Glamour and why it's poorly designed

[DPZ2]

Remember, FFXIV used to be worse than WoW during the 1.0 era, and WoW kinda rested on its laurels and now FFXIV is better than WoW lol. (that, and corporate greed by Blizz/Activision hurt it a lot too)

I don't view either as 'better' or 'worse' than the other. They serve different communities. Some players from WoW have migrated to FFXIV, most have not. Some players of FFXIV have migrated to WoW, most have not.

WoW has been resting on its laurels since Cataclysm. It was still pretty nice to play through the first year of BFA. It doesn't help that a number of developers are apparently jumping ship to work for the next Mike Morhaime company.

I think that after 7 years of FFXIV 2+, SE has more-or-less proved that it can make money with the current design. I can, after all, still play the jobs I started playing back in 2014 with no sense of "what the heck did the company do to my job?", unlike WoW.

[For reference: 11 years of WoW, starting in BC; 6 years of FFXIV, starting in 2.3.]

[Nixxe]

WoW has been resting on its laurels since Cataclysm.

There are a lot of criticisms I would level at WoW and Blizzard, but that's not really one of them. If anything, they go too far in the opposite direction where they often want to act like they can develop their way to total market capture or something. While Cataclysm was very much a copy and paste of Wrath in many respects, both MoP and Legion showed a ton of innovation on Blizzard's part. What did them in was more losing touch with the playerbase and choosing a business model that attempts to capitalize on the fear of missing out, rather than just developing a really good game people don't want to put down.

FFXIV's releases are far more formulaic, which is where I think the concerns about resting on their laurels come into play. Part of this is that SE is a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard and that SE is a normal game company on top of that, whereas Blizzard likes to be weird and focus intensely on like 5 IPs represented by a single persistent flagship title each, but part of it is definitely just on the developers for this game and the choices they make and don't make.

[Maeka]

There are a lot of criticisms I would level at WoW and Blizzard, but that's not really one of them. If anything, they go too far in the opposite direction where they often want to act like they can develop their way to total market capture or something. While Cataclysm was very much a copy and paste of Wrath in many respects, both MoP and Legion showed a ton of innovation on Blizzard's part. What did them in was more losing touch with the playerbase and choosing a business model that attempts to capitalize on the fear of missing out, rather than just developing a really good game people don't want to put down.

FFXIV's releases are far more formulaic, which is where I think the concerns about resting on their laurels come into play. Part of this is that SE is a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard and that SE is a normal game company on top of that, whereas Blizzard likes to be weird and focus intensely on like 5 IPs represented by a single persistent flagship title each, but part of it is definitely just on the developers for this game and the choices they make and don't make.

^^
This, mostly.

Cataclysm suffered from the immense time it took to redo all of the 1-60 content, but that was something that *really* needed done, as that old content was showing its age. I gave Cataclysm a free pass because of how much work they had to dump into redoing the old world. But even then, it was better than WoD.

MoP was awesome. Just a few little flaws they could have fixed, but otherwise it was awesome. They had Badges of Valor, they had upgradeable equipment that wasn't RNG, they had clear goals you could work towards, and Timeless Isle was something I very much enjoyed doing with a family member. There were dailies to do, there was Timeless Isle, the farm was interesting, the locale was cool.

WoD is where you could just tell that huge changes were being made in the company. WoD threw out a ton of hype. Hype, Hype, Hype, promises for this, promises for that, they wanted to add all of this awesome stuff, OH WHOOPS WE CAN'T ACTUALLY GET THAT DONE IN TIME, SORRY! They forgot to add any sort of fun activity that could be done daily that wasn't in an instanced dungeon or raid, there was 1 daily that was boring-as-balls and they thought all the hype would carry everything over.... but it didn't; it fell flat on its face.

It really seemed to me like the team that did WoD was some inexperienced group of interns who were over-confident that they could deliver on this huge list of promises that they got to work on a tech demo and then when it came down to actually code something ready for the public, they realize that they were talking out of their behind about it the whole time and had to cut massive amounts of content.

[Kesey]

To bring this back to main topic at hand:


I like the ideas being posted in this thread, but honestly, they feel moot until you can have glamour plates apply out in the world.

My hope is their silence on glamour dressers means they are working to implement this change for 6.0. Or at least I can dream.

[StairFacts]

I hate to have to bring this thread back 2 years later, but man I wish this kind of WoW-like Glamour system would get implemented. It would take a fairly large-scale effort on the development side of things, and would probably be relegated to being implemented inside of a new expansion, but I think it would go a long way towards future-proofing the state of Glamour and reducing the load Glamour Dressers and Glamour Plates have on the servers. I, among many others, find it extremely tiresome to have to comb through the Glamour Dresser to replace gear and swap it out for new glamour pieces due to limited space.

I understand how dyes would be a problem if they implemented that system, but then again, I think it would also reduce any hassle if the player was allowed to use a dye item and permanently have access to that color. If having dyes still be tied to a resource was needed, maybe you could just have a generic all-encompassing dye item that gets consumed upon dyeing gear, similar to how you just use a Glamour Prism upon placing gear in your dresser.

Glamour's one of the most beloved features of this game and it's strange to me that despite this, certain aspects of this feature are still cumbersome in many regards, and I hope they can be made more user-friendly and less heavy on micromanaging inventory space and retainers to keep gear for glamouring. I want to be able to use my inventory space for more useful things like materia, food, and crafting materials, rather than dungeon gear that I don't have room for in my dresser.