I think you vastly underestimate the carrot of the gear from eureka, yes the Mendacity tomestone gear is better, but as you can only get 450 of those a week, you are limited in gear progression. For those not raiding, Eureka is a quicker way to get a a fair few bits of high level gear. Especially useful for second job leveling.
Eureka has not "Reignited a lost age of MMO gameplay" it is simply well rewarded for minimal effort, most players going into Eureka are not doing so for the fostered community gameplay. They join a fate train silently move from event to event and farm Anemos Crystals until they can buy a full set of gear.
It is several mechanics away from being anything like the lost gameplay eras of EQ and FFXI, and it is the path of least resistance to gear that is very good for the non raiding player.
Fully upgraded Eurkea gear is penta meldable and only 3% lower in item level budget than capped tomestone gear, it is 11% higher in budget than uncapped tomestone gear. Eureka is also a very quick way to hit your weekly mendacity cap with minimal effort once you are high enough in elemental level.
Acting like Eureka is anything but a mis-step for FFXIV is in my opinion a mistake, FFXIV is my favourite MMO currently, but Eureka is a low budget content attempt reminiscent of Cata/WoD era wows efforts at making mid term content on the cheap. It is not up to the standard of previous Patch offerings from FFXIV and considering that we now get 50% less dungeons than in 2.x over the patch cycle I expect more from the alternative content.
FFXIV desperately needs to freshen up its casual endgame and it is commendable that they are trying, but in my opinion Eureka is not the answer, and if they do not get told that message loudly and clearly it will result in more tedious grinds content that has no place in the modern session MMO.
If Eureka was alongside the regular dungeon content and offering an alternative path to progression then I would be all for it, but the fact is Eureka is better for near term progression until the Mendacity stones are uncapped. Once they are it will be a nice alternative to dungeon spam to catch up on gear (as you will get drowned in Mendacity from it), but it was a step too early in the patch cycle for its importance. Additionally the gating of the first stage of relics behind it is a mistake, the previous relic quests were used to give life to the world outside of the max level zones, Eureka serves to take high level players out of the world, removing their visibility and removing an important carrot for people leveling characters (The "wow thats cool I want to do that" effect).
All in all it was in my opinion a well intentioned but ultimately flawed attempt to add a fresh coat of paint to the FFXIV end game, which is needed, just in a way that is more engaging and less tedious than Eureka
I hate to say it but the problem is people are god dam tired of the Raiding Treadmill in games. This is why people are wanting other content than the way the current Raid tread mill is setup. The way the games are designed is the treadmill is setup for a 2 to 3 month sprint on the treadmill to get all your raid gear in both FFXIV and WOW. Then you are waiting months between patches you are bored out of your mind. This is because we made raiding a sprint vs something that you can do over the course of months. WOW was very successful with raiding in Vanilla and TBC, they also had casual content for players who didnt want to raid in the forum of dungeons.
Right now in FFXIV and WOW you do X amount of dungeons a week for some currency to buy gear. Once you are doing with these dungeons you move to the raid treadmill and do the same shit on easy mode. Then you work on the hardmodes. The problem is Who the hell wants to see the same content on a harder mode than an easy mode? No one people get bored because its the same shit. Why do you think I dont play MMORPGS today? Because I do not care for the treadmills
This is exactly why we should have 2 forums of PVE content. Raiding and Dungeons like we had in TBC but take Dungeons a build more dungeons total and tiers of dungeons. Just like raids. This allows people who do not have 10 to 20 hours a week to dedicate to raiding to put effort into tough content. Yes and make Dungeons exactly like TBC Normal and Heroics were. Require CC, require Teamwork and so on. When you have streamlined dungeons were less than 1% of all dungeon runs fail it becomes mindless content and people get bored of everything else and few people want to put effort into anything.
This is the major flaw in MMORPGS since WOW WOTLK and developers keep making that mistake. Using dungeons as a gear up streamlined treadmill which ends up destroying true casual minded content.
Until MMORPGS stop using Dungeons to get everyone into raiding MMORPG will suck. This is what WOW did so well in its first 4 years. People who didnt want to raid still had ways to gearing up and it took time because you didnt click a button and get into an instant group. You had to work for it and make friends. Until MMORPGS goes back to this formula they will continue to be stagnate.
