More Horizontal Progression please

[Laraul]

What is Horizontal Progression? How does it differ from Vertical Progression? Is there such a thing as Diagonal Progression?

Seriously I don't know. This is such an obscure term. It's a game not an elevator.

[Sandpark]

That's not horizontal progression, that's just gear scaling. You can have scaling without horizontal progression and visa versa

What you are referring to is situational gear. That usually goes hand in hand with horizontal progression.

The gear scaling and horizontal to vertical comparison is applicable.

In vertical you progress in a ladder ,you obtain new gear and abilities to fight stronger enemies and toss or don't use the old stuff.
In horizontal you progress static/scaling, you obtain one gear or ability that strengthens or changes to fight stronger enemies and use what you have for longer intervals.

Emergent gameplay is horizontal.
http://www.gamespot.com/videos/the-p.../2300-6426981/

[Gooner_iBluAirJGR]

If they add a horizontal system, I'd hope they attach it to new / current content.

[Gardes]

We don't have to have extreme horizontal progression. We don't have to wear the same gear for 10 years. It can be expansion to expansion and level cap to level cap.

Imagine ARR with just i90 as the maximum ilvl cap. For coil 1 we could have i90 gear with general skill effects, for coil 2 we could have i90 gear with specific class effects on gear, for coil 3 we could i90 gear with set bonuses that require some gear from coil 1 and 2. Then come HW the ilvl cap is raised to is 110 and they can mix the gear effects up and rebalance them based on past experiences, instead of just shooting up from i50 to i130 at the end of 2.0 and then shooting up to 210 at 3.0 and possibly ending with 250 or more at the end of HW.

Sure you probably wont double your hp, tripple your dps, etc with each expansion but you're still getting stronger and the new players are more likely to see what a boss fight plays out like instead of it just getting destroyed in 1 minute in DF. Edit: It will probably get destroyed that fast with the progression I described, just not so soon.

[Warlyx]

There's the issue right there. This game is lacking in credible content now.

With FFXI ( only one I can compare ) the story that got you to the endgame was epic, you felt like you were working towards something. CoP is / was miles ahead on anything that FF14 has produced. When you got to the end what happened? We had variety.

i did COP x3 fully , once in my static took weeks and we wiped like mad but the most fun experience i remember in a mmorpg ! , once helping a friend later on, and once again duo NIN + SCH with my gf (we were lvl 90ish so was a cakewalk ) , and if u tell go do it it again....i will! , lvl 75 cap of course , and keeping actual homepoint teleports , traveling was the worst part of COP...

too bad my old HDD broke ...the amount of screenshots i had :_(

[Urthdigger]

Why not mention a good game?

I mean, Yoshi didn't take ideas from FFXI. There are games with both Horizontal and Vertical Progession. WoW has some of that, EQ2 had a lot of it.

I was specifically mentioning it as a cautionary tale, a path I do not wish them to go down. I don't mind some horizontal progression (Like people debating over what combination of CT, coil, and tomestone gear was truly best in slot), but things should be done under the assumption that the playerbase will require players to do all the current endgame available, and drop rates should be high enough that you're not stuck paying a debt to all the months of work people gave so you could have a drop.

[Fendred]

Horizontal progression was one of the main reasons I quit Ragnarok Online. As other people have said, it necessitates having abysmally low drop rates on items to ensure that people don't get their gear too quickly or easily, the end result being that you can grind for a particular piece for months and never see it drop once.

And then once you finally do have it... okay, that's great, then what? You have nothing to aim for because you've already got that piece of BiS gear. It leads to either tremendous stagnation or massive frustration after a while depending on whether you do or don't get the drops you're after.

Older raids in vertical progression games had the exact same level of grind for items, and people didn't have anything to do once they had the best equipment in those kinds of games as well. The problem you are referring to has everything to do with Ragnarok Online being a Korean grindhouse MMO and nothing to do with horizontal progression. The pacing in older korean games is not that appealing to a western audience. It's just way too slow.

What is Horizontal Progression? How does it differ from Vertical Progression? Is there such a thing as Diagonal Progression?

Seriously I don't know. This is such an obscure term. It's a game not an elevator.

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. In addition to lowering the value of older content, It eventually became impossible to reconcile the pace of leveling required by the various zones in the world with how long it took to reach max level. Eventually, players found themselves outleveling zones merely by questing in them long before they ever finished the quests required to see how the story unfolded in each zone. Now they just let people buy their way to max level because its too broken to fix.

[Xatsh]

What is Horizontal Progression? How does it differ from Vertical Progression? Is there such a thing as Diagonal Progression?

Seriously I don't know. This is such an obscure term. It's a game not an elevator.

Well gona comment on the general. FFXI was not pure horizontal, it was a diagonal progression just not a step incline. Patches did negate gear overtime, just very very slowly. Example the BIS ROZ expansion gear was not the same BIS gear in ToAU for any class really.

In XI your jobs was not cut and dry. Each job typically performed between 2 and 6 roles in a party. Vs XIVs 1 role per job. For instance a blm in XI was many time in fights NOT A DPS(DD) it was crowd control or main stun, infact if that blm dpsed at the wrong time it would kill your whole allaince.

