Why are you looking forward to FF14?

[Corrderio]

Main problem is if your friends are in a different shell or something you're kind of screwed if they're busy most of the time.

[arus2001]

Most of the time where games fail on grouping incentives tends to involve the activity itself not being very fun, EXP gets split to the point of suck, rewards aren't frequent enough, tanks and healers are usually at higher risk of death (amplify this if there's harsh death penalties), and the time it takes to get people together usually could've been better spent solo.

Hell, XI wrestled with a lot of those points even before EP/DC EXP adjustments and Campaign/FoV.

[nekoshoonen]

So you had no friends?

Sorry for the bad grammer was posting from my phone. I meant that ALL OTHER MMOs had no incentive to play in groups except FF11

[Vacht]

Sorry for the bad grammer was posting from my phone. I meant that ALL OTHER MMOs had no incentive to play in groups except FF11

Not to be the bearer of bad news, but you spelled grammar wrong. Im joshin...

[D44kpunk]

I'm not looking forward to FF14 at all, since we're all posting our opinions I figured I'd post mine.

THE REASON THAT THERE ARE SO MANY WOW CLONES AND NOT GAMES LIKE FFXI IS WOW CLONES WORK.

Hey, I'm a melee on ff11, guess what my role is? To engage a mob, stare at it for a minute while I get tp, hit a macro, rinse and repeat. MOST BORING SHIT EVER. this applies to most HNMs and the only change most of the time is to switch mobs, or to afk to camp something for 3 hours.

WoW and WoW "clones" actually have indepth fights and strategies that you actually HAVE to do to win, things that are required. The best thing SE has done compared to this is DI, lets face it its the mots complex fight on ffxi, you actually have to move away from shit and position it well(terrain wise) other than that theres not a single fight in the game that isn't tank and spank or zerg. It also has abilities and shit that you have to constantly do as any class instead of afk to get mp for 5mins, watch your tp slowly go up and do a repetitive refresh/haste cycle. WoW has a good dev team, lets face it SE is god awful. Linkshell community is eh, not advertised well enough it could be alot better. FFXIAH was a great idea but was a couple years too late. WoW has many sites that are just fantastic compared to ffxi and it makes the game a LOT more competetive. For example you have wowprogress which shows the top guilds, wowarmory which pretty much stalks people and shows their gear. and TONS of fan based sites(plus an official forum that mods and devs actually reply to!) that ffxi lacks and SE has no intentions of developing. On top of the fact that ffxi content patchs are SO FUCKING RARE (endgame hasn't changed in 2+ years, just being honest. SW and DI were the last things added that could be considered "endgame".)

Their customer support is god awful. people get banned for the dumbest shit. nothing more really needs to be said, if you argue for them open your eyes and go read some of the shit in advanced.

With all that being said, SE has been ruined in my eyes by making this fail game (I still play up to today, but trust me or ask anyone that I play with, its not for the content.) And I have no intention of giving 14 anything past a free trial unless serious changes are made.

edit: plus for some reason SE gets off on having AV be unbeatable and its just getting old

[Lucavi]

Main problem is if your friends are in a different shell or something you're kind of screwed if they're busy most of the time.

That was only for end-game. Early in FFXI, it didn't matter who was in what LS. Nobody had policies restricting LSmates from helping others in "outside" shells. If people were on, they helped, and most people had multiple shells anyway, simply because joining a linkshell didn't mean anything like it does nowadays, where you're expected to turn a blind eye to botting, MPK, hacking, and anything else that can get the LS leader rich faster.

I had friends in various LSes, and if I needed help, I asked, and they gave it if they were free. I did the same in return. Of course, in the latter stages of my FF adventuring, people would look at others funny if they helped out other shells or jumped between shells.

It'll be the same in FFXIV: shells won't mean much other than a place to hang out until the end-game scene is secured, and then all the elitism and asshattery will come flying off the handles.

:Edit: Wait, you hate the game, but you still play? I'm sure SE loves customers like you the most. Not only can they ignore you because they write you off, but they continuously make money off of you, knowing that no matter how much you hate the game, you won't leave for some strange reason.

[Lordender]

You shouldn't have to party to level up or whatever system is used, I like how WoW did it personally. Solo leveling with group quests here and there and if you find people to team up with then cool but it's not required for basic leveling. I really hope it's mostly solo leveling(the way it SHOULD be.)

I hope there is more emphasis placed on a linkshell system this time around with being able to edit members or boot people when they aren't online.

