What will you do when XIV Arrives?

[kareface]

I'll vicariously play through the forums and continue to enjoy the sun for the first time in 4 years.

[Atlasion]

I remember telling myself I wouldn't play another mmorpg but screw it. I quit FFXI a little while ago but I'll probably give XIV a shot.

[WhysoPherbius]

depends on what friends do

[rekie]

I will jizz

Oh and than play it consistently for a week!

[Kenichi]

I need more information, but if it looks promising I'll pre-order the PS3 version.

Hopefully the PC version isn't overwhelmingly superior because my poor laptop just isn't going to cut it.

[LD]

As long as it can run Crysis at all, it'll probably run this. I plan on buying a laptop by the end of the year that can do that, so I'm not worried.

I'm a tad worried about my clunker desktop, but I might get lucky.

[Aerin]

Most people I started playing with (myself included) stopped playing FFXI a long time ago. But when this comes out I think a lot of us are getting back together, that's what I'm looking forward to the most.

[Galvaya]

Starcraft 2, might be tempting. Never was a warcraft fan, but if they made world of starcraft. Hmm..

[Kilhart]

If tarus still look as awesome as they did in FFXI, I will play FFXIV. If not, I won't.

The sad part's that I'm 100% serious.

[Lordender]

A lot of good buddies are going to try FF14 and have asked me if i'm gonna try it. I am only going to give it thought if all of the following happens:

* Ability to just log on and "level" or "growth" my character without depending on people. I agree some things should need parties but i'm not interested in seeking however x time depending on how popular my job is.

* Endgame that doesn't have a retarded concept, i'm not camping anything like HNM again. Hopefully an endgame system that can be scheduled and not totally random on when things are popping.

* Easier to make gil, it shouldn't feel like a 2nd job like it did in FFXI. You basically were always farming if you weren't camping or leveling.

* Better "job" balancing, lets face it, some jobs were really shitty in XI to the point of almost useless.

* Better crafting system, I like WoW's and thats not really saying much when even that could be better.

* Official forums where the dev's take suggestions and voice their concerns or just talk about updates in general. Keep the players updated, if blizzard can do it so can SE, its just pure laziness that SE never did this.

* GM service that doesn't fuck around, I want my problem resolved if I have to call upon a GM for something or have the call escalated to a higher up's who can fix my problem if it outranks the GM. Being given the run around is bullshit, it shouldn't happen.

* A UI that doesn't blow balls.

* RMT undercontrol the minute the servers go live, I won't put up with the bullshit of being cockblocked by RMT. The minute i'm cockblocked by RMT will result in a closed account plain and fucking simple.


I'm not looking for a WoW clone with FF14 but I hope SE can look at some of the things Blizzard did and how they handled WoW and implement some of those principles with their own twist. Hopefully SE has learned from their fuckup's in XI and knock a homerun with 14 because it sure is going to have to after how XI was handled.

[Gergall]

* Easier to make gil, it shouldn't feel like a 2nd job like it did in FFXI. You basically were always farming if you weren't camping or leveling.

If a particular server has 100 "Sword of Awesomeness +1" and 1000 players want it, the top 100 players who put in the most time towards raising gil are going to be the ones who can afford it.

If you could raise the gil to buy it at current AH price in 20 minutes, everyone else would do the same. There still wouldn't be enough swords of awesomeness to go around, though. Some people would farm for 30 minutes and offer 1.5x the price. Others would do the same and the price would keep rising.

Eventually the price peaks when it is so high that only about 100 people are willing to put in the necessary hours of farming.

tl;dr
Supply and demand

[LD]

Effort does not necessitate tedium.

Lord wasn't complaining about economics, but the very process of accumulating enough gil to buy anything. The long and short of it is you can only make a large amount of money the same way you make a large amount of exp, by having other people help you. FFXI has eased our ability to accumulate exp alone, but not money. There are multiple means of limiting making money passively: Relatively low NPC resell prices, very limited AH slots, certain items being unstackable. A lot of games stike a balance between NPC item selling and the rest of the economy pretty well, so you can't just toss it up as RMT counter measures.

