One of my favourite part of maps are watching superstitions develop. One of my FC mates always picks the left door. One flips a coin. I close my eyes, spin my character in a circle and then /playdead, picking the door closest to my characters head. It's silly things.
oh ma gad! so true) in my FC we are occasionally offering "blood sacrifices" for chosen door (play dead haha) for it to open to next level, some people always pray before every door, some sweep for better luck. just silly little things that makes treasure map nights even more fun)
FF14 maps feel like something new for many of us crusty WoW-adjacent gamers because we studiously ignore microtransaction gacha games. Gacha games are predatory, of course, and they have made so many evil advancements in the last years - how to dress up random chance, how to build suspense, how to glitz up rewards, how to entice you to double down, how to fake you out so you feel like you got away with a win, etc. If you look up the lootbox animations for the newer and bigger releases I guarantee you will be blown away by the animation and obvious care put into them. The map dungeons are proof of how you can take all these concepts and still make them fun without real money involved. They take all the pomp and circumstance of gacha and let you enjoy it without opening your (real) wallet, along with scrupulous balancing that keeps them profitable but not mandatory. There aren't many games with microtransactions and an online shop that are capable of pulling that trick off.
I recently got into crafting, and I was absolutely blown away at the amount of layering rewards that FFXIV does. Want to quest to level? There's Beast Tribe reputations which give you daily quests for good XP, increase your reputation with the faction, and give you currency to buy cosmetics and minor convenience items from the faction. Want to be able to get some better crafter gear? There's Collectables for Custom Deliveries (which each have their own little mini-story and reputation too) or in just general collectables, either of which allow you to craft items and get some Scrip currency to buy either leveling or endgame gear depending on your level and the difficulty of what you're doing. All of those sound like too much trouble because you just wanna go to one spot and craft for an eternity while leveling from 20 to 80 without moving? Head to the Ishgardian Restoration and do just that, also while you do it, you earn the chance to gamble for cosmetics and you also earn another currency to buy specific cosmetics. All of it feels so incredibly rewarding even before you get to the point where you're actually able to make any gil off of your crafting jobs.
@@davistiadi Crafting leves were how I went from 20 to 50 on many of my crafters by just spamming a leve and always turning in HQ items. This was before I got to the Ishgardian restoration. There I got all my crafters and gatherers to 80, and in EW getting them to 90 was so fast I think I maxed all of them within a week or two.
The custom delivery stories are worth it just for themselves. Whether you're helping a princess making kitschy items to sell to those on the surface, or helping a dragonet explore how dragons can learn to gather and craft, or sparing the orphans from another round of rotten pineapple pudding, there's so much lore and care packed into one tiny weekly side quest it seems unreal.
One of the best things, too, are the communities that pop up around these little niches of gameplay! I've helped to run a linkshell since HW for map groups and have made a lot of friends that way! The pvp community is tightknit, helpful and mostly really rad, too. (such a change from the pvp-base in wow) - the same goes for the BLU community, Hunt-mark seekers, fishers, etc. XIV understands ways to get folks to do fun stuff together.
The fishing community is full of the longest suffering souls in the game. We genuinely cheer for others when someone finally lands one of the stupid ridiculous rare catches that have a window only open once a week.
@@katarh I've only just started dabbling into fishing more seriously (oceanfishing is an amazing gateway for that, tbh.) and you are not joking. And while I've been playing since ARR, it STILL surprises me when I step into a new little niche of the game and discover how nice and helpful (and supportive!) the majority of people are!
Lately, I've been leveling my characters in the 70s by doing fate grinds in ShB zones and using my bicolor gemstones to buy vouchers for the EW mount. The ability to multitask is wonderful.
Levelling my alts on FATEs in EW zones let me clear out the things 5.x patches added to SHB shops and then also clear the new EW zone shops as I unlocked them. I figured I was gonna need to wait til the EW relic to go back for those Bicolor Gemstones, glad they recycled the currency.
After you have the EW mount, if you still have some 70s to level, you could keep doing that. I suspect those vouchers are going to be quite valuable after the FATE trains have died down and people are still after that mount.
Hard agree, maps are best done in a discord where everything yells their bets on which door is correct, or pushes someone into committing harder to higher or lower. I think my favorite is where one of my friends who doesn't even play, seems to have the best luck for guessing doors, so we literally call him in just to make guesses.
One thing I appreciate about the Tomestone setup in FFXIV is that you can cap your tomestones slowly over the week, or you can power through and collect them in 1-2 days through multiple channels. I can cap mine on Wednesday, and then spend the rest of the week not having to worry about them at all and focus on crafting, gathering, Gold Saucer, or just logging off.
2 days of near-full roulette run (adjusted by doing the 4 8 man raids, which is good gearing for additional jobs) = capped 3 days of doing 2 EX runs a day (one daily roulette, one additional) = capped if I recall. I did this for quick capping in previous expansions when I was short on time. It's really great that they've given us so many different options, including the much cited Yoshida stance of "play other games"
The only downside and I know I probably only speak for a small percentage of players but if you raid in a static that raids specific times you'll generally want to cap your astrology the day of raid so you can get a 590 piece before your raid later on so for example if you get home from work at 6 and have raid at 9 on the tuesday of reset it can feel quite like a chore to try and cap before raid so you can get that little extra bit of dps or healing etc.
My FC does events for maps where everyone brings 3 maps and owners roll need on their own maps and greed on others. It works pretty well since you know you can always do the event again if your maps suck and if anything, you get residual gil from just doing everyone elses maps throughout the event.
If you plan to level up your crafting/gathering skills, you can do a big chunk of it through Ishgardian Restoration. You get some scratch off tickets from your crafting turn-ins and can get a lot of carbuncle furniture to furnish your house with (also mounts/minions and glam).
Everybody plays MMOs for different reasons and measure progress differently, so it's nice that there's lateral progression that's still meaningful. I got burned out on M+ and progression raiding in WoW so the only thing I do is work on FC crafting projects, like creating subs and repairing air ships, crafting food and other things for the raiders in my FC and working on Sprout Packages. I love that I am basically a FC mom, taking care of people and it still feels meaningful.
One thing I really enjoy about XIV's systems is there's so many ways to accomplish your goals. There are multiple avenues to achieve your goals (leveling alt jobs, making gil, obtaining tomestones, etc) so you can pick what content you enjoy and stick to it. Endgame currencies can be farmed in a matter of hours or trickled across the week depending on your priorities/availability. There's very little FOMO built into the systems...unlike WoW, which builds FOMO into its systems and makes it so unnecessarily stressful.
The many options in FF14 is why I love it so much. Back when I played WoW you had three options: High end raid, High end PvP, or be a casual altoholic. I picked raid which meant I HAD to do boring ass rep dailies so I could get a BiS shoulder enchant from Sons of Hodir, for example, and I would need to find a guild that would pay for gems because I was awful at making money. Guilds typically broke up after 1-2 content cycles so I was in this constant, annoying, unfun loop. In 14, though, they make capping so easy, and there is so much other crap to do. I could probably count on one hand the number of Expert Roulettes I did in ShB. I hate them because they are easy, and there are only ever two options at a time so no, I don't want to do the same dungeons 50+ times during each patch cycle. I did hunt trains though because in 1-2 hours of play you are capped for the week, and since materia also comes from them, I don't have to worry about that either. I still have 400+ of each ShB cluster in my inventory. Some weeks I won't do any raiding and just do treasure maps and fishing. Some weeks I'll log in only to do WT and Custom Deliveries. Some weeks I'll go hard and do every roulette every day. But I never, ever, feel pressured to HAVE to do anything, which is why I've kept my sub active for five years, even when I'm not. As a matter of fact, there was about a 4 month span during ShB where I only logged in to do fashion report and jumbo catpot every week and literally did nothing else. In and out, five minutes per week. No consequences other than I hit MGP cap and buy every single mount and other collectible when I finally was in the mood to play more again.
It’s kind of ironic how FFXIV devs are so open in their admiration for and inspiration from WoW in designing their game, and now there’s WoW players practically begging Blizz to copy FFXIV in return. I hope they eventually come around to it and take the time to see what other MMOs are doing right and implement that into their own game. Praying for the WoW peeps that you guys will get to have a feast of your own one day 🙏 It honestly just makes me sad for you guys seeing how frustrated you are with the game. As an FFXIV player, I’m not here to shill my game to the WoW heads. I know MMOs are a huge time commitment and for a lot of you there’s a lot of memories and nostalgia for your game, and no other game can replace that for you. So from the bottom of my heart, I hope you guys see better days in your game. I hope devs start treating you guys better, y’all deserve it. Some of you really stuck it out with WoW through thick and thin for years, and that sort of loyalty and faith deserves to be rewarded. I hope to see all our ships on this rising tide of MMOs for years to come 🙏
@@jesperjohansson9857 yeah who wants a fun story and deterministic progression. lets go pull that slot machine and do some world quests. you sound a bit salty and not a "former ffxiv player". just sound like a salty wow player that ruined their own experience by playing XIV like WoW, aka incorrectly.
@@jesperjohansson9857 They kinda did copy some MSQ-style stuff with the War campaign in BfA and the covenant/Korthia campaigns in Shadowlands. I think WoW did it better gameplay-wise but not as good story-wise. I think there's not much worth copying from FF in terms of end-game content, the only thing I'd like to see in WoW is the way FF treats their old raids. Would love to go back to older raids and experience them in a way that is at least somewhat close to how they were when they were current content.
The problem is, of course, the way sharding works in WoW, they *can't* do Hunt Trains because they will end up split to different instances and will miss out on the bosses. FF can do what it does because of the way instances work. A Hunt Train in Current Content goes between instances specifically. There's no player control in that system in WoW, so they *can't* actually arrange Hunt Trains. It's been an issue in some cases, notably Pandaria-era, as I heard, when the ground level and the air level were actually *split*, so if you saw something from the air, it *wasn't* always there if you landed. This would also be why FF has all those zone lines that bug people sometimes. The zone lines allow them to make discrete boundaries so they don't run into issues with, say, gathering nodes vanishing right as you walk up to them because they were actually in another instance.
Would anyone want Hunt trains in wow? Most i know that does It needs discord groups etc for It or Scan Addons. Also It brings out alot of toxic people 🤷🏼♂️
I do wish the experience of Hunt Trains shortly after an expansion launch was the same the whole time through, but it does kind of feel like you have to do them early on because if you don't once they collapse down to only one instance per zone, it is just so much slower.
