Dev Tracker: Discussion

[ccl]

Delve 1 with lvl 99 relic was very challenging, the only issue I have with it was it is way too easy to cap gear with it.

[EjinCaitsith]

Hard doesn't have to mean it's impossible to beat. Hard can be supplemented with low drop rates and drawn out progression to make it so it feels like an accomplishment when you get/finish something.

I thought Delve2 had a very good balance in terms of difficulty to beat. It was still cleared in the first week by the best players because of RNG method and beads, but it was and remains difficult to clear for a very large portion of the playerbase.

What absolutely killed Delve2 was the plasm and KI system. You only needed to clear it once and you never had to touch the content again. That's just bad design and a waste of a perfectly good event that could have kept people busy for months. Sadly, I think if there was a vote, the majority of people would vote that the plasm system was good/successful without thinking of the long lasting effects it has on endgame(capping gear the first week of release and having nothing to do after).

[Toth]

Hard doesn't have to mean it's impossible to beat. Hard can be supplemented with low drop rates and drawn out progression to make it so it feels like an accomplishment when you get/finish something.

I thought Delve2 had a very good balance in terms of difficulty to beat. It was still cleared in the first week by the best players because of RNG method and beads, but it was and remains difficult to clear for a very large portion of the playerbase.

What absolutely killed Delve2 was the plasm and KI system. You only needed to clear it once and you never had to touch the content again. That's just bad design and a waste of a perfectly good event that could have kept people busy for months. Sadly, I think if there was a vote, the majority of people would vote that the plasm system was good/successful without thinking of the long lasting effects it has on endgame(capping gear the first week of release and having nothing to do after).

I wonder if keeping boss mats only winnable from delve and not purchasable may have extended the content somewhat.

[arus2001]

So game shouldn't ever consider people having the best gear and keep being a piss easy game cause having one event/mob that assume you have the best gear is too hard on newcomer/people looking to play a new job did I get your idea right ?

I didn't say not to add some content for those with high end gear. I said not to make getting included in said content require an arbitrary and unfun time sink that people who haven't been around for years, or ever, wouldn't have done.

Or do we need to step back into the whole logistics of alliance content debate and why revolving the game around it these days is a bad idea? It's all about barriers of entry within and outside the player's control and minimizing keeping people away from content and thus getting the most bang for their buck. Make it too steep and they either won't bother or get frustrated and possibly leave the game. And when enough take that approach, that problem you don't think a problem will become a problem when the game's budget continues to shrink.

[ccl]

Right now my friend list and linkshell getting empty cause the opposite is happening shit is too easy you can clear most of it in gear you < a week of getting lvl 99.

[Sechs]

What absolutely killed Delve2

Why just Delve2?
I think that's the issue of Delve1 too.
5NM + MB runs gave way too much plasm compared to how much plasm you needed to buy drops and compared to any other type of run.
70k plasm, 60k of which came from the MB itself.
That's waaaaay too unbalanced.
When Delve2 came some people had way too much Plasm stored already.

In other games they solve this with artificial gating systems.

1) Each "tier" of content has a different currency (or currency gets "reset" between each "season" or "tier").
2) You can do content as much as you want, but there's a weekly/monthly/daily cap, which means you won't be able to farm more than a certain amount of "currency" under the same amount of time, no matter how much you do that content.


When Delve2 was released balance was already fucked up because of Delve1. They added 300k plasm-sink items (materials, used for Relic Reforge) to try to reduce the issue of people who hoarded too much plasm, and I'm sure that helped a lot reducing the issue but of course it didn't solve it.
Especially because Delve2 MBs now give even more (90k Plasm?)

Another unbalanced issue were the drop slots.
Their idea of "scaling" content was just to reduce HP according to number of participants. But the number of possible drops is exactely the same, which means the number of "items per person" is much higher when you go with 7 people compared to a full alliance. In other games it's not like this, the number of drops scale with participants as well, as it should be of course.
Getting that many guaranteed drops from a MB is about right for an alliance of 18 people.
But getting the same for 6-8 players is way too much, of course people capped on gear even earlier this time around.


Aside from this shortseeings, which are huge and show how SE barely even looked around themselves to see how other devs solved these issues before them in their respective games, I think that at least on paper the Delve system is one of the best drop systems we ever got in FFXI in the last 12 years.
Just my personal opinion of course.

[arus2001]

Right now my friend list and linkshell getting empty cause the opposite is happening shit is too easy you can clear most of it in gear you < a week of getting lvl 99.

And your friend situation has nothing to do with SE regurgitating BCs and being slow as molasses with Adoulin story progression...?

Maybe new Skirmish will be cool, I don't know, but you're reaching pretty hard if you think everyone is geared in under a week.

[Sechs]

I wonder if keeping boss mats only winnable from delve and not purchasable may have extended the content somewhat.

No, it would have only made things harder for the non-top players who are only interested in upgrading their AFs.
Making mats buyable was good to offer an additional sink for the huge amounts of plasm stored.
Likewise making the new delve gear require 6x Airlixirs+2 to reach R15 instead of only helped along the same lines.

The real "issues" of the system are elsewhere, imho, as I explained in my previous post.
It's not the system that's broken, the system itself is one of the best we've ever seen. It's the fact that they avoided to put some form of "control", of "gates", that fucked everything up.

[ccl]

And your friend situation has nothing to do with SE regurgitating BCs and being slow as molasses with Adoulin story progression...?

