Weekly lock-out mechanisms: Coil vs CTFollow

I didn't go on my first CT run until maybe the 2nd or 3rd week after 2.1 hit. And while I've been lvl 50 for a while now, I finally did Coil turn 1 for the first time this past week. So both of these events are still fairly fresh and new to me, and I was thinking about the similarities and differences between them.

They were both clearly designed to be limited to one drop per week. CT enforces this directly through your ability to lot and receive loot. Meanwhile, Coil did this in an indirect manner by limiting participation. You can only get a drop when you clear the turn, and once you clear it you can't repeat it until the next week.

CT has felt far more accessible than Coil. And while DF (which you can use for CT but not yet for Coil) and difficulty (CT is much less difficult than Coil) play a part, I can't help but think it's the style of lock out being enforced that plays the biggest role in my perception of Coil being less accessible. Coil reminds me a lot of Assault and Nyzul in XI. I had plenty of friends on my server in XI that would have been willing to help me with all sorts of stuff. But when it came to Assault and Nyzul, their hands were tied because they had to save their Assault Tags for their scheduled statics. The same thing happens with Coil. If you have some friends who are in statics for Coil, they absolutely can't help you with Coil. Meanwhile, CT is completely different. Even if your friends have already gotten their weekly drop and capped their myth, they could still choose to do a CT run to help you fill out your party.

While SE has announced plans to lift the weekly lock-out from turns 1 through 5 once turns 6 through 9 are added, I'm guessing that they will still apply this weekly lock-out mechanism to turns 6 through 9. I wish they would pursue a lock-out that's more like CT's. And I definitely hope they don't use participation based lock-outs on other new content that gets added in the future.

Anyone else feel this way?

The lockouts have to be in place or everyone would already have full allagan. Unfortunatley this is the result of making content more accessible.

In ffxi there were some lockouts in the form of a 72 hour (in the case of enm 5 days) lockouts, but the events that locked you out gave you more than 2 pieces of gear per run. Sky didnt need a lockout because getting a kirin pop set together took some time, but we were able to farm it as much as we wanted.

Many people would say ffxi's way of doing things is arcaic, but ffxi didnt feel like whitegate was just a lobby for matchmaking. You actually had to go to the places you wanted to do an event and you got to see the world. All i do now is sit in uldah crafting while waiting for a duty pop. The only exploration i get is teleporting to wineport for coil.

I think they are afraid to make anything a time sink in this game, and i think thats just going to hurt overall. Im fine for being more casual friendly...but not everything needs to be "accessible". Im going to get flamed for saying this but i really dont care. End game shouldnt be for casual players. Myself and other people are being held back because casual players are just barely getting to coil now? We can blow through our weekly content in litterally 3 hours because some casual player doesnt have time to play? As bad as you guys may say that sounds, thats exactly why our endgame is the way it is, and is exactly why we have lockouts and will continue to see lockouts. When i played ffxi i couldnt do einherjar because i had to work on days my ls went but i didnt ***** about it. I dealt with my situation and played around it.

Is there a word for people who are good enough at the game to tackle hard content, and want to do endgame eventually, but take forever getting there because they love to stop and smell the flowers?

The Coil difficulty nerf has me kind of upset, to be honest. I didn't wait so long to do Coil because I'm undergeared or because I suck. I waited because I was having fun elsewhere doing dungeons with my friends. And now my "reward" for taking too long is that I won't get the actual challenge I want. The game is going to stick me in easymode. My first bout against Cad is one of the highlights of FFXIV for me. He kicked my *** through 20-something wipes before we got him. It felt fantastic to finally nab that win. Like a real game.

SE has to make everything some kind of a race, it seems like. "Here's new content! Get in there and gobble it up before we nerf it for the next one! :DDD"

It's frustrating.

Edited, Feb 2nd 2014 12:48pm by DarkswordDX

Well, you still have about 2 months if seeing it in pristine condition is your worry. I know I straddle that awkward line between casual and hardcore, myself, but I also feel like a lot of the allegedly difficult content in MMOs winds up being difficult for the wrong reasons...

I would rather they did not lower the difficulty as well.