@@Kasaaz Maybe it's down to different servers or data centers, but in my experience, the hunt trains still die really fast even months after expansion. On Aether DC, we sometimes chain the servers together. Gilgamesh to Faerie to Siren and so on. With people from many servers gathered, the hunts melt pretty fast. With congestion, it wasn't worth doing it at Endwalker launch, and there's still congestion when switching instances. So, it may be a while before that happens regularly again.
@@azurechan Legacy trains (pre ShB) are pretty dead, but at least on EU ShB trains are still going mighty strong. I see every server on Light having at least one marathon train per day, usually even two or more. That's probably to do with the fact that both ShB and EW use Nuts which are always good for endgame and achievements/mounts specifically for those expansion regions. if they keep doing that, I don't see them slowing down at all any time soon.
The billed mark are super useful too. I picked these up in EW. In terms of nuts they offer very little but XP wise they are great. I leveled multiple jobs at the same time going thru the MSQ. And I get extra XP for poking certain Monsters along the way. The ability to swap "alts or alt jobs" so that the class behind is collecting xp is great.
Something that you wouldn't realize now that we are in endwalker bozja used to give the endgame tomes as well in shadowbringers so you could get your endgame currency while working on your relic weapons most things in the game that give u poetics at one point gave you endgame tomestones during it's respective expansion. more so just mentioning it so you know that the way ff14 allows you to do content you want without worrying about meeting your weekly caps as much goes even further treasure dungeons and hunts just being the tip of the iceburg til we get more patches.
8:20 your endgame tomestones come from all roulettes, not just expert at max level, but Expert is the highest amount daily from roulettes. You can also get more tomestones doing your weekly clear of the raid (and get the tokens that drop from it). However, because of the way treasure maps will give endgame tomestones from opening every floor in a treasure dungeon, the rewards stack even faster than hunting, which does have a longer timer if you miss calls. Plus, all you need is to go into a new party to join, and typically buy a map or two if you've exhasted your week cap of 3.
There is no weekly cap on maps. There's a daily cap, and a challenge log for getting to 3, but you can get 7 maps in a week from gathering, plus an 8th from WT. Stick the extras on retainers, or mail them to a friend, to be able to hold onto more.
This is the one thing that FFXIV does better than other MMOs out there. They respect your time by providing a wide variety of content that you can take part in, and still feel like you've accomplished something.
Re: Tomestone cap through multiple activates. Oh look, Mists Of Pandaria design. Not that WoW would remember or respect its own history. Blizzard discarded the good qualities of their own flagship over the years. It took Yoshi-P to pick up those pieces and make something glorious out of it.
Yoshi and team so far seem to be one of the only teams who can remember the past and adjust accordingly. So far they have taken nearly all lessons to heart and learned how to adjust course if needed. Meanwhile other games make an error, and just keep turning into it at full speed.
I love that one of the first things he did was make his devs play WoW and other MMOs. Got them to see the good and the bad, and then pick what works best.
@@jonathanborba9280 I think part of the issue is dev turnover and toxic studio culture. You add the company or department heads who are beholden to the finance guys/shareholders first and foremost, who don't understand or care about making fun games, only profits, to the working conditions at a lot of studios that are causing many devs to retire early or quit in search of a company with better conditions, and you get an industry that doesn't seem to care about either its own workers or the paying customers, only how much money they can make in the short-term. Plus when devs leave, they take their experience with them, and if there's nobody left from the previous team who learned the lessons, who's gonna remember them?
@@Khotetsu I mean, it's kind of common knowledge at this point that Blizzard was _always_ toxic, it didn't become that way later after Activision was invovled. Hell, lets even ignore all the problems with their developers, it was Blizzard, not Activision Blizzard who instituted the first real world RMT Lootbox system with TCG back in TBC. Blizzard has _always_ been bad, they just forgot how to build stuff people liked.
@@andrewshandle Oh absolutely, not disagreeing there. I was thinking in more general terms, as Blizzard aren't the only company showing these issues, there have been plenty of others both past and present. Hell, back in 2008 I was going to college for 3d art and animation and hoping to one day work for a company like Blizzard, and I bailed out 2 years later after hearing about the awful working conditions my teachers had dealt with. Especially things like working 7 days a week, through holidays and weekends, 100 hours or more a week, for months on end. Eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the office, even sleeping at the studio, only to get fired when the game released because the studio was downsizing until the next project started and you needed to start all over somewhere else. All while our teachers repeated the same mantra of "Don't expect to get rich making video games" over and over, because "It's not about the money, it's about the passion for creating things". The industry as it currently stands is built upon exploiting workers for their passion and love of games, and exploiting customers with things like lootboxes and microtransactions, because neither us nor their workers are considered as anything other than a resource to be used up and disposed of.
Imagine. Each week, Silas Darkmoon is always present at the permanent camps in the overworld, hands over 3 random maps to any player that talks to him (they are timed and delete themselves at the reset if not used). Some of the goods he needs to host the faire got stolen, he needs you to go get em, because. Each map is randomized from a pool of like 999+ maps, showing locations ***anywhere in the world*** that have a "Pile of darkmoon goods" at the X spot (only visible if you have the right map). Each pile of goods spawns old-gods minions when clicked, and when cleared you can rummage the thing. Sometimes, you get lucky, and a Portal spawns. You appear in a cave with the exit barred, face against a small 5-man advised rare-boss, but if you are more it scales up, like big rares. Kill it, and get some valor for the first kill each week, and repeatable crafting goods (mats, potions, elixirs...), as well as darkmoon rep and a token. You can exchange tokens for more darkmoon rep, or old transmogs from vanilla/tbc that are not in the game anymore. Crafting shit, old green shit, not Naxx gear or what. Keep that for events. Tokens are not limited so you are encouraged to do more maps than your own. There, made a fun side system using only content that already exists, safe some coding (maps), that most people would just do with their friends or guild each week.
Important note: If there's nothing "guiding" you to a door, the doors literally are strictly luck. Whether the door is a 'next zone' or not, is decided when you choose a door. There's no wrong answer there.
If that was true, there would be no need to have 2 doors, or even a trail that reveals the real door. There is always a correct and a wrong door. The only RNG that happens is if the door is gonna fake close or just straight open.
My guy, you forgot about one of the best parts of The Hunt - Centurio hunts!! Marks will drop mad centurio seals which you can use to buy Artheryte tickets! Haven’t paid for a teleport since I learned about it 👍👍
The more I hear bellular praise and be excited about ffxiv the more I see how utterly spoiled we are in ffxiv even though it wasn't always like this it was still pretty nice going through all these things and getting to experience them as they came into the game to see mordona idyllshire the dorman enclave all start from nothing and grow into these massive areas thanks to our efforts, the gold saucer starting off with little mini games then getting these ridiculous trials and the game go from good to great to better than great its so overwhelming when looking back
I joined a treasure hunt party finder for the hypertron9000 map, second map pixie wings. I rolled bad but it was super fun. Now I want to try and run some of the lower maps for glam mats
I logged onto woe after months away, I decided I just want to farm mogs, I'm not gonna take part in the power grind that burned me out. So I want to get the coven mogs on my hunter and pally from at least 3 of the covens, I logged on, seen/remembered I need to farm grateful offerings for each piece of mog for two characters for 3 covens, then I need to farm all the anima for all these, and then when changing covens I need to do all the grind to upgrade my coven, then to get some of the other tints I need rng (looking at you Unity), then I need to grind Korthia for those mogs...... After doing two WQs that I felt dragged on just a little to long, I was bored and had the energy drained from me alrdy n just logged off.
I had this same experience with game I put literally thousands of hours into. It just changed way too much and the devs made the economy so much worse making the grind longer
Dude, that sucks. To hop in, be motivated, and then be demoralized by the systems. This is why I like FF's glam system even with all its faults. At least if I want a piece of gear I can do the one piece of content that drops it, if it's not craftable, and once I have it I can dye it at will whenever I want with whatever color I want. (Some gear pieces are not dyeable, but the overwhelming majority are).
Happy to see my footage @7:11 Bellular! I agree, hunts are a great and fantastic way to just get some spare materia, cap tomes quickly, and just chill. World bosses didn't ever really feel the same in WoW, oftentimes because they tended to drop only gold or minor trinkets and things (or had very rare drops that were rarely seen), plus Bell's aforementioned do-it-every-day requirement. There are top end maps for Levels 60 (Aquapolis), 70 (Uz'nair), 80 (Lyhe Ghiah), and 90 (Excitatron), with the shifting altars that you had shown available at levels 70 and 80 (so far).
I think one of the best things about maps is that whoever wins the big ticket items (if you find any at all), everyone gets a good amount of just pure gil so it is *always* worthwhile doing them. This means getting good loot is a nice extra, and feels good, but it doesn't feel bad to not get any either.
I still remember my first Treasure hunt.. which is funny because I often forget it's a feature. You find real treasure maps and go to real places to unlock a secret dungeon. It's so much fun!
While most of the time I do run 5 Expert Roulette dungeons a week for that weekly tomestone cap, the fact that I don't have to is so refreshing. I could run any number of roulettes if I want to, I could do hunt trains, I could run treasure maps, hell I could even go back to PotD/HoH/Eureka/Bozja and work towards some other goal and still get my weekly tomestome cap along the way. Endgame in FF14 is what you want it to be.
I’ve been doing treasure maps since they came out in HW. Lvl 70 maps are the best in my opinion. You can loot a “Thief” map which is a no trade map from the chest. Once you open it, the location will be under water. When you finally find the spot and open it, it is a GUARANTEE PORTAL. Go inside like the other maps, and this time there is SEVEN LEVELS instead of five from regular maps and THREE DOORS, to choose from instead of two. Make it to the bottom and each person wins 500,000 Gil not counting the loot. You go to try out the lvl 70 maps, they are AWESOME!!!
The troll door gets even better when you realise the history of it, when the map dungeons were added in Heavensward the "rainbow door" after the screen fades to black it was easy to tell if it was fake as no loading circle would appear in the lower right corner showing the instance was about to unload. After the devs were made aware of this they patched in a fake loading symbol to appear whenever the screen fades which is still in there to this day.
