New Player Experience Sucks! - Impending Expansion Problems

[Barraind]

mmos are about playing at your own pace.

And if your pace is "I want to do raids and max level dungeons", congrats, you get to spend $50 extra.

What are huge draws for people in MMO's? Those things.


I'll say about this what I say about every MMO on the market, if you add an expansion and the overwhelming majority of your content is at or above the level cap of two expansions ago (or last expansion if your expansions are more than 12 months apart), either make it significantly easier for people to get to the current content, or stop starting new characters at level 1. 2 year old, or older, content nobody runs anymore isnt "current" content.

[Kamatsu]

And if your pace is "I want to do raids and max level dungeons", congrats, you get to spend $50 extra.

What are huge draws for people in MMO's? Those things.

These things are a draw for a minority of MMO players. The vast majority of MMO players are there for the story, to role-play, for the game/world setting, because their friends/family play there, it's the follow-on game from prior games they played, etc.

Look at WoW - a MMO which has generally always been known as a "Raid or go away" game, where all you ever heard about from it was it's raiding scene. Yet raider's made up less than 5% of it's population - prior to the past 2 expansions: as the past 2 expansions have forced players to raid if they want to complete the expansions base story, as there were raids interjected into the base story, unlike prior expansions which only had the end/conclusion of the story tied into raids.

This was reveled back in 2012 or so when the Devs, on the old WoW forums, discussed the changes they had made to Raiding back in 2008/2009 when WotLK had launched, why they had moved the top vanilla raid to be the 1st raid in LK, and why they had worked on the 'Looking For Raid' system.

They stated that the Dev's were unhappy that so few ppl ever experienced the content they had lavished much love on to create, thus they wanted to try and encourage/push more ppl into raiding and experience the raids. They also reveled the shocking low %'s of ppl who had ever touched raiding:

- Only 6% of players had ever stepped foot in a raid
- Only 4% had ever even finished the 1st raid
- Only 1% got to the final raid
- Less than 0.5% ever completed the last raid.

So yeah, for a "Raid or don't bother playing" game that all you ever really heard about was it's raiding scene... very few actually ever even bothered to raid or do endgame dungeons or content.

Take another "Raid focused" game: Wildstar. This was going to be the hardcore MMO for all those hardcore raiders. Yet after it flopped and went F2P, it's dev's admitted that they were surprised about how few people even bothered to go through the dungeon grind to attune for raids, or how few ppl even seemed interested in the raids & endgame dungeons. In fact they said the vast majority of ppl were looking for open-world stuff they could do either solo or with friends/guilds.

Look at another MMO which came out with dungeons, Guild Wars 2. Yes it was billed as a 'casual MMO', but it also had dungeons with a harder mode attached to it. The dev's eventually abandoned making any more dungeons, or even doing any work on the current ones, due to lack of people doing them and lack of interest in re-working them (as compared to interest in other things).

Take another MMO, SW:TOR. A bumbling story-driven WoW clone. But it did have it's endgame raids... and once again the amount of people doing these raids were small. The vast majority of ppl playing the game played the story and either left, or played the story from the other classes. This is also a game which has the same issue as FFXIV - you can't do the "endgame" dungeons & raids without having done the story 1st. But never really saw anyone much complaining about that... at least when I was reading the official forums *shrugs*

Look at ESO, another story-driven MMO. It releases "hard" dungeons once a year as part of it's development cycle (1 expansion, 1 story-based DLC, 1 dungeon based dlc per year)... and these dungeons are also the lowest populated content in the game. You can see the % of ppl clearing/finishing these dungeons is in the 6-10% range. The vast majority of ESO players have no interest in 'endgame raids / dungeons'. The same small % can be seen on the clears/finish's of the basegame endgame solo & group trials.

You can go look at most MMO's out there, be it FFXIV, WoW, ESO, SW:TOR, GW2, STO, etc and what you'll find is the same: the vast majority of players do not raid, they do not do hard content, they do not race to endgame so they can run the same dungeons/raids over and over and over and over again.
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Regarding the subject matter: About the only thing I'd support personally is if they were able to change the story-skip potion so it just placed you at the end of X expansion, and allowed you to go back and experience it unchanged when/if you want. Although this aspect is supposedly being addressed with the "Newgame+" system, where people who have finished the story can restart it and go through it from scratch again.

[Wynn_Storm]

These things are a draw for a minority of MMO players. The vast majority of MMO players are there for the story, to role-play, for the game/world setting, because their friends/family play there, it's the follow-on game from prior games they played, etc.

