Poll: Gear progression, horizontal or vertical?

[Garlyle]

Horizontal with meaningful options.

I, for one, don't give two gil for what other players consider the best or flavour of the month. As long as I can complete content and have fun that's all that matters.

That's kind of where it gets tricky. The more 'horizontal' choices there are, the wider the gap between "choosing right" and "choosing wrong" gets. Suppose based on what gear set you're wearing, build A's maximum potential is only half that of build B. When designing content, where do designers set the bar? Do they set it for the lowest denominator so everyone can clear? Because that's fantastic, except that people who went with B are basically not even having to try while A are having to work their ass off. To create a challenge relevant to those players' capabilities, those who went with A have to be excluded.

And when you're in a build that's going to struggle to clear something others can do effortlessly... you're not clearing content, and you're not going to be having fun doing it either, because playing with other people comes with the fact that your choice of inefficiency is weighing them down. The existance of that horizontal progression either hinders your personal enjoyment or the quality of the content (and, in turn, your personal enjoyment)

And while it's a pretty extreme sounding example, the reality is that the more options there are, the wider those gaps become. The more variables in practice, the worse that gap becomes. When you specify horizontal with meaningful options, these are the kinds of gaps in capability that have to be created for it to actually feel meaningful.

Sandbox is amazing in its own right. I've enjoyed it plenty. But I've also seen it really suck because I am one of those players who will do crazy off the wall builds. I've been there, I've done that. XIV already has sufficient meaningful choice to me in playstyle through the hard locks of the classes, which are freely available, I can work to gear up and progress all of them, I can get stuff that's relevant to them while in other 'styles', and it's a small enough set of variables that even when content has 'ideals', the remaining options are still able to be tightly tuned enough to be reasonable.