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The long waits for updatesFollow

#1 Nov 11 2013 at 11:49 AM Rating: Decent
Does anyone else think that Square Enix should drop this schedule of doing big patches every few months?

It's been a couple of months since launch and I think people are getting quite bored - and most of what's in the 2.1 patch was originally planned for launch, so people aren't that excited about it.

I think it would be much better if they did smaller updates here and there, especially for balancing purposes, rather than making people wait this long.

I think FFXI also did somewhat large updates with big gaps in between and it was pretty frustrating then as well. Especially in the case of balancing/class tweaks, I wish they would come more often (as necessary), not clumped into a big update that you have to wait forever for.
#2 Nov 11 2013 at 12:04 PM Rating: Good
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at some point in the last couple years, 3-4 months apparently became a long time between updates. Although they should have changed dungeon exp by now. Other than that, i don't have any issue with their schedule as it is.
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#3 Nov 11 2013 at 12:11 PM Rating: Excellent
There's still plenty to do for most players, and they need to make sure they don't introduce new content too quickly if that makes older content obsolete or too difficult to find parties for.

The pace seems just about right, imo. I agree with the comment about fixing dungeon exp though... not sure why they're waiting on that.

This update will expand the ways to get allegan stones, and that will make obtaining relic weapons/gear more entertaining, which will provide more incentive to redo existing content on multiple jobs... plus, we'll have new dungeons and primal modes, which will further break up the grind.

I'm more curious as to what will be implemented in the NEXT big update... as you said, we've known about what's coming up for a very long time now, but we still don't know much (if anything) about what will follow.
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#4 Nov 11 2013 at 12:27 PM Rating: Excellent
I can't imagine at this point that EVERYONE has easily cleared coil. I'm still having fun varying my activities, leveling other jobs, crafting, gathering, Garuda farming, Titan farming. Helping random shouters on Prae, CM, tanking lower level dungeons for people, the list goes on and on.

If you really have nothing to do, take a little break, play some other games. I don't know what else to tell ya, but if you're the type that's gone through ALL this content, it won't matter what they release. You'll go through it in a week or two and complain. The only reason people didn't blast through FFXI was because the drop rates on most things were so abysmal, along with acquiring pop sets that **** took forever to accomplish.
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#5 Nov 11 2013 at 12:33 PM Rating: Excellent
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They should be focussing on other things.

Housing is interesting, dont get me wrong, but right now the amount of blatent (and apparently easy) hacking that takes place, prompting an emergency maintenance and/or rollbacks every week again just needs to stop.

I cant go through a single zone without seeing 2-3 people mining under the ground, mass-farming monsters from out of their reach under the ground, or circumventing game mechanics they shouldnt be able to. They need to take a moment to adress the way the server handles things.

It is the only and most important thing they should focus on with all their might if they want this game to last.
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#6 Nov 11 2013 at 12:51 PM Rating: Excellent
Nah.

The RMT situation really has extremely little impact on most players. This game was designed so you can progress very easily without needing to buy from other players. Its not like FFXI. They need to fix that stuff, but not at the expense of more content. Shouldn't have too many cooks in the kitchen, either.
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#7 Nov 11 2013 at 1:22 PM Rating: Good
I think they'll probably pick up the pace for patches at the game chugs along.

The first few months after any major software implementation are going to be spent doing major bug fixes rather than developing new features. Like it or not, while the design team is probably separate from the bug fix team, it's going to be the same back end coders who actually write the guts of the game as the ones who have spent the last two months stomping bugs non stop. They literally lost that first month of time after the game came out just putting out fires. I think they had wanted to release the new content by now, but losing a month of development time means you are a month behind and there's not much you can do about it.

FFXI releases its content reliably every two months these days.
#8 Nov 11 2013 at 2:55 PM Rating: Excellent
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Might be a bit of a stretch delaying this patch till the end of December. The endgame community is growing very impatient from what I'm observing (FC members dropping off face of Eorzea because nothing to do) and it is barely the middle of November. I've kept myself occupied with multiple classes...but I can't actually do anything on those classes due to mythology cap.

