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

People have different goals and desires. Even when you share some they are not always aligned to be done at the same time schedule. It's like graduating from school. In that bubble of pre-graduation. You feel you might be a life long friend with someone. Sometimes that remains to be true but other times people move on. You can still be friends even if your goals do not align, but might spend less time together.

I feel Free Companies is about aligned goals with possible friendships, friendships are friendships with or without aligned goals, and linkshells are an in game forum whose purpose is not set in stone. When free companies don't serve their primary purpose. It's time to move on.

I would like to see a fluctuating percentage bonding stat track system for all three social systems. You click on their name in list to display info on how you bond.
1. How often you speak(type)
2.How often you group up for content
3.Activity focus(Shows what you spend the most time doing)

Fred:
Current focus Raids
Conversation 92%
Grouped up with Dungeons 44% Fates 20%(list of activities you grouped with this person)
Fates 49% Treasure hunts 12% (list all activities adding up to 100%)

That way you have a visible gauge of what kind of relationship this person offers to you.

A linkshell should do what it's name implies. It links linkshells channels already. It needs a simple party finder feature.
1.I choose a focus
2.It links other people with the same focus
3.We do content together

We have situations like that. Every free Company does.

What we try to do to keep things active (and, let's be honest, we're not always active. RL situations come up. Burnout does happen, like with this last Haitus.) is that we keep a schedule. Regular raid nights, regular RP nights. We mix the RP nights and have an open Raid night to keep things new, but at the same time give people a reason to regularly come back in a dependable manner.

Right now, we're reworking our raiding so that our core group of 8 actually works with the larger FC to get them their stuff done as well, and thanks to this new alliance we may have a dependable 16 rather than just a core 8, so even while the more hardcore group works, there can be some additional casual raiding going on, if that's what they want to do.


(( A good note as to helping your FC's specific problems is to start recruiting again. Just because you have a solid group of FFXI friends should not mean you stop looking for more. New blood is new life and new perspectives. Our FC is picky in recruitment, but recruitment is never really closed.))




And see, that's the quintessential difference between our perception and experiences: It's not a matter of what I can achieve alone. It's about what I choose to achieve with others.

I don't play for just my personal goals. I play for those of others as well. If I played with that method, I'd be past Coil 9 instead of hanging around just past Twintania.

For me, having the best loot does nothing if me and my seven buddies just sit on it. That's one of my major frustrations with the lock-out system in Second Coil - our FC would have been there already by now if it wasn't for the fact that we, collectively as a group, and as individuals, don't like the fact that 8 of us are going to be there and unable to help the others until much later. Which is why, when we do go in there with our core group, it's mainly for training to get the other groups through it.

That's how we see things.

It's not easy. It takes work and people who view the game not just as it's baseline game, but as a social platform as well. And it's a constant balancing act that doesn't work all the time.

That said, I encourage other FCs to follow our example: Make your FC a more social outlet. For us, it's easier because we're a roleplaying community. But there is much in actual gameplay we miss because we roleplay, and something as simple as a round table night were your avatars are sitting in table hall while you drink and chat on mumble/game brings a good use for the FC house setting.

It's worth the work - it changes the whole life of the game, and how you view it. If you're having difficulty enjoying the game and want to embrace it more, find those who are still enamored with the game and hang out with them. Their passion is infectious. And, in my view their goals, no matter how pointless they may seem to the bottom line of progression, really do add a new spark of life to the idea of adventuring.

Honestly, the game is just a pastime anyways, what do you really have to lose?


Edited, Aug 29th 2014 2:51pm by Hyrist

Doinitrite. I'm not really into the roleplay thing myself, but I understand that there are people who want to do that and I don't judge.


I didn't see any of that. I'm not saying it didn't exist, but forcing people to socialize... I mean, it's a multi-player online game. It's not like people didn't know what they were in for. I can't tell if you're pointing to that as a cause, but it's not really worth mentioning. Kinda goes without saying that you'll have to interact with other people.

XI is revered as having one of the best communities in any MMO. The majority will point to forced grouping as the reason, yet it seems you're almost blaming it here. /shrug



I can't get into XIV, but it was incredibly easy to get back into XI. Assuming you can shake the nostalgia for the glory days, that is.

