Make FFXIV more like FFXI and less like WoW

[Obysuca]

Thats exactly the way I see it. Abysea was released to appease the casuals and as a result the game died.

It was also probably an attempt to kill off XI and make people go to XIV, seeing as how it was shortly before XIV's original release, which was a mistake by SE, they even admitted to it. How is killing off your cash cow and hoping people jump to the new one a good idea? lol /SElogic

[Zantetsuken]

It was also probably an attempt to kill off XI and make people go to XIV, seeing as how it was shortly before XIV's original release, which was a mistake by SE, they even admitted to it. How is killingoff your cash cow and hoping people jump to the new one a good idea? lol /SElogic

Wrong. Dead wrong.

SE stated many times that they wanted to keep both games running simultaneously (they purposely designed FFXIV 1.0 to be VERY different from FFXI)... players were even offered a special deal for subbing to both.

Abyssea was actually a desperate gambit to KEEP FFXI subscribers from leaving in the wake of the 'brand new FFXIV'. The shocking and unbelievable announcement to raise the lvl cap to 99 (!), happened on the same day that FFXIV was announced. Not a coincidence.

SE was worrried that FFXI players would leave in droves to FFXIV which would hurt their profits, so they threw caution to the wind, and opened the floodgates of content hoping to keep FFXI players engaged in the game.



Sadly, it was a very bad gamble. FFXIV 1.0 wasn't well received at all (and thus wasn't leeching FFXI subs), and meanwhile, the drastic changes in Abyssea ended up damaging FFXI in a myriad of ways; causing life-time fans to walk away from it.

[Bita]

... causing life-time fans to walk away from it.

Do you hear us SE?

[Gramul]

Everything in FFXI was a chore.

In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.
You find the fun and snap, the job's a game.

Unless your idea of a game is totally different, in which case you're probably more comfortable with snack style content.

Praise the sun

\o/

Praise the sun

\o/

[R0llingThund3r]

Every patch more and more like WoW. I quit playing WoW due to their lack of engaging content. Fortunately for SE, I have an FC to run, so I can't just quit on them.

[NefGP]

Thats exactly the way I see it. Abysea was released to appease the casuals and as a result the game died.

I actually don't entirely agree with that. It wasn't so much that Abyssea ruined everything, as it was just destroying too much content all at once. I'm a big fan of XI's approach to gear, but even I found myself eventually saying that it was silly that Byakko's Haidate were still the best TP pants in the game. Abyssea was fun, the gear was awesome, and it was the first real content in XI that rewarded players for their time spent - for too many years XI relied far too heavily on the RNG being outright brutally cruel. What finally killed my interest in XI was void watch, for 2 reasons:


Abyssea was just such a fun power trip where even EXPing or Meriting was a blast with little to no job descrimination like we'd had in the past, and the devs had gone right back to "Grind your soul away for eternity for a singe item" with the whole bullcrap about needing 1000 plates for the 95 upgrades on Empyreans. Empy weapons had started out as a wonderful, accessible alternative that still required effort but nowhere near on the scale of Relic or Mythic and then turned into something far worse. And more recently, the Delve weapons which just outclass everything by leaps and bounds was the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of my friends who stayed behind as I moved on to XIV (patch 1.17 at the time I think).


I don't think either game has gotten gear progression entirely right. Even though I side more with XI, there's got to be a healthy balance we can strike here. Obsoleting older content and gear with each new patch is a terrible approach that ultimately deprives players of having a wide variety of activities to do at endgame, something XI had in spades. Conversely, never making anything at all that's better than older gear is equally depressing as at some point people will become tired of the old content, however fun it may have been.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. What's the best way to tackle the issues of power creep & content? How can we give players who want to have the activities they enjoy remain relevant without things becoming stagnant for those who want something new? There are way too many people on here arguing for 1 side or the other, when it's a false choice to begin with. There are plenty of other issues as well, but I feel these are the most pressing by far in terms of the long-term health of the game.


I don't want to see older events and gear simply thrown away each update - I liked having a persistent goal in XI, gear to work toward that I knew wasn't just going to become trash shortly after getting it. That made getting friends together to go after it easier and more exciting. XI did a pretty good job of making the content fun (for the most part anyway) even if the drop rates were generally crap (it wasn't all smiles and sunshine, I did a loooooot of complaining over XI back in the day so no, it's not all rose-tinted nostalgia so please stop insinuating that.)

