Horizontal progression? In MY theme park?!

[Maeka]

it keeps old content relevant and that makes people feel like there's more to do. i don't particularly care for it but usually it does do that.

The content is grindy enough, why do you want to keep it relevant for longer? lol

People already complain about having to run older dungeons for roulette... do you think people still want to be raiding Bahamut's Coil for gear that is still relevant today? Some people raid it for S&G or roulette bonuses, but not for the drops. Do you think it's healthy to force people to continue raiding it for the rest of the game's lifespan?

[Lambdafish]

The content is grindy enough, why do you want to keep it relevant for longer? lol

Because there are new players joining all the time. The idea of unsynced content, grind nerfs and other methods of making old content completely faceroll (to the point where some bosses can be killed before their first mechanic) is unpleasant if you are just reaching those pieces of content for the first time. Grinds I understand to a certain extent, but unsync is a really bad system that has unfortunately become baseline in the game. There needs to be some sort of control over it so that the content is at least still content rather than a few hits and instant rewards.

The same can be said about poor level sync (particularly on content early into an expansion cycle), but thats a whole other issue.

[Maeka]

But yet some newbies might not want to run old raids.

I mean if you're a newbie, the MSQ will already take you 100-200 hours of play, at least. But not only that, but you also want to dump the old raids on them too and make them required as well, to add another who knows how many hours onto that?

The newbies want to get to Max Level and participate in all this new content that's out, they don't want to be forced to slough through old stuff. Now, some newbies may CHOOSE to go through old raids out of curiosity of the sights and sounds, but I doubt very many of them want to have to grind that stuff for gear.

[Dzian]

The content is grindy enough, why do you want to keep it relevant for longer? lol

People already complain about having to run older dungeons for roulette... do you think people still want to be raiding Bahamut's Coil for gear that is still relevant today? Some people raid it for S&G or roulette bonuses, but not for the drops. Do you think it's healthy to force people to continue raiding it for the rest of the game's lifespan?

The biggest reason people complain about running old content is the games design means there's always so little content to actually do...

There is so little content that's relevant at any given time. That players literally have very few things to do.
Presently for example outside of roulette. The only content worth doing (casually at least) is the lighthouse 24 man raid and maybe the tsuyo ex. As a result they're the only 2 things players have to do. So it's no wonder they run them to death... there is nothing else to do..

Many players will probably have done that lighthouse raid hundreds of times by the time 4.4 comes out... Because that's why they get sick of old content..

If you had a larger variety of relevant content it would generally all feel fresher for much longer because each individual one wouldn't be done as often...

When there's only 1 or 2 things to do. They both get run to death very quickly. Especially if someone has to run lighthouse a dozen times each week to get there drop...

[Lambdafish]

The newbies want to get to Max Level and participate in all this new content that's out, they don't want to be forced to slough through old stuff. Now, some newbies may CHOOSE to go through old raids out of curiosity of the sights and sounds, but I doubt very many of them want to have to grind that stuff for gear.

I don't think you understand horizontal progression. Nobody is being forced, but in the current state of the game, you barely get a choice because content is being made intentionally worthless.

[Remedi]

The content is grindy enough?.....For real?

[Zojha]

I don't think you understand horizontal progression.

Truth be told, most people don't seem to. Heck, I constantly see people confusing it with special effects.

Ultimately, all progression is progression. It's a one-way street on which you can only progress, stagnate, or regress in a single direction and only the first of those three is deemed motivating. In computer terms, progression typically means two things:
a) A checkmark is cleared (Raid, Story progression)
b) A number goes up (Combat stats, e.g. DPS).

So called "horizontal" progression doesn't get rid of that, because it wouldn't be progression at all otherwise. All it does is to take the generic "combat" progression line and feathers it into multiple sub-purposes that each progress "vertically" individually.
By nature, given equal gear acquisition rates, that's going to mean more grinding, because you no longer have one "best" set, but multiple, one for each purpose, which may or may not overlap. And it also relies on there actually being multiple relevant purposes in the combat system itself to work. Which... is probably the biggest issue when trying to expand it in FFXIV.