I hate to say it but the problem is people are god dam tired of the Raiding Treadmill in games. This is why people are wanting other content than the way the current Raid tread mill is setup. The way the games are designed is the treadmill is setup for a 2 to 3 month sprint on the treadmill to get all your raid gear in both FFXIV and WOW. Then you are waiting months between patches you are bored out of your mind. This is because we made raiding a sprint vs something that you can do over the course of months. WOW was very successful with raiding in Vanilla and TBC, they also had casual content for players who didnt want to raid in the forum of dungeons.
Right now in FFXIV and WOW you do X amount of dungeons a week for some currency to buy gear. Once you are doing with these dungeons you move to the raid treadmill and do the same shit on easy mode. Then you work on the hardmodes. The problem is Who the hell wants to see the same content on a harder mode than an easy mode? No one people get bored because its the same shit. Why do you think I dont play MMORPGS today? Because I do not care for the treadmills
This is exactly why we should have 2 forums of PVE content. Raiding and Dungeons like we had in TBC but take Dungeons a build more dungeons total and tiers of dungeons. Just like raids. This allows people who do not have 10 to 20 hours a week to dedicate to raiding to put effort into tough content. Yes and make Dungeons exactly like TBC Normal and Heroics were. Require CC, require Teamwork and so on. When you have streamlined dungeons were less than 1% of all dungeon runs fail it becomes mindless content and people get bored of everything else and few people want to put effort into anything.
This is the major flaw in MMORPGS since WOW WOTLK and developers keep making that mistake. Using dungeons as a gear up streamlined treadmill which ends up destroying true casual minded content.
Until MMORPGS stop using Dungeons to get everyone into raiding MMORPG will suck. This is what WOW did so well in its first 4 years. People who didnt want to raid still had ways to gearing up and it took time because you didnt click a button and get into an instant group. You had to work for it and make friends. Until MMORPGS goes back to this formula they will continue to be stagnate.
While I absolutely agree, the two big mistakes WoW made with Vanilla/TBC raids was:
1. Locking major story points in them; which led to non-raiders demanding an 'easy / story' mode that allowed them to see the story.
2. Focusing almost exclusively on new raid tiers for post release / post expansion content; which meant an ever-increasing gear gap between raiders and non-raiders; i.e. raid or die.
Unfortunately, the developers took the feedback on these two points as 'everything is too hard and needs to put on a level that even my grandmother can do', thus we ended up with what we have now.
And while FFXIV does avoid these two pitfalls (with a 'normal' mode for the raid story, and regular content at all levels), the developers (so far) have been reluctant to release any meaningful (read: challenging with relevant gear) 4-man content; the latest excuse being that if the healer dies it’s GG… and thus dungeons are forever little more than a brain dead 'token farm'
The problem is that the Raiding Treadmill in FFXIV is actually the worst that I've ever seen...
Spamming instances. No challenging 4 man content at all.
There is nothing to do except spam raid instances to farm Tomes, all day, every day... Or spend your life leveling every Job or Crafting Profession in the game... Not everyone is a Completionist, Crafter, RPer, or Job/Alt-Holic.
Eureka was attractive to me for the change of pace... Being able to sit and grind for 170 minutes with some people in a group. Instead, it turned into a NM Train Zerg Running Disaster, and it isn't being used as intended by the vast majority of the players. It's already pretty much ruined for anyone who was interested in it (EDIT: for a similar reason to me).
The raiding is too cookie cutter, monotonous, and repetitive. Even though there's a different tier, nothing at all feels different about it. This is a huge disparity in comparison to WoW, where raids come with complete zones with lore that plays out as you move through it.
FFXIV needs something like a Mythic+ System, IMO. I can't even fathom why they are so intent on neglecting such a critical part of the game. For me, it isnt' even worth playing without this, because the queue fest for raiding is not fun, and I don't find any of the raids in this game to be enjoyable.
There are "things to do," theoretically, outside of raiding... But nothing that is actually worth me dumping hours and hours of my time into it... Eureka could have been that, but they released it wish such glaring design flaws that it was ruined within a week.
This is the major flaw in MMORPGS since WOW WOTLK and developers keep making that mistake. Using dungeons as a gear up streamlined treadmill which ends up destroying true casual minded content.
Until MMORPGS stop using Dungeons to get everyone into raiding MMORPG will suck. This is what WOW did so well in its first 4 years. People who didnt want to raid still had ways to gearing up and it took time because you didnt click a button and get into an instant group. You had to work for it and make friends. Until MMORPGS goes back to this formula they will continue to be stagnate.
