Do you think FFXIV will bring back old school endgame?Follow

Ironically though, this describes XIV as well, especially with the ability to spam content which also created ****** drop rates to the point people were pleading with SE to never do x again for future content.

Remember Atmas? Something that doesn't benefit you in any way as a drop itself but because the atma stage of relic only changed the ilvl and not the stats? Leviathans Mirrors? Ramuh's Weapons? Binding Coil weird drop rates? A MNK in my FC went 6 months of Binding Coil without a drop because it only dropped DRG or Caster stuff lol, so XI and XIV aren't that different in the long run, especially comparing a more modern era of XI to XIV since as said, plenty of people say "this is 2015 not 2004" when...XI has existed since 2001 and continue to exist today and has long had many changes to it. I remember very fondly getting 6 atmas in 30 minutes on release meanwhile people were spending 2-4+ months and not see 1.

Also a thing to note..XI rarely had "no drops" or "the wrong drops", it was all handled by your LS to distribute, I can't count how many times I've seen RDM hat drop in Xarcbard in our every run of it and not get it..not because it didn't drop but because I was further behind in line for it. Same with sky and crimson legs..so many of them dropped in a month but none went to me because it was PLD priority.

I get what you mean though but both game are very similar, XI seems worse in comparison because XIV hands you so much gear and invalidates almost all of it just as quickly it doesn't seem that bad, but I guarantee plenty of people who didn't get lucky has plenty of horror stories from First/Second Coil, Leviathan, Ramuh and Atma farming for relic and so on.



And sadly, this is what screws up the future of XIV's end-game, because as people say "you can't only focus on x player group" then in the same breath say "why focus on the tiny x%" while ignorig the fact they continue to release content said tiny x% actually partake in. It seems they have no means of releasing a story mode and savage mode at the same time, so it kills the content release by giving them an excuse NOT to do more content.

That's not a "bad thing", it just...is redundant, especially when the content is the same. It's like if they were to release Binding Coil story, 3 months later Crystal Tower Labyrinth, 3 months later they release Binding Coil 1 Savage, 3 months later Binding Coil 2 Savage, 3 months later Binding Coil 3 Savage and so on. It's just extremely sloppy when you think about it, but that's the life of vertical progression. Even though yoshi wants us to play "casually"..the game has more limits than candy crush and even candy crush lets you choose your pacing..XIV kind of forces you to follow its pacing.

Another thing I liked with XI, the "main end-game" was a set pace but the additional end-game content systems were another path you could take..in XIV there's really only 1 route..and it's usually locked tightly by weekly lockouts or cooldowns. Even on content that shouldn't have it. Alexander normal's should have been eased upon implementation of Savage because it's not like the people who spam normal will even get past Faust in savage 1.

So with yoshi stating they're scaling back on the size of updates from here on out and combining smaller updates into the large ones so they can "vary the content" they may be able to actually break out of this same ole same ole formula and let XIV get out of the...ahem...long hallway it's in that people despised in FFXIII.

There is no consistency to be had in this comparison. FFXIV launched just shy of 5 years ago. At the same point in its lifetime, FFXI had already launched vanilla, RotZ, CoP, ToAU and they had already announced WotG. XIV can stand on it's own now, but you'd be comparing it to FFXI approaching it's prime. That's a blow up.


If anything it made more sense because you actually knew exactly what the reward was for your effort.

You don't get another carrot in XIV, because you never actually caught the carrot. You get a piece of gear as a reward yes, but you also know that soon that gear will 'expire' and you'll be out chasing another slightly different colored carrot.

FFXI wasn't carrot on a stick. I mean sure, you can use carrot as a substitute for the rewards in XI, but they weren't dangled in your face. Instead you were just told that there was a carrot and usually given some idea about how long you'd have to work to obtain it. I much preferred that to the constant gear treadmill style of more modern MMOs.

Sure you get a new carrot Thayos, but all it does is distract you from the fact that there isn't much else to do in the game. In FFXI, I could make constant progress toward a goal or I could take a break to do something else and come back to it. There was no penalty for doing that so I had that freedom. In XIV, if you are chasing the carrot and stop for a while then your carrot eventually disappears and you have to start your chase over. It's a false sense of progression because unless you keep churning out gear on that treadmill, you stop making any progress.

No it's not the same game it was 5 years ago, but yes; FFXIV is 5 years old. ARR ushered in a whole slew of adjustments and redesigned mechanics, but that doesn't make it a completely new game. That makes it a completely different game.