I started FF XIV a few weeks ago after being a WoW player off and on since near the end of BC, and man, I'm having more fun than I have had in WoW for a LONG time. It feels like I can do the stuff I wanna do and still feel like I'm progressing.
Treasure maps are always a blast with my FC, and somehow every time we do those, my first map usually is the first one where we make it to the last room.
my favorite thing is roaming through an area and seeing the hunt train swarm roll in, and thinking to myself "why the hell not" and joining a party for some spur-of-the-moment fun
The 90 maps at the moment only got the dungeon instance, later on we'll get the roulette one which is waaay more fun imo (also less walking which is super nice lol)
They're the thing that brought me back to WoW after quitting early in WoD. I stuck around and played Legion all the way through Emerald Nightmare stuff after that. I stopped again after that tier for RL reasons, but they've never really had anything since that made me want to come back.
I didnt log in last week because I had my SCH and BLM at i580+ and dont feel bad. But in the mean time, scheduled events for some other members which gave me time to log in I can think of 14 as a thing to do and place to be just as much as any other game instead of it being my LIFE only
If you haven't tried some of the other maps (different maps have different portals to different dungeons) then I'd recommend doing so! It's fun seeing what variety there is
A quick note on S rank hunts. They have a much longer respawn timer than A ranks. They also have a very specific spawning conditions, thats different for each one. For example for the S rank in Labyrinthos you have to spam summon the Tiny Troll minion on spawn points with the weather conditions of Clear/Fair Skies in the day daytime. After the cooldown is reset its a random spawn chance for each trigger.
Tip for treasure door, you can roll /dice or /random. If the number is odd, pick left. If the number is even, pick right. Despite saying RNG but it’s only when you pick the correct door though. Not sure ppl I have seen ppl that keep pick the correct one a lot of more as they know which door and how 50-50 tend to work. One rule that you don’t pick the same door after 3 times the same side and if the door from previous player start for left, you need the right door in the next run. Unless the door is glowing rainbow. Addition to hunt, you need max level character to get clusters and exchange for materia. You can also use transmutation them to get crafting and gathering ones. Ppl make a bunch of gil just by doing that at the launch of a patch.
As long as I've been playing this game (since around the end of ARR) I have never taken a single person to do maps for their first time who didn't have a ton of fun and love the content.
personally i'd tie it to archaeology to revitalise that profession, you find an ancient tablet/scroll/whatever while digging that points to a lolg lost treasure, and maybe it takes you to a hidden vault, then that opens the way for them to have several different themes for the dungeon, a troll temple, a night elf settlement, an ancient draenei spaceship prototype that exploded on launch and now the narru inside has gone rampant? the possibilities would be, well not endless, but very broad. loot can be like FF, valor points, mats to make cosmetics using the professions, some prof mats like laestrite ore or whatever is the current stuff atm, maybe add some new currency that is rare to find but is rolled on like loot, and is a token that you can save up X of to buy rewards from harrison jones for your contributions to the museum's archives like new mounts cosmetics toys etc
I do love the Treasure Maps even playing Solo its possible to gather a group in pf it does make it feel way more social i think they changed some of the RnG but i'm not sure in my last run most people couldn't get passed the first door instantly kicked out lol.. Glad you're having fun with it Bellular wondering if you tried out the other things like Performance Mode on Bard, Gold Saucer, Bozja, crafting, gathering, did any glam contests? (like Preach)
I diversify my FF experience. I like doing MAPs with friends and FCs when the mood strikes (We'll usually stockpile a few) I like dedicating a day to Gathering or Crafting. Leveling them mostly through Ishgard means I don't have to put up with leve quests and it usually puts a few gil in my pocket with any leftover materials. it doesn't grant as many scripts, sure, but those I largely get from the Custom Deliveries for ease and convenience. :) I'm on a couple of Hunt Linkshells, so when they shout out about a hunt train in the current area, I can join in... or if I'm busy I skip it. Sometimes I use the Hunt Trains exclusively to boost my capped tomes, and use my Dailies for leveling the stragglers. There's more than one way to play and that's a major strength here. ^-^
I'd add a mention of the weekly Journals, encouraging players to run current AND past content with decent rewards. Guaranteed 50% of a level in XP and a big pile of poetics, with a decent chance of landing more current currencies or gold saucer points from a bit more gambling in the form of the connect-4 stamp sheet. Great way to feel like you're working on multiple goals at once, while also seeing some older content you may not have seen for months or even longer (or going on a solo power-trip if you choose to go stomp some if them without syncing your level down).
treasure maps are my favorite thing in XIV - it's simple, fun, but it uses the game's core mechanics and is the one thing in the game that doesn't fall to predictable tedium since RNG is at the core, but it's never too disappointing since you're always getting mats, materia, and Gil, and there's enough stuff to keep it interesting otherwise.
thats something nobody of my former wow mates understand when i go into raptures about all the things i do here and there in eorzea and how much i enjoy it. and everybody is like "what do you do in the endgame?" and i am like "this is kind of the endgame when you want to" and everybody is irritated and asks "but what do you have to farm?" and they cant even imagine theres content you do for fun. i mean as you said, theres reward in almost everything you do in this game (plus the simple fun) but its made so well, you have never the feeling to waste your time. i spend hours at the gold saucer with raid-like jump puzzles, daily/weekly lottery and all those game of skills, tetra master or chocobo racing (and breeding!). and damn i love the fishing system in this game!
well thats the kind of playerbase blizzard has cultivated over the years, doing something for fun has become alien and any content that doesn't give some kind of gear or other form of player power is useless. And even the few times when the content is optional many will not do it because they have been conditioned to think that way or simply because they have had their fill of daily/weekly playtime doing the 'mandatory chore' content
him saying "imagine doing expert roulette everyday to get mats, it would feel awful" my first thought: "in lost ark i need to do chaos dungeon everyday and una's tasks to get mats to upgrade my weapon to progress... i think its true" XD
One Correction. S Ranks don't have a Spawn timer. Or not a traditional one. After 2 days (Approximately) they become available, and can be spawned through specific mechanics. One can be summoned through blowing yourself up near it's spawn locations. One is summoned through throwing away a certain food item. One is summoned through kiting specific mobs towards smaller ones, letting them consume the small mobs to power up until it's dodgeable AOE's are instant kills, and then allowing yourself to be hit by the cone. So scouts like Bellular mentioned aren't just running around, they're doing all sorts of things to spawn bosses that everyone gets to benefit from.
as someone who beaten the exciteatron 6000 the reward for me (and my stupidly lucky 98 roll) was archangel wings and a fancy title: the excruiatingly excited The maps of endwalker are the first time me and some friends managed to get the right amount of luck on 1 good run of the new rng content! never had such a blast! i wish you luck in hopes you get that lucky run yourself bellular!
i find it super interesting how michael is approaching his time at 'end game' (as in, end game is whatever you say it is). i just cleared P3S with my static, and i have never done a single hunt or treasure map in the game. watching this video makes me wanna try it out!
Similar mechanics also exist in Old School RuneScape and Lost Ark, which makes me wonder why this kind of systems so rare in MMOs. The concept of a "treasure hunt" type of content solves a lot of problems with MMOs, it's kinda crazy. (base assumption for further statements is that Treasure Hunt mechanic is well designed) 1. Rare drop of "map" items makes people excited to try the content. As long as rewards stay worthwhile, people will always do this type of activity, which also creates a system for rare items with equal opportunities for all players. 2. Map drops durning a more tedious, but "efficient" content, makes them a good way of distracting players from a daily grind, which fights against "more efficient, less fun" style of play. 3. Having maps cover less populated areas of a game, makes player explore more of the game world, allowing them to find side activities they otherwise wouldn't find.
I think the bigger factor here isn't that everything has a sprinkling of rewards/tomestones on it, wow tried that back in early MoP, just about everything gave valor points. The bigger key factor is just reducing the amount of chores in the game. Like I said back in MoP, as well as at other points in time WoW has had lots of varied little bits of content, but often times player response would boil down to "why should I do this?", and so the devs would attach player power rewards on everything, or the devs would add in a new source of player power to create a reward for new content. Then players would need to min/max the best ways to reach all of their weekly caps, and spend all of their in-game time working on this stuff. But players weren't asking "why should I do this?" because they needed a reward, they asked it because they already had so much other stuff they had to do, that new content needed rewards to justify doing them instead of something else. Less rewards, less things that you "need" to do, means that players have more free time to spend on the things they want to do. Things like housing, glamour, role-play venues, what do any of these things have to do with player power or player progression in FF14? Nothing. In fact, these things typically cost resources rather than generating them, yet they're extremely popular in FF14. Now sure, wow isn't completely devoid of these types of things (I assume, been a while since I touched it), things like the brawlers' guild and Lei Shen's treasure runs were good examples, they were interesting and fun, if you could find the time for it (also these were both solo-content, which isn't bad, but having fun group content is nice as well). tl;dr: don't make players feel like they 'have' to play your game. make them 'want' to play your game.
FFXIV does have its share of chores like the Relic Weapons (especially ARR). But like you said, most of it doesn’t have a daily cap where we log in as if going to work. We just do it at our own pace. The only big exception I’ve seen is the Moogle Treasure Trove, at least the current one. Previous years could be somewhat cheesed, but now it’s a lot more tedious, and you only have until the next patch to get everything you want.
Yes, the hunt train concept is both awesome and would drastically improve the atmosphere in most WoW zones. Add in warmode and all of a sudden you get that classic feel again where we were fighting over rare spawns. I think it would be awesome.
great video, very interesting to see a comparison - I haven't played MMORPGs since 2016, pretty much just follow along on here haha. Damn those combat scenes and the UI text from FF14 remind me a lot of Rift in places. Question - isn't the "sprinkling of rewards" just the same thing as Artifact Power was in WoW which everyone optimised the fun out of and hated? Is it just a difference in terms of cap quantity (hours per week required)? Hmmmm
Yea... I wouldn't say that WoW needs to copy maps outright from FFXIV, but they do need to do SOMETHING that engenders the same kind of irreverent fun that guilds can do together. Because yes, like many others my FC has a dedicated map night where we just hang out for a couple hours and laugh and commiserate in Discord. The rewards from maps are great, but they're not really the point. It's an excuse for your community to socialize more than anything else. But having that activity as an anchor point is key.
