That time has come for me as well...Follow

Dude, I don't wanna be rude here, but I don't know what you're smoking.

"More efficient/economical to support a smaller, loyal, hardcore crowd."

Here, I thought that's what Wildstar was trying to do..... oh wait, last I heard, their subs have plummeted like a rock. Wanna know who is still King of the MMORPG Hill? That would be....

WoW.

What does WoW do? They give the Lion's Share of the game's content to.... you guessed it, casual players. They give the Hardcores Heroic Raids, and Rated PvP so they have something to do too. And it is successful as all Hell, because....

The sheer numbers of casual subscribers vastly out-numbers the small hardcore playerbase.

Subs = Money in a Subscription-based game. If you're going for a Subscription Model, you want as many subscribers as you can squeeze into your game. This means your game needs to be attractive to as many people as possible. WoW is successful because the Lion's Share of the game's content is great for all those casuals out there, and the Hardcores have something to enjoy too.

Cataclysm showed us what happens when Blizz decides they're going to go all Hardcore over what used to be Casual Content -- Subs plummeted like a rock, and quite suddenly.

A Sub-based MMORPG pandering to a minority crowd is destined for failure. It just doesn't work that way. You want a successful game? You need subscribers. Want subscribers? You tailor your game to the bulk of the subscribers. That's just how it works.

You are the middle schoolers Catwho. :)

The problem is the other schools do not jive with the middle people.You should make an LS called the party finders. A cross server LS with good attitudes, high desire, and a slower vibe. Has to be mega huge so someone always around to do it together.

How about "Loyalists"?

Players that keep playing because the Art and Feel of the game meet their preferences even when the available content does not exactly meet their needs as for as time requirements and ease-of-use.

Lyrailis, you make a good point about how Wow is hugely successful through the casual crowd. There is a very stark difference between the resources being made available for these two franchises. The FFXIV team had a chance to upgrade hardware and improve content design to meet the capacity and game play needs of a larger casual base.

What I see is they choose instead to cater to a smaller user base that was more closely proportionate to their budgeted hardware capacity. I'm not saying that was a good choice or ultimately the most profitable. Since they could not swing the immediate budget for large-scale capacity upgrades, they have instead artificially limited the population by not catering to the majority of users. I doubt this was intentional, rather that's just how it played out. When you have capacity issues, maintaining the current population levels moves down on the priority scale.

Perhaps that was meant as a temporary path forward, but it appears irreversible.

The execution elements were still required to be successful in LFR. Yes, it was easier because bosses did less damage and had less health, but they still had one-shot mechanics. You played WoW and I'm not sure how recently you've played, but just look at Durumu in ToT as an example. This fight still had 'maze phaze' in LFR.

For those that didn't play, it was a round battlefield similar to Titan so imagine a round clock face. At some point in the battle Durumu would call down a fog that would cover almost all of the battlefield, but leave a small chunk open. So in the clock example from 2 o'clock to 12 o'clock was fogged out and anyone who stood in the fog would take damage rapidly. If you were on the other side of the battlefield you had enough time to get where you needed to be, but you'd definitely need a heal on the way or to use a defensive cooldown.

Now for the fun part... imagine a seconds hand that starts at 12 o'clock and moves clockwise until it makes a full revolution. If that seconds hand passed through your character, you're toast. As that seconds hand moved, small(enough that your raid members needed to stack basically) portions of the fog were removed to allow you to pass through safely. Once you went all the way through the maze(one complete turn through the battlefield) the phase was over.

Now the mechanic was forgiving enough on LFR that you could lose a few members(class dependent) and still defeat the boss. If you lost too many healers then those who were alive couldn't keep up, if you lost too many DPS then eventually the damage would ramp up beyond what the healers were capable of keeping alive, ect. ect.



I was referring to execution errors. Yes people have issues with their power or internet or even their system specs that keep them from being able to perform sometimes. Other games are no exception yet people still get through it. XIV has the issue with server latency, but WoW wasn't without it's issues either. A simple google search of Durumu turns up tons of results about how you can make the maze phase easier to see and navigate.

Where do you draw the line though? If you can't punish players poor execution with one-shot mechanics than content is overly easy. If you removed the execute or be executed parts of the battle, for many players(myself included); you remove the excitement. Should players who don't have internet/power/spec issues be punished as well?



It's called progression for a reason. You should have to take one step at a time to reach your intended destination. This is undermined by events like hunts where you can obtain spiffy gear simply by participating in glorified(yet still braindead) FATEs. Players should progress through increasingly difficult content that 'preps' them for more difficult content that lies ahead. You shouldn't be able to obtain gear that allows you access to content unless you've gone through the necessary steps that train you up.


Perhaps XI was a poor example. The fights were much longer, many of them took place in open world and the options for communication and coordination were much smaller than people have now.

