Gil and 2.1Follow

This is the point really, I'm not to big on crafting/gathering, but a few weeks before 2.1 I started leveling mining and had plans to also level botany in hopes that with housing people would be crafting/buying up furniture and that I would hopefully be able to make money off the raw materials, at this point I've pretty much given up on that.

I still feel like SE is still just playing catch up from all the problems they had at launch. Yeah they released new stuff to do in this patch, but for me, it feels like they didn't really release any "new' stuff to get. The new 4 mans don't give any new gear, CT should have been released before BC, and housing is unattainable for another 3 months for almost everyone but the few people who have the time to farm gold. Spin it how you want to but its true. I guess to me it just seems odd to release a patch with out a new tier of gear at the same time, as in raising the ilvl. Which is why I feel like they just did things *** backwards and now they are trying to play catch up.

After the patch I honestly considered quitting for awhile (and believe me I really really like this game) cause, for someone like me who has limited play time (as in really only enough time to focus on one class), its like really all they did was give you more options on how you want to cap your myth for the week. I'm really surprised that a lot of the more "hardcore" players haven't left, cause I would think that those people who were already clearing BC with no real need for myth gear anymore pretty much got nothing out of this patch besides continuing to run BC and gearing out other classes. It is all about fun though, or at least it should be, which is why I haven't left, cause I'm still having fun, but they really better pull something out of their *** for 2.2.

I'll also mirror that "should've been in at launch" sentiment, which is obviously true for some things like CT. Were I to break down the game's current status into categories of perceived completion and thus free to be expanded upon in later patches, it'd probably look something like the following...

Dungeons: 95%
The miss 95% pretty much resides in the blunders of loot distribution and misleading ilvl requirements. As has been said, Pharos really should've had better than old AK gear.

Raids: 75%
I suspect people would want one more right now for the sake of some diversity, but I chop off points more for access restrictions. BC should technically have CT's system of access and gear locks. CT should be more like a dungeon with respect to access and loot rights. I've said it before, but it would help immensely in motivating me to level alternate jobs.

Crafting: 85%
Housing hullabaloo aside, the big problem here is crafting's endgame applications. Dungeon/Raid gear being better, "cheaper", and usually not being too hard to get hurts. A part of me also wants to knock off points for how easy it is to HQ the current endgame goods, as it basically kills any profitability in NQs or the drive for non-50-masters to even try making them.

Open World: 70%
I've said it numerous other threads, but we need an endgame zone or three to give people a worthwhile place to hang out and do stuff like EXPing chocobos, participating in difficult FATEs, SBing higher end gear, farming potentially exclusive mats, and basically just being challenged when they're not queuing. Dailies will never be good enough for this kind of thing and one may as well call Treasure Maps dailies, too. There's just so much wasted potential because doing this right can fuel crafting, too. It also gives those who dislike dungeons or raiding something to strive for.

PvP: 40%
We can beat people up in a specified area. That's about all the good it has going for it. More objectives need to be added and gear really needs to be divorced from performance. Pre-mades should ultimately be matched with other pre-mades before getting thrown at the PUG pool, too. This'll never be my thing, but I can understand wanting it better for those who do enjoy it in a more civil manner.

Housing: 50%
Prices. Benefits. Economic impact. Done to death here and in other threads.

Classes/Jobs: 60%
I'm scoring this one deliberately low because we've heard nothing about any additions here. Allegedly new classes/jobs will come with updates and not just expansions. We have only one class with 2 jobs. Broadening this scope can have an economic and participatory impact in various content as people strive to gear and master new things. Balance is still be a thing for existing classes, too.

Monsters: 60%
If I'm being honest, the world needs some more variety and upped densities. For the most part, we do have a lot of climates addressed, but there's still room to grow there, obviously.

Post-50 EXP: 0%
Basically, EXP needs a purpose when we're level capped. Improve upon XI's merit system. Yoink Rift's planar attunement. Draw inspiration from Diablo 3's Paragon 2.0. I don't care, really, but when you're either not getting gear or have no more gear to get for a class, it's hard to feel like it's growing. This alone can also goad people into various other endgame activities, existing now or in the future.


Overall, it may sound like a lot, and maybe even a bit harsh at times with the implication of how incomplete the game may be at present, but it's all stuff I do feel can be addressed. Some just require the courage to buck some MMO norms or not be so deathly afraid of RMT.

