Dev Tracker: Discussion

[Ligray]

Few JP Dev posts, ToAU kings respawn adjustment scheduled for march and looks like we can't get job points in abyssea or RoE.

[Damane]

I sense a serious fucking disturbance in the force with all this shit SE has coming out for FFXI now. It feels like they have more than 2 people working on the game again.

maybe we are getting some love/funds back, after FFXIV did/is doing so well

[Ophannus]

Good. Push people to get cp in new zones. Come April we'll get our duodecennial rings too .

[Twilight Sky]

That was exactely what I had in mind! :D

I think/hope they're gonna constantly work on the system btw. At least for a while.
It's one of the many reasons to drive people back into doing XP farm, which is something that had almost disappeared until some time ago.


@Byrth
Totally does.
Maybe now that FFXIV launched some of the original FFXI developers which were "lent" to the FFXIV team returned back to the FFXI one?
Or maybe it's just the same two people but focusing on more relevant stuff and handling communication better, I dunno.

Not a chance. The original team was fired, and the director resigned towards the end of FFXIV 1.0. SE wasn't going to let those guys stay after a record setting sales loss with 1.0. Guys doing FFXIV is a totally brand new team. That doesn't mean the two teams, FFXIV, and FFXI aren't collaborating in some way. It's certainly a possibility.

Edit: well the collaborating part was already confirmed in this thread.

On Merits: My points still useless unless I level a melee job.

[Malithar]

Few JP Dev posts, ToAU kings respawn adjustment scheduled for march and looks like we can't get job points in abyssea or RoE.

I've only seen that SS posted earlier of the system, and haven't seen a fully translated post regarding it. I was under the impression that JPs were a separate system from exp, like kills mob, get 200 exp and 100 JPs, or whatever. Is that not the case and you simply turn it on and all exp is funneled into it, rather than merits? Mention of RoE makes me wonder that. Hope that's not the case, was looking forward to going out and casually killing random shit in Adoulin, all the while getting merits for KI BCs, sparks for tales/skill, and JPs to advance whatever job I was working on.

[Damane]

I'd like to see a breakdown of the amount/quality of content added over the past year, compared to anytime prior. Maybe it's just that the monthly update deal has been working out well, but for the first time ever in FFXI, I feel almost over burdened with keeping up ingame. In the past, keeping up wasn't so much about doing the content, as there never really was a whole, whole lot to do, was more about getting lucky with your drops or grinding at it slowly to build points. Now, there's just lots on my plate, and for the most part, a lot of it is keeping relevant. Delve for mats/plasm to buy mats/gear for others, SKC for tales to 109 useful AF, mats to 109 it, mats to 119 it, DM/Eald/Kam/AAs for gear, mats for RF, Skirmish v3 to pray for KIs, stones, wings, etc.

The exp grind has been back in the spot light ever since AAs came back, and it hasn't really gone anywhere yet IMO. Content is still wildly successful, if not completely unique. I do hope to see an increase in the max merits, as well as reductions in current KI prices slightly, specially once new BCs are added.

I wonder from a business standpoint, what has changed within SE that has made XI's quality make leaps and bounds forward over the past several months. Did they decide they got everyone they would from XI to XIV, let's improve XI a ton so as to get those who left to return? To keep a rather successful game going til it's dying days instead of focusing so hard on their new pretty baby? It's just been a rather radical shift, and it's kind of shocking to experience it. I'd of expected Tanaka to personally show up at my door step with a bag of shit on fire than to ever see the day XI got the kind of love and development put into it as it has over the past several months. Matsui's the fucking man in my book, dude gets shit done.

this pritty much, I am haveing a hard time atm keeping up with the content released since they introduced hardmodes, Artifact upgrade, relic upgrades, skirmish 3.0, now delve 2.0 and Jobpoints. Oh boy

[Sechs]

Not a chance. The original team was fired

Where did you read this?

and the director resigned towards the end of FFXIV 1.0.

Ah you were talking about FFXIV 1.0's team.
The original director didn't resign, he got moved back to FFXI first, then he resigned passing lead to Matsui.
All of the other "important" people of 1.0 are still there, some went back to FFXI (Matsui being one of them, he's not alone), others stayed and worked with Yoshi-P. They just got assigned to different roles from their original ones, there's an official financial post about it.
And this is about the "important" staff, which were just a bunch of people.
There was at least 100+ other developers, low end programmers or whatever you want to call them, and as far as I know they're still working on XIV.

