Leveling adjustment feedback, big concerns.

[Dorfentyme]

As people start to hit higher levels, they are beginning to point out some issues with the game that could become a big concern as new players start to get higher into the game. Some of which are going to need to be addressed to keep people subbed to the game(and I hope that they do stay subbed).

Also, since the forums are intent on restricting how much you can post, I'll post most of the issues that I can think of, some minor, some major.

For those of you who seem to think this is a "I WANT TO HIT 50 AS FAST AS POSSIBLE!" or "YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO GRIND", then I direct you to this link here for clarification: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...09#post1269709

1. The higher you get, the less quests become available. This is very strange to me, and yet a lot of people are starting to recognize this issue. People have talked about how atrocious it is to level from 45-50. They say there are a severe lack of quests, and that it becomes most apparent starting in the mid 30s that there aren't as many quests as there was before, considering you now need MORE experience to level than you did previously.

Some people respond to this and say "well you can just grind Fates, or mobs, or dungeons, or leves". Please continue reading, we will get to that. Note, this issue of lack of quests or effective ways to level, become worse and worse with each class you go to level. That's one of the big issues here. Your main may not struggle so much in leveling, but your alts will tremendously.

2. The cap on leves and the award for them is too small. Okay, you can earn 6 allowances every 24 hours is it? That's not too bad imo, and 100 is the cap. Sounds reasonable. Until you realize you need almost 200k experience to level at level 31, and level 30 leves are giving you LESS than 5k experience. So if I do 6 leves (a days worth of accumulating allowances), I don't even earn a quarter of my level. So that's it for the leves that day. I can't do anymore until I accumulate more. That's a severe issue, leves need to grant you much more experience, or remove the cap on how many you can do(or keep the cap in place for GC leves, or have a seperate allowance for GC leves)

3. FATE grinding works now, but what about later? FATE grinding is a decent way to level right now, while the game is new and fresh. But how will it be later down the road when more people are playing their mains at max level? There will be WAY less people to do FATES with, making FATES take longer to complete(or not complete if its too hard). But let's not forget another issue about FATEs, they are boring. There is nothing exciting to them. It is a zergfest. Rush into the enemies, spam your attacks, you gain experience. Personally, I don't MIND that they are kinda boring, but if I have to resort to GRINDING them to level my character effectively? Suddenly it's not fun anymore. It's a nice break from whatever it was that I was doing before it popped. It's a nice break because its worth my time to do it because of the experience gain. But it BEING the main source of EXP? And having a party dedicated to just zerging and farming FATEs? Not much fun.

4. Guildhests are really only worth your time ONCE. I find guildhests to be very strange. On one hand, they are great experience the FIRST time you complete them, and they are good at introducing new players into MMO mechanics. On the other hand, once you complete them, what's the point of doing them again? If you put a group together to do them, you might as well do a dungeon. But at the same time, spamming the same guildhests isn't fun either, so doing that for experience isn't a great idea. Personally, I think a simple solution to guildhests is to allow them to grant you the bonus reward once daily, OR, once per class. They feel like wasted content at their current place in the game. Content I'd like to see get used more often.

5. Dungeons are great fun, but is the reward enough? Also, queues. I find the dungeons to be great fun, but unfortunately, the reward isn't enough when you outlevel the dungeon even by 1 or 2 levels. I was earning a huge chunk of experience per mob in a dungeon when I was at level, then I gained 2 levels and I run it again and my experience was drastically chopped down. That's unfortunate, as there is roughly a new dungeon every 4 levels. I'd like incentive to re-run the dungeons. Also, dungeons can't always be an effective way to level depending on your class. I play a tank and a healer. My queues are instant, so dungeons are decent experience. What about the DPS classes? Their queues are horrible. Let's not forget dungeon loot. Most treasure coffers from random locations in the dungeons offer you junk for loot. Yeah, you'll occasionally get an item that can be useful. But why am I getting a POTION(heals 80 hit points) at level 31, or an ETHER at level 31, or hell, 200 gil? That's horrible, and feels like a huge waste of time. Increase the amount of gil you earn from these coffers, or make the base items better. AT LEAST give me a hi potion or something?

6. Some of the quest rewards blow my mind, but this is minor. Why is a level 30 quest giving me a level 31 item? Why is a level 15 quest giving me a level 17 item? Who in their right mind thought that was a good idea? This is a majorly MINOR issue(if that makes sense), but I still felt like it needed to be said.

7. 1000 character limit for the post? But then I am allowed to post it when I shorten it to 1000, then edit it and copy in the rest of what I want to say. Square, plz

Sorry for the huge post. I love this game, I really want it to succeed. I just feel there are a few things that need to be addressed. These ARE important issues(well, most of them). I'm not even going to get into or list the issues with the economy at end game, because its already been said before.

If anyone has heard or read anything that a dev has said regarding anything being added in the future patches that might address some of these issues, please point it out to me so that I know.

Please let's have a good discussion about this and not a typical fanboy "well you're stupid the game is perfect" response. Thanks all.

