More Horizontal Progression please

[Ibi]

What separates a deep system from that is pulls that require forethought from different members.

Right. It was Nektulos-Tuor's use of the word "destroy" that was what I was trying to make the point over. It initially sounded like he was comparing two similar situations and calling one fun and the other mindless and zergy.

Destroy didn't, to me, imply forethought. Nektulos-Tuor agreed, in retrospect, and rephrased.

In a zone of things stronger than you when outnumbered. The puller has to study the path of where to pull a single target & assess which monsters will link if pulled at desired moment.

Yeah, I was the main puller for my Dynamis shell for a couple of years, so having to strategize pulls is a concept I'm not completely unfamiliar with.

What makes any mmorpg fun for me is thought and figuring out stuff as long as I don't have to resort to google more than playing the game.

The renkei system also added a dynamic/synergistic,emergent element to gameplay.

It wasn't the most intuitive system though. Without resorting to Google (or relying on someone else's knowledge), the only way to know what skill chained to what was trial and error.

And while there was the opportunity for dynamic, emergent game play, it didn't happen that much in practice; you grabbed someone who could open Distortion (or Light at higher levels) and someone who could close it, and they were the skill chain.

Or, as you say, abandoned them completely in the ToAU era onwards.

FFXI was known to be a hardcore game, not in terms of difficulty but as having really thoughtful, deep systems, and everything took forever to accomplish(ugh).

Some of it was deep and thoughtful, but a lot of it was just non-intuitive and unnecessarily complicated.

Anyways, why are we talking about this? I thought this thread was about horizontal progression.

We're not going to go 40-something pages in a thread like this without getting off topic, the same way that no thread about game play that gets past about three pages isn't going to mention both WoW and FFXI. It's unavoidable.

Besides, it's relevant in that while people do want more content, it's important that that content be fun and engaging, otherwise we'll just end up having this conversation again two weeks later. So it's worth establishing what fun and engaging would be.

[Sandpark]

And while there was the opportunity for dynamic, emergent game play, it didn't happen that much in practice; you grabbed someone who could open Distortion (or Light at higher levels) and someone who could close it, and they were the skill chain.

Yeah, that goes into that idea of illusion of choice, Skillchains could be done better if every SC was equally powerful in certain situations and situations didn't skew towards one element, same as most monsters being weak to ice or thunder versus being equally distributed across various content.