[Eaglestrike]

You shouldn't have to party to level up or whatever system is used, I like how WoW did it personally. Solo leveling with group quests here and there and if you find people to team up with then cool but it's not required for basic leveling. I really hope it's mostly solo leveling(the way it SHOULD be.)

I hope there is more emphasis placed on a linkshell system this time around with being able to edit members or boot people when they aren't online.

It should be something like the WoW system yes, but a bit more emphasis on group activity. Solo questing/leveling should be perfectly viable, but group play should reap great benefits. Make an instancing/LFD tool with enhanced loot/exp rates so that group play is the clear cut best to leveling.

I think that's the best to do it on the basis that being able to do everything perfectly fine solo really hurts the patience and level of BS people are able to put up with in WoW. Granted this probably stems more from what kind of people play WoW and exists plenty in FFXI as well, but some patience is useful to force upon players, it just shouldn't be at an excessive amount.

[Corrderio]

That was only for end-game. Early in FFXI, it didn't matter who was in what LS. Nobody had policies restricting LSmates from helping others in "outside" shells. If people were on, they helped, and most people had multiple shells anyway, simply because joining a linkshell didn't mean anything like it does nowadays, where you're expected to turn a blind eye to botting, MPK, hacking, and anything else that can get the LS leader rich faster.

Pretty accurate, nowdays friends aren't as reliable as you wish they were since they're usually busy with LS events and crap.

You shouldn't have to party to level up or whatever system is used, I like how WoW did it personally. Solo leveling with group quests here and there and if you find people to team up with then cool but it's not required for basic leveling. I really hope it's mostly solo leveling(the way it SHOULD be.)

Thankfully SE already said that you can either solo or PT and make worthwhile progress. I hope that they make missions soloable to. Misc/extra fights should be party based, but I shouldn't have to seek high and low for 5 others just to have interest in missions just to make progress.

[Lucavi]

I hate it too, Corrderio - the transition from a friendly game where everyone is all in it together, to this elitist cesspool, but every single MMO that has come out and will come out will ultimately degenerate into that as people become so-called "masters" at the game and seek to reach the top of the end-game summit.

Even for games where gear and bosses aren't the be-all end-all, humans naturally have a distrustful nature when engaging in end-game: they want to win on their own terms, with their own team, once they've established that they can defeat whatever obstacle is in their way with their own manpower.

On Hades, three end-game LSes banded together to all-but conquer Dynamis - we were all the first on Hades to down the Dynamis Lord, and many, many people were well-stocked with AF2 long before it was common - the only reason the three banded together (to form this awesome mix of the best of JP and NA) was because none of the three LSes had the strength to dominate dynamis alone -- fitting that the LS's name was "Dynamis Dominators."

Over time, as the three groups got stronger, one decided it didn't need to team up anymore, and went solo. No big deal, but that's just the nature of the beast. Pretty soon people were getting booted from shells simply for publicly having another shell's pearl. WoW is basically no different, nor AoC, or EvE, or Darkfall Online (except for the fact that their guild-exclusivity begins at level 1, or the beginning of the game -- join a guild or die, repeatedly), or LotL:O or even EQ and its bastard-child of a sequel.

Regardless of the mediums thrown in front of them, human nature never changes. Use who you can when you need to, and when you no longer have use for them, go rogue with your own group.

[GRT]

I hope that they make missions soloable to. Misc/extra fights should be party based, but I shouldn't have to seek high and low for 5 others just to have interest in missions just to make progress.

I actually hope the reverse is true: you solo the misc/extra missions and find groups for the main story ones. My best memories in FFXI was actually pushing CoP content, and those wouldn't be nearly as exhilarating without experiencing it with other people, which imo is how an MMORPG is meant to be played.

[Kaylia]

I actually hope the reverse is true: you solo the misc/extra missions and find groups for the main story ones. My best memories in FFXI was actually pushing CoP content, and those wouldn't be nearly as exhilarating without experiencing it with other people, which imo is how an MMORPG is meant to be played.

I agree entirely with this, but they really need to implement a better method to find people. It's great to do it with friend, but sometime, friend alone aren't cutting it.

They just need some sort of user friendly "looking for ___" interface where you can seek for leveling, missions, quest, and everything that might require a party.

[Eaglestrike]

Just give some rewards for helping people out and reduce the loss from a wipe and the number of people who will repeat missions will greatly increase.

