State of the Game: The Problem with the Current Progression System

[Ilyrian]

As for things to do beyond capping all classes, there are achievements, items to collect, or even progressing from the beginning again on a second character.

In fairness the achievements are just pointless in their current state - running X amount of dungeons isn't an achievement.

Items to collect... yeah but farming old content for a mount doesn't really appeal to me, the glamouring isn't really my bag either. Fun for 5 mins. Not that I'm knocking that - this being an internet forum people are always jumping to extremes; just because I don't think glamour is worth my subscription fee alone doesn't mean I begrudge other people enjoying it.

I have a house, I have more useless gil than I'll ever need. I've leveled all the crafters and desynth. I've won the Triple Triad Tournament and collect all the npc cards. I have ARR and HW relics, I have 3 Pagos weapons.

What I want is some PVE progression that keeps me logging in. I really don't think that's too much to ask in an MMO. I enjoy healing dungeons etc - but there is zero need for me to do any of it outside of Tuesday reset. Even that is pointless as the gear is all but meaningless.

People suggesting leveling up another character from scratch is a bit mental - giving that it completely negates one of the best aspects of the game i.e you don't have to to play all the jobs.

[Dzian]

It's a MMO. You can't have continued progression or the gap between long time players and new players creates an unbalanced experience.

That's not entirely true it's all about how it's done. many of the old school MMO's had long term progression things like EVE online where it could take you literally years to maximise your skill tree but that didn't really put new players at an unreachable place.

or FFXI where progression was incredibly long term still didnt make it to bad for newer players. hell there's times a newer player would join our endgame shell and basically make out like a bandit andgear up incredibly quickly so again they were never to far behind .

one of the things i find ironic is FFXI was actually a lot more casual friendly than XIV is. I could and did quite often go travelling withwork and holidays for months at a time and yet i was never behind on progression. or times where i would literally only play for 2 evenings a week and spend the rest of the week out with the family or playing counterstrike..

this game players feel trapped as i said above take a break for even a week and bam your behind on progression...

Its false.

Gatherer and/or crafter, PvP, treasure map, triple triad or verminion or whatever. Gear every job, sadic raid or ultimate trial are here too.

There is plenty to do, but you don't enjoy them its quite different.

there's plenty to do technically yes but most of it is pointless and worthless. as has been said many times players are tired of the endless treadmill so gearing up jobs just to gear them up again next month is basically a joke. and gear up every job is basically impossible with all the lockouts and restrictions in place.

verminion / triple triad even doh / dol are most side content than progressive to your character...... and 99% of the games content is obselete as well

[OurMom]

No. An MMO is about playing with other people. It's not about endless progression.

MMOs are usually about endless or a "long" progression and varies heavily on the type of mmo.

I get the complaint about wanting to continually progress and mmos used to keep that feeling with slower paced leveling, rng, horizontal progress, and a lot of items and content that actually matter. But once you market mmos towards people that dislike/hate the core functions of mmos you get...this.

There needs to be some form of progression but definitely not the continued leveling, that's getting really boring.

[Ruinfeild]

Did we REALLY need another topic like this?

[Andevom]

This is a game with fairly regular content updates. Your suggestions sound more fitting for a dead game where nothing really big is planned on the horizon. FFXI added capacity points when they literally had nothing else left to offer, just to keep people going at it. XIV is not at that level yet.

[KaimaSansun]

For exp, i suggest they add a merit system like how ffxi has, where you can slightly improve skills or add bonus effects to customize the job. As for taking a break i believe the housing thing is dumb, they should just remove the demolishing feature and take care of the actual situation by instancing smaller housing zones. Also i think that the tome cap weekly is limiting because, some people play the game to just do the harder content and some just play it casually but they shouldn't limit your progression, they should just take current armors, 1-70 and make different versions of styles as lv. 70 armor and weapons that you can obtain by grinding tomes, such as a haste set, crit set, det set, tank set and such. Right now it just seems like it's either be the same and do the same as everyone else or you aren't worth anything, as opposed to say ffxi where you could do so many different things and have different gear and still be better or worse than someone else because of 1 piece of gear that they took more time getting.

[Enkidoh]

The OP is misunderstanding the whole point of materia though, it is less about customizing stats on gear and more just yet another gilsink, in that by destroying gear when it converts to materia, you're taking that item out of the game and thus the economy (this is also why gear with even just a single spiritbond point becomes unsellable on the Market Board or untradable). It's clear SE does not want to change that so that is why there has been no real tweaks to the system since it's introduction.

As for implementing a Merit Point system for those at level cap, the whole reason FFXI had a Merit Point system is exactly because Hiromichi Tanaka stubbornly refused to level FFXI's level cap beyond 75, he was adamant at keeping it frozen at that point for years. Hence Merit Points were to compensate for that. Because FFXIV has a level cap increase by ten levels with every expansion (expect the next FFXIV expansion to raise our level to 80), a Merit Point system at this point would be redundant.

Maybe once we reach level 99 they might look into such a system. But until then, there is no need for it I'm afraid.

[SilverObi]

The problem with any sort of post-cap exp system is the devs themselves are dead set (currently) against the idea due to Balance™. Add in players who cry "illusion of choice" and you end up with a nonstarter. I'd love to see some manner of merit point system that adds in small boosts to classes because growth is fun, and yes a meta will always exist because number crunchers will always exist and say "you do it this way or you're trash", but is The Best of The Best actually required for anything outside of world firsts or speed kills? And why should we let interesting systems wither on the vine because we're afraid that some people will be a bit meaner than usual (gee I feel like I'm back in a parser thread).

[Acidblood]

Going to have to disagree on this one...

Between the ability to level every job on a single character (and more jobs added with each expansion), your personal Chocobo, retainers, squadrons, a few things I’m probably forgetting, and a constantly increasing gear cap, FFXIV already has a wealth of 'progression' systems and things to grind for. Now you could say 'but I've done all of that', and while possibly true, that's also going to be true for any system with a cap; i.e. those who have the time (and motivation) will exhaust it (and want more), while those who don't, or just started late, may never even get close.

So no, I would much rather the devs spent resources on:
1. Accessible* small group mid-core content (e.g. 'extreme' dungeons, more trials like Rathalos)
2. Scalability of existing content (e.g. all dungeons can scale to 'expert' level, treasure maps that scale to party size)
3. Ensuring that all classes are not just 'balanced', but fun to play (looking at you DRK and MCH, and to some extent BLM, MNK and post-4.2 WAR)

* PotD / HoH is a poor excuse for this sort of content, as getting to the challenging part requires hours of grinding.

NB. I do like the idea of 'traits' on gear, though I think it would be a much better fit for the Materia system (i.e. so it doesn't require grinding up specific gear pieces)... the Materia would need to be readily accessible though (as Grade VI is currently), because 'upgrading' a piece of gear only to lose a 'rare' trait would absolutely suck.

[van_arn]

I'd really rather see a diminishing returns system instead of a hard cap for the top-tier tomestones. As things stand, someone like me who enjoys running my dailies and other content nonstop has little incentive to even log in after I reach cap, since I'm sitting out of Savage this cycle due to out-of-game reasons.

I suppose Eureka was an attempt to provide additional, alternate, progression systems but trying to resuscitate designs WoW single-handedly killed is the wrong way of going about it in a game based on the WoW blueprint.