What's the point of ranks?

[Radaghast]

they said that the bugs were too much to handle at the time and couldn't do the changes which was asked. Do look that stuff up before posting.

Also if you seen the "to do" list you will se alot of changes to the game are being done fir the UI, such as a battle changes that will take 2 mnths. (as in each mnth they will have changes to the battles) They also have been changing the UI slowly. For a good amount of stuff Like getting levequests with in certain ranks, and adding and improving the market ward search function. All of which are UI changes.

They had plenty of fair warning in numerous beta phases about player complaints, bugs not withstanding. The UI thread was only an example. There were just as large threads on battle mechanics, lack of content, and the leveling system. If they follow the same path of ignoring us on these forums, of which I now have some hope they won't be because of the abysmal release, the same exact thing is going to happen.

I still have hope for this game because as you said they do seem to be listening now with proposed changes.

[TheVedis]

Well it all just achieves the same thing. The developers can give you "something to do" regardless of which option they take.

• if there were no ranks, they would give you meaningful battles, quests, objectives, and a wealth of content to digest.
• if there were ranks, then they would give you meaningless battles just to fill out your SP bar (think grinding), and less content to digest.

Anyway if endgame starts at day one, then you aren't "Racing to endgame". To the contrary, you have all the time in the world to digest the content the developers put into the game, and you wouldn't be beleagured by the constant nagging voice telling you to "level, level, level" before you could actually have fun. You could take it slow and just see all there is to see in the world and do all there is to do.

But, really, think about it. If the game is so devoid of actual things to do that it has to resort to forcing you to rank up for no other reason than to waste your time, then that's just poor development.

Theoretically speaking, there are many forms of progression. Making you grind out ranks to give the sense of progression is simply the most obvious one, and the cheapest.

wanna no what a MMO with no ranks/levels gives you?

Go play lego universe...im not kidding
all the content in the world dont matter when you can bulldoze it all when there is no way to advance to get to it and build yourself.

you need those levels to fill you in before you get there or there just isnt a game. unless you dumb it down like LU did

[Kilta_Firelotus]

Well gift. Not everyone enjoys end game. I hated it. The reason I did was how serious ppl took it. Like having a work sced to play a game. All for the possiblity of a reward.

I like leveling and exploring. Which is why I like ffxi as it took time to do that. Only time I ever wanted to speed level, is to progress the story(s). Not really to do endgame. Endgame should be an option to do, not the ONLY thing to do. And ffxi was great about that there was so much you can do that wasn't "end game".

[Kilta_Firelotus]

They had plenty of fair warning in numerous beta phases about player complaints, bugs not withstanding. The UI thread was only an example. There were just as large threads on battle mechanics, lack of content, and the leveling system. If they follow the same path of ignoring us on these forums, of which I now have some hope they won't be because of the abysmal release, the same exact thing is going to happen.

I still have hope for this game because as you said they do seem to be listening now with proposed changes.

they
did
NOT
ignore
you.

I hope that is readable. They did a large appology letter stating they did want to fix what the players issues were, but the server stability issues prevented that. They barely kept beta active and canceled alot of beta time.

Or is that missing from your memory?

[Radaghast]

they
did
NOT
ignore
you.

I hope that is readable. They did a large appology letter stating they did want to fix what the players issues were, but the server stability issues prevented that. They barely kept beta active and canceled alot of beta time.

Or is that missing from your memory?

Well gee, if I knew all they had to do was shove things under the table, write an apology letter, and push the game out the door anyway to make things alright, I wouldn't have mentioned it!

Call me crazy but I'd consider that being ignored.

[gifthorse]

Well gift. Not everyone enjoys end game. I hated it. The reason I did was how serious ppl took it. Like having a work sced to play a game. All for the possiblity of a reward.

I like leveling and exploring. Which is why I like ffxi as it took time to do that. Only time I ever wanted to speed level, is to progress the story(s). Not really to do endgame. Endgame should be an option to do, not the ONLY thing to do. And ffxi was great about that there was so much you can do that wasn't "end game".

But there are other ways to 'level' than just grinding on monsters 18397219341 times. Your definition of endgame obviously differs to mine because I never played WoW so I don't think of raid bosses when I think endgame.

You say you liked to participate in the story. Well what if instead of 300 hours of killing moles, sheep, and coblyns to do that, you just had 300 hours of engrossing quests and stories, which incidentally involved some killing, some exploration, etc?

What I mean is, there could still be storylines, there could still be exploratory quests, there could still be bosses and such, there could still be everything, but it would all be horizontal. It wouldn't be spread out vertically. It wouldnt make you jump through the needless hoops of grinding before you could do it. The only thing preventing you from completing quests would be your skill.

Anyway, there is always going to be grinding of mobs because you will always need to farm materials.

I acknowledge that a game with such huge amounts of content would be infeasible, or if it was feasible then it would imply that the content would be really crappy. Quality and quantity have to be balanced, after all. Developers dont have time to make infinite amounts of content. But that should be the only limiting factor. The fact that you can defend developers taking such massive shortcuts it pretty amazing to me.

I hope you know it takes like a week of grinding to go from the R42 quest to the R46. A week between quests... that's insane! The whole game should be a quest of sorts, not several quests separated by weeks of staring at the same mobs.

Meh, in my mind, the whole MMO genre has gone to hell ever since everquest came along.

[TheVedis]

You say you liked to participate in the story. Well what if instead of 300 hours of killing moles, sheep, and coblyns to do that, you just had 300 hours of engrossing quests and stories, which incidentally involved some killing, some exploration, etc?

You do realize all these games with "engrossing quests" still make you do nothing but kill X mobs, gather X items, go to X location and wiggle your toes....
they arent any different at all and people need to realize that


so instead of 200 hours of killing mobs, you are doing 200 hours of someone telling you to go kill those mobs

[gifthorse]

You do realize all these games with "engrossing quests" still make you do nothing but kill X mobs, gather X items, go to X location and wiggle your toes....
they arent any different at all and people need to realize that

so instead of 200 hours of killing mobs, you are doing 200 hours of someone telling you to go kill those mobs

I know other MMOs are like that. I'm talking about the 'ideal'. Im not talking about what crap other games have done.

[TheVedis]

I know other MMOs are like that. I'm talking about the 'ideal'. Im not talking about what crap other games have done.

the ideal which no game holds basicaly, yeah, got ya

people keep talking about this ideal like it exists, yet it always comes back to the same fact

the ideal doesnt exist cuz there are only so many things you can do in a game, we want it to be more, but the fact is it cant be that way.

some of the older MMOs were different, back when the quest wasnt about the reward but about the story as a whole, and as much as players demand it, they will be pissed off if it ever goes back to it, because at the same time, its not what they want

[Radaghast]

The trick is to veil the grind in a way that's enjoyable. I think we can all agree here that soloing doblyns in an endless loop pre-nerf wasn't exactly fun (unless you played archer!). I actually enjoy guild leve's right now since with the right setup you can get alot of sp, but it's really not the optimal way since you don't actually get the rewards from it.

What this game lacks is just basic content. There are no dungeons, no real quests. I don't count these new quests as anything but filler newbie content. No unique rewards that can't be found for cheap in the wards and no experience for completing them. There are dungeon like areas, but without points of interest or unique mobs, they're no different than any other area. The main storyline is so simplistic you might as well just play the cutscenes rather than have us actually do anything. What happened to the progression storylines that required teamwork and specialized setups to complete like in FFXI? Until stuff like this is in place this game will just be a massive grind fest.