/sigh

I'm not going to bother quoting, I'm just going to explain this once, and those among that still want to blame housing for everything from the economy failing to touching you inappropriately in the tree house that one time when you were nine, can go right ahead still be wrong.

The real reason the economy is failing is because crafting has no use. More and more people are finally getting clued in to that, but it's something I've been saying since about two weeks after launch. Nothing that can be crafted is better than easily obtained DL and end game drops. There are a few items that are somewhat on par with some DL pieces, but they require tome items, and even with the number of tomes dropped in the update, still take more tomes than it would to just get the DL item. Even though the cost of food and meds are fairly low, most people don't use them because you can get along fine without them. The bonuses are just too small to be worthwhile. Low level gear is also easily obtained via quests, so there really isn't much that anyone really needs to buy.

It doesn't help that there is no limit on the ability to learn all crafts. As more and more people level crafts, they have no reason to bother with the market board to get their mats. The only thing keeping the economy going early on was a combination of player ignorance (buying things they didn't know the could get in other ways) and the initial burst of crafting, when people had to rely on each other for mats. That time has passed.

The economy in this game was always going to crash, and was in the early staging of doing so over the last month or so before the update. If you had been paying attention at all, you would have noticed that prices of everything had been steadily falling. All housing did was speed up the process. Lowering the price of housing to make it more affordable to the masses will stave off the collapse, but the it's a temporary fix. Once the housing bubble pops, we'll be right back where we are now, with no reason to buy anything from someone else.

So please, instead of crying about housing costing too much, how about you start ******** about the horrific flaws in the basic economic model of the game. If things keep going the way they are now, SE might as well just remove gil from the game because it won't have any use.

I brought up this point quite a long time ago. As with almost any other issue I bring up that I foresee as being a problem, it was dismissed as 'negativity'. I'm still trying to piece together a tactful way to say "Your economy... it's going to fall the **** apart"

Gear is just handed to you, yet every pug and DF group I join has under geared players everywhere. If it was that easy to obtain, everyone would be running around in ilvl85-90 gear. Myth stuff and DL, I agree is no work at all to obtain, Extreme and Coil gear requires some effort. If those last two didn't, you'd have everyone running around in Allagan and Extreme Primal Accessories which simply isn't the case. Sure you can argue you may have had some bad luck with Coil in terms of drops, but if you've been completing 1-4 since Sept.Oct, you'd at least have one piece to show for it.

Hell, even running CT, 90% of the players there are in Primal Weapons (hard) and DL or AF. Very few of them actually have any Allagan pieces going for them. If you have a static group that's organized, then good for you, stuff is relatively easy to accomplish. If you're like me and PUG Coil every week, I can assure the majority of players have a hard time with it. I get it done every week, but unless I replace a static member for their run, it rarely goes well. Some weeks I end up joining well over 10-15 groups just to get Turn 4 done.

I can almost guarantee if I start searching player names of people here and on the official forums who complain that the game is easy mode, I will find most are under geared with the basic DL and Relic they probably got from a Titan carry. Unfortunately, Garuda Extreme and Titan Extreme can follow a similar pattern as we've ended up carrying some horrible players through them. Ifrit Extreme I'm not entirely sure as I've only won once so far, but pretty sure at least 1 dps could die and not matter.

Professions in WoW all have something that makes them profitable because there is a demand. You can sell an item that is in demand, or you can alter or enchant an item that someone already has and/or you can create items that players use in large quantities. You always have one of these avenues that you can use to gain profit on top of the bonuses they provide you personally.

The only reason that market thrives is because of dependency. If you are a Blacksmith/Jewelcrafter for example, you rely on miners to provide you with ore to prospect for JC. You also rely on them to create ingots you may need for BS. The same was true in FFXI. As a bonecrafter, you still might need to rely on goldsmith or blacksmith for ingots, leatherworkers to provide crafted goods I needed to use in my own recipes... so on.

Unless SE adds the ability to specialize, you'll probably never have the type of market that allows players to profit from their efforts. The economy will just be an allowance that the devs decided you should be granted by participating in x events over the course of y weeks. {No, thanks.}

I could do with a band-aid until they fix the underlying problem.

