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Is a community all that important?
c0exist
Member UncommonPosts: 196
For me the community is what keeps me playing an online game. Since FFXI I have yet to find a great community in a game. I personally think what made the community so great was that everything in that game required a few friends to accomplish. You could not be a loner in that game or else you wouldnt get far. You helped others and asked for help in return to accomplish a common goal. In todays mmo you need to complete a group quest or dungeon you enter the dungeon finder or some sort of queue to autopopulate a party. This is great, the problem is most of these people you group with are not on your server and you will never see them again. I hope ARR goes back to the basics of what made FFXI so great and kept me coming back for the 5 years I played it, the dynamic grouping system.
Comments
I've been singing the same rhetoric for some time on the various sites I frequent (whenever I have free time) in that if community is most important for you in MMOs (FFXIV in this case), then you should consider joining one of the older servers. Without going into ten paragraphs as to whys and hows, most of the new players (from various MMOs where getting to the end game and more powerful is top on their list) will probably just focus on getting more powerful and bidding for overpriced items in a seller's market. You'll likely see people stopping and waving at you in old servers (if most of the old players stayed, as the communities I've been a part of in there far surpass that of UO and FFXI back in their prime) and even wanting to talk for a bit and ask if you need any help.
Version 1.0 was very much that "tough" and "niche" type of game that forms great communities. It's something I highly look forward to, spending time with random strangers that all feel like they're a family that I should help or get help from.
Couldn't agree with you more, I have several buddies starting at lvl 1 who considered the fresh servers but once they accepted the fact that someone in japan/na/eu is gonna grind his *** off and attain competitive advantage on the markets and farming areas, they felt more assured joining me with an already stable guild and an AMAZING community of players who truely can be very friendly. I myself have several crafts and even a 50 culinarian and will definitely be more willing to part with free consumables for newbies and help people along compaired to someone who grinded to the top first for epeen and to dominate with their l33t squad.
It will be nice if the new servers can form the same type of community that legacy servers had (have), but given the nature of new servers on technically new games I just don't see that happening (especially since most players will probably be attracted from other games that have a raiding end game).
As far as parting with items goes, I belonged to a group of people who taught new players the ropes, parted with free 1-20 gear and pretty much sold whole sale everything else (21-49) to whomever asked for it. With such a large group of nice people one could also expect to unlock Artifact Armor faster than even the power gamers on new servers, simply because there will be a higher pool of experienced characters and armor won't cost an arm and a leg to get as you level up at your own pace.
There is no forced grouping in ARR aside from raids and dungeons. Not sure about jobs or AF gear yet as I imagine the quests are being re-designed, but I can't imagine them gating jobs behind forced grouping. Dungeon finder is a confirmed feature for launch. Leveling is going to mainly be quest driven. Grind PT's are a thing of the past. All of this information has been known for awhile.
This game does not resemble FFXI in any way. It is very much a modern MMO. The thing that brought the community in FFXI together was the insane struggle that you faced to get anything done. You HAD to rely on others, and as a result were forced to be social. That doesn't really happen in modern MMOs. Nowadays, you don't even need to be social to do a dungeon. Most of them are so piss easy that zero communication is required, and in my experience dungeon finder groups in any game are typically pretty quiet.
If you're looking for the spiritual successor to FFXI, look elsewhere.
ummm its been confirmed that questing will get you 1 class to 50, the others will be done through fate system, dunegeons, etc and if you want to be efficient you will need a group so post 1st 50 it is forced grouping to an extent. It won't be as drastic of course, but if you played 1.0 you'd know dungeons aren't something willy nilly to be completed appropriately, and for the best drops. Batraal took many organized guilds dozens of attempts and the hardest content with the greater rewards im sure will be challenging especially for a pug group.
"Most of them are so piss easy that zero communication is required."
This is true for pretty much most mmo's now days, yet i didn't find that to be the case in this serious and im curious what fights specifically your refering to...
Heck were you even able to manage past the ogre? I even know a lot of groups who struggled to understand that basic ghost concept
FATEs (zergs) and leves are mainly solo activities. I'm not going to say too much because I don't want to risk breaking NDA. Who cares about 1.0? We're talking about ARR here.
It's not the dungeon finder. It's the bad game design.
It starts with the extremely short leveling experience. Games are made so people can rush to the top in a week. A rich player can raise an alt in a few days in GW2. In Neverwinter, someone hit max level after 2 days, and this one is in Beta!