Speak for yourself, don't try and vouch for other players.

[Vahlnir]

Speak for yourself, don't try and vouch for other players.

Yeah. Honestly, enough people apparently participate in higher end content...otherwise they wouldn't bother using time and money to make them. If there's enough incentive though even the most casual of players may dabble in challenging content now and then. I'm pretty casual myself but I will hop into a current Extreme trial if I feel the rewards are worth it. Haven't been much of a raider though since 2012 near the end of WoW's Cataclysm expansion. But I do enter normal and 24 man raids in FF XIV regularly. I understand that by most standards that isn't really raiding but it's called a raid so...yeah. LFR in WoW, 24 man and normal "story mode" raids in FF XIV are pretty much my jam.

[AxlStream]

Yeah. Honestly, enough people apparently participate in higher end content...otherwise they wouldn't bother using time and money to make them. If there's enough incentive though even the most casual of players may dabble in challenging content now and then. I'm pretty casual myself but I will hop into a current Extreme trial if I feel the rewards are worth it. Haven't been much of a raider though since 2012 near the end of WoW's Cataclysm expansion. But I do enter normal and 24 man raids in FF XIV regularly. I understand that by most standards that isn't really raiding but it's called a raid so...yeah. LFR in WoW, 24 man and normal "story mode" raids in FF XIV are pretty much my jam.

You do realise clear rates and participation rate in Savage and Ultimate are abysmally low? The only reason they keep doing them is because they keep the higher tier players around.

[aeoncs]

You do realise clear rates and participation rate in Savage and Ultimate are abysmally low? The only reason they keep doing them is because they keep the higher tier players around.

While this is absolutely true for Ultimate, the participation rate of Savage definitely isn't "abysmally low" in any region and the same is true for the clear rate on Japanese DCs. Savage being content for the one percent hasn't been the case since Midas; plenty of players participate, even from the casual crowd.
Not to mention that clear numbers aren't even remotely accurate considering that they're based on people having the mount - I've cleared 3 Savage tiers and yet I only have a single mount because... well, PuGs.

[Melorie]

I think that the problem here is not "people wanting to rush to end game", it is the fact that, in order to unlock almost anything in the game, you have to spend hours doing solo stuff. FFXIV is a good game, but it's 90% solo and most people that play MMOs don't wanna play a single player game. FFXIV history is good, I like it, I've enjoyed doing it. But doesn't change the fact that it's a very bad design for a MMO, and everytime I get a new friend to play the game, I remember that.

Yes, you'll have people that want to rush to endgame - you'll always have, and I don't know why you people should care so much about them, since how they decide to play a game shouldn't be your concern. But they're hardly the majority. I think that there are a lot of people that would like to enjoy the journey, if only the journey wasn't getting to one npc to the next while reading text for hundred of hours.

[Emmanellain]

Speak for yourself, don't try and vouch for other players.

Kamatsu is stating stats though, and I happen to be among them. Regardless I welcome their input.
Instead of shooting down the conversation you should try and add to it sometime.

[Wynn_Storm]

Kamatsu is stating stats though, and I happen to be among them. Regardless I welcome their input.
Instead of shooting down the conversation you should try and add to it sometime.

You do realize i have said plenty about this topic throughout this thread and including another thread similar to this topic.

If you are going to try and call me out, maybe do some research and look at my post history.

I still stand by what i said. She does not speak for everyone, therefore she should stop.

I play for the gameplay, i don't care for the story.

Also anyone can state facts but she is not including any of the resources where she is getting these so called facts.

[Emmanellain]

"You do realize I have said plenty about this topic throughout this thread and including another thread similar to this topic."

Saying something and actually adding to a conversation are different things.

She does not speak for everyone, therefore she should stop.

You still ask for her to be silent, telling someone to stop speaking is not adding to the conversation - it is silencing.

I could say the same thing about you. Who cares that you exclusively play for gameplay? Your enjoyment is not representative of the entire playerbase.
There's an option to skip the cutscenes and potions if you so vehemently hate MSQ content.
Instead of arguing what purpose people play for, we should instead discuss solutions that actually get us somewhere.

Also anyone can state facts but she is not including any of the resources where she is getting these so called facts.

I, too, would like sources for the percentages they bring forth because I'd like to look through them, but you can at least have the common decency to ask for sources instead of telling them to shut up lmao