Live Letter from the Producer, 1/12/16Follow

Which is it? You agree with both. You do realize they're on opposite sides of the coin?


There isn't much difference to be honest. That's just the nature of the game. Every so often more story crumbs become available, slightly better gear and more difficult raids become available and another step along the upgrade path opens up.

If it's going to be a step you need to take, regardless of how soon or how late you intend on finishing that step, it doesn't really matter. If you deviate from that path you can always pick up where you left off. That was implicitly stated by Yoshi as 'working as intended'. This game was created with the expectation that players would stop start stop start and it comes through in the design.

You're not going to be overwhelmed with things to do in XIV because it's meant to be easy to get back into if you decide to shelf it for a while. As a player who has done just that, I can testify. You can play for a month, leave for two months and come back without the feeling of being helplessly behind to the point that you'll never be able to catch up.

I'd imagine that the only people who are 'under the gun' so to speak are those who are invested in a handful of jobs. Maybe a newer player who is testing out multiple jobs before making a choice about a few they really enjoy have a similar experience if they have higher level friends they'd like to play with.

Go back and read what each said when I agreed with them. The statements they made that I agreed with were not on the same issues. I agreed with Fyn explaining why it makes sense to prioritize certain things in game, and then I agreed with Callinon that the term "obsoleted" is often improperly used.

Two different coins.


Edited, Jan 14th 2016 11:43pm by Thayos

Level 1 gear still essentially "contributes to your performance" by that logic. (Hint: that means said logic is flawed)

You are using a much different definition of obsolete than the rest of us. It isn't just about what "contributes to your performance", it's also about what meets the current standard. Once esos go uncapped, i200-210 is no longer going to be the current standard. This isn't exactly rocket surgery.

There just might be a reason for that.

Bottom line, esoteric gear is going to be obsolete when the next set of tomes comes out. You can try to argue against that until you're blue in the face; won't stop it from being true. Didn't stop it from being true with mythology/soldiery/poetics, and it isn't going to stop being true here.

Stuff "contributing to your performance" does not fly in determining what's obsolete and what isn't, because every piece of gear contributes to your performance unless it has no stats whatsoever on it.

For someone who's apparently a defender of the vertical progression model, you seem blissfully ignorant of the effects it entails.

Is it possible for you to speak for yourself? I have really enjoyed the stories in this game.

That's totally a false statement.

The correct statement would be, "at the very least, they just haven't done it yet."

Based on what I've seen in game and on the OFs, I think it's safe to say that people don't see it as a priority right now, but that doesn't mean people are indifferent or don't care. It just means other things are more important at the moment.

For example, I care about the storyline, but I haven't done it yet because I'm prioritizing other things. I'll do it the moment I have some in-game free time.

Edited, Jan 15th 2016 11:14am by Thayos

I actually agree in the sense, they're indifferent or don't care at all. Unless you have absolutely no time to play due to your commitments to Thordan Ex farming and Savage Alexander all day, there's only a handful of quests that you could do in an hr or less. The reports posted recently were about active players and many people agreed that because there was no end-goal for doing 3.1's story other than to say: "HEY IT WAS ALL A DREAM" scenario type cop out writing, no one cared but the ones who absolutely NEED the storyline.

Now that 3.2 is confirmed to have a story gated dungeon, then people will do 3.1's story. So yeah it's not a priority, but even if it had no content achieved for doing it, don't you think the ones who love the story would do it, rather than an absolutely abysmal fraction of players? This is why it's hard to gauge where interests are when it comes to XIV because it's honestly all over the place due to SE overhyping numbers/underselling content additions and actual parsing (through lodestone) showing that more people are just done with the game and newer players are keeping the numbers up but of the active players, the storyline is the least of anyone's concern.

For example when XI releases expansion storylines, I immediately do it even when I know there's no goal for it yet, I liked the story so I did it. 3.1 hit..I just...couldn't care to do it even after I did all my weekly stuff the first reset day.