I suppose people will take a one month break and come back when CT hits. Sure doesn't help, though, if you're trying to kill a dragon and people keep leaving.
#9 Nov 11 2013 at 4:17 PM Rating: Excellent
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but I can't actually do anything on those classes due to mythology cap.


I'm guessing they installed that just to keep people from getting EVERYTHING before the first patch hits. Wouldn't surprise me if they eased up on that after the first big update is implemented.
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#10 Nov 11 2013 at 4:37 PM Rating: Excellent
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HitomeOfBismarck wrote:
Might be a bit of a stretch delaying this patch till the end of December. The endgame community is growing very impatient from what I'm observing (FC members dropping off face of Eorzea because nothing to do) and it is barely the middle of November. I've kept myself occupied with multiple classes...but I can't actually do anything on those classes due to mythology cap.

I suppose people will take a one month break and come back when CT hits. Sure doesn't help, though, if you're trying to kill a dragon and people keep leaving.


This is the biggest issue right now. Coil being only 5 turns (4 bosses) I could deal with easily if the game were designed around actually allowing you to gear up in Coil in order to prepare for future events. The cap destroys the entire purpose of having all classes on one job when you can only realistically gear up one job at the moment. If the cap were job based there wouldn't even be that much of an issue with having a cap in the first place.

Or I'd even gladly take the ability to do Coil more than once a week even if you could only get gear once if only so that I could run with a different group of people *OR* actually do something else than tank if someone needed me to.

It's a really poor stalling technique that works in something like WoW or Rift due to having alts, but not in FFXIV.

Thayos wrote:
Quote:
but I can't actually do anything on those classes due to mythology cap.


I'm guessing they installed that just to keep people from getting EVERYTHING before the first patch hits. Wouldn't surprise me if they eased up on that after the first big update is implemented.


Except that it's poorly thought out. You're *never* going to stop the top 1%. They get around it now by creating multiple characters and getting *those* geared so they can actually swap if something's needed on the fly. As of right now that's not as easily done with someone having only the one character unless you get extremely 'lucky' with coil drops that no one else in the group could use.

Much like the mailbox excuse it's punishing the majority because of the minority. I'm not going to gear up all jobs anytime soon (I only have 2 at 50 anyway), but the option to actually gear up another job with the highest current level gear would have been nice to have.

Edited, Nov 11th 2013 5:40pm by Viertel

Edited, Nov 11th 2013 5:41pm by Viertel
#11 Nov 11 2013 at 5:17 PM Rating: Decent
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I actually dont mind the way the end gear is limited. Youre forced to specialize one job at a time, and i dont see that as a bad thing. It helps everyone from being everyone else. Besides, getting a relic and full DL is enough to clear everything in the game except the higher tiers of coil which needs a bit more gear. If you look at FF11 it was the same thing. There was no cap on how often you could do content outside dynamis and einherjar, but there was a cap in the form of how long it took to get that gear. I had 4 decked out jobs out of 20 in 6-7 years of playing. Thats not even a quarter of all the classes. Thats also considering some of my jobs shared gear such as nin and sam, and partly bard.

I honestly think the issue right now is that DL is too easy to get, with the only gear actually taking work to get is allagan.
#12 Nov 11 2013 at 5:43 PM Rating: Decent
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i also sit in the "happy with gated myths" side of the room.

1. I like having to choose which job(s) to focus on (am reminded of the one thing i didn't like about FFXII; the license board, which basically made all characters able to do all things. I totally understand how that's perfect for some people, but it didn't work for me)

2. If myths had a much higher cap, I'd end up running out of time to obtain as many as I'd want to from week to week. As it is now, it fits quite well into my schedule.
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#13 Nov 11 2013 at 5:45 PM Rating: Excellent
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The cap destroys the entire purpose of having all classes on one job when you can only realistically gear up one job at the moment.


It's also worth remembering that many players don't really care about endgame, and for these players, there is a ton of value (and fun/accomplishment) in just leveling the different jobs to 50. Not everyone is hardcore... and the number of people who genuinely feel like they're out of things to do makes up a small percentage of the playerbase.