[Sol-Blackguy]

Where's the option for leveling Ninja as a subjob before it gets nerfed?

[Gergall]

Effort does not necessitate tedium.

Lord wasn't complaining about economics, but the very process of accumulating enough gil to buy anything. The long and short of it is you can only make a large amount of money the same way you make a large amount of exp, by having other people help you. FFXI has eased our ability to accumulate exp alone, but not money. There are multiple means of limiting making money passively: Relatively low NPC resell prices, very limited AH slots, certain items being unstackable. A lot of games stike a balance between NPC item selling and the rest of the economy pretty well, so you can't just toss it up as RMT counter measures.

You are correct that in FFXI, there is a huge discrepancy between the gil you can make solo (farming) versus the gil you can make in a group (Splitting Heirs, KS30, NMs). If I thought that this was what Lord was talking about, I would have agreed with him too. However, I didn't see him refer to this at all.

[LD]

I see him talking about farming being a second job.
I don't see him complaining PCC being 2m.

So I suppose we have to agree to disagree.

[Plow]

ACP started to, Kupo expansion thoroughly convinced me, I'm not fucking with XIV.

[Cadsuane]

Effort does not necessitate tedium.

Lord wasn't complaining about economics, but the very process of accumulating enough gil to buy anything. The long and short of it is you can only make a large amount of money the same way you make a large amount of exp, by having other people help you. FFXI has eased our ability to accumulate exp alone, but not money. There are multiple means of limiting making money passively: Relatively low NPC resell prices, very limited AH slots, certain items being unstackable. A lot of games stike a balance between NPC item selling and the rest of the economy pretty well, so you can't just toss it up as RMT counter measures.

You are correct that in FFXI, there is a huge discrepancy between the gil you can make solo (farming) versus the gil you can make in a group (Splitting Heirs, KS30, NMs). If I thought that this was what Lord was talking about, I would have agreed with him too. However, I didn't see him refer to this at all.

Now you're both wrong. The value of group effort rewards like BCNMs comes from the fact that they require a group. The difficulty of getting together a group reduces by a huge amount the number of people who can potentially set up a concerted effort to go and get the commodity. Fewer sellers means fewer hours can be spent getting the drops which means higher prices, as long as the item in question has demand. Making commodities soloable means more sellers which means prices tank. As soon as you make it so the average player can't get an item alone, the value of that item multiplies by a huge factor. The inverse is true as well; if you have an ENM that drops hagun and can be soloed by most jobs, you're not giving players a great way to make money, you're just making it so hagun is worth 100 gil. Even if you greatly reduced the drop rate, like by a factor of ten, the item in question would skydive in price. Hours spent in a group are inherently more valuable than solo man hours.

The trick to making cash in FFXI is to find a task which very few people can accomplish. Soloing/Duoing an ENM that can't normally be low manned is a good example. Hedgehog bomb, Forager's Mantle, Toreador's ring, Hagun, all top tier items, so you've got demand. It's a group event which shuts out the vast majority of would-be suppliers for lack of skill, or willing friends with open schedules. Furthermore you're soloing or duoing, so you multiply your reward by 6 or by 3 since conventional groups will go in on six mans, and not have to worry about having your trick duplicated too much because good players and specific jobs are needed to low man.

Putting the economy on easy mode can only be accomplished by making shit easy to get. In other words, reducing the value of items. You were right the first time Gergall.

[Gergall]

I'm right with you Cadsuane.

I don't see why my second post was wrong though - there IS a huge discrepancy between the gil you can get solo and the gil you get in a group. Your post merely explains why.

Maybe you thought I was saying that I agree with the complaint. That's not what I meant. I wasn't complaining about the discrepancy, just agreeing/acknowledging that it's there.


---New thoughts---

This could probably be balanced in some way with scaling. XI's quest "Uninvited Guests" is a very basic example of this: More people = more mobs, but also everyone gets a prize. This particular quest doesn't really encourage you to enter with a huge alliance though, as that would just cause chaos. With more tweaking, this could be a good starting platform for BC-style events in a new MMO.

