There’s also a leveling problem in the game insofar as there’s a level sync system to allow higher-level players to interact with lower-level content… but not to give much motivation for doing so. Doing a random low-level FATE on a maxed job offers me virtually nothing; I get a pittance of gil and seals I could earn more easily doing almost anything. Once you have everything maxed out, content worth experience feels actively counterproductive, because you can’t earn it and can’t get any real benefits from it.
Isn’t it nice when one system suggests a solution to multiple problems at the same time?
A brief history of Merit
Merit Points were introduced to Final Fantasy XI in 2004 to answer the question about where characters could go after the level cap. The cap at the time was 75, and there was no real plan to increase that, but there was always the issue of losing experience on a death. The result was that players still needed experience parties… very briefly. And someone came up with the idea for a way to keep players in experience parties longer as lightning flashed in the background.
That’s all speculation, of course. The important thing is that Merits served as a form of leveling without actually leveling. Players didn’t have to set out and earn experience for nothing more than insurance purposes; experience actually had a purpose and a positive effect at the level cap.
Essentially, once your character hits 75, you can change yourself from earning experience to earning limit points at a 1:1 ratio. Limit points accumulate, and hitting 10,000 earns one Merit Point and keeps you ticking over. Merit points can in turn be spent on your character’s abilities. You can spend merits on things like skills, attributes, and so forth (accessible to your character on every job), or you can spend merits on job-specific abilities (accessible when you’re on that job as your main job).
The system also has limits on how many merits you can spend within certain categories and on certain items. On a Red Mage, for example, there are six different debuff spells you can learn via merits. Each of those spells can be enhanced through further merits, but you can only level up the items in that category 10 times. Thus, you have to choose; you can have a really strong Paralyze II and Dia III, or you can have all of the spells at a weaker level, or three at moderate level, and so forth. If you decide you made a bad choice, you can discard the points you spent on something; you don’t get the points back, but you do have more chances to level something up.
It’s fairly simple and straightforward, albeit prone to… well, the classic issues that every FFXI system has. But it’s a system that allows character customization, encourages players to reach the level cap, and allows for advancement at the level cap which feels meaningful without necessarily being overpowering. There’s no piece of equipment you can wear to reduce recast times on your most valuable skills, for example, but you still want that; it’s a power boost, but one unavailable in any other fashion.
Application and bypassing pitfalls
Obviously, Final Fantasy XIV is a very different game from Final Fantasy XI. Even leaving aside the drastic differences both games have when approaching content and balance, I think there are several reasons that you can’t simply take the Merit system from the latter and drop it into the former — being able to increase your basic attributes isn’t exactly a rare thing in FFXIV, for starters.
Still, the core idea behind the system would work well, and it would serve to address both of the issues I outlined back in the introduction. Merits give you character customization, even if it’s within constrained fields, and that means you can play around with the most advantageous configuration for you and your party. They also give a reason for leveling with someone else even if you’re level capped. Low-level roulettes are a lot more appealing if you actually get something out of the exchange other than tomes that are readily available via means that do not include another run of the original Sastasha.
The biggest pitfall, of course, is that FFXIV is a very different game from FFXI. Balance is different and has to be considered in a different light, while at the same time it’s advisable to not simply introduce a new tier of grinding without any sort of horizontal element. To an extent, this was the issue in FFXI when Merits were introduced; someone with a full spread of points is going to be more powerful than someone with just a few points, even if they’re otherwise at the same level. Just making it “level more after the level cap” isn’t appealing.
FFXI got around this several ways, both by making certain improvements universal (thus meaning that they would apply for multiple jobs) and by making those improvements incremental. In order to see a major change, you need some extra points sunk into something; you make a choice between slight broad improvements or a few major ones. It helps that merits were rolled out slowly over time, as well, meaning that there was a fairly low cap at the start with plenty of time for players to reach that cap and/or catch up.
And part of the key would be in making sure that a lot of what you spend your merits on are improvements without being straight DPS buffs. Buffing or reducing threat generated by abilities and states, for example, would be powerful without being destructive. Reduced MP costs in Cleric Stance, reduced TP consumption for a certain Ninja poison, and so forth. It also could bring in more cross-class options; imagine spending points to unlock a skill for use on other jobs that would otherwise be exclusive. Rapid Fire from Machinist is something lots of jobs would like, even in weakened form. It wouldn’t make that job more powerful, but it would make your other jobs stronger… and it would make better use of the cross-class systems and give players more choice.
Do I think we’re going to get something similar? I don’t know. But I hope so as we move closer to the game’s next expansion. I don’t know if it’s too much to hope for before the next expansion, but it’s something that would make a major impact for the future.
As always, feedback is welcome in the comments or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to talk about the differences between weaknesses and deficiencies in various jobs, and why one needs to be fixed whilst the other needs to remain.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
