[dev1027] Game Difficulty: Adventure/Fantasy Experience and Fightingthrill"

[Jabo]

First of all i like to encourage the developers. I realy like their level of dediction they put in improving this game.
It is mainly the reason why i still play it. Keep up the good work!

Now to my biggest concern:
I intended to write a huge letter with specific suggestions but somehow there is realy one thing and one thing only that bothers me in this game.
(Yes, I can live with the class names the battle system and so on. Taking the UI aside, these things arent realy that bad).

But for me the most important thing in an RPG ist the Role Play Experience.
In short:
-Beeing (part) in a fantasy world,
-feeling like a hero,
-experiencing adventures
and in the MMO concept: experiencing them with friends.


Fantasy World
I personaly realy like the story in this game.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The hint of a bigger threat, endangering the whole world we play in, is realy exciting and gives us the feeling of beeing part in something bigger (bigger that we are able to sea now).

It is a problem though that many things in the cutscenes cant be comprehended. Especially the conflict with the Beast Tribes and the War in Al Mhigo. All things that noone will realy notice during actualy playing the game.
SPOILER END

It also bothers me quit a lot, that you can play the whole game in one Area. An Area (like all City-Areas) whitch lacks iconic lendmarks or other recognizable locations.
Fighting in an exciting area can be a huge motivation playing a RPG!

Feeling like a Hero
This point bothers me the most. In one sentence: You cant feel like a hero, because the game ist extremly easy.
FFXIV has a "Kill as fast as possible" playstile (because it is the only challange in the game), witch leads to many different problems:
1. (solo/duo/(small party))
You somehow realy feel more like someone cleaning areas up, than actually beeing engaged in a battle for life and death.
Your biggest concern while playing is, if there are enough enemys to kill and how much SP/Hr you can get.
-> You start to see rivals in other players, steeling your spots f.e.
-> You spent a lot of time (walking) searching for enemys
-> You dont have the feeling of acomplishment

2. (party/leves/behest)
The very low difficulty is a reason why players dont have to try their best or not even close to that.
It is realy suprising how many Rank 40+ Players cant play this game as they should.
The reason: They dont need to.
Also peoeple should join together because they feel that they have to. The motivation should be a threatening/dangerous world and not SP Bonuses.
-> A lot of "Bad Players" effecting the fun of party play
-> People joining together for SP and not for fun or experience

Experiencing Adventures
This point has something of everything i mentioned abov but is mainly a problem because of the lack of content so I know this will change in the future.

Suggestions
In my opinion all these thing can easily be improved.
Enemys could get more HP or maybe get stronger overall. On the other hand players should also earn more SP/EXP points (Maybe 50% more HP and 50% more SP).
This will reduce the feeling of jumping from one enemy to another, without an actual thrill of battle.

The party-play can easily be improved (as the point above) with a Death-Penalty.
People would be more concerned about what is actualy happening during beattle.
The will to help players in need, will also be encouraged and so a overall feeling of holding/playing together.
The penalty doesnt need to be as hard as in FFXI (in my personal opinion it could be even harder, but thats just me).
It can be something simple like a slight Physical EXP Penalty or a Surplus Boost.
Physical Level doesnt hurt you mutch but you will try to prevent it.
Increasing the Speed of getting Surplus because of dying would be a realy nice and smooth way to punish someone, too.
This could also solve the problem of death-warps!
Of course this askes for changes in enemy locations or - in general - of enemys one-hit-kill attacks.

Thank you for reading.
Jabo

[Jabo]

Had to delate first one because of wrong title name.

[Sephr]

I like most of it bar the surplus increase upon death, that seems excessively harsh and there are much better ways of dealing with a death penalty.

[Eclipse]

I would like to read more on this.

[Jabo]

I like most of it bar the surplus increase upon death, that seems excessively harsh and there are much better ways of dealing with a death penalty.

Like?

There is also always the possibility to regulate the surplus increase.
For example: If you need 50.000 SP to Hit Surplus 1, you get 2.000 SP less every time you die (48.000, 46.000 and so on). Could also be 1.000 or 5.000 or even 10.000.
U realy need to to try hard dying 10 times in a week. This would still be maybe 0,5h-1,5h gaining in surplus count. That would be ruffly 2.000 sp. Losing future (If you inted to play after surplus) 2000sp for dying 10 times in 7 days isn't realy a lot. It's 0,2%-1% on your rank up need. For dying once, IF you play after surplus.

It is definitly a lot smaller penalty than EXP loss and Level Down(!) in FFXI.
Also: The penalty has to "hurt." There would be no point if it does not.

The problem with surplus increase would be more likely that it is a bigger disadvantege for people who play more often as they are more effected on surplus in general.

[Budi]

I agree with most of it. I noticed a lot of "dumb" players who still don't know how this game works (claiming, enmity, roles) who are rank 40+ and ruin the gaming experience for the other party members. As Jado said, this behavior is caused by the "easyness" of the game. They don't need to think, because their actions have no great impact.

About the death penalty: I don't want a punishment for death, but for having to return. So you don't lose exp/gain surplus when you die, but when you return. This makes revives/ressurects more usefull, because most of the time you are in the near of a camp anyway.

[Budi]

Off-Topic Rant:
Stop talking about how terrible a jump feature would be and how much you want that auto-attack! There is no time to talk about meaningless topics at this current state of the game. Would you really start to ENJOY the game with Auto-Attack/Jump - would you STOP playing it if they would add it?

We have to improve the real problems this game has...
Sorry, but I'm really mad that this thread has almost no comments.

On Topic: Bump.