I was talking about another thing.
During the re-launch project of FFXIV, Yoshi-P borrowed a large part of SquareEnix developers from other teams, FFXI being one of them.
You can read this in official SE reports for stakeholders.
I have no clue what happened now that the "relaunch" project has ended, but I think it's pretty obvious to say that at least PART of those workers which were lent to FFXIV returned back to their original teams.

tl;dr: I just wanted to emphasize that one thing is getting people from other team and incorporating them into the FFXIV dev team, another thing is TEMPORARILY borrowing people from other teams. Both things happened with FFXIV, multiple times. People who got incorporated into the team are now part of the team, of course they're stayin there. People who were just lent to the team are supposed to go back to their original one.

Guys doing FFXIV is a totally brand new team.

It totally is, but it's mostly a bigger team, composed by the large majority of the old 1.0 team, which also was a pretty new team back then, largely (but not exclusively!) formed by ex FFXI developers.
This has nothing to do with the "personell borrowing" thing I was talking about though.


About no JP in Abyssea:
I'm happy and sad at the same time.
New zones don't really have many spots with enough mobs (and fast respawn) to accomodate more than a bunch of powerful 6men parties. At least that I can think of.
As much as I'd love to see the return of 6men exping, I'd want it to be an OPTION, not THE ONLY THING.
I had the same exact complaints about Abyssea exp back then. The part I didn't like was exactely the one that completely REPLACED previous method, instead of being an ADDITIONAL one.
I'm fine if they want to give reduced JP returns in Abyssea, even noticeable ones, but completely denying you the possibility to get JP in Abyssea sounds lame.
I feel the same about VW. If anything VW needs even further incentives to be done.

[Damane]

About no JP in Abyssea:
I'm happy and sad at the same time.
New zones don't really have many spots with enough mobs (and fast respawn) to accomodate more than a bunch of powerful 6men parties. At least that I can think of.
As much as I'd love to see the return of 6men exping, I'd want it to be an OPTION, not THE ONLY THING.
I had the same exact complaints about Abyssea exp back then. The part I didn't like was exactely the one that completely REPLACED previous method, instead of being an ADDITIONAL one.
I'm fine if they want to give reduced JP returns in Abyssea, even noticeable ones, but completely denying you the possibility to get JP in Abyssea sounds lame.
I feel the same about VW. If anything VW needs even further incentives to be done.

I really hope this doesnt bring the colibri situation we had where camps were taken everywhere. on the other hand I think a 6 Man pt nowadys would consist of at least minimu 2 pullers/support, because mobs die really fast and sometimes its hard to support the group with mobs enough as only 1 puller

[Toth]

Wow so unexpected.

For people wondering if this was coming this update or later, they can just have an intro to this in March and allow us only to bolster two abilities or something, with each update expanding more. Less crazy that way I wager.

[Sechs]

Colibri camp is a good example.
Even back then I had the same issues with XP (I'm talking about the discussion "Exp is boring vs Exp is fun").
I loved to XP but what made it frustrating (other than the "some jobs can't get invites" part) was the repetivity of it all.
Camping the same mobs in the same camp over and over and over and over and over with little to no variation in the mobs and /or pt setups. That was my issue with that.
Having multiple equally efficient camps or just different ways to XP (one with TP burn pts, one with classic setup pts, etc etc) is what I always dreamt of.

Of course this was only partially a fault of the game and mostly a fault of players' mentality. But since we know how players tend to think and act, the dev's role should be that to fight as much as possible this sort of attidue instead of actually incentivating it.
So once again, I'm totally fine with making VW and Abyssea less efficient/slower than XPing in new zones, but making so it's not possible at all is a wrong choice imho.

[Toth]

I've only seen that SS posted earlier of the system, and haven't seen a fully translated post regarding it. I was under the impression that JPs were a separate system from exp, like kills mob, get 200 exp and 100 JPs, or whatever. Is that not the case and you simply turn it on and all exp is funneled into it, rather than merits? Mention of RoE makes me wonder that. Hope that's not the case, was looking forward to going out and casually killing random shit in Adoulin, all the while getting merits for KI BCs, sparks for tales/skill, and JPs to advance whatever job I was working on.

I think they mean exp gained from completing ROE content may not count toward the capacity exp?

[Ophannus]

They need to introduce mobs that are lvl 120-125. Even a well geared dd can virtually 1 shot the highest level mobs currently out. Need mobs that are comparative to vt-it mobs at 75, that can take 2-3 powerful ws not just one. Otherwise you'll see more 3m parties or trust parties than 6man parties. I can foresee adjustments to mob respawns and more high level mobs being added to cater to players of all ilvls. I mean right now most of those khamir mobs have what 5-6k hp? A Shoha with minuets virtually does that on any ram or boar in khamir. Would love to see higher level mobs that give 3-4k exp per kill in a 6man party. After abyssea I kinda miss merit parties and party play mechanics. You'll get to see ppl lfg again and more love for blu,nin, dnc, drg/mage, pup (maybe melee rdm with CDC!) since those versatile hybrid jobs bring more to a 6man group(sambas,steps,stuns, debuffs, heals in addition to damage) than they do in alliance events

