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Guild leves restriction
TaishiFox
Member RarePosts: 999
Its funny how everyone is bitching about surplus and no one cares to mention the functiion of guild leves! Well, since I was in CB3 and played FFXIV during this phase a decent ammount, I'm gonna throw in my two cence on what I think is a bigger problem than the surplus, the guild leve system!
Ok, to start things off and make things clear on what guild leves are, they are basically mini quests where you are given instructions to go out in the field and kill a certain ammount of mobs, gather resources or simply craft items. Sounds like ya average questing in any standerd MMORPG right? well here's the catch, you only have about half a dozen of these per class focus. Lets say you wish to fight mobs, this is called battle leves and you can only obtain half a dozen, same goes for gathering which are field leves, once completed and handed in you can not repeat these for seemingly a certain ammount of time, I think the time limit is 24 hours as it took me til the next day to get them again. To add to this wait, you must exchange 2 of your leves you currently have, completed or non completed. This 2 for 1 exchange makes it impossible to obtain the half dozen quests you were doing the day before, you only end up with 3! Granted you can hand in your field leves for battle ones and visa versa, but you still end up with only 3-6 leves in total rather than the 6 battle and 6 field you had the first time! Also, so far all I found was this one NPC that was handing out these leve quests so all I can say is good luck finding them elsewhere in each city as it doesn't seem very possible to obtain them elsewhere. Also, if you chose to do lets say T1 leves which is basically level 1~ you cannot request the T2, aka 10~, as a seperate ammount of leves, you must still wait. In my opinion this system is pretty bad, I only played about 4-6 hours tops, per day, on FFXIV due to this system. I suppose they did it to work with the so called surplus system but to me this just restricts the gamer even more on how much ammount of time he or she wishes to spend per day playing this game.
Anyways, thats my feedback on this system, feel free to comment, add in your findings, whatever.
::UPDATE::
After getting some feedback on other people's experiance I have found that theirs may be different from my own. I am aware of this therefor don't need any further input on it. I would suggest to anyone who is curious on how leves work to read Magnum's post further down.
However, this does not change my viewpoint on how bad they are, its clear that they have a rediculously huge timer to obtain them and these leves are your main source for exp, which is just making things worese when we have enough punishing mechanics involved as it is. Anyways, thanks for reading and feel free to post your views.
Comments
It's getting rediculous ... Do they want us to hate this game or what?
Your speculation is your own, you people want the info, so here it is, make of it what you will. I for one am quite hugely dissapointed and I'm praying that OB proves to be better else I will be one of those fans joining the canelling wagen. Til then, roll on OB. I posted this just so you guys know what else is a problem and I think too many are bitching about the surplus while no one mentions this. Personally I would like to see other beta testers post some feedback to this in this thread so we know what their experiance was like with this system.
"They" = SE
Ah right, I follow you now. Yeah, no kidding. I don't s'pose you had the oppertunity to play this yet?
Nope, and this is where the problem lies for me.
I can only base my feelings toward this game on articles, beta reports, etc.
And while they seem to have a very positive feeling when addressing GW2, each release of info augments the positivity, FFXIV seems to achive the opposite.
The more info that comes out the badder the taste in my mouth I get regarding this game.
Ok people will say, it's beta, wait until release and check it yourself and then form an opinion. But the same rule applies to GW2, and as I just stated they menage to convey a complete positive feel.
As now the list of controversial info in relation to FFXIV just keeps on growing:
Jumping: I know people will say its not important blah blah blah, but it seems to be for a lot of people. It opens a lot of possible issues when your terain/quests are not aligned correctly. Plus the stupid running around a 2inch dip coz you get stuck on the terrain. Just yesterday somebody reported on an issue with a pit he couldn't get into and the quest reset or something.
Surplus: just go count the nr of threads created around the world on this one.
Controls: don't get me started on this one. I only can go by on reports, but they do not seem to be positive at all. The message I'm getting is: ltp with keyboard or buy a pad and your fine. Lfmao.
Guildleves: your point here.
UI: pfffft.
Slow combat.
Etc.
TLDR I am trying to like this game but information that reaches out to us makes it difficult.
Guild leve information I gathered from beta (some of what the OP said was wrong, I don't think they quite realized how it works).