Also, there were many encounters that weren't balanced and players could often circumvent the intended mechanics. I really don't think KB were designed with the intent that it be kited around in circles. I don't think Kirin was designed so that the adds it spawned could be killed by an independent alliance. I don't think AV was designed so that players died and de-leveled several times over using zombie strategies, nor that it only be possible to defeat with a party of KC wielding DRKs.

There are many different mechanics that don't directly one-shot everyone in the group, but if they aren't dealt with properly they ultimately lead to the same result... failure. While one is immediate 'try again', there are numerous mechanics that all lead to the same fate. Many people cite one-shot mechanics, but don't realize that ultimately any mechanic that can wipe a raid boils down to the same execute or be executed philosophy.

People aren't actually complaining about one-shots. They're complaining about failure to execute resulting in a wipe. 3 seconds to move out of a deadly AoE is no different than 3 seconds to activate a defensive cooldown is no different than 3 seconds for your healers to cleanse a debuff is no different than 3 seconds to taunt the boss off of the main tank is no different than 3 seconds to activate a switch... so on. I don't feel it really matters whether you die immediately, 10 seconds from now or 10 minutes from now. It all stems from the same failure to execute and the result is always the same.

Is it punishing? Yes. A little too punishing? Perhaps, but most of the time you get ported to the beginning of the encounter with little to no repercussion. If there is a fight similar to the animated weapons where you only get one shot every few days, by all means remove instant death mechanics. You're still going to see people failing because they couldn't execute something they needed to do in order to win.

Admittedly, I didn't spend too much time on this one because... well, frankly I'm embarrassed but.... if this is a joke, I don't get it. If you really have that much trouble getting out of bed than I completely sympathize with your inability to not stand in fire

If that happens in Eorzea, 7 of your friends die too.


Edited, Sep 2nd 2014 7:48pm by Gnu

YES!!

I totally agree. Especially when the timing of the AoE is the exact same every time you run the encounter. The pattern never changes.

It's not like all of a sudden "OMG that one-shot AoE came out of nowhere!"
It's more like "That damn one-shot AoE is coming up and I know it; I better be prepared to move."

Actually, it's more like, "I was finally lucky enough to be in a party of people who, like me, had memorized all the AoE dodge patterns of the first two phases... now, FINALLY, after a week of frustration, I can actually start learning the third of the five phases! Or, at least I can on this run... whoever I'm grouped up with next probably won't have this much of the fight script memorized yet."

Mainstream. We are Mainstream players - something that's starting to really define itself pretty firmly of late.

I still find myself sitting on the issue on whether or not it is the responsibility of game developers to force its playerbase into communities. It just seems to me that doing so bleeds their bottom line to really be a smart business move - which, in tandem also can be a bad thing for players to do so as well.

In comparison: We have far more tools to create communities than we have had before. Free Companies have their own little message boards on Lodestone, Multiple Linkshells are able to be kept. Party finder can be used to gather people for just about anything, including FC/LS recruitment - but I cannot help but acknowledge the outspoken complain that it feels wrong to some players that they do not feel a need to join these communities, and I'm not sure if I agree or not.

Having a common cause to gather around is great reason to join up, but I've seen the ills it can do to a community as well as the bonus. Therefore it seeming like an option, on paper, seems to be better. After all, the 'common cause' my group gathers around (which is mostly adventure roleplaying) is purely optional and inherently social.

I think there are more causes coming into the works to have a large grouping together. Airship construction is one of them, now that alliances for Crystal Tower runs is possible as well, that will start to gather people. But I feel there can be more larger scale actions that can be put in place to encourage it, so long as it maintains that "You group with who you want to enjoy your time with" feel still there.

In the end, I still feel that this game is very successful and still growing, and they took the long-term path towards building this game up, which is wise, but also with its own flaws. Building up a bit of content for each gameplay type over time is going to make the game feel shallow to start. But a person just starting out into endgame now is going to be busy for quite a while to catch up. And there are those of us even at endgame still figuring out how best to manage our time with the groups we have. Not all of us agree that 'efficient' is 'fun'.

Anyways, just musing aloud. I've got a wide breath of interests when it comes to this game so endgame advancement is currently in the 'meh' in trade for Roleplaying things, even though I'm Raid Leader for my FC.

I think about going back to that game everyday too :P. 11 and 14 are both alluring.

Exactly.

By the way, two nights ago, I finally found a group of people who were at my point of progress in Turn 5.

Last night, we beat it.

This is why the insta-death spam is such a lazy design choice... it's not that the content was legitimately difficult, but it was incredibly difficult to learn because of how hard it is to find seven other people who've memorized as much of each fight as you have.

And because so many fights lean so heavily on multi-phase memorization, spending 10 hours training in a fight like Turn 5 does extremely little to make you a better player in any other part of the game.

I do agree with Filth that the only "true" non-scripted battles are PvP, but FFXIV just overdoes the scripting by removing the ability to improvise and by having very limited ways (usually just one) to mitigate certain insta-death mechanics.

Edited, Sep 9th 2014 4:43pm by Thayos

Edited, Sep 9th 2014 4:43pm by Thayos