Data from lucky bancho about participation in field content

[Eorzean_username]

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Yeah, I know this might qualify as a "spicy take", but I think that the shift in developer attitude about Crafted gear is at least a part of the problem.

Ultra-cheap, ultra-accessible, high-iLevel Crafted gear, including Weapons, available Day Zero of a tier... completely-deranges one of the traditional progression systems of an RPG, where "playing it" rewards you with the ability to "play it more".

It defuses a lot of the "excitement" of working through various tiers of content, clearing "lower-tier" encounters, etc, and instantly makes a lot of content essentially DOA or 1-and-done for a lot of "reward-minded" people.

I saw someone mention somewhere that it's vexing that Savage gear is instantly obsoleted the moment a new tier begins, and I agree — there's something weird going on here, where XIV's devs seem hostile to the idea of having actual gear progression that spreads out over the course of an expansion.

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But I also know that this is basically shouting at clouds, because it's not the game SE wants to make (or maybe that "anyone" wants to make anymore? "Isn't profitable to make" anymore?).

"I can't do X, because I need to do Y first, to get the gear to be able to survive/enter/clear X" seems like something that's now considered "problematic", and so the game has stretched itself to try to provide what is basically an illusion of a gearing process, and one that it tries to make sure can be quickly and efficiently bypassed each tier.

I think this must at least partially-contribute to the sense of absolute ennui about almost everything in the game, because the sense of a positive sort of struggle to improve the character is increasingly-removed, which shifts the game more and more towards a "Metaverse hub" or "Login play" type of experience.

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I'm honestly beginning to suspect that if XIV's devs felt like the game could "get away with doing it", then PvE would get the PvP treatment — iLevels and stats are removed, and all gear just becomes Cosmetic items for collecting and glamouring.

[Sindele]

If the zones are dead, can someone please remind them? People keep doing drivebys on the south bunny fate in Pagos every time I try to powerlevel people and it's extremely inconvenient.

I think the only zone you can argue is conclusively dead is like, Zadnor Z1/2. And that's a) just a subset of the zone and b) a result of a flawed design that gives most people very little incentive to go back there for any reason ever.

"I can't do X, because I need to do Y first, to get the gear to be able to survive/enter/clear X" seems like something that's now considered "problematic", and so the game has stretched itself to try to provide what is basically an illusion of a gearing process, and one that it tries to make sure can be quickly and efficiently bypassed each tier.

I mean, it is, because it is, because of people. Activity in previous tiers plummets as soon as new tiers come out. Always has. Always will. Again, in WoW, it did so even when the game had powerful incentives to go back. People get fatigued and don't want to go back forever after wrapping up a tier, so if you don't reset the tier to where previous gear has only a marginal advantage, you're just going to wind up funneling anyone who missed the previous tier into a small and ever-shrinking pool of people trying to play catchup because player activity at every tier of progression is never, ever even close to equal.

It is not a stretch to say that every game that has ever done this has paid a stiff price in player retention by doing this. It makes it difficult to both onboard new players and welcome returning players back to endgame, often at mid-cycle times where you need new blood to juice your numbers the most - precisely why most broad-appeal MMOs have moved away from that paradigm and left it to the handful of MMOs deliberately courting more 'hardcore' experiences.

E: I should note I say this while deliberately playing on an individual progression WoW server in my spare time. I have no ideological opposition to the idea - it's just objectively bad for business these days.

[Dzian]

We still even argue on here if healers are actually bad or if this is an echo chamber (for example), if we can’t even agree on healer design how can square do much more than associate interaction with use

Thats because many viewpoints are quite narrow minded. the issue with healer design ultimately stems from content design. you could take these healer jobs out and put them in a different game and they'd be better jobs.

the real problems are
incoming damage in encounters is tuned to be weak so as not to be too "overwheming" something the devs have said quite frewuently.
encounters are so highly scripted damage is always predictable.
the duty finder system and the design that any one healer can work forcing them all to be far to similar in capabilities. so dev concepts like whm being a pure healer never worked because content had to be clearable with any healer.

all of these issues lead to the lack of engagement players have because all they do is 2 11 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 ad infinatum..

encounter design is ultimately whats busted all the jobs. phys ranged, casters , healers, tanks, hence the nickname. "meleewalker"

you cannot fix the jobs if you dont first fix the content. and you cannot make jobs fun, complex or interesting if the game has no fun complex or interesting systems to work with..

