Why not grind and questing?

[KatzuyAion]

Originally Posted by Terpsichore

Then remove raid, pvp, pve and quest gear, and and make a npc give it for free.

No thanks, allready did that on wow :P ! (yuck!)

I'm just saying different styles of playstyle should get similar rewards.

You want to raid? fine, it yours choice how to have fun in AION, but by doing that i dont agree that your gear should be superior to player x who plays the same time as you, but preferes to do other types of things (like grinding/questing/pvp).

[Terpsichore]

How can you compare mindless grinding or questing to organized pvp and raiding?

[Calindor]

BG in WoW is no different than questing or grinding in any other game.

[Terpsichore]

Because wow is based around giving free gear to every nub (thats why you get it even when you just afk or lose).

I was talking about real pvp.

[CPK1]

I like quests, makes the game seem less pointless.

[Shuyinn]

If we are going to grind, they should give us quests like, hey go kill 10000 dragon things, and then we will give you more EXP for your troubles.

Quest griding =)

[CPK1]

Even if it's a quest that tells you to go grind, it gives me a reason to grind and makes it seem to be less of a waste of time.

[Endrance]

Simple FFXI grinding appears to require more player-skill than the PvP or Raids I've done in most MMORPGs. That's because the difficulty of the game itself was way higher than it is in any other MMORPG I've ever played.
Just make even mid-class EXP mobs stronger than your actual character, but make them have less def/HP than they had in FFXI. Or make grinding constant boss fights, where timing, reaction, knowledge about mob-skills (OMG, the dragon is doing that eye paralyze thing! turn your character fast so you wont be effected! etc.) and elementals is critical.

But that probably wont happen again (SE has made the step with FFXI and I doubt their next MMORPG will be nearly as difficult), cause MMORPGs are more like business than about quality gaming (never seen a pure MMORPG company doing it cause of passion), everything is about money in the end cause our world is teh suck. For companies, the game sucks as soon as it doesn't bring them money. For me a game sucks if it sucks. Who's right? I am. Logically.
Those people have a choice, but that's not what this is all about, since it's all about profit (not talking about greediness, I'm talking just about the profit that is reasonably needed). Look at those high budget games. They're still not even average+ as a game in itself. MMORPGs are doomed forever, cause they are too expensive and there isn't a way but to trick the customer in some way to get their money.
Man, money sucks so much. It makes people stink.

[xdunpealx]

FFXI was great.. except waiting 3 hours to get in a party in the dunes.. :/ as long as i can do my own thing if i want and then have the party option for the bigger stuff im fine. But then again, if it is too easy people will be lv. 50 within a month and well thats lame.

[BahamutKaiser]

There wasn't a remote lick of difficulty in FFXI outside of the difficulty of waiting endlessly to complete something, even though the levels were very slow and the battles were boring and still rather talentless, characters wouldn't take that long to level if it wasn't for extreme wait times caused by extreme party dependancy, that's not what I'd call "hard", it's just obnoxious.

Guild Wars had far more tactical interaction and difficulty than FFXI ever wanted to have, healers trying to monitor and save any and every player on their team at once, attackers having to gauge their advance and retreat based on opportunity to strike and vulnerability, casters having to time and distance their spells properly, wile the super reactive interrupt units shutdown skills in mid-cast. Is that a special battle situation, no that's how GW is typically played even in PvE, everything FFXI had to offer doesn't even match up to the basic gameplay mechanics in GW.

As for the presumption that Aion is an open world PvP, I'd like to know where you gathered that from. From what the gameplay states, the open PvP is in a designated location, the Abyss, and only random instances of lower level access to certain areas allow an occasional invasion by enemies in any, or likely just some, of the typical PvE areas. I'm pretty sure they made it clear that there would be slower exp casual areas for people to grind and take it easy, and that the abyss would be open PvP and more rewarding, if your trying to couple open PvP with grinding than you've fallen off your horse, PvP and grind only exist in games where lack of tactical function reduce even PvP to a grind, PvP and grind don't even belong in the same paragraph.

[KatzuyAion]

Originally Posted by Terpsichore

Because wow is based around giving free gear to every nub (thats why you get it even when you just afk or lose).

I was talking about real pvp.

it exists real pvp in wow? woah, that's news for me. Anyways, Scripted fights should not give as good rewards as "real" organized pvp like you say.

Because everything that is scripted can easily be overcomed and controlled. you always know at x time at y place in z feature, that the target will do that and this, and i can't call that skill, can only call it as a group of persons, with alot of time to achieve that.

That's why i consider that the rewards shouldn't be over-rewarding in that type of gameplay. But as i say this, i have yet any idea of how the end-game rewards will work :P .

[Endrance]

Originally Posted by BahamutKaiser

There wasn't a remote lick of difficulty in FFXI outside of the difficulty of waiting endlessly to complete something, even though the levels were very slow and the battles were boring and still rather talentless, characters wouldn't take that long to level if it wasn't for extreme wait times caused by extreme party dependancy, that's not what I'd call "hard", it's just obnoxious.

Guild Wars had far more tactical interaction and difficulty than FFXI ever wanted to have, healers trying to monitor and save any and every player on their team at once, attackers having to gauge their advance and retreat based on opportunity to strike and vulnerability, casters having to time and distance their spells properly, wile the super reactive interrupt units shutdown skills in mid-cast. Is that a special battle situation, no that's how GW is typically played even in PvE, everything FFXI had to offer doesn't even match up to the basic gameplay mechanics in GW.