This makes no sense. Dungeons have always been used to gear up for raids, since EverQuest - arguably the MMO that truly introduced this model.
It's called progression. You go from Soloing Stuff, to Doing harder stuff in small groups, to do the hardest content in large groups. It's pretty logical, so I'm not seeing why people are making it out to be such a huge issue. It feels like people just want an easy ticket to end-game, with almost no upkeep. It's an MMORPG. There will be upkeep, otherwise why would you stay subscribed after initially "beating the raid zone?"
In fact, it was EQ that truly started the "Tier Set System" back in Destiny of Velious when they introduced class armor sets. Then we can talk about Focus Effects, where dungeon gear had clearly worse Foci than Raid gear/sets.
The content in Raids is designed for a specific gear benchmark. Otherwise, it will be under-tuned heavily for anyone who has done any raid content and has drops from it. It has to be done this way, unless you design your game without itemization, or just throw gear at everyone (which will make people feel like the game has no decent progression system in place - people complain about this in GW due to how itemization works there).
It's like people are desperate to blame everything on WoW, and are completely ignorant that the things they're complaining about in MMORPGs have actually been core facets of the genre pretty much since the beginning. All WoW did, was continue them... It didn't even really expand ono them, as the systems EQ had in place were a lot more discriminating between different tiers of gear than what exists at the beginning of WoW.
I don't see a problem with WoW's system, since they've added Mythic+.
It's an MMORPG. Play with other people, farm the gear, and go about your business.
Item level gaming is just BAD,super bad,dumbest idea Square ever copied from Wow.it is also a LAZY idea. As long as item level gaming exists,it undermines everything good the game does and it does a lot well.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Comments
Eureka has not "Reignited a lost age of MMO gameplay" it is simply well rewarded for minimal effort, most players going into Eureka are not doing so for the fostered community gameplay. They join a fate train silently move from event to event and farm Anemos Crystals until they can buy a full set of gear.
It is several mechanics away from being anything like the lost gameplay eras of EQ and FFXI, and it is the path of least resistance to gear that is very good for the non raiding player.
Fully upgraded Eurkea gear is penta meldable and only 3% lower in item level budget than capped tomestone gear, it is 11% higher in budget than uncapped tomestone gear. Eureka is also a very quick way to hit your weekly mendacity cap with minimal effort once you are high enough in elemental level.
Acting like Eureka is anything but a mis-step for FFXIV is in my opinion a mistake, FFXIV is my favourite MMO currently, but Eureka is a low budget content attempt reminiscent of Cata/WoD era wows efforts at making mid term content on the cheap. It is not up to the standard of previous Patch offerings from FFXIV and considering that we now get 50% less dungeons than in 2.x over the patch cycle I expect more from the alternative content.
FFXIV desperately needs to freshen up its casual endgame and it is commendable that they are trying, but in my opinion Eureka is not the answer, and if they do not get told that message loudly and clearly it will result in more tedious grinds content that has no place in the modern session MMO.
If Eureka was alongside the regular dungeon content and offering an alternative path to progression then I would be all for it, but the fact is Eureka is better for near term progression until the Mendacity stones are uncapped. Once they are it will be a nice alternative to dungeon spam to catch up on gear (as you will get drowned in Mendacity from it), but it was a step too early in the patch cycle for its importance. Additionally the gating of the first stage of relics behind it is a mistake, the previous relic quests were used to give life to the world outside of the max level zones, Eureka serves to take high level players out of the world, removing their visibility and removing an important carrot for people leveling characters (The "wow thats cool I want to do that" effect).
All in all it was in my opinion a well intentioned but ultimately flawed attempt to add a fresh coat of paint to the FFXIV end game, which is needed, just in a way that is more engaging and less tedious than Eureka
Right now in FFXIV and WOW you do X amount of dungeons a week for some currency to buy gear. Once you are doing with these dungeons you move to the raid treadmill and do the same shit on easy mode. Then you work on the hardmodes. The problem is Who the hell wants to see the same content on a harder mode than an easy mode? No one people get bored because its the same shit. Why do you think I dont play MMORPGS today? Because I do not care for the treadmills
This is exactly why we should have 2 forums of PVE content. Raiding and Dungeons like we had in TBC but take Dungeons a build more dungeons total and tiers of dungeons. Just like raids. This allows people who do not have 10 to 20 hours a week to dedicate to raiding to put effort into tough content. Yes and make Dungeons exactly like TBC Normal and Heroics were. Require CC, require Teamwork and so on. When you have streamlined dungeons were less than 1% of all dungeon runs fail it becomes mindless content and people get bored of everything else and few people want to put effort into anything.
