More Horizontal Progression please

[Shinsaki]

You crazy. Leaping boots were necessary for many classes, example THF SATA, only replaced by Hecatomb boots(good luck, we could start another thread about how hard it was to get these at 72). you mustve played when journals came out or something, because if you were a level 12 thf/rng/insert other class trying to get a lvling group in valkurm without proper gear in slots for WS's, #godspeed and hope some JP party takes pity on you for a carry through the grind.

Cant tell if this guy is high or trolling?

Why not throw in No Astral Rings = No party as well..............

[Iagainsti]

Cant tell if this guy is high or trolling?

Why not throw in No Astral Rings = No party as well..............

Kinda hurt, and I'm always high, I just saw the thread, posted my relevant experience concerning horizontal progression with the first example that popped in my head, ppl ren with the leaping lizard boots, and... here we are. I apologize if you do not like my points.

[Nadirah]

Leaping Lizzy the NM that usually 3-5 people were out there camping and had 2+ hour spawn and could even be like 12 hours because it was a lottery nm and may not even show up. Its not 14 times you have to count all those times you didn't get the claim. I don't think anyone these days would find waiting around 2+ hours in the hopes to claim a weak monster to maybe get a 7% drop.

I, and about 99% of my FC, would find another game.

[AnaviAnael]

I'm ok with horizontal gear as long as it doesn't become, "You don't have X, we can't use you." This happened to me in FFXI when I took a year off. Of course, I got told to do PUG groups to get the gear I needed.

[Welsper59]

I'm ok with horizontal gear as long as it doesn't become, "You don't have X, we can't use you." This happened to me in FFXI when I took a year off. Of course, I got told to do PUG groups to get the gear I needed.

Some gear expectations weren't too bad at least. I didn't exactly mind someone temporarily not having at least the NQ staves for casting post 51, but it really wasn't a big of a hit to the bank to buy them. Farming a stack of Black Tiger Fangs (or whatever it was called) could have bought at least 2-3 NQ staves. But yeah, if people expected you to have BiS crap as any role, then screw em.

[Yggberry]

I feel horizontal gear set only has its own problems. Such as the amount of storage space won't allow it. Rather than true horizontal, having best of both worlds would be better. I didn't really enjoy the gear progress with Heavensward though. I feel it is too much. And many of my friends were very disappointed because the hard earn gears they had had became obsolete when 3.0 came around. To me, this is very bad design. Furthermore, it makes content before the expansion pointless.

[Welsper59]

I feel horizontal gear set only has its own problems. Such as the amount of storage space won't allow it. Rather than true horizontal, having best of both worlds would be better. I didn't really enjoy the gear progress with Heavensward though. I feel it is too much. And many of my friends were very disappointed because the hard earn gears they had had became obsolete when 3.0 came around. To me, this is very bad design. Furthermore, it makes content before the expansion pointless.

There are, indeed, MANY problems associated to horizontal gear. The grand majority of it derives from how the system is set up, rather than any form of subjective enjoyment. Inventory is certainly a huge problem in a game where we don't have a whole lot of free inventory to use for the specific way that horizontal gear sets work. Other problems include how stats, abilities, AND how combat itself is designed. Had FFXIV not been designed the way it is and was in the planning stages, it could certainly be worked in. Right now though, those things absolutely work against effective distribution of horizontal gear.

To start with, we have no means of switching gear mid-fight. This means that you are destined to either always fail because you lacked the right specific gear or you found out you don't need it at all (assuming you could beat something without it). In the case of the former, realistically speaking, it's quite a lot of BS to be expected to know ahead of time what sort of gear you need for the job and also knowing exactly where to go for it... or if it even exists. Then comes how our stats work. The variances and application of our stats would need to change, because as is, it's very cookie cutter. Our only variance is deciding between stuff like Crit, SS, or Det. We can already do that in many cases, particularly if you include crafted gear to be melded. Next is how our abilities work. They don't have some hidden complex formula behind their usage, which means gear that modifies them would not be worth our while to either use or switch out of, depending on how good of a benefit it would be. For example, if we had gear that increased a specific ability, like a BRDs Bloodletter, we probably wouldn't use anything but that unless it dropped our other stats significantly (normal gear: +100 dex, Bloodletter gear: +10 dex). As, if it didn't, there would probably be little reason to ever use something else. We'd be back to vertical progression rules, basically. Now if gear swapping mid-fight were possible, then sure... that could work, since other gear would have its time to shine. But can you imagine the inventory nightmare? We already don't have this necessity as far as used combat gear for one job is concerned, so imagine how much worse it'll be if each job needed 10+ slots to fill for gear swap needs. We still haven't even dug into server and other system related adjustments, despite having problems right now that would have to be worked out lol.

