Allagan Tomestone of Astronomy should have a seasonal cap, not a weekly cap

[Tlamila]

I would totally support it. I've never been a fan of daily/weekly stuff, because it makes it so that you can't allocate your game time however you want. On busy weeks you'll be behind, on free weeks you won't be able to use that time to catch up.
But truth is, they don't really want people to not play every day and week, unlike what they say.

Keeps people subbed and having to login do content versus taking a break months later and expecting gear to be spoon fed..

well actually, months later you will be spoonfed, since that gear will be no longer relevant and there will be new one, and the old one will be dirty cheap. Problem is only if you take a few weeks break, instead of dropping the sub.
I actually have a few weeks vacation planned in Februaru and I'm here worrying about the missed tomes, which is very dumb.

[Sylve]

I don't really understand the point of the cap. Why is it so important to keep people away from gear that they clearly need?

Because without the limitation, people burn themselves out to get everything in a single day.

But mostly it's to pace out upgrades to match the weekly lockout on Savage and Normal Raids.

The world first raiders will use crafted gear, overmelds and off the wall strats to achieve a week 1 clear.
For the masses, the weekly upgrade of item level means each week they get closer to pushing through that same content by overgearing it.

It's nothing to do with padding out content. It's just upgrade pacing.
You technically do not need any of the weekly gear to clear the hardest content currently in the game.

[Shurrikhan]

450/weekly during most of expansion has been the normal course of action since 2013, not going to change. Keeps people subbed and having to login do content versus taking a break months later and expecting gear to be spoon fed.

Savage raiders need to cap every week to make use of i600 tome upgrades that drop from the floors, the majority do.

Tbf, it used to be 300/week. The 2000 caps, likewise, used to be far less. So, numbers can change. They already have, after all.

It's only FOMO if people are afraid of falling behind those that can keep up with the weekly cap.

It's FOMO so long as people believe they will have less content available to them as a result of getting the rewards of the weekly cap later than others, such as by being locked out of parties in Week 2/3, when they have next have time to really play, because those parties are now asking for over i580. We see this most tiers, so that fear isn't unjustified.

I'd argue that we should definitely still have caps, but I see nothing wrong with having seasonal caps instead of punishing players for having to take a week off from hitting their 5+ Expert Roulettes quota.

[Larirawiel]

I wouldn't call the cap a FOMO mechanic that doesn't really make sense cause all the content and stone gear is always available.

It is a FOMO mechanic because if you miss the weekly cap once then you have never the chance to catch up the missing tomestones in the future again. It is mathematically impossible to get the missing tomestones because the next cap will stop you. And that is the reason why i strongly dislike those artifical caps. They do add nothing positive to the game.

Cheers

[Michieltjuhh]

FF14: "We respect the player's time"

Also FF14: "Better do this irrelevant trash 0 challenge content that you have no use for every day so you can get these weekly tomestones for BiS gear!"

Personally I don't mind, but I'm just amused people buy into this motto so much when it's such a blatant lie.

[Escalon]

FF14: "We respect the player's time"

Also FF14: "Better do this irrelevant trash 0 challenge content that you have no use for every day so you can get these weekly tomestones for BiS gear!"

Personally I don't mind, but I'm just amused people buy into this motto so much when it's such a blatant lie.

This, since SE cannot come out with a decent long term goal, they just make you run the same dungeons over and over.

[UkcsAlias]

It is a FOMO mechanic because if you miss the weekly cap once then you have never the chance to catch up the missing tomstones in the future again.

As long as you can obtain more tomestones than what is required to get everything, there is no real issue though. It just puts you 1 week behind until you got a full set of gear. And the rest of the time you can still collect everything.

But i think a buffer system would be better. So instead of just 1 week, it buffers 3 weeks. Giving a casual player more time to get the tomestones.

Artificial caps are however needed! Without caps some players will rush and have everything far earlier than everyone else. And this will cause a major gap in gear between players. That is a problem as it can cause players to reject other players because they dont have the gear yet. Restricting the content keeps those players together and a missing piece of gear is not going to matter as much as a full set. Toxic players will still make an issue out of this, but most realy wont care at that point.

FOMO is only a problem if you cant reach the weekly limit, and this purely depends on how long it takes to reach the limit (this is usualy where the true issue lies, and not FOMO itself). If it only takes 1h a week, then sure, it still forces you to play. But at that point... you are paying to play the game anyway. As soon as a system forces players to login daily, or spend a lot of time to complete a task, then it starts to feel like a grind, rather than just a balancing mechanic.

FOMO is however always personal per player. And if you want to go extreme, i could complain that i cant get any of those tomes in the first place (dont have EW). But i already know that later on catching up becomes easy. The only real thing im missing out is the phase in which players are trying to find out the new mechanics of bosses. And i dont even complain about that.

[Shurrikhan]

FF14: "We respect the player's time"

Also FF14: "Better do this irrelevant trash 0 challenge content that you have no use for every day so you can get these weekly tomestones for BiS gear!"

Personally I don't mind, but I'm just amused people buy into this motto so much when it's such a blatant lie.

Additionally: All jobs on one character! (But not if you actually want to gear them simultaneously since Savage lockouts and weekly currency caps are character-based, not job-based, forcing you to have a character per armor class and do n times the grind if you wanted to progress on each at the same time.)

This, since SE cannot come out with a decent long term goal, they just make you run the same dungeons over and over.

The sad thing is even just offering upscaled old content for variety's sake would make hours-played systems like tomestones far more bearable. Yet 3 expansions' worth of requests to have more than just 2-3 dungeons available for said grind have gone ignored in entirety.

[Conundrum]

It's called Content Padding, and it's important when you don't develop enough content to prevent your playerbase from unsubscribing

I hate the cap, but it's quite literally impossible to create content faster than players can consume it.

[Kyuuen]

FF14: "We respect the player's time"

Also FF14: "Better do this irrelevant trash 0 challenge content that you have no use for every day so you can get these weekly tomestones for BiS gear!"

Personally I don't mind, but I'm just amused people buy into this motto so much when it's such a blatant lie.

This is such a laughably bad take.

If you don't like the content, then you don't like the content. Do you and by all means have an opinion, but to suggest that running expert 5 times a week to the accumulation of at most 2 maybe 2 and half hours of dungeon content a week is some how disrespectful to a players time, falls a little short of it being a joke.

Try playing WoW in it's era of Warforging and Titanforging; basically a High Quality drop and Higher Quality drop that exists for ALL gear including highest end raid gear that have nightmarishly low drop rates. Two hours a week is nothing in comparison to that type of torture.

To the topic at hand...

The cap is fine as is imo. It exists to both slow players burn through content and also allow those with the skills to clear the tier some glory, while those without as much get caught up with weekly nerfs in the form of further access to higher ilvl gear to help boost them through said tier.