FFXIV Online Community seems to be dying?Follow

Could be, I just know that in primetime, you couldn't go up there without seeing at least 2-3 linkshells still camping popsets. Certainly it wasn't like in the old days, where you'd find 4 groups camping Ulli spawn and a line to spawn Gods, but I think that had more to do with people getting what they wanted and being done than it did with the content becoming obsolete. It also probably had a lot to do with them massively easing the congestion in Sky by removing the ridiculous 8-16 hour windows on some of the NMs to spawn. Being able to farm Ulli pops and get 1 every hour or two certainly sped up the process and decreased the ridiculous amount of time linkshells needed to spend at certain camps.

That said, I still disagree that the content was obsolete, mainly because the gear itself wasn't obsolete. Pre-Abyssea, name me one piece of gear that could compete with Byakko's Haidate on the jobs that could use it. I certainly can't think of one. Same for Crimson cuisses, kirin's osode(situationally) and even some of the Neptunal Abjurations. Many of those were BiS for certain builds until Abyssea came through and smashed the notion of level 75 gear.

Edited, Jun 2nd 2014 1:52pm by BartelX

The differences between the way FFXI handled end game updates and the way FFXIV handles end game updates is the precise reason why we can say that.

The reasons why people say that FFXIV content is made obsolete is because the game follows a basic tiered vertical progression design, where new content and new equipment will seemingly always replace the old content and old equipment. The old content becomes both easy and unrewarding. If we're going to try and compare FFXIV's content obsolescence to FFXI's at all, the only thing I can say that is similar is that as long as the game follows the path it's currently on, we're going to see a lot more garrisons and a lot less sky in FFXIV.

Edited, Jun 2nd 2014 2:20pm by Susanoh

But don't you see that this is exactly what we're talking about? I want multiple avenues of content, so that people can pick and choose what they want to do. So basically, instead of being forced to do Coil for the best gear, how about giving 2-3 other options of content style to get the same gear in different ways?

We're going to have to agree to disagree on sky. I personally loved sky, and often volunteered to go up because I just liked the area a lot and once it wasn't as grindy, found it to be quite enjoyable building full popsets in a night's work. I don't think a lot of people stopped doing sky simply because ToAU came out. I think a lot stopped because it was another option for them to try, which just diluted the overall number of people that NEEDED to go to sky, and many people who had been doing it for years wanted to try out the new content. That said, sky still offered gear that stuff from ToAU couldn't even match in several situations, and was always bustling with people during primetime on my servers, so I can't fathom how it could have been considered obsolete at that time.

Also, I'd just like to point out that I'm definitely not trying to romanticize FFXI endgame. I know it for what it was... an endless grind before Abyssea, with gear coming in super small doses and super far apart. I'm not saying THAT is the right solution. I'm saying the idea of having many avenues of content is. There's a very distinct difference there.

What I dislike about XIV's endgame is just how vertical it is, and how "caged in" I felt. I didn't feel like I had options. It was pretty much a straight progression upwards, and as soon as you got past 1 hurdle, you just moved up to the next, as opposed to moving laterally to something similar, or even avoiding that aspect altogether in favor of something else equally as rewarding.


Edited, Jun 2nd 2014 2:37pm by BartelX

Totally agree on that. XIV needs more paths. I am hoping that comes with the expansion... That seems to be the logical time to expect those kinds of additions, and they can't come soon enough.

You and I must be talking about completely different things. I don't consider content that remains active with multiple linkshells farming it for years, that drops some nice and desirable rewards for years, and that has content that remains level appropriate for years, to be obsolete. If you do, then your definition of obsolete content is wildly different from mine, but more importantly than the definition of one word is the actual differences in game design. When people refer to FFXIV going obsolete, they (and myself) are most likely referring to the design choice to make new content tuned to a higher level (or "item level" in this case) and drop higher level rewards, which in effect makes older content both easier and unrewarding. Sky did not do this, and it didn't suffer the effects of content that does this either. As I and others have stated, we've seen first hand lots of participation years down the line, we know that it had appropriate rewards, and the difficulty remained about what you would expect from an end game FFXI event. When people talk about FFXIV content becoming obsolete too quickly and saying that they preferred FFXI design, these are the differences that they are referring to.