8 regional leves which are shared between faction (did not get a chance to do any of these, because you need a large amount of faction to trade in for one), battlecraft (normal combat leves, similar to short quests in most MMOs), and fieldcraft leves.
8 local leves which are specifically for Disciple of the Hand crafting jobs. These are seperate and do not count towards your regional leve limit.
About 3-4 leves per every 10 "ranks" for combat classes.
Leve difficulties are way too easy right now. Solo is a cakewalk. Band which is suppose to be designed for 2-3 players is fairly easy solo. Party (full group - ~5 members) and even Troop (2 groups - 10 members) can be done solo sometimes. Legion (full raid - max group size is 15) can be done with a small party.
The regional leves reset every 2 days (not 24 hours). They reset on a specific server time - ~10PM EST in beta. You can grab leves and do them right before the reset, then you'll be able to grab more.
Currently, if you DC while in a guild leve you fail it. There is also a time limit on the leves, but it's unlikely you'll have an issue beating the time limit. Failures count towards your limit and you cannot retry the leve till it resets.
Leves you get are random and the rewards you get for completing them are random, but you can tell what the rewards are before you take them. The leves are rerandomized about every 2 hours, so it can be beneficial holding out for a better reward.
Most leves reward gil. Some also give you a bonus armor piece. Raising the difficulty increases the "gil bonus" which is a small bonus you and your party members (party members do not receive the majority of the gil and any other leve rewards) receive for finishing the leve.
Some leves reward guild marks. You have to do the leve as that specific class that the guild marks are for in order to receive the marks. For instance if you get one that rewards Pugilist Marks, you need to do the leve as a Pugilist. I didn't test if you could take it the leve and switch in the middle of it, or just switch at the end to receive the reward though.
You can trade in leves you completed after you've picked your leve to increase the gil or mark reward. You can trade in up to 4 leves per leve you take. I recommend waiting for when you receive a guild mark leve to trade in. You do not need to trade in leves to get a new one, you can skip this step, the OP is wrong. It only increases the reward.
The same two NPCs in whatever city you are in hand out leve quests for all regions. You'll have more available as you increase in rank. You can pick up all 8 leves at once. So yes, you can have Tier 1 and Tier 2 and even Tier 3 leves ready to go.
Leves can be shared with party members. If party members have the same leve and you complete it as a group, it counts towards their leve being completed, so it's better to plan leves with your linkshell members - have one member grab all their leves and do them, then have another member run back to town, collect theirs, and do them, etc. This way you don't have any overlap and can do all 8 per party member.
Leves seem to give a significant amount of bonus EXP (roughly 3-4X more than normal!), so they are ideal for leveling. You can activated your Guardian's Favor during a leve if you earned enough of it which further increases your skill EXP.
Behests are similar to battlecraft leves, except a boss spawns at the end (which wasn't too difficult with a group of 3 in the behests we've done). A recruiter spawns by an aethryte crystal or gate and you can talk to them to begin the behest after a couple of minutes (the recruiter will say how long till start). One problem with this is that anyone who isn't a member of the party who started the behest cannot join in, and sometimes players will start them solo not realizing that they require (at the very least) a small party. The recruiters are on a long respawn timer that is at least over 1 hour (my guess would be around 4 or 5). In the behests I've done, only bonus gil was rewarded, no other loot.
people that cry about jumping, chronic bunny hoppers sad that they cant look like asshats hehe, who still plays anything on the pc without keyboard/mouse? or gamepad if supported, mouse only = ewwww wtf hehe. as far as how these leves work, seems like experience with them is limited, did anyone complete the combat ones and they do the gathering, and then the crafting? or did you takem all at once, and mish mosh? hard to say how that system works as it sounds complex.
edit: posted at the same time as magnum, see now theres someone who seems to know what hes talking about
Who's crying?