[Eaglestrike]

Just give some rewards for helping people out and reduce the loss from a wipe and the number of people who will repeat missions will greatly increase.

[Kaylia]

Yeah, but I still don't want to shout 1 hours in town before getting someone to join us.


[edit]

And where is your balance now? 6 years of retarded gears progression in order to preserve balance, and now, level 99 hit us out of nowhere.

It's probably the best move they ever did, but shit, it make little sense when you compare it to previous expansion.

[Destinye]

Just give some rewards for helping people out and reduce the loss from a wipe and the number of people who will repeat missions will greatly increase.

Most BCs/"Arena fights" does this (especially all new ones lately) and people still won't help many lol. You have to satisfied the greed of people which is hard to do.

[Lucavi]

Hahaha, what a way to hype me up for this beta, SE! You're bringing back the old Drg blood that's been asleep for years!

[Plow]

This is a weird thread to be quote-chaining in again lol, but it seems our progression discussion triggered some interesting talk, and then the new ffxi announcements, and there's just some stuff that reminded me of other things, etc. Anyway, here goes again, hopefully not so damn long this time lol.

Did you expect to continue playing for free and have them donate the operation costs to you because they just love bringing games to the masses?

Sarcasm switch set to off, I agree, that sounds pretty shitty, and why you should avoid free-to-play but pay-to-enjoy business model games.

I'm going to use the best one I played, Atlantica, to explain this.

First off, consider tiered dungeons-- you have to run through tier 1 every time you want to get to tier 2. etc. Just getting to t4 to do a quest there could take forever, let alone if you had to run there, do one, run back and hand it in, then run back and do the next.

But you could simplify all that with the teleportation feature.

Also, npc's in the world that could be literally anywhere, and one npc you could go to that would lead them to you. Then an auto-run feature so you could teleport someplace close then automatically run to the moving npc.

Also, the ability to see accurate health bars and debuffs and whatnot on your enemies.

Basically, you could get all of those kinds of features for 10-20 bucks a month. Totally reasonable, that game was great and I'd have paid that gladly were that all there is to it.

But, rather than try for a bigger base paying these smaller amounts... they simply try to milk every last penny they can possibly get out of anyone that will pay at all. They put item upgrades, mounts (which provide HUGE stat bonuses), outfits with more stat bonuses, power up potions, raise scrolls that any job can pop, huge nuke scrolls that any job can pop, exp bonuses, blah blah blah, everything you can possibly imagine...

And then they put it all on extremely low reward RNG. They'll sell you a "mount box" for $10... with maybe a 3% chance of having the new mount that's the only reason to buy it, a 5% chance of the older "new" mounts with slightly lower stats, and a 10% chance of a shitty mount box you can literally buy for $1 which gives you a random roll of an entirely useless mount, a mount that's almost worthwhile for extremely low levels, and a mount that is worthwhile for low levels.

And you can sit in town on the day those boxes come out and watch dozens of people open dozens of boxes each... and barely any of them get anything worth a shit.

/rant off lol

But yeah, the problem wasn't them asking to pay, I was perfectly willing, and planning, to pay typical mmo costs, until I saw the item mall and never took the game seriously again.

I kind of agree with you. It is silly that some low level gear is good for a LONG time such as PCC. That being said, every time a new dungeon or something comes out in WoW it makes everything before it outdated. I honestly can't think of a way, off hand, to find a happy balance of the two but then I'm not paid to find one either ;p

If every tier in WoW jumped by, say, 2 item levels instead of 13... it would be MUCH closer to what we're talking about.

LK would be dropping like 10 man Ulduar ez mode level gear, and uld ezmode vs say naxx10 would be barely any different at all.

You'd still end up with this guy:
http://huhuranisserious.ytmnd.com/

But I think a lot of other people owuld be happier, and balancing without the concerns for "84 ilvls in gear is a hell of a lot more scaling for a dps warrior or a prot pally than a xxxx" would be simplified.

Hey, I'm a melee on ff11, guess what my role is? To engage a mob, stare at it for a minute while I get tp, hit a macro, rinse and repeat. MOST BORING SHIT EVER. this applies to most HNMs and the only change most of the time is to switch mobs, or to afk to camp something for 3 hours.

I mentioned it already, but I think this has to do directly with them not realizing the implications of the tp nerf combined with the weak bonuses of tp on most WS, especially multi-hit.

Basically I think they intended for TP to be like our mana. Instead of resting to heal it up when it's empty, we just stop doing specials and melee for a bit.

