The long waits for updatesFollow

at some point in the last couple years, 3-4 months apparently became a long time between updates. Although they should have changed dungeon exp by now. Other than that, i don't have any issue with their schedule as it is.

I can't imagine at this point that EVERYONE has easily cleared coil. I'm still having fun varying my activities, leveling other jobs, crafting, gathering, Garuda farming, Titan farming. Helping random shouters on Prae, CM, tanking lower level dungeons for people, the list goes on and on.

If you really have nothing to do, take a little break, play some other games. I don't know what else to tell ya, but if you're the type that's gone through ALL this content, it won't matter what they release. You'll go through it in a week or two and complain. The only reason people didn't blast through FFXI was because the drop rates on most things were so abysmal, along with acquiring pop sets that **** took forever to accomplish.

Nah.

The RMT situation really has extremely little impact on most players. This game was designed so you can progress very easily without needing to buy from other players. Its not like FFXI. They need to fix that stuff, but not at the expense of more content. Shouldn't have too many cooks in the kitchen, either.

Might be a bit of a stretch delaying this patch till the end of December. The endgame community is growing very impatient from what I'm observing (FC members dropping off face of Eorzea because nothing to do) and it is barely the middle of November. I've kept myself occupied with multiple classes...but I can't actually do anything on those classes due to mythology cap.

I suppose people will take a one month break and come back when CT hits. Sure doesn't help, though, if you're trying to kill a dragon and people keep leaving.

This is the biggest issue right now. Coil being only 5 turns (4 bosses) I could deal with easily if the game were designed around actually allowing you to gear up in Coil in order to prepare for future events. The cap destroys the entire purpose of having all classes on one job when you can only realistically gear up one job at the moment. If the cap were job based there wouldn't even be that much of an issue with having a cap in the first place.

Or I'd even gladly take the ability to do Coil more than once a week even if you could only get gear once if only so that I could run with a different group of people *OR* actually do something else than tank if someone needed me to.

It's a really poor stalling technique that works in something like WoW or Rift due to having alts, but not in FFXIV.



Except that it's poorly thought out. You're *never* going to stop the top 1%. They get around it now by creating multiple characters and getting *those* geared so they can actually swap if something's needed on the fly. As of right now that's not as easily done with someone having only the one character unless you get extremely 'lucky' with coil drops that no one else in the group could use.

Much like the mailbox excuse it's punishing the majority because of the minority. I'm not going to gear up all jobs anytime soon (I only have 2 at 50 anyway), but the option to actually gear up another job with the highest current level gear would have been nice to have.

Edited, Nov 11th 2013 5:40pm by Viertel

Edited, Nov 11th 2013 5:41pm by Viertel

i also sit in the "happy with gated myths" side of the room.

1. I like having to choose which job(s) to focus on (am reminded of the one thing i didn't like about FFXII; the license board, which basically made all characters able to do all things. I totally understand how that's perfect for some people, but it didn't work for me)

2. If myths had a much higher cap, I'd end up running out of time to obtain as many as I'd want to from week to week. As it is now, it fits quite well into my schedule.

Theres a difference though between being easy and being time consuming. DL can be obtained simply by throwing time at dungeons. For some people that might not be a lot of time, but nonetheless easy.

Allagan can also be time consuming because of the nature of random drops, but is difficult to obtain because of the method required to get it.

This is what I was thinking too.

I'm actually concerned they didn't think this out when they were planning it and wonder if CT will follow the same trend. Why not have job-based myth caps? Like you said, you aren't going to stop those hell bent on gearing multiple jobs. Many people I know are now gearing a second character just to bypass the myth bull.

I mean that's great if you want to make another character just for endgame but uh..I personally do not want to. Thought the purpose of the job/class system was to prevent making a bunch of alts like you would in WoW and such, you know?

If I remember right, they're rebooting the servers during the twice weekly scheduled maintenance.

Edited, Nov 11th 2013 9:38pm by Catwho

Personally, I'm not a fan of the 3+ month patch cycle. Little tweaks that can be implemented weekly aside, it's also not as if all content is intrinsically linked. Theoretically, the functionality of Extreme Mode Primals should have no effect on Crystal Tower, PvP, Housing, and whatever combination of those and other unnamed features. In my mind, if they are ready, you add them. Part of Yoshi's onus on the whole, "We're not doing the F2P route!" was the promise of an ambitious and robust update schedule. Right now, I don't see SE doing anything fundamentally different than, say, Rift, which does weekly patches with various adjustments and fixes as they're ready. They still have their "big patches" like going from 2.4 to 2.5, yes, but it's a bit difficult to claim things are so dry.

