give up the potential for the team to innovate and introduce other types of content. So long as the team is the size it is, that is the reality of the developer's capabilities at this time.

Considering their track record, a return to 3 dungeons would be a good thing.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

The fact that people want 3 flavors of corridor tomestone grinding, despite people getting sick of said grinds every 6 months, confuses me.