Bullet-Point List of Things SE Should Consider Adjusting (For Longevity)

[OnyxStrife]

Before I start this list, a little introduction about who I am as a player. If you don't care, then just skip this little paragraph. I've been playing MMOs since Runescape in 2003. Since that time I have dedicated 80% of my free time into online gaming (sad? opinionated.) and I have played practically all of the MMOs out there. I know what MMOs I have played that have been great and what made them great, and I know what MMOs I've played have bombed and why they bombed. Before I delve too deep into this, let's begin with the things I think should be fixed in order to make this game great.

I do not hate or even dislike this game, I merely think that it isn't GREAT or REVOLUTIONARY like I'd come to expect a game from Square-Enix to be. It could be with a few small additions or fixes, and I just want to share some things that I think SE should considering looking at in order to reach the goal that they've originally wanted to get to. The way things are, it caters far too much to casuals or lazy players like most new MMOs have started to do, which is leading to the decline in all new MMOs. Things that shouldn't be far too easy to achieve ARE far too easy to achieve, if you know what I mean.

(BEFORE REPLYING : I am aware that a lot of this stuff has been said in other threads, but I feel that in order for the devs to truly see these things and care, they need to be said over and over by various people.)

• Make FATEs give less exp and more gil
• Make dungeons give more exp to make them a better form of exp than FATEs for the time they take compared to FATEs
• Put more emphasis on learning your current class DURING leveling to 50 instead of powerleveling to 50 and not knowing your class's job
• More gear variety and more gear stat variety
• Make materia actually worth-while by increasing difficulty during the leveling process
• Make crafting gear more worthwhile by doing above ^
• Doing the above 2 things will help stabilize the in-game economy ^
• After making dungeons a better source of exp, stop allowing cross-server groups for dungeons.
• Put in more class/job specific quests besides the guild ones
• Reward players for questing and monster-farming in groups to develop more sense of a community instead of soloing everything except dungeons
• As hard as this will be to do, increase map sizes. Add in more variety when adventuring from one place to another
• Make it possible to die from falling
• Add more depth to combat skills. The rotations are far too static for their own good at the moment
• Give different monsters more variety than stronger stats and different names/cosmetics
• Put more depth into character creation settings

I am aware that this is a lot of work to be done, but I think that by the time people's 90 day or 180 day subs run out, a good amount of these things could easily be implemented. I am also aware that there are more things that need to be done, but at the moment these are all of the things I could think of. Feel free to add more things to the thread and I'll add some more to the list.

Perhaps the worst suggestion/idea I've ever heard. Sorry, but no. You basically are telling people that they must stay in one area while waiting the unknown amount of time to join a duty, and they cannot go off and do something else in the meantime? Awful.

(This is in reference to a bullet point that I removed, about only being able to queue for duty finder while you're in the map of the dungeon you want to queue for.)

Valid point, but this is part of the reason it's so quick to hit level cap. I'll be adding more a detailed explanation for this in a few minutes when I finish the second post, but for now I hope this'll suffice. I have yet to play an MMO where you can just be sitting in an area no where near the dungeon you want to run and place yourself in a queue for it. And then you STAY in that same map and then be instantly shot into the dungeon with a group you've had zero contact with prior. THEN WHEN YOU'RE DONE IT PUTS YOU ALL THE WAY BACK ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD. What? There comes a point when things are convenient and then when things are just straight catering to casuals and lazy players.

But I suppose since this one bullet point is already making people rage about the entire list, i'll just remove it. I just think that the way the duty finder is now, it caters to lazy/casual players FARRRR too much.

TSW has a Gatekeeper challenge, mandatory trial for all that wants to queue into hard-modes.

This is exactly the kind of thing that this game needs. There are far too many inexperienced players queuing into difficult dungeons, not doing their job right, and then being bashed for 20 minutes by their party before having the entire party give up.

You can die from falling currently. You just have to have aggro on a mob and jump from too high a place. It's happened to me many times trying to escape.

I suppose I could have worded it better. I meant in a way that if you jump from a super high cliff to a spot with no monsters, you shouldn't live with 1 HP and then quickly regenerate and continue on your way as an insane shortcut. It's already far too easy to get from place to place.

Merely making it frustating to play won't make the game last longer.

Making it frustrating and making it take more work are far different things. People being too lazy to work for things in MMOs are the reason games keep failing, because they're making it far too easy to get things that shouldn't be far too easy to get.

• Put more depth into character creation settings

Just going to grab this one, there are other I wanted to comment on, but I didn't really feel like doing the whole thing right now.

