The long waits for updatesFollow

Inferring

Not to be confused with:

In Furring

Edited, Nov 14th 2013 3:43pm by Hairspray

Or Infurrying.

A few idiot trolls =/= a culture shift

Look, if you want to go play in another sandbox more to your liking, go for it. The admins here are not lavishly paid (or in some cases not paid at all I'd bet), are by and large extremely well-versed gamers with strong opinions, and all have a passion for the board they work on. I love that they will speak on topics. I love that they interact with us. They never abuse their power. I mean, seriously, if that's your concern, realize that they let you disagree with them. They could just as easily nuke your posts, suspend or ban you at their whim if they were so inclined. Instead, they debate as if they were just another forum member, just one with better manners.

If your pity panties are in a bind because you cannot dole out a rate-down (for all the **** that actually does), well terribly sorry boyo, you're out of luck. Drew Carey said it best, to paraphrase:

Welcome to Allakhazam, the forum where everything's made up and the karma don't matter. That's right the karma is just like tasteful shoes to Ryan Stiles.


Now, as to the persistent whine about no endgame, as has been pointed out by countless games, countless times, your hardcore represents a fraction of the population. I've heard numbers varying between 1% to at most 20% of the player base, with those higher percentages likely attributed more to a reduced overall population than an increased hardcore population. The reasons for this are diverse and varied, but it boils down to the fact that to be hardcore requires a fairly hefty time investment either on a regular schedule or in large blocks of time... or both. Designing content for these people is an utterly losing battle.

The reason it cannot be done is that, in order to produce enough significantly new content rather than just reskins or hard modes (which people are already complaining about in this very thread) requires the devs invest a lot of time and energy to build the environment, balance the encounters, test for bugs, design the rewards and balance those rewards. This is not a short process, unless you want broken, half-done content. On top of that, you need to keep maintaining the current game, fixing bugs and such, as well as develop future content, like true expansions and added storyline. Not to mention that all of these steps require art, scripting, in some cases storylining... That's a ton of work. A ton of work that the hardcore crowd will burn through at an incredible pace. So all those manhours might result in weeks, maybe a month or two, of content for these grinders unless they set arbitrary limits (another thing already complained about in this thread).

Realistically, they want the broadest audience possible, and the broadest set of rewards possible. Housing allows for rewards to be less tangible, and allows for branching content (ship/airship building). PvP allows for alternate grinding and gearing. Card games allow for another avenue of rewards. Hairstylists allow for something fun to reward players with (complete this challenge, earn this hairstyle, et cetera). They are trying to be diverse because those people who do not live and breathe the game are more numerous than those that do. What you're complaining about is how they intend to keep the game alive. So which would you rather have, a game alive with players, or one desolated except for a small few who are jammed into the same content you want to do?

Just knowing that they were working on a full sized expansion, complete with a raise in the level cap, a new city, new story line, new gear and dungeons, maybe even new Jobs, would be great. I don't even care when it is coming. 1 year, 3 years, whatever. I just want to know it's coming.

Edited, Nov 14th 2013 6:12pm by Gnu

A lot of people don't know this about me, but... I live right next door to Yoshi P. I went over and explained to him how unsettled you are that you don't know when the expansion is coming. Like a smartass he said "Please look forward to it" and laughed. I held up an crudely drawn picture of a fanboy in a PS4 t-shirt standing outside of his house with a pitchfork and laughed. "ARR is an expansion" he said with a twinkle in his eye. I told him I already knew when the expansion would be coming out and that I was just there to get the fight stick I let him borrow. He never really gave me a date for the expansion, but he looked a bit concerned when he saw the picture I'd drawn.

The expansion will probably come with the PS4. The beta starts in roughly 3 months. As history has shown, SE can push a beta out infinitely and still get people to be sympathetic for them(and sometimes even pay for it). They can bundle it as XIV 1.0 + ARR + [expansion name here] and sell it in a collector's edition for those who didn't pick it up at the first or the second-first launch. Seems legit to me.

Anyway, I congratulated him as I left with my stick. He's a nice guy and he works hard. He's never home during the day and at night, you know he's up working. I just hope SE uses some of the money they projected in their latest quarterly earnings report to get him a bigger staff. He looks tired （∂_∂）

Edited, Nov 15th 2013 1:28am by FilthMcNasty

Haha, nice Filth. Thanks for letting him know. My job here is done.

Would it come complete with the game crashing as soon as you enter Mor Dhorna?

I'm trying to figure out why I spent most of the day here at work missing 1.0 and watching/listening to old vids from pre-meteor. I think it's like 90% the soundtrack that is doing it to me, but there's totally something else going on. A game is more than just its (poorly implemented) mechanics, and 1.0 had something weird/quirky/dark about it that grabbed me. I know it's not just a case of rose colored glasses, because I remember feeling this way while I was playing it (at least when I wasn't being frustrated at the horrible bits of the game).

Anyway, would totally play a single player recap of 1.0. Only if Tanaka produces it though.

Mor Dhona also had the most sinister creepy synth-organ music. I kinda miss the level 70-90 mobs lurking around certain areas of the zones though. Nothing dangerous like that in 2.0. I guess I'm just starting to feel like Yoshi swung the pendulum too far in the other direction or something.

I think what made 1.0 awesome was KNOWING we would fail... yet pushing on anyway to stop the White Raven.

Although the final world event was botched, that End of An Era cutscene was pure excellence... that made going through the entire journey worth it.

You can easily recreate that 1.0 feeling by spamming the same four battle leves over and over and over again

Boy that is one massive derailment...

So back to the discussion about pushing the update farther back. Hypothetically speaking, if I tried crafting and gave up, what else would there be to do when you log on except DF primals for ***** and giggles?

In 11, I at least had something to do after dynamis. I could randomly go hunt for a coffer key on a certain area to unlock the map for that area. I could look for people in town shouting for help for a variety of things (AF quests, doing the trial fights for summoners, etc), search for people in particular level ranges to see if there was a viable party forming to exp with on an odd job, I could fish on a boat that had some neat events on it, and quite a few other things I am neglecting atm.

But perhaps it's unfair to compare 14 to 11. Maybe 14 to WoW is more accurate with DF in place. What could you do outside of dungeon/raid finder in WoW? You could also queue for PVP, farm 'old content' for the fun of it, and...I can't really think of anything else. Maybe leveling crafts (which you can do so in 14) or going fishing/gathering (can do this in 14 as well). Really, the only thing that kept me logged into WoW outside of raid night was leveling an alt or PVPing.

Maybe I'm forgetting something...but when I compare the two, I see that maybe this is the norm and that 11 was the special case.

Right now, though, I have little to no motivation to log in at all. Done with all of coil and my will to level crafting is only as strong as my will to max every class (DoW/DoM and DoL/DoH). That is to say, not very strong!