Will WotG be FFXI's BC?

[layoneil]

The funny thing about all this is that there would be absolutely no arguments whatsoever about CoP if they just made it so level caps reduced the stats from your gear instead of making you buy different shit.

there's like 50 ways to "fix" CoP and they never bothered to do it.

Wall of quotes. The only people who aren't scrolling right on past are the people doing the arguing.

i read it >.>

[BRP]

Wall of quotes is annoying, I'm going to stop doing it.

Your comment on how RotZ does no contradict mine. These encounters were made for lower levels than 75. As with most missions in the game currently, including ToAU. Without adjusting the challenge or putting a level cap on it, they become jokes of a fight. CoP stands as the only mission series that remains at least constantly challenging(rather than last three battles in the case of ToAU). Without level caps or without making everything targeted for 75, you will have easy missions. The idea of an adjusting difficulty is quite nice, but nonexistent as of present. That said, collecting gear was easily the most annoying part about level caps. Anyone who prepared themselves for a year(+) long walk through CoP could have stored some armor sets, make great use of their AF and level60 or under gear, and buy a couple weapons. The next most annoying part about doing CoP from my experience was the Meds which in an inflated market hurt.

The missions were not too difficult. Just because SE decided to weakened some BCs and make it possible to buy enfeebling boss items instead of farm them, doesn't mean it was necessary. What was stopping people from doing CoP missions often was not being able to find a group, or really, being too lazy to be apart of one. Your logic is stupid, sorry, but you need to provide some actual cases where CoP missions was too difficult if you want to debate that.

Non-CoP missions are painfully easy. That doesn't mean CoP should be. People who like doing missions want decently challenging missions. A lot of people don't enjoy missions, well bullocks to them, likely they will go through them within their first three tries if that and be able to forget about it. For those who actually look forward to missions, they want something at least harder than an exp monster. City Missions and Zilart Missions were both made with lower levels in mind and ToAU Missions was about 60% aimed for people under level 70. So yes, the rest of the game had it wrong. The most fun you get out of these missions is duo-ing or trio-ing them. Again, flawed logic with the whole "ITS NOT LIKE THE OTHER EXPANSIONS".

Expansions did not add the Job System, you can't credit them for that. Adding more jobs is certainly nice, but it is not nearly the most important thing an expansion should offer. It's all about content. You can challenge CoP and say it didn't have enough content, but to be upset over not having jobs is way off. New jobs are mostly hype. Hype dies down eventually. It's much harder to compare a job to a battlesystem like Limbus or Salvage.

I mentioned Outland towns as an example of towns that are not meant to be replacements. Comparisons to Al Zahbi are pointless and unnecessary(much like most CoP and ToAU comparisons you are making).

Almost as funny as your continued insistence that the quality of the other expansions is somehow irrelevant as to whether or not CoP is perceived as "good."

You're defending the quality of CoP, but compared to what? It's clearly much worse than the other two existing FFXI expansions, and will almost certainly be worse than the next one. So are we supposed to be content in the knowledge that CoP is better than Matrix Online? Or Star Wars Galaxies? Because it's surely the sh*ttiest thing to come out that's related to FFXI.

CoP was playable, gave us good gear, and new things to do. Many missions and quests were interesting and so were plenty of monsters. It fulfilled most desires of an expansion, but suffered from inflation/RMT and being made ontop of a very poor system created by RotZ and content before it. No matter how good ToAU was, it doesn't matter. CoP was at least average or good depending on how you felt about doing missions(as it was the most mission centric expansion, once called the main storyline of FFXI by devs).

As for comparisons, ToAU was better than CoP and it built off it and RotZ flaws(unfortunately, not in all areas...). CoP struggled because it did not do the same with RotZ. And RotZ made a very weak game playable, but used horrible foresight. ToAU > CoP > RotZ > Original Game. People will bash CoP because they haven't actually realized RotZ was roughly complete by the time players entered the game. Or how horrible the original game was.

[Rocl]

Wall of quotes. The only people who aren't scrolling right on past are the people doing the arguing.

i read it >.>

You don't count

[Spider-Dan]

Without adjusting the challenge or putting a level cap on it, they become jokes of a fight. CoP stands as the only mission series that remains at least constantly challenging(rather than last three battles in the case of ToAU).