[Eorzean_username]

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Yeah, I mean bluntly / objectively you're correct, there's just more money to had in making something hyper-accessible, and that's why I said that I'm basically just yelling at clouds.

But that circles back to the idea, "Does this game even need gear or stats at this point?"

Like nearly everything about an RPG seems inherently "inconvenient" to the "onboarding" process, and could be stripped-out for efficiency and effectiveness.

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I think part of the growing apathy / ennui / restlessness about general content is that the treadmill is increasingly failing to "fool" people, because it gets reset so frequently, consistently, and predictably, and it's becoming very clear that the gear is not really "needed" for anything, and likely never will be.

You "almost" had something vaguely-approximating gear progression with Savage → Criterion (as odd it is to "prog" from 8 into 4 player content), but then they decided to give Criterion no perceived reason to really be there.

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What I mean is like... for example, WOW also has resets and catch-up, but not in a way that instantly trivialises everything you previously did. It's a softer landing.

WOW also constantly changes-up exactly how you're progressing, and what kind of power you're gaining for progressing.

This much more strongly incentivises playing actual content to gain character power, vs. just hitting up the Market Board for some cheap, deflated, probably-botted equipment.

And WOW has "open-ended" and much more granular progression, where it feels like nearly everything you do is, in some way, continuing to improve — or at least have a chance at improving — your character further, and allowing you take on even further content (LFR to Normal to Heroic to Mythic; climbing up Mythic+ Keystone tiers; new patch zones and world-bosses hitting harder than earlier zones; etc).

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XIV on the other hand just slices almost everything out, and delivers a single slab of eternally-repeating character "progression" systems which are barely really progress and mostly just a theatrical chore (like obtaining and putting in Materia, or the octo-monthly ritual of buying 11 items from the Market Board).

There's just not much "power" to "collect" in XIV — you always know exactly how you'll navigate your gearing process, exactly when it will be finished, exactly how little it will affect your daily play experience even once completed... and it just makes a lot of content feel "irrelevant".

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Like I think part of what makes RPGs "work" is the illusion that you're "not" wasting time, because you're "building" something.

When, eg, a Dungeon doesn't really "build" anything, because the gear is all completely trivial, and there's no way to scale up the difficulty/reward, it becomes hard for people to mentally-justify spending limited time on that activity, even if they "like" some part of it.

And when that sense of "OK, but why bother doing that?" begins to spread to affect nearly everything in the game, then that sense of "listlessness" starts to settle in — that lack of a drive to really pursue anything.

Then, in turn, impatience with anything being inconvenient or difficult starts up — because everything all starts to feel like speedbumps or doorstops, rather than a desirable reward that you're fighting for.

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...Anyway, all of this relates back to why I think people feel a certain love-hate relationship with Exploratory Zones.

Yeah it's inconvenient to be shunted off into a little micro-world that's cut off from the rest of the game, and somewhat blatantly grind-oriented.

However, they also actually provided new and tangible methods of character progression and power development, that could be approached in new and different ways... which is something the rest of the game is just severely starved for at all times.

[Shurrikhan]

Yeah, I know this might qualify as a "spicy take", but I think that the shift in developer attitude about Crafted gear is at least a part of the problem.

Ultra-cheap, ultra-accessible, high-iLevel Crafted gear, including Weapons, available Day Zero of a tier... completely-deranges one of the traditional progression systems of an RPG, where "playing it" rewards you with the ability to "play it more".

It defuses a lot of the "excitement" of working through various tiers of content, clearing "lower-tier" encounters, etc, and instantly makes a lot of content essentially DOA or 1-and-done for a lot of "reward-minded" people.

I saw someone mention somewhere that it's vexing that Savage gear is instantly obsoleted the moment a new tier begins, and I agree — there's something weird going on here, where XIV's devs seem hostile to the idea of having actual gear progression that spreads out over the course of an expansion.

It does, but it also means that one's ability to play content while it's still decently accessible (getting their clears within the first couple weeks, rather than being reduced to dregs to go even a step further) isn't dependent on having played each prior tier that expansion, in turn, while it was decently accessible.

