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

[Fiorinol]

I'll post exactly what I stated in the video comments, with some addemups;

Progression feels really boring in this game. The content also feels boring. Maybe I'm just used to playing MOBAs; most of the non-savage content I find boring. I've done my weeklies in Party Finder today, it took me 7 hours to clear o11s in Duty Complete parties so I could get a page and a chance to get gear. This is not fun. It's like having a static (finding one being its own time sink) and playing this game on a schedule is mandatory if I want to play the "serious" content. That's just how bad Party Finder is on my data center.

None of the other content really makes use of the gear. Every other piece of content is either irrelevant, becomes irrelevant quickly, or is, for lack of a better word, uninteresting. Let's look at Normal Raid; you get 380 equipment, which you can get through crafting through a slow acquisition system that often requires you to re-run the same normal raid to get the trading piece you want. Meanwhile, you can get tomes and get the 390 gear of your choice. The 380 raid gear is non-upgradable, why would you even bother with it when you can eventually just get the 390?

The fastest way to get tomes is to run the same 2 dungeons 5 days a week. Every other way is significantly slower. These two dungeons are exactly the same as every other dungeon in the game; 2-3 groups of mobs, convenient obstacle, 2-3 groups of mobs, boss that does 2-3 mechanics, that frankly, does not offer that much of a challenge.

On odd patches, you get to play every 24-man raid in the expansion to get coins so you can upgrade your gear to the savage equivalent. 24-man raids are a snore fest where you just fight a giant dummy that does 2-3 mechanics, conveniently places down 3 adds, because, conveniently, there are 3 alliances, and you need to drag them apart so each alliance can kill one without them buffing each other. In these 24-man raids, it's not uncommon for most of the raid to do extremely poor DPS, making the raid take forever to complete. The 24-man raid also drops catch-up gear that is below the level of the upgraded tome gear, but doesn't come at the weird caveat of needing to get multiple pieces to get one piece of gear.

The only other sort of progression you have is savage. Which puts you in a weird situation, as you're left with little to do on odd patches as your gear is already maxed out.

I think the problems with the progression systems go hand in hand with the content. This game seems neither interested in providing lasting midcore content that isn't savage raiding content, or providing interesting lasting progression systems. As Bourne_Endeavor said, there's just not enough to do. It's also very difficult to keep free companies alive when everyone who doesn't own a house just unsubs for months, because there's nothing keeping their interest. That's not to mention the lack of long-term goals as Kirsten mentioned; almost all of the longer objectives are based around gear that's invalidated within a patch or two (And also honestly isn't used for much other than meeting requirements), or glamour.

The only content that retained my interest for a while was Heaven on High to 100. But we only get that once an expansion, and I'm done with it after a week.