Really SE 40+ kills and no drop?

[weeble]

well with out this carrot on a stick you call it then you'd just have all the weapons and gear from stronghold and then what, you'd be done with the game. mmo's aren't meant for everyone to have every piece of gear and they not supposed to be done with ease, that is called paying for your gear and weapons...yes your monthly. cause you just loged in got everything and yaaay can go back to doing nothing again. while i agree with ifrit, the way it is done is stupid, add a really low drop rate is fine but make it so you can pass around the gear to each other so you get the ones you want. other then that low drop rate gear and weapons is fine to me and expect them in ffxiv.

[Ilean]

well with out this carrot on a stick you call it then you'd just have all the weapons and gear from stronghold and then what, you'd be done with the game. mmo's aren't meant for everyone to have every piece of gear and they not supposed to be done with ease, that is called paying for your gear and weapons...yes your monthly. cause you just loged in got everything and yaaay can go back to doing nothing again. while i agree with the ifrit the way it is done is stupid, add a really low drop rate is fine but make it so you can pass around the gear to each other so you get the ones you want. other then that low drop rate gear and weapons is fine to me and expect them in ffxiv.

i only skimmed over thru your fence of text

I never said the stick should be gone, only that progress shouldn't be fueled by boredom and routine, so the stick shouldn't be that long.

Also, the payment thing is a sorry excuse for grind based game design. I pay more for cable TV than the average MMO fee.

By your logic instead of having a few great shows with new episodes every 8th day, I would be better off watching an endless amount of crappy B movies, as long as they keep me occupied.


I won't pay an MMO fee so I can keep my ass glued to the PC more than it's healthy. I hope SE doesn't share your sad view that they can make up for quality content by simply cheating us into sinking endless hours into the game.

I won't pay for quantity, I value quality more.

[weeble]

tl,dr i want quality too, just think quantity too lol, even though the grind was long in ffxi it didn't really feel like that to me. i have no problem playing a mmo for 5years straight long as it's a great mmo, weather i get 1 class to max or 8 that is the question.

every zone felt different, each party could be different too. like back when blm's actually got invites to parties prior to auht urgan. i was starting skill chains with my blm with AM spells and macro's. can't get no funner then a blm landing am's on magic bursts. it got to point we was tossing in 2-3 blms. every zone never felt the same to me. it just needs to be done well, nice dynamic fights and always things that can go wrong. by time you got your first max in ffxi you actually felt like you did something cool, least that was my feelings to it. every step seemed very well done.

also a problem with mmo's is they keep trying to push everyone into the same areas, if they kept the exp gain bonus in every zone including new and old ...it would never get old, being able to do the new zones, and always be able to go back to old ones would be great. plus most levels had a few different places to go, another reason having a full server is great, having to try other things forcefully is kinda nice. that's just me though and the few lol, i know most don't want these things but they need to have them or it just ain't a mmo. i'll keep repeating this but i'm not paying for a low quality offline game gone online with a monthly.

[Neptune]

Welcome to the next year of our lives. 1.x is nothing more than a pacifier to keep us occupied to v2.

The dev team probably divided the active server population by a set number to produce an extremely low drop rate. It's made so that you will run it dozens of times. You could do that, or play an offline game that doesn't do that to you. LOL.

[Bearforce]

IMO

The amount of times you need to kill Ifrit to get a weapon shouldn't exceed by far the amount of times the fight is actually fun and thrilling.

(Because otherwise it means the game requires a sacrifice in boredom to give you items and that's just wrong)

Lag issues aside (where I would get blown up half a second after cracks appeared, or I would get blown up even if I had moved half the map away from them) Ifrit stopped being a challenge the very first time we managed to form a retard-free party.

By the 5th win it was nothing but boring routine.

So you have a fight that isn't even fun or challenging and you need to do it 50+ times to get the couple of weapons you want.

The fact that you can't pick your weapon only makes it worse.


I understand that the game is broken now and SE is trying to keep us busy, but at least for me this actually makes me less likely to stay.

Grinding bosses is still grinding.


I think I would be (gladly) willing to do an average of 10 ifrits per weapon, if being allowed to pick which one I get. I would likely do twice the ifrits I need, helping people get their weapons and I wouldn't mind either.


As it is now:

-Beating ifrit means nothing. It becomes routine because you are forced to do it ridiculously way too many times if you want a reward.
-The OCD kind of player who MUST have all weapons and switch the lights on and off 10 times is having a blast, too bad they are a small minority.
-The rest of the players are getting bored of having to grind ifrit over and over and over, to the point where the boredom of farming is so huge that the weapon reward is just not worth it anymore. It's not that killing ifrit is hard, it's not fun anymore and there are other games, on and offline where you can do more interesting/thrilling/rewarding things.


