The Future of Serious Gamers in ARR

[Blackpearlguy]

Sounds like it's coming but i'd have to agree with OP here. Things seem more limited than in 1.xx, which is I think the point he was trying to get across. Not sure XIV was built to be a themepark however.

[Orophin]

I can't find the quote but Yoshi-P said that ARR was very much going to be modeled as a Theme Park MMO.

[auritribe]

I am angry. ANGRY ABOUT VIDEO GAMES.

I've come to the point where I'm just going to link this every time the topic comes up. Enjoy.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vide...Filthy-Casuals

[Zezlar]

I guess i'm kind of an asshole according to Jim.

but then again so is Jim, so hurray for a hypocrite.

[Kallera]

did you read this interview? from last month...
some key point inside answered your main core question:


so HC players can still show off their fancy gears for months, then later these will become standard gears like these old 1.0 dungeon stuffs before

Isn't this what caused many an endgame shell in ffxi to break apart? Or was that something else?

[Yrusama]

There is no professional level of gaming in MMOs.

Had to stop there. There are a lot of MMO players that make the game feel very much like a job. Anyone who's played an MMO, including XIV, for any length of time has at least heard the horror stories of getting kicked from groups for being undergeared or underskilled, or even for not showing up to weekly events. And Yoshi-P more-or-less encouraged this kind of crap with speed runs and gear checks like Garuda and Relic quests.

Edit: Ok, this makes me sound like a casual. I didn't bother with relic, and shied away from speed runs, but I do have my entire Dungeons achievement section completed, as well as the three Primal achievements. My point was that some linkshells take it beyond hardcore and work you harder than even a full-time job, but they aren't bound by workforce laws and can get away with worse abuse.

[Alhanelem]

There are many other points I want to mention but I’ll stop with these, I really hope SE gives serious gamers a deeper and more challenging experience. I’m not against casual gamers, they can be fun to play with, it’s just that they shouldn’t really be the majority or the deciders of how the game system should be.

In other words, you're saying the minority should dictate the majority's experience. I couldn't disagree with that more.

One of the problems I see is what some allegedly hardcore gamers ask for: steeper death penalties, no convenient HUD elements (quest icons on NPCs, etc), and the like. While I'm all for adding a range of content of different difficulties from easy to crazy, a lot of the things people ask for don't make the game harder, they just make it more annoying.

For example, take a typical FFXI quest, which, if you're lucky, gives you the name of the person and the zone or region you'll find them in. You spend half an hour searching, before you eventually look up a wiki to find the position of the NPC. Is this really better than just having quest markers or having NPCs be more specfiic? No, it's not. Yes, it might be "harder", but it's not harder in a good way- it's harder in a "why bother wasting my time when I can just look it up" way. Convenience and difficulty don't directly correlate. People say it makes you think, but it doesn't- you usually just look up a walkthrough from someone who had more time to waste than you. And for a lot of people, having a guide or walk through be almost completely necessary to play a game ruins it for them.

By all means, ask for harder dungeons/quests/content, but remember that there are good and bad kinds of difficulty. Challenging content that requires everything you have to complete = good difficulty. Gameplay elements that waste your time for no good reason (difficult navigation, EXP loss, clunky UI, quests that run you all over the place for reasons that don't make sense) = bad difficulty.

[finiteHP]

The only points I don't really agree with are the leveling and the (possibly unintentional) suggestion that "casuals" don't like the game as much as you do. I suppose it all depends on what you consider casual. If casuals are people that don't play the game as much as you do, then I guess I count as one of them. I played FFXI for almost eight years. I was only able play for two or three hours a day, even on weekends. It wasn't that I didn't want to spend time in the game. I had things that I HAD to do that prevented me from playing more. Does that mean that I shouldn't have played because I couldn't dedicate the amount of time you could? It took me five of those years to get my first 75 and that was the only 75 I ever got. Did I feel a great sense of accomplish at finally getting to 75? No. What I mainly felt was a vague sense of sadness. I play RPGs for the stories whether offline or online. By the time I got to 75 no one wanted to help me with the storylines because they had been past them for so long. While the main problem was people unwilling to do the "old content", the long leveling was a hindrance to my enjoyment of the game. It was that feeling that eventually made me quit a few years later (that and the fact that no one would level anywhere except Abyssea which crashed my network whenever I tried to enter). A few months later (May of 2012) I started XIV and played it until the end. In that time I got two combat classes to 50. Did I feel a sense of accomplishment when I got my first 50? Yes because while there were many people who had all 50s and weren't interested in doing the content they had already past, there were also a lot of people who had just got to the same point that I could do the content with. Is there such a thing as leveling being too fast? Of course there is, but leveling shouldn't be something that totally roadblocks people who are slower. As for equipment, of course the very best stuff should be for the people who have the time needed to invest in it as long as it doesn't make the people who have it so elitist that exclude people who don't.

I know some of what I had to say probably sounds antagonistic. I just get a tired of people saying that people who can't spend as much time with a hobby don't love it as much. Note: this isn't necessarily directed at anyone in this topic or in the community.

[Aion]

getting all relics

getting all primal (or records getting all primal)

pawning on PvP

World first on raids

Beat all hardmode dungeon (ex Ifrit x, NVD hard)

speed run achievements

all cap classes


..... I think those are opportunities for you that deemed yourselves as a serious gamer

[Zehl]

Your bowling analogy works fine, but you ignore the bottom line. The bowling alley owner will submit to popular demand because he needs to make a living, and so do all the other owners, so tough S***. Take your ugly skull bowling ball and sit in your rockingchair, by yourself, and talk about how good the old days were.... because the world is leaving you behind.