So anyone else tired of grinding tomes weekly for gear?

[Gemina]

Oh you'd be surprised by the amount of people that find them very challenging

Indeed. Even HM primals are still wiping parties. Trust me, they are my main source of exp free Poetics. Dead bodies everywhere.

[Genaxx]

This game is extremely bad between patches. I unsubbed before 3.5 as there was nothing to do, did all of 3.5 content in about a week and unsubbed again from now until SB, if it actually changes from the current formula otherwise im out.

Weekly tome caps has become stale, or the whole gear system is stale.

[SuperZay]

Don't get your hopes up. In 4.0 we'll do daily repetitive things for new 450 tomestones of X a week so we can purchase temporary, quickly replaced gears. The same thing we were doing for 3.5 years.
I'll enjoy 4.0 main scenario and probably take a break till 5.0. You can do the same things over and over again only so long before losing all interest.

[AnimaAnimus]

Yeah, while I stay busy E in the game I have S been finding new O sources of mmo entertainment lately. (but I can still cap my tomes with little to no effort)

Ones that are not just standard dungeons crawlers, are fully voiced and have side quest story lines that are much more interesting than go to over there and collect that thing then run to that place then back to over there then to that place then over there again. Not to mention better housing, better character customization and better most everything. Plus give subscribers free money for their cash shops when they pay a sub instead of being incredibly greedy, offer the same sort of items for their physical expac at half the cost and have much more open and reliable communication with their player base.

And basically just do common sense things and don't toot their own horn when they introduce content that's the same as last months or pretend something as basic as jumping, flying or swimming is new and something only they are doing when other companies have been doing it better for 10 years now.

[MiaGrey]

Originally I wrote this as a response to the “No Community” thread prior to seeing this thread. I am new to the forums and didn’t notice dates on the comments. When I read all the comments on this thread from pages 1 - 41 I was shocked at how many more pro-XI players had commented on here as apposed to the “No Community” thread.

Then I realized that this was a resurrected thread and that all of the pro-XI comments were from quite a while ago (probably given up and left). Reading through here another disheartening trend I picked up on was all the people pointing out that these kind of topics have largely been ignored by SE.

This is will probably be my first and last post here, so for what it’s worth:

Cultural Mechanics

I think game mechanics should be solely used to empower cultural mechanics.
IMHO a lot of what is happening in XIV is that the human mechanics are largely being ignored.

FFXI as a standard:
I don’t think using nostalgia as a way to discredit legitimate claims about XI’s game mechanics is being fair to the people trying to explain their experience. It’s just an emotional component within the assertions about mechanics and doesn’t disqualify the latter.

Many of the arguments against XI are predicated on how people experienced it’s grind. I’d like to reframe how people think about grinding in regard to game satisfaction.

Most games have to strike a balance between effort (pain) and reward. In an MMO the grind is the pain that allows there to be rewards (progression, item acquisition, social status, etc). What makes a grind bad? If the reward does not justify the pain (effort).

In our case with XIV I think a good example is status-symbol gear becoming obsolete too quickly (i.g. this thread). The effort to acquire Tomes isn’t being sufficiently justified by the reward (in this case gear).

I’m reminded of the saying: “when everything is special nothing is.” If you can never stand out: 1. it removes that from the incentive table and 2. it removes “icons” from the games internal culture. Not only do I think it’s OK that there are items not everyone can obtain but I actually think it’s quite beneficial to have those items be very static and identifiable.

Generally we see with XI fans the sentiment that the game was very hard but the rewards were commensurate with the effort. In XI things were hard even at level 1 and not just in the advanced content. So what was it that kept people going? I think one example is because people stayed in level ranges for long periods of time you could compete with your (level) peers as well as enjoy superiority to someone who was 5 or 10 levels below you. This created equally rewarding milestones to that of reaching the level cap.

Another thought I had about aesthetics in regard to culture was social class (level range). I think allowing people to modify their appearance a lot early on removes upward mobility as an incentive. In XI you could tell immediately what level someone was just by what they were wearing. I think social class as a mechanic in the game is important to have. I think having the sagely level 50 helping the level 15 greenhorns is a valuable dynamic (mechanic) for both parties. Of course none of that means anything unless progression is slowed to allow people to become immersed in a class identity (i.e. I’m a lvl 20 Thief).

Role (job) identity as a cultural mechanic. By imposing limits on when someone can change classes you allow them to fully own the role they’ve chosen in the game society.

I’m reminded of a quote: “I’m only free to expand myself within boundaries”. Given to much freedom people will generally flounder with indecision.

[kuma_aus]

This week I did my weekly Frontline Roulette. Thanks to event and freelancer it was a 5 minute wait. Did some extra Frontline matches and then some Feast matches. Maybe like 4 Feast matches. I did an A rank hunt here and there and finally did some A1S in Duty Finder when it was on bonus, maybe 6-8 times, and capped my tomestones.

Had a pretty fun week in game so not really tired of getting tomes.

[Khalithar]

Indeed. Even HM primals are still wiping parties. Trust me, they are my main source of exp free Poetics. Dead bodies everywhere.

Only time I see this (on Hard or Extreme mode primals) are people that forget to attack adds. You'd be surprised how many people still do this.

[CrimsonThunder]

Running the same faceroll easy content each week and you're getting bored? I can't possibly imagine why.

[AsahinaMyLove]

Since 3.0 and seeing all my hard earned 2.X tome gears being useless. I stopped to cap weekly tomes <,<
I only get gears to enter those new content o_o
Now its like end of the line and in 4-5months its 4.0 and all tome gears gets worthless again because NPC shops and story quests has way better stuff <.<

[TarynH]

ffxi things like sky, dynamis, znm, hnm, sea,... etc... these were all creative farms and grinds.

Were they though?

Sky - Farm for a NM, get item. Farm for another NM, get item. Use items to spawn NM, get item. Repeat. Use 4 items to spawn big NM.
Sea - Farm for a NM, get item. Farm for another NM, get item. Use items to spawn NM...
HNM - Sit around and wait. (Changed to farm item from BCNM. Use item to spawn. Possibly get another item. Use item to spawn other NM.)
ZNM - Use worthless system to take pictures of monsters. Use items to get item. Use item to spawn NM. Get item. Use item to spawn another NM. Get item. Use item to spawn yet another NM. Get item. Use item to... well, you get the idea.
Limbus - Get item. Go into Sea. Get another item. Go into Limbus. Farm farm farm until you get... item. Collect enough items, and you can use items to fight a boss.

The only different event was Dynamis. But it was essentially farming a bunch of mobs for... you guessed it, items. (Later changed to match the above, with forced-spawning NMs.)

To make matters even more frustrating with most of FFXI, was competing over a single monster, with several other linkshells. Most of which were using cheats to get faster claims. I won't even get into lockouts, and arbitrary time delays for most of XI's content. Oh, the good ol' days of creative grinding...