As for the presumption that Aion is an open world PvP, I'd like to know where you gathered that from. From what the gameplay states, the open PvP is in a designated location, the Abyss, and only random instances of lower level access to certain areas allow an occasional invasion by enemies in any, or likely just some, of the typical PvE areas. I'm pretty sure they made it clear that there would be slower exp casual areas for people to grind and take it easy, and that the abyss would be open PvP and more rewarding, if your trying to couple open PvP with grinding than you've fallen off your horse, PvP and grind only exist in games where lack of tactical function reduce even PvP to a grind, PvP and grind don't even belong in the same paragraph.

Bull. Try to solo most missions then. And no, it doesn't count what it has been made for. That's a part of difficulty. Most likely everything was soloable (and no, not just as RDM), it was just uber hard to do, cause you did need a good tactic, reaction times and lots of overview was required. Yea, that's (probably) not the original conception, but there was the option. Then again, SE had never told us how to play the game. And any other game I've played doesn't offer that option, cause they're nothing but static, repetitive, monotonous button smashing.
Also, you could solo EXP in FFXI on many jobs (even more efficient on BLM and RDM and BLU and some other jobs than in a actual PT), just not the support stuff and DDs, such as DRK (melee, no def). If you do just one tiny mistake or get resisted twice instead of once, you were dead. Sometimes it wasn't even your fault but you died anyway. Just FFXI EXP mobs were as hard (and complex - random double/triple attacks, actual skills on normal mobs) as some super world bosses in other games. Tell me one MMORPG that has a higher difficulty than that.

I've soloed most of my jobs (of course not my WHM) to 75 in FFXI and I've played most other MMORPGs you know of. Nothing was nearly as hard as that, but required actual knowledge and player-skill.
Just solo ZM16 in your first run, then come back here and tell me that FFXI doesn't require player-skill. Sorry, but when it comes down to FFXI, you're just talking complete bull****, especially because the whole concept of FFXI was way nearer to a truly good MMORPG than anything else has ever been.

Most likely everyone could beat world bosses in L2 or do Raids in WoW if you explain the Skills and game mechanics to them. But I doubt anyone who never played FFXI could solo Eald'narche (or Brothers, Holy Cow, Rapido or whatever, there's many). After they'd have tried about 20 times, they'd just give up.


May I ask which server you played on, when and which jobs you got to 75, merited and how you got them to 75. Also which endgame stuff you did? No lies, please.

[BahamutKaiser]

Solo was almost as slow as waiting for players, and equally boring, but I guess if you count any option as a good option well than it's OK? I only permit acceptable options, not whatever gets by. The hardest exp mobs were a cake walk if you had what you needed in a party, or even just some educated players. There is nothing difficult about waiting a moment to use a skill, timing a SC and MB, pulling, kiting or hiding, it wasn't even difficult to solo, just boring and time consuming. And the game wasn't soloable with more than half of the characters, indescribably slow progress is no progress at all, but pretending that you soloed all the classes up to max is nonsense, even if they did make soloing more viable with new expansions since I left, a little soloing doesn't not count as soloing all the way to 75.

Group combat was boring, solo combat was boring and slow, and waiting for a group could easily waste 3/4 of your time, basically rotting away your time unless your into crafting and alternatives. It's also ignorant to compare what you can accomplish with a repeat class to what you can innitially accomplish. Every class is easier when you've already accessed the best gear and have a powerful alternative to opt out of difficult situations.

But why even bother explaining myself?, I knew enough about the game to take a paying job writing guides about it, so try to explain it to me please. I'm only interested in good gameplay, not anything that a game can produce, and until an MMO gets the primary formula for gameplay satisfaction right, I'm not going to tolerate an MMO. You can keep justifying it all you like, but it wasn't an acceptable game, not for me, and not for any professional review or poll done on the game. There are many unacceptable failures in a game, and no amount of compensation makes up for them, and I'd rather have improvements than excuses.

[Endrance]

The main part of the game for me wasn't grinding (with a static or soloing mob pets (3-9k/hr) you could get to 75 in less than a month, playing about 3-4 hours a day). It were missions, BCNMs, ENMs, mostly soloing, duoing. Only did group stuff as WHM. Your post merely points out how much you disliked FFXI grinding and waiting for EXP PTs to pop.
There's still many open questions, one of them being: Ever tried to solo any missions or BCNMs, ENMs or stuff that is supposed to be for 18+ people?

[BahamutKaiser]

That's a blaitent lie, I know you didn't solo Bard, and most of the other professions arn't reasonably soloable. Possiblity perhaps, but than claiming to do it in a month is nonsense, not even if they made outragious changes and added exp to missions and quests would I believe that, and it still wouldn't account for the gameplay available before the Xbox release. FFXI just like many games could have been improved, and they slowly got around to it, it was the outragious slow investment in the game that stop me from playing, because I knew they wouldn't fix the problems at an acceptable pace. It's pretty damn obvious you can progress quickly with a static, as if that is a readily available and natural option to anyone who chooses to play, obscurities in any form do not qualify as relavent examples. You may as well be assuming the overall human running ability based on pro athletic records and mythological accounts.

Perhaps you didn't understand what I ment when I said I was contacted with job offers to write gameplay guides for FFXI, I played all of the content either on my own characters or on my roommates to the date that I followed the game, and it wasn't acceptable. BSing about leveling some or any character at all up to 75 in a month given any amount of gameplay per day is nonsense too, you can take that same remark to an FFXI forum and get laughed out. But since you've resorted to falsification to support a point that isn't even relavent to the topic, I'm not even going to bother wasting my time on it, your next response will add you to my ignore list. Next time you think you can prove something, try using logical explainations instead of falsified nonsense which cannot be proven over an anonymous conversation.

P.S. I still have the half dozen emails and website which offered me the job writing guides, for writing detailed, accurate accounts of the gameplay and walkthrus.