"New game plus - quests will have no rewards..."

[Callinon]

I believe it’s already been brought up numerous times in this thread, but people are concerned that adding experience to the feature will just result in players spamming the simplest part of it repeatedly for easy leveling—ForteNightshade pointed out that one can get ~10 million experience from the first 20 quests of ShB, and I don’t think that includes any dungeons. The concern is that they’ll just ignore the purpose of the content in favor of spamming the ESC key to skip all the cutscenes and dialogue. Kind of like how people used PvP for easy experience back in the beginning of SB.

People take the path of least resistance, and already exploit easy EXP methods now (e.g., Alliance Roulette cheesing). It’s not a completely unfounded worry. And it’s already happened before when they added experience to Frontlines.

Honestly, even if that did happen, it's probably fine. It's not like dungeon queues will suddenly just have zero people in them. That would never happen. So what's the loss? Those same people not spamming FATEs all day? Those same people not grunting through deep dungeons, annoyed that you dare to need chests? I'm not seeing the problem.

[HyoMinPark]

Honestly, even if that did happen, it's probably fine. It's not like dungeon queues will suddenly just have zero people in them. That would never happen. So what's the loss? Those same people not spamming FATEs all day? Those same people not grunting through deep dungeons, annoyed that you dare to need chests? I'm not seeing the problem.

The problem is not using the feature for what it was intended to be used for.

[Callinon]

The problem is not using the feature for what it was intended to be used for.

But again... so what? Why is that even a problem? Some people will certainly use NG+ to re-experience the story. I mentioned earlier in this thread that it might be cool to go back at the end of the expansion and see the whole thing as a cohesive unit not broken up by a patch cycle. If people want to use it to level jobs in the meantime, so what? Why is that bad?

[HyoMinPark]

But again... so what? Why is that even a problem? Some people will certainly use NG+ to re-experience the story. I mentioned earlier in this thread that it might be cool to go back at the end of the expansion and see the whole thing as a cohesive unit not broken up by a patch cycle. If people want to use it to level jobs in the meantime, so what? Why is that bad?

Why is that a problem? Because the feature is designed for reexperiencing the story. Not for easy 1-2-3 leveling. People will not use NG+ for its intended purpose if it had experience attached. They’d find the easiest, most time-effective method of spamming it, and do nothing but that. They wouldn’t be watching the story or enjoying the experience of doing it over again.

Look at Alliance Roulette: it’s supposed to help players with queues for Alliance raids while providing experience as compensation for time spent doing “old content”. What happens with it? Players cheese the item level to guarantee LotA and ST all the time. They aren’t allowing it to be used as intended.

PvP: Frontlines was ruined for those who enjoyed it when they added experience to it back in 4.0. Even worse, players started botting within the content. So much so that this forum had threads for weeks complaining about it. They weren’t using the feature for what it was meant to be used for: it was just easy experience to them—and some even had the content automated to make it even easier!

The feature being abused for easy experience in a game that already throws experience at players is why I’m glad it doesn’t have experience rewards attached. Because people would use it purely for experience farming, and not what it was meant to be used for—they’ve already demonstrated that enough in this game. Not everything has to give experience to be a worthwhile addition to the game.

[Callinon]

The feature being abused for easy experience in a game that already throws experience at players is why I’m glad it doesn’t have experience rewards attached. Because people would use it purely for experience farming, and not what it was meant to be used for—they’ve already demonstrated that enough in this game. Not everything has to give experience to be a worthwhile addition to the game.

Ok let me try this a different way: how does that affect YOU and YOUR enjoyment of NG+?

Alliance roulette, frontlines, ok.. people breaking the TOS there does affect your gameplay. That's legit. But how would people getting exp from this matter to you in the slightest?

[monk-dps]

Ok let me try this a different way: how does that affect YOU and YOUR enjoyment of NG+?

Alliance roulette, frontlines, ok.. people breaking the TOS there does affect your gameplay. That's legit. But how would people getting exp from this matter to you in the slightest?

