How Would You Have Done: Pagos ?

[Besame]

The biggie for me is when they took away my mount. Mobs hit like trucks and chase you forever. Another reason I hate Pagos is the lose xp upon death crap unless you get rezzed. This totally discouraged me from any solo play in Eureka also and I was hesitant to make long treks to join an existing group far away until I got the ports. Will I make it to my group alone without dying? Maybe, maybe not. Will they want to come all the way down wasting 10+ minutes and losing their xp and possibly a spot or impatient players just to rez me if I die? Maybe, maybe not...

The lower level chain groups are not working well. Friction between party members when another group tries to kill in the same area and I have seen griefers pull big groups of mobs on other group's players. Fates are too few and far between and a hella trek for players to get from one area on the map to the other in time to catch them. When all players finally get up there and ready to go, look forward to a sore wrist after endless repetitive motion on the mouse/keys/controler. Carpel tunnel anyone? I am almost 35 and do nothing but mash buttons for 2-3 hrs at a crack with a very occasional fate to screw up the chain.

I was hoping for more balanced, safer solo and gathering content for xp and crafting. Too few lockboxes and worthless junk for the most part. I don't like it myself but I just finished getting the relic 370 bow and mount which is nice. I met some nice people grouping, too bad I couldn't get to know them better while mashing/clicking like a madwoman during chains...

[Kaurhz]

Truthfully,
- Slight downscale of the level disparity between the mobs and us, vice versa.
- 3 Daily quests which award EXP, in line of that which you'd receive doing an NM of your level.
- Materials for making Potion of Harmony would be gatherable materials from nodes within Pagos.
- EXP awarded from the Elemental Conflicts. Not significant EXP, but enough to warrant people going for it. Additionally, bunny guaranteed to all participants that achieve gold. A conflict that provides absolutely nothing of any value in most cases. This clearly didn't work out as well as it did on paper, so we'll probably see adjustments, if not then it's a complete slap in the face.

[Lambdafish]

Not a lot can be done, eureka is grounded in the worst aspect of XIV, the exploration. Diadem was the same and flopped for the same reason. XIV has nothing relevant to discover in the world, no special ways to explore (think guild wars 2), and no reason to go anywhere. Eureka and Diadem were grounded in exploration and did nothing to fix these flaws.

Square should focus on combat innovation (mythic dungeons? Battle square?) and stop trying to innovate on their weakest link.

[missarielle]

I played Anemos and Pagos. I enjoyed the concept of Eureka but there are several things in its mechanics that I think make it terrible in execution. Here are the following ways I think would make Pagos better.

No Penalty for Monsters Above Level
Yes, this means that power-leveling elemental levels would be a possibility however I do not think this is necessarily a bad thing. Eureka is at its core, in my opinion, a team effort and it is incredibly discouraging and gated to have friends of different Elemental Levels that cannot party together. The time it takes to level is very steep and so to get ahead or behind one's friends tends to cause an utter loss of hope.

It would be far better if the mob grind was normalized by mob level not based on the level of the player to the mob. You could make it so chains don't happen below -5 level of monster to keep things optimized.

Have Notifications or Hints for how seen a Notorious Monster might spawn
It does not have to be specific "20/50 monsters killed" but having periodic notifications like ...
You sense a slight disturbance in the aether to being not close at all to A malevolent presence seems very close at hand to being it's going to spawn any kill now would be very helpful and help with the motivations of grinding when it takes upwards of 40-50 minutes to spawn a Notorious Monster.


Aetherytes should be available reflecting level-appropriate mobs
The Level 21 and 32 Aetherytes are perfect examples of this but the Level 30 Aetheryte should have been available much earlier--probably level 26.

No Jump Puzzles for Viable Content
In Pagos there was a design choice for needing to be at a higher elevation to jump down to a ledge to lead into a cave system but this ledge was not connected to the other caves. If you descended to the wrong one you had to climb all the way back around to try again. This took an incredible amount of time and it was often difficult to see where you needed to land. For one friend who is color-blind he actually couldn't make the distinctions and had to be shown every time.

There needed to be a walking path back up to the surface even if the jump-route was faster.