Bottomline: SE's idea of retaining players by putting the carrot on a really really long stick is absolutely stupid, it's nothing but negative reinforcement that in your customers' brains translates to:

"Beating ifrit in FFXIV gets me dark matter 95% of the time, that's 0.71% chance of getting each weapon that I care about"

Qft i would rather do a difficult raid that gives a guranteed drops then waste 2 years of my life getting AF2 body on my redmage.....

[TheFatHousecat]

Difficulty is subjective. Some people breeze through Nightmare mode on the 3D Ys games like it's child plays, others can't even kill normal monsters in Bellistine castle or Clock Tower or Ruined city of Kishgal.

Rare items are items that aren't in surplus, if everyone has Sword of Reckoning that has an added effect of shattering the land, it's no longer rare, it's common. Time commitment being added to rare gear is what keeps it rare without dropping the drop rate to .01%, i.e Ragnarok Online cards.

If you have gear that will drop at 100% after a certain period of time, it's no longer rare, because after 3 kills it gets to 50+%, what's stopping 100s of others from killing 3 mobs and getting said rare gear?

I spent 3 months farming wolves for the 4-slot weapon for Assassin, and then another month farming 4 Alligator cards ; ; SO MUCH FUN.

But yeah, the current drop rate is fine imo, rare items are rare because they're RARE. Considering the relatively medium/low difficulty of the current NMs in place, this rate is perfect. Although I don't think a drop rate should be as horrendous as to warrant 2 years+ of farming, I think a few months to even half a year of farming for an item is within reason, as long as it's worth it.

A new distribution system would be nice so as to minimize on mages getting Ifrit's Harpoon, or a gold coffer key dropping to someone who's AFK, etc. Excited about the planned need/greed-like system or something akin to it, which should hopefully rectify this issue.

[AmyRae]

The game in its current state doesn't keep you mentally engaged enough to want to keep doing the same things over and over and over again. I know developers put time sinks in the game to keep you wanting to play on a daily basis and to keep you paying your subscription fee, but there is a very fine balance for that line. IMO you could say there's an almost diminishing returns formula to it where as you make a game more grindy, tedious, and boring to play - ESPECIALLY an MMO that you pay money on a monthly basis for - the more players you will lose. SE has to find that fine line where they can keep the content engaging yet not to a point where it drives away players.

I don't know that we really disagree. What I was referring to was time as the "currency of hardcore players," who have lots to spend in exchange for a gaming advantage. However, there's the still a vast and broad network of casual players to consider, as well, and the producer certainly wants to attract as many as possible. Obviously, casual activities will have to be heavy on the engaging side and purposefully light on the time-consuming side.

But even rare items for casual players will inevitably require different type of time consumption, like the one you'd see with FFXI's Limbus. It would have to be something you can only participate once or twice a week as you slowly work your way towards the valuables over the course of weeks and months, but each event itself is engaging and challenging (yet not too long in a single sitting).

[Lucifer]

i only skimmed over thru your fence of text

I never said the stick should be gone, only that progress shouldn't be fueled by boredom and routine, so the stick shouldn't be that long.

Also, the payment thing is a sorry excuse for grind based game design. I pay more for cable TV than the average MMO fee.

By your logic instead of having a few great shows with new episodes every 8th day, I would be better off watching an endless amount of crappy B movies, as long as they keep me occupied.


I won't pay an MMO fee so I can keep my ass glued to the PC more than it's healthy. I hope SE doesn't share your sad view that they can make up for quality content by simply cheating us into sinking endless hours into the game.

I won't pay for quantity, I value quality more.

WHY bother with the genre then? There are plenty of multiplayer games that do not involve a monthly fee AND no time sinks.
Let me hear your STUPID excuse, please.

[Lebannen]

So my LS and I just got done Farming the NM who gives the Copper Zahar'ak key and we got the keys but no drops of the Wristband for mages. We farmed it for over 5 hours and some 45-50 kills later still nothing. Explain how this drop rate is even fair or works cause im baffled as to how the hell you can get numerous keys and open the chest over and over and over and be rewarded with crap gear but not the rare item, yet a person can go in and in 5-10 mins get the drop? I believe the drop rate of this item as well as others from the chests in Strongholds needs to be looked at closely and adjusted because come on who wants to farm something for endless hours each night just to not get the item after 100 or more tries?

We had a similar experience. One person in the LS wanted the sipahi turban so we were farming it. After about 30 keys we allowed someone else to try to get it, and he got it on the first try. Took another 20 to get the turban for the one that actually wanted it.

[Ilean]

WHY bother with the genre then? There are plenty of multiplayer games that do not involve a monthly fee AND no time sinks.
Let me hear your STUPID excuse, please.

Well someone woke up with a big stick up his ass, carrot included!

Why don't you go ahead and offer some good arguments to why the game should be a huge timesink? Because the fact that some other games are not timesinks doesn't seem good reason enough.