Thread: Coming In Version 3.0?

Originally Posted by Raymeo

False, unless you mean that they looked at WoW in order to figure out what NOT to do.

Scaling

First of all you've got WoW, a vertically scaling game, and FFXIV, a horizontally scaling game. Huge difference right there. The scaling of a game is the very foundation that nearly everything else is built upon, so this key difference alone already means that you're comparing apples to oranges.

In a vertically scaling game like WoW, once you reach max level, you are only able to enhance your character by directly upgrading your player's power. In this case it's done via gear upgrading.

In FFXIV this is not the case because players scale horizontally instead of vertically. In other words, as soon as you reach level 50, you're just about as powerful as you're ever going to be. Rather than directly upgrading your character's power after reaching max level, you begin to upgrade your character through adding on new options of equal power. For instance, you can continue earning new equally-powerful abilities to carry over from other classes. Acquiring new gear is also a horizontal improvement, because the majority of new gear that you earn will offer you different equally-powerful options to suit different tastes or situations, rather than giving your character a dramatic increase in direct power.

Classes

WoW locks you into one class. If you get tired of spamming Fireball on your Mage, then tough. You're a Mage. You just have to deal with spamming Fireball forever.

FFXIV allows and encourages you to play as multiple classes on one character. If you're a Black Mage and get tired of spamming thunder spells, then you can switch classes with the White Mage and heal for a bit, or switch classes with a Warrior and tank for a while. This is another glaring difference that separates the fundamentals of the two games entirely.

Crafting

Crafting is an afterthought in WoW. Characters are limited in how many crafts they can level, a craft can be leveled to max in a few hours, and you can tell your character to craft a bunch of queued up items while you go AFK. Crafting is almost exclusively leveled by min-maxers who are only in it for the passive bonuses that come with it. Repairs are all done by NPCs. Nobody wants crafted gear because it gets replaced in no time flat. Gear is almost exclusively gained through questing or dungeon crawling during the leveling process, and at max-level nearly everybody bypasses crafted gear because it becomes obsolete after running dungeons or battlegrounds for just a short couple of hours. If you PVP, you even get all of your gems and a good chunk of your enchantments purely through running battlegrounds.

Compare this to FFXIV, where crafting plays a very integral role in the game, and you are free to level as many crafts as you want. Crafting provides players with a majority of their gear through the entirety of their playtime. It provides players with the only means for receiving 100% repairs, which causes there to be actual interaction among players. It provides players with the only means of attaching materia to gear, which causes even more interaction to exist among players. It can't be leveled to max in just a few hours, so choosing to invest time into your crafting can actually reward you by placing you ahead of competition. Each craft benefits from leveling other crafts for more abilities, giving you even more ways to invest time into put yourself ahead of competition. Also, let's not forget that crafting actually involves the player in the crafting process, instead of encouraging them go make a sandwich while their character crafts a hundred battle elixirs.

Group Size

Current WoW end-game PvE content requires ten to 25 players to keep a coordinated schedule, making it extremely difficult to organize and operate a reliable end-game team.

FFXIV requires no more than eight players for the vast majority, if not all, of its end-game content, making it much more manageable for linkshell leaders to organize and lead a successful team.

Rewards for time subscribed VS Rewards for time played

WoW places a heavy emphasis on repeating the latest 25 daily quests every day, and the latest tier of heroic dungeons seven times a week, and the latest raid (or at least going as far into the instance as the time's achievable gear score allows) once each week in order to progress. Earning rewards is strictly controlled through a system based not only lockouts, but also on tokens, which you are limited to a very specific amount of each week, forcing players to play the same daily content for months at a time and in the end basing rewards on time subscribed rather than time actually played.

FFXIV requires repetition as well if you feel the urge to be 7/7 on all primal weapons, but there's no arbitrary minimum to the number of days or months that you are required to log in for in order to earn them. Rewards are based on how much time you invest into playing, rather than how much money you invest in subscribing. All that matters is how many times you kill a Primal. How many days you spread your victories over is irrelevant. There is nothing forcing your character to fall behind if you take a week off from the game.

Dividing players VS Letting players help each other

If you do miss a run with your guild in WoW and fall behind, then good luck getting caught up with your friends. At the time of FFXIV's launch, WoW barred players from re-entering heroic dungeons after each run until a daily reset, and barred players from re-entering raids after each run until a weekly reset, so you could not help your friends catch up to you if you had already run something without them.