My eyes maybe because of your punctuation and sentence build, but otherwise no crying around here, just stating some impressions on this games feedback.
lol yeah, I hear what ya saying and I'm in total agreement here. And trust me, you don't wanna get me started and what else I'd complain about. I am in total agreement on the the other problems such as jumpnig off cliffs not possible and losing out on guild leves because you couldn't reach said target in the alloted time you are given. Yeah, I forgot to mention that, if you fail to complete the quest in the time you are given once activated, which is normally half an hour, you fail the mission and again must wait in order to do it again! I once had a target that was far too impossible to reach due to not being able to jump down to it, and although I had more than 15 minutes left, I failed the leve. You can imagine how pissed off I was especially considering I had killed 5/6 of my targets >_< As for controls in general, you have no idea how annoying it is to target yourself, the nearest player/party member etc until you finally target the mob you wish to kill! and no, tab doesn't function as target nearest mob, it targets you, then closest player, then closest mob, WTF is with that?! The UI is so-so, though I find it annoying to have to access the menu for almost every function you wish to achieve. Invite to party, must access menu (ok same as FFXI whatever), trade, menu (again, same as FFXI), loot chest? menu, mine a rock? menu, chop a tree? menu! I mean for god sakes what happened to simply target and use interact button which is normally the damn enter key?! Slow combat? hell yeah, you got this damn meter that seems to go up graudually and if its bellow about 10% you can't do shit, meanwhile that mob you are trying to kill is still pounding on you! Not to mention the sound effect that goes with the selection of a skill is just plain annoying considering ya doing skills at least half a dozen times per fight. You should see the videos on the combat system on YouTube, you'll see what I mean >_> Heh, and to think I'm gonna wait til OB before I make my final decison? Well lets just say I'm a die hard fan with too much faith in SE I s'pose.
Thanks for the feedback Magnum but I have heard that theory about it being 2 days before and found it was untrue by personal playing experiance. And each time I went to do a new leve it pretty much insisted that I exchanged 2 for that leve to becmoe playable, so you tell me how I got that wrong. I am talking from hands on experiance here, not some info I just happned to find on a site. As for your info regarding ranks, I can't say whether this is accurately true or not, I will have to wait until beta to find out I s'pose. However, whether its 24 hours or 2 days is still making on factor clear, its restricted and therefor sucks. It states on the FFXIV site that these guild leves can be obtained at any time to give a player the oppertunity to play it how they wish, which is not enitrely true when ya can only obtain around a dozen or so per day or two! Its a lousy system, that part is fact.
You yourself said you played the beta for 4-6 hours, so I don't see how you made an assumption about a 2 day timer on the guild leve. I am telling you this as a matter of fact, it's not theory, as we had the exact server reset time down to a tea after the first week I got into beta. It is always every 2 days at around 10PM EST that the leves reset. What you can do is grab the leves an hour before reset, complete all 8 at once, and then you can grab the next 8 and complete those. You'll have to wait for a server reset after that, but you can do 16 leves by yourself in 2 hours that way.
As far as the leve exchange thing I had the same problem at first since the UI doesn't explicitly say you don't have to turn in leves. It makes it seem like you do, but if you cancel the exchange, it gives you the leve anyway. I don't think it's a bug either, just a case of the UI not telling you what is going on (something that happens a lot in FFXIV). What you are saying doesn't even make mathematical sense:
Day 1: You grab 8 battlecraft leves and complete them.
Day 3: You exchange the 8 leves since you are required to exchange 2 leves to pick up a new one according to you. You get 4 leves.
Day 5: You exchange 4 leves - now you can only get 2.
Day 7: You exchange 2 leves for one.
Day 9: You don't have two leves to exchange, guess you can't do leves anymore?
I almost never exchanged leves. Only time I exchanged them was when I was lucky enough to get a high gil reward or a very rare mark quest (in which I exchanged 4 at once). Considering I was doing 8 leves every 2 days while only exchanging leves rarely, I think that's proof enough.
First things first, I said I did 4-6 hours a day, not just a one off and gave up, so yeah, I played per day and found each day, not every 2 days, I could grab the same leves I did the day before! as for my mathematics not making sense, well ist not my fault that the game is so poorly done that it doesn't make it seem like you don't have to exchange a leve in order to obtain a new one. However, once again this still doesn't justify anything when it comes to how often you can do these leves. You're saying its 8 every 2 days, so lets assume that is true, lets assume you've done all your levels within 2 hours of game play on one day, then what? WTF would you do after that? go grind? fuck that, not as it currently stands anyway, high level mobs too close to camp not even worth trying to kill, mobs worth killing almost impossible to find cus everyone is killing them and it seems you travel for miles before seeing any spawn! imo you are trying too hard at justifying how FFXIV really works. I appreciate your feedback but I still say this system fails. I would rather have plenty of quests to do for those 4-6 hours of game play rather than only have enough to cater 2 hours and be bored as fuck and log out before I decide I've had enough! In most games I actually spend more than 4-6, but in this game, once ya done everything for a day, there's nothing else to do, so there's no point in waisting anymore time on it.
