Why vertical progression is poorly implemented

[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.

[Xtrasweettea]

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.

It could just be the circles of people you have met. People quit playing for many reasons. I had real life friends who quit because of how slow leveling damage dealers were back before Abyssea came out. I played support and mage type jobs before the days of Abyssea, so I didn't have that problem.

I did quit FFXI for mainly two reasons
1) I was spending way too many hours playing it
2) When Seeker of Audolin came out (the lastest expansion), the game went from a Horizontal Progression to a hard Vertical Progression [I will be calling Vertical Progression "VP" for the rest of my post] (not VP from leveling your character, rather VP for gear). This may not seem like a big deal in FF14, but when you go from a system where it took months to get gear that you could use for almost the entire career for multiple jobs for years, to suddenly that gear become worthless in an instant, that was too much for me. I didn't mind the gradual incline type of VP like Abyssea and Voidwatch provided. Those events did not completely made the hard earned but still viable gear worthless. Seekers made it to were almost all gear was irrelevant overnight. I decided if I was going to play in a game where it was mainly VP, I would rather play FF14.

I believe some people would have the same reaction if FF14 went from VP to Horizontal Progress without any gradual flattening of the curve that FF14's VP has.

[Belhi]

/snip

I wont quote the whole post cause otherwise this post will get kind of long. I did not mean to anger or upset you and I'm not going to block you cause I think it is important for different players viewpoints to be discussed to provide good feedback to the developers. I have merely being trying to be civil and polite and honest with my feelings on what I want out of the game.

I will respond with a few points:

First, I have not been trying to put words into your mouth. I have simply been responding as I have interpreted your posts and to try and clarify my own. Case in point is the Honeymoon period point. When you first posted and what I responded to was this:

I remember when 2.0 first launched, this community was rabid in their support and defense of the game. If you even so much as accidentally typed FFXI as a typo, forgetting the V - nevermind deliberately referencing it in some way - you were ripped to shreds. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was around and remembers this. Now? People openly make comparisons to and draw suggestions from FFXI, and not only are they not ripped to shreds, but more people are beginning to agree with them - if for no other reason than to get some new, fresh ideas into this game.

I interpreted that as you meant that at 2.0, when ARR was launched, the community had rabid support. Not that they had had rabid support for a full year. My point was there is always a gradual shift in opinion in every game I played as it ages and players expectations and desires shift.

Secondly, I think we can agree that there is a distinct difference in our preference in what we want out of a character customisation system. The system you seem to talk about would quite likely kill my interest in the game. That's normal. People have different desires and interests and enjoy different games. I don't like games with complicated build systems and I wouldn't want to see FF14 become that.

That said I'm not entirely opposed to some limited customisation. However if it got much more than the current WoW style skill trees I would very quickly become unhappy with it unless by some miracle they created a system with great balance across all possible builds.

Thirdly, while I don't work in software and game design my circle of friends includes quite a coder, a 3d artist, 2 project managers that work in IT and a guy who specialises in QA. While this hasn't made me an expert, listening to them complain about work over beers has given me some insight into how complicated even simple change requests in software can lead to huge and complicated issues.

Further your taking a general statement I said and making it sound like I used it to counter a specific thing you said. I would add to that that something being physically possible to do doesn't necessarily make it feasible to do. Regardless my original point is still very true and valid.

Fourth, I will reference a couple of points from your original post:

I'm finding that to be a very, very common sentiment among people playing this... and that's not a good thing. I'm in that same boat, as are several of my friends.

Well, there's been many, many posts and discussions - here, and elsewhere, on forums, blogs, vlogs, etc - of people asking and openly "hoping" that SE would do something more interesting for the new Relic weapons. People saying "please don't just throw another long, boring grind at us. Give us interesting storylines, epic, unique fights, a fun quest chain, even if it's really difficult".

People ask for more character customization, Yoshi-P says "nope".

And what happened to them listening to the players, something they vowed to do back when they were trying to get our trust back? I guess that doesn't matter to them anymore, because they seem to not only be listening less and less, but saying "No" more and more, whether directly, or through their actions.

Now you might not have intended to give the impression that you were claiming that the majority of people felt the same as you but the way you wrote your post gave me that impression. That's when I post I usually talk about what I want, not what people want.

