Letter from the Producer, XIV (07/20/2011)

[Lucavi]

Honestly I prefer instance-grinding, but a lot of that stems from my love of A) grinding fun events with skilled friends again and again and B) my love of having high quality gear for my character at all times; preferably something I earned in a fight. If this game had a working AH and some honest-to-God WORLD DROPS I'd have been playing it again for awhile now. The lack of world drops frustrates me because there's never any random factor out there while fighting. You always know what you're going to get, loot-wise, and there's never that thrill of randomly fighting something while grinding/farming/xping and suddenly you're about to either get a fantastic item to use or a LOT of money on the AH.

I know random drops are nonexistent in XI, but I'd love to see them make their first entrance onto a SE MMO. Remember the old days in single-player FFs where just about every mob had a chance to drop something really, really good? Whatever happened to those days? They weren't random (mobs had their own weapon/armor/item loot tables) but it was still better than what we had in XI; a forced single-mob camping cluster-fuck where the best bot won, and even winning the pull didn't ensure winning anything more than an earth crystal.

[Hyan]

It's probably more appealing once the game basically forces you to group, and give a shit about your gear.. for better and worse.

I think people are much more likely to choose the grouping option for second class and beyond.

Doesn't seem like the genre is pulling in that many new players lately though, so that probably carries from game to another. They're all carbon copies of one another either way.

[kisada]

if there's mob grinding, so what? he just basically said his focus from now on was going to be on allowing wide range of character building. obviously there will always be the case of what is optimal vs what is not, but if yoshida seems intent on making more than one viable avenue of leveling, then i can't imagine they're not gonna try to balance as much as possible.

[avelle]

I don't really mind grinding to an extent. I did really enjoy the old days of exping in parties in FFXI. You know, the days when you didn't sit in Jeuno all day lfg. Combat was fun in FFXI though and in FF14 it's just mind numbingly boring. I hope 1.18 goes a long way towards addressing that.

[Alderaan]

Honestly I prefer instance-grinding, but a lot of that stems from my love of A) grinding fun events with skilled friends again and again and B) my love of having high quality gear for my character at all times; preferably something I earned in a fight. If this game had a working AH and some honest-to-God WORLD DROPS I'd have been playing it again for awhile now. The lack of world drops frustrates me because there's never any random factor out there while fighting. You always know what you're going to get, loot-wise, and there's never that thrill of randomly fighting something while grinding/farming/xping and suddenly you're about to either get a fantastic item to use or a LOT of money on the AH.

I know random drops are nonexistent in XI, but I'd love to see them make their first entrance onto a SE MMO. Remember the old days in single-player FFs where just about every mob had a chance to drop something really, really good? Whatever happened to those days? They weren't random (mobs had their own weapon/armor/item loot tables) but it was still better than what we had in XI; a forced single-mob camping cluster-fuck where the best bot won, and even winning the pull didn't ensure winning anything more than an earth crystal.

I agree. Party grinding is so much more fun when you're moving from 1 area to the next while fighting some bosses, as apposed to camping in one spot in the open world. If there was a way to incorporate that into an open world then i'd be all over it.

[Kaiyoko]

I agree. Party grinding is so much more fun when you're moving from 1 area to the next while fighting some bosses, as apposed to camping in one spot in the open world. If there was a way to incorporate that into an open world then i'd be all over it.

Cap a chain of kills on one set of mobs then move to another near by to get your chain higher till it caps. Maybe killing enough of one type of enemy make a HQ/NM version spawn that gives equipment, bonus XP, or a point system that you can use to trade for equipment so they don't need to create unique items (same idea as lottery spawn but not time/chance based just straight kill x # of this type). Getting cap would spawn the HQ/NM one for you to know after it dies to move to another group to continue chaining. The chaining could be time based or not, it really depends on how hardcore you wanna get with it.

[Alderaan]

In theory sure, until 10 other groups show up.

[Sigmakan]

Used to be a huge fan of open-world mob grinding, but I've been converted to leve-type grinding.

Just recently tried to do a raptor grind and just about blew my brains out from boredom.

I think what I enjoyed most about grinding in FFXI was the sense of strategy and teamwork, not the actual endless grinding. If this sense of teamwork can be incorporated more aggressively into the SP-leveling schemes then I think we'll be all set.

[Kaiyoko]

In theory sure, until 10 other groups show up.

That's why you make it viable in most areas through lots of spawns and quick respawns. You also have more content to supplement groups. This type of content would need to be more time consuming of the player, but yield higher rewards in the long term. Dungeon/Raid XP would be short term group. Guildleve / Quest is quicker solo XP. XI's camping issues were that there was only 1 single way to XP efficiently.

They just need to give people viable options for XPing and make the XP / rewards scalable to the time commitment / difficulty.

[Kaiyoko]

double post

[Lucavi]

Cap a chain of kills on one set of mobs then move to another near by to get your chain higher till it caps. Maybe killing enough of one type of enemy make a HQ/NM version spawn that gives equipment, bonus XP, or a point system that you can use to trade for equipment so they don't need to create unique items (same idea as lottery spawn but not time/chance based just straight kill x # of this type). Getting cap would spawn the HQ/NM one for you to know after it dies to move to another group to continue chaining. The chaining could be time based or not, it really depends on how hardcore you wanna get with it.

That sounds a little complicated for SE to do, and yeah, what happens when other parties want to camp in the same exact spot? SE hasn't had a great track record with fast respawns, and with the linking aggro system in place, if mobs spawn -too- quickly, it can throw off the balance of the fights. Also, what happens when lots of groups want a higher shot at these "points" or equipment bonuses and camps all over one another and starts the drama that we saw with NM-camping in XI? Obviously a little competition is a good thing, but people love being idiots and trying to train shit ontop of groups. Does anyone remember the wolves at Grid during beta and launch that people would train all over one another, just for the lulz?