But I will say this, this game (from what I'm used to mainly) has a huge leap forward compared to games like WoW. I mean, I understand that we can't make everything so perfect that we can perfectly plan how much the nose tilts up to show off the exact amount of cuteness... .... But I digress.

My stand on it: It could be worse. I like a few of your ideas though. Thank you for not posting them in some weird crazy "I hate this game because:" kind of way.

This is why I added in the second post, the detailed explanations. If you'd go down to the character creation one I added in a note that I could do without it but it'd still be a nice little thing to touch up on, so we can make our characters look a little more like us. For example, Guild Wars 2 character creation and even AIONs are really good at this. But regardless, this isn't nearly as important as a lot of other things.

I don't hate the game, I want to make that clear. In fact I'm enjoying it a lot, but the way it is now I can see that it'll take maybe a few months for a hardcore player to max out the classes and run out of things to do. I just don't want to see another game die that has a lot of potential.

[OnyxStrife]

[Reserved for detailed explanations]

• Make FATEs give less exp and more gil
  Explained : Currently, the exp reward for FATEs is FAR too high compared to the exp gains for various other activities. FATEs give experience pretty much equal to the experience that quests give at your current level which is wayyyy too high considering the little amount of time that FATEs take. However, because this will make it so players will find less of a point in doing FATEs, increase the amount of gil that's rewarded or add something in that will give players an incentive to do FATEs. For example, add in a FATE point system, where you can trade the points in for items.
  
• Make dungeons give more exp to make them a better form of exp than FATEs for the time they take compared to FATEs
  Explained : As explained above, it almost pointless to run dungeons more than once as the amount of the experience they give is so little for the long amount of time that they take to complete. Some may argue that the point is in the loot, but honestly, you use the loot you receive for maybe a few hours before you've leveled high enough to use a better piece.
  
• Put more emphasis on learning your current class DURING leveling to 50 instead of powerleveling to 50 and not knowing your class's job
  Explained : This is a big thing, in my opinion. The way the game is currently designed is a bum rush to 50 with hardly any learning involved. By the time you're 50 you've only learned a sliver of your job/class's style and haven't delved any deeper into what makes it really stand out. More on this in my future bullet about adding more class/job related quests outside of guilds.
  
• More gear variety and more gear stat variety
  Explained : Gear is incredibly static at the moment. Currently, when you recieve a piece of gear you just see which gives higher defence and then use that for a couple hours until you've leveled high enough to wear the armor that the quest you just did rewards you with. Then at level 50 there's an obvious 'best' set of gear that you need to grind for and then you use that for the rest of your FF14 life. Where's the variety? Gear needs more stat options. More statistics and numbers to make it possible to have different sets of gear that the job can use depending on what type of fighting style they want to focus on. Want to be squishy but kill things faster than Zeus? Use armor (A). Want to be tanky but kill things relatively slowly? Use armor (B). Want to have a high crit rate, high skill speed, but low defence and HP? Use armor (C). See where I'm going with this?
  
• Make materia actually worth-while by increasing difficulty during the leveling process
  Explained : After reaching level 50, how much of your gear prior to that level did you actually put materia into? None? That's what I thought. Because what's the point? You don't NEED it even if you plan to solo everything, and you're just going to be changing armor in 2 levels anyways.
  
• Make crafting gear more worthwhile by doing above ^
  Explained : As above, how often do you go into the shop to search for a piece of gear that another player has personally crafted? How often do you pay a large sum of money for that great chest piece that player crafted for you to use? Never? That's what I thought. Because what's the point when there's a piece of armor in the NPC shop for a cheaper price and only slightly lower stats that you'll still survive without a problem in?
  
• Doing the above 2 things will help stabilize the in-game economy ^
  Explained : The above two points were fixed? WOAH, GUYS. SUDDENLY AN ECONOMY. Suddenly people are crafting armor and making money from it. Suddenly people are melding materia for other players for a profit. Suddenly THERE'S MONEY CIRCULATING AT A GOOD RATE.
  
• After making dungeons a better source of exp, stop allowing cross-server groups for dungeons.
  Explained : Why wait? Because the way it is now, if you stopped allowing cross-server groups, duty finder would take FOREVER. Even longer than it takes already. After players realize that dungeon running is a better source of straight-exp than FATEs, more people per server will begin queueing for dungeons and it'll take 20 minutes MAX to find a group even when it's not cross-server.
  
• Put in more class/job specific quests besides the guild ones
  Explained : In addition to more quest variety, this will also help people slowly learn their role instead of shoving it all down their throats at level 50 when your dungeon party is bashing you for not knowing how to properly keep aggro.
  
