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

[ForteNightshade]

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?

While this may not impact me as much, queue times become an issue for people who have yet to level all their jobs to 80. And as others have touched upon, the dev team can take us not running things as intended in a myriad of ways. I mean, the healer "redesign" in Shadowbringers is a direct response to how much emphasise the community places on healer DPS, which they do not like. A far bigger concern is they not going back and updating the system if it just becomes a level exploit.

[Kytrin]

I haven't seen it mentioned in this thread, but is anyone else hoping that replaying through ShB will include the ability to play Holmeister Switch with the Exarch and Lyna in your party? I mean, it might just have you use your current Trusts, but I'm hoping it'll be like it was when you played the MSQ the first time because I'd love to run that dungeon a few times with them. I also want to replay certain job quests, so I was glad to see them still being listed as something that might come in the future. All in all, super hyped for this feature. 5.1 can't come soon enough!

Oh! Meeeeeeeee! I wanna do that! I haven't leveled my Trusts at all yet lol. I've been trapped in crafter/gather -land and haven't touched ShB fates or Trusts.

I'm also hoping they sort out ARR relatively quickly. I have an alt that I haven't touched since like... 3.1? and I don't remember ANYTHING about what's going on currently lol. I think it's somewhere around something, something, talking to dragons about missing Estinien? So exp or not, I am dying to reset her story so I can do it coherently.

[Melichoir]

So the poster child for New Game+ for me has always been Chrono Trigger. It's the first game I can remember having it and it was a game changer (pun not intended). I got to go back through the game with my fully leveled and equipped characters and absolutely obliterate things I'd had to fight for real the first time. And y'know what? I still got another Rainbow Shell.. I still got more Gold Hairpins.. my characters kept going up in level. It was exactly the same game except I was an overpowered killing machine.

The problem with using CT as an example of NG+ is that exp didnt scale. So yeah, killing those goblins right after you tele to 600 AD when you were already level 50+ is by all intensive purposes pointless. You wouldnt spend time there 'leveling' and it would be a long while til you hit something that did give you worthwhile exp. Pretty much in practice EXP gains would be so negligible that you wouldnt notice till much much later into NG+

Now I know some are gonna chime in immediately with "Yes, but you still got exp, so NG+ should give EXP so we can use are level 5s and 10s and get exp from the low level content, just like NG+ is supposed to be." Except this isnt quite the same for two reasons. First, this point of view relies on the idea that if you did NG+ in CT, you would start back at lvl 1 again so said exp would be relevant. That isnt the case however. The second point is that exp gains in CT are strictly encounter based, not quest based. So if a kill quest in NG+ has you go kill 5 Goobues in the world, I would actually assume the act of killing those monsters that are nat spawned would actually give you exp, but quest rewards would not. This creates a different dynamic compared to old CT.

This is why relying on previous iterations of how NG+ operated isnt very useful. Everyone talks about the specifics of how NG+ was in this game or that game, but immediately throw out those differences when you begin actually comparing FFXIV to those games side by side.

Heck the rainbowshell concept you put forward actually illustrates this difference. Yeah in CT you could get another rainbowshell for either the sword, dress, or specs, but the equivalent of that kind of item in FFXIV would be a current Tier Savage 4 drop. The rainbow items were top tier - pretty much BIS in the game. Particularly Rainbow for Crono. And NG+ in FFXIV would not award you with said items through MSQ. So saying NG+ should be like CT, as an example, gets kinda messy because how NG+ operated in CT would not work in FFXIV as a direct translation. Itd have to be adjusted and changed. And look at that, it was, becoming its own iteration of NG+.

Beyond that, most of the people posting about being fine with NG+ not having exp arent here to make those who are bummed it doesnt have exp feel bad. The pushback, as I personally keep saying, is coming from people who flipped the switch and decided that the feature is trash and terrible simply because it doesnt offer exp. As I said in a previous post, the issue then isnt even about NG+ but about finding another method to level.

Beyond that, you never want extreme leveling methods in MMOs. There is a point where it is to fast, and can hurt the game (unless its designed into it overall). Pretty much if you can get to max with extreme ease, it cuts down on game time, changes the perception on investment, and adjusts player expectations on difficulty in a direction that isnt good for the game as a whole. If I could power level ALL the classes from 1-80 in the course of a day or two, Thats gonna mean I have less investment in sticking around to play, as well as create expectations everything should come as fast and easy. I can bet youll see way more toxicity towards hard content with that kind of model. My example is extreme, but you get the point hopefully.