FFXIV 1.0 is not the focus of the discussion. None of the comparisons of XIV and XI are taking it into account so I'm not sure why you'd even bring it up. Maybe I missed something? Where is anyone talking about the 1.0 version? The only acknowledgement it gets is that it was the first version, ARR was 2.0 and Heavensward is 3.0 so it's only really being used as a placeholder to keep count. I don't think being in denial about the existence of 1.0 would validate the discussion in any way.

If your goal is to obtain a piece of gear, you reach your goal when you obtain said piece of gear. Progression is the measure up to and including the completion of that goal. How much your player power increases(if at all) upon reaching that goal is of no consequence.

You could say FFXIV as an IP is 5 years old, but this version of FFXIV we are playing is 2 years old. They literally ripped the old one to prices and salvages it for parts. Especially for the sake of this convo, to say XIV is five years old makes zero sense. That would be like saying that the FFXI smartphone game will be 13 years old when it launches.



This is true, and I thought about this during my last post. In XIV, you chase carrots more rapidly than you do in XI. However, you also spend more time on top, and the carrot chasing is less stressful. You can play knowing that, in time, the carrots will be virtually given to you if you've been unable to catch them.

Yes, XI did have carrots on sticks. All MMOs do. I didn't chase after all that gear because the would look nice in my mog house. I chased gear when it would make my character incrementally better at something, even if I knew it had a chance of being replaced later on. Those are carrots! They were just on stupidly long sticks, and there were a ton of them (which goes back to the whole point of this thread about there being "more to do" in XI).

If we could wind back the clock and discuss carrots/sticks at FFXI's high point, people would be calling you guys nuts for denying the existence of carrots in Vana'diel.

Here's one thread from "back in the day" proving that, yes, those of us who were immersed in FFXI definitely had our share of sticks & carrots. NOBODY argued that the carrots didn't exist. They've always existed. It's only the sizes of the sticks and carrots that have changed.

http://www.zam.com/forum.html?forum=10&mid=1238040843134496542#28

That thread is actually relevant to now, as well, because XIV found a way to have sticks/carrots gameplay without everything (or anything) being "SRS BSNS." Case in point... I'm actually grinding Alex NM just so I might someday glamor the full set. I'm not doing it for statistical gain, or to be accepted into a larger community... I'm just doing it because I flat-out want to. I literally never chased gear that I didn't need in XI, because there were always so many other carrots that NEEDED to be chased.

But that's why there was "more to do" in XI. There were always more carrots on longer sticks. At 2 years into ARR, there's actually a ton to do in this game -- more actual content than XI had after 2 years -- but in XIV, the content stops being carrots. That's what separates the two games, and it's a valid debate over which model is better from gamer to gamer. All MMO players want to chase carrots, even if they don't really know it or want to admit it.

Edited, Aug 17th 2015 8:29am by Thayos

This is totally not true.

For most players, the size of the carrot depends entirely on how much your power increases by obtaining a goal. That's why, in FFXI, ground kings and other HNMs were camped by dozens of people on every possible window, while other NMs were roaming the world untouched even by RMT.

The fact SE made those monsters appear so rarely despite the huge crush of people competing to farm it is, by intentional design, the "stick" on which the carrot (gear) is attached. And it's the combination of sticks and carrots that's the true measure of a game's progression.

I apologize for this massive post, but I felt as if we should explore this matter in more detail, rather than just bantering back and forth. I wanted to decribe, in full, how my experiences in both of these games played out in comparison to one another, and why I feel they cannot be accurately be compared.

TL;DL, Apples and Oranges, FFXIV Heavensward has way, way much more content than Zilart, which is the accurate timeline gague for where we are (NA Release was first expansion) And right now Heavensard has enough content, as a whole, to compare with CoP - barring the differences between Vertical Progression and Horizontal. The stark differences in feeling are a result of FFXI's tendancy to bloat content with artificial difficult, and FFXIV's obsession with streamlining content to the bare bones.

If we look at both as a negative: It's like comparing obesity vs anorexia. Anyways, onto the post at (very) large:

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Except the term of progression content is not determined by what you personally believe is the definition. It is instead determined by the wider community, which is in conflict with your statement.

The concept of progression is widely accepted and perceived as the progression your character makes, ie: The net resulting power creep of your character. It is in this sense, character progression, that the term progression is coined in the prevailing discussions regarding MMOs in general, is the qualification benchmark when discussing content in most argumentative characters. The net power game of a player is actually the core mechanic. What you are referring to, which is content progression, is the biproduct rather than the core. That’s why Horizontal and Vertical are considered means to an end.