• Reward players for questing and monster-farming in groups to develop more sense of a community instead of soloing everything except dungeons
  Explained : Should be pretty obvious. It is far too easy and rewarding to solo the entire experience the way things are now. Community is part of the MMO experience and I've barely dealt with it in the leveling process.
  
• As hard as this will be to do, increase map sizes. Add in more variety when adventuring from one place to another
  Explained : Shouldn't need an explanation for this. Some of the maps are too small.
  
• Make it possible to die from falling
  Explained : This I don't care that much about but it's just an added challenge. Could take it or leave it (probably shouldn't even have this bullet in here then but I'm tired as hell).
  
• Add more depth to combat skills. The rotations are far too static for their own good at the moment
  Explained : As said. There are a very limited amount of times where I see myself or other people having to change up their skill rotation because there is a clear rotation that is better than every other possible rotation that you can do.
  
• Give different monsters more variety than stronger stats and different names/cosmetics.
  Explained : Monsters are too similar in combat mechanics at the moment. Currently the only monsters that ARE varied are dungeon monsters. The rest are easy to fight, none are different except have higher stats.
  
• Put more depth into character creation settings
  Explained : Another thing that I could do without, but it'd still be nice to be able to make my character look more like me or something else.

[beefyhaj]

[Reserved for detailed bashings]

[Nanga]

Make it so you can only register for Duty Finder for a dungeon that is located in the map you are in. This will help with the community aspect of things (in my opinion)

Perhaps the worst suggestion/idea I've ever heard. Sorry, but no. You basically are telling people that they must stay in one area while waiting the unknown amount of time to join a duty, and they cannot go off and do something else in the meantime? Awful.

[LordSideKicks]

Perhaps the worst suggestion/idea I've ever heard. Sorry, but no. You basically are telling people that they must stay in one area while waiting the unknown amount of time to join a duty, and they cannot go off and do something else in the meantime? Awful.

Agreed. If we were to do so. What's the point of duty finder? Try being a DPS and do that all the time.

[Ri_ri]

Merely making it frustating to play won't make the game last longer.

[Parodine]

I appreciate a thread where solutions are proposed as opposed to just criticism, albeit, I don't really agree with quite a few of them. But:

Make it possible to die from falling

You can die from falling currently. You just have to have aggro on a mob and jump from too high a place. It's happened to me many times trying to escape.

[nekochen]

[*]Put more emphasis on learning your current class DURING leveling to 50 instead of powerleveling to 50 and not knowing your class's job

TSW has a Gatekeeper challenge, mandatory trial for all that wants to queue into hard-modes.

In DPS challenge, you'd have to have sufficient DPS (limited time) while being awared of the Gatekeeper's action and interrupt accordingly, avoiding red zones on the ground
In Heal challenge, you'd have to heal a group of NPCs fighting by your side, which includes tank and DPS. If any of the NPC dies, you'd automatically fail the challenge. One of the NPC will be standing in red zone constantly to simulate stupids and you must keep this NPC up as well.
In Tank challenge, you'd have to keep the Gatekeeper face away from the NPC group which includes DPS and healer. Adds will spawn and they must be picked up and not let the NPC group get hit.

This is one of the best feature I've ever seen implemented in a MMO.

[OnyxStrife]

Perhaps the worst suggestion/idea I've ever heard. Sorry, but no. You basically are telling people that they must stay in one area while waiting the unknown amount of time to join a duty, and they cannot go off and do something else in the meantime? Awful.

Valid point, but this is part of the reason it's so quick to hit level cap. I'll be adding more a detailed explanation for this in a few minutes when I finish the second post, but for now I hope this'll suffice. I have yet to play an MMO where you can just be sitting in an area no where near the dungeon you want to run and place yourself in a queue for it. And then you STAY in that same map and then be instantly shot into the dungeon with a group you've had zero contact with prior. THEN WHEN YOU'RE DONE IT PUTS YOU ALL THE WAY BACK ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD. What? There comes a point when things are convenient and then when things are just straight catering to casuals and lazy players.

But I suppose since this one bullet point is already making people rage about the entire list, i'll just remove it. I just think that the way the duty finder is now, it caters to lazy/casual players FARRRR too much.

[OnyxStrife]

TSW has a Gatekeeper challenge, mandatory trial for all that wants to queue into hard-modes.

This is exactly the kind of thing that this game needs. There are far too many inexperienced players queuing into difficult dungeons, not doing their job right, and then being bashed for 20 minutes by their party before having the entire party give up.