There's something to be said for monthly updates and lots of quality of life and UI changes. Since the beginning of the year there's only been one update that didn't have something I was looking forward to. It also doesn't demand the same amount of time it did a decade ago. Dynamis is still the longest event that I can think of, but it's 2 hours whenever you feel like doing it. It's not progression type content either where you feel like you're behind the crowd if you miss a day.

There is some new content that's gear check, but it doesn't take long to grind out what you need to get it going. It's not like XIV where you need x amount of something for an upgrade, but you're capped so it takes weeks to get. It's still got tons of content and older content is quickly being overhauled to keep current capped players busy. Even if I played as much as I used to(minimum 3 hours just about every day, 6-8 on weekends), I would probably still have more than enough to keep me busy.

Wait, so THF is being added to the game after all?

I thought it was called assassin or something?

Back in reply to Filth.

The claims that FFXI was highly acclaimed to it's community... honestly is a mixed bag.

What happened, in my view, is that the stabilization of the game, the way it was created, created such a narrow niche of feasible playstyles that only players that primarily agreed with the accepted trends, or were capable, somehow, of find a group that commiserated with them, could find a home. The rest were pretty much harassed, shamed, or frustrated out of the game entirely.

Keep in mind that it also was still one of the earlier MMO adapters after Everquest, so the market for MMOs was still rather niche in and of itself - pitting FFXI players more along the lines of a fringe than a niche.

So if you didn't agree with the ideals of the Niche, the community itself made you feel rather unwelcome, and some of the surviving communities themselves, honestly, were rather horrid, particularly in endgame. Back then I used to also participate in forum based role-playing, where one of my RP associates openly bragged on how they used claim bots to dominate land kings and, when they finally got bored of monopolizing it, sold the program to the RMT companies. There was no shame in cheating or treating one another like dirt - there were just fewer people overall to have such experiences with. This is sited pretty clearly by the whole salvage debacle - in which a zero-faith and communication situation in the game developers topped with entitlement lead to an underground of people abusing the duplication glitch rather than reporting it. The result of over 500 people suspended or banned - let alone in the community fallout within itself.

Now, that's not paying justice to the gems out there. Anerio and FusionX and their respective Podcast crews, all of WeSH, and those who spent the time really caring about the community and building it up. I did meet a lot of good people. But I can't acclaim the game's difficulty as a good thing because a community formed around it. On the same grounds, I'd call FFXIV's 1.0 community a good community based purely off of my positive experiences. However, that does not mean the game itself wasn't in a horrible state or there wasn't people being abusive or cheating either - I just didn't encounter them in FFXIV in the saturation I did in FFXI. I pretty much had to swear off the FFXI endgame communities, due to the number of bad experiences I had there.

So between my personal experiences, and the more public issues that pitted FFXI's players in bad light, no, I can't agree with the notion that FFXI's community was any better or worse. Just smaller, and more niche. When you have a smaller niche like that, you're bound to get people that agree more often - but that doesn't make the community itself better.

The social problems FFXIV has verses FFXI, in my view, stems from the wider opinion base of its audience and the unwillingness from some of the players to community build. Which is sad, cause the RP community in the game is really good, and does put forth the effort to community build (we have a website for it with a character wiki, LS list, and forum listing events, etc and they encourage people to go there to connect in roleplaying, in the game. It's fairly impressive.) FFXI had sites like Zam and KI, and BG much in a similar fashion, but these days in FFXIV, there doesn't seem to be many people encouraging one another to go to these community sites. And I feel that's a bigger problem with the community than the game mechanics appealing to a more casual playstyle.

But these are my opinions. They stand on their own and they may or may not be popular opinion. All I know is that my personal experiences here in FFXIV so far trump those in my near-decade tenure in FFXI. Considering the vast differences in playstyle and community types that FFXI and FFXIV have, I don't doubt many FFXI players don't feel as comfortable or enjoy it as much. I can understand, but I can't agree. Thus I try to encourage people to work through the problems with the same patience they worked through the problems they had in FFXI.

