Poll: Gear progression, horizontal or vertical?

[Sapphic]

The original ever quest is 17 bloody years old.

He was talkiong about EQ2. Plus it has been free to play a few years now.

[Catsby]

Do I want to keep running old stuff for the next couple years? Yes, actually. I would like content to be fun, engaging and compliment anything new that's added.

I don't understand why people think MMOs have to be self destructive in order to survive.

[Sapphic]

Do I want to keep running old stuff for the next couple years? Yes, actually. I would like content to be fun, engaging and compliment anything new that's added.

I don't understand why people think MMOs have to be self destructive in order to survive.

Because it would be extremely smart to change from a model that is working and much more succesful than they even hoped, to something else because....

MMO designer rule number 1: Don't piss of your core base making changes to try and get an imaginary new audience.
If you want to know how that goes when you ignore that, look back at SWG with New game experience.

Players like new things. Simple as. FFXI worked to a certain degree with a niche crowd of players, FFXIV appeals to more players, plus FFXI had less competition at the time. FFXI design is no longer viable in the present market. It's getting its last ever content updates this year, shutting down PS2 and xbone support (albeit I think the didn't have any choice in that matter, imo they should have dropped support for those consoles years ago, and took FFXI to the next level, improved UI, graphics etc).

So lets go with em changing to pure horizontel, you have your gear, then what? They release new content, you clear it once, what do you do for the rest of the time until the new content is released? As you have your set, theres no reason to run any new content more than once. Because if that new content drops better gear, even if it is at the same level, it is vertical progression. Something you said you do not want, as you stated you wanted horizontal progression over vertical.

So to extend content you would be happy with an extrememly low drop rate? So it is down to pure luck if/when you get the item. Or make it token based, few hundred runs maybe to get enough tokens for the gear? Make that for every drop? How long do you think the population would continue to exist after that? Still doesn't cover after you get the set, what then? Nothing could replace it, otherwise as I stated prior, vertical progression (vertical as you are increasing in power).

Yyyyyyeah um hate to tell you but FFXI is a bad example. It doesn't really have horizontal progression, so much as just having more armor and weapon sets than XIV (due to being 5x older) that are just upgraded. It's vertical progression with a farm instead of a houseplant. But that farm started from a houseplant.
Also the way they're acquired and upgraded would make someone annoyed by the Zodiac quests in this game scream in agony just READING about it.

Well it was the gearswapping that made it horizontal. As you built up different sets for pretty much every ability to maximise. As DNC, i'd have TP set with mucho double and triple attack, plus dual wield. Waltz potency set to macro waltz cures, step accuracy set, samba gear, Jig gear, mid and high accuracy gear, flourish gear plus WS gear. To maximise you had to have all these different sets of gear. Inventory management was a b*tch XD.

NBut yus, I don't want to be farming FFXIVs equivalent of Nyzul and Dyna 1 year+ from now either.

[Gunspec]

A problem with horizontal gear progression in FFXIV is that we ALREADY have severe trouble in terms of inventory management. Thanks to vertical progression, you can safely discard any gear you have replaced, unless you want to hold on to it for cosmetics.

With horizontal progression, you would need to keep multiple sets of gear to mix and match the secondary stats. For example, if they were to design gear to utilize elemental resistance for horizontal progression, you'd need at least 6 sets of gear on hand in order to fight the extreme primals in a row.

With vertical progression, you'll be using the same amount of storage space for your important gear in three years as you are using today. (Assuming classes continue falling in the general established categories.)

[Gralna]

A problem with horizontal gear progression in FFXIV is that we ALREADY have severe trouble in terms of inventory management. Thanks to vertical progression, you can safely discard any gear you have replaced, unless you want to hold on to it for cosmetics.

With horizontal progression, you would need to keep multiple sets of gear to mix and match the secondary stats. For example, if they were to design gear to utilize elemental resistance for horizontal progression, you'd need at least 6 sets of gear on hand in order to fight the extreme primals in a row.

With vertical progression, you'll be using the same amount of storage space for your important gear in three years as you are using today. (Assuming classes continue falling in the general established categories.)

I don't really get this "multiple sets" debate, few horizontal mmo's i played, had stat caps, so all you had to do was build a template that capped all the relevant stats you needed, even though it was very difficult sometimes to find out what pieces you needed, it was very feasible to max out all stat bonuses and resistances relevant to your class.

[kyuven]

I don't really get this "multiple sets" debate, few horizontal mmo's i played, had stat caps, so all you had to do was build a template that capped all the relevant stats you needed, even though it was very difficult sometimes to find out what pieces you needed, it was very feasible to max out all stat bonuses and resistances relevant to your class.