I'll never not find hunt trains amazing. It's an organically organized player made system that has very little if any formal organization from the devs. There is nothing in FFXIV that ensures such an elaborate system should come to exist, but it does exist and it says something about the cooperative mind set of FFXIV players that this is how it works. But it still seems so at odds to how almost every experience I've ever heard about or participated in with online strangers.
There was actually a tidbit about this in a recent dev interview. Yoshida was asked if they might provide timers for hunt spawns or worldboss spawns in the UI somewhere, but his answer was basically that expanding the QoL features *too* far for this kind of content - making it too easy to track as an individual - would remove the need for the community to organize around them. And fostering the community aspect is what they value about it and is the point of designing that kind of content.
One of FF14 biggest strengths over other Games and their developers is very simple. The Developers actually play the game and want it to be fun. So, if something feels like you're at work and don't want to be there they will improve it and if they can't make it fun. Then that will be cut content. Games are meant to be enjoyed and to have fun. If it's not, then it's not worth playing. Playing wow since release I find myself more often than not running around a major city doing absolutely nothing but running. Why because its more enjoyable sometimes then their actual content. In FF14 I don't tend to do that unless I'm waiting for friends to come online. When I'm bored or don't know what to do I pick something anything it's going to be fun to do and it's going to help me progress in some way. I love it.
I personally noticed this most when doing Palace of the dead. You’re telling me I can get Astronomy, Aphorisms, Poetics, gold transmog, WHILE Progressing necromancer?? Freaking crazy. Also I always know that at any point I can just do a few endgame dungeons to cap so there’s no time stress or anything
Maps are my favorite thing to do in endgame. It's our shoot the shit night in my FC. Drinks, Discord, and Shenanigans. It's a wonderful time for us to bond and most of us have enough maps for DAYS
Oh i remember the hunt trains. Did it for solid 5 hours straight. So much fun...and treasure map omg, totally forgot about those stuff that I use to do with my FC.....after so many years of quitting the game (after finishing stormblood) due to LIFE. Looking back now, there are actually so many things you can do in the game without feeling that it was a chore....if only now I have the time or wish I was 20 years old again.
at the end of that it made me think "so your telling wow the take inspiration from final fantasy on something that final fantasy seems to have possibly have taken inspiration of from wow" and I'm like yea that makes sense
My favorite things about maps is that, if you're doing it with friends, it's less about the loot and more about the dumb little jokes that come up and laughing till we're sick. It's the best way to wind down after a long work week. And I enjoy it so much that I make it a point to pick up solo maps once I'm capped on group maps and then run them all at once when those are capped too.
FF has so many side activities or alternate ways to play the game, it really changed something in how I look at this kind of games. Just as example, all my jobs are at least 50 and 1 DPS, 2 heals and 2 tanks at max level with one tank and DPS close to 90. Also all gatherer and crafter at 90. In comparison.. since vanilla wow, my highest amount of alts I leveled for an expansion was 4 in total.. and that was classic wow last year that allowed me to pay another person to basically level for me while I do something more entertaining. I play FF for 5 month. WoW for half my life. But in FF I feel like I can do what I have fun with and still progress in a meaningful way for me. And I still haven't found everything that the game has to offer.
We always do a ritualistic dance before the last door to manifest the God of wealth 😂. You also have to tell yourself you don't want it at the same time.
No FOMO. Gotta love it. You aren't sacrificing something or giving up time on something else. Sure it's not a ton of tomes but at the same time, if you decided you just want to do a ton of maps? Hey you still get your weekly tomes! Even though its the endgame currency, there are so many ways to get it and it is just so freeing. "Aww I don't really want to run a dungeon today." or "Don't feel like raiding." You got options.
I also like to point out that part of the fun of treasure maps is that you are unable to outgear the dungeon, and half of the fun is the scramble as the party (especially the tank!) realizes 'oh we can't fully turn our brains off because these mobs got HANDS'
I wont spoil the last room, but the last room always has something valuable. The true test of your friendship. Also, lvl 60-70-80 maps also have a second dungeon, which is easier and a lot of fun. Second dungeon for lv 90 map will come at later date as usual.
FF14 design their games like this "here's optional things for you to do for fun", there's no incentives for any of the activities in FF14 other than what you choose to spend time on, if I want to spend a full day fishing, I can do that, if I want to solo Palace of the Dead, I can do that, if I want to do maps or hunts, then I can do that too, there's so much to do in this game and nobody is telling you that you're "wasting time" or "being inefficient" for doing the things you want to do, because you aren't wasting time, regardless of how I spend my time in the game I never feel like I'm wasting it.
Have you done any of the SHB/SB portals? There are two styles of map dungeons. Right now, EW only has the first type. SE will be adding a second roulette wheel style dungeon in the next couple patches. It is my favorite of the two dungeons you'll see. I'd definitely recommend doing a SHB map night just so you can see both styles of dungeons.
I have been doing maps for years now and it is still one of the best activities in the game that doesn’t take brain power to do plus you can make some good friendships while doing it.
Treasure dungeons have been changed multiple times. At first it was just two doors, then an update added the rare three door dungeons, then there were roulette wheel dungeons where you spin a wheel to see what boss spawns. The high-low is Endwalker’s addition to the formula.
That's interesting, because I remember high-low when in Shadowbringers doing maps, but it was a very rare chance of happening. Even so, it's a really fun twist to the minigame and I'm excited to see how treasure maps evolve over the years!
*Yep, treasure maps and treasure dungeons are fantastic in FFXIV!* *I love how they troll you with the gates too! FFXIV is great at respecting players gametime by rewarding in multiple ways even in side events.*
There was a monkey experiment where they gave monkeys puzzles to do. And the monkeys did it, because they had nothing else to do in their cages. And it was fun. After the researchers started rewarding monkeys for completing puzzles. Monkeys became less interested in the puzzles. It’s more fun to do the activity without being rewarded. But it becomes even better when there’s a surprise reward. So anyway, my point that I wanted to write about. Does having 2 rewards subside the effect of having rewards rather than not at all? While you’re farming for one thing, you’re actually amassing another, which results in a little surprise when you check up on it. This is just my hypothesis. I’ve done no testing.
The game is overflowing with fun content to do. I have been HOOKED for 7 months now and I haven't done a single treasure hunt and only recently just started deep dungeons. This game puts WoW to shame.
i did maps for the first time last week with the all fc we made multiple group it was so much fun we had such bad luck but the best fun everyone should try it, lvl 70 or 80 maps are still nice.
Me and a bunch of my FC have "Drunk Maps Saturdays", where we all kick back, form parties, get a drink, and mash maps all night while chatting shit on Discord. So much fun.
My FC does treasure maps every Fri. evening, and it's a lot of fun. Honestly, I don't care about the rewards. I just go for the good times. I agree with everything you said here, but I doubt these types of activities would feel the same if Blizz implemented them, simply because of the way the WoW community has evolved. My perception is that there is a much bigger emphasis on hyper optimizing everything within the community. FF has it's share of players like this, too, but I feel like they're offset by a larger proportion of more casual (but still community minded) players. I cannot imagine hunt trains in WoW being anything but a shit show, unlike how they feel in FF or the old world boss trains that used to run in GW2. The community is just not the same, and at this point, never will be, IMO.
A Treasure Map system like the one in FF would work just find in WoW, I think you are letting a very small portion of the toxic community way over influence the way you think about the community as a whole. Same with Hunt Trains, maybe it wouldn't be exactly the same with the way Sharding works, but killing World Boss in SL a la the Group Finder has never been difficult or toxic, the only problem is you only need to do it once a week for a World Quest (and for a Lego Pattern drop if you are unlucky), so it's very transactional. You do it once then don't worry about it again until next Tuesday. The WoW community generally doesn't have a problem with casual content, it's just that there just isn't much casual content to do and there's very little no reason to do it.
People: "Nothing compares to the sense of Adventure in Elden Ring!" Me: *Makes it to the final room in the treasure trove* "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"
I have to admit it's pretty cool to see when playing a sprout running around and then see a massive train of player flying over head to wreck a boss and then flying away
One of my favourite part of maps are watching superstitions develop. One of my FC mates always picks the left door. One flips a coin. I close my eyes, spin my character in a circle and then /playdead, picking the door closest to my characters head. It's silly things.
Always go left. Only morons go right!
oh ma gad! so true) in my FC we are occasionally offering "blood sacrifices" for chosen door (play dead haha) for it to open to next level, some people always pray before every door, some sweep for better luck. just silly little things that makes treasure map nights even more fun)
i used /dice to decide because we worship the RNG god
@@lens_hunter How wrong can you be? Always go right, right is always right.
@@yelenapavlenko2344 we sacrifice to the Roulette version while loudly yelling CASINO CASINO CASINO
FF14 maps feel like something new for many of us crusty WoW-adjacent gamers because we studiously ignore microtransaction gacha games. Gacha games are predatory, of course, and they have made so many evil advancements in the last years - how to dress up random chance, how to build suspense, how to glitz up rewards, how to entice you to double down, how to fake you out so you feel like you got away with a win, etc. If you look up the lootbox animations for the newer and bigger releases I guarantee you will be blown away by the animation and obvious care put into them.
The map dungeons are proof of how you can take all these concepts and still make them fun without real money involved. They take all the pomp and circumstance of gacha and let you enjoy it without opening your (real) wallet, along with scrupulous balancing that keeps them profitable but not mandatory. There aren't many games with microtransactions and an online shop that are capable of pulling that trick off.
I recently got into crafting, and I was absolutely blown away at the amount of layering rewards that FFXIV does.
Want to quest to level? There's Beast Tribe reputations which give you daily quests for good XP, increase your reputation with the faction, and give you currency to buy cosmetics and minor convenience items from the faction.
Want to be able to get some better crafter gear? There's Collectables for Custom Deliveries (which each have their own little mini-story and reputation too) or in just general collectables, either of which allow you to craft items and get some Scrip currency to buy either leveling or endgame gear depending on your level and the difficulty of what you're doing.
All of those sound like too much trouble because you just wanna go to one spot and craft for an eternity while leveling from 20 to 80 without moving? Head to the Ishgardian Restoration and do just that, also while you do it, you earn the chance to gamble for cosmetics and you also earn another currency to buy specific cosmetics.
All of it feels so incredibly rewarding even before you get to the point where you're actually able to make any gil off of your crafting jobs.
Levequest is an option too. Too much freedom to achieve a single goal. Play however you want, in your pace. That's why I love this game.