---
What Eureka Does Right
- Elemental Wheel is a fantastic mechanic, bonuses to chains replenishing the magia wheel would be appreciated.

- Mutating mobs on non-NM spawning ones is fantastic

- Weather changing circumstances is great!

- The team-based grind is fun and a great encouragement over the Notorious Monster spawn of Anemos

- Chain bonuses and boxes is a great incentive to stay within an appropriate level.

[Lubu_Mykono]

All this hate would have been negated if they just gave us that sweet Bunny as a minion and/or mount.

[Shiroe]

the bunnies and elemetal parts in Pagos are superficial..

but Pagos improved on the most important parts:

A) its world build up (with cliffs, steep climbs, vast landscapes etc.)

B) and enemy placements (trap enemies hidden behind obstacle, needing to dodge enemies by walking near cliff edges etc.)

aside if the early grind to reach lv. 21, Pagos is imo better than Eureka and fun (even if ofc grindy too).., and rezing is more important than ever

[Acidblood]

What should Pagos have tried to accomplish?

Actually being an EXPLORATORY zone... i.e. gather your party and venture forth, explore, have fun, and be rewarded no matter your party size or what you choose to do (except being AFK)...

How might it have done so?

Some ideas:
1. Get rid of levels... beyond splitting friends and the general community they are nothing but a pain.
2. Ditto for the element wheel... it may look good on paper, but in reality it adds nothing but busy work.
3. Make killing normal mobs worth something... every mob has a chance to drop needed (i.e. relic progressing) items... every mob has a chance to spawn a 'mini-boss' version that drops more / better loot.
4. Chests that randomly spawn throughout the map and contain at least 1 needed (i.e. relic progressing) item.
5. Mixed difficulties of mobs... i.e. 1-star = soloable, 2-star = duo, 3-star = light party, 4-star = full party, 5-star (NM) = alliance, with harder mobs being rarer / more random spawns (but also dropping more, but not better, loot).
6. Daily random mini quests to encourage people to do different things... e.g. open 3 chests, kill 5 of a particular mob, kill a 4 star mob...
7. Random ‘weather events’… i.e. every hour or so the weather changes, with different weather types presenting different (minor) hazards, and opportunities (e.g. certain NMs only spawn during certain weather, certain areas become accessible / inaccessible based on the weather, etc.)
8. Regularly updated 'world objectives'... e.g. week 1-2 would be to build up the main base, so go out and collect supplies; week 3-4 would be clearing out mobs, so go out and kill stuff; week 5-6 would be discovering lore, so go out and find hidden items / objects / rare mobs; week 7-8 would be defending the base(s) from attack, so get ready to drive off attacking mobs and build fortifications; etc, etc.
9. (bonus) Update / link all of the Eureka zones together... i.e. when a new zone is released, the old zones are updated, essentially letting players choose their biome (rather than ‘old’ zones simply being an annoying grind to access the next grind so that you can finally do the 'current' grind).

[Kalayel]

They should've done this: accept criticism. Read what people said about Anemos and try to do something better. If fate trains were so popular, it's because leveling up is BORING. It's not fun to chain the same mobs over and over and over for next to no xp. It's not fun to chain mobs for hours and doing just that. But then, they saw that players came up this the fate train and decided "Wait they aren't playing it like we want them to play. Let's make restrictions to punish them. They'll grind mobs for hours, whether they like it or not."

Eureka could be nice, some sort of story beside the story, with a new place to discover, new stories, new quests and dailies proper to the island... but no. There is next to no story. There are no quests except "Go find a thing in that direction." and the gameplay is limited to chaining the same mob for 4 hours, get a level and then go to a mob a level higher. It's not engaging at all, it's pure lobotomy.

