More Customize Skill

[Shurrikhan]

A realistic one? Building "my way" only ever works in MMO's before you start playing with other people seriously. People want online games to play like single player ones, but they can't. At some point, your allies expect you to play well, and that translates to very few options.

This is such a overly generalized argument that it's hard to tell where to even start in debunking its particular links. Yes, overall, people are easily led towards cookie cutter specs when they have little reason to or intelligence by which to experiment with other builds, when the developers split talent series across multiple metas yet only really reward one of them (the "raid" meta; PvP, open-world, etc., be damn), when developers cannot determine how they wish to balance general compensations or capabilities (such as AoE vs. ST, burst vs. sustained dps), and/or when the developers don't do a good job of balancing those choices.

Yes, making a customization that allows for more than a few of its choices to be viable requires specific balancing, actual validation of more than just one gameplay type (e.g. "the raid"), and a community who actually likes to experiment and explore. XIV thus far will probably miss every one of those parameters. But that is a failing of the developer and the product, not of the overall concept of customization. (Were it a problem with the concept itself, the moment the "gimmick" of reduced LB build rates is removed, jobs performing within 1% of each other in theory would be taken or excluded accordingly, until SE effectively streamlines us into just 3 possible classes in order to compensate.)

[dragonseth07]

snip

My statement was generalized because I have played countless MMO's over the years, and every single goddamn one runs the same course.

At the start, and in early levels, everyone loves building their character and exploring options. Eventually, the playerbase gets skilled enough to find what builds and strategies are better than others. The meta forms and stabilizes, only changing with balance patches.

Player customization is a hollow promise.

[Shurrikhan]

Player customization is a hollow promise.

By that degree, so too is "an interesting world setting" within a given MMO. I mean, gameplay's just going to end up being a boss arena accessible to the (slight minority) of players playing the "real" game, right?

It may be unprecedented, and a developer's promise to make it may just be sweet nothings, but it itself is not a hollow promise.