300 tp wasn't supposed to be a waste the vast majority of the time. 100tp wasn't supposed to take a damn minute+ on any reasonably high boss without massive buff/debuff stacking.

I envision it as tp being closer to a warrior's rage, and for a samurai close to a rogue's energy in WoW. While not as fast-paced, it was still supposed to be something you're always working with and making decisions on how to use most effectively, rather than attaining/unleashing it being the solitary goal. Definitely looking forward to seeing how they manage to make the melee combat system interactive in FFXIV, and the weapon system looks like it will make it a huge focus.

That was only for end-game. Early in FFXI, it didn't matter who was in what LS. Nobody had policies restricting LSmates from helping others in "outside" shells. If people were on, they helped, and most people had multiple shells anyway, simply because joining a linkshell didn't mean anything like it does nowadays, where you're expected to turn a blind eye to botting, MPK, hacking, and anything else that can get the LS leader rich faster.

There was more to this post but I'm trying to keep post length reasonable here so I'm just including the first paragraph.

It did. Many of the first ls were extremely superficial-- who's the richest? get them! Oh they have a fish bot? Sweet, share! Who's the highest level? Get them! Now we can farm keys in eldieme! etc. etc.

Beyond that, there's 2 key things here, and I'm going to use ffxi to compare and contrast again:
"Helping" in ffxi only really caused issues due to camping. *IF* you were available, there was no reason you couldn't help others... except, of course, when they finally put "instancing" in.

In WoW, you can't go help another guild unless you've got an alt to do it on. You're locked in to a given instance. It's kind of funny what it results in actually... on my server the 2 top alliance guilds have at least like 5 people, probably a few more, that are core raiders in both guilds' main raids... on different characters.

In FFXI you can... except in Dynamis, Nyzul, Limbus, Ein, Salvage, Assault, and camped mobs.

I.E... the most popular content in the game ><

It's fucking dumb if you ask me. These designers really need to find ways to progress games in a way that they don't have to artificially limit loot distribution so much. Low drop rates aren't fun. Limits on how often you can participate in your favorite parts of the game aren't fun.

And yet, somehow those 2 very unfun things are the most commonly abused mechanics for "keeping us paying" in mmo's.

I'm really hoping they use the campaign join/exp/points model of "so fucking what, let them have their cake with always-on non-burdening entertainment, and eat it with actually rewarding the experience pretty nicely as well."

I mean, really, I do understand the virtues of some rare-ass shit. But it doesn't have to be everything. Who the fuck cares if everyone you see has 99% of the stats available, as long as the damn game is fun.

It should be something like the WoW system yes, but a bit more emphasis on group activity. Solo questing/leveling should be perfectly viable, but group play should reap great benefits. Make an instancing/LFD tool with enhanced loot/exp rates so that group play is the clear cut best to leveling.

I think that's the best to do it on the basis that being able to do everything perfectly fine solo really hurts the patience and level of BS people are able to put up with in WoW. Granted this probably stems more from what kind of people play WoW and exists plenty in FFXI as well, but some patience is useful to force upon players, it just shouldn't be at an excessive amount.

Random dungeon system puts leveling in WoW at like exactly the right ratios imo:

Solo exp can be about equal to what you will get by joining up with a random group of 5 people and doing some group stuff, but *slightly* less rewarding in terms of gear.

A good party, though, will get the best exp, and the best rewards.

So, basically, bad group < good solo = avg random pt < good pt, with the gap not being too wide, but existing.

Pretty much hoping for exactly that level of parity in 14.

[Lucavi]

^ I haven't much to say except that I agree with what you said. I'll always vouch for a comfortable medium between FF and WoW because, while I acknowledge that FF purists will never want anything associated with WoW (even though the game has so many systems that just flat-out work), FFXIV will be a far superior game because of it, instead of simply just being a fresh coat of paint on FFXI's antiquated systems and mindsets.

Every major company in this world today draws from other companies when trying to design the best product they can. That's what you're supposed to do when you want the best. No company can produce the best all by their lonesome. For purists to think otherwise is foolish and immature.

SE will be best served by observing ALL MMOs that have come before and after them, and ultimately deciding on what and what not to use from others in their own design.

[Plow]

Yeah, one of the biggest things mmo devs can learn from WoW is how to copy without cloning.

See: everything good about Warhammer that wouldn't dramatically reshape WoW being instated in WoW within a year.