It continues with the bad design of group quests and group areas - for example, in SWTOR (one of the few games left which still has a massive amount of group quests) to help a lowbie on a group quest, I'd have to spend around 20 minutes and lots of currency traveling back and forth. The game encourages me to be lazy.
It ends at the "endgame". You can hardly create a community here because the developers are usually totally uninspired and consider that "character development at endgame" = "loot". Sure, loot plays an important role. but when you design a game around loot, the ones who'll stick around are the loot addicts.
What kind of player could be attracted by what i wrote above? The guy who waits to devour the next content update in order to get the new "phat loot". So it ends up looking like this: new content update, high activity for one month. It gets old really fast and a period of 3 months of inactivity (combined with people leaving the game) comes. You cannot create a community. There's no foundation.
My own example speaks loud all those things I've wrote. I have joined SWTOR one month ago. In one month I was able to raise a char to max level, get the expansion, raise the char to the new level cap, get good gear - not the best gear, but good enough to see all the endgame content, some even on hard mode. I feel I've "seen" and "done" everything. I've did all that playing no more than 2 hours per day, maybe a bit more in some weekends. What could i do now is farm some really tedious stuff for 3-4 months in order to improve my gear with 10% (improvement which i don't feel i need). When everything is so rushed, i won't be around enough in order to be part of a community. On the other hand, it took me one year and a half to reach max level in Anarchy Online, and i was younger then and had a lot more time.
Sorry for the double post, but I found out we can talk about what we've experienced in the current beta phase. We just can't post video, images, sound etc. Understand that all of this can and some of it probably will change.
Anyways, up until level 35, you can literally solo quest the entire time. There is no need to interact with a single player outside of dungeons. FFXIV's version of GW2s dynamic events, called FATE, are nothing but a zerg. No real option or point in forming a group for them. Some mobs spawn and you kill them. You get something called a Hunting Log which is also a solo activity wherein you go and kill some mobs; usually quest mobs, so what ends up happening is you're killing 5 mobs for a quest, and you're hunting log wants you to kill 6 of those mobs, so you kill 1 extra and you're done.
Dungeon finder isn't implemented yet, so people are mainly shouting for dungeons. Overworld grind PT's are extremely inefficent now. Leves are quests that aren't called quests. There is still a limit on how many you can do per day. I believe it's 4 and they stack up to 99. You can adjust the difficulty and link leves with others, so there is some potential and incentive for grouping there, but it is certainly not forced grouping.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask, and I'll do my best to answer them.
Seriously bro just stop posting about the game until you at least read some live letters or what the devs/Yoshi-P have written in their roadmap.
To even say "Overworld grind PT'S are extremely inefficent now" in an early beta testing of the STARTER ZONE designed to teach new players the ropes before throwing them into the wild AFTER their first lvl 50 highlights your ignorance.
It has been confirmed MULTIPLE times please google the loadstone that your first lvl 50 is solo friendly, so stop making the comparison to the whole game being an easy WoW clone because you have access to all classes and abilities in this game not just 1, and you need them for more dynamic content you haven't even seen yet.
It has also been confirmed multiple times that the FATE in the STARTER zones that you are projecting to everyone like this is a reflection of the majority of the content, will have roaming NM's, primals, and varying difficulties. And you clearly didn't play 1.0 or know how leves work because you link them for the most effective xp gain, yes even in 11 you could solo but forced grouping is about efficient xp gains, you can do them on low difficulty if your either bad or without friends/group but leves work more efficiently linked on a higher difficulty designed for a group, thats how i got my first 3 50's in 1.0.
In short your acting like a typical uninformed critic who thinks their face value opinion of an early phase beta for bug testing of a starter zone reflects a game that has been confirmed MULTIPLE times to have triple the content at phase 3, which isn't even near release.
These are my exat thoughts and 100% true.
It's ashame develops don't realize that and instead of having 5 games that people play for 10 years we have 20 games that people play for 3 months each.
I agree as well, unfortunately that some model would struggle (imo) in today's markets because of the tendancies of the modern gamers and $.
There is nooooooo way today's players could deal with waiting for a good party or finding a tank or whm that knows what they are doing in order for them to make progress.
While i also feel it was one of its best features, it forces dynamic group play, and in 2013 gamers don't want things forced, they want them handed to them or else they are on to the next mmo for 3 months.
