Level Syncing isn't the best solution

[Nabril]

It's not a question of "hard". It's a question of "Will this work with the programming code we are using and will making the change be cost effective?" They aren't going to rewrite the game code from the ground up if it's not compatible. They aren't going to do it if the time and resource costs involved exceed what potential revenue benefit would be gained.

Successful companies don't waste the money they're earning just because they have it.

This is a video game. And there is a huge audience who want this. SE makes changes to this game all the time. Costly ones too. That's how MMOS operate. You must be new to them. MMOs grew, change, and evolve. It happens all the time.

[Jojoya]

This is a video game. And there is a huge audience who want this. SE makes changes to this game all the time. Costly ones too. That's how MMOS operate. You must be new to them. MMOs grew, change, and evolve. It happens all the time.

Yes, we know this is a video game. Not sure why that needs to be mentioned. Like any other business product or service, there are significant costs involved that the consumer probably doesn't even think about like payroll, insurances, office space leasing, utilities, supplies and equipment, marketing, etc. Or did you think that games just magically appear in a cost free virtual space with those who make the game volunteering their services and use of their personal supplies/equipment without need for compensation?

Your idea of a huge audience might be a small minority of the total FFXIV player base. You have no way of knowing since you don't personally know every single player.

You honestly think those costly changes were made without some sort of cost/time/benefit analysis being done first? Are you that ignorant of how businesses operate?

I've played WoW since 2007. I also played RIFT for about 3 years and I've dabbled in SWTOR, LoTRO and DDO. Safe to say I'm not new to MMOs.

Growth, as in increasing the active player base or increasing the amount of content available? Most MMOs don't have much growth in the player base after their initial release and growth of content is inevitable because it makes zero sense to remove content that could be keeping players occupied.

Change happens all the time, yes. Companies are trying to figure out ways to keep their customers happy while increasing profits. Most customers aren't happy if they never get anything new, especially if they're being asked to maintain a subscription. Not every change ends up a good change, though.

People will argue over whether the way certain games "evolved" were good or bad for those games. Talk to anyone who was playing Star Wars Galaxies when it "evolved" to add the New Game Experience. Talk to the current WoW player base that is bitterly divided over the current state of the game to the point many are eagerly looking forward to the eventual release of the Classic WoW legacy servers.

You need to make a better case for how your proposed change to the way content is scaled will benefit the game and SE's revenues beyond "me and some others want". As you can already tell, there's considerable opposition from people who are already familiar with how your system has worked in other games or who just don't like the idea for whatever reason.

Did you bother to read the OP? In particular, I call your attention here:


This would never create a scenario in which people are kicked in hopes of a random level 70. In fact, it arguably would afford preferential treatment to sub-70 characters, since as others have mentioned, it's a lot easier to achieve optimal damage output at level 20 than it is to achieve optimal damage output at 70.

How do you effectively make someone with a full AoE toolkit deal damage on par with a player that hasn't leveled high enough to get any AoE abilties at all, especially considering the way things get chain pulled? Drop the potency on the AoEs from the typical 100 or so down to 10 so if it hits 10 mobs then it deals roughly the same damage as a low level player will deal using their standard single target attack?

Do you cap potency on all single target abilities at 150 or perhaps even down to 100 depending on what item level sync is being used? At what content level do you start increasing the potencies to bring them more in line with the demand of those higher but still not max level dungeons?

I'm sure SE would love to see the players behind this change presenting their theorycrafting analysis showing how this can work successfully on a job by job and dungeon by dungeon basis.

[Sigma-Astra]

Well, in WoW, it's just a very minor part of the game- here it's a HUGE part of the game. Also, I don't think a company that counts as a multi-billion dollar corporation should ever use "It's hard" as an excuse for not making an improvement

You keep using this "multi-billion dollar corporation" as an excuse for why your idea should work when that's not how companies work at all. A company could be the richest in the world, that doesn't mean that they have the extra finances to go with every idea that the playerbase comes up with because they're the one in a million person that happens to not like something again for the 100th time.

The money that SE makes from XIV very seldom goes back into XIV, it goes into their other projects. You're acting like XIV is the only thing they're working on at this time.

also, the more practice I get at my max level rotation, the better I'll be at it.

We have things called EX trials, Savage, and Stone, Sea, & Sky for that...as well as expert dungeons and the newest 24 man raid. If you want to practice your lvl 70 rotation in Sastasha, you'll barely get off one or two Fire IV's before the poor mobs are dead. That's not teaching you anything. Honestly, the idea of one-shotting those poor bats is incredibly cynical.

This is like the Zubat cave all over again.

[Penthea]

I don't think MMOs are for you. Typically they don't make classes that only have a single button attack. But some of us like max level rotations.

