Losing passion for MMO'sFollow

There's no down time between fights. That means no time for conversation like you would have in old school FFXI. What made FFXI great was the community, the community was built by those conversations and the slow paced battle system.

I'm constantly busy when I play this game. That's not good for a social recreational activity. It's why people golf instead of play football with their friends. Football is fun and all but when it's your normal leisure time and you want to socialize it's kind of restrictive.

I keep reading all these "Back in FFXI" posts... how about an "Back in EQ pre-POP" post?

- Boats, both games had them... and both were time spent waiting, for the boat to arrive, then depart, then take you to your destination. Also pray that you dont lag/dc because.. you will be left in the ocean, possibly dead.

- Slow (or no) mounts. You want to get to the other side of that zone? Walk, and try not to have every baddy in the zone still chasing you when you get there.

- Rare/Notorious Mobs that have a > 0.01% drop rate for the item wanted. "The King X spawns in this location every hour, but sometimes its just a ph (Placeholder).. so I'll kill the ph, and wait another hour" ... (an hour later) "Yay the King X spawned, now I can fight it for 2 seconds, and damn the item I need didnt drop".. (waits another hour)... Rinse repeat for 3 days or longer.

- Downtime/OOM Regen: Even if you were a 'mana battery' type class, if you were Out Of Mana.. that meant that you were vulnerable and not doing anything. You sat there for 5 minutes (along with your healer most likely) waiting until the group had enough power to continue farming or xp'ing. This is where 90% of my social interaction with people came in.

A lot has changed since 'the old days' for better and for worse. Noone is going to be 100% happy in any scenario, which was true back then too. In fact in many cases it was the exact opposite of all the things I listed. People wanted less travel, faster regen, access to mobs when they wanted/needed it (this is where instances came into play).

Yeah, I miss having a great group and farming/xp'ing with them for hours in whatever corner of the world, but I DO NOT MISS waiting 3 hours to get into or find that group.

Yes, I miss having to explore the world and learn where things were because EQ did not have maps, but I Do Not Miss having to wait for someone else to figure out the same paths that I took to get somewhere.

It's all subjective really, and it forces us, the MMO gamer to adapt to quality of life situations. Really the more time you spend here ******** about it, the less time you have to alter your viewpoint and start enjoying the game.

/thread.

Edited, Jan 27th 2014 1:16pm by Dyadem

Wish switching servers was easier... I that community feeling is what you want, then you would love my FC.

Having good people to play with is way more important than anything else for enjoying these games in the long run.

Every time I level up a job I do it differently. This time I've been doing some of the Leve Quests. Yes, Battle Leve Quests. The rewards are much closer to fate/dungeons post patch 2.1, and they are entertaining to do once or twice at least. The gear rewards are sometimes pretty sweet.

I've have NOT spent my time focusing on progressing 1-2 jobs. I focused my time having as much fun as possible, and stopping to help friends and have fun in groups as often as possible.

Different people get their gaming satisfaction from different activities. FFXIV just happens to cater to players who play exactly as I choose to. Horizontal all the way!! All the incentives are based upon diversification of activities.

Anyone stop to watch the cutscenes in the Beastman Quests? Hildebrand? The unique job missions? They are quality stories. I enjoyed them. Players that just skip all the cutscenes maybe just don't enjoy the wealth of content that FFXIV does have to offer. I've seen MMO that have a bit more cahracter than FFXIV, that's true. Players that skip the cutscenes in FFXIV probably feel as if the game has NO character at all. That is the drawback of allowing players to skip content. They will.

I'm all about more vertical progression options, bring it! Meanwhile I still have a ton of FF stories to see and enjoy, at least for now.

Aaaaaaaand sigged.

Thanks to all those who replied. I really enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts. Lots of great points have been made in this thread. Many pointed out the fact that MMO's of old and more modern MMO's each have their ups and downs. Certainly advancements have been made in several key areas, but at the same time things have been lost in others. In my personal case, I've just come to realize how important world immersion is to me, even for console games. If I am not absorbed in a story and do not feel a part of a world, then the game just loses all meaning. I play games to experience new worlds and to see life through the eyes of an assortment of characters. For me this is an incredibly special feeling when you can have such an emotional connection to something you know logically is not real, yet it manages to impact you just as strongly as if it were.

I really like one posters comment about the pace of battle in modern MMO's. Everything is happening at such a blistering pace, that there is no longer any time to chat with friends during battles....unless you are voice connected of course. In the days of FFXI experience parties, there was always plenty of time for chat between pulls and that made the parties so much more fun. Sure battle was a bit dull and repetitive, but for me it never felt that way. I think FFXIV would benefit from built in voice chat functionality. Then at least you would have the opportunity to chat with your fellow party members.

