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(05-24-2015, 03:43 PM)hauntmedoitagain Wrote: "Carrot on a stick" only appeases a small minority. In a game that the director advertises as easily accessible, this is counter-productive in the entirety.
Frankly I've never seen a game with said balance issues due to horizontal gear; Guild Wars 2 did it just fine and the balance issues were found elsewhere, not in the gear itself.
The game already really is designed for it; merge ilevel and required level, tie stats to the colored tiers, scale back post-ilevel 60 content and boom, done. Time consuming and unlikely? Sure, but it's not an Einstein project.
GW2's entire world and game design is completely different from ARR's. There's no point trying to use that as an example when the two games share almost no mechanics to speak of.
The class mechanics alone make it impossible for them to change things that drastically. Unless they completely retooled the way attributes work in the game, there would be no reason to pick anything other than the most optimal stat mixes as players already do now. And that would be one seriously major undertaking, to say the least.
And if you've never seen balance issues with horizontal gear, I can only assume you never played FFXI, which is where those issues were really noticeable and a large part of why FFXIV is itemized the way it is.
GW2's form of horizontal gear is mostly meaningless anyway. Once you have your optimal stat mix you have zero incentive to get another set. A huge part of what people want from horizontal gear is for each piece to have more meaning than simple ilvls. GW2 does NOT accomplish this. In that regard, its gear system is a failure.
(05-24-2015, 03:43 PM)hauntmedoitagain Wrote: Once again, Guild Wars 2 managed it just fine. The story was entirely optional making it no longer a tedium (at least in that regard, the writing was another story) to simply wade through. Hell, it works out just fine for countless sandbox games. Why not here?
Don't get me wrong, either, I totally get it; SQX wants that single player Final Fantasy appeal. That's fine and all, I can deal, but at least do us all a favor and have the MSQ unlock things on an account level. It's too much of an epic to do more than the one time, nor is it really good enough for that matter.
GW2's style is to have permanent story developments that completely and irreversibly change sections of the game world. ARE YOU SURE THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT? There is no way to replay sections of the story that you missed out on. This is one of my biggest complaints about the way GW2 does things.
I mean, they could have Ishgard permanently open their doors to everyone after a mass story event... that no one could ever replay or experience again because it was a one-time deal. I'm pretty sure the amount of bitching that would occur would be just as astronomical as what did happen to Arenanet when they did the same thing. No, even greater, because at least in GW2's case a fair chunk of the playerbase doesn't give a toss about its story whereas Final Fantasy is a completely different matter.
That being said, they could at least give us access to classes without having to play through main story content and going through the ilvl grind... but apparently they decided against that. I don't know the thought process behind why they made that decision, but I can only assume they thought long and hard about it before making it. Or at least, I would hope as much.
I do agree that being able to skip all the unlocking with alts would be a great change, however. That's one thing that FFXIV does really, really poorly.