Does anyone actually enjoy guildleves?

[Altano]

So far the arguments in favour of leves seem to stem only from a dislike of the alternative rather than actually liking the system itself.

Forgive me for missing your point, but doesn't this point to leves at least being a better option? Grinding will never be something people especially look forward to, isn't the lesser of two evils the best approach?

[gifthorse]

Forgive me for missing your point, but doesn't this point to leves at least being a better option? Grinding will never be something people especially look forward to, isn't the lesser of two evils the best approach?

Well forgive me for missing YOUR point but isn't this forum about ideas to improve the game, rather than just supporting a system that obviously isn't any fun. The lesser of two evils isn't the best approach when there are third, fourth, and fifth options which are better.

Progression systems

1) Grind your way to endgame

"Boring"

2) Grind your way to endgame with the occasional support from a guildleve to give you a boost

"Still boring"

3) Grind your way to endgame but instead of boring levequests, they have been replaced by levequests with a diverse array of objectives which are actually fun. Furthermore, there is variety so you aren't repeating the same leves over and over for the billionth time..

"Wow that sounds much better"

4) A little bit of grind so you can figure out how to play your class and gain a sense of progression, supplemented with a diverse array of guildleves, sidequests, and general self-motivated content, all of which are fun and exciting and you never feel pressured into doing leves just because it is the most efficient use of your time.

"This sounds good too"

5) No grinding of leves but instead there is grinding of skills and abilities. Progression is in the form of quests (either guildleve or sidequest-based) which give you access to skills and abilities. Endgame starts at day one and you don't have to go through the boring, repetitive intermediate. There is 100% horizontal content where the only factor which influences your completion of the content is your commitment to the game, abilities, cooperation with teammates, and your skill with the combat system.

"This sounds good too but is a matter of taste"

[Linnear]

Well forgive me for missing YOUR point but isn't this forum about ideas to improve the game, rather than just supporting a system that obviously isn't any fun. The lesser of two evils isn't the best approach when there are third, fourth, and fifth options which are better.

Progression systems

1) Grind your way to endgame

"Boring"

2) Grind your way to endgame with the occasional support from a guildleve to give you a boost

"Still boring"

3) Grind your way to endgame but instead of boring levequests, they have been replaced by levequests with a diverse array of objectives which are actually fun. Furthermore, there is variety so you aren't repeating the same leves over and over for the billionth time..

"Wow that sounds much better"

4) A little bit of grind so you can figure out how to play your class and gain a sense of progression, supplemented with a diverse array of guildleves, sidequests, and general self-motivated content, all of which are fun and exciting and you never feel pressured into doing leves just because it is the most efficient use of your time.

"This sounds good too"

5) No grinding of leves but instead there is grinding of skills and abilities. Progression is in the form of quests (either guildleve or sidequest-based) which give you access to skills and abilities. Endgame starts at day one and you don't have to go through the boring, repetitive intermediate. There is 100% horizontal content where the only factor which influences your completion of the content is your commitment to the game, abilities, cooperation with teammates, and your skill with the combat system.

"This sounds good too but is a matter of taste"

I will take 3,4 or5 anything other tha1 or2 please....

[Altano]

The lesser of two evils isn't the best approach when there are third, fourth, and fifth options which are better.

I had thought your suggestion of 100% horizontal content was tongue-in-cheek. Apparently not. Why there is and will almost certainly always be a grind in FFXIV is first and foremost that a level system provides a goal for players, a trajectory for their in-game efforts. Not to mention a way to gauge enemies based upon (presumed) player experience and overall strength, thus providing the structure for a balanced combat system.

So let's address your 3, 4, and 5, which you claim are "better" alternatives. I think #3 is the most viable option, unless you're including "objective"-based quests that have jack to do with actually playing as the job. I don't know exactly what you're suggesting there, but if it isn't appropriately related to what a job does (as many campaign ops in FFXI weren't, for example), then it shouldn't be the primary source of SP for a job. If it is, then I welcome your suggestions, but make them in concrete terms, rather than floating some abstract claim that you have a better idea. Let's hear it.

