FFXIV is in a Prime Position to Make Some Drastic Changes

[Pride]

Hey Everyone,

Let me begin by saying that I adore this game and that it has been a huge part of my life for the last couple of years. I have seen this game through from even its 1.0 days, and it has also captured my attention. But lately, I have found myself logging in less-and-less, and it sucks because I want to want to play.

I've been reflecting as to why my interest for the game has been waning. At first I thought it was because I had played too much and simply burned out. So, I took a 2 month break before 3.1, and came back come patch day. I enjoyed the new content for a couple days, but quickly dropped off again and unsubbed. It wasn't until 3.15 that I began to realize why I stopped caring so much, and I wanted to share that so people can see my rationale.

1. The Relic Grind.

Now this isn't what you think. "Oh, he's going to complain about the grinding, and how grinding isn't fun", thankfully that isn't the case. I think a lot of the critiques towards the new Relic Quests are misplaced. Sure, it's a grind, but is it the grind that is annoying, or is it the end reward where the root of the problem lies?

As it stands, Relics are a long and tedious grind for very, very little reward, that serves no true purpose other than to have a cool looking weapon. For some, this is enough of a carrot to chase. But I would wager that for the majority of us, this reward falls short. The time needed to obtain a Relic does not equal the power of the Relic, and that's a problem. These weapons are not unique in any manner. Sure, you can customize them a little stat-wise, but when it comes down to it, the difference between the Thordan, Alexander, Upgrades Eso, and Relic weapons are negligible at best. It's borderline insulting how under powered a Relic is compared to the amount of time and effort that is needed to obtain one.

Some might call this "Horizontal Progression", and in a sense they are correct, but it is extremely shallow. When people speak of having gear choices, this is not what they are referencing. We want options that last and options that, on a fundamental level, change the way we interact with the game. Which brings us to my second point.

2. Player choice in both gear and progression is basically nonexistent.

Gear is boring. Is the gear in this game beautiful? Of course. But ultimately, that's all it is. There is one thing that matters when it comes to gear, and that's Item Level. This is currently a plague that is running rampant in this game.

Final Fantasy XIV - by far - has the least amount of player choice. Let's ignore the behemoth that is World of Warcraft, and let's dive into some more niche MMOs.

Rift Talent Trees

Bland and Soul Talent Trees

SWTOR Talents

Sample of Everquest 2 Gear

Elder Scrolls Online

Wildstar Rune Examples

There are plenty of other examples, but this just shows that these are systems that every other MMO employs. FFXIV however, has strafed away from this.

Now, it wasn't always like this mind you. If you look back to 1.0, between the original Armory System, Materia, and Gear, there were actual options that changed how you played. I understand wanting to move away from that idea during the migration from 1.0 to 2.0, but a significant amount of time has gone by now, and delaying run-of-the-mill systems like these is hurting.

Everything about this game is vertical, and streamlined -- It's a huge problem, that needs to be addressed.

Materia has the ability to be our saving grace. Give us unique materia that enhance, or alter our abilities, and let all gear be able to be melded but with different restrictions on what / how much we can meld into it. For example, maybe the Relics should be able to equip 2 special materias, whereas the upgrades Eso weapon can only equip 1. This could solve the Relic problem I mentioned above, and help with the customization this game desperately needs.

3. Competition should not be shied away from.

Everyone likes some competition, but as it stands, the only real competition can be found on the market boards or in PvP and that is an issue.

It's fun to win, but it sucks to lose. It seems like the developers, instead of making the losing a learning experience, they decided to delete the option to lose altogether.

Competition does a couple of things very well. For example, it gives people an identity (Fans of sports teams for example), it facilitates a sense of community, and forces people to interact with one another. Grande and Free Companies were supposed to be the catalysts to competition and community, but they do so at a very shallow level. As it stands, Grande Companies are great for basically nothing, and Free Companies are a glorified chat room. You don't have to do anything with your Grande Company, nor do you have to do anything with your Free Company. Nothing in the game gives any true incentive to interact with people. Not even Diadem pulls people together because instead of Hard mode, you can always just opt into Normal or Easy. Not only that, but in Diadem there isn't any competition for anything. Instead everyone just lumps together and presses three buttons for an hour.

We need more competition because the sense of community, the feeling of winning, and interacting with other people far outweigh the negative feeling of losing.
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In closing, I want this game to be the most fantastic MMO on the market. They're getting close, but there is some much needed TLC that still has yet to happen.

[Alberel]

Honestly what I think they should do is give relics and equivalent tier weapons a unique materia slot for a special new skill materia. Every job has a selection of such materia that directly modifies their skills in some way. Since there's only one slot on the weapon there shouldn't be any balancing issues as there are no combinations to account for.

Beyond that it would be nice to start seeing 'sets' of materia for armour with stacking bonuses for every X number of them you have melded to your equipment. Again very simple to balance given that it's standard for the genre (seriously almost every MMO out there has set bonuses in some form).

I'm with you that materia is the way to solve the itemisation problems the game has. 3.2 is adding materia to tomestone gear as well so it seems SE is experimenting with the idea in some form. We just need some new, unique materia types.

[TheUltimate3]

My thoughts.

1. The Relic Grind.

In regards to the Relic grind, it will always be in this situation because of end game raiding. Unless Relics required Savage Anything, one cannot expect to get the most powerful weapon (for the time) to come outside of raiding. Long grind or no.

2. Player choice in both gear and progression is basically nonexistent.

Yes, gear is very boring. However I am more hesitant on Talent Trees than I feel most are. Mainly because, as a WoW Vet, I have seen what happens when one skill tree functions so awesomely that the others must suffer for it.