First of all, let's get something straight: describing CoP's missions (even old CoP) as "challenging" is a little misleading, since the Correct Party (read: SMNs) will mow down almost any CoP BC in seconds flat.

No, the real "challenge" in CoP is the tedium of shouting in town/begging LS members to get the party you need to win, combined with muling over all the gear you need for the equally tiresome hour-long trek past a bunch of truesight mobs to the BC (and the inevitable aggros that come with pickup parties), followed by a bunch of unnecessary cross-planet treks for a few scant lines of text before you repeat it all again. (That is, unless you decided to fight this battle "straight up" with whoever you can get, in which case you get to replace a couple of hours of shouting in town with a couple of hours of level-capped farming for Rare(!) BC items.)

I'm sorry, but I don't consider any of those things a test of any worthwhile skillset. They are a pathetic excuse for properly balanced game content. And if your response is, "make a static," I'm sorry, you f*cking lose. There is no logical justification for why a static should be necessary for basic, simple storyline missions. No other FFXI release requires them.

The rest of your excuse-making is just that; excuse-making. Why the hell should I have to "prepare myself" for a year-long(!) trek through CoP missions? It's completely out of whack with the rest of the game. And before you start screaming "original level caps were raised!" again, I did almost all the city missions at or below the levels they were intended to be completed, and they didn't even f*cking remotely resemble the level of obnoxiousness that CoP missions did.

What was stopping people from doing CoP missions often was not being able to find a group, or really, being too lazy to be apart of one.

Spare me the holier-than-thou speech. My personal CoP mission progress was significantly hindered because you decided to drop out of the group right when you would have had to redo a part of chapter 8 that you had already completed. Your words ring extremely hollow.

You want more challenging missions? Go solo TAU's (after all, the devs did say in the pre-release that TAU's missions were going to be more solo-oriented, right?). Oh, TAU missions are too hard to solo? Then kindly shut up.

People will bash CoP because they haven't actually realized RotZ was roughly complete by the time players entered the game. Or how horrible the original game was.

Or, alternatively, people will bash CoP because of the hideous mission design and general anti-player mindset displayed from the day of its release until the day TAU ended it.

[Zarath]

God dam it, can u 2 agree to disagree.

Anyways, CoP, as I said, was only good, not total shit, nor was it the saving grace, nothing but just good or even as far gone as average at best. It really didn't offer anything too groundbreaking outside of Limbus, but you can't deny the fact that it had some good points outside of that. The fact is, people want CoP done, why? Cause it has gear people want in it, and people are willing to go though such lengths to go though CoP even though it's deemed as the weakest of the expansions.

CoP missions are a challenge, outside of making it easy sauce but doesn't that ring true to everything in this game (IE: TP burn, DRK zerg, ect) and imo finding the perfect party is just stupid and too much work, yea sure you need some specific jobs now and again but a normal set up works throughout all of CoP; I've proven this on 8 different occasions with 8 different set up of people leading them through CoP, pick up, static and an entire LS (as I've said, I'm fking tired of CoP). I'm tired of the bullshit excuses people make in regards to CoP missions, though I admit pre-nerf anything short of a good team and leader would lead to disaster, but I've done CoP again on my new char and I tell ya, this shit is fucking easy compared to what it was. It took me exactly 2 and a half weeks of casually doing missions for a set of 6 people who wanted CoP done, including myself, 3 months back.

Anyways in summary, was CoP a mistake when it began? Probably, but has it been fixed later to be improved? Definitely.

[arus2001]

Only "difficulty" comparison I'd draw between CoP and ToAU was a general lack of dungeon crawls in ToAU. Whereas, say, the part of CoP you're forced to fight through the door traps in Pso'Xja just to get to where the CS takes place. In ToAU, you can pretty much just take a SP and be within 5 minutes of the CS you need, often without dire fear of true sight mobs. Fights never felt particularly hard, but I was also fortunate enough to not be running a pick-up. Being too lazy to make a static is utter bullshit when sometimes it can be hard enough to control your own schedule with work or school, let alone that of 5 others.

