Low level gameplay: A growing problem

[Allegor]

The complaint I hear the most is that combat is unbearably slow because of the gcd - just lowering the level requirement for at least one ability that people can weave in could solve a lot of downtime (considering class balance, of course) For me, personally, melee dps jobs were a snore-fest before 40 ish, and groan loudly whenever the roulette throws me in an ARR dungeon.

[RowanLauron]

Ironically that's one reason why wow bored me. A lot of classes you get your full rotation below lvl 30,the only things missing were higher level traits that streamline it, but I found that boring.

In ffxiv, you have something new every few levels that augment your rotation, makes leveling meaningful, but that's my opinion.

[Ronduwil]

Everyone who has played through to endgame has experienced the frustration of queueing for leveling roulette and getting something like Sastasha or Tam-tara and losing 80% of what makes your job fun to play.

Maybe at level 51 I'm too new to understand, but why do you need to queue for leveling roulette to level? From what I can tell so far, there are more than enough levequests and side quests to make leveling roulette completely optional.

[ArcanoJones]

I disagree. You don't have to have lots of buttons to push to have a good time. I actually find the feeling that you are just starting to learn things and your just a rookie very fun.

[MariaArvana]

Maybe at level 51 I'm too new to understand, but why do you need to queue for leveling roulette to level? From what I can tell so far, there are more than enough levequests and side quests to make leveling roulette completely optional.

Levequests are pretty much only useful up to level 50, and even then that's debatable when dungeons give tremendously more exp for the same effort. Side quests are also one-time only; if you want to level more than one job to 80 side quests aren't an option.

Leveling roulette, along with most of the roulettes, are designed to give the player giant EXP bonuses in exchange for the player signing up to do whatever content the roulette chooses to give them. Its meant to populate queues so that way no one gets stuck trying to queue for something, because there'll always be high level players queueing for leveling roulette due to the huge exp it grants. The unfortunate downside to this is that a level 79 player can get thrown into say, the level 15 dungeon, where 80% of their abilitys/attacks are removed due to the level sync to make sure things are balanced, resulting in a very slow, snore-fest experience.

[Makeda]

aside from that EVERY MMO has the same low level experience

ESO doesn’t but also reveals that the solution is radically extreme. At launch ESO had these kinds of problems, so i their One-Tamriel patch they made everything scale to max level. You do still have to unlock abilities but the system there is different so you don’t unlock with levels you unlock by spending skill points which you can earn by exploring and finding skill shards or levels or both.
They essentially made “level” a moot concept for 90% of the content.

That is how you solve this, but many will feel the solution is worse than the problem. ESO losr a lot of players when they did it, but then gained back 10-100 times more new ones.

So you can fix this issue, but it will cost you most of the current player base and there is no guarantee you can find new ones like ESO did.

So how might this look in FFXIV? Scale ALL instances content and all FATES... UP... to max level. Scale people that enter them up as well. Can SE do it?

Yes...

This would be essentially like making the whole game scale the way PotD and HoH do.
But how many people would unsub if they did that?

[Mahoukenshi]

The complaint I hear the most is that combat is unbearably slow because of the gcd - just lowering the level requirement for at least one ability that people can weave in could solve a lot of downtime (considering class balance, of course) For me, personally, melee dps jobs were a snore-fest before 40 ish, and groan loudly whenever the roulette throws me in an ARR dungeon.

As an actual new player, I can partially agree. I story-played originally Guild Wars 2 which is more action orientated if it matters, but when I started out on my Lancer, it did feel rather slow-ish on a "feeling"/guts basis. As in the attack animation felt slow and the time between skill use and auto attack made this feeling more prominent. I dunno what exactly changed at my current level (outside of new skills), but maybe it's the minimum skill speed on my gear that makes the CD feel more fluid, paired up with the basic "1-2-3" ST skill combo and Jump. Maybe it's because my mind switched back to tab-targeted gameplay as when I leveled Paladin and Maurador, I didn't have too much of that sluggish impression. Spamming Rock on Conjurer is monotonous, but not too bad so far. The Paladin's board and sword feels quicker and a bit fancier, while Maurador has more "Oomph" behind it. Again that's from a guts-based point of view based on FATEs, job quests and MSQ, which is my main focus, as I'm not really good at technical gameplay observations and these in-depth stuff.

[Mugear_bahamut]

As I mentioned in another thread, the boringness with synced instances can be solved by limiting potency instead of limiting skills when synced.
Although some harassment might come from leveled players to first-time players(due to lack of skills), so SE obviously doesn't implement this.
I still hope they do this because the main reason for this boringness everyone suffers from is the lack of skills.
In altering this, you get to train with the same complete skill set you do at max/higher levels even though the potency is minimized.

I hope this comes off right lol

Edit:
If anyone is wondering how this can be done, basically, you take a skill potency(ex. 800) and you are leveled max(ex. 80),
you divide the skill potency 800 by level count 80 andit goes --> 800 / 80 = 10
So that skill potency will be "10" at level 1. Let's say from level 80 you sync to a level 55 dungeon...
You take that level 1 skill potency "10" and multiply it by dungeon level (54) --> 10 x 55 = 550
Therefore, that skill's potency will be "550" in a level 55 dungeon.
All this while your skillset is a level 80 skillset with the potency reduced.
It will be just like doing a level 80 dungeon at a low level!

The disparity with noobs and high-level players will certainly be noticeable if you have different skill sets and the same potency.
The solution to this is to leave the low level potency for unsynced players as it is right now and only do this math with synced players.
This way, low-leveled players will have higher potency to make up for the lack of skills.

[Barraind]

The low level experience is pretty awful if you've played MMO's or RPG's before.

Its an exceptionally badly paced tutorial that at this point goes 50+ levels.

The only thing thats saving it is the ability to hit 800-900% xp bonuses on preferred servers, so you actually get to the levels you have meaningful combat well before you actually "should" as determined by the MSQ (which is one reason I hate the gating the MSQ does).

aside from that EVERY MMO has the same low level experience

Every? no. Theres a good number that will give you a full ability lineup within an hour or two of starting. Designers have realized you dont need 30, 40 or 50+ levels to get used to how skill combos on a long GCD work.

Even older games have revamped their low level experience so it isnt "press a button, stare off in the distance, press a button, pretend you're doing things". We arent in the early gen MMO's, and havent been for a long, long time.

[ArcanoJones]

The low level experience is pretty awful if you've played MMO's or RPG's before.

Its an exceptionally badly paced tutorial that at this point goes 50+ levels.

The only thing thats saving it is the ability to hit 800-900% xp bonuses on preferred servers, so you actually get to the levels you have meaningful combat well before you actually "should" as determined by the MSQ (which is one reason I hate the gating the MSQ does).




Every? no. Theres a good number that will give you a full ability lineup within an hour or two of starting. Designers have realized you dont need 30, 40 or 50+ levels to get used to how skill combos on a long GCD work.

Even older games have revamped their low level experience so it isnt "press a button, stare off in the distance, press a button, pretend you're doing things". We arent in the early gen MMO's, and havent been for a long, long time.

I cant think of any that give you everything within an hour. How would they keep you coming back. If there is nothing to work for. I agree with the comment that MMOS all have basically the same low level experience.