Dev Tracker

[Septimus]

Everyone's favorite autist got Yugl's thread locked. Awesome.

I am reminded of the great Jonathan Swift quote from so many centuries ago:

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

This was exactly why I was afraid to make that post.

[Septimus]

voidwatch is easily spammable, I don't see what the huge deal is

Because it is a huge step backwards in game design. We went from Abyssea with red, green, and blue procs to help you get what you want to a bunch of procs that just don't seem to matter at all. Even with the red light capped, everyone in the alliance can wind up with absolutely nothing. Then because of the personalized loot pool, characters can get items that are of no use to them with no way to transfer the items to people who would actually want it.

I am going to make one of my ever-so-silly suggestions for the Community Team to take back to the Dev Team. How about if you have an item, if you get that item again you can transfer it to a main loot pool. That way people can give items to people who need it, and you guys can be happy because people will have to clog up their storage with equipment that is useless to them. Everybody wins.

[Mojo]

It's not that much fun and the drop rates are terrible. Should be pretty obvious.

[Seraph]

I am going to make one of my ever-so-silly suggestions for the Community Team to take back to the Dev Team. How about if you have an item, if you get that item again you can transfer it to a main loot pool. That way people can give items to people who need it, and you guys can be happy because people will have to clog up their storage with equipment that is useless to them. Everybody wins.

Or they could just add the option to add a single item to the main loot pool, which would be much easier to code and makes way more sense...

...but they already said they didn't want to do that. Artificial barriers to rewards are fun!

[Colenzo]

Because it is a huge step backwards in game design. We went from Abyssea with red, green, and blue procs to help you get what you want to a bunch of procs that just don't seem to matter at all. Even with the red light capped, everyone in the alliance can wind up with absolutely nothing. Then because of the personalized loot pool, characters can get items that are of no use to them with no way to transfer the items to people who would actually want it.

I am going to make one of my ever-so-silly suggestions for the Community Team to take back to the Dev Team. How about if you have an item, if you get that item again you can transfer it to a main loot pool. That way people can give items to people who need it, and you guys can be happy because people will have to clog up their storage with equipment that is useless to them. Everybody wins.

The lights do help a shitload I can tell you this much. We have seen 4 bodies so far and we haven't even really spammed the T4s that hard. The real trick to getting shit is just bringing all of your magic triggers and getting full red every time then after that work on capping blue as much as you can. If you want to get gear from it just stick with it and do it right. As far as taking a step back in game design goes, everybody gets shit from voidwatch, even if you're spamming it for 1 item there are other less rare items that people can be getting. Strendu rings for example, excellent piece of gear and people can get these while you work on getting radiant mails. Its not like you aren't getting anything at all. I wish people would understand this. Stuff on tiers below can drop items that are just rare and you can sell that crap or if you have generous members that like to help eachother you can trade them amongst eachother. Plus there are rare/ex items that have fair drop rates too comparable to the drop rate on strendu rings. The only real super rare thing from voidwatch are the body pieces. I think its reasonable for them to be rare seeing as how unique they are. They're the only body pieces in the game with sphere effects on them.

[Septimus]

Or they could just add the option to add a single item to the main loot pool, which would be much easier to code and makes way more sense...

...but they already said they didn't want to do that. Artificial barriers to rewards are fun!

That is why I suggested the "if you already have it" condition. It still keeps a super-frustrating artificial barrier.

I can kind of understand why they added the personal loot pool so that everyone has a chance to get things, but it is not working out well in reality. I think that it would be more demoralizing for a mage-only character to get a heavy-melee body than the "Good Old Days"™ of CoP when you would fight Tiamat for an hour and wind up with a fire crystal as your reward.

[Septimus]

The lights do help a shitload I can tell you this much. We have seen 4 bodies so far and we haven't even really spammed the T4s that hard. The real trick to getting shit is just bringing all of your magic triggers and getting full red every time then after that work on capping blue as much as you can. If you want to get gear from it just stick with it and do it right. As far as taking a step back in game design goes, everybody gets shit from voidwatch, even if you're spamming it for 1 item there are other less rare items that people can be getting. Strendu rings for example, excellent piece of gear and people can get these while you work on getting radiant mails. Its not like you aren't getting anything at all. I wish people would understand this.

