Dev Tracker: Discussion (Old)

[Toth]

Good stuff and thank you slycer. The man seems to get what the current issues are with the game and appears to want to move to a more reasonable policy rather than Tanaka's BARANCE philosophy....

[arus2001]

Downside is it seems like Adoulin won't be out by March at the earliest, which I fear is rather desperately needed.

[Slycer]

No problem. One of the other important things about his post is that it sounds like he's going to hold the developers to whatever schedule they put out (which is one of the main jobs of a producer, within reason). Hopefully no more of this six months behind schedule BS... or else what's the point of publishing the timeline in the first place? Certainly he's stuck his neck out now, so he'll look rather foolish if they start falling behind schedule again come next March. Personal accountability is a good thing, though, so maybe schedules will actually be met next year.

[noodles355]

I like how he acknowledges most of the player feedback about key issues in the game, enmity, the fact that some content is just fucked from the start, etc.

[arus2001]

Delays don't bug me as much as nothing to look forward to on said schedule to begin with. Shit happens, and a "It's ready when it's ready!" approach isn't the end of the world. SE and the game has a history of the releasing shit when it's not ready behind them.

[Auspice]

Post is up now, take a read. His implication of item rewards moving to mostly points-based systems has me pretty excited about the future, if nothing else.

http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/112...=1#post5493296

Thanks for translating that. I'm wondering if they are feeling a hit from the rumors swirling around that SE is stealing tons of people inside SE to get XIV out the door and that is why they got so behind on shit. I find it strange that they couldn't project the amount of work required in making a new expansion. lol

[Toth]

I just want a date for the next version update....I am going to be done with NNi before they even change it lol

[Kincard]

One was because the schedule was published before the announcement of "Seekers of Adoulin." The impact of the development work on Adoulin was much greater than we initialy forecasted.

This sounds like it means the expansion didn't get planned/greenlighted until, at the earliest, May. Hm. Wern't they recruiting those new devs way before that? Weird.

[Byrthnoth]

Extracted the most relevant parts of the post, imop:

Once the best groups have exhausted the difficult content, we must also go in and make adjustments so that other players can come out with some reasonable success rate. For example, strengthening players with additional equipment or job adjustments is one of the methods that we can use to directly reduce the difficulty of all content. Of course, those in the top group might be a little disappointed by this, but there is the assumption that at that point there will already be a new challenge with better rewards in place. Also for existing content, to redefine the difficulty of getting the rewards, we will consider adjustments to the number of people required and the level range in order to meet the needs of whatever the current status in Vana'diel would require. This is especially true for adventurers who are just coming back now after a long break.

It's nice that they finally formalized/admitted to their "hard content -> watch srs player struggle for a year -> nerf it" strategy. I don't know what events are still difficult and limited by the number of players or level range.

As far as how to actually distribute rewards, we got a lot of feedback about this on the forum with respect to how we use low drop rates to adjust compensation to content difficulty. I believe we would like a point-based distribution method to be the standard method added for all situations.

Probably the biggest news of the whole post. Hooray for point systems.

For other things, we got a lot of feedback that battles at level 99 are just not well-balanced in general. For example, we need to make major adjustments to the processes related to enmity generation, and I suspect that there are issues with the TP system as well.

Enmity Generation! I'm on board.

TP . . . system? You lost me.

As it currently stands, the TP system is kind of a relic of 2005, where SE was trying to boost 2H weapons at the cost of Dual Wield options. The same patch (I think) also broke the 5.0 TP floor, though. Now when I look at the TP/sec chart all of the options are approximately even. If I was a betting man, I'd say there are two things that might be viewed as broken:
1) Though they removed the 5.0 floor, TP gain still increases dramatically as your delay decreases below 180 delay. This is relevant now because Monk (or KKK PUP) is the lowest delay DD in the game and benefits fully from these formulas. If they nerf it, though, it will hit NIN, DNC, and THF as well.
2) There is still the bump in TP Gain between 450 and 480 TP (sustained up to 530). At this moment this benefits Ukonvasara, Ryunohige, Apoc, etc. and we really no longer need incentives to use 2H weapons like in 2005 where SE was trying to wean us off Man/Ridill builds. They might nerf this. Kogarasumune and the other GKTs would be untouched, as would Ragnarok.

Just based on the delay distribution of different jobs, I don't see how SE can adjust the TP equations to bring balance back to the force. It seems like any nerf that hits a powerful combination is going to equally hit combinations that are barely making due (like Bravura, Apocalypse, etc.) and will spare weapons/jobs that are very powerful. I don't see much to be gained from this, apart from pissing a bunch of people off when they have to re-make their X-hit build or royally pissing me off when Dancer's TP gain starts to suck.

[Eldelphia]

If they really do change things to a more points-based system I will be so happy...

