Things going away in the x-pac

[Enkidoh]

The trouble with that sort of idea though is that you permanently cut off certain content to a section of the community as the game develops - we've already seen this with the changeover from 1.0 and the amount of players complaining about everything that was lost in 1.0 and the constant demands to bring it all back in some form or another probably has dissuaded SE from considering such an idea with ARR.

And having said that, there has been minor changes to the game world as the game progresses (the addition of the friendly beastmen areas, and the gradual development of Revenant's Toll with each content patch, from the dingy glorified camp it was originally at launch through to the booming adventurer's city is it now at the end of 2.55. We'll continue to see things change and develop as the game progresses.

[Veral]

It would be too much to have separate instances of cities for new and old players...Say Limsa sinks beneath the waves..it no longer exists...that would be interesting but if it was actually implemented i wouldnt be able to join or help out any new people that start off in the city the player population would be completely split in half and that's not a good thing whatsoever. You would only get that in a single player RPG. I can deal with the shifting of NPC's but for a whole city to be left ruined (say limsa sinking or even Mor Dhona being attacked by the Garleans or some such) i think is a bit much for an mmo where there are thousands of individual players connected to one another on a single server.

[Vandril]

It would be too much to have separate instances of cities for new and old players...Say Limsa sinks beneath the waves..it no longer exists...that would be interesting but if it was actually implemented i wouldnt be able to join or help out any new people that start off in the city the player population would be completely split in half and that's not a good thing whatsoever. You would only get that in a single player RPG. I can deal with the shifting of NPC's but for a whole city to be left ruined (say limsa sinking or even Mor Dhona being attacked by the Garleans or some such) i think is a bit much for an mmo where there are thousands of individual players connected to one another on a single server.

Actually, phasing has already been done successfully in an MMORPG - World of Warcraft. It took them a few expansions to get it more or less right, but, at the least, it is functional and largely unobtrusive (largely - it's still off-putting when people in other phases just...disappear after crossing a zone border). The "can't play with people in other phases" problem can easily be solved (for the most part) by making the party leader's phase take precedence over any other members'.

That said, my point is only that it is both technologically possible and feasible for an MMO to implement a player-specific phasing feature. Whether its addition is an overall benefit or detriment is debatable.

Actually, hell, come to think of it, very mild phasing is already part of FFXIV! Consider Revenant's Toll throughout the main quest storyline. The number and variety of NPCs in the town slowly increase as the quest chain is worked through, on the basis of the individual player's progress. Where said NPC might be there for one person, it won't be there for another. That is phasing. I believe it's even inclusive phasing, where players with various differences in the town around them are all in the same "instance" of the town regardless, rather than exclusive phasing where players are segregated into different instances of the town depending on what NPCs are available to said player.

[DmgAtton]

For people that are completionnists, even if it means doing past content, is there anything going away forever in the x-pac?

I mainly mean : dungeons, raids, achievements....

Anything you have until the 23rd to see and do?

Thanks

This isn't WOW or Blizzard so nothing is getting removed like in WOW

[Woggers]

I wish SE would implement individual phasing so we can actually experience the World change as we progress through our questline. Alas, they're just going to add more and more new zones and each zone in the game will actually be on a different timeline so to speak.

Like Revenant's Toll? RT has grown exponentially since ARR release. I hope they add more stuff like this in the future as well. It'll be cool to see some of the other outposts grow as well.

[Niwashi]

Like Revenant's Toll?

That isn't really phasing, since its changes have occurred without regard for what's going on in the story. The game does use phasing quite frequently with NPCs, who may or may not appear depending on where you are in the story. And at least after one particular incident the Waking Sands has phasing that goes beyond just which NPCs are there.

SE seems to be trying to avoid the type of phasing that splits players out into different instances, instead preferring the type where two players can be standing next to each other but see different surroundings. I think that's probably for the best, though it might limit them from making larger sweeping changes between different phases of the storyline.