Sorry if I came off a little hostile there, just get a bit upset when people are questioning things I pretty much know are fact. I'm a pretty meticulous tester, try to find every single bug and figure out every single mechanic. I even have several spreadsheets related to FFXIV right now to determine how exactly the systems work.
I never really commented on how I feel about guild leves myself. I just wanted to provide the facts, the stuff I collected on guild leves. It wasn't really feedback because I didn't provide my opinion. The amount of misinformation about the game circulating on these forums right now is ridiculous. People who aren't even in beta commenting on mechanics as if they were fact, or saying rumors like there will be a AH in the game after release even though Tanaka pretty much stated in one of his interviews that they are sticking with the retainer system and have no plans for AH. That's just one example, there are plenty of others.
As far as my personal feelings on the guild leve system it needs a lot of improvement, and I agree the cooldown is completely unnecessary as are numerous other punishing "features" in the game right now. Even if there was no cooldown on leves, it's still as repetitive if not more so than grinding since you start seeing the same leve quests over and over (especially if you run them all day in a party). My hopes lie in that SE will start listening to feedback (believe it or not, a lot of Japanese players share our concerns, so it's not just us Westerners SE isn't listening to) and that the game will drastically improve about 6 months or a year from now. Right now, it isn't release ready, but I'm still going to play it and I think it's going to turn around to be as good or better than FFXI.
*nod nods* amen to that buddy. And don't get me wrong, I do appreciate you giving out info on what you have collected so far, unfortunately I didn't even have enough time to get any real info on the game during beta, I got my key litterally last weekend and by fluke chance via a friend of mine. However, as we've agreed, this game has too many set backs and needs to be put straight, that was my main point of arguement here, not saying I'm right your wrong blah blah blah.
I have been playing in beta a while as well and I think the cooldown should be 24 hours and not 48. Still most people who complain about these haven't even tried to make the system work for them.
You can party for hours on end and with different sized parties pull from multiple leve locations. I can only imagine how much content and leves there will be once all three starting nations are in. Grouping really is beneficial to make these last. In about 6 hours with the same party we went through 2-4 leves each.
I strongly agree that gathering/crafting/questing leves should have their own limits though and I have left it in feedback. Still most people are making assumptions and have no idea how the system will play out once live just like with the Fatigue system. The fact of the matter is Fatigue won't even effect 90% of the playerbase, and this leve problem mainly comes about when soloing if the only way you can play is doing leves.
People talk a lot when they don't know what they are talking about on both sides of the fence.
Also OP you are incorrect. 8 leves, 48 hour cooldowns, exchange all 8 for 8 more. Most go in solo and grab up all 8 and then burn through them. They best thing to do is make a party then take turns taking 1-4 battlecraft leves for one person in the party, doing them all on highest rank, or low rank in a high area since a party can explore more advanced content. People don't explore the system enough before bashing it. It does need tweaks though.
ok first off, that 8 leves for every 48 hours cooldown has already been mentioned but I will still argue that til I'm blue in the face cus I know what I was experiancing, its not 48 hours, prove it else it never happened ok? As for its more benificial to do them in party and do them 8 per player at a time, I am quite aware of, perhaps I should have mentioned this in my original post but I was more annoyed about how hard it was to regain these leves more than ready to explain how it was more useful to be in teams. Thanks to Magnum with his input, this sort of thing was already cleared up, so I didn't really need you giving me any fiy's since its already menontioned by someoen else. However, I have a little pointer to make regarding this option of partying, some don't like to team wtih total strangers, though granted both FF11 and FF14 seem to hugely encourage this and I know hat ya thinking, so why play MMORPGs? well some like to play with friends that they may not live near too, some meet people online in chat rooms or other virtual environments and may wish to enjoy the game with these people instead. Once ya party and done everyone's leves you are once again placed into square 1, and believe me, a full party of 4-8 people ain't gonna take long doing everyone's leves anyway, we already analyzed how easy they are (see Magnum's post) at the moment, I do hope they become harder. Also, doing the same leves over and over and over can get rather tediously boring, so who really wants to do the same leve upto the ammount of times as there is people in your said party? Not me, and I'm sure alot of others agree. I don't see how smacking a dozen of the same wharf rat or flying rat a dozen times in the same area would be considered fun after a few hours (kinda reminds me of grinding in FFXI actually >_> ).
there are 2 thing I don't like about the leves
that is the 48 hour reset should be 24.
