I think it'll only happen once healer becomes the "role in need" for every Duty Finder roulette type for at least a week.
That being said though, I definitely agree on the request for more commendation rewards.
I think it'll only happen once healer becomes the "role in need" for every Duty Finder roulette type for at least a week.
That being said though, I definitely agree on the request for more commendation rewards.
Pretty much this. The tank mounts were added to move the DF queues along, pure and simple. I'm not saying I'd be against class mounts for healers (or even across the board) but SE has no incentive to put in the effort.
About comm rewards, this should definitely be a thing. The longer the game runs, the more people will rack up comms. It only makes sense to add a new reward every once in a while. I do remember hearing some rumor about a datamined mount that was just the Parade Chocobo mount in black. There was a lot of speculation that it'll be the next reward mount since the original Parade Chocobo is the 3k comm reward.
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This is an MMO. That means that it depends on people entering the game at any part of its life. Making ridiculous achievements that take years to finish may not seem like a problem to the guy that is 90% done with it when its released due to having played for those years, but it is a MASSIVE turn-off for the new player.
No achievement should take more than several weeks, maybe months, for a fresh, active player. For achievements like dungeons which are natural part of the game it can be a lengthier time, maybe a year or so (for ACTIVE player). But nothing further. So no...Ever-increasing numbers of commendations is not a good idea.
Making commendations gotten as X class, that's good. If a person wants it, they can start using that class and get it in a reasonable time-frame. An achievement for ridiculous amount of commendations?! No, nope, nah, no way. It's adding to the negatives to any new players. Something that literally kills games and why Final Fantasy offers TONS of experience bonuses for new players to catch up.
Thanks for the heads up.
I can acknowledge and agree that new players are important in order to keep the game alive, let alone thriving. That's just basic common sense.
What I feel we fundamentally disagree on, is the idea of whether or not all rewards (every last achievement, item, title, etc., etc.) ever placed in the game should be easily obtainable by every player. I think most should be. But some should also be very difficult and/or time consuming. Some should even be limited.
I don't think it's right to make rewards progressively worse as time goes by. That mentality effectively penalizes veterans at the expense of making things easier for new players. Easier being the operative word; this particular case does not even hinge on being doable or not. Because if they were to continue adding cumulative rewards, it's not like they'd be going anywhere. New players are still perfectly able to get them, for the exact same time and effort that everyone else put in.
It's a cosmetic item; it has no material bearing on the game except to say "I put in X effort at Y activity". It shouldn't be equated to helping new players "catch up" to veterans either in leveling (xp bonuses) or gearing (removing weekly tome or loot caps); both things they need in order to actually progress through and experience all of the game's content.
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Nothing should be limited. It's a...horrid, for inability to use far stronger words without a ban, thing that's being cheered for on mainly by the select few people that were born into the wrong species. They clearly planned on being peacocks.
For those select few that get it and enjoy it, there are TONS of people that don't give the slightest bit of care about preening their feathers in front of random strangers they'll probably never again meet in digital world, let alone real one, and just want to play the game.
That irksome bit behind me...I never said that every achievement should be easily achievable or anything of that sort. I cannot understand how you managed to see that in a post where I said that a good time for achievements is few weeks to maybe some months for some more common content when actively playing the game.
What I DID say is that any SINGLE achievement needs to be obtainable within that time frame.
You want bigger achievements that take longer?! Start by getting the achievements already in the game. Then once you did all of them go and clamor for further stages.
I have literally zero idea what you mean by this. I never spoke about rewards of any sort and I sure as...well, ya know...didn't even remotely imply making anything easier or "worse". I did say that no ridiculous layer should be added to the achievements like getting commendations or doing X duty Y times. You reached the highest level achievement on them?! Good for you! Now work on another type.
I don't care in the slightest what you think is a progression or not. I am not arrogant enough to think that my way of thinking trumps all and whether you want it or not there are tons of people that will look at the achievements, will count how much time they'll take and drop out within their first 30 days bundled up with the game. Those are the sort of people that could very much help sustain Final Fantasy XIV for years to come, but feel neglected and shunned for being "new", for not noticing the game earlier. Developers of many games finally notice that.
Veteran rewards being removed, Road to X buff being available, bonus experience to leveling secondary classes based on highest level class available, unsyncing old content etc. These things are all there to make "catching up" easier so that new players don't have to feel hopelessly behind in everything. Other games reduce the experience needed per level commonly. Even cheap, Korean mass-made games implement this reduction in experience needed. Because there's a reason.
Veteran players are veterans not because there's a super-duper achievement that they're almost completely done with on arrival. They are veterans because they actually enjoy the content within the game. But new players can leave for the smallest reasons. That's why they ARE catered to more, and rightfully so. The reward for veterans is that they have new people to play with on a regular basis so there's no stagnation.
