SE enough of the treadmill, please make the game more interesting!

[Tiggy]

Hardcore Gamer are able to progress through Coils and get all their BIS and ilvl 110 coil gear in 6 weeks. Mid Core players get screwed over because by the time they get their BIS and ilvl 110 gear a new set of gear is out in a week and Casuals are simply left to play Coils just to see the story and unlock the next Coils.

A) you are severely over estimating the rate at which raiders gear up. I've gone over three months of wins without getting a single drop. How does that fit in your six week time frame??

B) "casuals" got Syrcus Tower and unlocked sands and oils in hunts over three months before the new coil came out completely invalidating your assertion.

Your using hyperbole to attempt to justify your opinion, but you're so far off base that it can't be taken seriously. Either you aren't paying attention to patch notes or your willfully ignoring the true pace of progression. They do a very obvious patch cycle. 3 months for hardcore then 3 months for the more casual group.It's been that way from the beginning.

[Craiger]

This is the usual problem there is with every MMO...

People want horizontal progression, but if they made that, I'm certain people would complain about there being no reason to gear up or something along those lines...

In a themepark MMO, it usually just comes down to the amount of content the developers put out, and while the amount of content SE brings us is decent, they bring us the wrong content... A major patch every 3 months is okay(like they said it would be), but it has actually been like 4 months between them all, and every other patch makes no sense in the progression of the game. I'm not a hardcore player, and I see a use for Crystal Tower, but with how the weekly cap for tomes work, every player(however casual you are) will be able to have full gear from those tomes, so the gear isn't really that important... It all comes down to items to upgrade your gear, which is nice, but a whole 4 months wait to get something that already exists in the game? (much easier mind)

Instead of releasing crystal tower like raids every other patch, they should use that development to make the game a little more horizontal (not too much though), and offer something new and challenging for the more hardcore players, but still appeal to less hardcore players. And it should only be 3 months between patches... Then it would be fine

EDIT: In fact, if they struggle to make content for both hardcore and casual players (and they don't have resources to make more content), they could just make an extreme version or something of the content they release (not 24 man raids, oh god...), which would make it much easier for them, and they could release relevant gear for hardcore players. Could even make something new that you put on your gear to get a special attribute or something. Also, I don't want 24 man raids ever... Makes everything feel meaningless and chaotic.

[MageBlack]

I thought the Coil sory centered around the 1.0 story and was heavily intertwined with that. About the battle of Cartaneu, Nael Van Darnus, Dalamud, Bahamut, etc. I'm not sure though since I have not done any of it yet. I want to as a 1.0 survivor but I'm not on consistently enough to get into a static coil party or lucky enough to get in a party willing to let me learn/teach me. I've watched vids but that only gets a person so far.

[cookiecutter]

I'm actually looking forward to the gold saucer. If its incorporated right, it should be a great place to forget about the grindier aspects of mmos. I hope they keep the prizes glamour only though since it'll stay more fun that way. If they added better gear to it, it would probably feel more like a chore than escape from the grind. The hunts were a pretty fun idea too before they became obsolete since it got more people to see the world and, it got people to try crazy things to spawn S ranks. The sightseeing log and treasure maps where also pretty decent ideas as well. SE is trying new ideas at least. They just need to create stuff that has a little more longevity and hopefully the gold saucer is just that.

[Velhart]

Still love that people want to overly complex stat/gear systems and don't think at all the consequences in adding these features. Its like they believe these ideas have no consequence to how the balance works in this game. Can someone justify why changing how the entire backbone of the game works for the worst of it is a worthwhile investment? I always love the "options" argument, there are plenty of options, you just don't like them. On just my job alone, I can choose to aim towards making a Det. set, a Crit set, a SS set, or hell I can make a balance of all three if I wanted to. The argument comes next is BiS. Well sorry to disappoint, but BiS happens no matter what you do or change. There will always be an optimized set up, there is no work around on this. SE gave you all the options by 2.3 in getting gear. You had Coils, Soldiery gear, get Sands/Oils and other gear from ST and Hunts, get weapons from primals, and so on.

Where is this idea that the game isn't offering variety in getting gear to aim towards your end game goal. The argument shouldn't be no options, it should be "I don't like these options." Instead of trying to create destructive criticism and tear the game down and build it back up, why don't you suggest new content that could be fun that does not deteriorate what the game already is? The game is open to various forms of content, you don't have to overhaul how stats/gear works to do it. Like I would love to have content like Nyzul Isle from FFXI. A 100-foot tower you go up with a 4-man group. There would obviously have to be some adjustments made to make it work in FFXIV, but I don't see why not. Not every floor has to be a gauntlet of enemies and bosses. One can be a randomized puzzle room you have to figure out before the timer goes. Hey look, I suggested something that doesn't compromise the entire backbone of the game. Its not hard.

I have just come to the conclusion that most people don't know what they want, they only know what they don't want.

[Tiggy]

The argument shouldn't be no options, it should be "I don't like these options." Instead of trying to create destructive criticism and tear the game down and build it back up, why don't you suggest new content that could be fun that does not deteriorate what the game already is?

I always find this interesting myself. Instead of offering reasonable suggestions to improve everyone starts with burning the existing system to the ground. What they don't seem to want to acknowledge is that's exactly why there suggestions will never be taken seriously. The game is out, its running, and there are so many aspects that for better or worse are ingrained deeply into the game and will never fundamentally change. So any change that tries to change those fundamentals is completely dead on arrival. We need to augment or make minor changes to existing systems and those are the suggestions we need.

They already burned the game to the ground once for 2.0. People shouldn't think there is any chance of it happening again. We need to move forward not backwards.

[MageBlack]

Tiggy: I thought i remembered reading somewhere that FFXIV will have three stories to follow. One is the main story that the game is centered around, mostly about the three city states, then there are two sub stories that supplement the main one. One of those stories being the Crystal Tower and another surrounding the fall of the Seventh(?) Umbral Era.

I could be mistaken though, its been a long while since i remembered reading that.

[Tiggy]

Tiggy: I thought i remembered reading somewhere that FFXIV will have three stories to follow. One is the main story that the game is centered around, mostly about the three city states, then there are two sub stories that supplement the main one. One of those stories being the Crystal Tower and another surrounding the fall of the Seventh(?) Umbral Era.

I could be mistaken though, its been a long while since i remembered reading that.

Sounds right to me. Scion 2.0-3.0 plot line is the main, Crystal Tower Side Story, Coil is the fall of the Seventh Umral Era side story, and the Hildebrand side story. By the time the 3.0 expansion comes out the Coil and CT stories will be completed.

[Alukah]

Yeah I wouldn't go as far as to say it has nothing to do with the main story, coil story along with CT story are meant to close the story of the calamity, the calamity is a key point of the current story.

The quests labeled as "Chronicles of a new era" are pretty much complementary stories, directly supporting the main quest, not like other "side story quests" as Hildibrand or Moogle postman quests.

[Akiza]

A reasonable option for SE would be to add a character progression system where players can augment their abilities at lvl 60 cap. Any gear based horizontal progression will end up being seen as a massive time sink.