EDIT: I also don't think it's too easy to get DL gear. It takes a lot of grinding to get one full set... it's enough of a grind to deter me from farming for more jobs, at least for the time being... and while I'm not the most hardcore gamer, I'm not a casual gamer, either.

Edited, Nov 11th 2013 3:50pm by Thayos
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#14 Nov 11 2013 at 6:31 PM Rating: Decent
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Thayos wrote:
Quote:
The cap destroys the entire purpose of having all classes on one job when you can only realistically gear up one job at the moment.


It's also worth remembering that many players don't really care about endgame, and for these players, there is a ton of value (and fun/accomplishment) in just leveling the different jobs to 50. Not everyone is hardcore... and the number of people who genuinely feel like they're out of things to do makes up a small percentage of the playerbase.

EDIT: I also don't think it's too easy to get DL gear. It takes a lot of grinding to get one full set... it's enough of a grind to deter me from farming for more jobs, at least for the time being... and while I'm not the most hardcore gamer, I'm not a casual gamer, either.

Edited, Nov 11th 2013 3:50pm by Thayos


Theres a difference though between being easy and being time consuming. DL can be obtained simply by throwing time at dungeons. For some people that might not be a lot of time, but nonetheless easy.

Allagan can also be time consuming because of the nature of random drops, but is difficult to obtain because of the method required to get it.
#15 Nov 11 2013 at 6:57 PM Rating: Good
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Llester wrote:
i also sit in the "happy with gated myths" side of the room.

1. I like having to choose which job(s) to focus on (am reminded of the one thing i didn't like about FFXII; the license board, which basically made all characters able to do all things. I totally understand how that's perfect for some people, but it didn't work for me)
The difference in FFXIV being that you can't access all of those abilities at the same time, especially in instances (where it matters).

Llester wrote:
2. If myths had a much higher cap, I'd end up running out of time to obtain as many as I'd want to from week to week. As it is now, it fits quite well into my schedule.
That is a silly reason to have the current mythology cap, you have to admit that.

You aren't in any way obligated to cap out every week.

Edited, Nov 11th 2013 5:57pm by Kirby
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#16 Nov 11 2013 at 7:01 PM Rating: Excellent
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Viertel wrote:
If the cap were job based there wouldn't even be that much of an issue with having a cap in the first place.

Or I'd even gladly take the ability to do Coil more than once a week even if you could only get gear once if only so that I could run with a different group of people *OR* actually do something else than tank if someone needed me to.


This is what I was thinking too.

I'm actually concerned they didn't think this out when they were planning it and wonder if CT will follow the same trend. Why not have job-based myth caps? Like you said, you aren't going to stop those hell bent on gearing multiple jobs. Many people I know are now gearing a second character just to bypass the myth bull.

I mean that's great if you want to make another character just for endgame but uh..I personally do not want to. Thought the purpose of the job/class system was to prevent making a bunch of alts like you would in WoW and such, you know?
#17 Nov 11 2013 at 7:47 PM Rating: Good
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I can deal with a few months between content. What I'm quickly growing tired of is all the maintenance. Pick one damn day of the week already.
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#18 Nov 11 2013 at 8:35 PM Rating: Excellent
If I remember right, they're rebooting the servers during the twice weekly scheduled maintenance.

Edited, Nov 11th 2013 9:38pm by Catwho
#19 Nov 11 2013 at 9:11 PM Rating: Decent
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Depends on the player really. The schedule can work the way it is, but they need enough content to fill 3 months until the next one rolls out.
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Its personal preference and all, but yes we need to educate WoW players that this is OUR game, these are Characters and not Toons. Time to beat that into them one at a time.
#20 Nov 11 2013 at 10:35 PM Rating: Good
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Personally, I'm not a fan of the 3+ month patch cycle. Little tweaks that can be implemented weekly aside, it's also not as if all content is intrinsically linked. Theoretically, the functionality of Extreme Mode Primals should have no effect on Crystal Tower, PvP, Housing, and whatever combination of those and other unnamed features. In my mind, if they are ready, you add them. Part of Yoshi's onus on the whole, "We're not doing the F2P route!" was the promise of an ambitious and robust update schedule. Right now, I don't see SE doing anything fundamentally different than, say, Rift, which does weekly patches with various adjustments and fixes as they're ready. They still have their "big patches" like going from 2.4 to 2.5, yes, but it's a bit difficult to claim things are so dry.

