Thread: Some contents in 1.23 are better than ARR

Originally Posted by WeiShan

10.You will need to join a party in most content,so you can make a lot of friends.

This is actually the biggest flaw with old style MMOs and one of the biggest sources of their lack of appeal. Forcing people to form groups makes the time it takes to complete content take a billion jillion times longer. Hence the Duty Finder and Party Finder which make this easier. I'm not saying that this kind of content shouldn't exist. It SHOULD and it DOES in the form of endgame raid and maybe Extreme primals. But, this should not be "most content" because MOST players don't have time for that. It's part of why your beloved 1.x died and deserved to die. If you like that kind of thing XI still exists.

Originally Posted by Fuddy

This is actually the biggest flaw with old style MMOs and one of the biggest sources of their lack of appeal. Forcing people to form groups makes the time it takes to complete content take a billion jillion times longer. Hence the Duty Finder and Party Finder which make this easier. I'm not saying that this kind of content shouldn't exist. It SHOULD and it DOES in the form of endgame raid and maybe Extreme primals. But, this should not be "most content" because MOST players don't have time for that. It's part of why your beloved 1.x died and deserved to die. If you like that kind of thing XI still exists.

If people don't have the time to invest in a something, why the hell are they even doing it. I just don't get this way of thinking. This is a genre that has its roots in party play. Its party play that help build and promotes community, it also help police the community to a point. You can't be an ass if there is consequences to your actions, that's why I loved mmos before they started the cross server crap, you could have friends and rivals and jackasses either shaped up or would be blacklisted by the community. Now we have complaints of a 'toxic' community because there is no repercussion to being an ass, because there is a good chance you will never see that person again.

Originally Posted by Artemed

If people don't have the time to invest in a something, why the hell are they even doing it.

Time available to invest is all relative to the person playing it. I personally hated 11 because you spent more time looking for parties than actually doing anything.

If you really, truly wanted to have some people to hang out with, you'd find a way to do so. Even before I joined an FC, if people were out doing things at the same time as me, I'd interact with them. We aren't in the same FC. I talk to people in CT runs. If they're on the same server, cool, may be able to group with them later.

Just because you aren't forced to make a party and can do things solo or through DF doesn't mean that there's no interaction. Yes, you have to make an actual effort to do so, that's the difference. If people don't take the opportunities, that's them. Its not going to fall in your lap.

The community is considered toxic for a ton of reasons other than "there aren't any consequences."

Originally Posted by Artemed

If people don't have the time to invest in a something, why the hell are they even doing it. I just don't get this way of thinking.

Profitable game design (Many would outright say good game design) requires that a game be ACCESSIBLE. The average gamer is no longer a teenager with obscene amounts of free time. Using FFXI as an example I often spent as long just forming a party and doing NOTHING BUT looking for a party as I ended up being able to spend leveling or doing whatever content. Game designers need to think about the player's sense of reward for their investment of time. A game that forces you to form your own parties in large inhospitable worlds certainly offer plenty of immersion. You would probably say a lot more "immersion" than FFXIV currently offers but the problem in this case is that immersion breaks accessibility. The full-time working Mom just isn't going to be able to play the game you wish FFXIV was in any practical way. This person essentially CANNOT play and CANNOT enjoy the game making it inaccessible for him or her. This is why the gameplay you enjoy is enjoying a slow death. Until robots are doing our jobs and the vast majority of us no longer have work or responsibility you wont see a resurgence in that type of gameplay.

Originally Posted by Fuddy

The full-time working Mom just isn't going to be able to play the game you wish FFXIV was in any practical way.

The full-time working Mom isn't going to be playing XIV anyway, as this game is heavily endgame focused and that requires a time commitment, something casual players like said Mom dread.

Originally Posted by i2agnarok

The problem is on both sides of the fence.

