It’s really late in the game’s lifespan to be doing this. Like, way too late.
Yeah, everyone knew this was coming. They announced it a few months ago, and everyone could have gotten sufficiently prepared. As far as I can tell though, very few people put in the amount of dedication and effort into doing so. The game has been designed at the hard level cap being 75 for almost half a decade. This was short-sighted design, of course, since it meant that when the end of Rise of the Zilart came around, they were already implementing The Best Gear in The Game — Adaman Hauberks and Ridills and Relic Trinkets and shit.
One complaint I hear from World of Warcraft players is how irrelevant (and how fast) old gear becomes; new expansions meant better gear, which means more shit to get. Old content obsolesces fast in favor of new and different content. This had not existed in FFXI, which was drawing different complaints. Instead of obsolesced gear, gear progression was horizontal, and why everyone hates Dragon’s Aery.
This is how the endgame playerbase operated — investing in things when you’re 75 because that’s how far you’re able to go. You upgrade relics, salvage bodies, and stuff because that’s what’s you do at endgame.
It’s just that now, the endgame point has moved. Very pointlessly.
RDMs everywhere are crying because their spells have been hit in terms of enmity, and they can no longer serve as the “Most Efficient Tank”. My inherent assholeish nature propels me to give all those RDMs bitching about it the middle finger and to tell them to kiss my ass.
But then I read Kaeko’s post about the death of RDM tanking, and it got me thinking. Specifically:
“I think a lot of RDMs want to QQ over this and I can sympathize since I’ve found RDM tanking to be quite fun over the past few months, but I look at it in a different way. This is a game within a game. The creators (SE) have their own ideas on how the game “should” be played; we as players are the innovators and we sometimes popularize things they never intended to see happen (RDM tanking certainly being one of them).”
Square-Enix has always had a ridiculous amount of contempt for their players. Perhaps contempt isn’t the right word, but they do enjoy being antagonistic to their players. I understand that, as a game developer, you take a certain amount of egotistical pride in your creation. There’s nothing like pimply-faced geeks yelling at you about what they want and when they want it. It’s your game, after all, and you’ll design it however the hell you want.
That’s why RDM tanking died, because it’s not your game. You can’t do whatever you want in their game. Tabletop players will recognize this as a characteristic of a bad GM, that the GM doesn’t like their players going out of the confines of what they’ve established their players doing.
It’s pretty obvious that, at every turn, Square-Enix underestimated their player base, and it’s one of the things that they continue to do wrong and refuse to learn from. They were shocked how fast their playerbase leveled to 50, so they almost viciously ramped up the EXP requirements to 75. Yet, the playerbase did that, and over time leveled more than one job as well. Level more than one job to 75? That’s preposterous! You’re only supposed to have one job at 75!
To put it another way, the requirements from 75 to 80 alone is about 200,000 EXP, or one-fourth of leveling a whole new job from level 1. Plus the proposed cap now is going to be 99 over time, so you’re looking at leveling to 85, to 90, to 95, and then to 99. Even if we assume in the best possible world that each of those gaps is worth 200,000 exp, you’re looking at 1,000,000 worth of EXP, or practically leveling another job from 75 to 99. I have four jobs at 75, so I’d need four million exp if I wanted all of them to 99. I don’t even have four million EXP on all four of my jobs now.
This is something that, if Square-Enix was genuinely ever interested in doing as opposed to a last-ditch effort to try and reclaim their game, then it’s something they should have done a long time ago. I, personally, don’t have the time, energy, focus, or dedication to give a shit, and from what I can tell, I’m not all that alone on this. I’m not even one of those ridiculous players with relics out the ass who have to shove them through pointless and ridiculous Magian quests to try and shoehorn them into not being obsolete. I’m a shithead with only a salvage body upgraded, which, as it seems right now, is going to be obsolesced anyway.