Though with both games, I express concern for the players who are endgame but done particularly care for the raid scene. When I see 2.1 and "Even More Dungeons(tm)!" as the main selling point, with housing being the definition of fluff (especially if not individual housing), and PvP being an incredibly niche demographic, I have to ask myself what's in the patch for players with none of these interests? While I won't sit here and absurdly claim everyone has multiple (or all) 50s with top end gear and +1 relics, the leveling and questing game is a bit thin, as well as FATEs honestly having zero endgame relevancy. Though like with other mentioned activities, these should be modular. More FATEs shouldn't need a giant patch. More quests shouldn't need a giant patch. More GC ranks shouldn't need a giant patch. New craft recipes shouldn't need a giant patch.

Some annoying redundancy there, perhaps, but consider waiting 3-4 months only to get... nothing new. That is a problem MMOs need to be mindful of, especially if you're going the monthly fee route. It means someone might unsub. It means they might not come back. It can then mean a chain reaction due to social ties and word of mouth. The money's there. You don't claim 1.5m subs for it not to be. Money makes content happen, and if they don't want to spend it on XIV, well, we're back to XI all over again with what's making you the big bucks not being the priority of said bucks.
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#21 Nov 11 2013 at 11:01 PM Rating: Excellent
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It's simply mirroring the JP release of FFXI. I'd normally apologize for comparing the two games (because I know how much people just love that on this forum)...but they're run by the same company. Wouldn't be too farfetched to say they had similar business models.

Think back. Maybe you didn't play during JP release. Maybe you played at NA PC release. What was there to do if you were level capped at 50 at the time prior to NA PC release (Zilart came out a little earlier in Japan I think?)? Exactly the same thing we're having issues with now.

Problem is, leveling took much longer in 11, the world was more vast, and everything required a party to do. This slowed down the hardcore community much more than the gate that has been placed upon us in 14.

Times have changed, MMOs have evolved, etc, etc, etc.

I agree 100% with everything you said, Seriha. How are they enticing players not interested in the endgame scene? How are they even enticing players who are in the endgame scene with rumored gear from CT being weaker than coil gear?

I point to the profits as do you and wonder where they are going to. 14 isn't the only game they are developing but it did just rake in a nice amount of revenue. Now there are two paths:

1) Use that money to add new content in a timely manner to keep people paying the subscription fee

or

2) Use the money to fund other projects and leave 14 in 11's predicament
#22 Nov 12 2013 at 5:12 AM Rating: Default
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HitomeOfBismarck wrote:
Think back. Maybe you didn't play during JP release. Maybe you played at NA PC release. What was there to do if you were level capped at 50 at the time prior to NA PC release (Zilart came out a little earlier in Japan I think?)? Exactly the same thing we're having issues with now.


XIV has several clear and distinct advantages. The majority of XIV's mechanics come from other games. It should be easier to crank out content when you already have the formula. At least XI can say that while not everything was well received, they were forging into unexplored territory.

It's also worth noting that XIV was released over 3 years ago. 3 years after the launch of FFXI(even if you go with the early start JP version), they had already released RotZ and CoP. Granted the full storyline hadn't been implemented yet, but they added how many jobs there? How many zones? BCNM/KSNM? HNM? Despite being over a decade old, FFXI was miles ahead of XIV at this point in it's lifespan.

HitomeOfBismarck wrote:
Now there are two paths:

1) Use that money to add new content in a timely manner to keep people paying the subscription fee

or

2) Use the money to fund other projects and leave 14 in 11's predicament


1) This is the biggest argument I have against subscription based MMOs. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this way(probably due to the nature of my own job), but I'd feel much more motivated to put out engaging content that keeps players interested if I was allowing people to play for free. It's almost like a donation based system where players reward the developer by paying for a service they already receive. SE says pay up and gives you a 'promise' to create more content than their competitors. This is where all the misdirected anger about players being entitled comes from. In reality, they are entitled.

