Staggering Alexander Unlocks After Launch

[Aethaeryn]

Looks like it will be gated per this interview:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/wiki/pax_2015_interview

Thanks, Hadley! (And long time no chat. I left Excalibur last summer. )

snip

And thank you for that information too. I guess it's pretty easy to forget that even people who rush for world firsts like to enjoy some of the other new content too. I wonder if some might be annoyed at having to wait a couple of weeks before being able to tackle Alexander anyway. Can't please everyone, I guess.

[Hadey]

Thanks, Hadley! (And long time no chat. I left Excalibur last summer. )

Hey! I saw your forum name and wondered if that was you. Good to see you again! Do you still have a character on Excalibur? I thought I saw you when I was grinding out the gathering Lucis tools. Do you and N**** still play together? Tell her I said hi! Unfortunately, I lost touch with most of the PO people. Been trying recently to reach out to a few of them. Anyhow, hope all is well with you and that your new server is working out for you. ^^

[Aethaeryn]

Hey! I saw your forum name and wondered if that was you. Good to see you again! Do you still have a character on Excalibur? I thought I saw you when I was grinding out the gathering Lucis tools. Do you and N**** still play together? Tell her I said hi! Unfortunately, I lost touch with most of the PO people. Been trying recently to reach out to a few of them. Anyhow, hope all is well with you and that your new server is working out for you. ^^

Yup, still have Kero there, but trying to keep three characters relevant was burning me out, so I just log on her to chat with PO. And we do, and she says hi back! Really good to see you too! Sorry I took off without saying anything; it was a pretty sudden decision on my part.

I just assumed the "even ground" was targeted towards -just- the World First community. This allows for a higher potential number of groups to be in the running.

I'm not a 'world first' player, but I'd probably still feel pressured to plow through the new stuff. As such, I'm glad tomestones won't be immediately available either.

Edit: (Not all of my message pasted for some reason) I skipped over a lot of story stuff from the last couple of patches in a race to get new dungeons unlocked and start capping tomes etc. But anyway, I guess I'd still prefer if people had the choice to steamroll content. Two weeks is kind of excessive for the amount of time some people put into playing.

[carraway]

Players of other games have often voiced dissatisfaction with developers for artificial delays when they seem excessive, or as a method to "hide" the fact that content is unfinished. I don't think a week or two of delay is unreasonable.

Since someone else brought it up: Blizzard has staggered raid unlocks since Mists of Pandaria's release, wherein the first normal raid was unlocked about 10 days after the expansion's release. For Warlords of Draenor, the first normal/medium-difficulty raid was unlocked roughly two and a half weeks after the expansion's release.

Personally, if I'm going to set aside time for the raid content, I'd rather only do that once -- for the actual raid content -- and be able to level jobs, do quests, etc., at my own pace.

For other players, being given more time before the raid unlocks means they have more time to play the new jobs, get comfortable with new gameplay, and generally stretch their legs in the expansion before settling into static groups.

[Seig345]

I just assumed the "even ground" was targeted towards -just- the World First community. This allows for a higher potential number of groups to be in the running. As has already been stated, those groups are gonna eat up the new content lickity split anyway, but some groups may not be as quick as others in that area, which arguably takes longer than getting through one run nof an actual raid. Instead of it being a race to gear-up for the raids and then beat them first, the race simply begins with the raids themselves.

[raelgun]

I just assumed the "even ground" was targeted towards -just- the World First community. This allows for a higher potential number of groups to be in the running. As has already been stated, those groups are gonna eat up the new content lickity split anyway, but some groups may not be as quick as others in that area, which arguably takes longer than getting through one run nof an actual raid. Instead of it being a race to gear-up for the raids and then beat them first, the race simply begins with the raids themselves.

Pretty much this, if people didnt realise, the devs watched the road to world first for final coil and even congratulated the JP FC that got it first, if players dont care, well clearly the devs care.

[Melondra]

yea that's why it was done. I wouldn't be to happy either if I had worked on a project this large just for the player-base to steam role through it. He pretty much wants you to enjoy the beauty of heaven-sword and all it has to offer, pass behavior in this game shows that the player-base will try to rolle through this content as quickly as possible. Remember Castrium M and Pratatorium you had new players in a lot of those partys and what do you hear"you can Watch the cut-scenes at the Inn" This is what he is trying to prevent. In my opinion any time you have run a dungeon for the very first time they should remove the Skip-Cut-scene option untill you have seen the full cut-scene in its entiredy at least once.

[Stormrider]

Also I have not seen anyone mention the history of protecting players from players. No tells and more gated runs in newer dungeons. While more then likely speed runners will try to fight with the cut sceners. If all it takes is a two week window to help aleviate that. Would you be surprised at all.

Now if the raid is a buggy mess you will know they were buying time. Also anyone who has done a few expansions knows the game/servers are a crashing mess. If they haven't stabilized for the most part after two weeks I would also be worried we got a rushed product. Last one I did for WoW was Lich King and they either had maintenance almost every other day. Or they had to take wintergrasp off line so they could keep the servers up.

[Zumi]

I don't really like this at all. I am one of those people who wants to level up their job as soon as possible and do new content dungeons for tomes and raid for gear. When FFXI raised the level cap above 75, I had 5 jobs to the new cap on the first day. I do not find it hard to level cap jobs in a mmo.

With not releasing raids or the new dungeons for new tomestones until 2 weeks after. They choosing for me what content I will do which will then be to level up all my jobs/crafts to 60 and the new jobs before doing anything else. I rather level up my PLD first focus on that gear it up with new content rather then doing a bunch of leveling grinding for jobs I won't really play much at all.

Blizzard did the exact same thing for their last 2 expansions MoP and WoD, delayed the raids for a couple weeks a lot of hard core players were not happy with this because they sat around leveling alts while waiting the few weeks for the raids to unlock so I don't know why SE is doing it.

[raelgun]

Blizzard did the exact same thing for their last 2 expansions MoP and WoD, delayed the raids for a couple weeks a lot of hard core players were not happy with this because they sat around leveling alts while waiting the few weeks for the raids to unlock so I don't know why SE is doing it.

And a lot were just fine with it and found it fun to watch the top 10 battle it out for the world first, just like people are interested in watching the 100 m sprinters, you put them on the same starting line and see who does it the quickest.

The developers sure had fun watching it, why can't SE devs have fun with this as well.