The Asmongold Effect

[Lane]

But yeah, it definitely needed more casual content. Raiders are vocal minority, ultimately. They should absolutely be catered to, but even many raiders want stuff to fall back on that isn't raiding.

I wish more people understood this. The devs of Wildstar made the mistake of wanting to be "hardcore" and this was after WoW had to implement LFR to justify the amount of resources going into raid content. Not to mention prior to that Blizzard was always open about the fact that less than 10% of players raided and less than 5% were in the hardest content (being generous with figures because I don't remember the exact percentages). Reading threads with people saying they're glad casuals are abandoning WoW for FFXIV and Blizzard can focus more on raiding/M+ is foolishness. Maybe WoW can afford to do that where newer MMOs can't, but it's not what's going to be healthy for the game or their bottom line overall.

I didn't end up making it very far in Wildstar because their questing was abysmal and I couldn't help but notice that WoW has since copied their 'fill the bar' method with WQs. This was an ongoing complaint throughout beta and, to Carbine's credit, they tried to improve it as much as they could before launch, but it was obvious that the experience of getting to max level was not something they considered important in early development. I do miss my Mordesh spellslinger though, what a great concept both that race and class were.

[The Casualty]

I wish more people understood this. The devs of Wildstar made the mistake of wanting to be "hardcore" and this was after WoW had to implement LFR to justify the amount of resources going into raid content. Not to mention prior to that Blizzard was always open about the fact that less than 10% of players raided and less than 5% were in the hardest content (being generous with figures because I don't remember the exact percentages). Reading threads with people saying they're glad casuals are abandoning WoW for FFXIV and Blizzard can focus more on raiding/M+ is foolishness. Maybe WoW can afford to do that where newer MMOs can't, but it's not what's going to be healthy for the game or their bottom line overall.

I didn't end up making it very far in Wildstar because their questing was abysmal and I couldn't help but notice that WoW has since copied their 'fill the bar' method with WQs. This was an ongoing complaint throughout beta and, to Carbine's credit, they tried to improve it as much as they could before launch, but it was obvious that the experience of getting to max level was not something they considered important in early development. I do miss my Mordesh spellslinger though, what a great concept both that race and class were.

I loved Wildstar but even outside of raiding there were so many issues. The class design and gameplay was amazing, as well as the world and exploration. The quests were good but there was one route through the game after a certain level which became monotonous if you played alts, itemization was awful - I recall finding a raid drop and it was markedly worse than crafted gear just based on the random rolls of the sockets/slots. The randomization could make a vastly superior item level piece of gear garbage, and rewarded crafting the same piece of gear 100+ times just for specific rolls.

That and the attunement/medal system - Nothing was worse than either looking for a specific item from an adventure/dungeon and someone dying on the last boss or 15 minutes in and losing gold, making the whole run useless. Attunements similarly were silly, because it made raid teams have to run folks through to get replacements. Ultimately the hardest boss in raiding was the roster boss as keeping people interested through all these challenges and keeping people wanting to help out with attunements was killer.

It's one of the reasons why I'm absolutely okay with the casual content in FFXIV even if it's not necessarily why I log in. I know that draws the subs because people can log in and accomplish something.

[Sting]

Congrats he's your problem now

[Deadite]

Whoa! so upset, hey it's ok, truth hurts, it's normal.

ffxiv cash shop is out of control and agree, you're right, it is on par with ESO and BDO, cash shops are their end game content for their only audience/players - wallet players (whales). You can even pay to skip all the content and go straight to end game (the cash shop) like what do people not get?

The game devs are literally laughing at the players, all that content, the whole purpose, the purest soul of the game, the content, and you can pay too like WTF (i can't believe i can honestly and truthfully say this but) PAY TO SKIP the only thing the game has going for it, like pay real money, it's epically mind blowing that this is even acceptable.

Yeah real great mmo there lmao.

Hey anything taking whales out of wow before they corrupt wow is ok in my book my dude.

Not looked into the FF14 cash shop but unless you can buy a boost to max level then buy gold to pay for BoE's then pay people to carry you in max level content in PvP and PvE to get the best gear in the game it is no where near as bad as the WoW cash shop.

[Deadite]

I mean, people sell carries in every game. Here's the top results in the party finder on my server right now:


It feels like people are really naive when talking about cash shops nowadays. It's like the WoW Token came along and people forgot that regular old RMT has always existed.

Yeah but 99% of players won't use some shady third party site to buy ingame currency. Well 99% is prolly a tad optimistic but when the company is selling gold in a safe and secure way it will be much more prevalent. The only cash shop i ever sunk some cash into was GW2. I don't like the sub and cash shop model personally. Yeah cash for a carry is in every game.

[bmjclark]

When I started playing FF14 (a few weeks before asmongold did) I had no queue and was instantly able to create a character. My friend started playing yesterday and wasn't even to create a character because the server was so congested. I think it's fair to say it had a pretty massive affect.

I'm honestly convinced final fantasy would have 10-20% more players right now if their website wasn't so terrible and if the server congestion caused a queue to create a character rather than just having to sit in character creation and hoping it works eventually

[Dudenoso]

It feels like people are really naive when talking about cash shops nowadays. It's like the WoW Token came along and people forgot that regular old RMT has always existed.

