Golden Corral buffet or high quality dining...Which do you prefer?

[Shyd]

yo, i saw that fountain on the commercial, how much foreign matter do you think is in that thing

no idea, but im not touching it. i want my damn carrot cake.

[syntaxlies]

no idea, but im not touching it. i want my damn carrot cake.

you should dip a carrot cake in it

[tachi]

Hate to break the news but the battle system we have now is what we are going to have for 2.0 nothing major is going to change. We are going to get group skillchains built on combo's to improve the cohesiveness of a group but that's about it. The speed of actions and server response will most likely improve slightly as the server structure improves. We will see little UI improvements such as activating the skills that are triggered from things like "blocks's" "evades" "parry's" etc but not much will change.

If you have a fundamental issue with this now I would take your losses and pack up shop.

Personally I really am starting to enjoy combat. The new skills are interesting and each skill feels like they have some real "weight" to them. Things like collusion and convert can change the course of a battle in an instant. Each job has a real purpose in battle, and the new dungeons let each job shine at different places and fights. The battles within AV and CC all have interesting dynamics I would say the dance in FFXI was very static in nature and a fight like we get with Marbol in AV is anything but static. It may not be the most difficult but it certainly pushes you. Honestly I can't wait to see what they have in store for the future.

[Zahak]

I too wish that exp parties were slower, there's really no reason to use enfeeble effects

[syntaxlies]

Hate to break the news but the battle system we have now is what we are going to have for 2.0 nothing major is going to change. We are going to get group skillchains built on combo's to improve the cohesiveness of a group but that's about it. The speed of actions and server response will most likely improve slightly as the server structure improves. We will see little UI improvements such as activating the skills that are triggered from things like "blocks's" "evades" "parry's" etc but not much will change.

If you have a fundamental issue with this now I would take your losses and pack up shop.

Personally I really am starting to enjoy combat. The new skills are interesting and each skill feels like they have some real "weight" to them. Things like collusion and convert can change the course of a battle in an instant. Each job has a real purpose in battle, and the new dungeons let each job shine at different places and fights. The battles within AV and CC all have interesting dynamics I would say the dance in FFXI was very static in nature and a fight like we get with Marbol in AV is anything but static. It may not be the most difficult but it certainly pushes you. Honestly I can't wait to see what they have in store for the future.

you missed the point. He just wants longer fights in xp'ing with a sense of danger. Something that could easily be employed with bigger xp gains on certain mobs.

I mentioned before when we used to kill efts and they took like a minute to kill each and the lightning could easily kill you so they had to be tanked.

[Rau]

Because of my ethnicity I don't really ever get to eat "American" cuisine, so going to Golden Corral is a big deal because it's like HOLY SH*T MASHED POTATOES AND MEAT WHAT IS THIS WIZARDRY

GPOY

/10cha

[Efrye]

Most other fights, such as grinding off mobs in Natalan for EXP should NOT be as time consuming. [...] I see no point in making all the fights in this game into tedious chores.

Huh? Brainlessly spamming random skills against hordes of monsters that die within seconds is not a tedious chore to you?

I think it would be great to have something like boss fights for EXP. Or maybe advanced guildleves* that require a well-rounded party setup to complete. Whatever they do, I'd like to see longer, more engaging fights while leveling up. And of course a befitting EXP reward to compensate for the increased duration and higher risk of failure.

You can still keep the trash mobs in the game - I don't think anyone here is asking for them to be removed. But there should be other options that actually require a bit of skill and coordination, and these options should yield more EXP or other rewards.

* Yes, I know, I could just increase the difficulty of the leves. But usually that just ends up with people getting one-shot, and the EXP still don't match up to chain parties by far.

[KiriA500]

Huh? Brainlessly spamming random skills against hordes of monsters that die within seconds is not a tedious chore to you?

