Game Has Gone to the Dogs

[Drimn]

I'll never understand why people buy an mmo, pay for said mmo, and then expect there to be loads of solo content. It's an online game. The point is to play with other people. Joining a free company that wants to do the group content is a good first step. If you don't like this aspect of the game then this genre is probably not for you. This isn't meant to sound nasty, but it's the truth. There's plenty of single player rpg's out there that will offer the type of enjoyment that you may be looking for.

Yep. Anyone that complains about the inability to solo your way through everything wasn't around for GW1. GW1 and the first expac had "henchmen" that were largely the same as the Trust system, and could be used to fill missing party roles when you didn't have a full group. In Nightfall, they replaced it with the Heroes system that let you keep your own army of NPCs, built how you want, equipped how you want. It was an alright idea until power gamers bought their own party that could clear 99% of the game's content on demand, leaving newer players to play alone and eventually quit because of how dead the community was. The expac after making the game soloable was the last one. You don't want a soloable MMO.

[Shougun]

Yep. Anyone that complains about the inability to solo your way through everything wasn't around for GW1. GW1 and the first expac had "henchmen" that were largely the same as the Trust system, and could be used to fill missing party roles when you didn't have a full group. In Nightfall, they replaced it with the Heroes system that let you keep your own army of NPCs, built how you want, equipped how you want. It was an alright idea until power gamers bought their own party that could clear 99% of the game's content on demand, leaving newer players to play alone and eventually quit because of how dead the community was. The expac after making the game soloable was the last one. You don't want a soloable MMO.

You don't want a non-solo-able MMO (to some extent)* if you want a wealthy MMO in the themepark space. It's fairly obvious.... You're not going to get a bunch of hardcore bros together in a force strong enough to maintain a large scale MMO, that's how you kill games (as many have died specifically through this). Hell, a solo only game can survive (its called single player!).. You can't keep a multiplayer game alive if it's too punishing and you're not able to strictly cycle blood in (easier for MOBA or like games because they funnel to a lot less unique content).


Shouting for hours, or waiting for hours, to get your step 16 of 500 MSQ done feels like hot garbage and as the game grows you can't protect against this reality as its more and more content you need to cover.


*This is why the current content requires groups and as it gets older you'll see it get more forgiving to blood count. It 'should' be multiplayer at many points, but you do a "we'll see" for how long or for how many. You will also get players who WANT to have a living backdrop but mostly do stuff alone, and I think that's totally fine, but this content could probably benefit from being dynamic not strictly solo. Like making quests scale to number of players, so it's fun for all types and not made straight out of the gate for only you (GW2 event quests tend to do this a lot better, and I don't really want to example our FATEs as our scaling is fairly bad).

[OliverQ]

I do feel like the game is really boring right now. Other than Savage/Ultimates, there's nothing to do. The MSQ itself was boring, and not much content was added to make up for it. They need to speed up the patch cycles or add more content per patch.

[BigCheez]

You're quoting posts from 2014.

[kaynide]

Super old post, but still kinda relevant.

Guildwars 2 I can play entirely solo and have loads of fun just goofing around in the world. They have lots of spontaneous events like races/coin grabs/mini games. Good, Mario-kart-esque races mind you, not the nonsense we have in FFXIV.

When I play GW2, I don't much care for the story overall, but the actual engine lends itself to good fun and shenanigans.

That said, if you want a game to be soloable, make the game fully soloable a la GW2. Or make the game require partying up and making friends a la Everquest or original FF11. Don't half arse it. This nonsense with "sometimes you'll have NPCs in the trials/dungeons, but sometimes not tee hee!" is awful.

[Chasingstars]

I kind of like it. I think most people will get used to it in a few years.

Ma'am, ya got a necromancy license to operate that necronomicon?

[Lilapop]

I do feel like the game is really boring right now. Other than Savage/Ultimates, there's nothing to do. The MSQ itself was boring, and not much content was added to make up for it. They need to speed up the patch cycles or add more content per patch.

Don't forget, we're getting more of both before 8.0!

[Wired-Lain]

What this game lack is a REAL Open world content. Not talking about FATEs, I'm talking about exploration, things you can go around and without any pressure. They've added treasure hunt and that's a step in the right direction, but we really need much more than that. I love the game, but only standing in the city queuing and shouting for groups gets old fast.

Something that's really starting to wear on me is how little impetus to spend time in or explore all the new zones once you finish the MSQ. It feels as if there's rarely any hand crafted touches tucked away in a corner somewhere, no interesting npcs or flavorful locations. They tend to just amount to a big area with a lot of random monsters milling aimlessly around. I hate doing it, but its one of the areas I always found WoW a lot more successful at. The zones are packed with stuff, the animals and monsters you find have contextual reasons to be there. There's little mini stories going on in every corner of the map, treasure to find, puzzles and minigames to engage with. Even goofy little gags like finding the entire cast of Winnie the pooh chilling by a lake somewhere, or a cave with surprise fight tucked away guarding some fun loot that's basically useless but adds a little character to the zone. It just feels as if there's nothing to see out in Eorzea, you aren't rewarded for exploring these places because they're basically just weirdly large backdrops to the MSQs A-B-C plotting.

[klu]

Sounds like a community issue, not a "game has gone to the dogs" issue.