Run that shit in DF more than once per week? That's more pay to lose than anything.
Run that shit in DF more than once per week? That's more pay to lose than anything.
I would love a level boost that at least required you to have a character on your account at level 60. I leveled one alt to 60 and it was legitimately painful having to do the 2.1-2.55 story quests all at once. I would level another alt to 60 if it weren't for that slog.
I can see a few major factors that will determine the development of the feature:
1. They will need to make it possible to skip some main scenario quests and leveling at some point, because the more new content they add and the higher the maximum character level becomes, the more quests and leveling needs to be done to reach the endgame (which can get to a ridiculous amount eventually).
2. Running the game is a business, and they’ve used all imaginable ways to monetize the game so far, so I’m sure that they won’t miss this opportunity to monetize it either.
3. SE is content with the situation, when players need to go through the game content that was released in their previous commercial product (which is ARR in case of Heavensward) in order to reach the current endgame, because it takes time for players to do it and SE receives money for the playtime (subscription). I make this conclusion because SE haven’t introduced a level boost so far. Their main concern currently is about players having to go through too much content in order to reach the endgame after the next expansion is released, which is understandable because reaching the endgame is a very important goal for any player. At the same time leveling up other battle classes (jobs) and alternate characters is rather an optional goal, and you already know where this “optional” term leads us to: directly to the “optional” items/services in the “Mogshop”. So I certainly don’t expect any indulgence to leveling up secondary jobs and alts.
4. Some other factors (not directly related to leveling up) need to be taken into account. One that comes into my mind is availability of other players doing instanced dungeons/trials to form parties via Duty Finder. It is going to be greatly affected by players skipping leveling up their mains/secondary jobs/alts (by using the level boost).
Taking all the factors into consideration, these are my speculations:
– I think that they will introduce a jumping potion that can be used to skip all leveling and story in ARR. Players will still need to level up 50-60... and go through Heavensward story to reach the new endgame. In order to compensate for the shortage of players in ARR DF/PF instances, they will allow to run ARR instances alongside NPC players (GC platoons). I don’t expect them to allow platoons in Heavensward and the next game expansion content, so that the pool of players doing instances via DF/PF with other human players doesn’t decrease. I expect them to stop sending players back to ARR instances to progress through any new content: ARR instances will be excluded from Leveling and Mentor roulettes, won’t be required for new relic or anything else, i.e. they will become completely optional.
– Jumping potions will boost only a single character (giving them to all characters on an account would be too generous), and one potion will level up only a single battle class (job) on that character (players will be able to buy and use more potions to skip leveling other jobs). Jumping potions will certainly be available as a standalone product, but might also be included in some packages (for example one could be in the Collector’s edition of the new expansion).
I think I'd be okay if the potion is just the "Instantly get this job to cap" kind of thing. At that point you would blow through the main story quests anyway, and you'd still be required to do the mandatory gates to at least see what it looks like: It wasn't that different playing as a 50 on a Legacy server.
Leveling alts isn't that bad if you're taking advantage of guildhests/hunt logs/roulettes. The only sticking points are 47-50 because the story dries out and of course, fucking Churning Mists. Leveling secondary jobs is done almost entirely in FATE parties so people won't be learning how to play them anyway.
The most cashgrab way I can envision this:
Make 3 potions:
1: ARR potion. Boost to 50, Praetorium cleared.
2: 2.0 potion. Boost to 50, Steps of Faith cleared.
3: HW potion. Boost to 60, final HW whatever cleared.
The laziest way would just be 2 or 3. Though, are they planning on making HW required clear for the 4.0 expansion?
Official word is "Nothing set in stone currently but you'll be able to access some things without needing Heavensward 3.x Completed."
For the next expansion?
I just remembered that they were talking about this in the Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XXIV. Although they have said somewhat different things in the Update Thread:
and later on in the Digest:Originally Posted by Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XXIV Update Thread
The latter should reflect their position on this matter more precisely, because the text in the Digest has certainly been reviewed, and it has been published later.Originally Posted by Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XXIV Digest
I would note that while they say that “When it comes to the next expansion, there will be new players coming into the game, and I feel that the barrier for completing all of the main scenario quests up until that point is a bit too high.”, it doesn’t necessarily sound like they will make a shortcut (jumping potion) that will lead up the 4.0 content (after all they say that it was a good thing that players had to go through the previous story so far, and while completing all of the main scenario quests up until 4.0 feels like too big of a barrier to them, completing some of the previous main scenario quest may still be considered good enough by them.). So I think that releasing jumping potions only for 2.0 (ARR) content is still a possibility (for the reasons I’ve described in my previous post).