Imo, that's the larger issue with Savage. Even if you give them cumulative dependence, they're more or events that each last for only a fraction of a 'season' in Battlepass terms unless one has the time and willpower to take at least 5x as long forming a group some 1/5th the average quality (in terms of general mechanical knowledge, ability to adapt, lack of outright idiocy, etc.), by which to likely take some 5x the time to make any progress, which you'll disband before having capitalized upon only to then have a 1/5th chance that the next group you finally get can actually pick up from basically where the last left off, and so forth.

Progging after most have finished, unless playing with a static of a sort that'd wait for you or join you even after they'd already cleared... is really not great in XIV. The raid scene here polarizes much more quickly than in other MMOs I've played.

"I can't do X, because I need to do Y first, to get the gear to be able to survive/enter/clear X" seems like something that's now considered "problematic", and so the game has stretched itself to try to provide what is basically an illusion of a gearing process, and one that it tries to make sure can be quickly and efficiently bypassed each tier.

And honestly, I'd agree that it is problematic, if that content is something that quickly has vastly diminished returns on its rewards-per-time-invested as time passes. In the case of Savage, that's because there's a steep fall-off in how much value one can get per hour of progression --not to mention how frustrating it's likely to be in itself-- after a relatively short span of time following release.

To retain that but then give no catch-up mechanism without a player picking their next tier's gear class ahead of time and farming tomes and twine and coats and such for months... means that each of those get-it-now-or-badly-lose-out periods are no dependent on each prior get-it-now-or-badly-lose-out period. That would suck.

Naturally, if you made those prior tiers mandatory for any ability to reach the next one (such as by removing tome and crafted gear), you'd force more late-comers who really want to do the next tier, too, to actually go and bang their heads against those prior raids before each new one, collectively making it less of a pain and raising the content's average participation floor slightly.

But, I suspect that for each player who'd be forced to do the prior raids to prepare for those after once tome-gear and crafted gear would be removed... you'd have at least one other would-be later-tier raider who just decides not to raid at all that expansion as soon as they miss the cut for the first tier's activity.

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To be clear, I don't think that means that the current system of tome and crafted gear is good. It's shit, imo.

If not for getting screwed over by having all gear classes on one character (which I hate, as it's completely out of character and fit for a game in which all-jobs-on-one-character is supposed to be a feature), tome-gear would do more harm than good. It removes most incentives for raiding (unless specifically pursuing BiS instead of simply maximum ilvl and 99.5+% of said BiS's throughput) all to provide gear that is painfully excessive for all but Savage anyways (well, and now maybe Criterions, I guess).

Crafted gear, meanwhile, is just a way to turn having not kept up your sub and/or Savage participation into a gil sink. I don't mean that exaggeratively. What you don't pay the game in real money, as a non-crafter you will then pay to crafters in in-game currency. That's basically its sole purpose at this point. It's arguably better than having no catch-up mechanism, but it's still ****ery, especially when it and tome gear collectively prop up a system by which Savage is kept relatively short-lived (at least in terms of being able to get a reasonable group in a reasonable time).

I'd far prefer that Gear Classes (Aiming, Casting; Striking, Maiming, Scouting; etc.) and/or their interactions with weekly-gating were loosened up to begin with, so that we're not so penalized for having all jobs on one character, that playing with those who have already cleared would likewise be less punishing, and that much of the incentives for Savage were instead pushed towards other forms that could last a bit longer even when accounting for those softened Gear Class divisions, and that crafters could play a part in supplementary or accelerated gearing that comes from those new Savage drops over the course of that tier's use, rather than functioning apart from them.

And honestly, I could either way on tome-gear being nerfed or even outright removed.

That said...

I'm honestly beginning to suspect that if XIV's devs felt like the game could "get away with doing it", then PvE would get the PvP treatment — iLevels and stats are removed, and all gear just becomes Cosmetic items for collecting and glamouring.

The customization of/from secondary stats would have no reason to be removed (only to be better balanced and made more impactful), but replacing the incentive of ilvl progression with other rewards instead (or maybe even just instead using isolated vertical progression systems like Eureka's) would solve so many issues.

