Remember when Steps of Faith used to be "hard"?
Remember when Steps of Faith used to be "hard"?
Oh oh member when SCOB didn't give a fuck about your feelings?
I member!
How MMOs are supposed to work:
Community of veterans sees new low level player, helps noob become veteran and part of community. New veteran in turn helps other noobs become veterans. Community expands. Everyone works together to help each other improve and pass difficult content.
How modern day MMOs with jump potions work:
Community is nonexistent. Noob takes jump potion and level potion, never becomes veteran but thinks he is one. No one gains anything from his presence. Noob wonders why no one will carry him through Bismarck HM. Devs look at easy yet unpassable content and blame content for being too hard. Devs make content easier. Any veterans still left pray for the sweet release of death.
To be fair when they're introduced the highest you can skip to is Level50, i120, and with all story up to 2.55 complete.
You still have to go through HW story.
With the release of Stormblood you can skip to Level60, i260(??), and with all story up to 3.55 complete.
You still have to go through Stormblood story.
Plus the new leaf requires 168 hours of gametime to go away.
Atleast max level people who don't know how the fuck to play their class will have a legit excuse now. "I jump potioned, god, give me time to learn!"
I just came back a month ago and coming into an already leveled class that I only played a few months before a year break was daunting enough. I hate this idea. I like to level and learn as I go. It didn't take too long to get the hang of it again, but I felt like a terrible burden on anyone until I was comfortable playing again.
It makes no sense. Why skip the story? Why are you playing? For end game? Ah yes, the gear grind end game is the end all be all. That's normally what kills it for me. Atleast with Wow it's a constant sub/unsub until new content to have something to do again. Even pet and mount collecting which I love to do gets old... quickly. (With my drop luck).
As Silenka said, god forbid a community in MMOs exists anymore. This just helps make it even more nonexistant. It's all about self serving anymore. Gold platter, give me everything for nothing/no work.
Everyone tries to be more like WoW when it really isn't that great of a model, but if it's not like it the game normally flops miserably because it's not an instant gratification model and oh hell no, we can't have that. And no, spending months grinding for gear because of shitty drop rate or luck does not counter the fact that everything else in these games is pretty much handed to you. They need some kind of carrot on a stick to keep your monthly sub.
Why bother putting storyline in games anymore? Why not make a game where you literally are max level on creation and gear grind begins? No silly quest storyline to get in your way. No taking a few days to level to max. That way new players will always be welcome.
Sorry, ranted. Blame it on being depressed and having sleeping issues.
Why streamline the MSQ to not be as long (especially that 2.1-2.55 trudge) when you can charge people to skip it anyway?
Also that 4.0 is locked behind 3.5 completion so they can make the impatient folks double-dip so they can unlock a desired new job without the 150 some hours of fetch quests. More surprised they didn't do this already for 3.0 given I know it would have made them some money for folks who came back that were lvl50, but didn't do all the post-Prae stuff but wanted to unlock DRK.
Well they are hiding aspects people want hostage with 4.0 anyway, like inventory expansion you know will require having stormblood registered in order to access, similar to how you couldn't level beyond 50 unless you had HW registered (Despite most people N.Thanalan FATE grind to 60 anyway initially.)
Either way, if they do update it to skip HW stuff for stormblood, hopefully the battle changes are significant enough that the whole 'relearn jobs in HW" won't matter with the level 70 toolkit...but I doubt the changes are that big.
when your sub base is about a tenth of your sales it's not surprising that you'd want to do anything possible to gain more sub retention. jump potion won't make any unbelievable changes, but it should help some.
With how the game is thrown together from 2.0 start to 3.4 now, I can see why they want to implement jump potions to skip people though to 2.55/HW. We can act like people are actively doing 2.X content, but the reality isn't the case, especially not now with POTD thrown into the mix.
No one is slogging newbies though 2.X content (unless of course it's for a roulette which benefits them) except if they are in a FC. Turn on your Novice Network and check to see how much of an overblown and overindulged cesspool of asshats are inside who only talk shit and very rarely help the newbies like they are supposed to. A lot of people are realllllly complaining about this turn of events, but will do fuck all to help newbies regardless.
The only thing that will happen because of these jump potions are the increase of bads on all servers, as well as the possible clogging up of already max capacity servers. Most of them still won't touch real endgame, while the people who want to play for the story won't purchase these things at all. Jump potion or not, your average terrible player at 60 will still be very terrible.
It's OK bros (as long as you are an endgame/raid player), life will go on.
My experience with Novice Network is usually something like this
(Newbie) - Hey Guys, I'm thinking about leveling Paladin, can anyone give me some tips?
(Mentor) - Okay so you want to flash about 20 times, if you can't do that you should uninstall the game, also just spam Halone combo and give zero regards for anything else, 100% up time on shield oath is a must and you should never ever EVER consider taking it off or people will make fun of you because it's literally impossible to tank with it off.
(Mentor 2) - Tanking is really hard, I could never do it so I don't see how you could, I'd just give up and play a healer.
(Mentor 3) - Just push buttons and if someone takes hate oh well.
(Me) - What's your current level and what are you currently wanting to know about the class.
(Newbie Leaves Novice Network)
That's pretty similar to my experience with the addition of 2 or 3 people who exist in the NN with the sole purpose of deeming themselves "lords" of the Network, kicking people as they see fit if they don't conform to their notions of mentorship, or at random just because. None of them have done content more difficult than Thordan/Sephirot EX.
Didn't take me longer than a few days to turn that shit off.
As an endgame player: I hate it and will hate all the people who jumped up because they're terrible at the game.
As a person with RL friends: I know they'd love playing the game, but they'd hate doing the 50 main story to heavensward slog. Maybe the jump potion get them to play.
I still have no idea why they thought linking the two stories was a good idea. Heavensward should have just been a separate story (and you can just start it at level 50) making the original Realm Reborn stuff optional for new players that wanted to catch up to friends or whatever.
I think the jump potion is at least very useful for the second+ jobs, because exping scales horribly in this game and the bonus for having one class exped already doesn't help making it less awful.
I have a question:
Does this set the going rate for RMT at $25 per 300k gil?Originally Posted by Naoki Yoshida
Easily the worst rates in any MMO. :^)