I do agree we need more customization, but I'm a bit on the iffy side when it comes to deep talent trees

3. Competition should not be shied away from.

I honestly think this is less to do with SE and more with the community in general. While you are right, Grand Companies don't do a lot of anything, you can see they did at least try to have your GC matter in things like PvP, competition where yes your faction mattered. The end result was (because of the nature of this game) everybody jumped on board the path of least resistance and joined what was considered the "best" Grand Company or complained loudly that there should be a non-GC Restricted form of PvP.

In terms of nothing really bringing the players together, again that to me seems more of a community thing but this time SE has it's hand it it too. I've always felt that the limits imposed on characters is what forces us to interact with people to meet our goals. Crafting and gathering being the most obvious of this. However in this game, because everybody can do everything if time and money is put into it there is no real need for anybody but meat shields. The use of a cross server duty finder attributes to this "meat shield" mentality. Thankfully from my experience there are enough people who don't treat the game as such, stuff like this lovely relic quest has shown; put a big enough carrot out there and people will work together to get it, and I've seen more than enough Party Finder Crystal farming groups to make that call.

[Klamor]

The problem with giving the relic weapons a unique trait is that it would be difficult for the dev team to balance it with the raid weapons, especially if they maintain the two at the same item level. They've already mentioned that they will be having the raid drop weapons be a higher item level similar to how it was done in 2.0 where Binding Coil weapons were i95, and the relic at the time could be as high as i90. They continued that trend through Second and Final coil with weapons at item levels 115 and 135 respectively, while the relics were at 110 and 130 respectively, until the Zeta stage came around late into 2.55 and allowed relics to be equal to raid weapons at i135. Secondary stats aside...

I'm sure there are plenty of ways that the devs could work through the issue of weapon balance and maintaining raid weapons as still being desirable. Unfortunately, I have not the creative mind to come up with solutions to this issue. I see what has worked in the past, and what has worked in other games. Specifically, the weapons in WoW comes to mind. The legendary weapons (orange names) that were obtainable by different jobs (Thunderfury, for Warriors; and that staff for Druids/Shaman) were much more desirable than most raid weapons, but the quest chains associated with them required raid drops to even complete the weapon. That solidified to me that the intent was not for the "casual" crowd to obtain, and their normal Dungeon weapons, which were parts of a set with their tier gear on occasions, satisfied them well enough.

The issue still remains with the fact that the "casual" crowd still demand having a weapon of the same or similar item level to those clearing the most difficult raids, even though they are certainly capable of doing everything they could hope to do with a base-level tomestone weapon. Personally, I haven't bothered with savage except for a few early week clears of A1S and some practice on A2S. I still blaze through dungeons and the other content perfectly fine with an i200 weapon. I'm not so audacious to demand I have the same weapon of those who have cleared A4S. I also haven't been so blind to notice the significant lack of Gordian weapons being carried around. I'm sure SE isn't that blind either.

Nexus stage made Relic equal to SCOB Raid weapons as well, and we'll likely see that continue once they give Raid weapons the 5 item level boost again--but as usual, the last stage will usually be acquired perhaps a month before the end of the ~6 month period that constitutes a raid tier.

Good catch, Alahra. I failed to mention that one as well.

Don't know if you are aware or forgot to mention, but the weapons from Twintania were originally i90 on the same level as the Relic+1/Zenith but they were bumped up to i95 in a later patch. But that just begs the question why they didn't just do the same thing with the Gordian weapons, but I digress.

Thank you for this, as well.

[BlatantPyre]

I want to use an example of why I think this topic is important: Red Mage.

We all want it. Yoshida even teased us with the idea this past Rising. After thinking about it though, I wonder how it could even function in this current system...

Now, I've thought long and hard about how it *could* work, but I want to focus on one point, that Red Mage is really supposed to be a swiss-army knife class, say like Druid in WoW, and such like it. But such a class only works in a system with horizontal progression, where you can modify/self-personalize your job's path. We don't currently have that...how's that going to work?!

[Alahra]

They continued that trend through Second and Final coil with weapons at item levels 115 and 135 respectively, while the relics were at 110 and 130 respectively, until the Zeta stage came around late into 2.55 and allowed relics to be equal to raid weapons at i135. Secondary stats aside...

Nexus stage made Relic equal to SCOB Raid weapons as well, and we'll likely see that continue once they give Raid weapons the 5 item level boost again--but as usual, the last stage will usually be acquired perhaps a month before the end of the ~6 month period that constitutes a raid tier.

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

All the games you mentioned. ESO, GW2, SWOTOR, and Wildstar have had less success than FF14..... People begged the devs to make the game quicker and easier and now they are bored. New players are still having fun. It's the old saying "Be careful what you wish for, cuz you just might get it"

[Titor]

Wildstar runes are annoying and clunky. I would not use them as a good example of player customization. Talent trees and some options are fun, but Wildstar runes are awful and are a large part of what drove me away from the endgame of that game.

[WeekendSoja]

I wish they would do gear set bonuses or even skill enhancement on gear but in 1.0 they recognized that having bonus effects on gear that enhanced certain skills broke the gear system and you started to see people wearing low-end gear with a particular skill enhancement over endgame raid gear which was superior in stats by a long shot but paled in comparison to the skill enhancement

[BlatantPyre]

My thoughts.
1. The Relic Grind.

In regards to the Relic grind, it will always be in this situation because of end game raiding. Unless Relics required Savage Anything, one cannot expect to get the most powerful weapon (for the time) to come outside of raiding. Long grind or no.

While I understand many of your counter-points to his (though I believe you both have good thoughts), I think you missed what he said about the Relic Grind. His problem is not that it's a grind, or that Relics aren't the most broken thing since Red Mage/Ninja in FFXI, but that the reward does not fit the cost. In reality, he's asking for fun-factor that actually affects the game.