Content wouldn't progressively make the rich richer in prog nor, on the broader average, nerf content increasingly into triviality. You wouldn't need to have played the each of the previous tiers in their respective release-rush periods, grind months of tomes and ARs/Hunts, and/or pay the crafters your 2+ million in "Get me back on track because I took some time off" week-one gil fees. Performance would vary based on skill, rather than grind time or past luck.

...Yeah, I'm not seeing a net downside there. It's not the only way to reach most of those benefits, and perhaps one of those other ways could have fewer negatives, but on the whole even that sounds a ton better than what we do now. I'd much rather have fidelity of difficulty and leave content open to anyone who'd enjoy that content for its actual gameplay than... the shitshow we have right now.


Now, would that make more money by making things hyper-accessible? No, actually. Probably the exact opposite. Players would be that much freer to focus on just the content they like playing for its own sake, exhaust it, and move on to other things, which means you'd almost certainly need a higher rate of content generation to manage the kinds of "engagement" you had before. You might also be a little less able to warrant high-difficulty content now that Big Timmy can't see the difference of BiS gear in getting Expert Roulette down from a 12-minute run to an 10-minute run, etc., etc. And you might even *gasp* have to make battle content more appealing its itself in general.

[Supersnow845]

It’s why I think a lot of people still like doing eureka

Having a form of horizontal progression that will forever be BIS inside the zone is a powerful motivator especially when it comes with a side of being able to dunk of anemos

These days Cassie is an active hinderance to most DPS classes but people still go for it because it’s an item that has importance in eureka and always will, the game needs more of this, I get no enjoyment out of getting BIS anymore, I do get a hell of a lot of enjoyment out of getting a full set of +2 armour, Cassie, the speed belt and 7 magecite or 10/10/10 + 15 haste gear

[xbahax92]

Because there are (increasingly, it would seem) limited development hours, and we would logically want to maximize players' enjoyment available through what the game has on offer (in reasonable practice, not just theoretically).

Sad to see this is the norm. Just because the community doesnt participate in content, the Devs should stop working on it and create 1 week lasting content.
If there are people that like to see more Variant Dungeons, let them be.
If there are people that like to see more Exploration Zones, let them be.
I dont understand why a variety of content cannot coexist. Just because Indie company Square Enix is understaffed?
Well, maybe it's time to hire more employee's?

[CStrife912]

Sad to see this is the norm. Just because the community doesnt participate in content, the Devs should stop working on it and create 1 week lasting content.
If there are people that like to see more Variant Dungeons, let them be.
If there are people that like to see more Exploration Zones, let them be.
I dont understand why a variety of content cannot coexist. Just because Indie company Square Enix is understaffed?
Well, maybe it's time to hire more employee's?

Because just throwing more money/staff at a project doesn't always 'fix' the problem. Take a look at wow for instance... budget-wise and staffing wise eclipse the FF14 and yet they still pumped out 3 back to back questionable expansions and content cycles before they managed to do one decent expansion.

[DixieBellOCE]

It’s why I think a lot of people still like doing eureka

Having a form of horizontal progression that will forever be BIS inside the zone is a powerful motivator especially when it comes with a side of being able to dunk of anemos

These days Cassie is an active hinderance to most DPS classes but people still go for it because it’s an item that has importance in eureka and always will, the game needs more of this, I get no enjoyment out of getting BIS anymore, I do get a hell of a lot of enjoyment out of getting a full set of +2 armour, Cassie, the speed belt and 7 magecite or 10/10/10 + 15 haste gear

Solo prepping Cassie with full BiS BLM gear, cassie earring and blitzring.. its a fun activity
The feeling of fire IV's hitting for 140k constantly is something ill never get sick of.

[Xeronia]

I want to also point out seeing the statistics jogged something in my memory. During launch EW Zadnor zone 3 was the fastest leveling method available if you had it open, if you remember the EW dungeons had to be buffed in exp rewards due to Zadnor being superior for exp gains and way easier then EW dungeons. Also for new Reaper/Sage players it was the PoTD equivalent for the expansion. Honestly this may explain why Eureka Orthos' exp gain is also rather terrible as to not repeat what happened with Zadnor. This may explain some of the gap between Zadnor and rank 25 percents as rank 25 was not required to level there.