More Horizontal Progression please

[fortuona]

i don't care how it's accomplished, horizontal or vertical, but more interesting stat allocation (with secondaries reworked to not be meaningless and arbitrary, and new enhancements to job abilities added) is something that is much needed.

it feels like gear is only useful for progression raid checks, otherwise everything is tuned so that a minimum ilvl is all that is required, and that takes all the fun out of getting loot and gearing up.

[Nadirah]

Lets say they have the next raid in some kind of frigid northlands. As a result, players need to gather sets of gear that provide protection against ice damage to survive the environment and its denizens. That is what horizontal progression is. Instead of raising the item level, the raid set has some kind of situational stat. There are various reasons why this is useful, such as countering power creep in a game, but the primary reason a lot of people are asking for it is that WoW didn't do so hot after it raised its level cap too many times.

That's not why wow isn't doing so hot.

It's not doing so hot because its two phases are Facebook games(garrisons) or "raid or die", coupled with an obnoxious grind to unlock flying(which was the final straw for many.

After leveling a few times 1-cap to gets boring as balls. Even in Vanilla I had 1-60 down in 6 days /played so if you knew what you were doing it still didn't take long.

[Windklinge]

you just pointed out why max level raises are bad. on wow aswell. BECAUSE IT DOESNT TAKE LONG. its not content at all. its just a very tiny amount of time to reach new max level but it destroys all content up to that point to obsoletness AND it wastes devtime with stuff thats only used for said small leveling period. and then all that matters is endgame again and endgame is back to ZERO with a raise which forces devs to add new content FAST but devs are never able to keep up with players clearing stuff so they should focus an expansion on max level content ONLY. this gives them some BREATHING time for adding new stuff or developing new stuff and systems for a mmo.

there is countless forms of how horizontal progression can look like. there is many good AND bad examples out there of it^^ it CAN go wrong if the devs dont have a clue about it (e.g. aion) :/ but if they get into it theyll quickly find out what was successful and what not.

[Reih]

I would love more horizontal progression, specially since the stuff we can get is limited by an imposed cap rather than a "natural" progression (weekly cap). Giving players more to do than just the same stuff, like roulette or raid until you can't get a reward from it. You know you have to do 450 tomes of the top tier tomes + the current raids or primal. That's it.

FFXI has situational gear that can be swapped on the fly (i.e. gear to enhance an ability, PDT, Acc, TP, etc.). So horizontal stuff made sense. In FF14 that aspect is hardly touched. You have the latest raid gear, the average tomes gear, and the materia upgraded gear. This gear is getting pushed away by the next iLv increase. So you get a very repetitive task.

The challenge the dev team has with 14 and horizontal progression is to make new rewards attractive. It doesn't have to copy FF11 at all. It just has to make sense for a player to get that kind of reward so that it can be used across the game.

[Akiza]

WoW failed becasue of the raid or die and they litterly gave gear away just for logging in not level cap raises. Horizontal Progression main challenge is the gridiness of it and if you don't have a specific piece of gear gtfo.

[midnitdragoon]

Interesting to see all these points rise from previous games such as 11 and everquest.

In the past people were quick to say "Ohh rose tinted glasses" or "Nostalgia, watch out!".

To see these ideas resonate more and more these days tells you something not just about the gamer, but the game itself. This simply can't be ignored.

With ilvl going up and new gear with the new content it really pushes aside most of the earlier stuff. I feel like their pushing the ilvl way too quick here.

SE must be aware of the current situation and who knows... Maybe they already have something planned for the future to address these issues.. We just have to wait and see.

[Iromi]

I really hope this thread gets a dev response, or at least acknowledged in some way or form. I remember reading in previous interviews and such how they were going to put horizontal progression into the game...hm so far it is still a copy/paste of 2.0.

[CosmicKirby]

Snip

That fact that more people are becoming or still are nostalgic for old MMO mechanics doesn't really prove anything. Very, very rarely, does anyone that asks for a "return to form" for older MMOs, goes into great detail about it. It's normally a very highlight reel-esque view of the game that doesn't really show why the systems would be fun/rewarding, or have a very dismissive look at the flaws in those systems.
From personal experience, my enjoyment of MMOs has only gone up the longer I've played them in my 15 something years. There's certainly a magic feeling to the MMOs or yore, but looking back on the objective structure and design of their systems, I don't find anything that was substantially better than current options.

Rose-tinted Goggles. Your nostalgia is probably making the old systems seem better than they actually were.

[Fendred]

That's not why wow isn't doing so hot.

It's not doing so hot because its two phases are Facebook games(garrisons) or "raid or die", coupled with an obnoxious grind to unlock flying(which was the final straw for many.

After leveling a few times 1-cap to gets boring as balls. Even in Vanilla I had 1-60 down in 6 days /played so if you knew what you were doing it still didn't take long.

I'm referring to more long term problems over the course of its life than its current state of affairs. It turned into what you are describing after many years, and is connected to the second part of what I wrote where the pacing of the game eventually became incompatible with the bulk of its material. It created a situation for itself where the only part of the game worth approaching as an MMORPG was at level cap because that was the only place in the game with enough people to be MMO material. No one wanted to level because the pacing was poorly balanced by the Cataclysm rework. Yet they had to rework the pacing or it would have taken people too long to get to max level. They were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.

[Nadirah]

you just pointed out why max level raises are bad. on wow aswell. BECAUSE IT DOESNT TAKE LONG.

It *never* took long if you knew what you were doing.

That's the point. The hell you asking for, 20 year level grinds?

I'm referring to more long term problems over the course of its life than its current state of affairs. It turned into what you are describing after many years, and is connected to the second part of what I wrote where the pacing of the game eventually became incompatible with the bulk of its material. It created a situation for itself where the only part of the game worth approaching as an MMORPG was at level cap because that was the only place in the game with enough people to be MMO material. No one wanted to level because the pacing was poorly balanced by the Cataclysm rework. Yet they had to rework the pacing or it would have taken people too long to get to max level. They were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.

I didn't want to level because I'd already leveled 20+ times.

It's never been really bad if you had one character, but when you're someone that had 6 60s, 8 70s, 7 80s, 11 90s and 7 or 8 100s(almost all of them actually being individual characters over different servers), it's BORING AS BALLS to do it the 20th time, and you want it over and done with as soon as farking possible.