All of the vendor-trash crafting items that I have received from Voidwatch will beg to differ. It is so bad that the group that I used to do it with has disbanded.

Don't get me wrong, I would like to do Voidwatch just because there looks like there will be a story involved. But I don't expect any decent gear rewards from it. Ever.

[Colenzo]

All of the vendor-trash crafting items that I have received from Voidwatch will beg to differ. It is so bad that the group that I used to do it with has disbanded.

Don't get me wrong, I would like to do Voidwatch just because there looks like there will be a story involved. But I don't expect any decent gear rewards from it. Ever.

well how big was the group you were going with and were they getting capped red and blue?

[Seraph]

That is why I suggested the "if you already have it" condition. It still keeps a super-frustrating artificial barrier.

I can kind of understand why they added the personal loot pool so that everyone has a chance to get things, but it is not working out well in reality. I think that it would be more demoralizing for a mage-only character to get a heavy-melee body than the "Good Old Days"™ of CoP when you would fight Tiamat for an hour and wind up with a fire crystal as your reward.

Sure, but the personal pool already accomplishes that. Noone can take what drops to you from you, noone can force you to make it public loot. However, if I want someone else in my group to get something that drops in my pool, I do not understand why I should be prevented from doing so.

Why do they have to take a decent new content idea and just totally ruin it with how they do drop distribution? There is only so much mental skullfucking people can take with respect to a game before it stops being enjoyable, or worse yet becomes work. "Just spam that shit." Yeah, sure, that works when you can visually see you are making progress on something like a relic/empy/mythic and feel good about getting closer to your goal. Going back to the Ebisu quest item reward system makes it really hard to get people motivated to go spend yet another night fighting shit and getting nothing for their troubles. I can spend an entire night doing Voidwatch, and if I don't get the drop, I am statistically no closer to accomplishing my goal than when I started. That doesn't even include the chance that a drop goes to the wrong person. That shit just makes it more terrible.

[Colenzo]

What exactly are you not getting that you want so bad? Everything is relatively easy to get except the bodies.

[Seraph]

What exactly are you not getting that you want so bad? Everything is relatively easy to get except the bodies.

It's not what I wasn't getting, it was what noone in the group was getting. I think we had a total of two people actually get something they wanted that was R/EX in the entire time we did Voidwatch. That was extremely discouraging for morale considering the number of man hours we put into it, and the fact that I did actually enjoy the fights.

It's mainly the issue that with such a small change the system could be so much more rewarding. If you like the crappy item distribution, good for you I guess.

[Septimus]

well how big was the group you were going with and were they getting capped red and blue?

It started out with 18, then dropped to about 12 within a few weeks. Then disbanded. The full groups capped out red and blue, even in the 12-person alliances they got red and blue pretty high if not capped.

Sure, but the personal pool already accomplishes that. Noone can take what drops to you from you, noone can force you to make it public loot. However, if I want someone else in my group to get something that drops in my pool, I do not understand why I should be prevented from doing so.

Why do they have to take a decent new content idea and just totally ruin it with how they do drop distribution? There is only so much mental skullfucking people can take with respect to a game before it stops being enjoyable, or worse yet becomes work. "Just spam that shit." Yeah, sure, that works when you can visually see you are making progress on something like a relic/empy/mythic and feel good about getting closer to your goal. Going back to the Ebisu quest item reward system makes it really hard to get people motivated to go spend yet another night fighting shit and getting nothing for their troubles. I can spend an entire night doing Voidwatch, and if I don't get the drop, I am statistically no closer to accomplishing my goal than when I started. That doesn't even include the chance that a drop goes to the wrong person. That shit just makes it more terrible.

I think that their goal was to make it so that no one could force you to make your loot public. And that is a noble goal, because we all know that there would be plent of LSes that would force people to give their loot to the people with the most points (i.e. the LS leaders) and would kick people who hid gear. But they didn't account that people would get things that they could not use and would want to give to others.

[Byrthnoth]

My mule's five voidwatch drops beg to differ. Of course, the only thing that drops for Byrth is Rancor Collar when I have one in storage already.

