@niiroYour comment applies to just about everything in game. If the content doesn't amuse someone in some way, Why would they even do it? What exactly do you expect yoshi to put out?
@niiroYour comment applies to just about everything in game. If the content doesn't amuse someone in some way, Why would they even do it? What exactly do you expect yoshi to put out?
It's the roundabout "log in, clear savage, log out for a week" argument. The only real content is the raid content, everything else doesn't give you the best gear so it's a waste of time.
Y'all need Aquapolis with friends on discord in your lives. I really can't stress enough how much I hope PotD gives us that same kind of feeling.
If I still expected anything from Yoshi I probably wouldn't have quit, I'm just the peanut gallery these days.
I never considered a list of aggressively repetitive, challenge-devoid, daily digital chores to be amusing, especially when they they're not even particularly rewarding (cap tomes, raid if it's raid day, log out until Tuesday has been the core progression since launch, and other than raid day requires like 30 mins a day).
You're partially right, but the crux of it is, again, the content needs to be challenging or rewarding to actually be engaging, from what I understand Aquapolis offers neither.
I'm sure it's a fun distraction every now and then and worth a few laughs, but it just sounds like extended treasure maps.
(when someone brings up Discord/the social aspect my eyes just kind of glaze over, I could take out a PSP/DS and entertain myself while playing that way too for all it has to do with the actual game)
That sounds genuinely depressing. It's okay to like... play games and have fun with people without it needing to be a colossal mountain to climb.
But I confess to being fairly casual about this stuff. I don't have the time or the chops to take Savage seriously but I miss raiding, so I'm content to slowly get my fill of Number Go Up doing other things.
Settle Down, Lyall. Its one person's opinion. If everyone thought like he did there'd be all of 15k subs in the game across all servers.
Fun has always been subjective. It's fairly irking, for me, when people say easily amused because it just means that they have an objectively superior level of fun over another. Just because you don't find it amusing doesn't mean it isn't amusing to someone else. It's a different strokes for different folks kinda deal.
The game has already gutted social interaction outside hardcore, savage/EX content. That much Yoshida has admit when logs are silent on the first couple of Weeping City. People are conditioned to play solo, fuck whoever else is in party. The radio silence is completely on the devs and Diadem being a steaming pile also didn't help.
Aquapolis is a step in the right direction but perhaps PotD can be a solid foundation for more social activities. Which should improve overall communication across all content.
Or maybe we'll get more PvP. Anyone have a solid opinion on XIV's PvP? I've all but ignored it outside diving in once or twice. Am I missing something really good?
Here's the thing with anyone who takes issue to this comment: it makes a lot more sense once you have actually stopped playing.
Back when I was subbed I probably would have thought this was a bullshit statement, but in a sense when all 8 of us in a group are bitching about the same lack of content while we mash face against keyboard until we maybe win progression I think it's fair to say that the game is not 100% of the enjoyment anymore. In retrospect I hated progression because we would always get hung up by something so I couldn't go back to doing autopilot stuff like crafting while playing other games. Try to figure that out. I wanted to be done with the game for the week so I could play the game while not playing the game.
I mean that's far from EVERYONE's experience/reasoning but I can definitely understand and relate to why "unrewarding" content is laughed at if the only tangible enjoyment is from social.
Without going on too much of a tirade, I always wonder about what could have been if they had ever put in some kind of infrastructure for cross-server friends or leaderboards or something. Something that lets players compete with other players and not feel butthurt about "missing out".
e: When I say I hated progression, I should say I hated not making progress. Not actually learning anything and just waiting until we clicked.
I enjoy it, but the long wait times because of a lack of a mercenary system (think filling empty GC party slots with anyone who is queued instead of waiting for that particular GC to queue) are a sticking point.
Edit: To the point about progression, I feel like if the game had launched with the raid practice option, raiding as a whole would have been improved. Being able to skip exactly to the phase that troubles your group is a Godsend, and I can only imagine how much more enjoyable my raid group's nights would have been were we able to simply practice a single phase (usually final) again and again until we nailed it.
To us, grinding one's dick against content was only a real grind when you had to spend half of your food buff just progressing a fight to the point where you can truly learn from it. I feel like that system needs to be standard in MMORPGs that have a raiding focus from day 1 at this point.
As far as leaderboards, a lot of raid teams have been using FFLogs as something to e-peen once the progression race is over so that in a sense extends the life of the content. It's not official obviously and for the most part is a good chunk of the playerbase is ignorant to it.
While agree with you to an extent, even the social aspect of XIV was always pretty weak for reasons that have been expounded upon many times (ie. there's almost nothing to encourage it).
The social aspect was actually the only reason I kept playing for a long time, I enjoyed raiding with my static, but most of us hardly logged in much at all otherwise and there was nothing else engaging enough to really bother grouping for.
Outside of that, I had a list full of linkshells that had long since gone silent because the game is such a revolving door and, again, there was almost no gameplay-motivation for seeking out other players that wasn't negated by the convenience and ease of overall content in the DF.