The housing didn't "speed up the process". It caused the economy to tank overnight pretty much. The economy, although somewhat anemic pre-patch, was still in working order and many of the items involved, from raw materials to finished products, actually had very stable pricing. I know because I sold everything from raw mats and crystals, to gear and materia. The only stuff that was considerably declining was the endgame items, because the supply of them kept growing as people hit 50 and farmed tomes and t3/4 materia. I sold mats at the same price for weeks at a time, with only slight increases or decreases if the market got overflooded on something, in which case I just switched to a different mat for a week until it calmed back down.

I'm not arguing that the economy was in great shape pre-patch, what I'm arguing is that it completely bombed the moment that housing was announced. The reason is, not only are far more players saving money for housing now, but at the same time far more players are trying to sell everything they can to MAKE said money. So no one is spending a lot, and everyone is listing a lot. It's really pretty obvious what the result is in that situation, which is exactly what we are seeing. The economy has completely tanked, and there are almost zero viable markets left where there were many before the patch.

I get your whole point of view, that the economy was always inevitably doomed, I just don't agree with you. Certain areas of the economy were sure to stagnate eventually (tome mats and materia being the biggest for reasons already mentioned), but many others were very healthy and doing just fine with no foreseeable reason for that to change pre-patch. Like I said, I had my hand in quite a variety of stuff, so I can say that from first hand experience selling stuff on an every day basis.

Regardless, who cares if it's a symptom as you seem to think or the problem as I do, the pricing is still bogus and bickering over the semantics of that doesn't change anything.

When people say something happens "overnight," they're often not speaking literally. Rather, they're addressing the speed of how quickly something happened in relation to the speed of events before a certain point. For instance, when considering the age of the earth, mankind sprang up overnight. Clearly, mankind didn't spring up during an eight-hour window.

So you were mocking me for a comment you didn't even grasp. As Thayos said, I wasn't literally saying overnight. It's a pretty common expression you see. "This town sprung up overnight. His campaign took off overnight." Do you get it now?

Since we're playing the literal game, it's funny how the patch came out December 17th and apparently then to now is "nearly a month" and a "quarter of it's total life cycle" according to you. Last I checked, less than 20 days isn't nearly a month. It's also not even close to 1/4 of the game's life cycle. So next time you want to "mock" someone for foolishness, at least have your facts straight.

I'm going to leave the argument, as it's clear you're just going to be insulting from this point on and I'm honestly bored of arguing with you.

Edited, Jan 5th 2014 11:33pm by BartelX

I think another issue in this game is that there's too much supply and too many suppliers.

There are really only a few bottleneck items in this game, and they are farmed off mobs that respawn within minutes (eg apkallu eggs, wool, etc.) They made an abysmal drop rate on those items with no means of boosting it, but the result is generally that the crafters ignored those items and just focus on things that are easier to obtain. I hit flax on Weaver tonight, and rather than buy off the AH I just spent an hour grabbing five stacks for myself and a stack of HQ to stick on the AH. That's a sale someone else on the AH didn't make (or many of them), and another person undercutting the goods.

Crafts are the fastest jobs to level in the game, so anyone is able to quickly crank a job to 50 and then pour more items into the market... and so on.

I wish they'd have used the abjuration system they had in XI for gear in XIV, at least for top tier items. You need the rare drop AND the crafted item that matches it, and an NPC transforms it for you into a wearable item.

I wish I was able to turn in HQ goods to build a house instead of paying in gil. I'd have a chance of getting it a lot faster.

All of my characters in WoW had professions centered around other things(read: things other than crafting) with the exception of one. I had two characters strictly for PvP, another two strictly for PvE and the exception was the second paladin I leveled up. My reasoning for leveling another was because I enjoyed it so much the first time, but it turns out paladin and druid have travel perks that make them exceptional farmers. You have the freedom to pick whatever profession you like because they're all viable for perks and income.



I remember JC/BS being common, but I think that was mostly people who were all about min/max. For some reason you could squeeze out an extra 20 of whatever stat you were using your JC perk for, but they normalized it all. Now you get a buff to the main stat for your class and the amount is the same across all professions. This is how both of my PvE characters ended up, but the second I leveled up with mining and then switched.

You don't need gold or a guild's support, all you need is a plan. I made an over-estimate of the materials I would need for both crafts, farmed all of the ores I would need to cap JC and smelted all of the ores into ingots I would need for BS. It took a bit longer to level, but I think it would actually be pretty even if you tried to do it now though. IIRC they added experience to the gathering professions.

Edited, Jan 6th 2014 1:29am by FilthMcNasty