Future proofing and community funneling

[Jeeqbit]

I see... A "SQEX can do no wrong" player.

I'm not saying they can do nothing wrong. I am just explaining why SE is doing it. I'm not saying if they're right or wrong to do it. But it seems like a logical thing for game developers to chase - trend chasing, and optimizing everything.

Allow contributions you make to events in these areas to impact the completion based on how many people are participating.

That would have been desirable for Cosmic Exploration. But for the most part, things like FATEs and NMs are affected by how many people fought it the last time and CEs scale directly based on participants, to the point I can solo most of them.

In terms of future proofing they tend to add The Echo to almost everything as well as making nerfs over time. This is the case for relics and field operations, trials, extremes, savage and gear improvements help dungeons get solo'd if they can't be solo'd like variant/DD can. They add the Unrestricted setting to duty finder for that reason. Not to mention that they're even progressively rolling out Duty Support to dungeons now as well.

Allow for zone wide buffs that increase your battle power based on how many people are in the instance

Really this is kinda the same thing as just rescaling CEs and FATEs which already happens, and precedent shows they add the Echo to the content when it gets old and give you loads of ways to increase your power. Personally, I've never had trouble getting through field operations solo, even going back to Eureka, and it's been heavily improved since then too.

They are going to see if they can improve FATE scaling, I believe, but for now if you're fighting one solo you can pull it then reset to help reset the scaling on it. It's been working for me so far in OC.

Allow for the dungeon content that is accessible in these areas to be completed with lower numbers of people

In terms of "normal mode" content, that's already the case. It was theoretically possible to solo Delubrum Reginae as soon as they dropped the 24 player requirement. I heard Dalriada got duo'd shortly after release. CLL's main hurdles were significantly nerfed once it's popularity reduced, such as the prisoners becoming more optional.

The difference is really when you're talking about high-difficulty content, which currently seems to include BA, DRS and FT. They obviously don't want to make it too easy since that defeats the point. But technically the boss HP scales based on the number of people participating.

In any case, they said they are re-evaluating scaling difficulty and time investment and that the change to Deep Dungeons is an actual mindset shift about content generally, although they still believe there should be a bit of content that is firmly "hardcore" or firmly "casual". They just want to make the majority of it more scalable so it can be enjoyed by the whole playerbase like Deep Dungeons rather than there being a split.

And you know what, yes. Getting assistance from NPC fill-ins WOULD be preferable. As the content ramps down, allow for zone appropriate NPC companions or at least our g'dyam chocobo to assist us.

I'm not personally against NPCs for all content. But a lot of players don't see them as valid or would still view it as a ghost town with them there.

[Shurrikhan]

Because that is how gamers play games. They login, do new DLC, then leave. Just watch any friend/user list on Steam, Discord. A new game or its DLC releases, they play it for maybe a week, then they move on. Games are just FOMO.

:: "Why health care? People just die. They get born, hang for a bit, and then poof. Life is just transient. Accept it, stop asking for any extended access, and move on."

More directly:

Gamers shifting from game to new game can be a statistical trend without remotely precluding value from extended lifespan of games. By your logic here, there'd be no value in Steam holding onto games and spending the server costs to hold the data for them or allow their downloads past their on-release prime. There'd be no value in the likes of Good Old Games or certainly zero use of torrents for, say, emulatable copies of old console games (the old FF games among them). There'd be no players of the original CoD: Modern Warfare from the moment the original MW2 came out, let alone the MW remake. There'd be none still playing Starcraft in this day and age. And yet, evidence to the contrary abounds.

People don't solely play games when they are maximally popular. They play games also when something about the (idea of the) game appeals to them enough to acquire and play it. For a great many people, the game's broader popularity is damn near irrelevant. And it's generally worthwhile to tweak content or infrastructure, therefore, to be run even past something's heyday, or, where already runnable, to give it the occasional impetus for a bit more player count.

If you do Ishgard Restoration 6 years later, probably most others aren't doing it and the "fun" crowd that was there no longer is.

That in itself is fine --as long as it's still there and usable despite its later-day player counts instead of, say, facing requirements of 24 crafters soon into the experience-- especially so long as its development time is fruitfully reused later.