[Niwashi]

As a simple example, they cannot change traversable paths with inclusive phasing. That, of course, means that things like city destruction can't be phased inclusively unless they suspiciously left all traversable paths exactly the same - what kind of ruined city has perfectly unblocked streets?

Real destruction (or construction, for that matter) would be limited, but they could still show major damage to a city if they wanted to. They could do things like having a few buildings (ones we couldn't enter anyway, but were part of the scenery) having collapsed into ruins, while others have boarded up windows, big cracks in the walls, and maybe a hole in the roof or something. Add in a few carefully placed bits of rubble where other non-traversable scenery had been, and they could create changes more dramatic than we've seen so far.

When they do a temporary change that occurs only during a single quest, like wagons or a crashed airship or something appearing in what's normally a road or open field, they've done it visually but without any collision detection, so you can walk right through such obstacles. That can be pretty immersion breaking unless you just deliberately avoid walking through it, though, so isn't really suited to anything that's going to remain in place any longer than a single quick quest. (Conditionally-appearing NPCs aren't quite as distracting, since the game lacks collision detection between characters anyway, but when larger pieces of scenery that you'd normally expect to block the path don't, it creates a bigger reminder of that bit of unreality.) But maybe this technique could be used if rubble in the streets appeared only during the first quest after a city went through a major destructive event. Have that quest be to clear rubble from the streets or recruit NPCs to do so, and once that quest is done the rubble that would have blocked paths (if it had collision detection) is no longer present, though damage to buildings remains longer.

So yeah, it could be done, but would have to be set up pretty carefully to keep the same area usable both by players who have passed that point in the story and others who haven't.

[Belhi]

Phasing can be tricky for several reasons. One of the biggest ones though is that it can lead to a divided playerbase. You could have 20 people in a town in 5 different phases but due to the fact that the players are out of sinc with each other they only see 4 or 5 at the most. This can make the world feel a lot more empty and also cause problems with people playing together if they are 'out of sync' on certain content.

It also requires more server space and processing and tends to have a higher risk of bugs the more its used.

In short, Technology like Phasing is best used in moderation.

[DmgAtton]

Thanks for telling this WOW fan boy y this "Phasing" whop suck, I have a real friend who may play this MMO cause they like FF games and I wouldn't be able to say get to lvl 30 then we can play together will I leave up a new Job if they Phased me out of place due to my completion of the ARR Story or oh look I can't do class/job/crafting guild quest cause I am out of phase with the city state as of current

[Vandril]

Phasing can be tricky for several reasons. One of the biggest ones though is that it can lead to a divided playerbase. You could have 20 people in a town in 5 different phases but due to the fact that the players are out of sinc with each other they only see 4 or 5 at the most. This can make the world feel a lot more empty and also cause problems with people playing together if they are 'out of sync' on certain content.

It also requires more server space and processing and tends to have a higher risk of bugs the more its used.

In short, Technology like Phasing is best used in moderation.

I call phasing that segregates players based on criteria "exclusive phasing", and this player separation is definitely an issue on MMOs as they are inherently social-based games. I much prefer the "inclusive phasing" that FFXIV is currently using, despite the limitations.

Thanks for telling this WOW fan boy y this "Phasing" whop suck, I have a real friend who may play this MMO cause they like FF games and I wouldn't be able to say get to lvl 30 then we can play together will I leave up a new Job if they Phased me out of place due to my completion of the ARR Story or oh look I can't do class/job/crafting guild quest cause I am out of phase with the city state as of current

I was fully aware of the issues that phasing can cause. I'm a game designer/programmer in training; I pretty much need to know all about this sort of thing. But you do realize, I hope, that I never once said that they should add phasing to FFXIV, right? In fact, I never even said I liked phasing. All I said in my initial post where you misguidedly labeled me as a "WOW fan boy" was that (exclusive) phasing had been done properly in the past in an MMO, meaning that it is both possible and feasible given today's technology.

I then went on to explain that FFXIV is actually already using (inclusive) phasing in a cleverly unobtrusive way.

So, remind me again why you're on my back over this?