There is one more matter, related to players having to do the old content before starting 4.0 content, that bothers me. This time they will very likely not only introduce new actions (weaponskills, spells, abilities), but will also need to replace some of the existing actions (which will also alter rotations), because otherwise the number of actions that players have to use would become overwhelming (I’ve heard this opinion many times and myself believe that it is true). Making new players relearn their battle class (job) actions and rotations (in 4.0) as soon as they’ve learned the old ones (in 2.0 – 3.0) seems rather harsh to me. This problem could be solved if they allowed to use new actions and rotation in 2.0 – 3.0 level synced instances, while adjusting new actions’ power accordingly, but this seems like a pretty difficult task to me, so I doubt that they will do it. Letting all new players to start right from 4.0 could be another option (which I personally don’t like that much), but taking into account their answer in the Digest (“However, this will only grant access, so while a level 1 character will be able to go to these places, there won’t be anything for them to do.”), I believe that it’s not going to be the case.
After reading the last Game Watch interview with Yoshi-P, I think I can guess the possible solution for the problem: that’s right, it’s going to be the Deep Dungeon (the one that will be introduced in the next expansion). Since it is going to be the next expansion content, it will be natural that players will use new actions and rotations there. At the same time it will be accessible to new players right from the start, so they will be able to practice new actions and rotations alongside veteran players. And in the current Deep Dungeon (The Palace of the Dead) they will be able to practice 2.0 – 3.0 actions and rotations.
If my assumption that with the release of the next expansion SE will stop sending players back to ARR instances to progress through any new content (ARR instances will be excluded from Leveling, Trials and Mentor roulettes, won’t be required for new relic or anything else; players will be able to use jumping potions to skip ARR content and will be able to enter ARR party instanced battles alongside NPC platoons), that I’ve made in the post above, is correct, then I see the main purpose of Deep Dungeons as new party leveling content (especially important for levels below 50). While players will be able to skip leveling 1 – 50 and use platoons in dungeons/trials/raids, none of these ways of leveling involves interaction with other human players, which is not completely right for this type of game (social).
I can see the following benefits of using Deep Dungeons as new leveling content:
1. It is much easier on the matchmaker, because players don’t need to use specific roles to form a party. While currently the matchmaker is capable of forming parties for ARR content, you can’t stretch the existing player pool across increasing amount of content infinitely.
2. It has a sense of novelty for both veteran and new players. It should become increasingly difficult to attract veteran players to old content for the sake of leveling (because many of them have already leveled classes that they are interested in), and while adding new rewards is another possibility, I don’t think that being sent back to Sastasha and other notorious instances to achieve something new would be received by veteran players with enthusiasm.
3. As I’ve just mentioned, new players will be able to practice new (4.0) actions and rotation in 4.0 Deep Dungeon as soon as they start playing the game.
4. Playing a battle class (job) is generally more interesting when you have all its actions at your disposal (rather than just 3 buttons to press). Deep Dungeon allows to spend more time playing at the level cap of a job, while maintaining a “reasonable” speed of leveling up the job in the outer world.
In regard to production, Deep Dungeons with dungeon maps being randomly generated allow to reuse existing assets a lot. So far SE has been making only one more version (so called “Hard”) of an existing dungeon. However, each 10 floors of a Deep Dungeon contain a separate dungeon worth of gameplay (at least in playtime). So the first 50 floors could be considered a replacement for 5 leveling dungeons, and total 200 floors could be worth 20 dungeons of playtime (SE needs to keep players busy, right?).
While floors above 100 are being presented as a more difficult content, I think that this is also a matter of reusing assets (of what is a leveling dungeon at its core). SE has been doing such things a lot. For example they’ve released different levels of difficulty of the same primals (Normal, Hard and Extreme). Another example is hardcore mainstream raids (Coil, Alexander Savage), that are first presented as hardcore content, after the addition of echo become available as midcore content and after allowing doing them unsynced also become accessible as easy content. Deep Dungeons are just another example of targeting essentially the same content (but with some variations) for different categories of players.
With just two save slots, the possibility of using premade parties in Deep Dungeons looks limited. While this time they didn’t go as far as completely prohibiting premade parties (as they used to do in Leveling roulette and are doing in Mentor roulette), I think that the main reason why they still limit it is to ensure that there are enough players in the Deep Dungeon Duty Finder to form parties for players that do leveling.
To keep the leveling going, I expect SE to send players to Deep Dungeons eventually a lot: for the Relic, Mentors if necessary, probably a Deep Dungeon roulette someday, although this time they are also using some new ways to motivate players (such as rankings for speed running).