Now that the complaining is over, what might have they done? I'm sure many had the same ideas but there it is:
1. Give daily, random quests, like tribal quests. In short, give option. It's perfectly fine if some like grinding mobs. But it's not fine to impose it to everyone, especially when a LOT of players find it boring.
2. Hire writers. FF14 has never been so good story-wise, it's always a lot of clichés and tropes, but it was still entertaining. Lately it's just as boring as Eureka's gameplay. You're never surprised or even interested by the scenario.
3. Bunnies that lead you to a chest? Why not. But at least give -everyone- a chance, not just a select lucky few. Or at the very least, make it so that the entire party can profit from it. Oh, and make it an actual reward.
4. Speaking of bunnies, give some XP when doing the fate. I get that people would just spam it since it reappears often, but just a reward for our efforts instead of "Well played, that girl over there won a bunny. That's all."
5. No, seriously, hire writers, I'm actually begging you there.
6. Don't take our mounts away. Why would you even do that? All I see is a strong will to make everything as tedious as possible.
7. Chest drops. In Anemos, since rewards from locked chests were rubbish, their high number made it somewhat acceptable. Somewhat. Now, not only it's still rubbish, but you get like one chest per boss.
8. Give chain XP that actually matter. Not just the tenth or twentieth monster, boost ALL XP in a chain and allow limitless chain.
9. Get rid of the elemental wheel. It brings nothing in terms of gameplay, except "Tank takes the same element to not be oneshot and everyone else take the opposite element to do more than a gentle tickle."

There must be some other points, but I think the best advice would be, basically: take every idea you had for Pagos and do the opposite.

[Trensharo]

FFXIV is the only MMORPG that I've played where you suffer such huge penalties just for trying to socialize with your group. This is why grinding doesn't work in this game. The combat system is designed for scripted dungeon and raid encounters, not grinding. The game is designed to assume external voice communications, so the chat system is literally useless when your'e in a party grinding MOBs. On the flip side, they were lazy and didn't implement their own, as SOE did in EverQuest II and Blizzard did with their Battle.net client... So you cannot easily get PUGs into voice chat to enable this (and everyone doesn't want to voice chat).

Because of the way the combat works you literally have to be mashing buttons 100% of the time, otherwise you're suffering a huge performance penalty.

This is completely different from games like EverQuest where Mana Management and the lack of rigid "rotations" paced the grind such that there was always room for constant in-group communication. In other words, the combat and content was designed such that the grind did not burn you out in record time. That is why it worked so well - and it STILL feels so much better than grinding Eureka or Pagos in FFXIV; despite the game being old as dirt.

This game plays like a single player game, even when you're in a party.

That's the biggest issue with Eureka and Pagos: The combat system coupled with grind-focused content completely removes the primary reason for playing FFXIV over something like Skyrim or The Witcher. The rotations are too rigid. The combat pacing is molasses. The MOBs have way too much HP, and the AI is awful. There is barely any need for critical thinking while doing this (CC, etc.). You're just mashing buttons tens of thousands of times to kill HP bags. It's the epitome of time sink. A complete waste of time, given how unfun it is - and the whole point of a video game is entertainment.

I could quad kite 3 groups of MOBs around Plane of Fires Tables on my Necro in EQ back in 2001 in the same amount of time it takes to kill one trash MOB in Eureka solo. The amount of time this content wastes, for virtually no benefit in entertainment and even less in progression is astronomical.

It feels like you're playing with AI teammates, and unless you're botting you don't even feel like the game gives you the opportunity to get to know any of these people you're grouping with. If the group is chatty, then it's not really going to net you much XP; so the people who want to XP as efficiently as possible will just leave, anyways.

There is no way to make this game feel like FFXI. It's not possible, barring a complete revamp of some basic gaming systems. That's why they're different games.

And with the way content is reset, grinding is hardly worth it in almost any modern MMORPG anyways.

I think WoW's "World Quest" system is the best "middle ground" that exists right now.

[Hazmick]

I would like to preface this by saying that I enjoyed Anemos. For me, Pagos feels much slower than Anemos and there is no indication that SE have acted on any feedback whatsoever. Ultimately, disappointing but not surprising. I really want to enjoy Eureka, comfy grinding is right up my street, but I just can't.

Anyway, a few of the changes I'd like to see:

Nerf the mobs, make it easier and more viable for solo players.

DAILY challenges. Give people a reason to jump into Pagos more frequently than once a week and give folks more flexibility if they don't have the immense spare time required to flat out grind.

More rewards. Doesn't have to be anything crazy but just something every now and then to make people feel like they've achieved something. All this for a weapon that will be obsolete in a few weeks is just...sad.