Eorzea Examiner #6: Attunements & Content Gating

Want to run a dungeon? Hope you've done all the prerequisites.

"Want to Sell Your Crafted Wares? Go Into the Depths and Slay This Accursed Fiend!"

When FFXIV relaunched, one of the first changes it made was requiring players to get to level 10 in a combat class before they were allowed to switch to a crafting or gathering class. While this was a bit strange, most of us were fine with the change; now when we switched to crafting, we would have that questing money to help us kick start our crafting careers. While many players may have switched back and forth between crafting and combat, there are those players who wished to craft from the beginning. After all, they were told this was a valid form of progression and it's not entirely unheard of to find players interested only in building and making money; that's pretty much all I did in EVE Online. For those players only interested in the industrial and economic offerings of FFXIV, they might just as soon never fight again after they hit level 10 and can switch. Well... except they really can't.

While yes you can technically go full crafter/gatherer at level 10 and never pick up a blade again, you're missing some very key tools of the trade still. Let's say you're a Miner with bags full of ore or an Armorer with tons of crafted armor you need to sell for more crafting materials. In any other MMO you would just waltz over to whatever form of auction house is available, post your goods, then wait for the money to roll in. FFXIV has a slightly different system with its Market Board and Retainers. The Market Board is FFXIV's equivalent of an auction house: a searchable listing of all goods being sold by your fellow players. None of the names on that board belong to players however - those are all Retainers, NPCs used by FFXIV as a multi-purpose bank and auction control system. Ring the Summoning Bell, hand your Retainers whatever you want to sell with the price, then come back to collect your money. This system sounds pretty close to what everyone else has, so what's the issue? You have to earn your Retainers.

Earlier in this article I mentioned that first stretch of Duty Finder dungeons is at level 15 for your main story quest line. Beyond being your first official encounters with the Duty Finder system and instances, this section of quests is important because it's also what gets you your Retainers. That's right, if you want to sell your gathered ore or crafted goods, then you'll need to make your way through the first three dungeons in FFXIV to earn the right to do so. Makes you wonder what kind of epic quest chain the NPC vendors with physical stores had to go through to open those, huh?

Admittedly unlocking Retainers won't require a great deal of time on the crafter's/gatherer's part. They got to level 10 already to unlock their preferred classes, so that just leaves them nine or ten more levels, the associated main story quests and those three Duty Finder dungeons to knock out before they can switch back to what they really want to do. The question is: why should they? Once you've given them access to the classes they really want to play, why are you then forcing them to switch back to something else to unlock features that really have no justification to be locked in the first place? The Retainer system has no combat functionality and is essentially just putting a face (literally - they have you build them like a new character) on your bank vault and auction tabs. If you really feel the need to gate these, why not tie it to the class quest lines instead? You could make Retainer access a reward for finishing your level 20 class quest for all of the base classes. That way everyone gets access to them, not just the combat-oriented players.

Conclusion

There are some advantages to how FFXIV has tied dungeons and features to the story. I like how some of the dungeons have an actual place in the storytelling. For most MMOs, with the exception of end-game raids and patched in dungeons, the story skips over the early instances and they're left feeling like loot piñatas with one page of flowery quest text from an NPC at the front serving as your "story". By tying the majority of the dungeons to the story quests, they can have cutscenes and actual rationales for going into them beyond "there's loot in there, so let's go!"

The problem here is that FFXIV goes overboard in tying everything to the story. Level 19 and your friend wants to run Copperbell Mines? Tough - you still need Sastasha and Tam-Tara Deepcroft. Ready to begin your climb to the top of the Market Board? If you haven't done those first three dungeons, that journey will have to wait. There are reasons for gating players from features in MMOs, be it for pacing new content or requiring a certain item level for pick-up groups to give them better odds of survival. If you were playing one of the single-player console Final Fantasy games, you could gate content however you wanted and few people would complain because it would theoretically fit the story and the main character's motivations. This isn't a single-player game though - you have millions of players, all with different play styles, interests and motivations.

