Dev Tracker: Discussion

[Byrthnoth]

I'm not complaining, but you can see how most people would be more interested in just farming papers rather than doing harder fights for... the only iLevel throwing item.

[Hitou]

Uhm...

To be fair PW and AV are kind of outliers since they were practically unbeatable without glitches and throwing multi alliances at them. I think the first PW took 8hrs to win and caused the devs to make it and AV depop after 2hrs due to the bad publicity it got. I'm not sure AV was ever beaten legitimately before the lvl cap raise since his gimmick was never really understood. I'd say legion was challenging but I'm not the one that's complaining the game is too easy, can beat everything blindfolded, blah blah blah. I never really got into in due to 90% of players lack of interest in the system though. But again I don't know what people consider "hard" since apparently 100% of this game is now "easy."

[Sechs]

With PW I meant Provenance Watcher. I left PandyWarden and AV aside because they were older content and because of the reason you said. Altough even there we could argue more about the game cheating rather than real difficulty. For instance try to compare that with some of the hardest raid fights in WoW. For my personal point of view some of those fights were really hard in every possible meaning of the word, but still possible.
AV wasn't "hard", AV was just devs cheating and abusing of game mechanics

As I said before, there still is a degree of difficulty here and there even for some of us posting here, but it's slowly going down and the last WS rehaul patch accelerated that process a lot =/

[Byrthnoth]

New dev tracker posts for the JPs.

Post 1:
* They're a little worried about skirmish congestion, but so far problems have failed to materialize. They'll keep monitoring the situation.
* New Skirmish is going to be content level 119. It is designed to be undertaken by players that are outfitted with 119 Skirmish gear from traditional Skirmish.
* New parts for the new skirmishes are going to come from private boxes in old skirmish at a fairly high rate.
* There won't be a lobby area (I think).
* No accessories, but they're considering adding armor to future new-Skirmish expansions (head and body are mentioned in particular).
* You will be able to attach two Arcane Glyptic augments to skirmish shit from this system, but I think they're considering expanding it in the future?

Post 2: Some Campaign changes that I can't even bother deciphering because who gives two solid shits about campaign anymore?

[Treize Kordero]

LOL I remember the 24hr Pandy Warden fight that made the news... now look at AV and PandyW. They ain't shit anymore! Rightly so tooo

[Damane]

I'm not complaining, but you can see how most people would be more interested in just farming papers rather than doing harder fights for... the only iLevel throwing item.

well yeah some BCs have hortible drops. the one you mentioned particularly. noone gives a shit for those legs because whm has the aklready better lvl 90 alternativ from aby. if the leg piece would have had jobs like sch rdm blm brd geo additionslly the BC would get farmed to no end. (typing on phone is a bitch)
same applies to shadowlord bc, the fastcast body is good but the rest? occult acumen would have been top sidegrade/upgrade if it would have the same nuke power as hagondes +1 with almost max MAB augment. mythic holders would want it for a beneficial sidegrade to occult, whm would want for a best in slot nukeing. same with the mantle, to occasional to be useful, if they would have gone with "during nighttime" the cape would have sold to all melees.
dev team has the right ideas for sidegrades but fail to push some things on the gear that would make it sought after.

[NynJa]

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.

NNONONONONONO BITCH YOURE ON FUCKING DRUGS

Supplementing difficulty by shitty drop rates has zero correlation to player/group skill. Because one group can go 1/3 on X drop, and another group can go 0/100, does that make the first group better? No, it makes them frustrated and moves them to WoW.

[Byrthnoth]

NNONONONONONO BITCH YOURE ON FUCKING DRUGS

Supplementing difficulty by shitty drop rates has zero correlation to player/group skill. Because one group can go 1/3 on X drop, and another group can go 0/100, does that make the first group better? No, it makes them frustrated and moves them to WoW.

Ah! We should make acquiring useful drops require a combination of different difficulty drop rates then. Like, lets say we have one drop that's a 5% drop off a moderately difficult NM, another drop that's a 100% drop but you have to sacrifice an entire event to obtain it, and a third drop that's a 20% drop off a high difficulty NM. This way, on average, gimps won't get gear purely by luck!

Spoiler: show

I just described Salvage v1.

[NynJa]

Spoiler: show

I just described Salvage v1.

And the ones that got frustrated and wound up cheating, got banned and moved to WoW.

[Fwahm]

Personally, I think the best system would be a difficulty > drop rate scaled system, like the hard mode battlefields, but with personal pools instead of a global pool. Add the ability to send something to the global pool, and have multiple good items per fight instead of one.

Make the difficulties much more effective on drop rate: say 100% for a single rare/ex item in each pool for VD, 25% on D, 10% on N, etc.

[Karbuncle]

Idk, with 100% on VD, I don't know... most hardcores would probably be able to do that, which wouldn't much solve the problem of the hardcores getting bored a week after content. I can't say its their fault for blowing through it either, Hell i did a couple Yorcia runs the other day, like 5 of them in just a couple hours... capped out on gear from that zone after the first. It was really that easy, all i had left was to get Airlixirs to upgrade those pieces.