Fifth, I'm perfectly happy for Yoshi P to be held to what he said, though with the exception that I'm incline to overlook thing he said if I find the reasoning for those things or for changes to them to make sense. Feel free to give examples. All I did was point out he literally talked about the very issue in the last interview he did a couple of weeks ago. You can even find the translation on reddit if you go looking for it.

Finally, Perhaps I should have linked the whole thing rather than that specific part. I was just trying to avoid bloating the post unnecessarily. I did read the whole post and fundamentally even with the full post my response would be the same. I don't like that in games I play. I'm being honest. It is that kind of game design that was a big factor in me not playing GW2 anymore. It would have been dishonest of me to say different.

Simply put I disagree with things you seem to want. I haven't called you names or been rude to you and I have explained why I feel the way I do. I think that is pretty sane and civil.

[Duuude007]

Since you're talking about new players here, I feel like I should point out that the class quests at level 45 and 50 now give out the i90 Philosophy gear in addition to the i50/55 Artifact gear. I believe the MSQ also gives you an i90 weapon (the ones from Primal Focus) and possibly an i110 weapon. As you progress through Heavensward, if you do the MSQ and all of your side quests you can also get entire sets of HQ crafted gear items starting at item level 115 and going all the way to item level 145.

I rolled an alt recently, and you get a full i110 set... effortlessly. Explicitly through MSQ.

There is no concern whatsoever about vertical progression.

[Gunspec]

So I just noticed something about this thread... Are lots of people posting with alts? I'm going to assume so, because I'm seeing lots of opinions (both for and against VP) coming from characters that aren't level 60 on any class yet.

Now I'll admit I never hit level cap in FFXI when I played, so my knowledge of that game is limited to what I've heard friends describe, but my opinion on OTHER horizontal progression games that I've hit endgame is that it kills my interest since I'll never grow stronger beyond tweaking, min-maxing, and developing new but similar powered character builds. It always feels like there is nothing to look forward to when it comes to my character.

What I look forward to in FFXIV is seeing the ilevel cap go up, getting that extra power, and doing more with it. I look forward to soloing and duoing more old content, clearing dragonskin maps without needing to form a party, punching more A rank hunts in the face, and walking into new fights that hit hard and take a long time to kill, knowing that I'll gear up to kick their butts better in the future. Maybe I'm crazy, but being able to go back and fight Ultima Weapon 1v1, helping a new player with their story quests by annihilating a dungeon I once crawled through, and seeing how quickly my well geared groups can handle dungeons that used to take what felt like an eternity... those are some of my favorite moments that come with vertical progression. Horizontal progression alternatives just sound like grind in which nothing really changes.

[Alahra]

It always feels like there is nothing to look forward to when it comes to my character.

FFXI did honestly have vertical progression, too, but that progression typically only happened once every several years. The game was originally cappped at level 50 (like this one) but by the time it released in NA, the first expansion had raised the level cap to Level 75. Four or five years after that, the level cap was raised to 90 in a series of mini-expansions, and then sometime after that (I can't remember exactly how long) the level cap was increased to 99. A few years after that, they instituted item levels mostly as we understand them here (which is where the game now stands).

For all the time in between those periods, the game has been horizontal (even now, after they tried to make it more directly vertical, they've had to go back and reinstate most of the old horizontal aspects through upgrade quests for old gear and the like, because that's what their playerbase, small though it is, wants). And a big part of why horizontal progression worked in FFXI was that leveling was essentially the vertical progression, not gear. It took a very long time to get to 75 during the first expansion, and you had all those Limit Break Quests getting in the way, Missions to do, and so on. What that meant was that, by the time someone hit 75, there was just a metric ton of content to gear up that job, whether it was their first job or a newly leveled one, and everything took tons of time (the kind of time that makes our current Anima questline look like a joke).

Something like that could never work in FFXIV mainly because of time. The game's already set up in a way that the endgame is where they want people to be, which is why we can level so fast, and so on, and no matter how long content lasts at the level cap, it will never be able to meet demand when people can get to 60 in a week or two and when they can then gear up a job at a basic functional level in another week or two. There's not going to be any room for real horizontal progression in FFXIV and the people clamoring for it honestly don't understand that a game has to be built from the ground up for it to function properly. They want a different game.