The difficulty here is less in the mechanics and more in the social aspects. It's less about gritting your teeth against even the smallest monsters outside in the field and more about offering your hand in friendship to one another and helping them out where they are having difficulty, even though you passed it with ease.


Anyways, that's quite a long post form someone who's supposed to be out enjoying his birthday. I hope you guys have a great labor day.

For me... I think it's time for some carrot cake.

I would just point out that there are one-shot mechanics in nearly every other game. Most of them have several bosses with this ability and some bosses with several of them.

Hate the player, not the game. It's only an issue because there are players who aren't able to execute properly who think they should be clearing this content. I agree that there is poor game design involved, but the source of that is allowing players who aren't skilled enough to enter the content at all. SE is trying to marry casual and hardcore and it's never going to work.

The difference is the rapid rate of insta-death mechanics in some FFXIV battles completely nullify player skill. Instead, winning is simply a matter of memorization... it's like playing an old-school video game, where getting through each level simply means memorizing the layout of the map and the order of enemies.

I think your right in that battle design that leans so heavily on insta-death moves will never bridge the gap between casual and hardcore... which is why I'm hopeful SE tones back the insta-death moves in future content and gets more creative with battle design. Battles can be hard without turning them into do-or-die dances.

It's not any different. In most games, at a certain time or when a certain condition is met, the spell or ability is cast. Sometimes it's randomly and sometimes there are conditions, but it's not any more prevalent in XIV than it is in other games. If you think it is, you never played other games at endgame.

I don't really have anything to say about memorization. Most other games vary the content enough that you can't force things to spawn in exact areas in terms of the map. The only thing I can think of close to this is where a player is debuffed and after a certain amount of time, they drop an AoE that will damage the raid. It is possible to mark a spot on the map where it needs to be dropped, but it's always random who receives the debuff. You still need people to execute.XIV is a bit of a special case with the issues due to server latency, but the mechanic of 'execute or be executed' will always be in games.

The only other mechanics I've seen that punish for failure are bosses that are DPS race to kill and if you don't kill it in time, the boss leaves or that keeps you from fighting another boss. I'm not sure if you ever did weapons in dynamis for relics, but these mobs would grow bored and warp away if you didn't kill them fast enough. They don't come back so you're basically screwed. Imagine if you only got 1 attempt on Titan every 3 days... Is the punishment of getting ported back to a fresh instance to try again almost immediately(and repeatedly) really that bad?

I don't really see any other way to punish players for failure that aren't worse than the current iteration.

WoW did it right, with variable difficulties. If FFXIV had something similar, you'd have Coil Normal, Coil Hard, and Coil Extreme, where Normal wasn't necessarily one-shot by every mechanic, while Coil Hard would be Coil right now, but nerfed maybe just slightly (10% or so). Then Coil Extreme is what you have right now.

In WoW, you have LFR (easymode, but still get to see the sights and get a little taste of what epic gear feels like), Normal (you probably want a guild for this, but if you get lucky you can do it on a PUG or after a new tier is released) and Heroic (the End-Endgame).

This is what FFXIV is missing -- there's no Raid options for the Rest Of Us. There's Hardcore or...... don't do it at all. Raiding as a mechanic might be fun, but sadly most of us will never see it because it is just too ridiculous with all the one-shot mechanics. Your average player just can't do that. Your average player doesn't have 40+ hours per week to devote to learning all of these complex fights to do them flawlessly.



Ain't always the player's fault. One burst of lag and a healer goes down? Enjoy your wipe. Was it the healer's fault? No! Internet hiccups happen all the time. Hell, my Power Company IRL has these f---ing annoying 2-3 second outages at least a couple times a week. What about lockups, or framerate drops? Boss powers up a MEGAINSTASUPERDEATH move and my FPS drops to 15 for 2 seconds and causes me to get hit with said move.....guess what? Hope everybody else likes wiping. Oh wait, I'm going to get called a "noob" and a "scrub" because of something I had no control over.



And just how do you prevent players who "aren't skilled enough" to enter the content from trying to do it? Add more attunements and more sky-high walls that very few people can ever hope to pass? Just what is the point of designing content that only 1% of the playerbase ever gets to see?

