Weekly Gear Lockouts Kill Gameplay

[Ayan_Calvesse]

Simple solution - link your lockouts to the job you do it on.

[jimmybe29]

Gear lockouts and tomestone caps exist because otherwise people would run dozens of raids and hundred dungeons in the first week, and then spend the next 6 months complaining about how there's nothing to do.

The only reason is sub money, not being scared of people complaining about having nothing to do. That's why they'll never raise tome caps, or change the gearing system.
You already reclear every week then spend the rest of the week doing nothing which is, in my opinion even worse of an experience.
Same goes for ultimate weekly lockout with totems btw, makes 0 sense

Just let me farm so I can gear my other jobs and have more fun playing them

[NekoNova]

SE shouldn't give the option then.

You can take all courses at the University, did you?

[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.

[Colt47]

The only reason is sub money, not being scared of people complaining about having nothing to do. That's why they'll never raise tome caps, or change the gearing system.
You already reclear every week then spend the rest of the week doing nothing which is, in my opinion even worse of an experience.
Same goes for ultimate weekly lockout with totems btw, makes 0 sense

Just let me farm so I can gear my other jobs and have more fun playing them

And the really dumb reason why they have this cap is that supposedly, drip feeding and putting barriers in that feel artificial in nature are supposed to increase the amount of time people are subbed to the game. Its not done for convenience or to make the game feel harder, it is a component of the "Games as a Service" model. If it wouldn't cause a giant uproar they could probably sell items that lift the cap up to 900 per week temporarily via the online store much like how they sell the retainer books and level jump options. But they want to avoid anything that looks like buying power due to the politics of it.

[Brightamethyst]

The only reason is sub money, not being scared of people complaining about having nothing to do.

Of course it's about sub money. This is a paid sub MMO. Ultimately, everything is about sub money. That doesn't make all time gating "wrong", though.

Fact is, players can and will consume contently exponentially faster than the devs can create it, and the devs been a way to balance that out. Without gear lockouts the serious raiders would go in over and over, get BiS in the first week, and stop playing, making raiding "dead content."

[Colt47]

Of course it's about sub money. This is a paid sub MMO. Ultimately, everything is about sub money. That doesn't make all time gating "wrong", though.

Fact is, players can and will consume contently exponentially faster than the devs can create it, and the devs been a way to balance that out. Without gear lockouts the serious raiders would go in over and over, get BiS in the first week, and stop playing, making raiding "dead content."

They gate the savage raid mostly for the 2nd hidden boss fight at the fourth tier. If it were just a gear grind people would drop doing it entirely because the only benefit is getting the dyable slots on raid gear and higher damage numbers, which are rendered completely moot by the next big content patch. But the fact it takes a specific group of people putting in over a hundred hours just to get the clear done optimally makes the content unaccessible to most people.

Also, some numbers so people get an idea of how insane savage really is (because our blessed content creators tend to have a bit of bias in the whole thing and don't seem to want to show people the ugly parts like arguing with your team mates and the time commitments)

A week 1 clear party generally puts in 12 hours a day with some minor breaks, and generally the later tiers require more than one week to clear for these groups. So a top tier raiding group can potentially race and clear in around 84 - 144 hours. FYI, most people aren't in this category and have to divide their times up each week hence why it can take 4+ weeks to clear. However, that isn't all of it. In truth, it takes even more hours for groups that do not dig into the fights every day because they often have to review and reprog older mechanics, since people forget things between last week wednesday and the current wednesday. So lets say an entire night gets wasted on reprogs and someone is doing 3 hour nights for three days in a week. Without counting reclear times, the number of weeks goes from 12-16 weeks to 14-18 weeks since those extra hours of reprog have to come out of something. Now lets say that those days people are raiding on are also representative of the time they have to do reclears. It takes a full night to reclear all the way to the 4th fight and the prior nights are basically getting cut down because of the reclear times. We're looking at anywhere from 19-20 weeks to 21-24 weeks easily. This is why people end up trying to get skips in later tiers because the increased difficulty in the 2nd and 3rd tiers are pretty brutal on groups.

And remember, the longer the time it takes to get through savage the more likely there is going to be drama and in-fighting, let alone having to go find another group in that case of a break-up. This is why it takes many people ages to clear a tier and why the content creator comments that savage is easy is kind of a stupid smoke screen for how much of a pain it really is. By tier 3 any sane person will want to tear their hair out with the amount of stupid stuff they likely had to deal with. The one good thing is at least the first tier is forgiving enough the social issues are not quite as bad.

[GTK0HLK]

Of course it's about sub money. This is a paid sub MMO. Ultimately, everything is about sub money. That doesn't make all time gating "wrong", though.

Fact is, players can and will consume contently exponentially faster than the devs can create it, and the devs been a way to balance that out. Without gear lockouts the serious raiders would go in over and over, get BiS in the first week, and stop playing, making raiding "dead content."

Yet Shadowbringers had many people rerunning the content and trying new roles.

Interesting how that works out.

It seems that people will do things they enjoy beyond their limits.

More so when others give their assistance freely.

When not restricted.

At least they could lighten the barriers.

[Syln]

Weekly lockout always has been a cheap way to keep people playing the game overtime, so is the way you get said gear. Why do you have to do the same fight over and over if you want a specific token and lose them to other players ? Why can't you just chose your token after completing the fight ? "Because it's always been like this tee hee"

How about giving more incentives to do those raids multiple time if you feel like it instead ?

I wish more peoples were looking things through the lens of "Does this thing give me a better experience ?" instead of "they need to make things worse for x or y"

Lessening the player experience to retain them in your game, which is a thing Gacha games do to the extreme, is a really cheap way of doing things, figuratively and literally, which is why most companies do it instead of investing more resources and give more content.

[1313]