You are talking about making 12 years worth of content and zones still getting bustling with hundreds of players no matter which content you pickup.

You're really doubling down on the strawmen...

No. It is impossible to make each and every piece of content "bustle" with "hundreds of players" each in a game as expansive and in decline as XIV. Scaling tweaks to make old content more enjoyable and accessible and incentive structures to make it more worth the rare revisit as new blood reach said content, on the other hand, is very doable.

Making it so content can be run without needing a party of friends and/or a queue of 20+ minutes even when fed by roulettes... does not require making each and every piece of content to ever exist mandatory to complete weekly.

My point is that you need to give people a reason to go back to any of this 12+ year old content. Otherwise, why would they, when they did it already?

...So, exactly what the OP and others were asking for in terms of allowing for the incentives to be more lastingly worthwhile/compatible... which you then treated as purely a waste?

You also can't necessarily make a roulette for a Field Operation or Cosmic Exploration.

Why would player-funneling or -contiguity necessarily have to be via a roulette? That's one example of player-funneling that we already have. The OP is asking for more -- more than just what features or implementations thereof that we already have for tempering the decline in player count and, just as importantly, its more quantized impact on how that content can be played.

Again most things can be done by players in the future still. I was just saying that it's mostly going to be a quiet experience (ie. 1-8 players) because players did the day1 rush thing that they do with all games.

The post specifically refers to areas that presently require 24+ players. A significant portion of gameplay hours available to what would otherwise appeal to players completing things at their own pace, which becomes increasingly important --especially if one wants to feel like they're not always merely in "pre-game" until current content-- as the game gets more and more expanded (the exploratory missions of Eureka, Bozja, OC prominent among them), is currently bottlenecked by those requirements.

It would require first allowing such content to be done with 1-8 players before your response could be pertinent to the thread. Otherwise, the content indeed becomes effectively impossible to complete after a certain point. The less tempered the decline, the sooner its development hours become impossible to leverage beyond that Day 1 / Week 1 rush.

most things in this game end up being soloable, including Savage, dungeons, DD, variants and relics.

...Soloing level 60 Savage dungeons as a level 100 is not content in any meaningful sense of the word: it's a visual progression with glamour drops. A cutscene with rewards, given a bit of "walk here, then there" prior would about as equally count as content. Nor is soloing a DD remotely the same experience as playing through it in a party; there's a reason the first gets leaderboards.

Yes, but it won't replicate 144 people in Eureka or 72 people in Occult or Cosmic.

No one's asked for it fully replicate that. Only one person has even asked for NPC fill-ins at all, with others just considering it "better than nothing".

But there's a difference between, on one side, the vibe of the content changing as it goes from a FATE/CE train rush to a single Full Party moving together through a zone and grabbing what nearby FATEs they can survive while leveling together, or even the maximum level among players and mobs, both, being reduced to broaden the portion of players each little group can play with and/or mob-kill experience increasing to build that experience more around self-paced play now that the FOMO waves have paced anyways... and, on the other, the end of said content being essentially impossible with fewer than 24 players at a time where most are level 120 (or 100 with 20 "Merit Ranks" or what have you) and that content sees barely a dozen players at a time.

Just as there's a difference between players being "forced to re-do each and every bit of past content weekly" and a rotating schedule of bonus rewards to funnel the community in ways that'd allow for newer players to see enough activity in past content to engage with it and for veterans to enjoyably revisit what different content forms may appeal to them more than just what's visible at max level.

[Jeeqbit]

And it's generally worthwhile to tweak content or infrastructure, therefore, to be run even past something's heyday

I agree. I was referring specifically to the "it's a ghost town" part of the post. It will always be that after the original FOMO. I'm not saying the content shouldn't be made playable after that (and it is made playable after that, most of the time, it's just not as fun as when there's lots of others doing it ie. the unsync feature, gear allowing you to destroy old content, nerfs/echo buffs).

It is impossible to make each and every piece of content "bustle" with "hundreds of players" each in a game as expansive and in decline as XIV. Scaling tweaks to make old content more enjoyable and accessible and incentive structures to make it more worth the rare revisit as new blood reach said content, on the other hand, is very doable.