[Callinon]

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).

Lords of Verminion hasn't seen any additions to it because it's:
A: A feature-complete system and
B: Nobody plays it.

It wasn't abandoned because people were using it for something unintended. It was abandoned because it was a dead-on-arrival system that served no purpose, wasn't fun to play, and offered no reward sufficient to mitigate the first two problems.

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.

Still I don't think this would really be a thing in NG+. Like this theory really banks heavily on there being a LARGE number of players literally just spamming the same like six to ten quests over and over again, and while I'm sure there would be at least some players that did that, I doubt it'd be any kind of population worth worrying about. Eventually they'd move on or stop because what they'd be doing would be soul-crushingly boring.

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.

If it's popular, they'll support it. If something about it is problematic, they'd fix it not abandon it.

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.

That's just a matter of tuning then. So the exp rewards offered from NG+ quests would have to be just a little bit worse than the same amount of time spent in group content. But then you just do math and figure out where that reward level is. PotD didn't cause everyone to abandon the duty finder even though it was numerically superior to doing dungeons. I'd prefer not to assume the sky is going to fall down if something like this is done.

[Melichoir]

Still I don't think this would really be a thing in NG+. Like this theory really banks heavily on there being a LARGE number of players literally just spamming the same like six to ten quests over and over again, and while I'm sure there would be at least some players that did that, I doubt it'd be any kind of population worth worrying about. Eventually they'd move on or stop because what they'd be doing would be soul-crushingly boring.

You really underestimate the player base at times. In previous patches the fastest leveling methods were Pulling all mobs up to the first boss in Doma Castle, and spamming floors 50-59 over and over. Still think that latter one might be the case. Havent checked in a while. People are very quick to rationalize best bang for their buck timewise, even if it is excruciating. If spamming 5-10 quests nonstop was horribly boring to do, players would do it if it was the most efficient method.

That's just a matter of tuning then. So the exp rewards offered from NG+ quests would have to be just a little bit worse than the same amount of time spent in group content. But then you just do math and figure out where that reward level is. PotD didn't cause everyone to abandon the duty finder even though it was numerically superior to doing dungeons. I'd prefer not to assume the sky is going to fall down if something like this is done.

Problem is this is way easier said then done. We quite literally have 300+ quests in MSQ. Youre essentially saying "Go back and rebalance MSQ rewards so its just a little bit worse than everything else offered, but not so bad that you cant use it to level". As you point out yourself though, people will math things out and find efficiency. If you recieve 10% less exp to do a quest chain in MSQ, but you can complete that guaranteed in the same time a dungeon would take (if not slightly faster) people will do MSQ. Hell, MSQ provides a unique problem with that scenario too. It would not be to hard to set up a bot to do the same quest chain over and over. So you wouldnt have to do anything. Set your bot on at night to do an MSQ where its just run around and talk to NPCs. Whos gonna report you? MSQ is a personal thing, and unlike other bot activities which are more noticeable, this probably will be a lot harder to deal with.

As for PotD, no people still ran in duty finder, but then that was a choice between running a 4 man dungeon in DF and running a 4 man in PotD. Both had the same risk when dealing with other players. Now itd be comparing running a 4 man in a dungeon vs just doing things yourself.

Btw, even if MSQ gave reduced exp, this doesnt solve the initial complaint. Instead of "Why no exp" the argument just shifts to "Why isnt it as good as a dungeon" or "As much exp as MSQ normally?" Considering how vocal certain complaints have been, I am personally skeptical that people wouldnt complain just as hard if the exp values werent comparable to duty finder content. After all, the complaint isnt that NG+ exists, its more about having another avenue to level with. Pretty sure with reduced exp rates, people will consider it a non-optimal method of leveling and deem it a half assed job the devs did and say that this is a worthless feature.

[Callinon]

You really underestimate the player base at times. In previous patches the fastest leveling methods were Pulling all mobs up to the first boss in Doma Castle, and spamming floors 50-59 over and over. Still think that latter one might be the case. Havent checked in a while. People are very quick to rationalize best bang for their buck timewise, even if it is excruciating. If spamming 5-10 quests nonstop was horribly boring to do, players would do it if it was the most efficient method.