Your implication that we could see less dungeons and actual-content in favor of pre-fab DD content is both possible and depressing.
That's still a big change for some classes though. MCH, for example, plays differently every 10 levels. BRD changes a ton after 52. BLM gets completely upended once you get your 60 skill. If there are more sweeping changes down the line, it can be extremely disorienting for players to go from the original design to the Heavesnward adjustments and then, a short time later, into the 4.0 changes. It's a lot of whiplash.
As for ARR content, I don't see it going away. The whole reason the other content required older dungeons and primals and everything was to incentivize people to keep those queues moving. When there was no Duty Finder at launch, there was a huge tide of players who would sit in queue for, say, Qarn or Cutter's Cry for entire nights without a pop. Cutting those out in the future would mean new players can't play the game unless they also shell out for a skipping potion. I don't know if they'd do that. Maybe, but they'd get a ton of heat for it.
I'd be unsurprised if the new cap is only 64 or 65. The real progression is ilvl anyway, so the level cap doesn't mean a thing. They could cut down on new abilities by not adding that many levels in the first place.
I didn’t want to make an impression that I expect SE to release less number of unique individually designed leveling dungeons in the next game expansion, because I actually expect it to be about the same as in Heavensward. I see Deep Dungeons mainly as a way to bring a new life to leveling up to pre-Heavensward and pre-4.0 levels. SE could even limit the level cap that players can bring outside of the 4.0 Deep Dungeon at the release of the next expansion. In my opinion, players will level up post 60 mainly by using the new unique leveling dungeons, that will be tied to the main scenario and other important quests, and of course by using other usual means, such as quests, FATEs etc.
I certainly don’t expect SE to remove ARR content from DF completely, it could become just a separate thing with no rewards that are useful in the new endgame. And to compensate for the lack of human players doing ARR content, players would be able to run it with NPC platoons.
I think that character level increase is the base thing that limits the speed and gives a sense of progression during leveling. And the number of new actions is not strictly tied to character level increase: there could be 3 new actions per level or one per 3 levels, or new actions could be acquired separately via quests etc. I would personally be just fine without any significant changes to the actions of existing jobs, but this is just me. =)
Still waiting for the skill crunch. A lot of skills could be compressed into a single ability and save on icons.
I'm expecting 4.0 to overhaul the skill loadouts on each class and to simplify rotations and number of actions, so the dps gap between braindead idiot and competent player isn't the huge gulf it's become in 3.0.
5. It forces everybody to start from a low level. This allows all new players (even those that have used a jumping potion) to not be initially overwhelmed with the amount of available actions, but rather start from the basics and learn to use them gradually (but still at a faster pace than in the outer world). LOL
4.0 would seemingly have to do a massive redesign on the back-end given how skills are acquired now: Every class has the same number of buttons at the same exact levels. I suspect that's mostly design infrastructure as opposed to any intentional design; This is the same group of devs who claim they can't reskin egis because of how the system works.
I'm all in on a redesign, though.
This is exactly what we were talking about when it comes to things changing so suddenly. Bard at 40 isn't bard at 52, and the whole feel of the class changes at that break point (for MCH, too). It can be jarring to have to relearn a class on the fly like that, moreso if you're hitting those changes sooner.
There are already too many level 60s who have no clue how to play their class. Let alone fresh new people.
I don't know - I know people sometimes put off joining an MMO because of the sheer amount of content they'll have to get through to hit cap. I can understand their frustration but .. it's an MMO... what do people expect?
I recently made an alt as I started my char on 2.0 launch day and have experienced nearly every patch day one. It was really interesting how much content is available from the get go, how quick it is to level and how overwhelming it could be for a new player who has no idea really what is going on.
Its pretty funny to see people complaining about there being too much content.
I think part of the issue is that so much of the old content gets lost in the shuffle: 50 roulette is largely composed of things you don't ever have to touch AND you might not even know exist. Better, since the job quests now give you i90 gear, most of the stuff you'd find in those dungeons is only good for completion or glamour (excepting, of course, that a good number of them are recycled as dyeable crafted recipes).
Because the MSQ takes so much more time after hitting level 50, and immediately deposits you into Ishgard for HW after 2.55, there's no "break" in the game to go explore the rest of the level 50 stuff. Players during the launch periods had a lot more of a streamlined way to get in on the offerings, since Expert was locked behind all of the new stuff. Keeping up with the content patches meant you had experienced everything outside of Coil. Now you just get dropped into the world. Not helping is that all of the optional content is now entirely optional, and with no real rewards hiding inside of them...