Suggestion: healer-based incentives/rewards

[Rymm]

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.

You conveniently ignored the “or commitment” part of the sentence you quoted. If someone wants to devote that much time and effort to something, there is nothing wrong with rewarding them.

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")

So you are okay with housing enthusiasts not being able to collect every housing item in game, but not with mount enthusiasts or achievement hunters being held to the same limitations? Why do they get left out of your crusade to allow everyone else to attempt to obtain everything they want? You're free to think how you want to on the different rewards, but this double standard just really undermines your entire argument when you arbitrarily pick and choose what should be available and what should be limited. It made it very difficult for me to take the rest of your post seriously.

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.

Alright, since you opened this door, I’ll go ahead and share my thoughts, though we’re getting off point here.

You’re right. SE has already made it clear how they feel on the matter. They already sell “different” versions of the same game. Feast trophies are not available once the season is over. Period. Seasonal event items are only available during their original event or on the MogStation for real money. Whether you agree with the practice or not is moot- SE is willing to do it. My original comment (remember what this topic started about?) was nothing more than expressing support for an item that would always be available to everyone for nothing more than an investment of time and effort.

I'm not demonizing people that put in effort.

I never said you were. I said you were “demonizing people who do put in the effort and would like something special to show for it.” Your strongly, but carefully worded comment made it abundantly clear that you don’t like the idea of people openly displaying their achievements if they aren’t still available to the entire playerbase.

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.

People who want to have something special to show for their hard work are animals notorious for their vanity. Well, if you “have no issue with trophy” that the Feast seasons reward… welcome to the flock, I guess?

And seeing how popular achievements are, there are MANY people that care.

Admittedly, it’s not very important, but I’m just curious where are you getting your data on this from? Is there somewhere that tracks players who are actively hunting achievements and not just accumulating them through normal play? And if they are as popular as you claim, why exactly should they stop having rewards attached to them?

That is wrong.

Thank you for your opinion. Players “may want”… well darn near anything. Or everything. They may want to go from level one to the cap in five minutes. They may want to play as a giant mechaziod robot race. Theorizing about the infinite myriad of things that players “may want” in order to stay with the game would be exhausting and pointless to this conversation.

If you compare two items of some practical function, for example safety boots...is it subjective which is better?! No.

This analogy is… insufficient at best. For starters, we aren’t comparing items with a practical functions. In addition to that, it also depends on the items in question and how they are being compared. If the boots are the exact same except one pair is red and the other is blue, then it’s definitely subjective.

Items have objective values.

I can’t agree with this at all. Items, all items, digital or not, have subjective value. They are only worth what people are willing to pay/give/do for them. It’s not up to you to dictate if something is “worth it” to anyone else. You could make the argument that statistically speaking, X item is only worth Y investment to Z% of players but, I would need to see actual numbers and references before giving any credence whatsoever to your claim. Please don’t take it as personal slight, it’s just my nature to need to source any “fact” based claims I read on the internet before I believe them; too easy (and common) for people to present their own conjectures/beliefs/wishes as “fact”. At this point we are branching into the philosophical here and I feel like we are getting way too far off-topic.

But time =/= effort =/= skills.

That skill does not equal time or effort is fairly obvious and I never claimed otherwise. But what good is time without effort? It’s not as if we’re talking about an achievement you receive just for existing. There is clearly effort involved in playing all those dungeons, let alone in doing so with the bare minimum of skill that is sufficient to result in commendations. I’ve been playing since 2014 and haven’t gotten the 3k comm achievement yet, because I haven’t put in the effort to do so. I’m sure there are plenty of people who joined well after me who used DF enough and were competent enough to have gotten the Parade Chocobo a long time ago.

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.

I think you are confused by what I mean by ‘progression.’ I mean the ability to advance in the game and experience all of the content. Someone can be mad for collecting mounts, but they will never obtain them all if they don’t reach the level cap. Not grinding enough DF commendations for the Parade Chocobo will not bar you from anything except the Parade Chocobo. Allowing new players to quickly unlock and access all available aspects of the game is important and things like bonus xp and easily obtained tome gear facilitates this. Allowing new players to quickly and easily obtain all rewards already implemented in the game when they started is much less important, in my opinion, than allowing them easy access to the means of achieving them.

And what is a better compromise than what is actually known to increase player retention?!

Source please? I’m sorry but, for reasons I already explained above, I can’t take these types of claims seriously without one. Assertions like “Everyone knows it” or “It should be obvious” just don’t cut it.

Doubtful. Sorry, but I do not think there really is anyone out there with all the achievements. I doubt I'm wrong.

I’m sorry, I’m confused. I thought you said that achievements were popular? You claimed that there are “MANY people that care” about achievements. So if there are enough new players who care sufficiently about achievements to be turned off of a game for them for being too hard, how can you be so dismissive of achievements' power to retain players? That’s quite the contradiction.

One thing up to debate is however how many people does that constitute. That's not something I can give numbers to.

I can agree with this, as it’s basically what I said in the final paragraph of my last post. The thing of it is, SE has already established precedent for both long grind achievements and limited rewards. Both are already in game in very small amounts and SE has not yet shown any inclination of changing their model. I’m not now, nor have I ever argued for excessive additions to either of these, but I don’t take issue with their existence. And I don’t think adding them in “once in a while”, as I said in very first post, will make the game suffer unduly. You’re free to have your own opinion on the matter, but let’s not pretend that either of us can objectively prove it.