Does anyone actually enjoy guildleves?

[Linnear]

Actually if anything he IS making a good point. As irrelevant as the guildleve descriptions are, they're interesting to read at least the first time. The fact that you don't like something and choose to ignore it doesn't mean it doesn't exist and someone else can't.

He made a point, I wouldn't take the risk by throwing in an adjective such as good but he did make a point, as biased and arbitrary as it was, to which I was argueing.

To that fact, I never said it doesn't exist nor did I say I am ignoring it, I said it was not enough to build lore or a world and what i want to see is a world with stories and reason for doing things.

I will give him some credit though he almost made a point, until he said "absolutely obliterate basically every quest in wow, both narriation and writing wise,"

Albriael claims they blow the flavor text of WoW quests out of the water and I doubt he will find much evidence to that fact, but then again there is never any evidence to anything he says so nothing new there. Can you claim to be engrossed, or entertained, hell I would even settled for highly amused by many of the texts in the regular leves? I would say ANY of them but I can't claim to have read all of them so I assume that there are some of them that might be good but I have yet to see evidence to that fact. If these leves texts are so mind bloiwng and entertaining, why isn't anyone else talking about how good they are? I guess the posters in this tread dont' appreciate the higher style of literature I guess.......

[Griss]

I sort of enjoy leves. but would definitely like to see a greater variety of them.

[ApplePie]

Yes because I like gil, sp, guild marks, faction marks, armor, and gil. Did I mention that I like gil?

[vax]

Guildleve are ok.

When FFXI started you had to party, party, party, party and more party till 50.
Atm on FFXIV you could play solo, party, guildleve, behest.

I see FFXIV better than ffxi when it started.

[gifthorse]

the levequest system is called field of valor in ffxi and is pretty popular to do. It pretty much gives you a reson to kill mobs. It is also part of the lore. The lore is eorzea is in the age of adventure, guild were formed to keep ppl busy. like all the mercenaries and the armies, all the craftsmen and gatherers. Since no other city-state was attacked.

All they are, are just glorified fov pages. They are not to be "quests" per say. More like how ff tactics is with the bounty system. I've done fov pages in ffxi and found them fun.

What is really a non issue is how far you run between the spawn points. After the starter zone ffxi fov pages are spread out using 2 or more mob types spread out on the map. They are not gonna be all in 1 spot.
So complaining about running around is a complaint for sake of complaint.

How about just stop thinking about stuff and just play. If your not having fun then just move on to find a fun game as you wait to do more stuff in this one.

Um, you don't play the game so you don't know how crappy these quests are. We understand the inherent purpose of the levequests and their deisgn-philosophy, but that doesn't assuage the fact that they are implemented in a crappy, boring, way.

If you need an alternative to levelling, then something is wrong with the levelling process.

[gifthorse]

He made a point, I wouldn't take the risk by throwing in an adjective such as good but he did make a point, as biased and arbitrary as it was, to which I was argueing.

To that fact, I never said it doesn't exist nor did I say I am ignoring it, I said it was not enough to build lore or a world and what i want to see is a world with stories and reason for doing things.

I will give him some credit though he almost made a point, until he said "absolutely obliterate basically every quest in wow, both narriation and writing wise,"

Albriael claims they blow the flavor text of WoW quests out of the water and I doubt he will find much evidence to that fact, but then again there is never any evidence to anything he says so nothing new there. Can you claim to be engrossed, or entertained, hell I would even settled for highly amused by many of the texts in the regular leves? I would say ANY of them but I can't claim to have read all of them so I assume that there are some of them that might be good but I have yet to see evidence to that fact. If these leves texts are so mind bloiwng and entertaining, why isn't anyone else talking about how good they are? I guess the posters in this tread dont' appreciate the higher style of literature I guess.......

So very true.

[Moth]

I like them cause they have made me rich >.> lul

[Cendres]

I like them a lot, they are designed for people like me who log only a few times a week (not necessarily out of choice), and want to still get somewhere, It's decent XP and money for a short time. It is perfect for casual players who may not have that much time to fight mobs for some hours.

If you do not understand this simple concept than I am afraid leves will forever be lost on you. It doesn't matter though because like Fields of Valor they are there for a very specific and good reason. With more content on the way hopefully the focus of leves will diminish and leave it for those like myself who need them.

[Abriael]

Such a fan boy....

because of course disagreeing with you means being a fanboy right?

But considering that the texts in this game are not continuous, as in rank 20 leaves do not build on story form rank 10 leaves, if you can call that a story.

A story doesn't need to be a chain-story to be a story. This not to mention that several leve quests are actually related or complementary.

I don't think there is anything in FFXI that is as entertaining as the Harisson Jones quests in Uldum,

Your opinion. I find absolutely nothing creative or intresting in a wink to pop culture (of which wow is filled to nauseating extremes) that brings in concepts and characters that have absolutely nothing to do with a fantasy world, and ultimately looks just extremely childish.
I'm sure you were overjoyed when you saw Darth Vader and Yoda in Soul Calibur IV. I was disgusted.

but after all, the lack of creativity of Blizzard's writers is well known since when they created their two major worlds copying from other sources, it's not surprising that they have to copy pop culture tropes in order to find ideas for their questlines.

which is sad becasue SE is known for beign really good story tellers, they just don't seem to bother outside of mission content, if you want to think that 3 lines of pseudo flavor text on a card is trying to build a a lore and world then you are sadly mistaken.

What part of "in FFXI" isn't clear?
Besides the fact that even (quite a lot more than) 3 lines of flavor text on a card contribute quite nicely to create a lore and world.
The fact that you decide to ignore them is your personal problem.

As usual Abriael, your points are lack luster, and very biased. But you keep trying one day you will make a solid point on ... well something.. I am sure of it, I believe in you.

Isn't it nice that this isn't for you to decide?

[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.