The Weekly Cap - Am I completely disillusioned?

[Kaedan]

this whole idea of "Well you have to have caps or people would get everything and then stop playing." Is stupid. If that's the case then maybe your game is shit. Maybe you need to change what you're doing so that it's enjoyable enough to want to do beyond having not cleared it. Or maybe... JUST MAYBE focus on cultivating community. You know like MMOs used to have and people kept playing them even though we didn't get content updates every 1-3 months with new raids and dungeons.

Spoken like a person who prefers idealism over reality... with a hefty dose of rose-colored glasses.

It would be impossible for them to create content at such a speed to keep up with demand. They could make the best content the world has ever seen and have the best game in the world and people would unsub as soon as they finished it.

"But if you make the content challenging, then they can't finish it right away" I'm sure you'd reply...

Yeah... and if they did that they'd lose FAR more subs than they would from the people who can't handle token caps. The "hardcore" portion of the community only makes up about 10% of the population. While everyone can agree that the game shouldn't be super-easy, the vast majority of people don't want it so hard that the content takes months to complete.

As for the "MMOs used to..." blah, blah, blah. People tolerated them because that's all there was. FFXI wasn't a bad game by any means, but it still had a LOT of problems. Same with EQ and even UO.

[Kathryn]

Personally I don't like the caps, but thats because some weeks i can cap out instantly and bedone and bored and some weeks i cant cap at all so i fall behind.

[Gilthas]

I don't particularly like the caps, but I prefer them to the alternative.

[Aeyis]

Yeah, I know it's crazy, but with the cap, I now have the ability (since HW came out) to put the game down and do some necessary life things. With no cap, I was consistently under pressure (from myself however) to just keep playing to get to that next milestone that ups my ilvl.

I feel the opposite. With a cap present I feel forced and pressured to meet that cap each week. A lot of people feel that way. Without a cap we could just put the game down because we wouldnt lose out on not capping this week.

Caps = making grinding mandatory. Making it like a job. A job that you pay for, no less.

[saber_alter]

went and did pvp, got it capped by wednesday.

i don't mind it (mind you i'm used to it since i've been here so long), but i do think it can be improved.

[Fendred]

It's no so much the cap itself as much as the way players are intended to meet the cap for a given week. It falls into the same category as the Alexander drops, where if you do try to meet the cap along with all your loot lockouts you'd be forced to do the same content on repeat to the point of excluding all of the game's other activities. Not only does this make players burn out in frustration from seeing the same stuff over a dozen times a week, you don't have time for anything else.

[Miiu]

Personally I don't much care for the cap.
The game allows us to switch freely between classes and therefor encourages the player to gear all the jobs. Which to me should be able to done in anyone's pace in casual content.
Tomestones are casual content. I don't mean this in a bad way it is just the way it is. If you uncap the tomes you don't force the players with not that much time to play to login so they reach the weekly cap but instead don't make them feel like they're missing out. Hardcore people don't feel frustrated by the arbitrary stop sign.

As of now they should have made esoteric uncapped and balanced alexander savage around the Idea of people having full AF2 on their jobs. Please don't understand it as me saying they should nerf alexander savage because I am not.

[DragonSlayer45]

Along with what everyone else mentioned, I consider the weekly cap to be the carrot on the stick. You want to get _____ piece but you don't have enough Esoterics tomes to get it. You know you'll get it next week. You get the piece the following week, and you move on. Repeat until you get the full set. Its there to keep people paying and playing.

The weekly cap is nothing new to this game. Its been throughout ARR and I imagine it'll continue through Heavensward and probably beyond. Do I wish they could try something different? Maybe, but I'm of the mentality of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." There's nothing wrong with the weekly cap, and I'll take having gated progression over farming the same instance over and over for the one piece you want that will never drop, that a lot of MMOs have done. I also imagine we would see a lot more complaining topics if it was the latter.

[Wizarus]

It is impossible to make a game with infinite content...(that is not repetitive)

Perhaps it is but hard capping progression is not the answer, just look at the state of crafting and what dedicated crafter have to say about it.

This all ties to the problem with vertical progression though. Yes, there will always be a "best" way, but it doesn't take long to get to that "best" way, and there is always something to do since different content will make diferent sets better than others and casual will still be able to progress with 1 set.

[Izularia]

Met the cap by grinding seal rock lol Never reached the cap before... SE, thanks for that awesome new PVP mode!

So when you're playing PVP a lot, you can reach the limit in a very very short amount of time. But yeah.. otherwise, I don't really care about the cap.