I dunno, the last series of ToAU fights would've felt a bit more epic if instead of being plopped against the BLU with Naja's help, you had to run with her through some Nyzul Isle equivalent assault where the objectives might've varied before finally getting you to the big fight. Otherwise, the lack of imposed level caps is a definite blessing.

[Kyupi/Kij]

Does BRP even do endgame material? Or have like, more than one or two jobs at 75? Or done the CoP mission set through multiple times? (Totally hats off to Zarath here because I would have gone insane and started stabbing people by #4 I think.) Because that might explain his ignorance about what is a good item, what the drop rates on them were (or ARE), and why he thinks that keeping several well-equipped 75s with all that good shit-is-situational gear (that you worked your fucking ass off for), while holding several level-cap sets via ANY method, doesn't lie somewhere between frustratingly ridiculous and impossible.

[BRP]

Does BRP even do endgame material? Or have like, more than one or two jobs at 75? Or done the CoP mission set through multiple times? (Totally hats off to Zarath here because I would have gone insane and started stabbing people by #4 I think.) Because that might explain his ignorance about what is a good item, what the drop rates on them were (or ARE), and why he thinks that keeping several well-equipped 75s with all that good shit-is-situational gear (that you worked your fucking ass off for), while holding several level-cap sets via ANY method, doesn't lie somewhere between frustratingly ridiculous and impossible.

I only have two jobs, but otherwise I can say yes for both. Don't believe that I don't know about how troublesome inventory space is. When I was talking about equipping oneself for CoP, I meant make use with what you got and use any utilities you can. You can clear CoP without amazing gear. Usually you can make do with a weapon, a set of armor(statless or RSE) you have stored via NPC, and it is common for people to have access to several accessories that are not over level 60(Peacock Charm, Okotes, Sniper Rings, etc). Stuff isn't really demanding until you reach O/U and thankfully AF(and Haub and ele staves) is available for that. Meds took more inventory space than anything else, assuming you needed them.

One doesn't need to like or enjoy level caps, but they are not as frustratingly impossible as people make them out to be. They are not really lazy either. Quite reasonable. Adjusting difficulty would be a better solution obviously, but there are better solutions for everything in FFXI(and all of it's expansions), it doesn't make the game shit.

God dam it, can u 2 agree to disagree.

This will save time.

[Sekkite]

I don't want to stray from the topic but I love having only two nights a week of playing WoW. It lets me do other things like spend time with friends outside of the computer, do work and try out a few new games. Not the same for everyone in some cases but still. Also, didn't you go from a not so progressed guild to one a lot further progressed on a different server? It's different experiencing the game with your friends through the entire progression time line.

Eh, the only content I skipped was Mother Shahraz through Illidan. My goal was not to transfer to a better progressed guild at the end, but to where my friends were (as the first guild I transferred to turned out to have players with terrible personalities). Just so happened a few of my friends were in a high end progressed guild.

It's the SSC/TK days that really make me hate the game. Terrible content that I have to do week after week (to stock up on gold/marks for when sunwell comes out to relieve our raiders from having to farm for repairing/consumables).

WotG won't hurt the game, expansions will only benefit a mmorpg. It happened on WoW and it happened on FFXI.

And to this, I point to an earlier post made in this thread:

I just can't stop laughing when I read these posts about how WoG could be the worst expansion ever, the FFXI killer, etc.

CoP has that title and it will never, ever give it up. You think 2 new jobs sucks? How does 0 new jobs sound? How does completing hours of level-capped content just to access the new city (and a crippled version of it with no auction house, at that) sound? How does a 30-minute walk to reach said city sound?

If WoG was as horrible as CoP, the playerbase would quit in droves (which they did). CoP is the gold standard of a sh*tty expansion. The CoP team clearly believed that the playerbase was some sort of out-of-control mob; rotten children that needed to be taught a lesson. They treated the playerbase like an enemy at every turn, and the only people you can get to defend CoP display some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where they argue that that's the way it should be.

A shining example of this is AV vs. Odin. AV (the big bad guy of CoP) has been slaughtering alliances for over a year, and the most we can squeeze out of Squenix is "this is how to stop his irrelevant regen." Odin (the big bad guy of TAU) slaughters a few alliances for a couple of months, and Squenix immediately offers up a trick to nullify his deathga.

It's a fundamental difference in attitude.