XI's Union system is also an example of scaling - larger group earns more treasure, but has to divide it more ways. The cast lots part at the end is really stupid, and it's a shame that you can't have private unions, but this is still a nice base platform that might be tweaked to create a more balanced drop system.

[LD]

Now you're both wrong.

Spoiler: show

The value of group effort rewards like BCNMs comes from the fact that they require a group. The difficulty of getting together a group reduces by a huge amount the number of people who can potentially set up a concerted effort to go and get the commodity. Fewer sellers means fewer hours can be spent getting the drops which means higher prices, as long as the item in question has demand. Making commodities soloable means more sellers which means prices tank. As soon as you make it so the average player can't get an item alone, the value of that item multiplies by a huge factor. The inverse is true as well; if you have an ENM that drops hagun and can be soloed by most jobs, you're not giving players a great way to make money, you're just making it so hagun is worth 100 gil. Even if you greatly reduced the drop rate, like by a factor of ten, the item in question would skydive in price. Hours spent in a group are inherently more valuable than solo man hours.

The trick to making cash in FFXI is to find a task which very few people can accomplish. Soloing/Duoing an ENM that can't normally be low manned is a good example. Hedgehog bomb, Forager's Mantle, Toreador's ring, Hagun, all top tier items, so you've got demand. It's a group event which shuts out the vast majority of would-be suppliers for lack of skill, or willing friends with open schedules. Furthermore you're soloing or duoing, so you multiply your reward by 6 or by 3 since conventional groups will go in on six mans, and not have to worry about having your trick duplicated too much because good players and specific jobs are needed to low man.

Putting the economy on easy mode can only be accomplished by making shit easy to get. In other words, reducing the value of items. You were right the first time Gergall.

....Fuuuuuuuuck. Ok, I'm gunna keep this as short as possible...for me. -_-

The fact of the matter is a lot of the best items aren't worth the effort or time or man power required to get them. Yeah, I said it. When you make a stat so valuable that a measly 10 of that stat in a single spot not only makes it one of the most coveted pieces in the game, but significantly more expensive than a piece with 2-5 less of that stat, that's simply bad game design. You can talk about the economics of the situation all you like, but the root of the problem has always been shitty itemization and game balance.

Spoiler: show

Before anyone calls this dodging the point, I continue to refuse to play a game of tag just because a kid runs down the street and hits me on the arm. I was doing something before I even saw him.

The imbalance has everything to do with SE's poor rationing out of items on mobs (and stats on gear), that's what I was getting at. If PCC were an Assault item like Chiv chain, wouldn't you expect it to only be worth twice as much AP? Of course. Hell, if Acc were like Att, it might not even be worth that much. As things stand, we're paying for the prestige that comes with the time and effort in addition to the item's worth. That's stupid.

Also, the idea that plenty kills price is a little simplistic. Even if you deny that, even in large numbers, items would retain a certain value, and consequently a certain price, the fact is NPC selling has always dictated the minimum, giving every item a floor. Some of the current floors are reasonable, some are not. That's what keeps many people from paying even less for an item and is something that could be adjusted that wouldn't necessarily inflate the economy (may even be a little required, since all the gil in the game comes from NPCs anyway).

It isn't so much that mobs with good gear should be made easier, hard mobs should drop better gear.

Incidentally, you didn't refute anything I said in the post you quoted. What parts were wrong?

[Cadsuane]

You seemed to be making an equivocation between grinding for money and grinding for exp, and that since facilitating low man or solo exp seems to have been a step forward for the game, gathering cash should also be made easier for the individual. If that's not your position then I guess I misread you!

But if it is, I'll go further than my first post by pointing out that gil generally doesn't grow on trees unlike exp. Only generally because, it sort of does, by vendor sales and NPC rewards for quests and so forth, which essentially mints new gil. Otherwise, to get gil you need to trade a commodity or service for it.

I very much agree that poor rationing of stats has been a large problem resulting in undue over or under emphasis on certain NMs.