[Sechs]

Didn't they do that already with (at least some) of the mobs in Outer Ra'kaznar? Without trust NPC you definitely do not oneshot most of them, think about the VT/IT Ironclads, the VT umbrils and so on.
The current cap on XP is something like, I forgot, I think 1250 per kill? Can get higher with chains of course. Iir I was getting 2500 from chains off Ironclads? (who are annoying to kill but have a small HP pool)

[Malithar]

With the post spelling it out now, the only question left is how many capacity points we can look forward to getting from mobs. 30k for 1 JP sounds high, but if the exp you gain is multiplied by some factor, it wouldn't be that bad. It's still to be seen how the increases scale, we only know the cap is 30 and the first increase costs 1 JP. Is it +1 JP per increase? Something silly like merit WSs and it jumps at ridiculous ranks? Cap is 200 afterall... Here's to hoping it's not TOO terrible of a grind, know all too well you'll be "gimp" without them, and with as many jobs as people keep geared and ready to go, it's gonna be a lot of work getting them all caught up.

[Fwahm]

They need to introduce mobs that are lvl 120-125. Even a well geared dd can virtually 1 shot the highest level mobs currently out. Need mobs that are comparative to vt-it mobs at 75, that can take 2-3 powerful ws not just one. Otherwise you'll see more 3m parties or trust parties than 6man parties. I can foresee adjustments to mob respawns and more high level mobs being added to cater to players of all ilvls. I mean right now most of those khamir mobs have what 5-6k hp? A Shoha with minuets virtually does that on any ram or boar in khamir. Would love to see higher level mobs that give 3-4k exp per kill in a 6man party. After abyssea I kinda miss merit parties and party play mechanics. You'll get to see ppl lfg again and more love for blu,nin, dnc, drg/mage, pup (maybe melee rdm with CDC!) since those versatile hybrid jobs bring more to a 6man group(sambas,steps,stuns, debuffs, heals in addition to damage) than they do in alliance events

I'm pretty sure Kamihr mobs have 8-10k HP.

[Sechs]

With the post spelling it out now, the only question left is how many capacity points we can look forward to getting from mobs. 30k for 1 JP sounds high, but if the exp you gain is multiplied by some factor, it wouldn't be that bad. It's still to be seen how the increases scale, we only know the cap is 30 and the first increase costs 1 JP. Is it +1 JP per increase? Something silly like merit WSs and it jumps at ridiculous ranks? Cap is 200 afterall... Here's to hoping it's not TOO terrible of a grind, know all too well you'll be "gimp" without them, and with as many jobs as people keep geared and ready to go, it's gonna be a lot of work getting them all caught up.

I think you're being too optimistic. They want this to be a long-time term sort of goal. Not something that hardcore people can max in 2 days of hardcore exping.
Something that will make people progress slowly and will give them long term goals.
I mean, if they wanted it to be faster than XP they could have just made 5k Capacity Points needed for 1 Job Point.
The fact they chose 30k makes me think the rate of Exp/Capacity will be 1:1 and that you'll need 30k XP/CP to get 1 JB, period.

Maybe I'm just being pessimistic because of how FFXI used to be, hope to be proved wrong but this is what I expect.
And yes Ophannus, doubt Kamir mobs have 6k HP only, and they do some real damage and have annoying/damaging TP moves. If you want to make fast chains without breaks and are playing solo (or with trust) it's not gonna be as fast as you make it look like.

[Yugl]

Kind of sick of SE rehashing the "NQ mobs as gatekeeper" method though. Ever since Reforged AF, your objective has been to grind NQ mobs for hours to earn an opportunity to attempt new content. This didn't change when they introduced AA HM. This did not change when they introduced CN/EP HM. This is not changing for the J-Point system either.

[fantasticdan]

Kind of sick of SE rehashing the "NQ mobs as gatekeeper" method though. Ever since Reforged AF, your objective has been to grind NQ mobs for hours to earn an opportunity to attempt new content. This didn't change when they introduced AA HM. This did not change when they introduced CN/EP HM. This is not changing for the J-Point system either.

The art of adding content without creating any.

[Kari]

Or they could just be announcing everything that's going to be released up until the June update. <__<

I think it's pretty unlikely.

According to this post, they already had plans to make a new "character growth system", which sounds like Job Points. They said at most they'd push it back to April. I'd say all of the recent Dev Posts are either March or April. I'm hoping they get at least some of Job Points in by March.

[Ophannus]

Some of the outer mobs are kinda weak though haven't tried harder ones. What lvl are ironclads?. Maybe not 7 umbrils or ironclads but the fomors and butterflies have low up and def, and a solid we usually rocks 70-80% of their hp