Well, you're perfectly entitled to your opinion, but I think on this matter we'll just have to agree to disagree. I feel that occasionally, exceptional skill or commitment should be recognized and rewarded. And I am talking about very, very, few select cases here. Things like PvP seasonal rankings or world-first savage kills (not even sure if SE does anything for the latter, it's more to illustrate the type of rare circumstances I'm referencing). And I say that as a player who has neither the skill nor inclination to pursue prestigious achievements such as that. But I'm also not going to try to demonize people who do put in the effort and would like something special to show for it.
If said hypothetical players “just want to play the game” and truly don’t care about “preening” in front of other players, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so; regardless of what achievements or rewards anyone else has. Again, I don’t see why hard work and effort should not be rewarded just because not everyone will want to or be able to do the same. Again I would like to reiterate that I am talking about a very small number of special cases here. Such achievements should not be a commonplace occurrence; maybe less than 1% of the achievements in game already follow this model and it should stay that way.
I apologize if you misunderstood me, that particular line was more directed at the poster below you who suggested that they continue to give rewards but that they shouldn’t be items. I probably should have quoted him to avoid confusion.
As for “ridiculous layers” added to achievements… well what constitutes ‘ridiculous’ is nothing beyond your opinion. I mean, you’re perfectly entitled to have it, but it doesn’t make it either an objective fact or more valid than my own opinion that it’s perfectly acceptable to have a handful of achievements that do take a long time or a lot of effort to accomplish. Which is really the crux of our disagreement.
The next paragraph of your post was fairly contradictory and I’m afraid it didn’t make much sense to me. You claim you aren’t “arrogant enough to think that my way of thinking trumps all” and yet you talk down to me and say that you “don't care in the slightest” about what I think. I’m certainly not saying you should, but it the spirits of the two sentences are rather conflicting. I was under the impression that we were both just stating our opinions. At least, that’s all I was trying to do. I would never dream of making blanket statements about large swaths of the playerbase, or take it upon myself to speak for a group of people, with no substantiating evidence whatsoever beyond my own personal conjectures, or topping it all off by presenting the whole argument it as if it were fact.
The balance between attracting new players and retaining veterans is a tricky one. I do not envy the people at SE who are in charge of managing it. People are complex; what attracts one person is almost certainly guaranteed to turn off another. Eventually it boils down to a numbers game- keeping more people coming in than there are going out. Would having long-term achievements keep some achievement-oriented people subbed (especially between patches) so that they could work on it? Maybe. Would having long-term achievements discourage some new people and contribute to them giving up the game? Maybe. Would adding an achievement for 4 or even 5k commendations kill FF14? I suppose it's possible, but I doubt it.
My stance on the whole issue is simply this: There is nothing wrong with achievements or rewards that take a long time or a great deal of effort to obtain. There will never be a consensus among the playerbase on where the line between ‘difficult’ and ‘too difficult’ falls; it is entirely up to SE to make that decision. Like anyone else, I have my personal opinion on the matter, but I’m also willing to accept wherever SE chooses to draw it.
Last edited by Rymm; 01-14-2019 at 10:33 PM.
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Except what I am against is not rewarding skills, but rewarding things that have nothing to do with them. You don't need to be skilled to finish a dungeon for 1mln times. You need only...time and willingness. You don't need skill to get 10000 commendations. You just need to run a lot of stuff as tank or healer and not wipe the party at every opportunity. It's actually hilariously simple if you just do dungeons. Again, it's just time.
I have no issue with trophy. As in...the actual, trophy item. I have issue with other stuff like mounts and such, as well as achievements tied to specific feasts (like "Win Feast Season X"), but not ones tied to feasts in general (for example "Win a season of Feast"). I have no issue with time advantage, like, get the mount now, others can try to get it six months later (paying tons of the PvP tokens for example).
Ultimately this is game that is constantly "active". A person that bought it at 2015 and a person that will buy it now get two completely different games because of all the limited stuff, even though both buy the same "game", pay the same subscription (ignoring here the legacy players) and the same prices for stuff on the item mall.
I'm not demonizing people that put in effort. I am demonizing the game not allowing people to put the effort due to limited form of something. Someone could put tons more effort than the winner of first season of Feast, but no matter how much effort he puts and how much skill he have, he won't get the glamour, mounts and whatever else was available then. This is not a problem of effort. It's a problem of "banning" the very attempt. And as far as I am interested, having something a while before others is more than "special" enough. At least when you consider that we're not talking about trivializing the items (at least, not me) so effort would still need to be put forth.