This is easily seen in MMO discussions wherever they're more prevalent than here. By your logic, Beastmen dailies should count towards 'progression' content - but that sort of argument will hold no weight in any official MMO discussion forum. If it doesn't net them a gain in power, that content is ignored.

This is important to recognize, even here. Because if we were not ignoring that content, we could count so many small things that are being overlooked as part of the breath of FFXIV's content scope - and we have not. (Perhaps we should.)

Even Hio is arguing how much content is irrelevant to ‘progression’ due to the fact that the average character is so much higher on the power-creep scale. Which is a fair argument on behalf of Horizontal progression. But we’re past the point where Horizontal progression can be considered as part of the format of this game. It’s already slated for an eventual level cap of 100, as was announced more than two years ago at this point.



However, on the same vein, calling it 5 years old is a misnomer. Iga’s Castlevania habits of reusing graphical, physics and combat mechanic assets come to mind. Something that is salvaged to reduce development time and increase productivity does not mean the product itself is older upon release onset.

That would be on the logic vein of including development time as part of the game’s age, in which case FFXV is already over five years old and it’s not even released.

Post cycle on development begins on product release date, not before. If people can’t even agree on that then that just provides more evidence to my point that discussions on these topics become pointless.

ARR is the Swan that got frankensteined together from the shambled bits of the ugly duckling that was 1.xx, but in terms of lifetime this iteration of FFXIV is only 2 years old. I’m sorry but bringing up 1.xx continually when it comes production time is kinda moot and redundant, and can be mistaken very quickly for sour grapes.

Thayos has the good idea. The IP is 5 years old, but the game itself is only 2. What we played back in 1.xx was a different game. So much that going back to 1.xx from 3.0 mechanics feels alien.



This is patently wrong - and stems from the discrepancy in the timeline you’re thinking. Again, we’re second year, going into the beginnings of Third. Expansion wise, we’re still in Zilart stage.

And as far as “Things to do” we’ve now lapped FFXI several times over. Dynamis at this point in time isn’t even out, and even if it was, FFXIV has more than that too, size of zones and artificial difficulty notwithstanding.

It’s not as if FFXI had more to do, at all. FFXIV dwarfs that in comparison. Where was FFXI’s beastmen quests? FATEs alone encompass Expeditionary Force , Highly Notorious Monster fights, and even similar systems to Sky and Sea with the Fate Chains, especially in Heavensward where these chains lead to large, powerful enemies that drop equipment not had anywhere else.

We easily have far more dungeons as FFXI had in the entirety of Zilart, and may even be at this point more than even CoP at this point. And the actual land-mass covered in these dungeons at this point at the very least equates the size of the dungeon zones that FFXI had through Zilart.

I will contest the concept of ignoring reused assets to produce new content as part of this as well. Quicksand Caves is not the same as it was in 1.xx by a long shot. And most reused dungeon content follows that.

However even if we ignore the pieces of content that follows through similar veins mechanically, the amount is smaller compared to the new content that came out in subsequent patches alone. Hard Modes Dungeons revamped every component and featured new fights. New Dungeons on top of that, and we’re not even discussing Guildhests at this point, of which FFXI has no equivalent until Treasures of Aht Urgan’s system.

It’s completely, and utterly wrong to say there was more to do in FFXI at this point. It’s simply not true. FFXIV in Heavensward may even at this point be comparable to Zilart + CoP in CoP’s early days, before Sea was released.

That said, you are correct in saying that it FEELS like there is less to do - and we should explore that vein.
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The problem is best summed up in your next paragraph, so let’s review that first.



In a vertical progression game, content that is there, seems invalidated because there is such an emphasis on ‘current content’. People are obsessed with having a higher number next to that Asterisk in your character portrait - and I think that does the majority of the game a disservice.

FFXI, in comparison, was far more bloated affair, using drop rates and artificial difficulty to make less content seem like more. This, in pair with a Horizontal progression gearing system meant you spent more time in older content because it still felt relevant to you. Those drops you mentioned, getting pieces from Sky and Sea and whatnot, started giving you advanced pieces for your Hoard, when you got them. But in truth, you were just stomping the same grounds, hoping that ‘this time’ the item you’ve been hunting for six weeks (or in some cases six months or more)may drop.

