I just don't get it.

[Igziabeher]

Let me preface this by saying that this is by no means my first MMO, I have been playing them on and off since Diablo 2, and have tried out a good deal, if not most, of the "big" titles out there in the MMO world at the moment, (excluding ESO and a few others I'm sure). And yes, before you say "well thats just how all MMO's are", I'm well aware. I also think this game is pretty darn great, my friend and I had a lot of fun up until max level and realizing the um...pattern. However, my issue lies not with the overall power curve and gear progression, but with the absolutely mechanical, procedural, numerical way in which SE presents it, or more to the point, how they do absolutely nothing at all to disguise this simplistic design. This isn't just a whine thread, I have a serious question here, just give me a minute with a bit more exposition.


In almost every game, when new content is released, it doesn't happen on a set schedule, nor does it follow some pattern of previously implemented content. If it does, its done so in a way that it isn't blatantly obvious to the point where we are able to make predictions (pretty accurate ones from what i've seen) on what will be implemented next, which kind of undermines any content we know is going to be rendered outdated in the near future...We're left to just sit and say 'well it will be a while before this is outdated, i guess i can afford to pentameld". A bit absurd, no? Of course we all expect power curves, more powerful gear to come along, but we dont exactly say to ourselves its okay to spend months farming this, if it'll be junk by the time we get it all. I, for one, have just gotten into end-game gathering/crafting, working on red scrips, then i see that in 3.3 there will be new (cant remember which) gear, for red scrips. AND there is a cap on red scrips, (not tokens ofc, but dont get me started on redundant currencies, thats another whole wall of text). So wow, that entire portion of the game is pretty much up in the air for me at this point, I can farm red scrips just fine at the moment, so why would I want to spend any on anything if new gear is coming? Right there SE is just undermining its own content, but in reality they shouldn't be screwing people over by blatantly power-curbing items with new gear on a set schedule....let people be the best for a while, introduce new content for the best, not just stuff the best has to bust their ass to regain their title as "BiS" or whatever.. Okay, as I promised, here is my question...

How do you guys justify playing a game in which there is *multiple* tiers of absolutely useless gear (i'm looking at everything with a level 50 requirement that isn't either easily obtainable as a drop/level 50 white crafts, ie. all the i70 and i90 stuff, which is more difficult to get than the Ironworks gear, and also i190 and i200 stuff from a1-4 and VA). Maybe I played a bit differently than others, and I will admit I only spent eso's on one class past level 50, but I had *way* better than i190 gear by the time I finally got to do A1-4 normal, and the Void Ark gear is comparable to the eso gear(which I had by the time I bothered to do VA, with very little grinding), except it can't be upgraded. Besides all this, there is still another whole tier of gear (lore) that has the SAME level requirement as all this other junk. What we are left with is people just sitting there in max ilvl gear *waiting* for NEW content to be released, repeating same raids over and over to farm the current patches gear, and by the time they are done, new patch has dropped, and hooray, we finally have all that old patch gear to meet ilvl for new patch gear to immediately repeat the cycle.

I really, honestly, earnestly, am asking you, as an MMO lover.....is this where we are at with MMOs now? Just a constant flux of new currencies/gear/copy-pasted raids with new textures on walls/mobs every couple of months? I mean I've only been here a few months, but its baffling to me how people are able to literally predict what next patches content will be. Like we all knew relic would get an upgrade in 3.25, so its just a simple paradigm shift to "okay now lets all do relic stuffs". It feels absurdly plastic and monotonous. No other MMO I have played in my 12+ years of playing them has ever had such a formulaic approach to gear progression, to the point where they literally put NUMBERS on the gear, just to say "oh this new gear we just made is 10 points better than what you hvae now, better go 'n' get it!". Its a slap in the face to anyone who wants to actually have some customization with their characters. Remember when Final Fantasy had character customization? Remember the skill-sphere on FFX?..I know this isn't entirely feasible in an MMORPG, but ffs. linear gear progression with just new and new raids that outmode the old ones (to the point where you have to tie in CT with new content just to feign some relevance) is just bad game design. Please help me understand how I'm wrong about this, because I know a friggin zillion people play this shit. You can't all be this careless about game design?

