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Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn: Gear Score Incoming
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The Final Fantasy XIV community team has weighed in on a forum discussion on the official site to let players know that gear-locked content will be incoming soon.
The development team is aware that there are times when you cannot participate in content so easily and without worry, and I’d like to let you know future countermeasures we have planned to address this.
Significantly reduce repair fees and the cost of dark matter
While the focus will be placed on high-levels, we will be significantly lowering the overall fees for repair and the cost of dark matter.
Addition of item level requirements for high-level dungeon participation
We'll be adding a requirement to participate in high-level dungeons and hard mode primal battles that will make it so you need to have equipment above a certain item level equipped to participate. To coincide with this, we will be implementing a system that will display the average item level for your gear in the character window.
Addition of a party recruitment window
We'll be implementing a bulletin board type of system where you can recruit party members that are only on your world. When recruiting, you can indicate the dungeon you would like to do, the roles you are looking to recruit, the levels, etc. (We'll be announcing the details soon.)We will be addressing #1 after the maintenance tomorrow, and #2 and #3 will be implemented after patch 2.1.
Participate in the discussion on the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn forum.
Thanks Hitman211 for the forum thread and information.
Comments
If SE really has its heart set on copying features from WOW i just hope they focus on the good ones and not stuff like gear score. Yea gear is important for end game raiding but player skill also counts. There is no gurarante that if gear score passes you in flying color you will be able to complete HM without skill.
Stuff like this is why i feel that hamster wheel gear tread mil grind and gear score should have been left 10 year in past with WOW where it belongs. I thought MMO genre was moving forward not backward?
Same people from 1.0 who said they won't touch 2.0 if it is anything like WOW are now defending it so i don't know.
/shrug.
This, unfortunately, is needed because end-game content is actually quite hard beyond the first end-game dungeon, and pug groups are destined to fail before they even start as it currently is. Skill is important, but sometimes no matter the skill, something is just impossible or very close. It's no fun to get into a group of people to do something and find that your group is ill-equipped for the situation and doesn't even know it, and that you will not be going anywhere tonight.
Gearscore is something we don't like generally, but it does fix a problem that is occurring quite a bit. I wish everyone was just responsible enough to understand their own limitations, but in the mmo sphere, I don't see that happening any time soon.
The problem with a gear score system is that people assembling group always want a score higher than required.
I personally feel that all the similarities to WoW in FFXIV:ARR is not a bad thing at worst, and a really good choice at best.
It might not be an innovative game, but the systems are proven to work well (instances, tab targeting, dynamic events, auction house, etc.), and it does all of this with a certain Final Fantasy flair that just isn't present in other games. The story, the music, the fan references, the look and feel of the world, the Final Fantasy is all there, just with a traditional mmo combat style and instanced dungeons.
As a Final Fantasy fan, I enjoy riding my chocobo next to my friends, with my pet cactuar as we rush off to fight Ifrit... lol, I like it. At least the mmo systems in place don't detract from the experience by being untested and un-fun... and the game is down right polished, I have to admit.
Oh, and lastly, where they did add some new things to the theme park genre, they did it very well. The crafting is nigh on amazing, you can really get lost in it, and I usually dislike crafting in games. And playing all classes on one character and mixing and matching skills is very well done. The armory system is very refreshing.
Come on, that's obvious. The problem is people will want everyone to be overgeared (wheres the fun in that?!), leaving out newer players or someone who plays at a slower pace
agreed. whatever happened to skills.
it all became a numbers chart game- it felt like being an accountant!-sad. every article thats coming out of this game (FF14) , reinforces i made the right descission not to buy it.
iam very happy-for me choice!
lookign forward to wildstar! if i go sub.
This is where finding a guild that fits your personality and play style is so important. Things like item level requirements truly only affect the pugs and overly elitist guilds, there are plenty of very friendly and helpful guilds out there.
Item level requirements are an unfortunate side-effect of progression based, gear treadmill end game mechanics. Hopefully with these changes, SE will also make crafting more important in terms of getting filler pieces and alternative pieces of equipment that aren't overly impossible to make, but don't have set bonuses like raiding gear. That way people can get geared at a reasonable rate, but still have upgrades to look forward too.
@Tsuru (thanks for getting exactly what the issues is).
Everyone else is completely missing the point and this article/news update is actually factually incorrect.
In WoW, the level you needed to enter a dungeon is not the same as the Gearscore addon. Even if you met the minimum requirements for entering a dungeon, people expected you to have WAY BETTER gear than what was required to complete the dungeon. People wanted to finish in 20 minutes and didn't want to "carry the newb."
The mechanic instituted by Blizzard for minimum item level requirements is a good thing. That's what SE is doing. Basically, in FFXIV, it just means you can't queue for content unless you've done enough work to meet the minimum requirements. It's not just being up to date in the story and having access to said content, but actually putting in some time to get the minimum gear needed. If you're DPS, you have to wait 1 to 2 hours sometimes to get a Duty Finder group only to find out your tank is undergeard and you're doomed to fail. This allows one variable to be taken out of the equation. Your tank/healer/dps has the minimum gear stats to complete the content, the rest is whether they have the skill.