Special effects on gear are entirely separate from that and can be either "vertical", i.e. represent an upgrade in performance or "horizontal", i.e. represent a different purpose. "Randomly spawns 3 Voidlings to deal damage" is a different purpose than "Randomly erects a barrier that blocks 15% of your max HP", thus they are "horizontal". They are also "vertical", because it's a clear improvement of combat performance over "nothing at all" or a weaker version of the same effect (like 1 Voidling/5% max HP). Same goes for less fancy stats like +15 Survival Stat vs +15 Damage Stat, it's just less smoke and mirrors there.

Neither of the two has much to do with how long content remains relevant. Barring plain enjoyment, a piece of content is relevant for as long as it represents progression. For gear, that means the rewards need to be better than something you already have. And in the "horizontal" model, being better in general is simply replaced with being better at some (ideally relevant) purpose. Since "horizontal" progression ceteris paribus requires more grinding, it naturally boosts longevity of content as well. How much depends on the degree of difference between the different "best" sets.
However, ultimately longevity is mostly decided by the rate at which gear (or any other progression metric) is acquired. That's obvious: Since the relevancy of the content is tied to the progression it provides, the sooner you get that progression, the sooner it becomes irrelevant.

A good example here is leveling content: If you level multiple jobs, XP remains a relevant reward for longer than if you only level one. Thus, the content remains relevant longer, i.e. has a higher longevity. Since leveling multiple jobs is not mandatory however, this is entirely optional and that's a good thing. But it matters little if you can just boost yourself to max easily. Gear follows the same principle. You can have a million different gear purposes and item slots, if you can get all items for free at a vendor in the starting area, the longevity of that is as long as it takes to navigate the menus.

Personally? I'd loath to try and support more "horizontal" progression within the individual jobs while the overarching job progression is still such a PITA to participate in. Most of the time, you can barely gear up your basic trinity roles before the gear becomes obsolete due to caps and other pacing measures. Adding more progression on the job level would increase that issue exponentially.

[Maeka]

-snip-

That's because everybody cites FFXI Pre-Abyssea as the poster child of Horizontal Progression and that's what HP *was* in FFXI.

You'd reach Level 75 and there's a million activities all to grind on, and your reward was gear that you'd wear for 2 seconds at a time constantly swapping gear for every little action you take. Blue Mage was rather egregious so I'll use it as an example. You'd have 50+ pieces of equipment (even though you can only wear 16).

Meleeing/Building TP? Wear Accuracy gear.
Wanna do a WS? Swap to str+ gear, use WS, swap back to Accuracy.
Wanna cast a spell? Swap to the gear that buffs that specific spell. Swap back.

etc etc etc.

It's just so ludicrous and ridiculous.

OR, how WoW did "Horizontal" Progression back during Vanilla: Wanna do Naxxramas? I hope you went back and farmed Cold Resist gear or you'd get smeared by one of the bosses in there. You'd have a suit of armor you'd wear for normal bosses, but then you'd have this alternate Cold Resist gear that you'd swap in for THAT boss and ONLY that boss. Blizz promptly dumped this system in their very first expansion, because it was universally hated, nobody liked having to lug around a whole suit of gear for one boss.

Not sure how else you'd do Horizontal Progression unless you're suggesting we do a bunch of things like Eureka or PotD that have their alternate progression... but then, try asking most players what their opinions of PotD and Eureka is and I'm pretty sure most hate it. Only reason why most people do PotD these days is to level their classes up (this should point out a flaw in the leveling system TBH).

[Ilyrian]

OR, how WoW did "Horizontal" Progression back during Vanilla: Wanna do Naxxramas? I hope you went back and farmed Cold Resist gear or you'd get smeared by one of the bosses in there. You'd have a suit of armor you'd wear for normal bosses, but then you'd have this alternate Cold Resist gear that you'd swap in for THAT boss and ONLY that boss. Blizz promptly dumped this system in their very first expansion, because it was universally hated, nobody liked having to lug around a whole suit of gear for one boss.

Pretty sure there's a circle of hell where you have to play that way again - but as an adult with a full time job and family - for all eternity.

[RaideDuku]

This thread again.

*sigh*



Again, there is not enough statistical complexity to this game to allow for any horizontal progression. To do so would require a complete redo of the system, which would mean every fight and every enemy would have to be rebalanced to accommodate the new system. The odds of this happening are pretty near nil.