If you average one body every three T4 NMs with a full alliance and capped light, every individual player has about a 2% chance of getting the body per kill. After 35 T4 NMs, you would expect half your alliance to have a body. Assuming you do one NM per day (no dust), this means that you can "cap out" half your alliance on one T4 NM every month. Of course, half your alliance isn't all your alliance, and there's a pretty good chance many of the (often highly situational) bodies will be wasted on people that couldn't give a shit while half the people that care about the bodies still don't have them.

It's just a dumb system.

Scholar Adjustments. Some pretty minor and nonspecific shit, but I think they're adjusting more common complaints with the job.

[Colenzo]

It started out with 18, then dropped to about 12 within a few weeks. Then disbanded. The full groups capped out red and blue, even in the 12-person alliances they got red and blue pretty high if not capped.

Were you guys spamming any one particular NM? or were you just going through and getting clears for people? We didn't really get much stuff when we were just going through and getting clears for everybody. We only really started getting stuff when we sat down for a couple of hours and spammed at a NM for a bit. I was kind of screwing myself on drops from voidwrought until a friend pointed out that we should make sure to have all the magic procs present for red. After that we really started cleaning up.

[Alkar]

I like those SCH adjustments. That's what SCH should've been in the first place instead of moving into BLM's territory that much.

[Septimus]

My mule's five voidwatch drops beg to differ. Of course, the only thing that drops for Byrth is Rancor Collar when I have one in storage already.

If you average one body every three T4 NMs with a full alliance and capped light, every individual player has about a 2% chance of getting the body per kill. After 35 T4 NMs, you would expect half your alliance to have a body. Assuming you do one NM per day (no dust), this means that you can "cap out" half your alliance on one T4 NM every month. Of course, half your alliance isn't all your alliance, and there's a pretty good chance many of the (often highly situational) bodies will be wasted on people that couldn't give a shit while half the people that care about the bodies still don't have them.

It's just a dumb system.

Scholar Adjustments. Some pretty minor and nonspecific shit, but I think they're adjusting more common complaints with the job.

OK, Atum just had a heart attack because "2. Adjust the level Regen III/IV are learned" means that he will be able to Accession Regen IV on WHM.

Don't get me wrong, the rest of the adjustments are really nice; but I haven't had a reason to put Atum on SCH since I don't even know when, and none of these adjustments seem to shout "OMG SCH IS AWESOME NOW!" (Which is really sad because Atum looks really adorable in his SCH set.) None of these things are going to make SCH a needed or even wanted job. At this point, I am not sure what would.

[barber2006]

The inevitable problem that even the most seasoned and tight knit linkshells face with voidwatch is when to stop doing a particular fight. Even if the sun smiles on your group and 8 of the 9 people that need a body drop within 200 kills of a mob, how long are you going to keep using a huge chunk of event time so that last person can get his? With a .5% drop rate you could literally be looking at doing 500 more fights for this one guy, all while having other people throw away the drop they already had. Check the Ebisu thread. 1/256ish on average. But that doesn't mean there aren't people that don't go 1/2000+. How long will the average ls continue to waste time for that one guy? Not long when the opportunity cost could put multiple relics/emps in the hands of ls members for the same time commitment.

If you have never seen an ls stop doing limbus because most of the members were maxed on homam consider yourself very fortunate. Same way with sky gods back in the day, etc. And those were events with a 50% drop rate. If you think people are going to keep spamming Hahava every night for 2 months straight so one unlucky bastage can get a body that makes him 1% better you are dreaming.

And that inevitable problem only begins to arise once the majority of the people have their drops which is a situation about .001% of people find themselves in currently.

[Alkar]

I think the Light/Dark Arts adjustments have tons of potential if done right. The idea of DoT mage is interesting.
The real issue is the Helix damage formula at this point.

[detlef]

On the SE forum, I suggested allowing a player to place an item into the common loot pool after taking what they wanted, similar to the gold chest mechanic in Abyssea. If SE didn't want people to be forced or coerced into doing so, then perhaps the option might only be made available if the player already had the r/ex item in his possession already.

Incidentally I was immediately shouted down by the next poster because it would upset the balance and render the content as useless lol.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...357#post181357

[Lordender]

They could have added transfer loot to the loot pool like abyssea item chests, we could literally dream up 100's of ways they could have made a better system than the one they went with.