That's what's so good about instances. Yes, you lose a bit of that worldy freedom to just run around and see lots of groups doing lots of things, but you have to remember that all of those players are controlled by humans. Humans are assholes and dicks. Humans will screw one another over without so much as a second thought, and will laugh about it. In a game where you can't really get "revenge" through any sort of PVP, its frustrating being greifed or otherwise annoyed by other players when you can't do shit about it. Instances allow groups to focus solely on the goal, so, once again, the devs are free to jack up the difficulty since they're cutting out nearly every form of distraction.

Tl;dr: You have to factor the human element into all of these wonderful ideas, and the bottom line is that humans are lying, cheating, kill-and-loot-stealing assholes. You make a system easy to abuse and players will abuse it.

[Hyan]

That's why you give each group its own mobs.

Like... Like... Shit...guildleves!!!!

But no. FFS.

[Lucavi]

So... semi-instanced, respawning mobs that will re-spawn endlessly until the party decides that they're finished XPing for the day? And you think SE would do that for the players?

Tell you what, Hyan; make a post about it on the official forums and see where it goes. Seriously. It'd take the "freedom" of assholes to be assholes right out of the equation, while still allowing for people to see other people (the main gripe non-instanced purists have against instances), even if they couldn't interact with them enough to steal their mobs.

[Kaiyoko]

That sounds a little complicated for SE to do, and yeah, what happens when other parties want to camp in the same exact spot? SE hasn't had a great track record with fast respawns, and with the linking aggro system in place, if mobs spawn -too- quickly, it can throw off the balance of the fights. Also, what happens when lots of groups want a higher shot at these "points" or equipment bonuses and camps all over one another and starts the drama that we saw with NM-camping in XI? Obviously a little competition is a good thing, but people love being idiots and trying to train shit ontop of groups. Does anyone remember the wolves at Grid during beta and launch that people would train all over one another, just for the lulz?

That's what's so good about instances. Yes, you lose a bit of that worldy freedom to just run around and see lots of groups doing lots of things, but you have to remember that all of those players are controlled by humans. Humans are assholes and dicks. Humans will screw one another over without so much as a second thought, and will laugh about it. In a game where you can't really get "revenge" through any sort of PVP, its frustrating being greifed or otherwise annoyed by other players when you can't do shit about it. Instances allow groups to focus solely on the goal, so, once again, the devs are free to jack up the difficulty since they're cutting out nearly every form of distraction.

Tl;dr: You have to factor the human element into all of these wonderful ideas, and the bottom line is that humans are lying, cheating, kill-and-loot-stealing assholes. You make a system easy to abuse and players will abuse it.

I can clear it up later, but a lot of your issues I have a fix for, busy atm and will take awhile to type.

[Hyan]

Tell you what, Hyan; make a post about it on the official forums and see where it goes. Seriously. It'd take the "freedom" of assholes to be assholes right out of the equation, while still allowing for people to see other people (the main gripe non-instanced purists have against instances), even if they couldn't interact with them enough to steal their mobs.

Of course they won't agree when the players(mouthbreathers from now on) are all like HURRDURR OPAN WORDL GRINDAN YEAY and HERPGUILDLEVES SUX CANT MAEK ANYTHEN GUD OF DEM while Yoshida is all "Sup fellas, we here at the dev team agree with y'all and decided to make guildleves less of a focus because they're just no good and never will be! See ya at the forums, derpin' and herpin'!"

What really sucks is that even if I wanted to I can't deny that some people here are the exact same.

It wasn't a long stretch to make guildleves function exactly like you described, with the same changes that are on the way to open world mobs right now. BUT NOOO. Guildleafs sux0rz plz give us an AH nao

[Grey Jorildyn]

XI's real problem was not camping, but more deeply rooted. They did not allow you to progress during their "instances", leaving the only way to level up be grinding, thus the camping issue. Mobs gave 0 EXP in Dynamis, Salvage, Limbus, etc. It wasn't until Abyssea that it changed, and look at how well-received it was in general. Yoshida recognizes this and we're gonna be getting XP for killing in dungeons, which is great. It's like SE needed to have a revelation about obvious shit like this and it's sad that it has taken so long in the modern age of MMOs.

@Lucavi: they can have mobs respawn in their instances. They are going with time-restrictions this round so it's feasible imo. This would be great in instances where you have to double-back to take different routes or what-have-you.

[Cichy]

I hope we're getting some good gear, I'm not even going to touch the instances if there's no good loot

[Vuitton]

Camping EXP spots in XI was an issue because the whole server used the same 2-3 spots for every level. So you'd have multiple groups at one spot. Which is more a problem of laziness than anything because all it takes is a few moments on a database to find mobs in the level range you want, note their locations, and head on out. Instead, people found these spots by following others and only ever knew of those spots, and asking them to find a new unknown spot was like completely offensive.

SE can make all the EXP spots they want. The players are still going to pick 2-3 out of all them they prefer the most and then ignore all of the others.

[Hyan]

SE can make all the EXP spots they want. The players are still going to pick 2-3 out of all them they prefer the most and then ignore all of the others.

Or they can regulate it by making guildleves act as the exp spots and randomize the mobs.

The devs let us choose, we will go with the path of least resistance. They won't let us choose, well, at least the mob variety will go up. It's wasted freedom..

It's just a bad design choice to encourage open world camping and discourage guildleves. But at least they have the community's backing this time...

[Vuitton]

Or they can regulate it by making guildleves act as the exp spots.

Aren't they already being use that way? Every leve party I've been in has been a mobile exp grinding group.