If I may, it effects everyone when SE chooses not to add fun things in the future cause the playerbase at large doesn't use it as intended. They could say things like " it's a waste of resourses and manpower for features to not be used in the way we attended it." And it's not like they haven't done or said things like this. So that could be a huge red flag. It's pretty much the term " This is why we can't have nice things"

[Iscah]

Ok let me try this a different way: how does that affect YOU and YOUR enjoyment of NG+?

I could see it being an issue if it artificially increases the amount of people running that one section of the story and having an unnecessarily high number of people hanging around those quest NPCs and objectives.

If it comes to people using bots to auto-run that story chapter repeatedly... from previous times when I've encountered bots running the same story quest I'm doing, they're "rude" by social perception and it feels quite distracting to have them on screen. They stand on top of the quest NPC at point-blank range whereas an actual player would position their character at a normal distance for interacting with someone.

And I'm not just saying this because it makes the NPC hard to target - I know there are workarounds for that - but it just feels unpleasant when the character you're talking to is standing 'inside' a random player that just popped up on top of them.

[Callinon]

If I may, it effects everyone when SE chooses not to add fun things in the future cause the playerbase at large doesn't use it as intended. They could say things like " it's a waste of resourses and manpower for features to not be used in the way we attended it." And it's not like they haven't done or said things like this. So that could be a huge red flag. It's pretty much the term " This is why we can't have nice things"

It hasn't stopped them so far. Lords of Verminion is still in the game. Also we saw with Eureka people leveling in ways other than what SE intended... they kept developing Eureka anyway.

Be wary of putting SE on too high a pedestal. Even if something doesn't work out exactly the way they thought it would doesn't stop them from doing other things. They haven't made themselves into the fun police just yet.

I could see it being an issue if it artificially increases the amount of people running that one section of the story and having an unnecessarily high number of people hanging around those quest NPCs and objectives.

If it comes to people using bots to auto-run that story chapter repeatedly... from previous times when I've encountered bots running the same story quest I'm doing, they're "rude" by social perception and it feels quite distracting to have them on screen. They stand on top of the quest NPC at point-blank range whereas an actual player would position their character at a normal distance for interacting with someone.

And I'm not just saying this because it makes the NPC hard to target - I know there are workarounds for that - but it just feels unpleasant when the character you're talking to is standing 'inside' a random player that just popped up on top of them.

I very seriously doubt you'd get crowds around an NPC that would cause any significant problems. You get that kind of thing on launch days because literally everyone is doing the same thing at the same time. It's not really a comparable situation here.

As for "bots exist, so don't do this" ... no. Screw them. That's allowing the existence of bots to ruin something they shouldn't be able to ruin. That kind of thinking is why we can't send mail to our own alts. Because "rmt exists so don't allow this" ... news flash here: it hasn't even slowed them down.

[HyoMinPark]

It hasn't stopped them so far. Lords of Verminion is still in the game. Also we saw with Eureka people leveling in ways other than what SE intended... they kept developing Eureka anyway.

Lords of Verminion hasn’t seen any changes or updates since it was introduced. As for Eureka, they saw people leveling via the NM trains in Anemos and went out of their way to attempt to destroy that train in Pagos because we weren’t doing it as they intended (e.g., mob chaining).

I very seriously doubt you'd get crowds around an NPC that would cause any significant problems. You get that kind of thing on launch days because literally everyone is doing the same thing at the same time. It's not really a comparable situation here.

Well, this was a concern when PotD came out because of how much activity it was showing. And it persisted for a while on some of the more populated servers. It was enough that you could report players standing on the NPCs on their mounts and GMs would show up to knock them offline.


My biggest concern is that the developers stop adding to this feature. We know that they plan to add in things like the new ARR and job quests down the line, as well as sidequest chains like Hildibrand, Alexander, and perhaps Coil and Deltascape. But if they see that people are mainly abusing this feature for experience and not story replayability, who’s to say that they won’t just stop adding to it/updating it. I don’t know if that would ever be the case, but I’d rather it not be.

[Fynlar]

But how would people getting exp from this matter to you in the slightest?

Anything in an MMO that causes people to take solo avenues instead of group avenues can negatively impact the group experience. This is precisely why they made Trusts as inefficient as they are, for instance. There's still potentially reason enough for some people to use them (insta queues for instance), but there's still many others that won't due to the fact they cannot play as efficiently as a party of human players.