[arus2001]

I feel like context was implying more monsters and their TP use, as that's part of what's led to broken content. And personally, I think TPing is fine for melees. It's mages that get the short end of that stick with what's basically forced weapon swapping to do their jobs, thus never seeing TP at all and depriving them of whatever added utility they could bring.

[Slycer]

I don't know what he meant by TP, it just said they wanted to change TP. I just added the word "system" because it didn't really make sense otherwise. It could be talking about TP moves from monsters also, I don't really know. I'll take another look at the original JP and see if I can come up with something clearer.

[Byrthnoth]

I feel like context was implying more monsters and their TP use, as that's part of what's led to broken content. And personally, I think TPing is fine for melees. It's mages that get the short end of that stick with what's basically forced weapon swapping to do their jobs, thus never seeing TP at all and depriving them of whatever added utility they could bring.

I would like both of these changes to happen. Neither change would have much of a strategic effect on how we handle content, but it'd still be nice.

Also, wtf@"there isn't lowman content".
Alliance content - Voidwatch, Einherjar v2, Legion
Lowman (~6 or less) content - Everything else that has ever been added to the game

[Slycer]

Also, wtf@"there isn't lowman content".
Alliance content - Voidwatch, Einherjar v2, Legion
Lowman (~6 or less) content - Everything else that has ever been added to the game

He's not saying there's very little low man content, he's saying there's very little casual content still worth participating in. I think there's a pretty big fundamental difference there. For example, neo-Nyzul is low man but decidedly difficult with requirements to perform well, and Meeble Burrows is low man but fairly un-casual with its annoying progression. To be more specific, I think his point is that Abyssea was the main source of casual content, and it's been out for a while now (almost two years since Heroes - but POL still reminds us that it's on sale now in case you forgot), so even casual players have mostly exhausted what they want to get out of it. I'm not sure what else I'd consider casual AND relevant aside from maybe Dynamis.

[pchan]

point system = nyzul, woot.
If they mean TotM then it's different.

Knowing SE it's going to be : random luck on good gear and point system on shit drops like Einherjar.

[Damane]

Extracted the most relevant parts of the post, imop:


It's nice that they finally formalized/admitted to their "hard content -> watch srs player struggle for a year -> nerf it" strategy. I don't know what events are still difficult and limited by the number of players or level range.



Probably the biggest news of the whole post. Hooray for point systems.



Enmity Generation! I'm on board.

TP . . . system? You lost me.

As it currently stands, the TP system is kind of a relic of 2005, where SE was trying to boost 2H weapons at the cost of Dual Wield options. The same patch (I think) also broke the 5.0 TP floor, though. Now when I look at the TP/sec chart all of the options are approximately even. If I was a betting man, I'd say there are two things that might be viewed as broken:
1) Though they removed the 5.0 floor, TP gain still increases dramatically as your delay decreases below 180 delay. This is relevant now because Monk (or KKK PUP) is the lowest delay DD in the game and benefits fully from these formulas. If they nerf it, though, it will hit NIN, DNC, and THF as well.
2) There is still the bump in TP Gain between 450 and 480 TP (sustained up to 530). At this moment this benefits Ukonvasara, Ryunohige, Apoc, etc. and we really no longer need incentives to use 2H weapons like in 2005 where SE was trying to wean us off Man/Ridill builds. They might nerf this. Kogarasumune and the other GKTs would be untouched, as would Ragnarok.

Just based on the delay distribution of different jobs, I don't see how SE can adjust the TP equations to bring balance back to the force. It seems like any nerf that hits a powerful combination is going to equally hit combinations that are barely making due (like Bravura, Apocalypse, etc.) and will spare weapons/jobs that are very powerful. I don't see much to be gained from this, apart from pissing a bunch of people off when they have to re-make their X-hit build or royally pissing me off when Dancer's TP gain starts to suck.

I think he means mob behavier on TP and mobs building up TP, rather then the Player TP gain

[pchan]

The unbalance was refered to when they discussed PD/embrava. So they could mean lowering the TP spam of mobs, through subtle blow for instance.

[Yugl]

They could just limit the TP gained within a given period. For example, only gain a maximum of 10 TP every tick or so (Includes regain etc.).

[NynJa]

His implication of item rewards moving to mostly points-based systems has me pretty excited about the future, if nothing else.

i am and am not ok with this
Im ok as shitty drop rates are dumb as fuck, when 1 person can go 1/3 and one person can go 0/300.
Im not ok with this as my top job is thief, removing TH necessity hurts, considering they have no intention to increase DD capability over an already overpowered TH.

My personal fav is where loot can drop from the mob, but if youre unlucky enough, you can eventually get it via point system.

[InsaniacTHF]

I'm glad he found time to type this up from his cubicle in the FF14 office.