@@davistiadi Crafting leves were how I went from 20 to 50 on many of my crafters by just spamming a leve and always turning in HQ items. This was before I got to the Ishgardian restoration. There I got all my crafters and gatherers to 80, and in EW getting them to 90 was so fast I think I maxed all of them within a week or two.
The currency from Ishgardian Restoration can also be used to buy things to sell on the MB so you can even make money off of leveling crafting.
@@davistiadi and if your smart with it you even make gil while turning in leves for xp. its so freaking good
The custom delivery stories are worth it just for themselves. Whether you're helping a princess making kitschy items to sell to those on the surface, or helping a dragonet explore how dragons can learn to gather and craft, or sparing the orphans from another round of rotten pineapple pudding, there's so much lore and care packed into one tiny weekly side quest it seems unreal.
One of the best things, too, are the communities that pop up around these little niches of gameplay! I've helped to run a linkshell since HW for map groups and have made a lot of friends that way! The pvp community is tightknit, helpful and mostly really rad, too. (such a change from the pvp-base in wow) - the same goes for the BLU community, Hunt-mark seekers, fishers, etc. XIV understands ways to get folks to do fun stuff together.
The fishing community is full of the longest suffering souls in the game. We genuinely cheer for others when someone finally lands one of the stupid ridiculous rare catches that have a window only open once a week.
@@katarh I've only just started dabbling into fishing more seriously (oceanfishing is an amazing gateway for that, tbh.) and you are not joking. And while I've been playing since ARR, it STILL surprises me when I step into a new little niche of the game and discover how nice and helpful (and supportive!) the majority of people are!
Lately, I've been leveling my characters in the 70s by doing fate grinds in ShB zones and using my bicolor gemstones to buy vouchers for the EW mount. The ability to multitask is wonderful.
Levelling my alts on FATEs in EW zones let me clear out the things 5.x patches added to SHB shops and then also clear the new EW zone shops as I unlocked them. I figured I was gonna need to wait til the EW relic to go back for those Bicolor Gemstones, glad they recycled the currency.
After you have the EW mount, if you still have some 70s to level, you could keep doing that. I suspect those vouchers are going to be quite valuable after the FATE trains have died down and people are still after that mount.
@@ninjafoxgamesgeekery well there are also the wings which are another 500 on top of that.
I need to remember to do that when I get burnt on job leveling in Bozja.
@@ikkemenx Biggest gemstone sink is music rolls. There's also a few minions and some Triple Triad cards.
Hard agree, maps are best done in a discord where everything yells their bets on which door is correct, or pushes someone into committing harder to higher or lower. I think my favorite is where one of my friends who doesn't even play, seems to have the best luck for guessing doors, so we literally call him in just to make guesses.
Not the ff14 unofficial discord though. The mods there are horrible people who abuse power and encourage bullying
One thing I appreciate about the Tomestone setup in FFXIV is that you can cap your tomestones slowly over the week, or you can power through and collect them in 1-2 days through multiple channels. I can cap mine on Wednesday, and then spend the rest of the week not having to worry about them at all and focus on crafting, gathering, Gold Saucer, or just logging off.
With 3 instance servers up you can literally cap your tomes in an hour or so with a full hunt train while making big money to boot!
@@Xbob42 Absolutely! I was even able to get the Forgiven Reticence mount (finally!) through EW hunts
gold saucer, a woman of culture ! : D
2 days of near-full roulette run (adjusted by doing the 4 8 man raids, which is good gearing for additional jobs) = capped
3 days of doing 2 EX runs a day (one daily roulette, one additional) = capped if I recall. I did this for quick capping in previous expansions when I was short on time.
It's really great that they've given us so many different options, including the much cited Yoshida stance of "play other games"
The only downside and I know I probably only speak for a small percentage of players but if you raid in a static that raids specific times you'll generally want to cap your astrology the day of raid so you can get a 590 piece before your raid later on so for example if you get home from work at 6 and have raid at 9 on the tuesday of reset it can feel quite like a chore to try and cap before raid so you can get that little extra bit of dps or healing etc.
My FC does events for maps where everyone brings 3 maps and owners roll need on their own maps and greed on others. It works pretty well since you know you can always do the event again if your maps suck and if anything, you get residual gil from just doing everyone elses maps throughout the event.
If you plan to level up your crafting/gathering skills, you can do a big chunk of it through Ishgardian Restoration. You get some scratch off tickets from your crafting turn-ins and can get a lot of carbuncle furniture to furnish your house with (also mounts/minions and glam).
Also gil. The stuff you get from Ishgardian Restoration sell for a lot on the Market Board.
@@sita4932 Love the mountain of gil made from Replica gear and dyes.
Everybody plays MMOs for different reasons and measure progress differently, so it's nice that there's lateral progression that's still meaningful. I got burned out on M+ and progression raiding in WoW so the only thing I do is work on FC crafting projects, like creating subs and repairing air ships, crafting food and other things for the raiders in my FC and working on Sprout Packages.
I love that I am basically a FC mom, taking care of people and it still feels meaningful.
I’m intrigued, what goes in a Sprout Package?
@@jimi_jams Food, potions, glamour prisms, some dyes, a companion, sometimes full outfits.
Sprout Packages 🌱 how cute
One thing I really enjoy about XIV's systems is there's so many ways to accomplish your goals. There are multiple avenues to achieve your goals (leveling alt jobs, making gil, obtaining tomestones, etc) so you can pick what content you enjoy and stick to it. Endgame currencies can be farmed in a matter of hours or trickled across the week depending on your priorities/availability. There's very little FOMO built into the systems...unlike WoW, which builds FOMO into its systems and makes it so unnecessarily stressful.
The many options in FF14 is why I love it so much. Back when I played WoW you had three options: High end raid, High end PvP, or be a casual altoholic. I picked raid which meant I HAD to do boring ass rep dailies so I could get a BiS shoulder enchant from Sons of Hodir, for example, and I would need to find a guild that would pay for gems because I was awful at making money. Guilds typically broke up after 1-2 content cycles so I was in this constant, annoying, unfun loop. In 14, though, they make capping so easy, and there is so much other crap to do. I could probably count on one hand the number of Expert Roulettes I did in ShB. I hate them because they are easy, and there are only ever two options at a time so no, I don't want to do the same dungeons 50+ times during each patch cycle. I did hunt trains though because in 1-2 hours of play you are capped for the week, and since materia also comes from them, I don't have to worry about that either. I still have 400+ of each ShB cluster in my inventory. Some weeks I won't do any raiding and just do treasure maps and fishing. Some weeks I'll log in only to do WT and Custom Deliveries. Some weeks I'll go hard and do every roulette every day. But I never, ever, feel pressured to HAVE to do anything, which is why I've kept my sub active for five years, even when I'm not. As a matter of fact, there was about a 4 month span during ShB where I only logged in to do fashion report and jumbo catpot every week and literally did nothing else. In and out, five minutes per week. No consequences other than I hit MGP cap and buy every single mount and other collectible when I finally was in the mood to play more again.
"But I never, ever, feel pressured to HAVE to do anything" yea best part
It’s kind of ironic how FFXIV devs are so open in their admiration for and inspiration from WoW in designing their game, and now there’s WoW players practically begging Blizz to copy FFXIV in return. I hope they eventually come around to it and take the time to see what other MMOs are doing right and implement that into their own game. Praying for the WoW peeps that you guys will get to have a feast of your own one day 🙏
It honestly just makes me sad for you guys seeing how frustrated you are with the game. As an FFXIV player, I’m not here to shill my game to the WoW heads. I know MMOs are a huge time commitment and for a lot of you there’s a lot of memories and nostalgia for your game, and no other game can replace that for you. So from the bottom of my heart, I hope you guys see better days in your game. I hope devs start treating you guys better, y’all deserve it. Some of you really stuck it out with WoW through thick and thin for years, and that sort of loyalty and faith deserves to be rewarded. I hope to see all our ships on this rising tide of MMOs for years to come 🙏
As a wow player and former FF14 player i hope They do Not copy anything from FF, especially endgame or MSQ style content 😂
@@jesperjohansson9857 Did you seriously think treating FF like WoW will get you far?
@@jesperjohansson9857 yeah who wants a fun story and deterministic progression. lets go pull that slot machine and do some world quests. you sound a bit salty and not a "former ffxiv player". just sound like a salty wow player that ruined their own experience by playing XIV like WoW, aka incorrectly.
The FFXIV devs don't take any inspiration from modern WOW. They took inspiration from WOW in the WOTLK-MOP era.
@@jesperjohansson9857 They kinda did copy some MSQ-style stuff with the War campaign in BfA and the covenant/Korthia campaigns in Shadowlands. I think WoW did it better gameplay-wise but not as good story-wise. I think there's not much worth copying from FF in terms of end-game content, the only thing I'd like to see in WoW is the way FF treats their old raids. Would love to go back to older raids and experience them in a way that is at least somewhat close to how they were when they were current content.
The problem is, of course, the way sharding works in WoW, they *can't* do Hunt Trains because they will end up split to different instances and will miss out on the bosses. FF can do what it does because of the way instances work. A Hunt Train in Current Content goes between instances specifically. There's no player control in that system in WoW, so they *can't* actually arrange Hunt Trains. It's been an issue in some cases, notably Pandaria-era, as I heard, when the ground level and the air level were actually *split*, so if you saw something from the air, it *wasn't* always there if you landed.
This would also be why FF has all those zone lines that bug people sometimes. The zone lines allow them to make discrete boundaries so they don't run into issues with, say, gathering nodes vanishing right as you walk up to them because they were actually in another instance.
Would anyone want Hunt trains in wow? Most i know that does It needs discord groups etc for It or Scan Addons. Also It brings out alot of toxic people 🤷🏼♂️
I do wish the experience of Hunt Trains shortly after an expansion launch was the same the whole time through, but it does kind of feel like you have to do them early on because if you don't once they collapse down to only one instance per zone, it is just so much slower.
@@Kasaaz Maybe it's down to different servers or data centers, but in my experience, the hunt trains still die really fast even months after expansion. On Aether DC, we sometimes chain the servers together. Gilgamesh to Faerie to Siren and so on. With people from many servers gathered, the hunts melt pretty fast. With congestion, it wasn't worth doing it at Endwalker launch, and there's still congestion when switching instances. So, it may be a while before that happens regularly again.