I don't see why that necessarily has to conflict with folks wanted to experience new content and go after new shinies on some kind of regular basis either, though. Doing it every patch is a bit much though. It's like the people who spend $800 on the new iPhone, only to ditch it for the next model that comes out. That really shouldn't be the standard.

Furthermore, why is it us XI vets are the jerks, exactly? Where are you pulling this whole notion that we simply want to hold the rest of you back for our own gratification from? If you actually played XI you'd know that you were never forced to do any one event, that was the whole point of horizontal progression - to give people options for what they wanted to do. It only sucked if you really wanted a specific item and hated the event, and generally that wasn't a fault of the content's design so much as the devs just relying too goddamn much on the RNG and beyond crappy drop rates (seriously, who the hell thought that having a less than 1% chance on anything was a good idea?! I don't care how good the kraken club was that was still an absurd thing to do.)

How about looking at yourselves the condescending attitudes that have been directed at us? How about stopping with the finger pointing and name calling. What is so horrible and wrong about having a sense of accomplishment? It's hilarious how some people on these forums whine about the game being easy mode, and that everything is spoon fed to us and then turn around crying that Titan is too hard, or that they have to have their new shinies right away because they already got bored with their current ones.

THAT is precisely why Chains of Promathia was so brutally difficult for people who didn't take the time to learn the game and prepare for each mission accordingly. The fights were challenging but not impossible for a dedicated group that actually bothered to find out what they needed to do, like farming polymers for the airship battle or salts for the bomb etc. It also kept the bad kids out of end game until they learned to be better at the game, if ever.

Seriously how many people were complaining - heck still are, really - about people going into Titan or other events and causing wipes for the party because they can't do the fight? Do you know how many PF groups I see on a daily basis on Excalibur where it's all "Know the fight or don't join" (paraphrasing here, it's usually much ruder than that sadly...) heck people are even abusing the heck out of the vote-kick system. Now a good chunk of that is old fashioned elitism, which nobody cares for. But part of it stems from the game being way too lenient pre-50, and then using item level as the only real barriers (if you can call it that) of entry into content.

I'm all for accessibility, it IS still a game after all and should be treated as such. But maybe we need to have a more serious separation of content - stuff purposely designed for the average player, and then events tailored to the serious/hardcore crowd. Right now Coil is the only form of the latter and even then it's not really the case; Enemies were generally pretty OP in XI, but it did at least force us to make the most of our tools. XIV seems to simply just rely on nonsense like landslide where if 1 person doesn't move fast enough, it screws everyone over. There's no skill in that, especially when lag can be a major factor. That's just as dumb as Pandemonium Warden spamming astral flow over and over or Absolute Virtue having access to every single Super Ability.

[LioJen]

Perhaps you could keep the sideways gear AND have vertical progression by introducing entire new tiers all at once.

Like save it all up for an expansion, so that you introduce not just 1 or 2 new armor sets at a higher ilevel, but introduce dozens of new gear sets and weapons with unique sideways abilities and effects that encourage mixing and matching gear, as well as new areas of the world and bosses tailor made for that tier (and even new content for the lower levels as well)

This way you have tons of choices and room for players to experiment with gear and content, but the entire thing is a whole tier higher than the last. This way you keep vertical progression going, but all the sideways progression within it keeps things feeling fresh for longer periods of time while you're getting the next update ready.

It also allows lower level players to have more fun before the endgame because each "tier" has more to keep them entertained before they hit the cap to move on to the next tier.

It's gated content, but within each gate is a lot of room for individuality and variations instead of what we have now which is just one set to the next with a bigger number. I don't think casual players would mind the endgame being gated if they didn't feel like all the cool stuff was only at endgame, and I don't think the hardcores would mind their gear being outdated if they had more time to play with it and feel like they got their "money's worth" out of it first.

[Taruranto]

Every patch more and more like WoW. I quit playing WoW due to their lack of engaging content. Fortunately for SE, I have an FC to run, so I can't just quit on them.

Saw this coming miles away. And people even said this game wasn't a WoW clone, ah.

[Kiara]

And therein lies the crux of the problem. What's the best way to tackle the issues of power creep & content? How can we give players who want to have the activities they enjoy remain relevant without things becoming stagnant for those who want something new? There are way too many people on here arguing for 1 side or the other, when it's a false choice to begin with. There are plenty of other issues as well, but I feel these are the most pressing by far in terms of the long-term health of the game.