UPDATE: Math for folks who need numbers to understand:
Content from 40-50 feels very dry, but the most noticeable difference is DEFINITELY 45-50. If you check here, http://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Ca...idequest/26-50

You'll see that there are hardly any quests from 45-50. 45-50 roughly takes 2,250,000 experience to level. From the 45-50 range, there are only enough side quests(18) to give you roughly 225,000 experience. You're still left with 2 million experience. Well now lets add the story quests from 45-50: 13 quests, roughly 175,000(being generous here) of experience. So now if you do ALL main story quests and ALL side quests from 45-50, you gain 400,000 experience and still need roughly, 1,850,000 experience. Now you're stuck grinding. If you're rested? Dungeons aren't BAD experience, but they aren't great either. When I was level 46, and I did Dzemael Darkhold, I was rested and got about 1200-1500 a kill. Let's say there were 40 enemies in there(roughly), and lets include 5-6k experience per boss kill. I gained about 70k experience, while rested, in that dungeon. The only other dungeon I have available closest to me is Aurum Vale. We're looking at 26 runs, roughly to get the last of my experience IF I am rested. If I'm not? Add a dozen or so more runs. Does it seem terribly long to have to do 26(MINIMUM) dungeons or so to get the last 5 levels? Probably not, but the issue is that not everyone can spam run dungeons(I can, but not everyone I can). So add in a long arse wait time for those who can't get an instant queue. You could do leves, but leves are LAUGHABLE experience unless you're doing them for DoL or DoH.

Conclusion: Fastest way to level just so happens to be the most boring(and all the other options are generally boring too except dungeons). It's VERY clear that Square hardly did anything in the 45-50 content range. 40-45 is pretty bad, but nowhere near as bad as 45-50. If people weren't content with FATE grinding(since its fast leveling, so many people don't care if something is boring so long as its fast xp), then more and more people would see the issue here. Hell, people who DO FATE grind understand that its a huge issue.

[NalXes]

Just for your information, both link are not working.

Edit: Now they do

[Ravij]

All good suggestions. I have a fresh toon that I've been working on; leveling Arcanist, Thaumaturge, and Conjurer all at the same time.. but once I got past the starting city Main Story Line; those quests to continue leveling those three classes all at once start to thin out.

As someone suggested over in another thread; make it to where each quest can be done ONCE(1) by each DoW/DoM. So say you're an Arcanist, you can do all of the Limsa Lominsa quests inside the city on your Arcanist, then switch to Conjurer, and viola, all those quests can be repeated again on your Conjurer but they will forever be done to your Arcanist. I don't know why this wasn't implemented given that we have something just like it already in the game via Hunting Logs. Or at least go down the path of FFXI where you had repeatable quests.

[Dorfentyme]

OP updated with working links. Thank you.

[cbwriter]

May I suggest that additional quest lines be added and only unlocked when you start your 2nd (3rd, 4th, etc.) job. This would give added backstory/lore/etc. and needed quest exp to level the added job(s) without getting into a boring grind. Admittedly it DOES mean additional work for writers and devs, but if Yoshi's goal of having FFXIV last for 10 years, they WILL be needed to keep people busy and exploring.

End-game content cannot do it all. There needs to be a way to keep those that want to keep adding jobs busy without getting them bored. Yoshi and the devs would be smart not to ignore the lower levels while adding end-game content.

FFXIV seems to be based on multiple swings through the lower levels and keeping them fresh with new and surprising new content and quests would do much in making FFXIV different from other MMOs that just concentrate on adding end-game content

[Vagrant-0]

On this note, what might be good is to have quests which are intended for a specific class and are which are only opened up as you get that class to that level. Not only would this give each class its own sort of feel as you level through them, but would allow writers to structure these quests around class abilities or rewards around what that class can use. A few of these could even be used to add incentive to re-run some instances with a healing or tanking class to help alleviate the wait times.

I do agree with the OP though in most of what was said. There is relatively little reason or benefit to re-run earlier instances, which means that people will just blow through game content in a month and just decide to no longer subscribe as there isn't much to do other than grind out other classes once you've hit end-game.

[Namynyor]

As a Legacy player returning 2 chars, and a new char strictly from v2.0 (one for each city-state to experience all quests), I have another concern regarding all the quests rewards. Not so much the EXP issue that most people are addressing, but the items. Where is the incentive to level ANY crafting classes if you gain equipment and tools/weapons for every class quest completed, and from some random quests also. If I unlock all Crafting classes, I end up with an Armoury chest full of 8 identical lv1 body armors for Crafting stats. As I level any of those classes, I get rewarded with new tools almost at the same time as they become available, so there is no reason for any crafter to craft and sell these tools. Since selling items that are crafted to other players is a big part of the DoH class usage, when the end items are already being given as quest rewards, there's less demand and greater supply.

[Namynyor]

Now, for DoH levequests, Legacy players are accustomed to these having a multiple-quantity synthesis of items without having to farm all the materials to complete the synth, but now we are expected to use all of our own materials for these levequests. This puts an added expense to try and do a levequest as we now have to purchase the materials, or spend additional time trying to farm those items, some of which are very low drop rates (like Gigantoad Skin, which I haven't gotten one of, since I always get Animal Skin from toads now). While it does help to have a guaranteed item reward for MIN and BOT when farming on those classes, FSH and any mob drop farming is still random, and obtaining the specific items you need for crafting a DoH levequest are more time consuming than the actual crafting of the leve. All in all, levequests were much more balanced and enjoyable in v1.0 than they are in v2.0, whether DoH leves or DoW/DoM leves

[Namynyor]

On this note, what might be good is to have quests which are intended for a specific class and are which are only opened up as you get that class to that level. Not only would this give each class its own sort of feel as you level through them, but would allow writers to structure these quests around class abilities or rewards around what that class can use.

Isn't that exactly what the Class Quests are, that you gain every 5 levels? Or have you avoided doing them because of the level-capped solo instance fights that they are filled with, and seem to me to be contrary to MMO basics since they are Solo only fights. These quests just need to stop giving all of the equipment players would normally purchase from the markets and other players.

[Asterope]

Being someone who wants to be a slow steady Swiss Army knife with my levelling, I can say that the quests are so rare that I have to ration them between classes. And I'm still in low levels.

The other thing is that I genuinely really enjoyed all the quests. I thought they were gorgeously written, and I'd love to experience more of it even if it's not for EXP.