I don't think that's ever going to not be the case again unless some time machine becomes available and everyone goes back to when they were in middle/high/college and had nothing but free time to devote to a single game. People play many games at once, and when content is gobbled up, they go elsewhere. If you take it back to XI days where you can't even tie your own shoes in the field without a full party and a 6-hour block of time set aside, you're going to have a passionate, but minuscule community in this era, and then you'll have either an extremely dated looking game or an extremely thin one as the lack of revenue leads to cut corners and slashed ideas.
Would I like more ways for people to work together? Hell yeah. My LSes are much like yours, and my FC is all but gutted; hell, I was gone for 8 months myself, but that's still the nature of gaming today; there's more choice than ever for social content in other games, everyone works more and has less free time, and its very hard to mix a rewarding social platform with one that still allows for personal achievement.
I want people around, but I don't want to be bound to them to accomplish anything of worth. Going back to that nostalgic XI-style (in its heyday, not modern day with gutted servers) would mean I couldn't even accept a levequest without a full party and 45 minutes to devote to the task, for even less XP/gil. I don't want that no matter how fun the discord convo would be during the fighting.
Can you name a single MMO that actually has this system? Allowing midfight checkpoints would shorten the shelf life of the encounter significantly, so really can't imagine why any developer would ever do this.
Nobody is asking for this, maybe drop the hyperbole sometime. There's a world of a difference between wanting every menial task to require grouping up, and wanting more group content than 4 fights every 6-7 months.
Just having any incentive at all to do premades for content would be nice.
Well we wouldn't want that now, would we?
Spoiler: show
Its a bit reaching to say the Relic is "new" content - its just grinding old content, but fair enough.
Weeping City - once a week, maybe a few more times if you're after a specific loot piece.
Nid Ex - Once its cleared/farmed, its kinda dead content.
Aquapolis seems fun, need to do more of it. I'm looking forward to deep dungeon, but I really think it should have come with the patch coming down.
I think the realization that the thinktank isn't capable of thinking outside of it's tank is worrisome for the future of the game. If 4.0 ends up being the same recycled nonsensical progression system for both PvE and PvP, and it likely will be, I think we'll start to see a much steeper decline of people who give a fuck about the game outside of logging in for 2 hours a day to casually shit about and this game is going to slowly just die off or become the next doll simulator where it's literally dress up before anything else, which is largely what it already is.
It's been 2 years now? And their PvP progression and reward system, mostly the latter, is one of the most nonsensical I've come across. Not only is there an existing stat that does absolutely nothing, but there's no reward beyond getting that gear which is no different or better than any other piece of gear you could use from PvE. The biggest point of Wolf Marks is to Desynth the shit for skillups and money, or building a full 180 Crit/Det set for your relevant class, which arguably would be a lot more fun if their Materia actually did anything and this "you're not allowed to be any better than the standard shitter that puts no effort into this" went away. They fucking removed food buffs for gods sake because of people eating and being a few stats over someone else. It doesn't even apply the other way around because the gear is a max of 205 in a 230+ tuned environment. It makes no goddamn sense to me. It's driven by unmotivated shitters whom can't be bothered to excel at anything. It promotes an environment where people can just give zero effort or thought and then we wonder why people are so horrendous at this game. It's fostered from the moment they start playing. A ball of laziness, with xenophobic instanced-based nonsense and zero community reliance at the core that leaves a trail of shit as it rolls along.
Things they've done right in the communities eyes seem to largely come from when they do something outside the box and I do sincerely hope they continue to do it. PotD, Aquapolis, Diadem (without the fucking nerf stick, Jesus Christ what was wrong with letting people do shit together for gear.) It's all things this game needs more of. Less of a focus on this dreadful tome system and more on letting this game be fun. Less of a fear of people hitting item level cap would be a good start. It isn't the end of the world. Less limitations on their bullshit. Why can't I do Mentor Roulette with a friend? Fuck you and your "do 2000 mentor roulettes B Y Y O U R S E L F for this two seater mount. FEED THE COLLECTOR IN YOU." The ironing has thoroughly unwrinkled my clothes.
tl;dr More fun. Less bullshit restriction. They're so focused on being a time gated theme park that they've forgotten the game should be a blast to play and do shit in. Maybe I'm just getting old. I don't know. Fuck. There's enough broken content that could be re-worked to be made fun and engaging that's just been left and only revisited because "lol u gotta do this 4 da relic quest." FATEs, to name one. Which have been said to be shite from the moment the game launched.
That, and Ishgardian marks can be used for books, which get turned in for lore upgrades. It's not enthralling content, but it's something to help make the Number Go Up.
Thinking about it, I'm in a weird place socially for the game. My group of RL friends and raid-buddies have mostly split up due to real life stuff, and while we're usually online together bullshitting or chatting, our game time doesn't overlap much and we maybe sometimes get one or two of us to do a dungeon or a trial or something. Not much in the way of actual stuff, which is why Aquapolis felt like such a breath of life for us. Only a couple of hours on the weekend when all of our schedules line up, and it's accessible enough that our 190~ BLM friend can participate without feeling like he's holding us back, stuff like that.
We could just as easily be doing this in other games, which I think is also implied in the "hanging out on discord doesn't actually count" part. I don't really have a response to that besides "but we like playing XIV" which is pretty flimsy.
...but we do like playing XIV.