To me community is very important. FFXI was the only mmo that i ever stayed with for over 6 months. I loved the fact that it had slow paced combat and forced grouping. I tried to play WoW for like a few months and hated it because i was solo questing the whole time. I went from being a whm for years in ffxi to being a healer in WoW, and i was like "Whats the point of being a healer when thers no one to heal?" I really got into that mentality with WoW and ended up hating it and quit after a short time.
I always ended up going back to ffxi because of the community no matter what mmo i tried to move on to. What killed ffxi for me was abbysea, it killed traditionall parties and made leveling way to fast. Never could go back to ffxi after that.
I've been part of Tribe Gaming for 3 years now, best group of players I've ever been a part of in the 15 years MMO gaming. I've been with them in a few of their chapters, FFXIV 1.0, WoW, SWTOR, TERA, GW2 to name some of them.
Check out the recruitment post here by our FFXIV ARR Chapter leader Despaire: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/446/view/forums/thread/377609/Tribe-GuildGaming-Community-Recruiting.html
Or this one I put togeather for all 3 active recruiting chapters we currently have steaks into on gamespot.
http://www.gamespot.com/forums/topic/29383206/tribe-gaming-is-recruiting-for-gw2---ffxiv-arr---wow-
Sharess Dragonstar - Midgard
Grievance is recruiting.
i agree with this statement 100% games today all focus on "skill less rewards" or "instant gratification" which kills a mmorpg. Not to mention ability to solo quest spam from 1 to cap and no grouping creates a crappy community I also miss ff11 and have yet to play a mmorpg besides old everquest or ultima with similar community.
I think some of the NDA has been lifted so I think I can say this...
FFXIV is pretty much WoW with a Final Fantasy skin and what feels like Rift combat from playing my Archer, though that could just be the Archer that feels crappy and not the other jobs/classes. I miss the pre-shutdown combat so much bcause it felt so good to play, I just wish they would have tweaked it a bit for the new version.
I will play it because I'm a FF fan and I believe that a game that gets rebuilt from scratch instead of going F2P is a very good thing and should be supported, but personally I liked pre-shutdown FFXIV better than what I've played of the new version, and the pre-shutdown version game me a reason to group while this one I mostly just quested solo.
I wish they would try to remake a FFXI type of MMO, but it is very unlikely for a long while because casuals are the new target audience for MMO's and not the real MMO gamers like it was back then.That's what they always say about the WoW clones. Guess you don't have the perspective needed to see whats what?
A reader lives a thousand lives, the man who never reads lives only one.
if they took "ideas" and inspiration from their own games and the overall experience from running a mmorpg for so many years and made thier own product they would be making good money and having loyal customers.
I for one would like to agree with what has been stated, I am so sick and tired of mmorpg WoW rehashing and extremely over casualizing and dumb-ing down every single game release nowadays. they treat us as if we have ADD and require immidiate effortless instant gratifications to make us play games.
the majority of people who hate to argue over this topic are the same casual gamers who play mmorpg for 1-3 months solo everything and move on to the next thing rinsing and repeating.
no community= no MMO part of the RPG, whats is the point of playing online rpg if you want to solo everything and "be expected" to be rewarded similar to people who work hard. FF11 had one of the best communities I have seen, as soon as i started i felt the game alive and was on a epic adventure. The people were forced to socialize as if you were bad players people would remember you and vice versa if you were good. Cooperative gameplay also made the game challenging and fun, i loved to xp pt in ff11 as much as people seem to believe to think they did.
I also loved I WAS NEVER......ever pressured to just "bum rush" all out just to reach endgame or cap as there was a ton fo stuff to do almost a all levels of the game.
I am still mad over the power leveling issues on the game in 1.0 and how they allowed more than half of the servers to AFK and get hand holded by level 50 player all the way to cap within 1 day or less.
Any news on the ease of leveling? or if power leveling still allowed? a level 1 player should never have been able to gain "experience points" without any interaction or experience in their part lol.
I miss ff11 pre-abyssea if only they didn't easy mode ff11, they needed to do stuff for lack of players but they went extremely overboard.
I would say it's as, or more, important than any other element. People may try out a game for it's graphics, or stick around long enough to get through the main story, or play for a bit because the gameplay is good, but no one will stick around for long if the community isn't there. Community is what creates longevity and loyalty in MMOs - not disposable content, not daily quests, not exaggerated artificial time sinks.