
Originally Posted by
Teakwood
Did they, though? Other than wanting to help your friends get sea/sky access so they could do whatever endgame stuff with you... FFXI was actually really, really terrible about this.
I'm on the fence about this, myself - I personally loved FFXI's "s[tuff] is situational" approach and horizontal gear progression. However, it's virtually impossible to keep people doing old content without (pick approximately two):
a) making the content so difficult that nobody can do it - which isn't feasible, because if you make it -just difficult enough-, once people get sufficiently skilled, the difficulty is no longer a barrier to gear saturation, although the content tends to be a lot more fun this way! If you make things -too- difficult, though, the content just leads to longstanding player rage. (Hi, AV! Heck, most of CoP pre-nerf could count, depending on how vindictive you're feeling.)
b) making the drop rates absolutely horribly low, which is unsatisfying from a gameplay perspective,
c) putting enormously restrictive cooldown timers on everything, which is also unsatisfying,
d) requiring extremely specific set-ups in order to do the fight, which is basically fake difficulty.
The only solution to this that I'm aware of is to not actually worry about reward saturation and assume that there will always be people working their way up the vertical-progression ladder. I'm not actually sure that this is feasible unless you have a constant inflow of new subscribers, and this interacts really weirdly with the Armoury System (leveling up a second job and doing lower-level content for gear for your second job? Having trouble with a boss? Everyone switches to their 50 jobs and they roll the sucker), but...
I think I can see where MMO developers in general and SE's dev team in specific have themselves in a corner about this. It's a difficult game design question and I'm not sure there are any easy answers. I don't like to see obsolete content, but at the same time I know I can't come up with valid incentives for people to do older content in the way the game intends.
Thoughts?