Would Horizontal Progression Help this Game?

[Zabuza]

I remember back in FFXI during the ToAU days, the amount of things to do at endgame was staggering.

-Sky
-Sea
-Dynamis
-Salvage
-Assault
-ENM
-HNM
-Limbus

It got to the point that my endgame guild couldn't fit it all into a schedule and we had to drop certain things. Thanks to horizontal progression, the content was able to keep building upon itself, all remaining relevant. This also combined with the ability to level every job, so that if you geared up a main you could do sky on an alt to get gear for the harder content. Gear itself had unique and interesting bonuses that even made old gear relevant, creating for several complex gear switching algorithms depending on the situation.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a FFXI wank thread. But I think most MMOs have their merits, and the horizontal progression in FFXI was, in my opinion, one of the things that kept the game interesting.
So I now come to its successor, FFXIV. The combat is more fluid, I actually like the dancing mechanics of boss fights. However, I can't help but notice a great many people seem to be bored of this game as of late. Why is this? I believe the answer lies in the pattern. The expansion followed the same pattern as 2.0 did, and it's predictable.
-Start with story
-Grind dungeons for tomes
-first raid ends up being the hard, 8 man raid.
-second raid in the next patch ends up being the casual 24 man raid content.
-relic weapon with monotonous grind is implemented.
I suppose that Diadem was something they implemented that deviated from this pattern a tad, but a lot of the people I talk to seem to be bored of this as well. The gear, besides the designs in and of themselves, are dull. There is nothing that makes one piece unique from another statswise. Every one of them has the raw stats without any bonuses, resistances, or latent effects attached. Was this really a good decision? Are the majority of players really so averse to depth when it comes to gear and stats? Elemental resistances and strengths on enemies was also not implemented, again along this same line of reasoning. I feel this is selling even the casual players short with this simplistic design.
FFXI had horizontal progression, but it also had a much smaller playerbase. Now was that because of the archaic combat style, the insane grind, or was it really too complex for most players? The one thing that would have to be sacrificed for horizontal progression is the abilities that come with new levels.
The Coil of Bahamut and Crystal Tower has now become irrelevant thanks to vertical progression. The amount of things that will fade into obsolescence as the amount of expansions increases will only rise. While I admit SE has done a decent job of keeping some content relevant with their roulettes, vertical progression certainly makes it more difficult.
Either way, this endgame pattern that repeats itself constantly needs to find a fresh new deviation, to revitalize people's interest in this game once again. If not, then this game may lose a decent sized chunk of its playerbase at this rate.

[Belhi]

This is a thing bought up quite a lot.

I agree some horizontal progression could be quite good for the game. However horizontal progression has as many potential pitfalls as vertical progression and if done wrong it can make things really messy. I know as sure has hell there are things I don't want to see happen personally. If they are going to do something like this it would be something I would want them to take some time in and implement probably during an expansion.

I don't think any system used in another game will necessarily translate well into FF14 since it will have to gel with both the player base and games existing progression systems.

The other thing is that content like Coil and CT will fall out of favour anyway. Even if Coil and CT offered rewards usable at max level they wouldn't hold the popularity among the bulk of players compared to newer content simply because most players have already run Coil and CT a lot unless it was easier/more efficient in which case people would mindlessly spam it and complain about SE reusing old content.

[Zabuza]

I just find it odd that they give veteran players motivation to run level 50/lowbie dungeons through the roulette but give no such benefit to running old raids. Is this because the raids aren't needed for new players to level up? But then, any new player who wants to experience these raids has to get their FC to do it for fun, with no benefit to them.

[seraf]

I just find it odd that they give veteran players motivation to run level 50/lowbie dungeons through the roulette but give no such benefit to running old raids. Is this because the raids aren't needed for new players to level up? But then, any new player who wants to experience these raids has to get their FC to do it for fun, with no benefit to them.

Right now is probably the best time for newer players to clear the old Raid content like Coil because of Poetic bonuses. The endgame players who are Relic grinding will be more than glad to run new players through Coil/Primals for the bonuses. It's not quite the same thing though as doing it the old fashioned way (level sync'd) but it at least gives new/old players a common goal and gets them into old content again.

[jomoru]

Horizontal progress only works in the days before BIS web sites and theory grinding.

[seraf]

Horizontal progress only works in the days before BIS web sites and theory grinding.

I've never played this game before but I've been told that Guild Wars 2 has Horizontal progression and it works out pretty well. I can't verify this though as I've never played the game myself but if it's true then the formula can still work in modern MMORPG's it would seem.

[Kaurie]

I've never played this game before but I've been told that Guild Wars 2 has Horizontal progression and it works out pretty well. I can't verify this though as I've never played the game myself but if it's true then the formula can still work in modern MMORPG's it would seem.

I was going to say that most games that I have played which incorporated Horizontal Progression have had reasonable success, with the notable exception of Guild Wars 2 :|

[seraf]

I was going to say that most games that I have played which incorporated Horizontal Progression have had reasonable success, with the notable exception of Guild Wars 2 :|

Then I was lied to. :P Like I said I couldn't confirm it but maybe the person who told me how great it was is just a huge fan of the game.

[Kaurie]

Then I was lied to. :P Like I said I couldn't confirm it but maybe the person who told me how great it was is just a huge fan of the game.

In terms of horizontal progression, they made it very very easy to choose your gear build; however, they designed the content around no healing and no tanking - so it made most support/utility builds not viable (speaking PvE atm). Further, they designed the stats of Power, Precision and Ferocity to multiply by each other. Every other gear set didn't have this advantage, making 1 point in power more valuable in Berserker gear than 1 point in power in any other gear (for example). So, it became the PvE meta to stack Berserker gear and DPS stuff down as fast as possible, if you didn't wear berserker you were doing it wrong.

I would say my main issues, and what I think resulted in this issue is:

1. Too many 1 hit kills in higher level end-game, meaning vitality was fairly useless - you just had to learn to dodge.
2. As I said above, they made 3 stats multiply by each other, but no other 3 stats worked this way
3. They removed healing and tanking
4. Support stats scaled very weakly with skills (i.e. you could stack up a skill to up your healing abilities, but your heal would still be very weak, on a long cooldown and virtually useless because everything is one-hit-ko).
5. All the stats were very 'basic' in design, as in this raises your attack power, crit power etc - and there weren't really interesting stats to experiment with (i.e. +Fire Damage that you could put on your Elementalist, even though Elementalists stance dance among the elements).
6. Most bosses had CC shields making the use of a lot of cc/utility less viable

Further to all of this, they made gear way tooo easy to obtain. Shortly after launch, you could be in max stat gear within 5 minutes of hitting level 80. It was fairly absurd.

Anyway, I would love for Horizontal Progression to be in this game, but not with the basic stats we have. We'd need stats that aren't (add this much to have all of your attacks do x% more damage).

[StrejdaTom]

Short answer, yes.
It has to be quite demotivating for devs to spend hours on creating a content knowing it will be obsolete in 3 months.