Those aren't true horizontal progression, though. That's vertical progression with more useless pieces of gear. If you have 12 gear slots and 144 pieces of gear to choose from that are all the "same level" and specific stat caps to reach, you're still only going to pick 12 of those 144 items every time, and the other 132 are either going to hit the floor or take up space in your inventory.
True horizontal progression has situational gear, such as DPS sets for tanks, healers, and support, resist sets for everyone, damage type sets, different emphases for different resists, etc.
XI is the crowning example of how horizontal progression works, and also how it's a horrible idea for games that aren't FFXI.
For endgame gear, there are currently about 5-6 different sets of iLevel 119 gear in the game: Relic, AF, Empy, and 2-3 more I'm not up on, plus tons of jewelry.
Many of those pieces augment specific stats or skills, and you can change equipment in combat so people will actually macro gear changes to coincide with specific attacks (and since your character briefly blinks out as the equipment is applied, this means endgame raiding looks like a strobe effect).
Unfortunately this ALSO means each job uses up an absolutely absurd amount of equipment slots, and since this is one of the few games where your worn equipment takes up inventory space, you're already limited. Now, if this were a single class structured game it'd be fine, but XI uses the Job system similar to XIV's, with the addition of subjobs. So without a lot of inventory finagling and mules (that you have to pay more per month to have access to) the idea of having more than one job "maxed" means it takes about 5 full minutes to swap jobs as you need to completely change your inventory loadout. Certain mods help this but they're...kinda gray market.
If you go horizontal, you NEED multiple sets to justify going horizontal. Otherwise it's just vertical with more useless inventory garbage.
The only other game I can remember that did horizontal progression was EverQuest 1 (and probably other games of that era), and that was completely nullified in recent years with the introduction of Defiant gear that was used to streamline the leveling process. Other than that, most "horizontal progression" left in the game is getting random knick-knacks to help with the latest set of raids.
And glamour is not a reason for horizontal progression and shouldn't even be considered as an excuse.

Not really, just make horizontal progression gear with different playstyles but that can make up for it with other playstyles.

That is why I like Horizontal Vertical. It is as you described (above me!) however it is less punishing. You can tank end game raids for example with the DPS set of tank gear. As long as you have full Healing gear healers to make up for it. However if you go Full tank, that means for example now healers can hybrid as dps as well. So you just have to have a balance.

Ummm...that exact situation already plays out currently, except healers don't really NEED extra gear options to go DPS since crit and det are used for both and Cleric Stance trades MND with INT.
Which is part of the issue with adding horizontal to this game: We have consolidated stats. We don't have "Cure Potency" or "X skill increase," we have the main stats, det, crit, parry, block, accuracy, skill speed, and spell speed. With the exception of Parry, Skill Speed, and Spell Speed, the skills are all universal against all jobs, which makes making diverse gear problematic.

[Gralna]

snip

I beg to differ, DAoC was about as horizontal as you could get, they refused to even raise the lvl cap for fear of power creep. There was no true BiS due to utility that pretty much all endgame gear had, there were a few pieces that majority of people coveted after, but they were carefully balanced to never be overpowered. Procs from gear were so weak, only impact they had was in solo content, anything raid worthy was so powerful that your procs were all but useless, /use abilities generally had 10-30 min re-use timers, making them fairly impractical for any kind of strategy, and even then were insignificant in their impact on endgame.

Carrying around extra gear just for it's /use was useless also, since equipping it reset it's re-use timer.

A fine example of how horizontal progression can be implemented, without requiring cheap gear swapping tactics, or requiring people to carry multiple sets of gear for each raid.

[kyuven]

snip.

Important to ask the question, though: If it was so great, WHY has no other game managed to even attempt to come close to it?
horizontal progression systems get very, very murky and impenetrable, since in order to be viable for all those situations, you need a different set for each one, which means grinding out those sets. And that increases the impenetrable nature down the line when they *MUST* introduce new content and gear. DAOC ran into this problem head long, and so has every other MMO with horizontal progression.

[Ultimatecalibur]

...
True horizontal progression has situational gear, such as DPS sets for tanks, healers, and support, resist sets for everyone, damage type sets, different emphases for different resists, etc.
...
If you go horizontal, you NEED multiple sets to justify going horizontal.
...

I agree with you, kyuven, but feel that these particular sentences need to be expanded upon.

Having a thousand different specialty gear sets each with different benefits does nothing if you do not have content where each set is advantageous over the baseline BiS. Resist and damage type sets are useless if there is no content where having them is advantageous. For example if the Primals were easier to take down with elemental Melded i110 crafted gear then people farming Primals would regularly gear up in that stuff.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

Not really, just make horizontal progression gear with different playstyles but that can make up for it with other playstyles.

That is why I like Horizontal Vertical. It is as you described (above me!) however it is less punishing. You can tank end game raids for example with the DPS set of tank gear. As long as you have full Healing gear healers to make up for it. However if you go Full tank, that means for example now healers can hybrid as dps as well. So you just have to have a balance.