Low level gameplay: A growing problem

[Mugear_bahamut]

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.

In higher levels there are no battle leves anymore because only a small amount of players did them in HW, side quests don't give that much EXP, roulettes give you EXP by percentage based on your level.
Maxed players can still obtain a good amount of gil/tomestones/seals. The worth of doing them are intentional, otherwise there would be no point.

[Zsplash]

I think you could argue it never gets fun for some jobs.

The problem is their lack of willingness to design classes from 1-max level and instead literally focusing on 50-60, 60-70, then 70-80. Each class thus can feel very old and boring since there's very little fun in the 1-50 with class mechanics/abilities taking up till 70 to get to in a lot of cases.

In comparison, when wow reworks their classes it's always going to feel different early on because they're not just tacking things on. This is an incredibly annoying habit of FFXIV's developers and you will notice it exists everywhere in game with antiquated ideas/systems. Blue mage is one stupid example of a concept no one needed and has been completely forgotten.

[Barraind]

How would they keep you coming back

By changing how skills work, or giving you different skills to swap out, or making skill interactions differ based on what other skills are used.

Theres a massive difference between "Having everything" and "Having a full action suite".

20 minutes in to Guild Wars, for instance, you have a full set of skills. You're going to MAYBE use one or two of those in a final build, depending on your class, but the game gives them to you and goes "heres how skills work, heres how leveling impacts skills, heres how skills interact with each other, here's how to manage the resource costs of a full set of skills, here's how to prioritize what you do". At the same place in 14, you maybe have your first ae.

[Nariel]

By changing how skills work, or giving you different skills to swap out, or making skill interactions differ based on what other skills are used.

Theres a massive difference between "Having everything" and "Having a full action suite".

20 minutes in to Guild Wars, for instance, you have a full set of skills. You're going to MAYBE use one or two of those in a final build, depending on your class, but the game gives them to you and goes "heres how skills work, heres how leveling impacts skills, heres how skills interact with each other, here's how to manage the resource costs of a full set of skills, here's how to prioritize what you do". At the same place in 14, you maybe have your first ae.

Yeah, meaning they should totaly rework how the whole game works, seems reasonable.

[Physic]

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.

tgey don't give you everything, they give you a core of abilities though, and we aren't talking about a few hours in ffxiv, we are talking days to weeks. As for how to keep it interesting, interesting encounters, horizontal growth, etc.


the key isnt having everything, but having fun stuff. mid go low level has gotten more and more incomplete with each expansion

[Tsukino]

I would definitely like to see this fixed up, ideally along with something to make the level 50 2.x main story quests less terrible.

I don't think the jobs were bad to play originally, when the max level was 50. But as the OP mentioned, they seem to not be giving very much attention to how to redistribute things as they rework jobs for the last two expansions. They definitely needed to cut down the action bloat, and the jobs have felt better at 70 and 80 than they ever did at the 60 cap. Yet the leveling process for the first 50 or 60 levels has suffered as a result.

Skip potions are basically a terrible idea for anyone new to the game. They have to go back and do a ton of side quests to unlock things anyway, they don't understand the systems of the game, and most importantly they miss out on the story that is one of the biggest strengths this game has to offer. The things are fine for someone who wants to make a new character and already knows the game, but they cause nothing but trouble for new players and should not be considered an alternative to fixing the distribution of earlier content.

[Genz]

Yes please.

The progression curve of FFXIV has always been horrible, and it indeed get worse with each expansion.
(and skip potions are an anti-consumer practice that only get by because there are more important problems for consumer protection associations)

Another important thing is the boss fights themselves. Some of them just don't make any sense. The labyrinth of the ancient, for example, is just awful. No reasonable game designer would want this mess in a game, but we have it here because there is this weird logic that older content is less interesting by nature and can be ignored updates after updates.
Old content should be updated to be less stupid. Not longer and not really harder ; just less stupid.

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The root problem is actually leveling (and adding 10 more level per expansion for the sake of adding more levels) which is an archaic game design concept that should disappear in most games but it's still used by habit and because it means more money for "service games".

[grinkdaboy]

yeah looking at how actions and traits are distributed i'm glad i started back in december when i did. before, your stock standard class felt like it was starting to wake up when you got your jobstone and then becomes alive after that, but now it just seems like level 50 is when things start to come online

[Barraind]

Yeah, meaning they should totaly rework how the whole game works, seems reasonable.

Yeah, how dare they make lower level combat functional by changing levels at which you gain things, or the levels at which certain abilities have certain aspects enabled through traits, its the most mind-boggling idea ever, and they would certainly never think of ever do... oh wait, they do that every expansion.

[Gula]

I liked XIV's ease into skills because I'd played many an mmo with all kinds of shiny buttons to press, no balancing, and an absolute lack of care for players who aren't just going to spend $$$ on cash shop boosts.

What needs to be addressed in ARR is the filler in the MSQ.