This is the major flaw in MMORPGS since WOW WOTLK and developers keep making that mistake. Using dungeons as a gear up streamlined treadmill which ends up destroying true casual minded content. Until MMORPGS stop using Dungeons to get everyone into raiding MMORPG will suck. This is what WOW did so well in its first 4 years. People who didnt want to raid still had ways to gearing up and it took time because you didnt click a button and get into an instant group. You had to work for it and make friends. Until MMORPGS goes back to this formula they will continue to be stagnate.
While I absolutely agree, the two big mistakes WoW made with Vanilla/TBC raids was:
1. Locking major story points in them; which led to non-raiders demanding an 'easy / story' mode that allowed them to see the story.
2. Focusing almost exclusively on new raid tiers for post release / post expansion content; which meant an ever-increasing gear gap between raiders and non-raiders; i.e. raid or die.
Unfortunately, the developers took the feedback on these two points as 'everything is too hard and needs to put on a level that even my grandmother can do', thus we ended up with what we have now.
And while FFXIV does avoid these two pitfalls (with a 'normal' mode for the raid story, and regular content at all levels), the developers (so far) have been reluctant to release any meaningful (read: challenging with relevant gear) 4-man content; the latest excuse being that if the healer dies it’s GG… and thus dungeons are forever little more than a brain dead 'token farm'
Spamming instances. No challenging 4 man content at all.
There is nothing to do except spam raid instances to farm Tomes, all day, every day... Or spend your life leveling every Job or Crafting Profession in the game... Not everyone is a Completionist, Crafter, RPer, or Job/Alt-Holic.
Eureka was attractive to me for the change of pace... Being able to sit and grind for 170 minutes with some people in a group. Instead, it turned into a NM Train Zerg Running Disaster, and it isn't being used as intended by the vast majority of the players. It's already pretty much ruined for anyone who was interested in it (EDIT: for a similar reason to me).
The raiding is too cookie cutter, monotonous, and repetitive. Even though there's a different tier, nothing at all feels different about it. This is a huge disparity in comparison to WoW, where raids come with complete zones with lore that plays out as you move through it.
FFXIV needs something like a Mythic+ System, IMO. I can't even fathom why they are so intent on neglecting such a critical part of the game. For me, it isnt' even worth playing without this, because the queue fest for raiding is not fun, and I don't find any of the raids in this game to be enjoyable.
There are "things to do," theoretically, outside of raiding... But nothing that is actually worth me dumping hours and hours of my time into it... Eureka could have been that, but they released it wish such glaring design flaws that it was ruined within a week.
This makes no sense. Dungeons have always been used to gear up for raids, since EverQuest - arguably the MMO that truly introduced this model.
It's called progression. You go from Soloing Stuff, to Doing harder stuff in small groups, to do the hardest content in large groups. It's pretty logical, so I'm not seeing why people are making it out to be such a huge issue. It feels like people just want an easy ticket to end-game, with almost no upkeep. It's an MMORPG. There will be upkeep, otherwise why would you stay subscribed after initially "beating the raid zone?"
In fact, it was EQ that truly started the "Tier Set System" back in Destiny of Velious when they introduced class armor sets. Then we can talk about Focus Effects, where dungeon gear had clearly worse Foci than Raid gear/sets.
The content in Raids is designed for a specific gear benchmark. Otherwise, it will be under-tuned heavily for anyone who has done any raid content and has drops from it. It has to be done this way, unless you design your game without itemization, or just throw gear at everyone (which will make people feel like the game has no decent progression system in place - people complain about this in GW due to how itemization works there).
It's like people are desperate to blame everything on WoW, and are completely ignorant that the things they're complaining about in MMORPGs have actually been core facets of the genre pretty much since the beginning. All WoW did, was continue them... It didn't even really expand ono them, as the systems EQ had in place were a lot more discriminating between different tiers of gear than what exists at the beginning of WoW.
I don't see a problem with WoW's system, since they've added Mythic+.
It's an MMORPG. Play with other people, farm the gear, and go about your business.
As long as item level gaming exists,it undermines everything good the game does and it does a lot well.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.