Yes, you can add what I normally call horizontal aspects to the game (like more gearsets at the highest item level for each raid tier), and that's something I'm in favor of. But those aspects wouldn't actually result in horizontal progression in any way. The overarching progression would still be massively vertical, just as FFXI's progression was still largely horizontal despite it being punctuated with periods of intense vertical progression.

[Ibi]

Now I'll admit I never hit level cap in FFXI when I played, so my knowledge of that game is limited to what I've heard friends describe, but my opinion on OTHER horizontal progression games that I've hit endgame is that it kills my interest since I'll never grow stronger beyond tweaking, min-maxing, and developing new but similar powered character builds. It always feels like there is nothing to look forward to when it comes to my character.

This is absolutely one of the major drawbacks to a horizontal progression system. Any increases in player power become minimal, and it can take literal years before you can return to old content and actually notice the difference.

The game was originally cappped at level 50 (like this one) but by the time it released in NA, the first expansion had raised the level cap to Level 75. Four or five years after that, the level cap was raised to 90 in a series of mini-expansions, and then sometime after that (I can't remember exactly how long) the level cap was increased to 99. A few years after that, they instituted item levels mostly as we understand them here (which is where the game now stands).

To fill in the actual dates:

• 05/2002: JP PS2 launch, level cap is 50.
• 09/2002: Level cap raised to 55.
• 11/2002: Level cap raised to 60.
• 04/2003: Level cap raised to 65 in Rise of the Zilart pre-patch. Expansion goes live a couple of days later.
• 07/2003: Level cap raised to 70.
• 10/2003: NA PC launch.
• 12/2003: Level cap raised to 75.

(Source for the above)

The cap remained at 75 for six and a half years, until the Abyssea add-ons were introduced in the second half of 2010. Those raised the cap to 90, where it paused for a while, then continued to 99 by the end of 2011.

• 06/2010: Vision of Abyssea is released. Level cap increased to 80.
• 09/2010: Scars of Abyssea is released. Level cap increased to 85.
• 12/2010: Heroes of Abyssea is released. Level cap increased to 90.
• 09/2011: Level cap increased to 95.
• 12/2011: Level cap increased to 99.

Finally, item levels were first introduced in 07/2013.

For all the time in between those periods, the game has been horizontal

Although this is generally true, there were definitely instances of gear being introduced that could obsolete a lot of older stuff even when the level cap wasn't increasing. In particular, events like Limbus and Salvage added new sets that you would completely replace older items (but due to FFXI's ability to change equipment in combat though, it's rare that you'd ever replace all your gear for a particular slot with any upgrade).

[Iagainsti]

One thing I can chime in about was the bad timing in this expansion with regards to vertical progression. I was fate farming my relic crystals last week because, unfortunately, there was no relic for the MCH. So there I am, farming fates for hours to get an i170 wep for my alt class, when it dawned on me that this exact step should have been released with xpac. At release, we had the choice of either acquiring law tomes to get an i170 wep to upgrade it with hunt seals to i180, or we went the trial route and received an 175 and then an 190 from ravana. Why could we not have the fate farm route for our 170 relic at the same time? I could've leveled my MCH this way between roulettes, but instead I had to level my MCH separately and now, 7 months later, am fate farming the new zones as a lvl 60 for an ilvl 170 weapon.... I'd like to point out I do love this game, but this was poor implementation.

[Xtrasweettea]

So I just noticed something about this thread... Are lots of people posting with alts? I'm going to assume so, because I'm seeing lots of opinions (both for and against VP) coming from characters that aren't level 60 on any class yet.

Do we need to post with an account with a class that is level 60 to give validity or weight to opinions we provide?

I can understand having a level 60 class to add weight behind opinions or point of views pertaining to that specific class, doing events with that specific class, the state of events at level 60, etc.

For general opinions that do not necessarily require you to have working knowledge of an event, class, endgame, etc. that is experienced at 60, requiring a class at 60 to post an opinion is unnecessary.

[Interceptor]

How about instead of creating a new tomestone and associated gear every patch, the developers focus on content that actually makes use of the current high end tier?