Also, compared to a horizontal progression system, having gear be viable for one year is quite a treadmill. If the game were to follow its current path, what we're going to see is a game where the newest content is difficult and restriced, and the content from the previous patch is quickly farmed. This really doesn't have that much of an effect right now. The effects can certainly be seen (edit: just for example, I get a queue time of at least 27 minutes on any job in crystal tower, in a cross server duty finder queue. This is, what, 5 months after release?), but a decent amount of the content in this game is still viable. As the game progresses though, we're going to see more and more content left behind in terms of progression. FFXI didn't build up to having a decent amount of content in a single patch. It did it over years and years. This is why players who liked easy going farming in the open world could go and do sky and sea, people who liked secluded "raid" like instances could do dynamis and limbus, etc. and all were relevant for progress. In a vertical progression game like FFXIV, years later we are very likely to be in the exact same situation we are in now. Players will be farming a patch that game out a few months ago, and trying to complete and obtain items from restricted content for 3-6 months until that becomes the new "farm" content and some new stuff comes out in a never ending cycle. Meanwhile, every time that new content comes out with higher equipment requirements and a higher tier of rewards, yet another level of viable end game content gets shaved off the bottom.

Edited, Jun 2nd 2014 3:19pm by Susanoh

There's a difference between "irrelevant" and "worth the time invested." We also did run {sky} up until I quit HNMs and endgame, but it was just a small aspect of what we were doing, and it became much more efficient since we only needed a party to handle almost the entire zone until we had the pop sets ready to go. It became much more worthwhile for us to farm other aspects of the game, especially as we acquired more Salvage gear and some of the old {sky} things became obsolete.

I'll agree that {sky} was still farmed up until Abyssea. It just wasn't where we spent 3-4 nights a week any more.

The FFXI development team has done a good job of finding ways to make irrelevant content more relevant again. A bulk of the content updates before I stopped playing seemed geared toward this (such as getting people to go back to Dynamis, Salvage, etc.). And, perhaps, the XIV development team will borrow this page from the playbook to keep the various zones of ARR relevant, as well.

As for gear, this is just a totally different game. It's true that endgame gear (unless it's upgradable, like the Zodiac Weapons) probably has a shelf life of about a year, which is different than the early days of XI. On the flipside, there is nothing in XIV that takes months or years to acquire... and the development team has made it pretty clear they have no interest in creating an endgame based on long-term grinding.

With that in mind, the question is: How to create multiple endgame paths in a vertical system that everyone can be happy with?

To be honest, I don't think the "treadmill" aspect of ARR is ever going to change. It's one of the game's key design principles, and it seems to be the trade off for not having such long, tedious grinds as the olden-day MMOs once did.

Edited, Jun 2nd 2014 1:35pm by Thayos

I think I came up with a pretty admirable solution to this. Give each "avenue" of endgame a different gear set that prioritizes different stats. Keep Coil drops as the "best of the best", but make other alternative content give out gear that might have different stat varieties, but offers different build options, such as a critical hit/critical magnifier build, a "haste" build, an attack damage build, A DoT build, a +healing% build, etc etc ad infinitum. With all of the relevant stats FFXIV has, they could easily incorporate gear sets that specifically tailor your character to however you really want it.

At the same time, if they made content that played to these specific sets, such as bosses that were weak/strong to criticals, number of attacks delivered in a specific time, or even had an ability response to certain things (lets say you build an entire healing+ set on whm, but if you heal for over a certain amount, it causes a mega-AoE)... this would allow players to custom build their sets to the content, but mix and match gear as well for what they like best or for the min/maxers, they could determine which set is best for EACH type of content. It allows those players to min/max to their hearts content, while allowing casual players many avenues to find gear that they like or that works for them.

Edited, Jun 2nd 2014 4:50pm by BartelX

Hmm, I'd say the solution to that is to make the gear upgradeable down the line when more content is released, or make the ability to add other stats to the gear through a secondary system.

I love how easy it is to play armchair developer! Clearly I must know better than them! Right! Right? ...right?

Edited, Jun 2nd 2014 5:22pm by BartelX

It's not so much "new junk into old content" as it is "new junk into old content that has been re-tuned to actually be hard again."

My team of 5-6 friends that still play XI had gotten spoiled by being able to do almost ANYTHING with our core group - or less. We don't need no stinkin alliance! Heck, we don't even need a full party for most things. Except... Ark Angel hard mode was actually, you know, friggin hard. We really did have to pull in six people to defeat AA Hume in hard mode because he is a *******.

Edited, Jun 2nd 2014 5:33pm by Catwho

I don't disagree, but anyone with experience in those 'olden-day' MMOs should understand why it would upset people in ARR.

It's been nearly 7 years since I obtained my Byakko's Haidate, yet if I reactivated and logged in today I could make them as valuable to me as they were the day I got them. Weeks, months or even years of grinding out gear in XI was rewarded by gear that has lasted the better part of a decade now.

People are unsure of how much mileage they will get for their grind in XIV so it's normal that they're not thrilled with the prospect of grinding out a piece that will possibly be converted to inventory -1 when 2.3 hits.