Number 4 - a little bit of a grind is heading a lot down the wrong road, for a number of reasons. First, the grind itself functions as a dual-purpose time sink: it gives the players something to do when they don't have time for some of the more intense content (which admittedly, is yet to come) and it also gives the developers time to, you know, develop while the players continue playing. Now you can disapprove of the forced time sink, but it's the nature of the beast in any RPG, and MMOs certainly not the least. Moreover, if you're talking of these sidequests/leves/"self-motivated content" (a vague-sounding term) as "supplements," then you're acknowledging the necessary primacy of the grind, making it more than just "a little bit." Lastly, you make the assumption that players feel "pressured" into doing leves because it is the most efficient use of time. Be that as it may, players will always look for the most efficient use of time when it comes to advancing their character. If the other activities are supplementary, then they'll not be turned to for the purposes of efficient time use. Nobody is forcing you to do the leves; they're just the grind with more concrete rewards.

Finally, #5, a matter of taste though it may be, seems horrible to me. It is just asking for an elitist mindset. "Oh...your Gladiator doesn't have XYZ weaponskill fully leveled yet? We need it for battle regimen, noob." This suggestion calls to mind the materia system from FFVII introduced on a large scale, and the potential for exclusion based on not having certain abilities up to somebody elses' expectations is enormous. Call me a cynic, but I see that happening right away under this model. And if that wasn't enough of a problem, the idea of "endgame starts at day one" takes whatever hope we had for a carrot to reach for out of the game. But maybe that is just a matter of taste.

[gifthorse]

I had thought your suggestion of 100% horizontal content was tongue-in-cheek. Apparently not. Why there is and will almost certainly always be a grind in FFXIV is first and foremost that a level system provides a goal for players, a trajectory for their in-game efforts. Not to mention a way to gauge enemies based upon (presumed) player experience and overall strength, thus providing the structure for a balanced combat system.

It wasn't tongue-in-check. I was dead serious. Consider end-game content in FFXI for a minute. Of FFXI, everyone seems to say “FFXI only started at endgame”. Well then why didn’t the simply start at endgame, if that's the case?

So let's address your 3, 4, and 5, which you claim are "better" alternatives. I think #3 is the most viable option, unless you're including "objective"-based quests that have jack to do with actually playing as the job. I don't know exactly what you're suggesting there, but if it isn't appropriately related to what a job does (as many campaign ops in FFXI weren't, for example), then it shouldn't be the primary source of SP for a job. If it is, then I welcome your suggestions, but make them in concrete terms, rather than floating some abstract claim that you have a better idea. Let's hear it.

When i mentioned a diverse array of objectives, I was considering things like quests with an exploratory emphasis, or quests which required you to protect an NPC or small village from monsters, or to escort an NPC to a specific location while protecting him or her from enemies, or perhaps escorting a valuable object, or perhaps defusing a bomb, shooting an airship out of the sky, setting up a trap for an encroaching horde of beastmen – hell – perhaps there could be a quest which involves collecting ingredients to call forth a demon which must be killed in order to pluck out its heart and feed to a dying orphan so as to cure his polio.

Do I really have to be so specific?

The current objectives we have for leves have you essentially perform the exhilarating task of killing or collecting. Kill/collect, kill/collect, kill/collect. It doesn’t even sound good on paper.

Even the quests that require you to find a hiding enemy is basically just a kill/collect quest. While the objective in itself is fine I suppose, the implementation of the objective is pretty clinical and uninspired. Basically every single levequest in the game is completely unengaging. This is increased by the lack of variety. Similarly, the quests themselves do absolutely nothing for the lore of the world. People play MMOs for the adventure, don’t they? I didn’t know they played MMOs to be Hedgemole exterminators every 36 hours.

Anyway, to elaborate on my former objectives, I would like to explain what I meant about exploratory quests. With quests where there was an exploratory focus, I would suggest having the few monsters which you kill in those quests to have SP which scaled up according to the time allotted for that quest. This way there would still be similar SP/time as the other quests.

And yeah, maybe you have a point about my suggested quests being totally unrelated to SP gain. Quests should have something in them which relates to the class you're playing otherewise SP gain is nonsensical. After all, If there is no killing of mobs, how else can you justify SP gain?

Well, here is a solution, just throwing it out there: say you have a quest to find a magical herb, well there's no reason THM and CON couldn’t gain skill points from such a quest (rationally speaking) since the experience of finding a magical herb is related to the magical arts. Furthermore, the quests could contain some content to justify the SP gain for the other classes, tracking, destruction of obstacles, etc.