Moving on with that, I say 50% on VD would be a good midway... especially if you could pool said r/ex like you suggest... even 25% on D would be quite high if its split between 6~18 people and could be pooled, would be done about as quickly as Delve is now unless the difficulty was absurdly high, which may very well be what you're suggestion, hard enough to the point where N would be the best most could do, in which case, maybe 10/20/40 wouldn't be awful either.

[Bukadan]

idk ive always been a firm believer that if you suck, or arent able to be in that position due to being unable to achieve playtime, in comparison to the best players in the game, you should be essentially unable to get the best gear in the game(doesnt mean you cant try). spending time doing bullshit easy content shouldnt give you a piece of equipment that even RIVALS spending time doing very hard, content. there should be things in between, and obviously over time things could be done to increase availability (the way theyve been doing these days), but at least make it obvious that people need to step up their game (and pay attention to people when they give them advice about how to get better and not just ignore them, like being told to change gear, use certain peices for enfeebling/wsing ect) to be viablly invitable for this type of content.

[Fwahm]

Yeah, maybe 100% would be too much for individual pools even for VD. On the otherhand, except for ranger strategy available hard mode battlefields, very few can clear VD battlefields as it is.

[Draylo]

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

You aren't seeing past your own group then. I have people in my crew that are bored to tears and trying XIV or another MMO atm. It isn't hard to cap on gear at all now and there isn't anything else to do really. Most of the BCs are side grades that people don't care about.

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.

Do you even play this game or any MMO? Seems like you don't with the amount of ignorant posts you make. A lot of MMO do this, even XIV with ilevel requirements, story requirements and gear check fights. I don't see one person here asking for only alliance content. They are asking for challenging stuff, and if that happens to be at least one alliance event then what is the problem with that? We have all these low man 6 people fights already and newbies have tons of content they can engage in.

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.

You don't have to be amazing to have already been capped on current crap, it is that easy. Creating content by gimping yourself is the worst idea ever. Should we strip to level 1 swords and beat things with our friendship powers?

[Cream Soda]

Friendship is magix

[Damane]

You aren't seeing past your own group then. I have people in my crew that are bored to tears and trying XIV or another MMO atm. It isn't hard to cap on gear at all now and there isn't anything else to do really. Most of the BCs are side grades that people don't care about.

of course I reflect what i see in my group, we do stuff regularly, noone is bored and noone is swamped. Content comeing out at a steady pace so you dont feel swamped or overwhelmed and have enough time to get shit done till the next update hits. We run events 2 nights (sometimes 3 but rarely) and 1 afternoon (sunday for 4 hours or so). Its perfectly balanced with all the RL stuff.

[ccl]

Last 2 update didn't bring anything worth doing; not only the fights were jokes; but it give gear to job that lose parse to SC damage or gear that make 0 sense at all.

AA were the only good hardmode since they actually had good drop.

[Priran]

yeah they design stuff to be beatable without RMEs, but that's not the problem. that's actually a fairly sane way to design things. the problem is that support RMEs totally shit on the next-best option, while most DD RMEs are only marginally better than the next best thing (i.e. Tsurumaru, DEX-path Tinhaspa). if that SKCNM dagger gave 15% song duration, or Dunna gave 8 Geomancy, or Bolelabunga had 80% Divine Veil on it, and they based fights on assuming people had those, stuff would be more challenging. it's at least getting to the point where Ochain and Aegis are really hurting for not having shield skill, so that problem will probably solve itself the next time they raise the ilvl

[Damane]

yeah they design stuff to be beatable without RMEs, but that's not the problem. that's actually a fairly sane way to design things. the problem is that support RMEs totally shit on the next-best option, while most DD RMEs are only marginally better than the next best thing (i.e. Tsurumaru, DEX-path Tinhaspa). if that SKCNM dagger gave 15% song duration, or Dunna gave 8 Geomancy, or Bolelabunga had 80% Divine Veil on it, and they based fights on assuming people had those, stuff would be more challenging. it's at least getting to the point where Ochain and Aegis are really hurting for not having shield skill, so that problem will probably solve itself the next time they raise the ilvl

i believe aegis has somewhat reached that point allready now, ochain will prolly reach that point wiht ilvl 129 (when fighting stuff that is lvl ~139)

[Hitou]

There was a dev post long back that said Ochain was equivalent to ilvl 150 or something so I guess if we ever fight mobs around that lvl it will have the block rate of a kite shield. It mostly suffers from low def rather than block rate issues on higher lvl things.

As far as people leaving for greener pastures, I can see that. Most people I knew from this game left before even Adoulin came out or right after it, so I'm kinda surprised large groups held on this long. Do you think people are going to come back just because stuff is harder though? I think the main issue isn't that the content isn't challenging enough, it's that it's boring. Would you really be happy to spam something 500 times? Because you can do that now if you want. Merc for gimps, make it a personal mission to get every person on the server the gear. Whatever. Making content artificially challenging with crappy drop rates just caters to the lucky like VW did. Those people get what they want and get bored while everyone else has to spam it, but are still bored. I'll agree that delve kinda took it too far in the other direction with how easy it is to get a win and then just buy everything with plasm, you know, if you can actually get said win. Still amazes me how many groups can fail, with beads.