They're not saying they don't want to do more than press one button, they're saying they don't want to press several buttons to get the same result as someone else who only presses one. Needing to put in far more effort than someone else for the same result isn't fun.

I think there can be another solution- like simply lowering the output of our spells to be on par with what we're doing.

And what about healing? Does my cure 2 get nerfed to the ground because I'm in a low lvl dungeon making it about as good as a cure 1? Do all my heals get nerfed so I have to use several gcds to heal someone, while someone else who isn't synced only needs to use one or two?

I have a level 70 rotation and I should be able to use and practice my level 70 rotation.

Then why not do lvl 70 content?

[Nabril]

They're not saying they don't want to do more than press one button, they're saying they don't want to press several buttons to get the same result as someone else who only presses one. Needing to put in far more effort than someone else for the same result isn't fun.

Do you really consider it to be a lot more effort to do a level 70 rotation over a level 50? I don't know what you mean... perhaps we simply don't have the same definition of the word effort... To me, effort is a measure of difficulty. There's no difficulty in pushing more buttons on a keyboard. Effort is what I expend at my job- or at the gym- or even on my diet... Effort is not pushing buttons. Could you elaborate on what you mean?

[Penthea]

Do you really consider it to be a lot more effort to do a level 70 rotation over a level 50?

For some classes yes, also the lowest lvl dungeon is 15, not 50.

I don't know what you mean... perhaps we simply don't have the same definition of the word effort... To me, effort is a measure of difficulty. There's no difficulty in pushing more buttons on a keyboard.

I think you don't know how the game works if you're not aware that pressing three buttons in the correct order is far less effort than a full lvl 70 rotation.

Effort is what I expend at my job- or at the gym- or even on my diet... Effort is not pushing buttons. Could you elaborate on what you mean?

I suggest you try to play truly challenging content if you don't understand how playing your class to its fullest at lvl 70 is more challenging than low lvl dungeons.

[Ameela]

One thing they could do is apply the reworked PvP system to PvE, so whenever you're synced below a certain level you get a new hotbar with the old skills and rotations from ARR and HW.

It'd probably make the transition from 60 to 61 incredibly jarring, but it'd also make going back to older content much more enjoyable.

[JunseiKei]

One thing they could do is apply the reworked PvP system to PvE, so whenever you're synced below a certain level you get a new hotbar with the old skills and rotations from ARR and HW.

I don't think this is really necessary. They condensed a lot of the skills to replace another (IE: WHM's "Stone" will scale to II, III and IV depending on the level of the content you're doing. Previously, you needed to place each spell separately.) Most of the other skills you simply don't have (IE: A level 50 DRG doesn't have Blood of the Dragon, but there's really no need to create a whole new hotbar for removing it, Geirskogul, Mirage Dive, Dragon's Sight, etc). Some classes, like RDM, simply doesn't even have a full rotation until level 68. Others, like DRG, have had nearly the same rotation since level 50. Just seems like extra, unneeded work for something I can't even consider a 'quality of life' change. It's just hiding the skills you simply can't use.

In PvP, they made other changes, like combined all of RDM's melee attacks into one button or gave most, if not all, jobs unique skills only found in the PvP areas. Hence part of the reason why they completely separated the PvP hotbars from normal ones. That was an exceedingly needed quality of life change for those of us that recalled how annoying it was to forget to add your PvP-only skills on your one-set-of-hotbars-for-all (and vice versa, forgetting to place your PvE skills back on your bar for things like raids).

[khovel]

One thing they could do is apply the reworked PvP system to PvE, so whenever you're synced below a certain level you get a new hotbar with the old skills and rotations from ARR and HW.

It'd probably make the transition from 60 to 61 incredibly jarring, but it'd also make going back to older content much more enjoyable.

i'd just like the pvp style skills to be available outside of pvp. I would want each "skill" to be an automatically adjusting button.

Warrior for example, i'd like the rotation to be able to go on one button spot rather than across 3, just like in PVP.

[HyoMinPark]

i'd just like the pvp style skills to be available outside of pvp. I would want each "skill" to be an automatically adjusting button.

Warrior for example, i'd like the rotation to be able to go on one button spot rather than across 3, just like in PVP.

No, thank you. I find single-button mashing mindless in terms of gameplay. Having to press 1-2-3 is much better and far more engaging than pressing 1-1-1.

As for the sync thing, there are many other things I'd rather the developers spend time and resources on as opposed to going back and adjusting level sync from Sastasha to whatever our final dungeon will be (assuming they decided to do this with level 80 in mind). We're already overpowered enough as it is in the lower dungeons because they get nerfed each expansion, and the way the game already syncs us inside of them on top of that. It would take an amount of time and resources that I would rather see placed elsewhere - like making a better Relic questline in 5.0, to give an example.