I was referring to the "it's a ghost town" part of the post. I'm not disputing the scaling thing and they often do scale/nerf/etc.

...So, exactly what the OP and others were asking for in terms of allowing for the incentives to be more lastingly worthwhile/compatible... which you then treated as purely a waste?

It's a waste because it won't reverse that it's a "ghost town", which is what the OP mentioned as a problem multiple times.

The post specifically refers to areas that presently require 24+ players.

The only content in the game that requires that many after the initial FOMO that I can think of is high-end raids such as BA, DRS, FT and Chaotic. None of which are required for their respective stories or relics. They're also still done via discords.

If we're talking of the rest of field operations or places like the Firmament and Cosmic, I can do everything in these solo (except possibly CLL and Dalriada, haven't tried these after the changes). Realistically a few others will probably help out eventually if I hang out in the areas too.

No one's asked for it fully replicate that. Only one person has even asked for NPC fill-ins

It sorta came across that way with the complaints centering around it being empty and a ghost town.

[Shurrikhan]

I agree. I was referring specifically to the "it's a ghost town" part of the post.

Right, but that's a perception based on the presentation of the content. When content was built specifically to house 40+ players (i.e., lacked the depth or attention to be appealing at lower player counts) and now holds 4, it will feel like a ghost town, because the systems, pacing, etc., feel disjointed from how it can now actually be played. (Or, put less kindly, it was unpolished content that simply pushed enough players into it with transient rewards and FOMO to gloss over its comparative shortfalls.)

But compare those "ghost towns" to how, say... South Shroud FATEs on ARR release feel compared to how they are now. Yes, they're very different. Back then, you had to scramble to tag enough mobs to get credit for enough kills to earn Gold, even when in a full party and there nearly from the start. Now, those FATEs are chill little encounter you stumble upon solo or when leveling a new alt with a friend new to the game. But the point is that they work in both cases. They're different, but neither necessarily feels disjointed (if anything, very high populations fit those FATEs less).

Now consider Occult Crescent when down to just a small group of people per instance. By just re-theming the expedition a little bit, e.g....

• greater mob kill EXP, small-scale spawned events (possibly even having those partly replace auto-spawned FATEs or having those alongside limiting FATE spawns to populated regions or those near enough in level), greater emphasis on the gradual collection of field notes, etc., so that the zone doesn't feel particularly empty even when it's just a single party moving through it / there's no FATE train to follow, and/or
• NPCs move around the camp and keeping individually busy instead of standing still constantly at attention to facilitate a hoard of adventurers coming through, and/or
• those NPCs more obviously being non-combatants or even merchants just here to supply the archeologists in the main town and you, yourself, who are uniquely chartered for this, and/or
• allowance to hire mercenaries or bring over your squadron, or occasional NPC forays that you could join up with and support.

...you end up with something that still feels fine even when played in a more isolated manner (e.g., when not wanting to be bounced from region to region following FATEs / CEs) and therefore also when the area is contains a lower population. A good half of that would be improvements in optionality or zone liveliness for even when the content is new while also future-proofing the region for when it's no longer in its rush period. And what little would be of minimal use then (e.g., the vibe of the base NPCs) would be of very little cost in better matching with that later time and its population sizes.

Tl;dr: Generally speaking, so long as some decent rewards remain, better-designed content lasts longer and at greater ranges of player-count; wanting the content to last longer... often just means designing it better in the first place, with a smidgen of taking some small time if needed to adjust it later to fit its new circumstances. Occult Crescent and other at-your-pace content side-content could benefit from that immensely.

[frostmagemari]

It's a waste because it won't reverse that it's a "ghost town", which is what the OP mentioned as a problem multiple times.

So because it won't <perfectly> solve a problem, it's a waste of time?
I'm sorry if this sounds crass, but that is the absolute worst way to look at any situation and at best you're engaging with the argument in bad faith.

You're right, all of the things i mentioned won't make them as populated as they were when they were being zerg-rushed by content fiends; but they would be enough to keep these places alive.