The whole discussion about cash shop in FFXIV seems weird to me. It sells cosmetics, and it sells job/story skips (which is straight up paying to not play the game you paid to play for).

If there ever was a 'benign' cash shop, that's it.

I do wish leveling alt jobs was easier, but as long as you just do your roulettes instead of playing 12h per day it is fine. Would be nice if they swallowed the pill and let you do synched content with your whole toolkit.

Surely SE isn't such a small, indie company that they can't afford someone who knows a little bit about mathematics and programming to fine tune synched potency

[sam86]

Don't know why you say wow peaked in wrath

because it had the most subs, not to mention that wrath was banned in china, and china was 4-6 million sub of TBC
that means the 12 million sub from wrath are pure eu+us, no china, which alone was almost half of TBC
ppl don't get that part no idea why, heck we made lot of memes mocking china ban on wrath (and unhappy knight, and no skeletons and so on), tbc had ~10 million sub, but half of them were china, wrath was the most popular in western world because it WAS popular and a lot were playing it

[BiggestNoob]

I do wish leveling alt jobs was easier, but as long as you just do your roulettes instead of playing 12h per day it is fine. Would be nice if they swallowed the pill and let you do synched content with your whole toolkit.

It's intentional. They don't want to segment the playerbase into "endgame only" and "leveling." This way doing the old content is still relevant, and end game players will help new people with queues.

For content people want to be brought forward, they've started doing that with unreals.

[xpsync]

Yeah you can roll that way in wow, expensive af like WOW (no pun intended lol), but yeah, sadly.

I recently subbed back up to FFXIV and yeah i just flat out can't stand the game and compared to wow no contest (to me). When i first tried FFXIV 7 years ago i thought it was amazing, wasn't playing wow at that time, i was an avid hater of wow actually for messing up the mmorpg genre. Today wow is miles ahead and above all mmorpg's.

I subbed up as sure i tried it 7 years ago, was enamored for few months, tried a couple come backs and each time was met with "meh", but this latest wave of it's the greatest game of all time to so many i thought, heck been a few years maybe it changed into something spectacular, nope, now i'm subbed up for a month and already uninstalled it, personally, anyone who loves ffxiv i'm so happy for them, enjoy! it's just not for me.

[Moose184]

because it had the most subs, not to mention that wrath was banned in china, and china was 4-6 million sub of TBC
that means the 12 million sub from wrath are pure eu+us, no china, which alone was almost half of TBC
ppl don't get that part no idea why, heck we made lot of memes mocking china ban on wrath (and unhappy knight, and no skeletons and so on), tbc had ~10 million sub, but half of them were china, wrath was the most popular in western world because it WAS popular and a lot were playing it

It wasn't banned in China. It was delayed while it got approved just as TBC had gone through.

[dlld]

Being interested in the topic I decided to make more easily readable data points with some context relevant to the situation.

Data taken from Steamcharts displaying concurrent users on steam for ff14.
Sundays have the highest peak of a week barring any big patch day - only sundays listed, earlier data has been condensed and specific days can't be seen.

May 16th - 34,753
May 23rd - 35,594
May 30th - 36,432 - 5.55 Patch Release week
June 6th - 36,289
June 13th - 34,508
June 20th - 34,567
June 27th - 40,067 - First sunday after asmongold announced he was going to play (tweet dated june 23rd)
July 4th - 47,538 - Day after asmongold first stream (July 3rd) and the first Sunday after 9.1 Release (June 29th)
July 11th - 58,043
July 18th - 67,019
July 25th - 61,987 - July 20th Blizz lawsuit is filed.
August 1st - 62,574
August 8th - 65,329

[Wrecktangle]

Being interested in the topic I decided to make more easily readable data points with some context relevant to the situation.

Data taken from Steamcharts displaying concurrent users on steam for ff14.
Sundays have the highest peak of a week barring any big patch day - only sundays listed, earlier data has been condensed and specific days can't be seen.

May 16th - 34,753
May 23rd - 35,594
May 30th - 36,432 - 5.55 Patch Release week
June 6th - 36,289
June 13th - 34,508
June 20th - 34,567
June 27th - 40,067 - First sunday after asmongold announced he was going to play (tweet dated june 23rd)
July 4th - 47,538 - Day after asmongold first stream (July 3rd) and the first Sunday after 9.1 Release (June 29th)
July 11th - 58,043
July 18th - 67,019
July 25th - 61,987 - July 20th Blizz lawsuit is filed.
August 1st - 62,574
August 8th - 65,329

Thanks for sharing. It's helpful to visualize.

[Katchii]

Surely SE isn't such a small, indie company that they can't afford someone who knows a little bit about mathematics and programming to fine tune synched potency

It's not just about the potency though, it's about the fact that you now have entire new skills you didn't have before. At level 15 let's say you have 1 skill that hits for 100 potency (arbitrary number), but at level 50+ you have that skill, a second combo skill that hits for 150, a third combo skill that hits for 200, a DoT that ticks for 50, a debuff that increases damage taken and/or a buff that increases damage done along with a bunch of oGCD skills that all have uses and can do damage too. The overall damage potential for the person who has more skills is significantly higher.