In FFXIV on the other hand, progressing your own character through content doesn't lock you out of helping other people afterward for any longer than a trivial 15 minutes, and then when you do take the time to help other people, you're still eligible for loot again.

WoW did learn that their lock-out system was a bad idea and they eventually patched it so that you no longer get completely locked out of entry, but Blizzard did not announce this change until a year AFTER FFXIV was launched, and a whopping seven years after WoW was launched. Even after the change though, WoW still locks players out of eligibility for loot if they take the time to help their friends with something after having already completed it for themselves, which removes any in-game rewards or incentives for players to help each other.

Linear/gated/tiered content progression VS Doing what you enjoy

Not only do you fall behind your friends if you take a few nights off from WoW, but you don't ever get to play with them again. Your guild leader is forced back into the painful process of recruiting because they suddenly need to replace you with a new player who not only fits the schedule of the team's other 24 members, but is equally progressed with them, unlike you who's now fallen behind. That's the consequence of a game that's based on vertical scaling. Since you are allowed to continue to directly increase your power after you reach max level, content has to exist for all of the multiple tiers of player power. Thus increasing your power will grant you access to new content, but you also grow to overpower old content. This locks you into a path of extremely linear progression, where each player only has a small portion of the game's content relevant to their character at any given time. The worst part about this is that it ends up dividing the game's community into several tiny pieces, all because of gear. When characters having different gear scores means that the players get locked into different areas of relevant content, the game effectively separates players from playing with each other. If one player falls too far behind their friends, they'll probably never get to play together again. Then the ones who fall behind end up quitting, and understandably so, because people don't subscribe to MMOs so that they can play alone. So not only do you have a system that divides its community, but the game's community is only getting more divided as the amount of content grows with each content patch, and it's declining in size as more and more people fall behind their friends and quit each day. It's a terrible forumla. That's why each expansion of WoW has to include an increase in level cap. Increasing the level cap makes all old content instantly outdated, which is the only way for WoW to wipe the slate clean and place everyone on an equal playing field again. This lures back all of those old players who had quit after falling behind, because it finally presents them with a limited window of opportunity to start playing with their friends again. Take a look at subscription trends and you'll see this pictured as clear as day. Why do you think Blizzard brings back their Scroll of Ressurrection program for a limited time whenever a new WoW expansion is about to go into beta? Why do you think it's giving returning players a brand new level 80 character or any class they desire this time? Content patches are all that it takes to keep players subscribed, but expansions? Those exist to get alienated players resubscribed and back to playing with their friends again, placing an artificial band-aid on the game's divided community system until they begin to patch new tiers of content into the game again.

Content tiers in WoW aren't just gated between different instances, either. There's gating WITHIN instances. It's gated all the way down to the point where it takes weeks of grinding the early bosses of a raid instance before you can stand a chance at killing the later bosses of the SAME raid instance, so just because you beat the first boss of an instance, it doesn't mean that you have what it takes to join a team that's working on the third boss. You might have to spend the next month beating that first boss four more times before you have enough gear to beat the second boss, let alone the third. That's how much Blizzard micro-manages the content that each player is allowed access to. Take Heroic Spine of Deathwing as an example. Blizzard calculated the DPS requirements for beating that fight so that it was mathematically impossible* to defeat at the time of its launch. Yes, the community's most hardcore theorycrafters and DPS simulators proved the fight to be literally mathematically impossible to defeat until a required minimum gear score was achieved across entire raid, which could only be achieved by farming the earlier bosses of the instance multiple times over a period of multiple weeks. (And that's after the Spine's initial nerf, which occurred a week after it's launch because pre-nerf it was actually calculated to be impossible to defeat no matter what. Yes, even if players were to farm the instance long enough for the entire team to earn all of the game's best-in-slot gear. Oops!) The game's most hardcore guilds demonstrated the validity of this math, proving it through the course of several hundred attempts each. All of the world's top 50 guilds blew through the first five bosses of the raid only to hit a road block upon reaching Heroic Spine. All of those guilds reached this same point within three days of each other, yet it still took a full month of farming the instance's earlier bosses before a single one of those guilds earned a gear score high enough to get the first Heroic Spine kill. Then and only then did the game allow them to start attempting the next boss of the instance, Heroic Madness.