Maybe new Skirmish will be cool, I don't know, but you're reaching pretty hard if you think everyone is geared in under a week.

Nope, my friend are bored cause this game pretty much offer no challenge atm. The WS update turned an easy game into something much easier and I hope I'll be surprised with the difficulty of the new skirmish; but being able to <1min some hard battlefied and trio most delve(I bet all are trioable but I didn't try to trio all of them) wich are supposed to be the end game content is really fucked up difficulty wise.

[EjinCaitsith]

Technically, 3 people clearing 6man Delve is no different than when 9 people were clearing 18 man content, which was fairly common with plenty of events. And let's be real, there are not many people out there capable of clearing any Delve with 3-4 people if you think about the entire population and most can't even clear Delve2 with 6.

The main redeeming quality of the event is that it's a cash cow for those that can clear it easily, which makes it worth spamming endlessly assuming you need gil.

[ccl]

Fair enough; but they need to at least give content more longevity and worthwhile drop so people care to do it for a while kinda like salvage 1 back then (but prolly with better drop rate I guess).

[Damane]

i am pretty happy with the content they push out atm. i dont need to play hardcore, dont have to grind endlessly, can go to work np and have RL and still can cap out in most/all gear needed just in time for the next update to hit. I think they have found a perfect balance in that term regatding content. getting swamped with heavy grindy/gated content isnt a solution in my eyes.
its nice that my shell does stuff sometimes extra hard by lowering amount of people, going unusual setup or picking VD just for the giggles with non rngornin setup. we just did DM2 on D with 8 peeps and manage to win in 20 min, gonna try VD

[Sechs]

since abyssea ended there's never been anything "hard" in the existence of this game.

Uhm...
Of course it all comes down to your definition of "hard", as you implied first, but personally I think that Provenance Watcher (at start) wasn't the thing you could do qith 100% success rate, even with thousands of prebuffs, there was always a chance of something going wrong.
Legion wasn't particularly easy either, some wings required coordination and strategy and took some time before people learned to do them reliably.
SoA-wise well, Delve1 content at start wasn't particularly easy either, took some time before people learned to do all 3 zones in 5NM+MB runs.
DM2 VD as well I wouldn't consider very easy and a couple of revamped BC fights on VD, at least for a while, weren't a cakewalk either.

There has been some challenge here and there over time, but the tendency I see is for things to go slowly down (i.e. get easier). There also has been quite a big breakpoint with the last WS patch that really made things jump in that direction.


I partially agree with what Damane said btw.
I kinda feel the balance they found wasn't that bad, but it's getting boring/old very quickly, they can't go on revamping BCs forever, there needs to be something else, some more "articulated" and complex (and ultimately *entertaining*) content.

[PSOfanatic]

If you want hard mode why not just try content with Lv99 Gear/RoE gear. I'm sure the "Amazing" LS some of you claim to be in are actually not really that amazing. Gear really does carry people in this game. You'd be lying to yourself if you said it doesn't. On the rare occasion, yes, you have shitty players that don't know how to utilize the gear and end up sucking but honestly...that is not always the case.

[Sechs]

I'm sure the "Amazing" LS some of you claim to be in are actually not really that amazing.

Bold words man, boooold words :D
Btw hope you were thinking of someone else 'cause I'm everything except amazing lol. But some of the players on these forums truly are, I'm disappointed you can't see that.

[cut] on the rest of what you said.
Cannot deny it, but you're kidna stretching it.
Tipically truth is somewhere in between the extremes.
So yes, some people are not as amazing as they claim, while still being clearly better than an average player. It's the gear they managed to get that makes them what they are.
But many other people gained those gear long time ago, using very old gear, and they achieved that just because they are exactely what they claim to be when they brag: amazing players, part of amazing groups.

[JSHidaka]

I haven't done a phantom fight after AA, they don't drop anything I can use on the jobs I play...

True, that the game is way too easy, and the "nerf" to delve allowing low man groups, was the main problem, easier than 18man and same reward as before... Yea...

Either way, ATM I keep playing 'coz working in a mythic (assault/einherjar), while helping a friend... I should finish in a month if do einherjar everyday, but after that I might be done with the game... Hopefully empy gear revamp will be released and give me 1-2 more weeks of content

[Sechs]

I haven't done a phantom fight after AA, they don't drop anything I can use on the jobs I play...

Are you writing this here to convince yourself it's real?

[Treize Kordero]

Speaking of Empy gear reforge.. I hope that's coming August or September... Dat DNC body..... AHHHHHHHHHHH YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[Byrthnoth]

Well, to be fair . . . the drops kinda suck. If you ignore drops that can come from AAs/DM, most of the pieces are sidegrades, downgrades, or specialty items. Melee mage stuff, Fast cast sets for light armor jobs, Regen builds, HP Healed -> MP pants for the only job in the game that has an alternative, etc.

[Sechs]

Well, to be fair . . . the drops kinda suck. If you ignore drops that can come from AAs/DM, most of the pieces are sidegrades, downgrades, or specialty items.

Well... the % of "omg awesome" pieces from BCs other than AA fights is not as high, I concur.
I like the label of "specialty". Most of those pieces are stuff with very specific use. They might be upgrade for one job, but then sidegrade or downgrade for others.

Eitherway, after so many people complained of SE dropping the "sidegrade" model which has been going on for over 8 years, should we really complain that we're getting mostly sidegrades?



@Treize
Clearly not in the august patch. Well not "clearly", but it seems to me content-focus of this patch will be the new Skirmish.
September maybe?