I think it would be great to have something like boss fights for EXP. Or maybe advanced guildleves* that require a well-rounded party setup to complete. Whatever they do, I'd like to see longer, more engaging fights while leveling up. And of course a befitting EXP reward to compensate for the increased duration and higher risk of failure.

You can still keep the trash mobs in the game - I don't think anyone here is asking for them to be removed. But there should be other options that actually require a bit of skill and coordination, and these options should yield more EXP or other rewards.

* Yes, I know, I could just increase the difficulty of the leves. But usually that just ends up with people getting one-shot, and the EXP still don't match up to chain parties by far.

Yeah, leveling isn't super fun, which is why I want it out of the way. Grinding levels isn't MMO content to me, it's what I do with the class/job I've leveled that I care about. If you want to make the journey to get there longer than it needs to be, by all means, go for it.

[Efrye]

If you want to make the journey to get there longer than it needs to be, by all means, go for it.

Who's saying anything about taking longer to get to 50?

What I'm talking about are fights that last longer and give more EXP/hour. It will/should be more fun than what we have now, and it will/should be better EXP than what we have now. Win-win?

The length of the journey is a completely different matter. (It's still nonsense to say that if someone wants a longer journey, s/he can just go slower. A few rare exceptions aside, there's no value or sense of achievement in taking longer than everyone else.)

[Darshu]

The problem is, most players like KiriA actually do not enjoy the game, and most people do not realize the game is not the end of it, it's not supposed to be showing off your character in town or whatever else kids do, you're supposed to play it through and enjoy the journey.

I really don't understand what goes on inside one's mind when they completely ignore the journey for some benefit in the end. The journey is dynamic, it changes, it tells a story. The end is static, repetitive. If you switch those two up, it happens precisely what this post complains about. People do not care about enjoying a good meal everyday, because they want to live the end of their lives now, and the faster way to do it is not spending any more than 5 minutes eating their food. Fuck it if it's not healthy or enjoyable, I don't give a shit about food being enjoyable, they will say.

This affects modern society as a whole and it could not be different when that same society plays games. People are just anxious for something in the end, so anxious in fact that they do not realize how enjoyable getting there can be. The biological pace personal to each individual might affect it but I believe that it is also mostly some result of education, culture and life experiences. Society changed as a whole to this new style of "get there as fast as possible" and we can still see the disparity between city folk and country folk in that regard.

So as long as we continue to live like this, consuming frenetically, it's very unlikely that gamer's minds will change and prefer to consume little for higher gain instead of a billion mobs per second.

I personally enjoyed FFXI battles way more than any other MMO I've played, and only there could you clearly see when a party was doing it's job right and when it wasn't. Not only things could go completely wrong when someone did not know their job right, but even a party that survived could earn exp incredibly slower than an excellent party. And it never stopped the game from having even stronger boss creatures that required an even greater amount of people, and even greater skill. That's what I miss in this game, where every little thing you can do affects the game ever so slightly, but in doing it right and using all you got, in the end the difference becomes enormous.

Fighting multiple enemies is something I've always wanted after I played XI, because every other FF did that, and I thought it would be a great idea. But it doesn't seem to work on a MMO style of gameplay.

Far from wanting the game to be a hassle, I want it to be enjoyable all the way through, and not just at the end. Fighting is a big part of any Final Fantasy game, and it should be as enjoyable as it possibly can. The way it is now is not, by any standard, enjoyable. Even those who prefer it like it is do so because it gets them to what they perceive as "enjoyable" much faster. And it's even crazier when the end game right now is so limited you can be doing nothing new in a month, so why the hell rush it?

I think the analogy fast food vs high cuisine is good, but not quite perfect. It would be more like fast food vs what the Brazilian said, a decent balanced home cooked meal, that takes you time to do it, but it's way more beneficial and rewarding. It can't just reward your tastes, it needs to get you through the day, too :P And neither junk food nor 20g of rare expensive mushrooms can do that.

Square needs to show gamers it can actually be fun to level up and play, because as it is now, it will be hard to convince any one to slow down and enjoy.