"Don't care to" means to me that it's not a preference or a priority. As many people have stated, they don't feel forced to do the story content because it's not required, they don't care to do it. If someone were to ask you where you wanted to eat and you said "I'm so hungry that I don't even care", then you're indifferent. You obviously care about eating because you're hungry, but it really doesn't matter where you go to satisfy that urge. You don't feel that you stand to lose or gain anything from either choice.

It doesn't make sense to me for someone who enjoys something, anything for that matter, to wait until they're actually pressured or forced to do it. When the patch hits both the relic quests and the story quests will still be there. At most, your opportunity cost is an hour spread out over the course of however long the current patch lasts.

What are you excluded from by not having relic? That is to say, is it really all that important to have your relic an hour earlier that it makes sense to sacrifice any other activity you'd enjoy doing? That's my point here. Most people set priorities based on the consequences of not meeting their goals. Outside of the far more lofty goals of being world first or even top 10 Savage clear, almost everything else is inconsequential. The game is designed around doing what you want to do whenever you can so it's strange to me that people put things they enjoy off until they're all but(see what I did there) forced to do them.

I'm not waiting until I'm pressured or forced; I'm waiting until I have more time. For now, my priority is on clearing my dungeon roulettes to farm for relic (and doing my beastman dailies), and that usually takes all my available free time. With a little luck, I might get to that hour of storyline this weekend.

Also, I agree with 99 percent of what Fyn said.

I do disagree with Fyn on the concept of gear becoming completely worthless as soon as newer gear is introduced. As I said earlier, I'm still getting a lot of mileage from a few pieces of i190 gear on my paladin, which is my main job.

But I do agree that goals become obsolete as new tomes are introduced. When the replacement currency/gear for esoterics are out, I'm not going to be putting in extra time to deliberately keep farming esoterics -- regardless of the fact that esoterics will be falling like rain when that happens. (Of course, this might change if the new relic grind requires getting esoterics, but you get the idea.)

Edited, Jan 15th 2016 3:42pm by Thayos

Just to be clear, we're talking about the difference between you having relic now and an hour from now. It's one thing to get your relic done and have it a month or even a week earlier than you would have if you did something else. I can see someone making the case that they might have cleared a raid prior to the next one coming out if they had an extra lockout because I've actually been in that position myself.

I cannot, however, entertain the idea that being 'irrelevant' for an hour out of the several month long content cycle is meaningful in the slightest

At 12 hours a week, a single hour(not even a consecutive 60 minutes, but an hour total at your leisure) is literally a fraction of 1 percent of your time. Is it sinking in Thayos? The 'limited playtime' argument is ******** even at your standard, much less for the players who are logging into the game closer to the average.

Try again?

Finally had time, did the 3.1 story missions... and they were great!

Honestly, I expected them to be of the same tone/tediousness as the most of the filler missions between ARR and "Before the Fall." But the 3.1 missions carry on with the same tone, pacing and quality as the missions of the main HW storyline. And only one of the missions had elements of an errand quest.

Glad I finally did these -- and glad I waited to do them leisurely -- and now I'm even more excited for next month.

The story didn't go nowhere. I thought quite a bit happened in such a short span of missions. We progressed in terms of what happened with the missing Scions and got to see what's been happening in Ishgard since the conclusion of 3.0's story. We also met a new character and got to see the introduction of a new storyline. I don't want to spoil anything though, but the story definitely made progress.

I expect the ongoing issues with the Garleans and Ascians will continue through the game's life, and the 3.0 storyline was pretty much self-contained. However, unlike the 2.1 to 3.0 transition content, the post-3.0 transition content seems to be more directly pertaining to 3.0's story. I doubt we'll get complete resolution on the 3.0 story arcs until the last 3.x patch, and until then, the plot will move forward. That's how it's supposed to be.

But yeah, I was actually impressed with the quality of the 3.1 storyline. It totally blew away the standard transitional storyline content from the 2.x patch series.



Destiny actually has a pretty cool story with lots of explanation... unfortunately, you have to go to Destiny's website to read those stupid cards, which I don't do. But I read up on a plot summary not long ago, and it was pretty cool! It's just too bad that the story is so poorly told in the actual game.

Edited, Jan 18th 2016 3:22pm by Thayos