Anyway, if all you're looking for is some rational justification for SP gain, then I'd hate to see your opinion of the levequest system as a whole, which is entirely irrational by nature.

Number 4 - a little bit of a grind is heading a lot down the wrong road, for a number of reasons. First, the grind itself functions as a dual-purpose time sink: it gives the players something to do when they don't have time for some of the more intense content (which admittedly, is yet to come) and it also gives the developers time to, you know, develop while the players continue playing.

Now you can disapprove of the forced time sink, but it's the nature of the beast in any RPG, and MMOs certainly not the least. Moreover, if you're talking of these sidequests/leves/"self-motivated content" (a vague-sounding term) as "supplements," then you're acknowledging the necessary primacy of the grind, making it more than just "a little bit." Lastly, you make the assumption that players feel "pressured" into doing leves because it is the most efficient use of time. Be that as it may, players will always look for the most efficient use of time when it comes to advancing their character. If the other activities are supplementary, then they'll not be turned to for the purposes of efficient time use. Nobody is forcing you to do the leves; they're just the grind with more concrete rewards.

Yes, well the perfect MMO with eternal and ever-changing, and unique content is obviously out of reach for MMOs of today because every development team faces time-constraints. To have a time-sink is a somewhat fundamentally necessity because of this scarcity of time and development costs which all development teams must deal with. With an infinite budget, I’m sure SE could develop an infinitely interesting game. Obviously this isn't the case, as even SE doesn’t have infinite funding. However, there are several ways of approaching an MMO, and to develop a huge timesink (grinding) as a prerequisite for the fun content (end-game) or some intermittent content (story quests) seems to be very old-fashioned. Especially in FFXIV's case where the intermittent content is so few and far-between.

At some point the developers will have to take shortcuts and introduce some kind of repetitive items (due to scarcity of development resources), be they a repetitive monster horde which you are expected to cut a swath through, or a huge distance which you must cross in order to fulfill your objective. Any gruelling task can be called a grind. And I readily implied that in my statement. But anyway, the relative magnitude of said grind, that I did not imply. And it is something developers should seek to avoid as much as possible, not incorportate into the very design of their game (see guildleves).

Unfortunately, FFXIV (using levequests as an example) has gone out of their way to include boring grind as part of their game design. Time-sinks don’t have to be as boring as FFXIV makes them.

What I am saying is that the foundation for an MMO should be to provide players with interesting gameplay. I mentioned above about grind being old-fashioned, and I'd like to further that by saying that many MMOs are developing games where dynamic content is part of the world (so it never gets tired and predictable). Also games are trying to make quest-progression the main form of advancement, as opposed to boring grind (quest-based or otherwise).

In another post, Abriael said that “Everything in an MMO is a grind” or something to that effect. And that’s truthfully a very sad indictment on the state of MMOs if he thinks that. Not everything has to be a grind. If something is enjoyable, then it isn’t a grind.

It's like, sure grinding can be a necessity because of restraints, but developers need to decide on a direction where the whole game isn't just one big, unenjoyable time sink. There's a fine line between what's interesting content and what's a grind. But what we see in FFXIV is an almost complete lack of the former and way too much of the latter.

Finally, #5, a matter of taste though it may be, seems horrible to me. It is just asking for an elitist mindset. "Oh...your Gladiator doesn't have XYZ weaponskill fully leveled yet? We need it for battle regimen, noob." This suggestion calls to mind the materia system from FFVII introduced on a large scale, and the potential for exclusion based on not having certain abilities up to somebody elses' expectations is enormous. Call me a cynic, but I see that happening right away under this model. And if that wasn't enough of a problem, the idea of "endgame starts at day one" takes whatever hope we had for a carrot to reach for out of the game. But maybe that is just a matter of taste.

Anyway, this carrot-on-a-stick is exactly the problem with a lot of MMOs today. You can’t just make a game around an elusive carrot which exists on the horizon. Instead, you have to make the whole game a field of carrots, and then on the horizon you have something even better than a carrot.

I guess the issue comes down to whether you think grind is awesome or whether you think it's stupid.