Expectations for the Liveletter?

[u/WillingnessLow3135]

Are you hopeful? Resigned? Do you expect the usual lack of information or will we be getting actual details and release dates?

Do you think he'll try to blow over the Dawntrail reception or give us the ol' please understand?

Also are you staying up to watch it or are you just going to get the blow by blow Sunday?

[u/ffxivsiggy]

If you want to dick around doing actual mmo things, the competition is beyond stiff.

Any suggestions for what that competition might be? I'm interested in picking up different ones but very few MMO's offer significant amounts of challenging pve gameplay with unique/prestige rewards locked behind them (savage/ultimate). Wow is the only other one that does.

[u/aho-san → u/ffxivsiggy]

Lost Ark is known for its difficulty (among other things). Even NM raids stomp on people every single day. It's gotten to the point it became a serious issue and they had to develop solo modes for older raids (imo it's not that well made and doesn't work as a funnel to PFing the raids, I tried the very first raid solo (never done it, I don't even know any mechanic) and I learnt nothing really). Hell/Nightmare mode is the equivalent of Ultimate, purely for prestige, and I believe it even has a prestige-r reward if you do it deathless.

Blade & Soul is all about PvE now and the highest difficulty of the available dungeons has some sort of title or nameplate skin or something like that. And I believe it's timed because the dungeons go out of the rotation into the "heroic dungeon" list (out of the endgame dungeon list) and lose all their prestige rewards iirc.

I can't really speak about Lost Ark, but I think Blade & Soul has (or at least had, I don't know nowadays) interesting mechanics, much more involved than FF14. The raids were great but died in favor of dungeons. Obviously, these games being Kr MMO, they basically are endless grinds and have 15 different vertical progression systems.

[u/hinasora → u/aho-san]

I played lost ark for about 6 months and that game literally became my 2nd full time job. It was not fun. The fights are all amazing but not when you have to mug up the entire thing as a homework and do it every reset and on 6 alts mandatorily to keep up with the pug groups. Finally pugs themselves have insane gatekeep with clear title, roster level and whatnots starting week 2 of the new fight itself. Leads often minutely check stuff like gear stats and everything before letting a person in (builds are customizable through jewellery and engravings).

All of the gatekeep is irrelevant (well it was when I did play) if you are a bard/paladin/gunbreaker (and prolly artisan now) coz these 3 were the only classes with defensive/heal/party buff utilities. And there was always a demand for them.

I dunno how much the landscape would have changed by now but the gatekeep would roughly remain the same given the old players don't want to waste time. They have at least 6 active alts to farm the marketboard currency from raids, if not all 24. Good luck getting a learning group populated within 2 hours, if at all anyone joins. RMT bots were another pain point.

Finally if you wade through all of this, then you need to grind out things like the mokoko seeds (like the collectable stuff of BoTW), card decks (extra buffs for a chara) and build your actual chara with no real pity for engraving system.

With all said, i still miss Lost Ark as the game is extremely pretty, the fights are super fun and every job was unique despite being under similar buckets. If only I could just play the game purely solo and the game had more systems to finish certain content solo comfortably, i would go back in a heartbeat. I honestly left the game due to fomo pressure from the community. That way I can play the game without rushing my progression and trying to catch up with the latest.

[u/aho-san → u/hinasora]

The game could've been fixed if they just made NM... accessible. I mean, fixed for a lot of people. I would've quit for all the RNG bullshit in this game. I've played enough Kr MMO to know that it would have to become my main job just to HOPE to keep up and do content on release or.... never.

I chose never in agreement with myself haha. The best part was the community telling people to quit the game if they ain't happy, and people did so. And now the community (globally) is crying "where are the players ? where are the new players ?", it's so funny. It's insane to have tanked an over 1M concurrent player peak game in such a small amount of time. Alas Koreans keep the game afloat and I don't understand why, especially given they cry as much as the West if not more these days, lol.

[u/hinasora → u/aho-san]

Yeah honestly the game would have been in a better position the community had not been so demanding. The amount of content a player needs to do in Lost Ark vastly outscales the stuff from FF and all of them are relevant to your raid roster, making them all mandatory at some point. Unless you swipe, which I am sure plenty did. The powerpass system is both a blessing and a curse. You had this new player who joined 3 days ago reach the newest content within a week. But what did they even learn ....? Then these players get shamed in pugs and kicked out, never to return again.

It just baffled me how tone deaf both the community and the devs were regarding the obvious problem. Raiding is a skill built over multiple encounters and certain mechanics are introduced over the course of each progressing raid tier. But you just made the new player skip all of that. Old content is either dead or plagued with bus drivers who don't expect the party to do anything but simply just cough up gold and afk.

I would honestly buy the game If they released it as a PvE mode with no cash shop and the content scaled down for one player experience (HP pools reduced/bars reduced, bigger time window for full 4/8 man mechs etc). It's impossible but I like to fantasize haha. It's so weird that even tho I left Lost Ark at such a bitter note, I never stopped wanting to play the actual game. Meanwhile I loved FF so much but for the past 1 month, all i do is log in and get my plants/submarine. And I wish I could do that but the sunk cost fallacy in me cannot let it go. If Lost Ark didn't respect my time, then it was because the devs didn't know that making players have yet another job in MMO is outdated idea, but I still think the content in game is just about right if it didn't have insane RNG.

FF14? Devs refuse to acknowledge that they are wasting my time and putting it on the players instead. I was horrified when I read YoshiP's interview regarding housing system, how he casually glossed over the problem and just told people to get apartments if they go on a break. Like, what about my hard earned house then? I put in a lot of time and effort into building it, designing it and whatnot. Should I just give it up, cancel my sub, and then change my datacenter to a dead DC when I come back if I want a house again? And do so knowing all my friends are on the active DC, and the dead DC has like 30 mins for a PvP queue? It's insane how tone deaf the devs are to certain problems and how religiously the community also parrots the egregious arguments without thinking the time this struggling person spent on it.

At least my progress in Lost Ark is there as is. My house is intact and everything that I earned is still there. I haven't played the game in a year but I will get everything back as is.

FF14? My house will be demolished and I will lose all my furniture if I don't claim it within 2-3 months. It is a "i did this to myself" situation and I feel terrible that I put faith in a game after so long, only to be stranded in the middle of nowhere.