[Igziabeher]

inb4 "if you don't like it, quit", cuz

I probably will if thats all anyone has to say :P

[Judah_Brandt]

Well, all of that gear you are referencing was at one point relevant. Some of it still is if you plan to level another class to do current content. Most of it exists as a way for players who do content casually to be able to have multiple options in which to gear their character in order to do said content. Also that high end gear that they make available is to ease the most difficult content, as everything else is relatively easy if you put forth any effort.

Go ahead and try the Extreme Primals or Savage content with minimum ilvl sync on, and then you'll start to see how things have functioned in the past. It makes sense in terms of scope, player skill can only supplement high end gear to such an extent. The only way to create difficulty is to tune things beyond our capabilities at the time of their release and provide a way for us to work at becoming strong enough to challenge them.

Simply put, every MMO is like this, was like this, and will likely continue to be like this. It's a functional system, and the reason it comes across as whining is because there are no alternatives that make sense for what this game or many others offer.

And there are stat optimizations, if you bother to look into them. Itemization for PvP, mixing and matching end game gear to maximize DPS in correlation with things like Skill Speed. Albeit in 1.0 there were secondary functions on certain things, such as the Dragoon's Gae Bolg increasing the damage from jumps. That sort of itemization is enjoyable, but don't get yourself caught up in it because it seems more complex than it really is. The best weapon will still be the best weapon, and all alternatives do is burden the community with arguments over optimization.

[Jijifli]

If this is really not your first MMO...

Then you must have been really blind in those other ones. The point of gearing going up is a sign of progression. Of course gear eventually becomes worthless. That's not going to go away. Do you get upset on a new character when you pick up an upgrade from you starting gear? It means your starting gear is pointless. Maybe starting gear should then be equal to the top end gear? Why not everything be equal to it at this point?

[X-ill47]

This is vertical progression for you. Item level is a thing. And I really can't remember MMO with vertical progression (btw Diablo 2 is NOT a MMO, it's Action/RPG with a strong multiplayer) that doesn't work this way. Content itself is not predictable, only rewards. Raids and dungeones are not copy-paste of each other, they are different. Next tier of DotH gear is going to require in some way current tier of DotH gear so I assume that your red scripts are not going to go nowhere (and new DotH will not require red scripts). Also, current DotH gear was released in July 2015 iirc, so it's defenitly time to give people an upgrade.

It's not really a bad game design. New gear is a bait for people to look at newest content. Some way of "outdating" old content is needed to change tune of regular playing. Regular playing is constructed in a way that you can acquire some stuff via grinding, but generally everything "best" is locked out for both purposes of eliminating real grinding and keeping people playing. Again, gear progression IS predictible, but the tune is not. And if the tune is bad, people are complaining and leaving. And if it's fun, people are playing.

BTW, you're saying that we're predicting all this stuff while we're ceartanly not always. The only thing I can "predict" (because developers didn't say it anywhere) is that we will end 3.x series gear progression with ilvl270 gear and ilvl 275 weapons, and that this ilvl will be available only for raiders in 3.4 and for nearly everyone later. I can't predict how next raids will look (except, of course 3.3 24-man raid, because they showed us pictures of it). And, well, that's not the only thing to do in this game. It may sound rather strange maybe but I like to do stuff in Gold Saucer. I LOVE to do story side-quests (still have to do some). Sometimes I feel like doing low-lvl content and then I level new class. Sometimes I feel like I would like to do hard content with group and then I start learning party for latest EX primal I still need to beat (not for the weapon and even for a bird, but for a fight itself).

You are not required to get latest gear if you feel obligated because of it's existance. Try to do content for itself, there can be no better bait than this.

[FoxyAreku]

Maybe it's different because I came from World of Warcraft, but there's nothing wrong with this?