@@azurechan Would be cool if they added something to Hunts in like a .3 patch or whatever just to have a mid-patch cycle bump to em.
@@azurechan Legacy trains (pre ShB) are pretty dead, but at least on EU ShB trains are still going mighty strong. I see every server on Light having at least one marathon train per day, usually even two or more. That's probably to do with the fact that both ShB and EW use Nuts which are always good for endgame and achievements/mounts specifically for those expansion regions. if they keep doing that, I don't see them slowing down at all any time soon.
The billed mark are super useful too. I picked these up in EW. In terms of nuts they offer very little but XP wise they are great. I leveled multiple jobs at the same time going thru the MSQ. And I get extra XP for poking certain Monsters along the way. The ability to swap "alts or alt jobs" so that the class behind is collecting xp is great.
Something that you wouldn't realize now that we are in endwalker bozja used to give the endgame tomes as well in shadowbringers so you could get your endgame currency while working on your relic weapons most things in the game that give u poetics at one point gave you endgame tomestones during it's respective expansion. more so just mentioning it so you know that the way ff14 allows you to do content you want without worrying about meeting your weekly caps as much goes even further treasure dungeons and hunts just being the tip of the iceburg til we get more patches.
8:20 your endgame tomestones come from all roulettes, not just expert at max level, but Expert is the highest amount daily from roulettes. You can also get more tomestones doing your weekly clear of the raid (and get the tokens that drop from it).
However, because of the way treasure maps will give endgame tomestones from opening every floor in a treasure dungeon, the rewards stack even faster than hunting, which does have a longer timer if you miss calls. Plus, all you need is to go into a new party to join, and typically buy a map or two if you've exhasted your week cap of 3.
There is no weekly cap on maps. There's a daily cap, and a challenge log for getting to 3, but you can get 7 maps in a week from gathering, plus an 8th from WT. Stick the extras on retainers, or mail them to a friend, to be able to hold onto more.
This is the one thing that FFXIV does better than other MMOs out there. They respect your time by providing a wide variety of content that you can take part in, and still feel like you've accomplished something.
Re: Tomestone cap through multiple activates. Oh look, Mists Of Pandaria design. Not that WoW would remember or respect its own history. Blizzard discarded the good qualities of their own flagship over the years. It took Yoshi-P to pick up those pieces and make something glorious out of it.
Yoshi and team so far seem to be one of the only teams who can remember the past and adjust accordingly. So far they have taken nearly all lessons to heart and learned how to adjust course if needed. Meanwhile other games make an error, and just keep turning into it at full speed.
I love that one of the first things he did was make his devs play WoW and other MMOs. Got them to see the good and the bad, and then pick what works best.
@@jonathanborba9280 I think part of the issue is dev turnover and toxic studio culture. You add the company or department heads who are beholden to the finance guys/shareholders first and foremost, who don't understand or care about making fun games, only profits, to the working conditions at a lot of studios that are causing many devs to retire early or quit in search of a company with better conditions, and you get an industry that doesn't seem to care about either its own workers or the paying customers, only how much money they can make in the short-term.
Plus when devs leave, they take their experience with them, and if there's nobody left from the previous team who learned the lessons, who's gonna remember them?
@@Khotetsu I mean, it's kind of common knowledge at this point that Blizzard was _always_ toxic, it didn't become that way later after Activision was invovled. Hell, lets even ignore all the problems with their developers, it was Blizzard, not Activision Blizzard who instituted the first real world RMT Lootbox system with TCG back in TBC. Blizzard has _always_ been bad, they just forgot how to build stuff people liked.
@@andrewshandle Oh absolutely, not disagreeing there. I was thinking in more general terms, as Blizzard aren't the only company showing these issues, there have been plenty of others both past and present. Hell, back in 2008 I was going to college for 3d art and animation and hoping to one day work for a company like Blizzard, and I bailed out 2 years later after hearing about the awful working conditions my teachers had dealt with.
Especially things like working 7 days a week, through holidays and weekends, 100 hours or more a week, for months on end. Eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the office, even sleeping at the studio, only to get fired when the game released because the studio was downsizing until the next project started and you needed to start all over somewhere else. All while our teachers repeated the same mantra of "Don't expect to get rich making video games" over and over, because "It's not about the money, it's about the passion for creating things".
The industry as it currently stands is built upon exploiting workers for their passion and love of games, and exploiting customers with things like lootboxes and microtransactions, because neither us nor their workers are considered as anything other than a resource to be used up and disposed of.
Imagine.
Each week, Silas Darkmoon is always present at the permanent camps in the overworld, hands over 3 random maps to any player that talks to him (they are timed and delete themselves at the reset if not used). Some of the goods he needs to host the faire got stolen, he needs you to go get em, because.
Each map is randomized from a pool of like 999+ maps, showing locations ***anywhere in the world*** that have a "Pile of darkmoon goods" at the X spot (only visible if you have the right map). Each pile of goods spawns old-gods minions when clicked, and when cleared you can rummage the thing. Sometimes, you get lucky, and a Portal spawns. You appear in a cave with the exit barred, face against a small 5-man advised rare-boss, but if you are more it scales up, like big rares. Kill it, and get some valor for the first kill each week, and repeatable crafting goods (mats, potions, elixirs...), as well as darkmoon rep and a token.
You can exchange tokens for more darkmoon rep, or old transmogs from vanilla/tbc that are not in the game anymore. Crafting shit, old green shit, not Naxx gear or what. Keep that for events. Tokens are not limited so you are encouraged to do more maps than your own.
There, made a fun side system using only content that already exists, safe some coding (maps), that most people would just do with their friends or guild each week.
Important note: If there's nothing "guiding" you to a door, the doors literally are strictly luck. Whether the door is a 'next zone' or not, is decided when you choose a door. There's no wrong answer there.
Lies. Everyone knows you always pick the left door... Unless the dungeon is on to you, then you trick it by picking right once!
If that was true, there would be no need to have 2 doors, or even a trail that reveals the real door. There is always a correct and a wrong door. The only RNG that happens is if the door is gonna fake close or just straight open.
@@RafaelROUNDUP illusion of player choice.
Some events do spawn a marker guiding you to the correct door though, so in that case they have to be predetermined.
@@Poldovico No, they don't.... Could just as easily pick a door at random and make it the correct one. Doesn't prove anything
My guy, you forgot about one of the best parts of The Hunt - Centurio hunts!! Marks will drop mad centurio seals which you can use to buy Artheryte tickets! Haven’t paid for a teleport since I learned about it 👍👍
The more I hear bellular praise and be excited about ffxiv the more I see how utterly spoiled we are in ffxiv even though it wasn't always like this it was still pretty nice going through all these things and getting to experience them as they came into the game to see mordona idyllshire the dorman enclave all start from nothing and grow into these massive areas thanks to our efforts, the gold saucer starting off with little mini games then getting these ridiculous trials and the game go from good to great to better than great its so overwhelming when looking back
we're not spoiled, our devs are just competent
@@ZodaSoda Most important thing is to go into other games with an open mind, and acknowledge the difference andqualities of these games.
I joined a treasure hunt party finder for the hypertron9000 map, second map pixie wings. I rolled bad but it was super fun. Now I want to try and run some of the lower maps for glam mats
I logged onto woe after months away, I decided I just want to farm mogs, I'm not gonna take part in the power grind that burned me out.
So I want to get the coven mogs on my hunter and pally from at least 3 of the covens, I logged on, seen/remembered I need to farm grateful offerings for each piece of mog for two characters for 3 covens, then I need to farm all the anima for all these, and then when changing covens I need to do all the grind to upgrade my coven, then to get some of the other tints I need rng (looking at you Unity), then I need to grind Korthia for those mogs...... After doing two WQs that I felt dragged on just a little to long, I was bored and had the energy drained from me alrdy n just logged off.
I had this same experience with game I put literally thousands of hours into. It just changed way too much and the devs made the economy so much worse making the grind longer
Dude, that sucks. To hop in, be motivated, and then be demoralized by the systems. This is why I like FF's glam system even with all its faults. At least if I want a piece of gear I can do the one piece of content that drops it, if it's not craftable, and once I have it I can dye it at will whenever I want with whatever color I want. (Some gear pieces are not dyeable, but the overwhelming majority are).
Happy to see my footage @7:11 Bellular! I agree, hunts are a great and fantastic way to just get some spare materia, cap tomes quickly, and just chill. World bosses didn't ever really feel the same in WoW, oftentimes because they tended to drop only gold or minor trinkets and things (or had very rare drops that were rarely seen), plus Bell's aforementioned do-it-every-day requirement.
There are top end maps for Levels 60 (Aquapolis), 70 (Uz'nair), 80 (Lyhe Ghiah), and 90 (Excitatron), with the shifting altars that you had shown available at levels 70 and 80 (so far).
YES! Maps are amazing thing, really casual and perfect for FC bonding.
I think one of the best things about maps is that whoever wins the big ticket items (if you find any at all), everyone gets a good amount of just pure gil so it is *always* worthwhile doing them. This means getting good loot is a nice extra, and feels good, but it doesn't feel bad to not get any either.
I still remember my first Treasure hunt.. which is funny because I often forget it's a feature. You find real treasure maps and go to real places to unlock a secret dungeon. It's so much fun!
While most of the time I do run 5 Expert Roulette dungeons a week for that weekly tomestone cap, the fact that I don't have to is so refreshing. I could run any number of roulettes if I want to, I could do hunt trains, I could run treasure maps, hell I could even go back to PotD/HoH/Eureka/Bozja and work towards some other goal and still get my weekly tomestome cap along the way. Endgame in FF14 is what you want it to be.
I’ve been doing treasure maps since they came out in HW. Lvl 70 maps are the best in my opinion. You can loot a “Thief” map which is a no trade map from the chest. Once you open it, the location will be under water. When you finally find the spot and open it, it is a GUARANTEE PORTAL. Go inside like the other maps, and this time there is SEVEN LEVELS instead of five from regular maps and THREE DOORS, to choose from instead of two. Make it to the bottom and each person wins 500,000 Gil not counting the loot. You go to try out the lvl 70 maps, they are AWESOME!!!
Map nights are always my favorite nights. Drinking, jokes, great times. Been doing map nights for over eight years.