I don't want to see older events and gear simply thrown away each update - I liked having a persistent goal in XI, gear to work toward that I knew wasn't just going to become trash shortly after getting it. That made getting friends together to go after it easier and more exciting. XI did a pretty good job of making the content fun (for the most part anyway) even if the drop rates were generally crap (it wasn't all smiles and sunshine, I did a loooooot of complaining over XI back in the day so no, it's not all rose-tinted nostalgia so please stop insinuating that.)

I don't see why that necessarily has to conflict with folks wanted to experience new content and go after new shinies on some kind of regular basis either, though. Doing it every patch is a bit much though. It's like the people who spend $800 on the new iPhone, only to ditch it for the next model that comes out. That really shouldn't be the standard.

Furthermore, why is it us XI vets are the jerks, exactly? Where are you pulling this whole notion that we simply want to hold the rest of you back for our own gratification from? If you actually played XI you'd know that you were never forced to do any one event, that was the whole point of horizontal progression - to give people options for what they wanted to do. It only sucked if you really wanted a specific item and hated the event, and generally that wasn't a fault of the content's design so much as the devs just relying too goddamn much on the RNG and beyond crappy drop rates.

How about looking at yourselves the condescending attitudes that have been directed at us? How about stopping with the finger pointing and name calling. What is so horrible and wrong about having a sense of accomplishment? It's hilarious how some people on these forums whine about the game being easy mode, and that everything is spoon fed to us and then turn around crying that Titan is too hard, or that they have to have their new shinies right away because they already got bored with their current ones.

THAT is precisely why Chains of Promathia was so brutally difficult for people who didn't take the time to learn the game and prepare for each mission accordingly. The fights were challenging but not impossible for a dedicated group that actually bothered to find out what they needed to do, like farming polymers for the airship battle or salts for the bomb etc. It also kept the bad kids out of end game until they learned to be better at the game, if ever.

I'm all for accessibility, it IS still a game after all and should be treated as such. But maybe we need to have a more serious separation of content - stuff purposely designed for the average player, and then events tailored to the serious/hardcore crowd. Right now Coil is the only form of the latter and even then it's not really the case; Enemies were generally pretty OP in XI, but it did at least force us to make the most of our tools. XIV seems to simply just rely on nonsense like landslide where if 1 person doesn't move fast enough, it screws everyone over. There's no skill in that, especially when lag can be a major factor. That's just as dumb as Pandemonium Warden spamming astral flow over and over or Absolute Virtue having access to every single Super Ability.

Hi NefGP,

Great post. I totally agree.

No one in favor of Horizontal Progression is asking for SE to keep it that way forever, but there should be *some* Horizontal Progression and enough time to allow more than the top 1% of players to earn, use and relish their newest gear, before it all becomes invalidated.

There's nothing wrong with wanting a sense of accomplishment looking at the RPG Roots.

For those only wanting Vertical Progression, how would you feel if Yoshi P released a weekly patch raising the Item Level and making last week's gear worthless? I know it's an extreme example, but at some point, even for Vertical Progression lovers, it becomes silly.

Besides the top FCs out there, it would probably take a solid 1 - 2 months to clear the latest "hardest content" (e.g., Coil 1 - 5, Extreme Primals), and then beyond that, dealing with the Random Number Generator to get the drops you actually want (and/or what place in line you are with your FC to receive drops), etc., which is probably another month or 2, let alone finishing up a full set of whatever highest gear set is released. Then what about your 2nd or 3rd Job and gearing that up?

At this pace (with 2.2) of about 6 months (and that's with a month delayed to Server upgrades / transfers, etc.), most average to veteran players wouldn't be close to done, or if they were, they'd have all of, maybe, a few weeks to a 1 month or so(?) to actually use and relish their rewards, before it's all invalidated by the next major patch?

This just isn't healthy. Ultimately, a lot of players come to Final Fantasy XIV because of the name of "Final Fantasy" and the hopes of some RPG aspects in this game. Having a long term goal, finally earning it, and being able to enjoy it for a little while at least, before it becomes worthless isn't too much to ask. Especially if you can use it to help you flesh out your 2nd, 3rd, 4th Jobs, and help out fellow FC / LS / Friends in the game to reach their goals.

Thanks.

[Bufkus]

Hi NefGP,
For those only wanting Vertical Progression, how would you feel if Yoshi P released a weekly patch raising the Item Level and making last week's gear worthless? I know it's an extreme example, but at some point, even for Vertical Progression lovers, it becomes silly.

I'm sorry, but this is totally asinine. There is a HUGE difference between seeing new vertical progression every 6 months vs seeing it every week.