Weekly Gear Lockouts Kill Gameplay

[Colt47]

Thats why its called END GAME RAIDING not Casual Game Raiding

After doing FFXIV end game all the way through savage for an entire expansion, the game has a lot of problems it needs to get addressed with it and a lot of them are from how they have basically engineered everything to work. Unfortunately, I doubt they are going to change it.

1. Every major patch the gear level is raised / reset.
2. Optimal stats are only available from savage loot and as people have pointed out, there is no point to having optimal stats unless someone is doing end game content.
3. The lockout is personal for normal raids, but group based for savage. (And the main reason they made the lockout for savage group based to begin with was because of people selling runs of the hard content back during ARR days... GL selling runs with how fights are designed now)
4. Tomestone cap is insanely low except on the final patch of the expansion and the launch of the new expansion.

What happened in FFXIV is what happens when you got a person copying someone elses homework and not understanding why they did things the way they did them to begin with. I mean, actually doing savage for three tiers plus doing all the extreme mount farms kind of made me question the entire thing after looking at how much time was needed, the social problems someone has to deal with because of the lockout system, and the opposing goals that different people have for doing the content.

Person A does X content because they want to clear it and have proof they cleared it.

Person B does X content because he wants to gear his jobs faster.

Person C does X content because he wants to be able to dye the gear from it.

Person A and person B are going to get into arguments later on skipping fights because person A only wants to gear their main job for the sake of that goal. Person B doesn't care and just wants a faster gearing route. Person C isn't going to want to stop running the content until he at least has a full set of dyable gear, even if the tomestone gear is superior for some slots.

Meanwhile, in normal mode content people hop in on tuesday, clear everything, and then have to wait until next week to do anything. They might do a few runs to cap tomestones but that is it.

So we have this MMO where the culture paradoxically goes between everyone just zoning out, vs everyone trying to do the harder content and getting into fire fights with one another in statics or going the no-life PF route of grinding like it's their overtime job and praying they don't burn out before the end.

[Granyala]

3. The lockout is personal for normal raids, but group based for savage. (And the main reason they made the lockout for savage group based to begin with was because of people selling runs of the hard content back during ARR days...

The reason was less people "selling" runs. People can and do that now: see mount selling runs.

The main reason was that raid groups did "split runs" and funneled all the gear to one character, then reran the raid again for the next etc, etc, greatly increasing the item level progression speed at the cost of real life play time. With items being in neutral coffers nowadays, that would be a huge problem. IIRC, back then items still dropped directly and were job specific.

This behavior promoted burn out and gave groups willing to do it an unfair advantage, especially during early progression.

With the current system, you'd need multiple alt characters to do this (I am sure there are super tryhards insane enough to do that but the number is infinitely smaller).

[Colt47]

The reason was less people "selling" runs. People can and do that now: see mount selling runs.

The main reason was that raid groups did "split runs" and funneled all the gear to one character, then reran the raid again for the next etc, etc, greatly increasing the item level progression speed at the cost of real life play time. With items being in neutral coffers nowadays, that would be a huge problem. IIRC, back then items still dropped directly and were job specific.

This behavior promoted burn out and gave groups willing to do it an unfair advantage, especially during early progression.

With the current system, you'd need multiple alt characters to do this (I am sure there are super tryhards insane enough to do that but the number is infinitely smaller).

Ah right, they had that going on as well back then. Either way they should revert the lockout to personal loot but they wont because no one in JP is complaining. That and unfortunately, those who do try out savage are the minority in this game.