FFXIV definitely has potential and plenty of time for the developers to attempt to actualize that potential. I am going to step away from it for a bit and give it some more time to develop and see where the game goes. In the mean time, I am going to catch up on some console games as I anxiously await the arrival of Lightning Returns, which all of my Japanese friends seem to have loved. I know so many people hated FF13, but for me, based purely on story, it's the best since FF10.

Edited, Jan 28th 2014 2:20am by DrCapricious

Actually I completely agree with you Thayos about the voice chat. I was just thinking in terms of the style and speed of battles in FFXIV. Their design doesn't lend themselves to open communication via typing during during battles.

This doesn't concern the VOIP discussion but if this is true (which I also think it is) from a dev perspective you run into problems very quickly if you don't do certain things with your game.

The most important process to do is to identify the variables that go into a certain encounter and limit them to be manageable from a design standpoint. Then you design the encounter based on the remaining variables. The more unknowns you end up with the more likely it is that the community will identify and abuse said unknowns (making the content less challenging than intended).

This is most often solved by instancing (restricting the encounter/event to X players, in this case 4 or 8) and having a good sense of how strong the players going into the encounter are on average (ilvl requirements). Another practical solution for a designer is to limit the choices of the player and trying to be aware of how the players are going to make use of the available choices. A lot of freedom in the way skills are set up will put an enormous burden on the designer to identify the way the community will play a class and/or utilize that class in a group for any given encounter (leaving more room for unknowns to be abused). In the end ARR is quite rigid as far as the freedom to build your own class/job is concerned (there are little options to choosing your own abilities beyond switching classes).

Anyway the point is that as players want more challenging content they (mayhap some other group of players) want a) more freedom and b) open world content that challenges them. Sadly more freedom and an open world goes directly against the philosophy of challenging encounter design and the problems are hardly solved by just throwing more designers at the game to compensate for the massive amounts of variables that come up.

Easily abuseable open world content will just not do it in this day and age. Players will notice the lack of challenge.

You're not alone. I know I get tired of people demanding voice is required to do anything of possible difficulty within an MMO. It isn't. What that means is leaders need to do a better job in prepping their subordinates on tactics and exercise a little faith. Stuff like markers/calls/macros can basically do the rest when it comes to spot orders.

Got to admit, the mention of Voip breaking immersion makes me chuckle, when you can go to Mor'dhona and see several people riding behemoths, which are one of the most memorable monsters, and hearing voices that don't exactly match are the straws that breaks the camel back.

It was even less stressful than that. EXP until 50 was really linear. You start off needing 500 and it went up by 250 until you get to 2,000 (which is 7/8). Then it jumps lowers to an additional 200 until you reach 5,000 (22/23), and then it's simply an extra 100 until you get to level 50 when it starts the jump.



You play through a colorful UI, with flying numbers, and red DEATHZOMG areas that appear all the time.

If you think voice chat kills that immersion you never really had it.

I haven't really lost the passion to play MMO's, its more like I've lost the passion to spend all my time playing MMO's. Its to the point now for me where its just fun to log in for a few hours, do some quests/dungeons, have fun with my friends/FC, and blow some stuff up on my BLM.

I cannot agree with you more Laverda~!

As a hybrid RP type player myself, many little things (how some NPCs literally look at you as you walk by, how your pets respond to you, how the wind blow your hair to different direction, the hot steam coming out of the bathtub with the sunlight beaming through it in your house, etc...) really do help me feel immersed in this world.

Though even as casual and immersive RP focused as I am (if interested I have a post here describing my play approach, you can check it out via my signature below), I too have run into some challenges in keeping the same level of passion in playing FFXIV. Like one person mentioned here earlier, I understand why 2.0+ was designed the way it is based on the circumstances... while I am fully aware in the current stage FFXIV 2.0+ is not primarily designed to tailor to minorities like me, I do my best to keep me engaged in-game and continue to find ways to make things immersive and refreshing for me.

My recent play approach change:
http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/2990579/blog/812413/

At the end of the day... As a young working professional (like many of you here) who also happens to be a huge FF + traditional MMO fan, I want to make sure that my precious off-work time spent in Eorzea is well worth it~ Are there things that I hope Yoshi-P and teams did/will do differently to make the game more appealing to me? Absolutely~! But personally I prefer to focus on what I myself can do to adjust and adapt to get the most out of my play experience. And if one day I can no longer make it work, at least I know I'll be leaving Eorzea with a lot of fond memories, just like what I had with Vana'diel :3



Edited, Jan 28th 2014 2:28pm by YumieAC

Edited, Jan 28th 2014 2:29pm by YumieAC