I didn't say no one would do it, I believe I said there would definitely be some that did. What I said was that it wouldn't be enough to cause problematic congestion, which was the issue I was addressing.

Problem is this is way easier said then done. We quite literally have 300+ quests in MSQ. Youre essentially saying "Go back and rebalance MSQ rewards so its just a little bit worse than everything else offered, but not so bad that you cant use it to level". As you point out yourself though, people will math things out and find efficiency. If you recieve 10% less exp to do a quest chain in MSQ, but you can complete that guaranteed in the same time a dungeon would take (if not slightly faster) people will do MSQ. Hell, MSQ provides a unique problem with that scenario too. It would not be to hard to set up a bot to do the same quest chain over and over. So you wouldnt have to do anything. Set your bot on at night to do an MSQ where its just run around and talk to NPCs. Whos gonna report you? MSQ is a personal thing, and unlike other bot activities which are more noticeable, this probably will be a lot harder to deal with.

The existence of bots that level really fast is .. very clearly .. not something SE is concerned about.

As for PotD, no people still ran in duty finder, but then that was a choice between running a 4 man dungeon in DF and running a 4 man in PotD. Both had the same risk when dealing with other players. Now itd be comparing running a 4 man in a dungeon vs just doing things yourself.

But again, what do you think the negative is here? Fewer people in DF that couldn't give less of a shit about what they're doing? I can live with that.

Btw, even if MSQ gave reduced exp, this doesnt solve the initial complaint. Instead of "Why no exp" the argument just shifts to "Why isnt it as good as a dungeon" or "As much exp as MSQ normally?" Considering how vocal certain complaints have been, I am personally skeptical that people wouldnt complain just as hard if the exp values werent comparable to duty finder content. After all, the complaint isnt that NG+ exists, its more about having another avenue to level with. Pretty sure with reduced exp rates, people will consider it a non-optimal method of leveling and deem it a half assed job the devs did and say that this is a worthless feature.

People will complain about literally anything. You're never (ever) going to please 100% of a large group of people. It can't be done. The existence of complaints is also not a reason to not do it.

Giving people an alternative leveling path, even if it's numerically inferior to dungeon grinding, is a good thing for the game. I'd have to go back and look but I don't remember deep dungeons getting this kind of backlash when they were talked about as a leveling path. Nor trusts. Why is this one special? Why would giving exp for NG+ be so horrible whereas those things weren't? Again I remind you that the sky is not falling.

[Adeacia]

Giving people an alternative leveling path, even if it's numerically inferior to dungeon grinding, is a good thing for the game. I'd have to go back and look but I don't remember deep dungeons getting this kind of backlash when they were talked about as a leveling path. Nor trusts. Why is this one special? Why would giving exp for NG+ be so horrible whereas those things weren't? Again I remind you that the sky is not falling.

The other things you mentioned are group content. MSQ is not. That is your answer.

[Callinon]

The other things you mentioned are group content. MSQ is not. That is your answer.

That's why I included trusts. Trusts are solo content.

[Niwashi]

That's just a matter of tuning then. So the exp rewards offered from NG+ quests would have to be just a little bit worse than the same amount of time spent in group content. But then you just do math and figure out where that reward level is.

The problem lies in how the time is determined, and in the wide difference between how long it takes to fully do a quest versus how long it takes to click past it.

In order to avoid all the efficiency maxers spamming this, you have to look at how fast it can be spammed while skipping all cutscenes and clicking as fast as you can past dialog. That's the speed, clicking through quests in seconds, that you have to make sure is still only mediocre XP/minute.

But if XP rewards are that low, then the people wanting to do the quests for real while leveling another job in the process aren't going to be getting enough XP to be useful to them. Those people aren't going to want to spam the quests a few dozen times over before they see any meaningful leveling progress.

XP isn't going to be enough to be useful unless it's way way above the threshold that would be widely exploited. Keeping it below that threshold leaves little point in going through all the effort of tuning XP rewards that aren't going to be useful anyway.

[Driven]

Sorry this may have been asked earlier in this thread, but will this also bring up more 4man trials in the dungeon roulette? Per people going through the missions again?
I might be weird but I like the idea of doing those more often.