Heavensward!Follow

There's a sliding scale of "Is it worth the work?"

Some gear like the I-90 gear is so easy to get, that you might as well as soon as you ding 50 regardless of what might be coming later. However, something you have to sink in 50, 100+ hours... then you have to stop and ask yourself "is it really worth it to put this much work into something I'll chuck hours into the expansion?"

The harder the thing is to get, the less it is going to be worth it to grind up to get it once the expansion is out unless you really enjoy the grinding to get the item, then you'll probably do it for the fun factor.

But... hearing some of the people in this thread, some of them are just plain NOT having fun doing 100+ hours of work into one singular item. Can't blame them TBH. I can understand some challenge, I can understand some grind, but 100 hours for one item is way over the top.

I assume info is being broken up between the 3 fanfests. Less so the JP one since it's far enough ahead that they'll just have more stuff to talk about, but the EU one is in like a week.

And I quite like Soken's work.

Why do you hate fun?

Also Yoshi P just STRONGLY suggested Dark Knight would be in this expansion.

Half Life 3 confirmed?

Don't forget that the game had its level cap raised from 50 to 75 early on. If they had done with XI what you are suggesting now, the level cap would have stayed 50 for 8 years.

This is why people keep referring back to FFXI. They kept building upon the world. They never made events/gear obsolete until they raised the level cap past 75. This addition of content kept building up, which made was why there was so much to do. FFXIV keeps killing it's content every 6 months. This means there will always be little content available that is relevant. People don't care aboutanything below the highest tier. In FFXI, there was no highest tier. Every event had something for someone that was the best. FFXIV puts all their eggs in one tiny basket. The game has been out for a year, but the only content people will be doing is whatever comes out in 2.4. All the old content will be skipped, and everyone will be forced to run the same content, again, over and over and over. There is no variety. FFXI had that variety which made the grind very bearable. It also didn't negate the time you put into your character. If FFXI did anything right, it was this aspect. I played FFXIV, but it's just another clone MMO with a nice paint job.

They had something going when FFXIV was at patch 1.23, it was getting fun to play after that mess of a launch. Nearly all the people that I played with, including myself, were really let down by what the game became after the servers shut down. Gear actually had stats on it that wasn't generic as hell. Another thing FFXI did right. Gear doesn't feel worth going after because all the gear is exactly the same. Sure you can min/max but does it matter? no, not at all. The only thing that matters in the end is whether or not your new piece of gear is a higher ilvl than the old one. After playing FFXI no one can tell me this way is better. It's boring. I played a whole year of FFXIV, and the longer I played the more I didn't care anymore about anything. The first time I played the game from arcanist 1-50 was really fun. But after you get to that level cap, the fun and interest starts to go down over time.

Now there is an expansion coming, but the question is, can they fix all the issues I mentioned (which are pretty big ones.) and make the game after level 50 fun and interesting? In all honesty, I don't think they will. I am hoping that they do though because I do like the combat as well as some of the other things they have done. But after a year of seeing what they have done I am very disappointed.

I said my goodbyes yesterday to my FC because my sub finally ran out. I have been playing FFXI again for the past 2 and a half months and am enjoying my time there again. I can't pinpoint exactly what it is about FFXI that makes me crave more of it, but at least I'm having fun. I sincerely hope the expansion brings to the game what it needs.

I do have a hard time listening to you never getting what you want and the devs doing almost the complete opposite. My b*tt is really hurt about it.

Of course that makes zero sense, but if that's the narrative in your head...



Edited, Oct 19th 2014 8:16am by Hyanmen

Just because the grind gets replaced doesn't mean the time you had to enjoy the previous fruits of your labor was somehow "pointless". It's the same mentality with relationships. Just because a relationship ended, doesn't mean it was "a waste". The good times you had together have not suddenly changed only because it was finite.

Granted, it's a problem with grinding for grinding's sake. If you don't enjoy what you're doing it doesn't really matter whether you need to redo everything every 6 months or 2 years. And if you do enjoy what you're doing, it still doesn't matter. People are projecting their dissatisfaction at the developers, when the clear solution has always been to stop doing the things you don't enjoy. Changing the time it takes to grind stuff isn't going to fix the disease.

On the flipside, when something isn't replaced 'soon' the rewards simply aren't there, especially in the short-term. When every individual content starts rewarding you only after a long time, it may very well affect a person's perception of the 'fun' negatively as well. Especially if you don't have the time to do seven different things in a week, which obviously helps with the initial reward drought in the long-term.

The repercussions to taking this middleground approach are larger than people may think. The game becomes increasingly hard to just pick up and play, while long-term players are rewarded exponentially better. It would not be very hard to think that this would affect people's perception negatively as well. It's pretty much the reason why it's never going to happen at this stage. SE wants people to feel that they can quit and come back, instead of making them feel that if they come back, catching up will be harder than ever. It's a struggle of the opposites and to be honest, it's much harder to keep around the people who quit and come back (like myself). Thus the game is designed for them for the most part.

Fact of the matter is, FFXIV is designed for vertical progression. There has been no secret made about this. It's not been sprung on everyone that suddenly this is a thing. It's been like this for quite some time now.

We all have different opinions, and yours is no less valid than anyone's, but to be honest...

I didn't find it all that "Awesome". Side-grades offered at best, 5% better performance, and that was an awesome "OMG!" piece. You had tons of gear that you wore for a split second (swap gear in, cast spell, swap gear out. Swap gear in, use a weaponskill, swap gear out) and I always found it absolutely silly.

And then there were the troubles trying to find places to stash all of this gear. Back before we got Wardrobe, before we got the Case, the Sack, and even the Satchel... you had, IIRC, 60 (later bumped to 80) inventory slots and that was it. Your worn items counted against this, so really you only had 44-64 (assuming 16 items worn) slots to carry stuff AND leave a few open so you could pick up something that dropped.

Carrying around a ton of crap on you so you could get "+5% on (insert specific ability here)" didn't seem all that "awesome" to me. In fact, it felt like it was far more trouble than it was worth.

And that's not even counting the trouble you had to go to get some of these items. How many red mages, again, never saw their AF2 hat despite years of running the correct Dynamis every single week?

You put all of this work in, to get a piece of gear that isn't really "better" than what you're wearing save for one situation that occurs in 3 seconds out of every 5 minutes or some-crap. That doesn't sound like a very good (or interesting) investment of my time, nor do the hours spent muling equipment and constantly managing my inventory to handle all of this junk either. I remember the days when "Change Jobs" meant "Spend 30 minutes swapping gear from Safe to Inventory to Storage, Storage to Inventory to Safe until you managed to get all 30-40 pieces of gear moved around to where they go.

I didn't find that "Fun" nor "Awesome".

But then, again, that's just my opinion. I'm glad they chucked that crap from XIV. Gear might be "bland" or "exactly the same" in XIV these days, but at least when you got an upgrade, it was an actual upgrade and not another one of the hundreds of side-grades that are only better during X, Y, Z conditions that happen for a few seconds every several minutes.

Thanks for the '1st' info I've heard about this.