The troll door gets even better when you realise the history of it, when the map dungeons were added in Heavensward the "rainbow door" after the screen fades to black it was easy to tell if it was fake as no loading circle would appear in the lower right corner showing the instance was about to unload. After the devs were made aware of this they patched in a fake loading symbol to appear whenever the screen fades which is still in there to this day.
I started FF XIV a few weeks ago after being a WoW player off and on since near the end of BC, and man, I'm having more fun than I have had in WoW for a LONG time. It feels like I can do the stuff I wanna do and still feel like I'm progressing.
Treasure maps are always a blast with my FC, and somehow every time we do those, my first map usually is the first one where we make it to the last room.
Maps are great and I've never gotten into crafting/gathering endgame, so doing a session of maps every week is my way of making some quick gil!
Oh no... Bellular's talking about decorating a room. Welcome to the *TRUE* end game! 🥳 🎉
Wait til you get a house!
At this point he may have better luck with the Island Sanctuaries in 6.2.
my favorite thing is roaming through an area and seeing the hunt train swarm roll in, and thinking to myself "why the hell not" and joining a party for some spur-of-the-moment fun
The 90 maps at the moment only got the dungeon instance, later on we'll get the roulette one which is waaay more fun imo (also less walking which is super nice lol)
The pre Legion events were amazingly fun and a great way to level alts. Which is why Blizzard had to get rid of them.
They're the thing that brought me back to WoW after quitting early in WoD. I stuck around and played Legion all the way through Emerald Nightmare stuff after that. I stopped again after that tier for RL reasons, but they've never really had anything since that made me want to come back.
my personal endgame is creating glam sets
4:53 Back in SB I loved running Treasure Maps with a regular group. They were called "Skittle Raiders" for apparent reasons. Good times.
I didnt log in last week because I had my SCH and BLM at i580+ and dont feel bad. But in the mean time, scheduled events for some other members which gave me time to log in
I can think of 14 as a thing to do and place to be just as much as any other game instead of it being my LIFE only
If you haven't tried some of the other maps (different maps have different portals to different dungeons) then I'd recommend doing so! It's fun seeing what variety there is
A quick note on S rank hunts. They have a much longer respawn timer than A ranks.
They also have a very specific spawning conditions, thats different for each one. For example for the S rank in Labyrinthos you have to spam summon the Tiny Troll minion on spawn points with the weather conditions of Clear/Fair Skies in the day daytime. After the cooldown is reset its a random spawn chance for each trigger.
Tip for treasure door, you can roll /dice or /random. If the number is odd, pick left. If the number is even, pick right.
Despite saying RNG but it’s only when you pick the correct door though. Not sure ppl I have seen ppl that keep pick the correct one a lot of more as they know which door and how 50-50 tend to work.
One rule that you don’t pick the same door after 3 times the same side and if the door from previous player start for left, you need the right door in the next run. Unless the door is glowing rainbow.
Addition to hunt, you need max level character to get clusters and exchange for materia. You can also use transmutation them to get crafting and gathering ones. Ppl make a bunch of gil just by doing that at the launch of a patch.
As long as I've been playing this game (since around the end of ARR) I have never taken a single person to do maps for their first time who didn't have a ton of fun and love the content.
personally i'd tie it to archaeology to revitalise that profession, you find an ancient tablet/scroll/whatever while digging that points to a lolg lost treasure, and maybe it takes you to a hidden vault, then that opens the way for them to have several different themes for the dungeon, a troll temple, a night elf settlement, an ancient draenei spaceship prototype that exploded on launch and now the narru inside has gone rampant? the possibilities would be, well not endless, but very broad. loot can be like FF, valor points, mats to make cosmetics using the professions, some prof mats like laestrite ore or whatever is the current stuff atm, maybe add some new currency that is rare to find but is rolled on like loot, and is a token that you can save up X of to buy rewards from harrison jones for your contributions to the museum's archives like new mounts cosmetics toys etc
I do love the Treasure Maps even playing Solo its possible to gather a group in pf it does make it feel way more social i think they changed some of the RnG but i'm not sure in my last run most people couldn't get passed the first door instantly kicked out lol.. Glad you're having fun with it Bellular wondering if you tried out the other things like Performance Mode on Bard, Gold Saucer, Bozja, crafting, gathering, did any glam contests? (like Preach)
I diversify my FF experience.
I like doing MAPs with friends and FCs when the mood strikes (We'll usually stockpile a few)
I like dedicating a day to Gathering or Crafting. Leveling them mostly through Ishgard means I don't have to put up with leve quests and it usually puts a few gil in my pocket with any leftover materials. it doesn't grant as many scripts, sure, but those I largely get from the Custom Deliveries for ease and convenience. :)
I'm on a couple of Hunt Linkshells, so when they shout out about a hunt train in the current area, I can join in... or if I'm busy I skip it. Sometimes I use the Hunt Trains exclusively to boost my capped tomes, and use my Dailies for leveling the stragglers.
There's more than one way to play and that's a major strength here. ^-^
@11:00 And suddenly I realize those pre-Legion invasion points were kind of nice like that, for alts anyway.
I'd add a mention of the weekly Journals, encouraging players to run current AND past content with decent rewards. Guaranteed 50% of a level in XP and a big pile of poetics, with a decent chance of landing more current currencies or gold saucer points from a bit more gambling in the form of the connect-4 stamp sheet. Great way to feel like you're working on multiple goals at once, while also seeing some older content you may not have seen for months or even longer (or going on a solo power-trip if you choose to go stomp some if them without syncing your level down).
treasure maps are my favorite thing in XIV - it's simple, fun, but it uses the game's core mechanics and is the one thing in the game that doesn't fall to predictable tedium since RNG is at the core, but it's never too disappointing since you're always getting mats, materia, and Gil, and there's enough stuff to keep it interesting otherwise.
thats something nobody of my former wow mates understand when i go into raptures about all the things i do here and there in eorzea and how much i enjoy it. and everybody is like "what do you do in the endgame?" and i am like "this is kind of the endgame when you want to" and everybody is irritated and asks "but what do you have to farm?" and they cant even imagine theres content you do for fun. i mean as you said, theres reward in almost everything you do in this game (plus the simple fun) but its made so well, you have never the feeling to waste your time. i spend hours at the gold saucer with raid-like jump puzzles, daily/weekly lottery and all those game of skills, tetra master or chocobo racing (and breeding!). and damn i love the fishing system in this game!
well thats the kind of playerbase blizzard has cultivated over the years, doing something for fun has become alien and any content that doesn't give some kind of gear or other form of player power is useless. And even the few times when the content is optional many will not do it because they have been conditioned to think that way or simply because they have had their fill of daily/weekly playtime doing the 'mandatory chore' content
him saying "imagine doing expert roulette everyday to get mats, it would feel awful" my first thought: "in lost ark i need to do chaos dungeon everyday and una's tasks to get mats to upgrade my weapon to progress... i think its true" XD
and... its time for Bozja. It will blow your mind
One Correction. S Ranks don't have a Spawn timer. Or not a traditional one. After 2 days (Approximately) they become available, and can be spawned through specific mechanics. One can be summoned through blowing yourself up near it's spawn locations. One is summoned through throwing away a certain food item. One is summoned through kiting specific mobs towards smaller ones, letting them consume the small mobs to power up until it's dodgeable AOE's are instant kills, and then allowing yourself to be hit by the cone.
So scouts like Bellular mentioned aren't just running around, they're doing all sorts of things to spawn bosses that everyone gets to benefit from.
as someone who beaten the exciteatron 6000 the reward for me (and my stupidly lucky 98 roll) was archangel wings and a fancy title: the excruiatingly excited The maps of endwalker are the first time me and some friends managed to get the right amount of luck on 1 good run of the new rng content! never had such a blast! i wish you luck in hopes you get that lucky run yourself bellular!
i find it super interesting how michael is approaching his time at 'end game' (as in, end game is whatever you say it is). i just cleared P3S with my static, and i have never done a single hunt or treasure map in the game. watching this video makes me wanna try it out!
Similar mechanics also exist in Old School RuneScape and Lost Ark, which makes me wonder why this kind of systems so rare in MMOs.
The concept of a "treasure hunt" type of content solves a lot of problems with MMOs, it's kinda crazy.
(base assumption for further statements is that Treasure Hunt mechanic is well designed)
1. Rare drop of "map" items makes people excited to try the content. As long as rewards stay worthwhile, people will always do this type of activity, which also creates a system for rare items with equal opportunities for all players.
2. Map drops durning a more tedious, but "efficient" content, makes them a good way of distracting players from a daily grind, which fights against "more efficient, less fun" style of play.
3. Having maps cover less populated areas of a game, makes player explore more of the game world, allowing them to find side activities they otherwise wouldn't find.
I think the bigger factor here isn't that everything has a sprinkling of rewards/tomestones on it, wow tried that back in early MoP, just about everything gave valor points. The bigger key factor is just reducing the amount of chores in the game.
Like I said back in MoP, as well as at other points in time WoW has had lots of varied little bits of content, but often times player response would boil down to "why should I do this?", and so the devs would attach player power rewards on everything, or the devs would add in a new source of player power to create a reward for new content. Then players would need to min/max the best ways to reach all of their weekly caps, and spend all of their in-game time working on this stuff. But players weren't asking "why should I do this?" because they needed a reward, they asked it because they already had so much other stuff they had to do, that new content needed rewards to justify doing them instead of something else.
Less rewards, less things that you "need" to do, means that players have more free time to spend on the things they want to do. Things like housing, glamour, role-play venues, what do any of these things have to do with player power or player progression in FF14? Nothing. In fact, these things typically cost resources rather than generating them, yet they're extremely popular in FF14. Now sure, wow isn't completely devoid of these types of things (I assume, been a while since I touched it), things like the brawlers' guild and Lei Shen's treasure runs were good examples, they were interesting and fun, if you could find the time for it (also these were both solo-content, which isn't bad, but having fun group content is nice as well).
tl;dr: don't make players feel like they 'have' to play your game. make them 'want' to play your game.
FFXIV does have its share of chores like the Relic Weapons (especially ARR). But like you said, most of it doesn’t have a daily cap where we log in as if going to work. We just do it at our own pace.
The only big exception I’ve seen is the Moogle Treasure Trove, at least the current one. Previous years could be somewhat cheesed, but now it’s a lot more tedious, and you only have until the next patch to get everything you want.