Another thing I'm against is telling a new player "Hey, here is a nice little game, but since it's X years old, there are achievements that you won't get unless you spend five+ years playing it. And there are several of them. Have fun.". Because that shuns these players away if they care about achievements. And seeing how popular achievements are, there are MANY people that care.
It may not be the only or even main reason, but it may be the final straw.
That is wrong. Players that just want to play the game may want that cool looking mount too. Not to brag, not to "preen"...but simply because they like it. They don't care whether they are special or whether everyone else have them. They just care about the fact that THEY like it and that they CAN'T get it, no matter how hard they try. Or in case of super-bloated achievements...they can't get it for years. In which you can get tons of cool stuff by doing other games.
The effort to value of the items is just out of whack at that time.
If you compare two items of some practical function, for example safety boots...is it subjective which is better?! No.
Items have objective values. Even digital ones. When one games offer a "value" of one item for 3 months of work while another offers a similar item for 3 years of work, there's a disproportion there.
Now, that on its own doesn't speak much of anything. However when you compare these items with many other games...it becomes a lot more clear. You can take less time to get top of the line items in very competitive games riddled with win-to-play microtransactions than some of the achievements that I've seen in games that did follow your opinion that new, higher tiers of achievements should be continuously made for the veteran players.
When you have to put enough time into getting a single achievement that you'd earn enough money to make an mid-tier game...clearly there's something wrong there. That's rather objective, even if value of the thing called "achievement" in itself is subjective.
And again, I have never spoken about effort of any sort. Achievement is, by design, something you get with some sort of work. Insinuating that I am against requiring effort is simply...weird, to say the least. But time =/= effort =/= skills.
I don't care in the slightest what you think is a progression or not because if I did, it'd be implying that it actually is somehow more important over all the other. And sorry, it's not.
What I do care is that there are people that think like you, then there are people that thing that 'glamour' is the end-game, there are those that think that collecting all rolls or all minions or all mounts is end-game. As such there are those for which progression is winning and getting unique cards from further NPC triple triad players, getting every further roll or minion etc. There are those for which progression is in simply achievements.
You represent a very small group, because of the massive diversity. EVERY group is very small. As such, compromises need be made. And what is a better compromise than what is actually known to increase player retention?!
Doubtful. Sorry, but I do not think there really is anyone out there with all the achievements. I doubt I'm wrong.
If a person is interested in getting the achievements and that is their goal...they're going to have those goals for quite a while yet.
Now, it could help prevent some people to leave that only care about limited content and simply like collecting achievements on the way. But those people often are so volatile that they can leave on a whim no matter what you do. Turning off masses of new players to have a chance at keeping them is simply inefficient.
I can say that from experience. I am one such volatile person. There's nothing that a developer can do to keep me, only things they can do to make me leave sooner. I'm not going to leave over any single thing because I don't care about any single thing. But as a result, it's simply not possible to hold my attention for longer without a game custom-made for me.
And yes, this is both an anecdotal 'evidence' as well as a very obvious opinion, and nothing else.
It's not a maybe. MMO's are not something that exists for only the past year or two. Nor is psychology. When people are put before a brick wall that takes way too much effort, they are very prone to just go the other way. One thing up to debate is however how many people does that constitute. That's not something I can give numbers to.
But I can stipulate that it is significant enough percentage that MMO developers either change or design their games in such a way as to avoid doing that.
I doubt it too, but there are many spots between "dying" and "thriving". What I am arguing is that it would unnecessarily make it have lower player retention in general, because it is more of a deterrent for new players than it is an incentive for veteran players.
This is exactly the reason they eliminated the veteran rewards program. We were getting to the point that a new player would have looked at it and realized they wouldn't get that sweet Zidane glamor (or whatever other one they were eyeing) until they had been playing the game for literally YEARS at which point, at the rate it was going, there would be other items added in, possibly that they would never get.
Adding in items that players might want but logistically won't ever obtain is bad for player morale, especially if it's in a role you're wanting to draw players to. Even now the commendations are rough for people not playing healer as a primary job. I've been in the game since 2.0 and still don't have the parade chocobo because I main a DPS job, and tended to only get comms when leveling tank and healer jobs despite how well I performed as a DPS or how mediocrely I performed as a healer.
I main Tank.
My back up has been healer.
But 24 man need DPS... not healers.
80-90% of content needs tanks most of the time when it's not tank it's normally healer but that only last 10 mins.
my 24 man run today was at 3/3 6/6 3/15 for 22 mins.
Commendations.
If I play dps I only give it out to other dps.
If I play tank I only give it out to healers.
If I play healer I only give it out to tank.
Only if they should be getting a commendation.
There are always exceptions to the rules!
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