If you get booted from the server you fail the leve.
Otherwise there are fine.
Maybe there was a bug. Did you leave it in feedback section? I know I made a char, took all 8 leves, did all 8 leves in a couple hours on easy rank for testing purposes, went back to npc at 32 hours ish and couldn't exchange, and then went back at about the 50 hour mark and picked up 8 new leves. When I was selecting exchange I could select more than 1, but in the end I got 8 leves again. It seemed to work like expected to me, but exchanging was a bit questionable.
I also thought I noticed in earlier phases exchanging leves giving a reward, but maybe my brain was wonky.
Yeah the failure thing they are taking into consideration. I left the same feedback. They said somewhere they were considering doing something better for failed leves like allowing a retry. I agree totally on this.
One other change I want to see is if someone in your party completes a leve it should not complete your leve if you have the same one unless you activate it at the crystal or aether node. This way a group can cycle doing leves without overlap. I don't think they will do this, but I would like to see it anyway.
It's eight every 48 hours
I did the 4 Battlecraft ones then 2 Fishing ones then 2 Minings ones... 2 days later it let me do more.
Now if you just take the 4 Battlecraft ones at that frist camp, that is all you can get for what seems like 24 hours.
So you could get 4 one day and another 4 the next
Another issue with grouping and leves is it really cuts down on the amount of EXP you get. Party mechanics just aren't rewarded at all on this point. You could spend all day doing leves in a 15 member party, but because of the way skill points and experience is rewarded you'll likely get as much EXP as you would have doing your 8 solo, only 10X more quickly. In one of the interviews they did say they are looking into making party mechanics more rewarding.
I haven't had a chance to try faction leves either (I'm not even sure they are available in beta). Supposely those are harder and longer versions of battlecraft leves.
Are we still arguing over the 48 hour timer? I told you we had it down. We tested it time and time again. 9PM EST = no leves available, 10PM EST = leves now available. It was on a 48 hour timer. If you experienced differently it was probably because you happened to pick up and complete a bunch of leves right before the 48 hour server reset. It's on server time, it doesn't matter if you picked up the leves 1 hour before it or 47 hours before it, it's going to reset and you can do the leves again.
Hmm.. its possible thats what might have happened, I didn't do the gathering on my first day I know that much. However, I thought the 48 hour cool down was for each quest? ie, say ya grabbed Bats will Cry or whatever it was called, you shouldn't be able to do this for another 48 hours correct? well I found I still had 4 battle leves that I had done the day before available for me the next day, and I was promted to make an exchange, which I thought was vital to repeat them but I guess not. If you mean you can do any 8 quests, including repeating 1 or 2 within 48 hours, that I can understand which would make me question how long does it take before you can repeat a single leve, not how long does it take to obtain 8 of them, can you answer that one?
You don't have to exchange the leves, but they really need to make it more clear that you can skip it. It's best to exchange 4 leves only when you get some really high gil rewards or marks for a class you can do the leves with otherwise save them up. The marks can be exchanged for extra abilities related to that class and passives traits like being able to receive 10% more healing.
When I did the 4 battlecraft leves that one day... I got a couple of the same leves the very next day...
You actually can't repeat the same guild leves before a reset. Well, you can if you didn't have the leve active and completed it via a party member, but that's what I was getting into with the whole overlapping thing. Once again what you experienced was that you grabbed the guild leve a day before the guild leve reset timer, rather than 2 days.
Let me try to explain it better. The guild leves reset for everyone at the same exact time. If the last leve reset was on Monday at 10PM EST and you completed your 8 guild leves on Wednesday at 8PM EST, in 2 more hours you can grab 8 more guild leves again, regardless of whether you grabbed the previous 8 guild leves on Wednesday at 7PM EST or Monday at 10:30PM EST. We've (as in the few in the linkshell I'm in who I've been playing beta with) have tested this over and over again for the past 3 weeks and each time it has consistently reset every 2 days at 10PM EST for everyone.