Keeping the game basic for new players?

[Marxam]

This is why Japanese developers are falling behind. Making a game simple is not going to make it better. Chess is probably the best example of a game that follows the "Easy to learn, Hard to master" that I feel every game should follow. Several games franchises that come to mind are Demon/Dark Souls, Street Fighter and Smash Bros. to name a few. Here are examples of games that easy to understand (maybe not so much for the Souls series since its aimed at hardcore/true-gamers) but difficult to fully master.

As for FFXIV keeping things simple is only a cover up for their very poorly implemented class/job quests that are all really just fetch and trigger event battle, quests. If SE took more time in some of these quests like explaining rotations or even how to use moves properly then new gamers will be more informed and thus more attune to their class and ultimately more comfortable in harder content.

Examples of quests I would do if I was in charge:

Marauder (level 15): Upon learning "Tomahawk" the player will be sent out to the farms in Lower La Noscea where s/he must help the farmers keep the Mandragoras away from the vegetables. However the player cannot enter the fields and must stay behind the fence to avoid stepping on the delicate patches so the must resort to using "Tomahawk" to grab the Mandragoras and keep them away from their targets. This teaches the player that "Tomahawk" can be used to grab aggro from a distance and also teaches them the range of Tomahawk while being fun and playful.

Lancer (level 26): Upon learning "Full Thrust" the player must talk to Godbert who will require your help in breaking some stones to help "feug sheui" his surrounding landscape. This, however, will require you to know the basic rotation TT > VT > FT and will require you to always keep up the Heavy Thrust buff to keep up the damage to break the stones. He will then join you half way an proceed to challenge you to a contest to see who finishes first. So in addition to the normal rotation you must now include "Leg Sweep" for extra damage. This teaches the player to always start with Heavy Thrust and reinforces one of the rotations that a LNC will need to know when s/he changes to a DRG. There will be another quest against him at 50 that utilizes both rotations along with cd's but not the exact "perfect" rotation described in the DPS section of the forums as that is a bit complicated for normal gamers.

These quests are examples of small QoL changes that should be made that allows a player to fully understand their class while still being fun and informative and not the usual go here/there, trigger event, enter battle, turn in quest. Quests like these solidify the importance of the skills they have on their class and their uses. SE please take note.

TL;DR, flesh out your class/job quests more and dont reduce them to simple fetch quests then players can feel more comfortable with their class since they understand how it works and plays and will in-turn proceed to harder content to test what they learned.

[TheRogueX]

I'm sure they also said that they'll be keeping the same sort of stats on the gear, without having any sort of 'gear set attributes' because it would be too complicated. They must think we're all thick as shit...

Err.. I bet a huge percentage of the playerbase has spent a tremendous amount of time playing WoW. Gear sets are sorta the norm over there. Hell, it's the Gold Standard of MMOs and, uh, it's 1000000x more complex than this game.

As for the lack of buffing... it makes me sad. I remember playing a priest character in other games and standing on the corner in noobville just so I could buff the crap out of lowbie characters as they ran out into the world for the first time. It was great.

[Caraway]

He's got a bit of a point though... People playing this game have a hard enough time with the current classes and current content as it is. They have numbers we can never see, retention rates and exit surveys and everything. They can see what levels people get to, which quests cause the most headache, whether certain skills are underutilized.

If that data leads them to feel that complexity is anathema to this game's community then I am not at all surprised.

[SarcasmMisser]

I'm pretty sure the "it's complicated for new players" reason you see a lot is just their token nice way of saying no and they don't seriously believe that.

[Estevo]

The majority of the combat is based around the encounters, which would be fine, if it wasn't for the need to play within the rules of the fights. The problem is it's ALL encounters and NO player skill, if you mess up, it's because you didn't know the fight, or didn't do what the boss told you to, not because you played poorly.

This will be something that has to be looked into if the game is going to evolve and grow.

[Kiara1]

Unfortunately the new generation of gamers are used to the 1 hour tutorial each game has at the beginning. And tips and hints for boss battles. Remember playing zelda ocarina of time and figuring out how to beat certain bosses? That was fun but new generation gamers would generally have a much harder time figuring it out cause they are uses to pop up text boxes telling them what to do.

And unfortunately this game caters to players whove never played an mmo. Its a pity cause this game has potential to be a great with complicated and fun mechanics

[Amberion]

And unfortunately this game caters to players whove never played an mmo. Its a pity cause this game has potential to be a great with complicated and fun mechanics

While that is true. Everyone else also had a MMORPG that was their first. And somehow, we handled it well.

I would be kind of insulted if I was a new player and see how dumb they consider new players.

[Felis]

I was reading through the last live letter notes and came across this.

Q: Do you plan on adding buffer or debuffer roles?

A: At the moment we plan on continuing with the three current roles: tank, DPS, and healer. If we added more roles to these three, it would become more complicated to decide which job fits into which role, and I believe new players will be joining the game in 3.0 so we don't want to make it difficult for them to understand. For the time being we would like to keep the number of roles as it is as we move forward.

Really?? Keep in mind the question asked is irrelevant. The answer is where the problem lies "In Bold". Is the dev team assuming that new players are incapable of figuring anything out? This is not the mindset that i am looking forward to in the evolution of this game. That's fine if he wants to keep these 3 roles but his reasoning for doing so is not a good one.

I marked some parts

[Magis]

Unfortunately, with the way the MMO market is nowadays, you can't rely on your current players for revenue - too many gamers bounce around nowadays, I read an article a few years back about the life-span of an average subscription, it hovers around 2-3 months, then the player leaves and the return rate is very low. So if you cater to your current crop by the time you get them what they want, most will have already moved onto something else, specially nowadays with all the F2P mmo's that saturate the market. Gotta keep the door revolving and the only way to do that is to focus on new players.

Is that due to the player base, or the way MMOs have been developed now? It seems content has become so basic and easy that players blow through it in a single month causing down time between patches. With a lack of some large overarching goal (cause taking time to get something is hard), players quit until the next patch due to having nothing to do. Heck, this makes sense giving your time frame of 2-3 months.... the time a patch takes to come out. I recall new raids in Vanilla WoW taking a month or longer to clear (some of it was because Blizz put up rooster blocks IE: BWL), and was appalled that the Naxx remake was cleared in what... 3 days? How is that even sustainable? Heck, when XIV launched, people complained of boredom in 2.0 and the excuse was "you blew through the content". Except this was being said 3-4 months down the line. The fact was one of the biggest tools MMO devs have to stretch content out was thrown out: leveling. It could have set the pace for people, and let the devs focus on a balanced end-game, rather than this "catch-up" that is happening. Heck, CT1 was suppose to lead into Coil day 1, but got delayed to 2.1, and now it's alternating ever patch (this may have been the plan from the start, so I may be wrong).

It doesn't help that this game's difficulty makes the grinds become more mind numbing and the super fast verticle progression make the rewards meaningless. This gives a terrible combo of: This content is boring and I don't feel motivated to do it. I myself have been jumping from thing to thing trying to keep myself entertained, doing high-level BTN now.

While that is true. Everyone else also had a MMORPG that was their first. And somehow, we handled it well.

I would be kind of insulted if I was a new player and see how dumb they consider new players.

Indeed. There are games with much more complicated system than XIV yet many players of all types play them (casuals and hardcore). SE shouldn't dumb the content down for new players, rather... they should uses system to help new players learn. They did that well with the quests and tutorial system, but still don't have faith the new players aren't complete idiots?

[Lebenoshl]

Lets focus on hardcore players and ignore newbies and filthy casuals.

Look how that worked out for wildstar.