On one hand, anyone that consider themselves remotely hardcore at any game always tends to place the genre on a pedestal. In this day and age, all of the information is laid out for you to have access to, not just limited to gaming, but life in general. People refuse to take advantage. People will always be terrible at things. MMOs are the same thing. This game is so easy when you look at it objectively that I don't consider anything that has to do with the actual mechanics of the game require any special set of skills that makes it something that only someone with knowledge and experience with MMOs can ever feasibly tackle. MMOs still require the same skills as any other game, plus an awareness of what other people are doing.

On the other side, everyone that's not an MMO player acts like people that are hardcore have no lives. I don't consider myself hardcore by any stretch of the imagination. I don't even like MMOs in most cases. However, I can watch a video, learn a pattern, and observe what other people are doing and not get wiped by Titan a million times. The only thing that I find time consuming by this is that most of the content later is just another facet of MMOs; you have to depend on other people and, just like in real life, they can screw you over repeatedly. People can call people nerds, say they have no lives, wipe groups repeatedly, and then can say that they don't have time to invest in learning a fight. 10 minute video should be all you need to one-shot half these fights, especially for people running around in complete i90s (minus lag checks).

As long as games exist, those two viewpoints are going to exist and the disconnect is going to cause "elitism," fabricated or not.

EDIT:



Why do I keep falling victim to rehashed threads? -_-

This sums up my thoughts exactly. I don't cater to the hardcore/casual crap. There can be people who spend a ton of time in the game and they can be completely useless in a group setting just as there is a person who only logs for a couple hours a week, but are completely awesome and are a boon for anyone that groups with them. Personally I'd rather group people as competent or incompetent, even though that itself is an assholish way to look at things, but when I want to do something in the game, I want to get it done with as little stress as possible, I get enough of that crap irl. As for the people who are bad and make no efforts to improve themselves or willing to recognize their own shortcomings? I don't want them in my groups, and while the majority of this game is by no means 'hard' (certain fights withstanding, I'm looking at you Titan...) I don't want to waste time having to babysitting someone who should be able to handle themselves and are willing to improvise in a pinch.

Originally Posted by Artemed

stuff

Companies have to make a decision, and they want to bring in more money.

Also using gaming (albeit a different genre) as an example, many hardcore fans of fighting games have also made similar complaints. People argue that Guilty Gear was one of the greatest fighting games around and had a very strong fanbase that had some pretty hardcore mechanics. However, it isn't accessible to everyone because of the myriad of things you have to learn, practice, and they aren't explained to you at all. The player base that was good at the game was also very unfriendly to newcomers. The barrier of entry was very steep.

The same company later released a new series of fighter that was far more accessible. Sure, the veterans of their beloved series were taken back by the relative ease of the game and the more lenient learning curve. Many didn't continue with this new series, but most of those who continued playing were happy to have a game that they could actually play with a larger base of players. The community reformed as new members came in and are better off for it. Many actually went back and started playing the previously-inaccessible game, even.

I hated FF11 for what I played of it. I hated it immensely. It was not accessible due to the requirements and time that had to be invested before you could do anything at all. At the time, many classes weren't viable at all in most situations. I hear the story was great. I hear once you got to endgame, it was very entertaining. I wouldn't know because I didn't care to partake in the chore you had to go through to progress on a day-to-day basis. The barrier to entry shouldn't be trying to get people together or not being able to play a class you liked because it was gimped compared to others or the metagame reduced it to one particular niche. The community may have been fantastic, but when everything is just an extreme grindfest, most of the people you're going to encounter are going to be in it for the long haul.

I'm not in love with FF14. However, it is what it is. At least I can actually play and enjoy it. Yes, there are some pretty godawful players. When you have more people, that's just to be expected. Company wants to make a profit, so they're going to appeal to as many people as possible. They can make adjustments, which everyone is going to expect to happen overnight, but thinking they aren't going to try to reign in the casual audience and make things less hardcore when that's what 95% of the gaming industry is doing is just setting yourselves up for disappointment.

I truly did have an interest in many things FF11 did on paper; however, the way it was executed made it inaccessible to me and many others.