Why vertical progression is poorly implemented

[Loki]

Vertical progression....ok but i wish we weren't so much limited everywhere by week etc. One of the main lineaments of this game is to be able to play all jobs on 1 character. Gears become outdated so fast that idk why we are so restricted.

examples : we could be limited to 450 eso per week but per job too, in void arch we could be limited to 1 gear per week but per job too...etc

[Critical-Limit]

There is no way FFXIV's general playerbase would be happy with that, given how people already dislike needing to grind various things to progress. People want to be able to quickly get into endgame content (to the point where even needing to gear up via Law tomes/Alexander NM already bothers some players), and adding materia-gates to end-game content would defeat the purpose of catch-up content like Hunts and 24-man Raids, which are meant to help people get into or progress through more difficult content.

WoW already did this and they ultimately abandoned it because it made the barriers for newer players too high.

So you didn't read what I said.

I didn't say gate fights behind anything. It's just BiS if you need it. The fight can still be won w/o the earth resistance. It's just if you want a faster or "safer" run. That's a choice. Hence horizontal.

Will some people try to require you to have it? Only if they know you can't do mechanics

[Alahra]

I didn't say gate fights behind anything. It's just BiS if you need it. The fight can still be won w/o the earth resistance. It's just if you want a faster or "safer" run. That's a choice. Hence horizontal.

People will definitely require it if the fight is designed in any ways such that the resistances are actually significant until you can overgear the content. It's just another form of a VIT/HP check, really. For it to not be necessary, it would need to not be significant, and then you have a choice that has no impact (so why would anyone bother actually farming the resistance gear?).

[Dzian]

Considering the "get currency, get loot every week" model has been pretty well established since 2005 or so (I can't remember when WoW first added it) I can't see them making major changes in this regard. The model's proven fairly successful at maintaining player subscriptions (even if it kind of results in a "revolving door" model).

But it seems no matter where you look recently you see more and more comments along the lines of this

The new dungeons that come out are already outdated when they do, and the tome collecting quickly feels like a chore rather than something fun to do (not a lot of fun to cheer having gotten 30 more of some intangible thing when you need hundreds per week and then months of doing it).

And they’re generally not wrong either, new dungeons even the “experts” are dead on arrival pretty much, there’s pretty much no reason to even enter them except maybe for your daily bonus. And it’s a lot more wide spread than dungeons, the raids / trials seem to be following suit.

I recall people saying they were tired of the tomestone grind a few iterations ago now. It's been brought up many times that repeating the same tomestone process over and over again was getting old and boring. It's been requested many times to please introduce something new, do away with the tomestones, find a new, more interesting system. SE's response? Well, a new tomestone is reportedly being introduced in 3.2.

Which comes back to my earlier suggestion. Tomestones should be a back up option nothing more. If they release new experts in 3.2 then they should drop better and more relevant gear, the new 3.2 tomestones should be a back up. So if people have ran those new pieces of content a hundred times and still not seen that last item they need drop there’s at least the knowledge they will get it eventually no matter how evil rng is. Again this is what people wanted from “tokens” even before beta.

Vertical progression....ok but i wish we weren't so much limited everywhere by week etc

Again an issue as it
A: disuedes players from participating in content. And
B: creates situations like many people encounterted in WoD, where players abandon the duty if there chosen item doesn’t drop from the first boss, no point in even doing the rest of the run… it’s a pretty bad design.

[Gunspec]

"I want a completely different game" is what I'm basically hearing echoing around. Well, you've got $15 a month, right? Do you need me to drive you to the store to pick out a new game?

While there are ways in which an ongoing game like FFXIV can change and develop over the years, turning progression into a flat line with no upgrades yet endless side-grades isn't going to magically change anything. It isn't going to make content like Crystal Tower relevant for over 2 years, it isn't going to make dungeons drastically more appealing (why would a dungeon ever have gear as strong as raid? Easy rewards will always be inferior, and best for lightly gearing secondary classes), and it isn't going to improve the community unless you mean by making all content pointless to run more than once, and forcing people to find their own groups for nearly all of this unengaging content.

Removing tomes wouldn't improve the game, it would only reduce my "things to do" each week and would utterly destroy the purpose of running dungeons. Making tome gear a "back up" to dungeon gear would essentially mean that a person like me would be fully geared after a dozen dungeon runs or less. The dungeons would become irrelevant in a week, and seeing as I don't raid, it would mean that I could stop playing for 6 months and still be up to date for the next patch.

Horizontal progression is essentially the method 90% of games use when they aren't adding much new content anymore. Endless sidegrades with minimal upgrades, designed to cater to those who endlessly tweak their characters, all an attempt to keep a game alive which the developers no longer are planning significant content for. FFXI is the only exception that comes to mind for me, and if the number of "former FFXI players" I've met in the last decade is any indication, while it was a wonderful world experience, it wasn't the best system for retaining player interest.

[CyrilLucifer]

and if the number of "former FFXI players" I've met in the last decade is any indication, while it was a wonderful world experience, it wasn't the best system for retaining player interest.

That's a horrible, horrible, absolutely abysmal reasoning.

FFXI is more than 12 years old. Do you honestly expect people to play the same game, with the same amount of love and passion, every day for 12 years?

Of course they are former players. I have absolutely absurd amounts of time devoted to XI and even I get bored of it, no matter how much I love my friends there and how long we've been together (I've had friends from XI for more than 10 years that I still talk to).

In fact, you've basically proven the opposite point: XI is still P2P and still retains a decent number of subscribers after so long. If anything, that shows that whatever it is doing, it's doing it right. I don't see modern XIV lasting even half as long as XI in its current state. That being said, a pure jump to horizontal is unrealistic, hence why I propose at least starting with something as simple as "more options" and "more variable stats." You know, like every other MMO in existence.

[Andrea]

That's a horrible, horrible, absolutely abysmal reasoning.

I agree fully with what you said, Honestly speaking if this games lifespan is anywhere near 11s I'd count that as a success but as you said I honestly can't see that happening.

No matter if people want to admit it or not 11 was highly successful and the fact that its still going speaks for itself.

[Gunspec]

That's a horrible, horrible, absolutely abysmal reasoning.

FFXI is more than 12 years old. Do you honestly expect people to play the same game, with the same amount of love and passion, every day for 12 years?

I said "of "former FFXI players" I've met in the last decade" as in I met people ten years ago who had already stopped playing. Throughout the last 10 years, I've probably met two or three dozen "former" players who all started and stopped at different points in the game's life cycle, while in that same decade I never met an active subscriber. Maybe its just the circles of people I meet, but something is clearly a bit strange there.

No matter if people want to admit it or not 11 was highly successful and the fact that its still going speaks for itself.

Runescape is still going after 15 years. It has to do entirely with the strange little communities that develop around a game, and I honestly can't say that any single factor in an online game is responsible for creating or destroying such a community.

[Andrea]

Runescape is still going after 15 years. It has to do entirely with the strange little communities that develop around a game, and I honestly can't say that any single factor in an online game is responsible for creating or destroying such a community.

Runescape in its own way was also successful. Obviously to a smaller scale than 11.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Runescape in its own way was also successful. Obviously to a smaller scale than 11.

I think runescape may be more successful than XI actually.