Though with both games, I express concern for the players who are endgame but done particularly care for the raid scene. When I see 2.1 and "Even More Dungeons(tm)!" as the main selling point, with housing being the definition of fluff (especially if not individual housing), and PvP being an incredibly niche demographic, I have to ask myself what's in the patch for players with none of these interests? While I won't sit here and absurdly claim everyone has multiple (or all) 50s with top end gear and +1 relics, the leveling and questing game is a bit thin, as well as FATEs honestly having zero endgame relevancy. Though like with other mentioned activities, these should be modular. More FATEs shouldn't need a giant patch. More quests shouldn't need a giant patch. More GC ranks shouldn't need a giant patch. New craft recipes shouldn't need a giant patch.

Some annoying redundancy there, perhaps, but consider waiting 3-4 months only to get... nothing new. That is a problem MMOs need to be mindful of, especially if you're going the monthly fee route. It means someone might unsub. It means they might not come back. It can then mean a chain reaction due to social ties and word of mouth. The money's there. You don't claim 1.5m subs for it not to be. Money makes content happen, and if they don't want to spend it on XIV, well, we're back to XI all over again with what's making you the big bucks not being the priority of said bucks.

XIV has several clear and distinct advantages. The majority of XIV's mechanics come from other games. It should be easier to crank out content when you already have the formula. At least XI can say that while not everything was well received, they were forging into unexplored territory.

It's also worth noting that XIV was released over 3 years ago. 3 years after the launch of FFXI(even if you go with the early start JP version), they had already released RotZ and CoP. Granted the full storyline hadn't been implemented yet, but they added how many jobs there? How many zones? BCNM/KSNM? HNM? Despite being over a decade old, FFXI was miles ahead of XIV at this point in it's lifespan.



1) This is the biggest argument I have against subscription based MMOs. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this way(probably due to the nature of my own job), but I'd feel much more motivated to put out engaging content that keeps players interested if I was allowing people to play for free. It's almost like a donation based system where players reward the developer by paying for a service they already receive. SE says pay up and gives you a 'promise' to create more content than their competitors. This is where all the misdirected anger about players being entitled comes from. In reality, they are entitled.

2) All I can think of here is the revenue that XI was bringing in. Undoubtedly, XIV has a lot of players that transferred over from XI. There are probably also a few who still play both. The initial popularity spike kinda splintered the community. No denying that XI wasn't the subscription powerhouse it used to be circa ToAU, but XIV pretty much killed it off. A buddy on Asura reports /sea all of only a few hundred players during prime time as opposed to the 3k+ you'd find on just a few years ago.

My nostalgia goggles broke long, long ago. Given the option though... if I had to pick a game to kill off it would have been XIV. If all the time and effort making XIV had instead been focused on 'updating' FFXI, they probably could have brought back about the same number of players as we'll see eventually settle into playing XIV.

Edited, Nov 12th 2013 6:14am by FilthMcNasty

On an anecdotal note, I've seen this wearing of patience myself. People just disappear and don't log in anymore. Or you see them for 1-2 hours a week for Coil and then they vanish. That's bad for community when the heard of regulars grows thin. Those who still log in have fewer, if any, "friends" to talk to, and eventually they also get bored and log in less. It not only affects hard core end game players it also affects the medium/soft core players that are in those FCs because it acts as a domino effect, first the raiders stop logging in, then the rest slowly drift out to join them in other games or just simply not playing.

Nothing happens over night and this won't kill the game, but slow major patches don't seem necessary anymore except where it concerns a very large addition to the core of the game, like housing. Other things, as mentioned above, like extreme primals, can be dropped in as you go to keep people patient.

This is the key takeaway for me anyhow seeing the shifting culture of MMORPG communities. People don't seem to be as patient as they once were and not playing to that, by stringing people along with minor content between major content is a mistake.

Edited, Nov 12th 2013 9:46am by Furiousnixon

I think this is a point that's getting overlooked. Us part timers still aren't even finished with the main storyline yet.

Granted, I frittered away a lot of the last few weeks fishing, but it's nice to have a steady source of income as I approach level 40.