The only way to balance the amount of damage being done by someone at 15 with only the one skill and someone who's 50 but synced down and still has all their skills would be do absolutely decimate the potency of all of those skills, which would feel horrible. Every skill hits like a wet noodle and you have to use them all to do equivalent damage as someone who's just mashing one key. That's awful.

[Katchii]

So how much do we care about whether or not a level 80 DPS comes in and crushes Sastasha even more than usual in leveling roulette?

I wouldn't be opposed to it that much either, because it feels really bad going from level 70+ and basically having your full kit to level 15 and having practically nothing.

The only negative I can think of is how it would make actual low level characters, especially new ones, feel useless in these cases and hinder their learning dungeon mechanics. There be so much mechanics cheesing everything due to how fast everything dies, how easy it is for healers to keep everyone alive through pretty much anything and tanks just ignore mechanics and probably solo the dungeon without ever waiting for the rest of their group.

[Toby451]

I wish action combat MMOs were more of a thing. I loved combat in TERA and Wildstar. I've been disappointed that the newer MMOs coming to market look to still be doing the same old thing that we've had since the early 2000s. Frankly, I don't know why someone doesn't just buy Wildstar assets, it had everything it needed to be a great game that was just unfortunately poorly designed to be excruciatingly grindy and cater to elites at end game. At least TERA has the excuse that it's Korean and that's their audience. Wildstar did too much wrong to be broadly appealing to more casual western markets.

The problem is MMO's are a dying breed. They are insanely expensive to develop (Risky) and most younger people don't care for them.


Which is fine. I have been playing MMO's for most of my life. From Lineage to WoW, Wildstar, Rift, Tera, FF14, GW2, and the other dozens I have tried over the years. Most of them sucked. Even now when something new actually looks decent (New World) I just watch gameplay and think to myself "Thats a lot of running through the woods doing a lot of nothin". I'll probably try it, mostly because my friends want to. But I am not exactly excited the way i would have been in the past. Maybe illl be surprised and it will actually have some staying power. But I suspect like so many before it will just be a fun little 2-3 week game and quickly forgotten.

[Kyriani]

Yep. And then do this for every possible level range. Which, for some jobs, would be no small feat. (Hello, BLM)

Now, the counter-argument would be: "Down-synced content isn't balanced anyway, so who cares if you walk into Praetorium with Foul and Xenoglossy? What, it would go from faceroll to extra double faceroll? Small price to pay to have players not dread down-syncing in general."

I'll admit that I'm actually unable to come up with a really compelling argument against that. Synced content really isn't balanced well at all when the level gap becomes large - even Ultimates have an issue with syncing substats, such that you can have more crit, DH, etc with the right gear setup in UWU than someone who was actually level 70. (Or, in other cases, your higher level gear ends up worse than the old gear)

So how much do we care about whether or not a level 80 DPS comes in and crushes Sastasha even more than usual in leveling roulette?

The only argument I can come up with not allowing us to retain higher lvl abilities when synced down, is that it would give higher level players a distinct advantage in that lower end content vs someone who was still leveling. That, in turn, might promote an environment where higher level characters are more valued in lower level content because they retain their full kit.

I don't have a problem with how it works right now, but I do think there's room to improve the rollout of abilities through the leveling process. Some skills could stand to come much sooner in a job's leveling imo.

[Lane]

The problem is MMO's are a dying breed. They are insanely expensive to develop (Risky) and most younger people don't care for them.

I agree but, like I said, Wildstar was a complete MMO. I would assume the IP and assets of a defunct game could be purchased for much less than it cost to develop a new one from scratch. It just needed a content overhaul.

It's possible it would still lose money. I'd have to know how much it would cost to buy, re-develop, and publish vs. how much it could make via a cash shop. It also has the benefit of a some brand recognition and at least a modest amount of players who would return to it.

[NineSpine]

I agree but, like I said, Wildstar was a complete MMO. I would assume the IP and assets of a defunct game could be purchased for much less than it cost to develop a new one from scratch. It just needed a content overhaul.

It's possible it would still lose money. I'd have to know how much it would cost to buy, re-develop, and publish vs. how much it could make via a cash shop. It also has the benefit of a some brand recognition and at least a modest amount of players who would return to it.

Systems are cheap. Content is expensive.

[Wrecktangle]

The only argument I can come up with not allowing us to retain higher lvl abilities when synced down, is that it would give higher level players a distinct advantage in that lower end content vs someone who was still leveling. That, in turn, might promote an environment where higher level characters are more valued in lower level content because they retain their full kit.

I don't have a problem with how it works right now, but I do think there's room to improve the rollout of abilities through the leveling process. Some skills could stand to come much sooner in a job's leveling imo.

This would 100% be the issue. I'd be worried that the super nice always perfect community would actually dread having low levels in content vs. the way they act now. Would they outright kick and replace? I doubt it, but I'd probably guess that they might harass or be annoyed.

It's a tough problem to solve for sure.