IN XI the horizontal system worked by playing on this. Each endgame event droped some BIS gear and Some not BIS gear. Note that each job role had a BIS gear - thus many jobs had 5-6 gear sets depending on your job. Meaning in XIV you have what 14 pieces... in XI each job could have near 70 BIS pieces of gear..

As patches came they slowly negated gear but never all of it. It is why Sky was still relevant 7yrs after it launched. 90% of the gear was negated. But about 4 of the pieces were still BIS for a specific job role. Since there was never pure negation people still had a reason to do all the content in the game. (abysea removed this... why you will also read some places that abysea killed the game)

It also was attributed to XI battle system. There was no True DPS checks in ffxiv. There were rage timers but you could beat the mob with more or less Basic Gear. A few exceptions being AV and PW (the 24hr group that was vomiting because they tried to fight the top tier Raid boss with garbage gear. Would be like attempting Savage A4 in Ilvl 160 gear. The fights also rarely required Exact numbers. Most raids were 18 36 or 60ish. But you could enter with any number. When you were more geared it was doable with less.

Example Limbus a group new to endgame would need 6-12 ppl to safely do a turn. But if you have an extremly overgeared Rdm and Blm you could actually solo a area within the timelimit. Same with dynamis you could take in 64 ppl starting at level 60, most groups with endgame gear could clear it with 18-24 lvl 75 people. Thus meaning having the BIS gear was not required to do the content but it assisted and made it more lowmanable.

Since you were always doing content from the whole game Yes the drop rates where low. But in an average week playing 4 hours a night and killing some HNMs and such a typical guild could pull in 30-40 drops a week. Each of those drops would be valid for potentially 4-7yrs. The typical dynamis run also droped between 8-15 pieces and 400-500 currency. These no drops in dynamis were Xarcabard/COP which were slightly different where you fought primarily boss monsters to spawn the zone boss without clearing alot of trash. (IF people killed normal mobs.... the drop rate is the same as other dynamis runs... very few groups were good enough to clear the zone with enough time to farm though... thus the crap drop rate)

AS you fought endgame you got gear that was marginally better alot, and people took it until they got their BIS gear.

This allowed XI to get absurd amounts of content to do. For example at the launch of RoZ XI's first expansion there was over 10xs the endgame content progression wise as there is now. Over 40 instance boss fights, Over 100 Open world boss fights (about 30-40 dropped a endgame usable piece of gear)and 5 Large scale instanced raids. VS 2 primals (both negated now btw), 2 dungeons, and 8 instance bosses (4 from Normal Alex and Hard Alex (these are not really raids by standard mmo definition)). Seriously this is why people want more horizontal it is just sad when you compare the two.

To note this will not work at all in XIV because it followed the WOW model. It uses the pure verticle progression model... which is also the main cause of the lack of progression based content.

[Waeksyn]

FFXI worked for horizontal progression for one main reason - the ability to macro change gear in battle on the fly. This allowed people to min/max gear to fit the specific action (although the blinking used to drive healers nuts). Swapped gear would often contain buffs specific to the actions performed - more so than changing primary or secondary stats. So, you would swap the gear in to do a buff (put up Sneak Attack for example) and swap it back for max damage when you executed your next attack. If that attack was a weaponskill, you would macro in the gear that affected that weaponskill, then swap back. You could easily be carrying - and using - 5 or 6 pieces of gear for every gear slot (the only exception being your main weapon as changing that would reset your TP).

Frankly, I don't miss this and wouldn't want to see it added to FFXIV.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

FFXI worked for horizontal progression for one main reason - the ability to macro change gear in battle on the fly. This allowed people to min/max gear to fit the specific action (although the blinking used to drive healers nuts). Swapped gear would often contain buffs specific to the actions performed - more so than changing primary or secondary stats. So, you would swap the gear in to do a buff (put up Sneak Attack for example) and swap it back for max damage when you executed your next attack. If that attack was a weaponskill, you would macro in the gear that affected that weaponskill, then swap back. You could easily be carrying - and using - 5 or 6 pieces of gear for every gear slot (the only exception being your main weapon as changing that would reset your TP).

Frankly, I don't miss this and wouldn't want to see it added to FFXIV.

That is bad game design honestly. When I say Horizontal Progression gear. I mean gear like this.

http://eq2.zam.com/db/item.html?eq2i...9b0fcf037945cc
http://eq2.zam.com/db/item.html?eq2i...dce40f771d6f91
http://eq2.zam.com/db/item.html?eq2i...c84178c2e09dfd
http://eq2.zam.com/db/item.html?eq2i...2c928dbc478081
http://eq2.zam.com/db/item.html?eq2i...aa87b89b8b536b
http://eq2.zam.com/db/item.html?eq2i...145f5d94f205c6
http://eq2.zam.com/db/item.html?eq2i...ad614085382ef7
http://eq2.zam.com/db/item.html?eq2i...88d4d8fbbd1cfe
http://eq2.zam.com/db/item.html?eq2i...9cfcbaaa75c6aa

Notice how they all have similar stats? This is the kind of gear you pick to your playstyle. You do not need to switch it out, you build your character around it.

FFXI was just a badly designed game where you needed things like different resistances per fight and such and you needed gear for different fights.

EQ2 also puts an internal cool-down on your character. If you try to equip a piece of gear all your spells and abilities go on a small GCD, for each piece. The items spell/proc effects are also removed from you when you take off the gear.