[Gardes]

Did you guys somehow forget or decide to just conveniently omit the bcnm drops of the exact same boots with a different name (and other good items). You get the currencies to buy the orb to access a mini boss fight by the boat load and you can try it over and over until the loot you want drops. IIRC it was already there by the latter half of toau (when I came back after having to quit just before cop due to irl issues) and the drop rate wasn't even low.

I don't even get how horizontal progression == low random drop rate. Like vertical progression can't have that too? One little adjustment and vertical progression can be stupid too. Here: dungeons and ex roulette now only have 7% chance of actually giving you the tomes you're running it for. Normal and savage alex now only has 10% chance of dropping anything at all, upon clearing.

[Ibi]

Did you guys somehow forget or decide to just conveniently omit the bcnm drops of the exact same boots with a different name (and other good items). You get the currencies to buy the orb to access a mini boss fight by the boat load and you can try it over and over until the loot you want drops. IIRC it was already there by the latter half of toau (when I came back after having to quit just before cop due to irl issues) and the drop rate wasn't even low.

Conveniently omit? No. As you noted, that was added later. Why? In response to the item being too difficult to obtain (partially due to them being very heavily camped by RMT).

I don't even get how horizontal progression == low random drop rate. Like vertical progression can't have that too?

You don't have to, but you run into problems if you don't.

Under vertical progression, the developer knows that the items a player is getting within any tier will be made obsolete in six months. As a result, they can set a drop rate such that a player will, on average, get all (or almost all) the gear they need within that six month period, because there will be something new coming in by the time they're done.

Under horizontal progression, the developer knows that the items a player is getting from any particular event could remain relevant for several years. If they set the drop rates the same as they were in the vertical example above, then their player base is done with that particular event in that same six month time frame. So far that's not, in and of itself, a problem.

In both cases, the developer is adding new content at around the six month mark. But where the vertical progression developer doesn't need to pay attention to the old rewards when creating their new event, the horizontal progression developer needs a way to add drops that serve some sort of purpose, while not making the old items obsolete.

If you make the items effectively equivalent, the players are effectively done with the reward from the new event before it even starts. If that's the case, the event needs to be entertaining enough to be worth doing despite the rewards, at which point the event would have worked equally well under a vertical progression system.

If you make the items better than the existing items in some situations, and worse in others, now the player needs to collect an entire second set of items and also hang on to all the old ones. In addition to now needing to carry around twice as much gear, the player isn't really getting any more powerful, they're just switching out one thing for another depending on the situation (and likely still not really having a choice in the matter).

The alternative to this is to make it take much longer to get all the items from any particular event, and then add parallel alternatives through which to (hopefully) obtain other items to fill in the gaps. Each event ends up with a much longer life span, but only because you need to run it more to get the same results.

[Kaurie]

You don't have to, but you run into problems if you don't.

Under vertical progression, the developer knows that the items a player is getting within any tier will be made obsolete in six months. As a result, they can set a drop rate such that a player will, on average, get all (or almost all) the gear they need within that six month period, because there will be something new coming in by the time they're done.

Under horizontal progression, the developer knows that the items a player is getting from any particular event could remain relevant for several years. If they set the drop rates the same as they were in the vertical example above, then their player base is done with that particular event in that same six month time frame. So far that's not, in and of itself, a problem.

In both cases, the developer is adding new content at around the six month mark. But where the vertical progression developer doesn't need to pay attention to the old rewards when creating their new event, the horizontal progression developer needs a way to add drops that serve some sort of purpose, while not making the old items obsolete.

Just to counter that, you can have a mix of both and have horizontal progression within each tier. The gear becomes obsolete in 6 months just like vertical, but within that 6 months you have horizontal progression to wiggle around in