Ask Blizzard that question; they did this in Vanilla WoW with Naxxramas. They brought Naxxramas back during Wrath of the Lich King because quite frankly, they spent a LOT of development time on something less than 1% of the playerbase ever got to see. It is a ridiculous waste of development time and manpower to make content that hardly anybody ever sees.

That's why they need to make 2 versions of all of this stuff. Tone one of them down and slap some sort of "easy" label on it so people get to enjoy the storyline and get some mildly decent gear out of it. Let the hardcores have their "one wrong move and everybody dies" stuff they seem to love so much (though I honestly can't understand why).

Not all games rely on one-hit KO mechanics for the vast majority of their difficulty like XIV does. I played endgame SWTOR up through the first 4 raids (nightmare), and there were very few one-hit KO mechanics. Most of the mechanics required killing waves of adds in time, or matching DPS between 2 different boss mobs, or removing stacks of nasty stuff in a timely manner, or stunning hard hitting moves that were often spammed, or avoiding ground crap, or solving puzzle bosses. I can't remember more than a handful of times where one-hit KOs caused wipes. It was usually the combination of several to many mechanics concurrently that caused the issues, which makes a heck of a lot more sense to me.

The same was true of LOTRO when I played in endgame. Yes, there were a few one-hit KO mechanics, but for the most part it was stuff that built up over time that killed you, or standing in stupid stuff, or just not being able to match the overall damage output and being slowly wittled down.

So no, all games don't rely on one-hit KO mechanics as prominently as XIV does. Even XI, which certainly had one-hit mechanics on HNMs, didn't have nearly the quantity that XIV does. Heck,even some of those moves... like fulmination or Gates of Hades could still be recovered from if the support were quick enough with heals and dispels. And that game has 10+ years of content compared to 1 year.

I agree with having multiple difficulty tiers. Have a story mode coil for casuals who just want to have fun and beat things at their own pace without constant 1-hit KOs. Keep normal and insanity mode as they are. Even with echo buff people still hit a wall at t5 coil and titan HM, so why not give a more forgiving version of the event simply for progression but with lesser drops? Will it offend hardcore players who "did it the hard way"? Probably. But honestly, I'd rather have a game that ticks off the top 1-5% if it means the rest of the playerbase doesn't have to bash their head against the wall. There are people on this board who have been gaming their entire lives who can't get past these hurdles. That just doesn't seem like good game design to me.

Edited, Sep 2nd 2014 9:06am by BartelX

I agree and your comparison to old school games earlier is real good.. Pacman you had to memorize the patterns pretty much and you could play forever.

I am not sure this type of thing is good for casual players.. I work very hard all day and work overtime pretty much every day now... When I joined FFXIV I was playing FFXI and looking for a game that required less time. My problem is I really dont want to come home burned out and memorize patterns. I dont want to spend hours watching videos to learn patterns because my brain is already dead from work.. I play MMO's to escape period.. The dodge mechanics are being relied on too much in this game.. The bosses are starting to run together and all feel the same. The game just needs something different and I am not sure SE gets that.. This was fun for a while and was clearly different from anything in FFXI.. The quotes on the new expansion in the live letter leads me to believe they dont get that..

You know there is so much that is better in this game than FFXI too... I would hate to go back to that style of crafting, I hated it.. Dungeons are cool they just need to change them up some...

I am in the same boat as Thaos, I am not casual but I am not hardcore either. I want to beat this hard content but dont want to have to be on every single day.
Someone said earlier this game does not favor the person that has a foot in both sides and I agree...


-------------------------
Sorry been out of town for a few days so addressing something earlier in the thread.

As far as FC goes I left mine a few weeks ago and have not had one since. I have had lots of offers, actually so many it gets annoying.. Thinking of joining one just to stop the invites..

Anyway when I left mine someone said not to leave.. He basically said FC and LS have switched and FC are the social thing and if you want to get stuff done have a static and use a ls instead.

I think for me I want to do this stuff with a FC and my friends. since you spend more time in a FC they start to feel like friends and that is who I would prefer to do this content with...







Edited, Sep 2nd 2014 10:01am by Nashred