In many cases, you felt you had more to do simply because you rarely got anything done.Imagine if Dynamis was designed for you to be able to get all the equipment you wanted out of it if you dedicated to it ,well before Limbus came out? (Or for that matter, having all the drops in the City Dynamis before Beaucedine came out, and then again before Dynamis Lord) Then it would feel as if you had less to do. Right now we’re complaining at systems that lock people out and don't reward fast enough, where FFXI had these problems in spades, and it drew out the content far longer than the content’s difficulty itself.

Therefore, it always felt like you had more to do. And many people are completely ok with that kind of game. Apples.

FFXIV (and to some degree, the Twilight period of FFXI) has the opposite problem. Everything is easy access, all the content is quickly completed and digested, and the rewards of them are for the most part, acquired before the new content came out. And when the new content comes out, old content becomes irrelevant to character progression.

No more writing thesis papers while waiting to get the drop from Leaping Lizzy, or doing your studying during Fafnir/Nidhogg’s spawn camping sessions. Now it’s go out, get your weekly/daily allotment of stuff in a few hours, and your progression efforts are done for that lockout period.

There is plenty else to do. But it’s not related to that progression mechanic. There’s no pressure, therefore it gets ignored. But there are many who enjoy having the simple ,straightforward endgame as well as those who enjoy the casual pursuits they can play and go for. Oranges.

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What I keep hearing from these arguments is the square peg arguing that the round hole is cramped and doesn't fit them. These core concepts and mechanics just don’t work with their sensibilities and they want them to change.

What makes this endeavor fruitless is that in many ways, their desires have been met in ways that just aren’t relevant to progression. There is, in fact, an amazing amount of content to do for the age of this game. It does, however, fall into the trope of streamlining too much and falling into the same base systems.

But in the end, these core differing design philosophies won’t change. It’s like complaining that there isn’t enough RPG elements in a First Person shooter, or, perhaps more accurately, that a World War II shooter does not have enough science fiction elements. These elements are dynamically opposed and just don’t fit together.

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That’s curious. My experiences on Aether are the opposite. Since the inclusion of Eso weapons, clears on Alexander normal have come far more stable than previously, to the point where it’s clear when people don’t have Eso weapons because the group has such a harder time of it. My experience in Experts has also garnered similar results.

I could be incorrect, or you could have had a string of bad luck. I’ll sit on this more and see the rule of averages play out.



Edited, Aug 17th 2015 1:49pm by Hyrist

I have to be honest, for me reading what you both are discussing I feel the truth for me is somewhere in the middle heh. It is funny how different we see the same things, especially afterwards when we have new perspectives for ourselves as well.

And all it took to win were five players who could follow incredibly simple instructions, and a SMN running the show who knew how to Astral Flow. I went 23/23 on capped (pre- and post-nerf) Promys, levelling SMN specifically to do so. I enjoyed them (and the climb) immensely.

I should try T5 someday to see what the fuss is about. I suspect it's a lot harder than Promy.

Personally, my high point in XI was actually managing my social linkshell... but even the stuff we did was dictated by sticks/carrots... just much smaller carrots on shorter sticks. For example, my GS paladin friend always wanted to kill offbeat NMs that nobody else ever cared about, so we'd go hunt those. Or we'd run the promies to farm drops for the AH. Or we'd sometimes go after something like Ug Pendants. We always had fun, and we had fun because we were doing these adventures together... but still, those tiny sticks/carrots were always there.

When we weren't doing events, we'd all be chasing our own separate carrots. Very, very rarely did we just sit around, doing nothing, not chasing some kind of carrot.

That's the luxury of a horizontal game though. As you said earlier, power creep in a horizontal game moves very slowly... like one stat point at a time. But that one stat point is STILL an improvement, and maybe it's been an entire year since the last time you could enhance your enfeebling skill by +1... so if you're a red mage, that little bump is still exciting!

SE actually started getting wise around ToAU, with Assault rewards... if you didn't want to go through the hassle of chasing the biggest carrots on the longest sticks, you could get an assault group and chase after a respectably large carrot on a significantly shorter stick. That was a game changer, imo... I wish SE would have kept that balance for the rest of the game's life.



This is the essence of sticks and carrots... offer players a reward, but create some kind of grind, risk or consequence in order to get it. Players who want to chase the carrot must deal with the stick. It's all about choice. If players were REQUIRED to chase carrots at the ends of long sticks, then everyone would quit and the game would fail (cough cough Wildstar cough cough). It has to be a choice.