One of the biggest things that stops people from ever interacting with old content is the fact that no one does it because no one else is doing it. If you gave some incentives for people to actually be there and do things, you will have more people join in and do things.

[Supersnow845]

I think the point that “future proofing amounts go basically being able to do it solo” is a relevant point that is not the right way to approach future proofing especially since as they have most clearly shown with OC that they aren’t willing to leave content with its old incentives intact to encourage people to do it later

Old “evergreen” content should be actively encouraged by the system (say something like a CE roulette for Bozja or even a permanent mogpedium analogue for content like DD floors or eureka NM’s)

Evergreening content shouldn’t amount to “okay now you can solo it”

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]Xbox launch didn't help, Dawntrail launch didn't help, none of the major content patches since than have helped. In fact Cosmic Exploration made things WORSE because we had a bunch of our gatherers and crafters mass-leave when they got tired of the constant project failures, which in turn upped our marketboard prices across the board.

Personally I think one of the bigger factor to your issue is the fact that DC travel was added without ensuring region-wide DF/PF works. Then there are also little things like gathering ephemeral/legendary nodes, retainer, etc can only be done in your home world. You can't just have one without the other. People will just leave their home to do activities in more active hubs.

[DreadCrow]

And no, that's not particularly, let alone universally, how gamers play games, either. Putting aside the obvious fact that I can pick up any old SP game and go through it at my own pace, there's still lively activity through older content in many other MMOs via different incentive structures.

FOMO is absolutely a thing in even single-player games, in the social media age. Just because you don't feel it (and I don't either) it doesn't mean that it's not a big thing. Like, Baldur's Gate III and Elden Ring didn't get as big as they did just because they were good games. But because everyone and their mother was playing it. Animal Cross: New Horizons, too. (Although I suppose that game does have a community aspect.)

[Shurrikhan]

FOMO is absolutely a thing in even single-player games, in the social media age. Just because you don't feel it (and I don't either) it doesn't mean that it's not a big thing.

I didn't say FOMO wasn't a thing. It's just far from the 100% and unavoidable core of gaming that it was being treated -- let alone a warrant for any further future-proofing to be 'inherently wasteful' or the like.

It's not universal. Nor is it, alone, what makes gaming what it is.

Accordingly, just like some multiplayer games that have had their server support pulled have later allowed for P2P play, at least, it's worth making dead content that would otherwise require, say, 24+ players require less so that they can still be done --and ideally, even to hold future content to a slightly higher standard of design/optionality such that it wouldn't require hordes of players to make it enjoyable.

[PaulusHamsteru]

I see... A "SQEX can do no wrong" player. I love this game as much as any other player, i've played since 1.0, played the beta and have played since. That doesn't mean that SQEX is doing the right moves across the board. All of their competitors are actually starting to improve themselves, they have to too.


You're right, it won't; but by actually having plans for the future of your content, you can alleviate issues.
A few examples...
Combine all the post-expansion "islands" into one zone, to allow us to swap between what content we're actively doing if we decide to help out with the events from the other content (ie. Have crafting/gathering/combat stuff happen on the south horn of Occult crescent instead of splitting off into the moon and the island)
Allow contributions you make to events in these areas to impact the completion based on how many people are participating.
Allow for zone wide buffs that increase your battle power based on how many people are in the instance
Allow for the dungeon content that is accessible in these areas to be completed with lower numbers of people
Give REGULAR incentives to go back and do content on a regular basis instead of it being a possible weekly part of the mogpendium
- And not make it 15 poetics. If WoW can make the trading post work, so can SQEX. Make something like that, but you gain it by doing content that is from past patches/expansions. Swap out the rewards every month so people can get something new. Maybe have one less store outfit and put it on the post. (And don't slap them on the store after you cycle them, put them back in a month or two later)
And maybe most simple.. stop making so many instances that fracture the people who are trying to play with the content. There were SIX people on the moon last night, and two instances were created, shunting three into each.

And you know what, yes. Getting assistance from NPC fill-ins WOULD be preferable. As the content ramps down, allow for zone appropriate NPC companions or at least our g'dyam chocobo to assist us.

Jeeq is the biggest Squeenix apologist. Just check his post history.