Duty Finder iLvl is a good idea. Community made GEARSCORE is a bad idea. I don't know if other's can view your gear score, but majority of the content is done with duty finder. The end game hardcore stuff is done with Free Company. So this isn't an issue for Free Companies. However, it does solve one problem for Duty Finder groups.
If you're dps, what are you going to do? Yell at the tank for being undergeared and ask him to leave? Sure, good luck waiting another 2 hours for a party.
Really?! I'm not into the hardcore gear grind, but I have a hard time with your sentiment.
How do you design hard and engaging content if a lvl 50 in lvl 45 gear can "tank" it the same as the person who spent time doing the dungeons to get better gear. The tank with better gear will make the content trivial.
There's great content in this game. The dungeons are some of the best in the genre. If you expect to skip that content and go straight into raiding, that's unreasonable and completely nonsensical.
Gs for this game is good. People always talk about a skill based game and how skill should be the measure and so forth. That is true, and there is a skill check within the game, I have seen countless amounts of DPS fail so hard on trying to do Titan alone. As a tank I have shouldered that burden of titan for a lot of my company and the random DPS I have got, even when I explain to them over and over again constantly fail the skill check.
As for GS promoting elitism, this can happen. But, if you are queuing for a dungeon via Duty Finder you will get queued if you meet the base requirement. So, none of that nonsense about having a higher GS than needed. As for FC based groups, you will always take a member that hits the requirements, after all it is important to gear up your members.
The only issue I see here is that some people will ask in channel for higher GS players for quicker runs, but with alternative access available to you, this is a non issue. If you don't meet other players inflated GS invites, do it with the company or duty finder until you do meet those requirements.
Enough said. People are making such a mountain of a molehill about this.
Gear score works and makes sense when you can't "game it" - which is something that happens in WoW unfortunately.
The idea is, you have to do easier content, beat it, and beat it enough time to gear up from it - that builds experience and familiarity with your chosen class/job/role in the group.
It's a progression path.
You hit max level, you have a mix of probably quest, crafted, vendor (maybe), and dungeon gear.
You then hit up enough dungeons / questing / crafting / seals etc. to get enough gear (and the experience that comes playing your character through this content) to be able to handle the next tier - both in terms of raw stat requirements (because lets face it, in the end the numbers and the RNG are > player skill in any RPG with stat based advancement) and in terms of learning the mechanics of the lower tier fights and your role in the group.
The "model" works - and is actually a good model - you have to prove you can beat lower end content before you can do mid level content.
It gives you something to work towards, something you can handle now and build your skill and stats for the next hurdle.
One thing WoW does well is that if you form your own groups, not using the built in tools, you can bring whoever you want. So a group for friends/guild could bring people as a handicap to themselves and help gear them up.
But when you can cheat the system, like in WoW using a ton of PvP gear or tanks using DPS gear etc. just to get a high enough score - it can have disastrous results.
I think it is a good idea for ARR.
It's a good idea for WoW - it WAS terrible in the days of PUG raids and such as elitists wouldn't take anyone who didn't already have the achievements and gear... which didn't make much sense as how are you supposed to have the achievements and gear...without being able to run the raid?
But now with LFD and LFR - the only problem is people cheating the score with off-set gear in their bags or PvP gear etc.
It's only a game, sure, but all of our time is precious to us - I don't want to join a raid with a bunch of people who don't have the stats to survive or complete the content, or the knowledge, skill, and experience from previous tiers of content to be able to understand and work through the mechanics.
People demanding higher than required ilevl won't affect anyone using the Duty Finder, which this is supposed to help.
So you don't like it because you want your FC to carry you because you are too lazy to run the preliminary content everyone else runs in order to prepare for end game content?
Entitled much?
As long as you have the option to hide the gearscore or they don't allow other players to see it I would be completely okay with this. I understand tuning raids / dungeons to work with certain gear, it makes it easier to set a limit to how hard it is and not just make everything easy to steamroll through.
My major gripe with gearscore stems from the mind of most raiders / players. Any time this is implemented into a game, every single group shout you see ends up asking for gear from 2 dungeons / raids higher than the one they are doing. Lets use wow as an example for explanation, in WOTLK to do the lich king raid you had to have gear from the lich king raid and the achievments to do it. So basically if you were new and couldn't get into any decent guilds, you basically were stuck waiting for a group who allowed you to join, even if your gear was good enough to physically do the raid, simply because people wanted it to be fail proof. No matter what if they allow players to see the gear score then every single group shout will end up wanting gear from you that will guarentee that they will win the raid, no matter what the minimum is, they will end up asking for people with gear that is way over that and not let anyone in.
So that leaves you stuck using the duty finder, which at the moment is completely broken in terms of how long it takes for dps. It would have been a simple fix for them, make a couple more tank and a couple more healing classes. I don't understand why developers don't see this. If you balance out each specific type of class Tank Dps Healer with even amounts of classes that perform it in each, you get more people in each. If you had 5 tanks to choose from each catering to a specific type of player or just different types of tanking, I'm sure way more people would choose to tank. No matter what if you have 2 tank classes, 8 dps classes, and 2 healing classes there is such a variety in dps that a lot of people end up going there. I know if they had ninja tanks in the game right now I would be tanking.
Your assuming that just because the class is available, that players will play it. You could have 15 tank classes, 18 healer classes, and 2 DPS classes, and there would still be more DPS players than tank/healer players.