2) All I can think of here is the revenue that XI was bringing in. Undoubtedly, XIV has a lot of players that transferred over from XI. There are probably also a few who still play both. The initial popularity spike kinda splintered the community. No denying that XI wasn't the subscription powerhouse it used to be circa ToAU, but XIV pretty much killed it off. A buddy on Asura reports /sea all of only a few hundred players during prime time as opposed to the 3k+ you'd find on just a few years ago.

My nostalgia goggles broke long, long ago. Given the option though... if I had to pick a game to kill off it would have been XIV. If all the time and effort making XIV had instead been focused on 'updating' FFXI, they probably could have brought back about the same number of players as we'll see eventually settle into playing XIV.

Edited, Nov 12th 2013 6:14am by FilthMcNasty
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Its personal preference and all, but yes we need to educate WoW players that this is OUR game, these are Characters and not Toons. Time to beat that into them one at a time.
#23 Nov 12 2013 at 8:17 AM Rating: Good
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It should be easier to crank out content when you already have the formula.


It's only easier if the other games also give you their source code.

Edited, Nov 12th 2013 9:18am by Catwho
#24 Nov 12 2013 at 8:43 AM Rating: Excellent
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On an anecdotal note, I've seen this wearing of patience myself. People just disappear and don't log in anymore. Or you see them for 1-2 hours a week for Coil and then they vanish. That's bad for community when the heard of regulars grows thin. Those who still log in have fewer, if any, "friends" to talk to, and eventually they also get bored and log in less. It not only affects hard core end game players it also affects the medium/soft core players that are in those FCs because it acts as a domino effect, first the raiders stop logging in, then the rest slowly drift out to join them in other games or just simply not playing.

Nothing happens over night and this won't kill the game, but slow major patches don't seem necessary anymore except where it concerns a very large addition to the core of the game, like housing. Other things, as mentioned above, like extreme primals, can be dropped in as you go to keep people patient.

This is the key takeaway for me anyhow seeing the shifting culture of MMORPG communities. People don't seem to be as patient as they once were and not playing to that, by stringing people along with minor content between major content is a mistake.

Edited, Nov 12th 2013 9:46am by Furiousnixon
#25 Nov 12 2013 at 8:48 AM Rating: Good
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FilthMcNasty wrote:
It's also worth noting that XIV was released over 3 years ago. 3 years after the launch of FFXI(even if you go with the early start JP version), they had already released RotZ and CoP. Granted the full storyline hadn't been implemented yet, but they added how many jobs there? How many zones? BCNM/KSNM? HNM? Despite being over a decade old, FFXI was miles ahead of XIV at this point in it's lifespan.


I disagree, IMHO ARR is a new game altogether... and is not a 3 year old game.

As such, 2 months without a significant update is not the end of the world. Anyone who is bored at this point has nobody to blame but themselves for rushing to end-game and not taking part in all of the activities along the way.
#26 Nov 12 2013 at 8:51 AM Rating: Good
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FilthMcNasty wrote:
It's also worth noting that XIV was released over 3 years ago. 3 years after the launch of FFXI(even if you go with the early start JP version), they had already released RotZ and CoP. Granted the full storyline hadn't been implemented yet, but they added how many jobs there? How many zones? BCNM/KSNM? HNM? Despite being over a decade old, FFXI was miles ahead of XIV at this point in it's lifespan.


I disagree, IMHO ARR is a new game altogether... and is not a 3 year old game.

As such, 2 months without a significant update is not the end of the world. Anyone who is bored at this point has nobody to blame but themselves for rushing to end-game and not taking part in all of the activities along the way.


I think this is a point that's getting overlooked. Us part timers still aren't even finished with the main storyline yet.

Granted, I frittered away a lot of the last few weeks fishing, but it's nice to have a steady source of income as I approach level 40.
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