Yes, the hunt train concept is both awesome and would drastically improve the atmosphere in most WoW zones. Add in warmode and all of a sudden you get that classic feel again where we were fighting over rare spawns. I think it would be awesome.
great video, very interesting to see a comparison - I haven't played MMORPGs since 2016, pretty much just follow along on here haha. Damn those combat scenes and the UI text from FF14 remind me a lot of Rift in places.
Question - isn't the "sprinkling of rewards" just the same thing as Artifact Power was in WoW which everyone optimised the fun out of and hated? Is it just a difference in terms of cap quantity (hours per week required)? Hmmmm
There's nothiing required about any of these avenues though which doesn't limit fun per week.
Yea... I wouldn't say that WoW needs to copy maps outright from FFXIV, but they do need to do SOMETHING that engenders the same kind of irreverent fun that guilds can do together. Because yes, like many others my FC has a dedicated map night where we just hang out for a couple hours and laugh and commiserate in Discord. The rewards from maps are great, but they're not really the point. It's an excuse for your community to socialize more than anything else. But having that activity as an anchor point is key.
I'll never not find hunt trains amazing. It's an organically organized player made system that has very little if any formal organization from the devs. There is nothing in FFXIV that ensures such an elaborate system should come to exist, but it does exist and it says something about the cooperative mind set of FFXIV players that this is how it works. But it still seems so at odds to how almost every experience I've ever heard about or participated in with online strangers.
There was actually a tidbit about this in a recent dev interview. Yoshida was asked if they might provide timers for hunt spawns or worldboss spawns in the UI somewhere, but his answer was basically that expanding the QoL features *too* far for this kind of content - making it too easy to track as an individual - would remove the need for the community to organize around them. And fostering the community aspect is what they value about it and is the point of designing that kind of content.
One of FF14 biggest strengths over other Games and their developers is very simple. The Developers actually play the game and want it to be fun. So, if something feels like you're at work and don't want to be there they will improve it and if they can't make it fun. Then that will be cut content. Games are meant to be enjoyed and to have fun. If it's not, then it's not worth playing.
Playing wow since release I find myself more often than not running around a major city doing absolutely nothing but running. Why because its more enjoyable sometimes then their actual content. In FF14 I don't tend to do that unless I'm waiting for friends to come online. When I'm bored or don't know what to do I pick something anything it's going to be fun to do and it's going to help me progress in some way. I love it.
I personally noticed this most when doing Palace of the dead. You’re telling me I can get Astronomy, Aphorisms, Poetics, gold transmog, WHILE Progressing necromancer?? Freaking crazy. Also I always know that at any point I can just do a few endgame dungeons to cap so there’s no time stress or anything
Maps are my favorite thing to do in endgame. It's our shoot the shit night in my FC. Drinks, Discord, and Shenanigans. It's a wonderful time for us to bond and most of us have enough maps for DAYS
Oh i remember the hunt trains. Did it for solid 5 hours straight. So much fun...and treasure map omg, totally forgot about those stuff that I use to do with my FC.....after so many years of quitting the game (after finishing stormblood) due to LIFE. Looking back now, there are actually so many things you can do in the game without feeling that it was a chore....if only now I have the time or wish I was 20 years old again.
at the end of that it made me think "so your telling wow the take inspiration from final fantasy on something that final fantasy seems to have possibly have taken inspiration of from wow" and I'm like yea that makes sense
My favorite things about maps is that, if you're doing it with friends, it's less about the loot and more about the dumb little jokes that come up and laughing till we're sick. It's the best way to wind down after a long work week. And I enjoy it so much that I make it a point to pick up solo maps once I'm capped on group maps and then run them all at once when those are capped too.
FF has so many side activities or alternate ways to play the game, it really changed something in how I look at this kind of games.
Just as example, all my jobs are at least 50 and 1 DPS, 2 heals and 2 tanks at max level with one tank and DPS close to 90. Also all gatherer and crafter at 90.
In comparison.. since vanilla wow, my highest amount of alts I leveled for an expansion was 4 in total.. and that was classic wow last year that allowed me to pay another person to basically level for me while I do something more entertaining.
I play FF for 5 month. WoW for half my life. But in FF I feel like I can do what I have fun with and still progress in a meaningful way for me.
And I still haven't found everything that the game has to offer.
Outside of doing MSQ, Treasure hunts with my FC are my favorite activities in the game!
We always do a ritualistic dance before the last door to manifest the God of wealth 😂. You also have to tell yourself you don't want it at the same time.
Will you release a video on Blue Mages? They have a really fantastic new game mode with spells, Carnivalle, etc.
Not sure he's up on Blue mage yet. Probably hasn't had the chance to experience its content
No FOMO. Gotta love it. You aren't sacrificing something or giving up time on something else. Sure it's not a ton of tomes but at the same time, if you decided you just want to do a ton of maps? Hey you still get your weekly tomes! Even though its the endgame currency, there are so many ways to get it and it is just so freeing. "Aww I don't really want to run a dungeon today." or "Don't feel like raiding." You got options.
I also like to point out that part of the fun of treasure maps is that you are unable to outgear the dungeon, and half of the fun is the scramble as the party (especially the tank!) realizes 'oh we can't fully turn our brains off because these mobs got HANDS'
I wont spoil the last room, but the last room always has something valuable. The true test of your friendship.
Also, lvl 60-70-80 maps also have a second dungeon, which is easier and a lot of fun. Second dungeon for lv 90 map will come at later date as usual.
Enjoyed watching you talk about how much fun you have in the game!
For those who want to do a Relic Reborn (ARR Relic Weapons) for side activities after finish the MSQ...
Run! You have a chance to run!
Treasure maps are some of my favorite casual content, because they're just built for comedy and sometimes you get cool stuff.
FF14 design their games like this "here's optional things for you to do for fun", there's no incentives for any of the activities in FF14 other than what you choose to spend time on, if I want to spend a full day fishing, I can do that, if I want to solo Palace of the Dead, I can do that, if I want to do maps or hunts, then I can do that too, there's so much to do in this game and nobody is telling you that you're "wasting time" or "being inefficient" for doing the things you want to do, because you aren't wasting time, regardless of how I spend my time in the game I never feel like I'm wasting it.
The map content just gets better each expansion. Very happy that there is side content for me to do after resubbing for a month
Have you done any of the SHB/SB portals?
There are two styles of map dungeons. Right now, EW only has the first type. SE will be adding a second roulette wheel style dungeon in the next couple patches. It is my favorite of the two dungeons you'll see. I'd definitely recommend doing a SHB map night just so you can see both styles of dungeons.
I have been doing maps for years now and it is still one of the best activities in the game that doesn’t take brain power to do plus you can make some good friendships while doing it.
Treasure dungeons have been changed multiple times. At first it was just two doors, then an update added the rare three door dungeons, then there were roulette wheel dungeons where you spin a wheel to see what boss spawns.
The high-low is Endwalker’s addition to the formula.
That's interesting, because I remember high-low when in Shadowbringers doing maps, but it was a very rare chance of happening. Even so, it's a really fun twist to the minigame and I'm excited to see how treasure maps evolve over the years!
*Yep, treasure maps and treasure dungeons are fantastic in FFXIV!*
*I love how they troll you with the gates too! FFXIV is great at respecting players gametime by rewarding in multiple ways even in side events.*
There was a monkey experiment where they gave monkeys puzzles to do. And the monkeys did it, because they had nothing else to do in their cages. And it was fun.
After the researchers started rewarding monkeys for completing puzzles. Monkeys became less interested in the puzzles.
It’s more fun to do the activity without being rewarded. But it becomes even better when there’s a surprise reward.
So anyway, my point that I wanted to write about. Does having 2 rewards subside the effect of having rewards rather than not at all? While you’re farming for one thing, you’re actually amassing another, which results in a little surprise when you check up on it.
This is just my hypothesis. I’ve done no testing.
Bellular himself made a video using this experiment as proof already, forgot which one
Lol, what a coinkidink.
The game is overflowing with fun content to do. I have been HOOKED for 7 months now and I haven't done a single treasure hunt and only recently just started deep dungeons. This game puts WoW to shame.
After watching this video I really want content like Lei Shen's loot cave back. I really enjoyed this scenario in MoP.
i did maps for the first time last week with the all fc we made multiple group it was so much fun we had such bad luck but the best fun everyone should try it, lvl 70 or 80 maps are still nice.
Me and a bunch of my FC have "Drunk Maps Saturdays", where we all kick back, form parties, get a drink, and mash maps all night while chatting shit on Discord.
So much fun.
My FC does treasure maps every Fri. evening, and it's a lot of fun. Honestly, I don't care about the rewards. I just go for the good times. I agree with everything you said here, but I doubt these types of activities would feel the same if Blizz implemented them, simply because of the way the WoW community has evolved.
My perception is that there is a much bigger emphasis on hyper optimizing everything within the community. FF has it's share of players like this, too, but I feel like they're offset by a larger proportion of more casual (but still community minded) players. I cannot imagine hunt trains in WoW being anything but a shit show, unlike how they feel in FF or the old world boss trains that used to run in GW2. The community is just not the same, and at this point, never will be, IMO.
A Treasure Map system like the one in FF would work just find in WoW, I think you are letting a very small portion of the toxic community way over influence the way you think about the community as a whole. Same with Hunt Trains, maybe it wouldn't be exactly the same with the way Sharding works, but killing World Boss in SL a la the Group Finder has never been difficult or toxic, the only problem is you only need to do it once a week for a World Quest (and for a Lego Pattern drop if you are unlucky), so it's very transactional. You do it once then don't worry about it again until next Tuesday.
The WoW community generally doesn't have a problem with casual content, it's just that there just isn't much casual content to do and there's very little no reason to do it.
I usually make between 600k and 1M gill per night depending on how many maps we do and if RNG is on our side with the doors.
People: "Nothing compares to the sense of Adventure in Elden Ring!"
Me: *Makes it to the final room in the treasure trove* "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"
I have to admit it's pretty cool to see when playing a sprout running around and then see a massive train of player flying over head to wreck a boss and then flying away
Have you run into Odin in the Shroud yet? Back in the day that place would always get flooded with dead players. lol
I just got the nuts mount from the Crystarium. Feels so good.
No one:
Michael: THE SPECTACLE
Nice a video on content thats been in XIV forever and literally everyone knows about, this channel is so FOTM