FFXIV, on the other hand, does not arbitrarily gate its content so that players can't experience it when they want to. Nor does FFXIV divide its community based on tiers of gear scores. This is a consequence of FFXIV being a horizontally scaled game. Since your character only grows in options rather than in direct power, all of the game's level 50 content is relevant content to you when you hit level 50, and all of it remains so forever because you can never outgrow it by increasing your power beyond its tuning. If Aurum Vale sounds like fun but your linkshell boycotted Darkhold because it was boring, you can still succeed at clearing it just as easily as any Darkhold veterans of equal skill. If you didn't get your first class to level 50 until after all of your friends finished farming Moogles and Ifrit, you can still jump into slaying Garuda with them just as easily as anybody who's 14/14. Anybody who is level 50 can participate, and achieve victory, in any of FFXIV's end-game content, and do so with anybody that they want to play with, as the only absolute requirements for success in the game are job levels for entry and player skill.

FFXI was horizontally scaled as well, and if you find graphs showing subscription numbers for FFXI then you will see that the game had an unbelievably steady subscription rate that very rarely fluctuated. FFXI had many of its own flaws, without a doubt, which is why the subscription rate was never as HIGH as WoW's has been. However it's easy to conclude that a horizontally scaled system at least succeeds at steadily maintaining subscriptions. The same can not be said about WoW with it's massive fluctuation in subscriptions, as it declines between expansions and experiences massive re-subscription at the launch of each expansion due to the problems of a divided community that are created by vertical scaling.

*See discussion starting at 3:55

In conclusion

FFXIV got some things right. With it's horizontal scaling system, the ability to change classes, SE's natural abilities for storytelling, no lock-outs, a focus on manageable-sized groups for instances, and a crafting and gathering system that actually involves players and forces interaction, FFXIV learned a lot from WoW about what NOT to do. Unfortunately, that's all that it learned from WoW. No inspiration was taken from the few key components that actually DID work for the game.

Customizable and user-friendly UI, intuitive game engine and fluid gameplay controls, an engaging and easy-to-explore world, and inventive instance design with creative boss challenges were all overlooked. Not to mention WoW's option for quest-based leveling could have taken players on a journey around the world and served as a PERFECT outlet for SE's storytelling abilities, instead of straight-up grinding and a lazy, time-controlled excuse for quests in the leve system. These are all of the things that would be found in this game if it was in fact inspired by WoW. However none of these things exist in FFXIV, so you may want to offer some reasoning for your comparison. I'm failing to find the logic to your claims on my own.

tl:dr version please

So much excessive verbiage...

Originally Posted by Raymeo

Which is exactly why crafting is in the process of being revamped with so many new and difficult synths being added to the game lately. It had been stated that U/U gear was only supposed to be as good as double-melded crafted gear. The fact that crafting has since been marginalized was a completely unintended and unexpected consequence, and they're obviously unhappy about it. Either that, or they had the implementation of high-difficulty synths in mind while developing the new U/U gear and they just couldn't get it all out of the gate at the same time. Either case can be evidenced by the fact that they're now making visible efforts to bring crafting back up to par with everything else with the release of more powerful recipes. Seeing as the latest batch of recipes is all class-specific, not to mention only for DoM/DoW, I have serious doubts that they're anywhere near done, and I will not be at all surprised when we see more recipes being added to give crafting an even bigger push in 1.23.

They've added irrelevant synths. That's all. Most people just wear AF and use Primal weapons to the extent that a huge aspect of crafter gameplay is gone. This change has therefore been a shift from FFXIV's original philosophy which was to include crafters in endgame, not exclude them and relegate them to the sidelines to make "class restricted" gear no one will ever use or want. Now the only way to get good gear is through drops or else spending a gruelling amount of time on 3-slotted materia gear, and even then there's only a few gear slots where that is better than AF or primal drops. Consequently, crafting is no longer important, like WoW.

This attempt to restore the game's difficulty is far from gating content though. Gated content results through better rewards being given to players during progression, not through fights simply being made harder. Garuda does not require you to have weapons from Ifrit or Moogles in order to have a chance at success, and go ahead and try to convince me that you'll suddenly be equipped to take on new, significantly more difficult content in the next patch simply by upgrading from Ifrit weapons to Garuda weapons. The weapons from Primals are all intended to be side-grades, only serving to prove the point that this game is not being designed to be linear, tiered, or gated.

Also, not to say that Garuda is as challenging as SE was aiming for, but some fights can be intended to serve a greater challenge than others purely for the sake of offering skilled players a fun challenge to take down. As long as rewards aren't increasing in value from these fights, all it means is the fight is more challenging than others. It doesn't have to mean anything more than that.

That's actually true, but the pieces are all there to make this game a gear progression grind, and it's only a matter of time before these pieces all fall into place.