Some of your players will be interested in playing through your main quest line straight through, seeing dungeons when they're meant to be seen, experiencing the story the way the devs wanted it to be seen. Not everyone wants that though. Some players love chaining dungeons with friends and as soon as they're available, they would just as soon live in instances. Others would rather avoid combat and see the economy and crafting recipes as their endgame content. All of these players have perfectly legitimate play styles and they're all making use of content that the developers wanted to see used by the community. Why not just give them the tools to do so up front? When you gate all of that content behind activities they don't want to do, you're not really "controlling the story" - you're just interrupting their fun.

That's it for this edition of the Eorzea Examiner. I'm still missing that last eight-man run for the original main story, but should that happen this week, we'll probably talk about it next time. Otherwise, it'll either be class speculation time or a post talking about FFXIV's FATEs. Until then, see you in Eorzea.

Michael "Ragar" Branham 

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Comments

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Balanced Examiner Please
# Jan 24 2014 at 10:17 PM Rating: Good
**
719 posts
Wow. You complain a LOT. Seriously, it's one thing to analyze the game, but all these articles are so negative. Maybe pause for a moment and try and consider WHY things have been implemented this way in the first place?

Like Caligulove describes, the beginning dungeons serve as extended tutorials to ease new players into more advanced aspects of MMOs. Locking these features behind storyline quests gets players to try out different aspects of the game. Maybe some of those people who prefer crafting will actually enjoy the combat aspects once they try them out and get deeper into the battle system (1-10 hardly scratches the surface). Even the crafting class quests specifically encourage you to spread out and level battle and gathering classes as a source of materials.

And this attitude of only wanting to progress solo until your friends log in seems completely bizarre to me. Storyline quests are a huge source of exp and significantly cut down on the grinding to level up, so NOT keeping up with them and FATE grinding instead just seems silly. Also, similar to how the early dungeons ease players into advanced battle mechanics, all the dungeons progressively ramp up the difficulty curve. Jumping from Copperbell to Aurum Vale would be a terribly rude awakening for anyone. FATEs are very poor at training people to effectively play their class, while dungeon progression does it rather smoothly for the most part. Besides, for someone who claims to prefer crafting and gathering, I'm not sure why you're so eager to blitz up through battle classes on your solo time instead of just crafting and gathering and doing battle classes when your friends are on.

Really, the increasing sense of entitlement and whining with each new article is really becoming a buzz-kill. And I'm not suggesting a complete 180 with nothing but fanboy praise, but something more balanced would be far more interesting to read.
Dungeons are necessary for some
# Jan 21 2014 at 11:49 AM Rating: Excellent
17 posts
While your criticisms of the dungeon/story relationship are just and valid, there are reasons it SHOULD be like this as well.

For MANY people, more so in this game than most, this is their first MMO experience.

The first dungeons are crucial to teaching you the mechanics of MMOs. To teaching you aggro, tanking, healing, positioning.

For instance:

The first boss you'll fight is a mob that has simple AOE. This teaches you what red circles are, and how to move away from the boss during attacks. The second boss comes with two adds, this teaches your priority in targets (kill adds first, then kill boss). The third boss has the same two adds and boss combo, but at a certain % adds are spawned as well. This teaches you priority management with adds, and allows the tank to learn how to pick up aggro on new mobs. The last boss of that dungeon teaches you environmental triggers. Bubbles begin to come up on grates, and without clicking them adds spawn.

That's the first dungeon. These are CRUCIAL skills to learn for an MMO if you want any success.

The next dungeon teaches you new mechanics yet. The slime boss teaches you how to position mobs within AOE so they take their own damage. The last boss of that dungeon spawns strong adds that break walls, teaching you how to focus fire adds asap, then continue on boss.

So while your criticisms are understandable from someone who understands the basic mechanics of dungeons, they are necessary for a good amount of people that play FFXIV (first time MMO players).

This was more of a complaint before they added duty roulette. It's not hard to find other people to do dungeons now through Duty Finder, as most people are running roulette throughout the day making plenty of people available for dungeons.

It's an MMO, and while I realize there is room for solo play, most progression is based on group efforts.

***lets hope they bring back Hamlets so crafters/gatherers can get some good group action in!

Edited, Jan 21st 2014 12:51pm by Caligulove
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