There will still be a challenge though. And players participating at a slower pace will not be stuck at T4-T5 for weeks as I have been. They will have an easier time getting a T5 win so they can instead get stuck on 6-7-8 with the other semi-casual players. That's the stated intention, and it makes sense to me, despite my preference.

As the game get's further from release, these lockouts will hopefully become less cumbersome in regards to the overall progression options. I know the players that I have seen hit 50 post patch 2.1 have had a ton more gear options than we did at release. Looks like Patch 2.2 will be creating a similar situation.

They have said the buff can be removed if you don't want to use it. Of course then you have to persuade others to go that way.

And yet, one of the most common complaints about XIV from certain folks is that everything is just kind of handed to you. Either we have roadblocks with things that make us strive to overcome them, or we allow everyone to do everything all at once and they get burned out because they had the opportunity to do everything all at once and actually did it.

I don't think gated content is inherently a bad thing. What's wrong with having a goal in the game?

But isn't that a fundamental aspect of video games? To get to level 2, you have to first beat level 1? People who are getting frustrated with lack of success against Titan HM are likely to be even more frustrated with Coil. I've been in a couple of Caduceus runs that have struggled just as much as some of the DF Titan HM runs I've been in.

Going back to the original subject, at least Titan HM is a roadblock that you and your fellow FC members who are already doing Coil can go back and help members who are stuck on Titan HM as often as they are willing. It's one thing to have content that's locked until you complete other content. It's quite another to have content that's locked yet again after you complete it.

And will Coil somehow be a low lag event? At least there's a possibility to get carried through Titan by 7 other people if you can't function due to lag. Even if there were 7 players who were geared well enough and worked together well enough to carry someone through Coil, it's not going to happen right now because of the nature of Coil's lock out.


Motivation aside, at least it's possible to for people to back and do Titan HM over again to help others. That's not even a possibility with Coil's current weekly participation lock out.

The best way to avoid this discussion is to stop bringing it up!

Titan is a very difficult fight for eight people to get through without any mistakes. For some though, yes, the roadblock is lag.

Most of us picked it back up the next day and tried again, actually.

XI had massive roadblocks, too. Airship 6-4 was an infamous fight in XI before the CoP difficulty nerf. People leveled up jobs specifically to get passed it (I leveled BLM to 60 for my static) and it took some people 20+ tries to beat. No airship win? No {sea} for you/

I'm sorry Nash, don't take this the wrong way, but I think you are blowing the whole "Titan is a roadblock" thing way out of proportion.

I obviously don't have any actual SE census numbers to back this up, but I would be willing to bet that if SE were to take a census of players who are level 50, the majority of them would have beaten Titan and have access to at least one relic weapon. Then also take into consideration that many people have multiple classes at 50 and have cleared Titan more than once for those characters. The result is that the roadblock is not nearly as bad as it seems - the majority of people have gotten through the "roadblock" and in some cases, more than once. Yes some people have lag issues with it, but you can't have bad lag on each Titan attempt, all the time, and not experience lag in other encounters as well (in this discussion BC Turns).

Titan HM is a bit unforgiving in regards to making a mistake, sure, agreed. However, as I have said before (we have also covered this over on our FC forums...) even if four people are still standing after the heart phase and know the fight well enough - and even if those four people are two tanks and two healers (the lowest possible DPS combination for four remaining members) - you could still pull out the win. It's really not that bad.

I can't wait to hear your thoughts on Titan EX!



In regards to your Edit which came out during the writing of my post... If you now lower it to less than 15% then it is definitely not a roadblock. A challenging fight, sure, but not a roadblock. If this game didn't have any challenging fights many people wouldn't play it... maybe even more people would quit than those who can't get past a more difficult encounter.

Edited, Feb 5th 2014 3:28pm by Canadensis

I see what you are saying, but don't necessarily agree with all of it. Reducing difficulty after the fact to let more people through - I am fine with that.

I have bolded your two points in the quote. If a lock out only locks out 2% of people do they really need to make it easier down the line? If 98% of people get past, could it really be that hard?

How easy must a lock out be made until all 100% of people can beat it? How easy can you make something before you are basically just handing out the win? There can never be a 100% clear rate on something...