I mean that's how WoW is and has been for as long as the game has existed. Everything below max level and the current raid is useless, or just something you use to reach the end. Nothing wrong with it and it's perfectly fine.

[Igziabeher]

I have no problem with gear getting stronger, maybe the reason it feels so strange to me is that there is no corresponding level increase, so as i said, you have multiple tiers of gear, all but one (maybe two, if ones easy to get at entry-level) are useful, and new content is just constantly stacked on top of old content. I just find it hard to find motivation in grinding the same roulettes every day for an ambiguous token #, without any actual character progression, because all of the gear that drops is only useful for desynthesis or glamour...none of anything any of you have said is invalid, and i appreciate your responses, but I feel you're missing my point entirely. Yes, this is how MMO's "have" to be, but it doesn't have to be so upfront as to outright just slap a number on gear and make new stuff every couple of months. why isn't there any all-encompassing, persistently difficult-to-obtain gear that people dont have to ditch/throw on retainers/desynth/convert just because a new raid that came out drops things way better than whatever they did have, secondaries/melds/etc or not. Crafting is already WAY too complicated and expensive as is, why can't we at least craft things that aren't just on-par with whatever new crap they give us in random patch. It's just a damn cookie-cutter, predictable set of upgrades every "tier". I mean seriously, this completely ruins immersion. Sitting there waiting for some bad thing to happen/some dumb NPC to figure out what he wants you to do next so you can get "moar power shinier gear!". Like come on...it's like a Saturday morning cartoon that has a new episode once a month.... You guys really just okay with having ONE raid every couple of months that is your sole venue for the next step in gear progression? It's pretty pathetic to me. I've played 15 year old MMORPGs that haven't had new content in years that still have a more fulfilling gear progression system than this. Seriously. It's called randomly-generated-content. They had right idea with Diadem loot being random in secondaries, too bad its all i160-i210. The random glamour appearance was also neat, but there we go, just another outdated useless un-used zone. Whole bit of content wasted. Just like ARR relic, and ARR beast tribes until they retro-fitted them with a sloppy purpose like "durrp lets just make em give these things peeps want". I came into this conversation genuinely curious, but I really can't jive with what you're all saying. It feels like an excuse. A somewhat valid excuse, but one I don't think is worthy of a modern video game that holds the title of such a good franchise.

[Nicobo]

...What we are left with is people just sitting there in max ilvl gear *waiting* for NEW content to be released, repeating same raids over and over to farm the current patches gear, and by the time they are done, new patch has dropped, and hooray, we finally have all that old patch gear to meet ilvl for new patch gear to immediately repeat the cycle....

Were you talking about the real RAIDERS who have all the loves from YoshiP? ^^;

[Damona]

...and all alternatives do is burden the community with arguments over optimization.

So ur telling me that we cant have arguments over optimization? No wonder that the game is in the sorry state it is, have fun grinding your ilvls for all eternity without any depth or anything else at all.

And dont worry OP, I dont get it either. I'll gladly play FFXIV as a resub MMO where I'll log in every 1 or 2 patches and play the catchup game for the primals and the story. But as an active MMO? I am not interested in savage or sitting on 230 gear which will be meaningless in a few patches anyways.

Cant do something? Hit a brick wall in a tough fight? Oh lets just wait 1-2 weeks until we can get some more lores, do we do something for that gear?
Nope, we just throw time at it, grind a bit and get 1337 ilvl gear without any effort at all. Why? Well the answer is painfully obvious and I dont think that it needs further explaination.

tl;dr: The game is good but could easily be amazing, but why go that route? Its a system that works and it isnt going to change anytime soon as it seems.

[CookieMonsta]

Oh, you also haven't noticed. This community loves responding to discontent (albeit very well thought out discontent) with "just quit" or the ever lovely "Just take a break".
Its all an illusion, everyone here is enthralled, any and all opinion that tries to break this illusion will be met with extreme resistance.
I for one am extremely jaded because everyone simply does not see the hamster wheel around them, the golden prison bars.
To cope, I play this game mostly to enjoy the company of close friends, everything else is unimportant.