FFXIV and Risk vs. Reward

[Magis]

The problem is how do you define "reward" for thousands of subscribers? What might be a "reward" to you (gear from Alexander? 210 gear?) might be utter trash to me. Surprising as it might sound, some people don't play this game to get the best gear for the moment and unsubscribe. Some people play the long game. What you call "casual" players, can sometimes be players that "casually" and steadily get out of the game what they want. They don't unsubscribe right after new content. They stay subscribed, and slowly gather scrips, or esoterics, or enjoy beast tribes. Or perhaps they take their time between patches, actually getting geared up to a level they feel is appropriate to their play style.

I understand the OP's explanation of "risk." They're basically saying they want everything about FFXI that I hated. We have sight and sound aggro mobs already. Scent? Low HP? Magic? All of those things were annoying as hell in FFXI. Especially when you were after a certain objective, or goal, that had nothing to do with those mobs. It was annoying because they would aggro you while you had no reason to fight them in the first place.

And that is where the OP fails to explain the "reward" side of their post. What is rewarding about overworld mobs aggroing you, or possibly killing you? Example: You're out farming those dhalmels for skins. But wait! A stray elemental enters the fight! Why? Because you happened to cast magic too close to them.

So while you are beating down on your "new and improved" dhalmels, that take 2? 3? times as long to kill, the elemental starts casting Tornado on you. Out of nowhere, you lose half of your HPs (a la FFXI style). You look at the elemental and scream "WHY?!" You're capped on wind shards/crystals/clusters, and all of your retainers have 9999 of each. You have no need to fight, let alone look, at that Wind Elemental. But now you have to kill it, or die. You can't run away, because in your flight path are skeletons that just spawned at night. And guess what... they aggro to low HP.
There was nothing "rewarding" about FFXI's overworld mob system. Everything took forever to kill. Could kill you, if you let it. And absolutely never dropped anything remotely worth it, unless you were farming a particular item. I guarantee I never felt "accomplished" getting that one crystal to drop from those elementals either.

I never actually specified gear. Reward could be the story as it is for me. It could be glamour as the other post said. But in Savage's case, both rewards were already given out for normal, so you have to fallback to stats which is useless in XIV anyway. This is what killed Savage for me and many in my static; not the difficulty, but lack of reason to bother with it.

And to your crystal analogy: That was just a piece of the bigger puzzle. You got crystals to gain gil or to synthesis items or to turn in for rankups which had a bigger impact in value than it does in XIV due to what you had to do to get it. Even killing things in general gave EXP, and through the long haul got you to max level, which was an achievement back then and many people look back at it as a big point while playing XI. You are taking a small experience and aren't looking at the other things it effects.

[TarynH]

You are taking a small experience and aren't looking at the other things it effects.

Of course I'm looking at the other things it impacts. I played FFXI for years. It was my first MMO experience. I quit FFXI for FFXIV, to have a completely new and different experience. I remember the overworld in FFXI being mundanely annoying to get anything done. Sometimes you wouldn't even get through a CS for a mission before the mobs respawned and aggroed you again. Most of the time you couldn't run away. The mobs would follow you to the zone lines, and you had to pray you'd get into the other zone before they killed you. Random harder mobs would wander through your experience camp and slaughter you. There was a ton of "risk" with very little "reward."

As far as my example of the crystal drop... That wasn't my point. My point was setting out to do one objective, but being interrupted by something aimless, and needless. Even on FFXIV, I sometimes get annoyed when Titan aoes a mob I don't need. Because it's pointless for me to kill that mob. It wasn't my goal to kill it. Yet, sometimes I have to. FFXI was ten times worse in that regard. There were so many annoying ways to aggro some other pointless mob, that you never intended to fight in the first place. And nothing ever is rewarding about defeating a mob you don't need; on either game.

[Kona4me]

I agree with OP.

hope to see changes soon~ more open world & risk.

[Dyvid]

FFXIV: Heavensward had a lot of different expectations set upon it by different types of players. For some of us, we understood that ARR had to play it safe in order to rebuild trust in the game and draw in new players who may not have played MMOs before. We were okay with that. When 3.0 was being discussed, the dev team mentioned that they would be more experimental and felt more confident after ARR's success. Players like myself interpreted this to mean that the training wheels would come off, and that new content would be difficult or at least would require a higher level of skill and participation than content in ARR did, and that the open world itself would also follow this model.

Honestly I took a completely different meaning from this. I was thinking they would try to break the ilvl mold and add more character depth past end game instead of this "Fashion Fantasy" we are getting. Honestly Diadem i210 is nothing to me other than more glamour sets because I don't need higher stats to complete anything in the game save A:S. In fact I was doing just fine with i190 in dungeons, open world, and VA.

Every time I hear the open world needs to be hard I just don't get it. FFXI open was hard and everyone used methods (Sneak/Invis/Hug the corners) to side-step and avoid those challenges. In fact most people found FFXI to be very frustrating in terms of trying to get anything done and ran to FFXIV 1.0 when it came out. Hence why 2.0 ARR isn't punishing players and beating them on the head to just unlock a coffer. That's not to say hard content is bad in the open world and wouldn't mind see things that requires people to group up but not the real reason things aren't going smoothly in 3.0.

What the game truly lacks is longevity goals and character depth. After 60, what else is there to do with my character? I wanted to further development past a simple base stat raise. Yoshi-P and his team really needs to draw inspiration from previously FF title as well as other MMO. FFVII had you equip materia to learn new skills. FFXI had the merit system to further augment your job. FFIX had weapons that granted you special abilities. These are the things the community is really hungry for.

[Nestama]

Imagine if we could unlock more traits by doing this or that (challenges, quests, sightseeing, etc) and the traits would be treated similarly to BLU spells in FFXI (you have X amount of traits, but you can only pick a certain amount. I've not played other MMO games to the same extent as FFXI and XIV, so I'm unsure if they already have this), or anything that could change abilities/spells in one way or another. A trait to boost the AoE range of Fire II, for example. Another trait to give Surecast the added ability to allow BLM's to cast spells while moving.

The more beneficial the trait, the harder it is to obtain. Nothing like requiring you to beat Savage or EX Primals or anything. Just need to farm for a pop item from somewhere and then pop a NM that is roughly around the same level as an S rank (though not to the extent of requiring an alliance. Only the party will be able to attack the monster, too).