Edited, Aug 17th 2015 1:57pm by Thayos

And content is "obsoleted" in horizontal games, too! It just happens at a much slower pace, and usually with a lot more uproar from the playerbase.

Even in some vertical games, though, there's still a small bit of horizontal wiggle room. A great example now is choosing between Alexander NM gear or esoterics gear. Although Eso gear is 10 iLevels better, both gear sets are more than adequate for beating all content in the game except for Alexander SM. And soon, when new gear is released in the upcoming 24-man content (I'm guessing that will be iLevel 200), then people can effectively choose between Alexander NM, 24-man or upgraded ESO gear. This is especially viable for people who are gearing up more than one job.

That said, the stick for the ESO carrot is so small that most people get ESO gear regardless... but still, the element of "choice" is there. You don't have to farm ESOs. Right now, you could pretty much roam the world with a small group, hunt A ranks, buy law gear and then farm Alex NM. Not saying anyone does that, but the choice IS there.

EDIT: Hryist, just read your bit about pillared vertical games. I think that's what Yoshi-P is going for with XIV, only there are only like two or three pillars at any given time.

Edited, Aug 17th 2015 2:25pm by Thayos

No worries! I appreciate your insights on pillared vertical systems. That makes sense for it to be based on max gear builds, as opposed to just "possible" gear builds that are suitable for casual players.

The sticks and carrots thing man, you're really missing the point there. These are rewards and penalties placed into the game by developers to encourage(read: force) players into participating in specific content. What you're talking about here has nothing at all to do with that. Sure there were a ton of different things you could do in XI to occupy yourself, but those aren't carrots on a stick. No one lured you into camping random NMs or farming promy or tonberry for money. There was also no penalty for not doing any of those activities.

That's what carrot on a stick means. Developers enticing you toward the content they want you participating in by baiting you with shiny stuff(carrots) and penalizing you if you don't participate(stick).


I don't know why you're stopping me, you're saying what I said almost verbatim. Vertical progression is about player power(increases making content obsolete) and horizontal progression is about choices and variety of play style.

It almost seems like you're trying to disagree with me for the sake of disagreement. If it's simply because you want to attach progression to the character, that's silly. Whether or not a game follows one style of progression or the other is completely up to the designers and developers of the game. It's not something players get to decide so their hand is forced.

Edited, Aug 18th 2015 8:08am by FilthMcNasty

Actually, I just did more reading... and you're partially right. I did have the visual representation of the idiom wrong. While this topic is widely discussed on MMO forums as "carrot-on-a-stick" mechanics (which is what I was referring to), the stick in the non-MMO standard idiom is literally a stick hitting the horse's behind.

It's interesting that, in MMO communities, people often speak of this as I do... like carrots being dangled at the ends of sticks of different sizes. I think this is the case because, in MMOs, the evolved idiom makes a lot more tangible sense. When we fail a goal in an MMO, the only way in which we're really punished is with a loss of time. Experience points losses, the loss of a pop item, the need to re-run the raid, etc., all translates to a loss of time and nothing more. Game developers can't beat us, shock us, take things away from us, etc... but they can certainly invalidate the time we've spent in their games, and that's a meaningful consequence.

Which is why everything else I've said is absolutely correct. Like virtually all other MMOs, FFXI was definitely a game of sticks and carrots back in its heyday (haven't touched it in two years, so can't say anything about what it is now). Whether you interpret the stick as the thing beating your behind or separating you from your goal, it's all the same... you chose which carrots to pursue based on the risk of the stick.

If I told you the ultimate weapon for your class required a synth from rare drops with horrible drop rates from NMs that only popped once a week -- and if that synth only had a 1 percent chance of success -- you'd never chase that carrot, no matter how big it was. You'd find the next-bast carrot with a more palatable stick. This is the essence of what keeps people involved and grinding through various systems of MMOs, FFXI included. Or, if you're enjoying a random event night with your social linkshell, you're not going to go and tackle an immensely difficult HNM (burning a rare pop set in the process) if you don't have the jobs/skill/practice to be confident in winning. Instead, you'll seek out a smaller carrot with a more forgiving stick, because who wants their fun event night to turn into a giant waste of pop items (time)? Sticks and carrots... that's all it is.

My comments about FFXIV are also absolutely correct. It, too, is a game of sticks and carrots... but many more smaller carrots and much, much smaller sticks. And, eventually, the carrots are essentially given to you.

So, now that we're on the same page with semantics, how about you explain why you don't think sticks/carrots applied to FFXI?


Edited, Aug 18th 2015 8:36am by Thayos