Dev Tracker: Discussion

[Draylo]

You have higher hopes than I. Either way, pretty much spot on with everything, past, present, and future about the game with bonus sarcasm and parody.

What exactly didn't I comprehend? You just love to jump on bandwagons don't you? Little funny when your own posts get attacked though isn't it? Keep resorting to personal attacks, I'm sure it makes you look cool right? lol

[Seha]

I agree with Sparth, ToAU best expansion 4ever.

Everything there was designed with long term goals in mind; Salvage, Odin farm, Mythics, Nyzul climb, ZNM..all stuff with good longevity, and this is what Adoulin is lacking at the moment(seemingly because it simply isn't complete yet, it probably will have it in the future..)

I think Delve would have probably survived much longer for a greater part of the community if you could only buy mats and not equipment. And skirmish...brrr skirmish...

[Sechs]

I think Delve would have probably survived much longer for a greater part of the community if you could only buy mats and not equipment.

Lol!
Delve would have just needed reasonable amounts of Plasm gained from runs.
Of course 70k from a single run is not reasonable when normal drops cost 20-30k lol
More reasonable and consistent amount of plasm gained and maybe a weekly cap would have solved the issue.
And SE wouldn't have invented anything new, stuff like this is pretty normal with other MMOs when it comes to currencies.

[arus2001]

Legion and Voidwatch were perfect because you could bring 18 people to them. Any and all flaws others may bring up with the systems is just butthurt casual whining.

Hey Ronin, am I Draylo'ing right?

I'm "attacking" you, Draylo, because you've persisted time and time again in insisting your minority fanboy experience is the whole of FFXI. When you express a flippant lack of care for how others wind up playing the game, or in some cases, can't, then of course I am not going to do you the service of treating you amicably. The bullshit you clamor for is why I lost friends post-Abyssea. Heck, it's why I lost friends prior to it. For the rest of us who have bothered to play any other modern game with a modest level of sincerity, we're also quite capable of looking back to XI and implicitly pointing out what it lacks to be relevant in today's MMO market. Those lacking features will hamstring the arrival of new players (Notice how even bringing this up is considered a joke by some?). Even retired vets may not look back because things like LFG tools are far better than sitting in the main hub city shouting and hoping for the best with a strong possibility you'll get fuck all done. Why in the hell should anyone be paying for a game they can't play? You seriously want to drive even more people off with out of reach content because you guys play too much and are therefore bored with SE's glacial content development?

Look, we're not saying XI can't be a good game. We're telling you that you can't go back in time to the game you remember and hope for the same success. The population isn't there. The dev manpower isn't there. The patience of players for stupid grinds, RNG, and arbitrary waits isn't there. A few voices on the forum here, coincidentally aimed more toward "your type" in this place's early days isn't going to change any of that. Hatred for the casuals and how they kill games is not a new gaming argument, nor was it ever a good one. Yet their majority percentage is paying for what you enjoy. I'd tell you to be thankful, but that'd require a healthy dose of grow the fuck up and respecting the issues presented on their behalf. A couple knuckle-draggers trying to tell me off has a long way to go in usurping over a decade of personal experience, relationships with friends and enemies, the observation and participation within various communities, and just watching how devs react to situations within their games proper, for better or worse.

[Hitou]

Lol!
Delve would have just needed reasonable amounts of Plasm gained from runs.
Of course 70k from a single run is not reasonable when normal drops cost 20-30k lol
More reasonable and consistent amount of plasm gained and maybe a weekly cap would have solved the issue.
And SE wouldn't have invented anything new, stuff like this is pretty normal with other MMOs when it comes to currencies.

70k is a bit much but I don't think SE really expected people to consistently clear 1-5 +B at least not so early. And the 110 crap was useful for about 10 min since it was replaced by skirmish for the most part a few months later. So who cares if you could buy a few pieces that dropped often enough for the NMs anyway. Takes 3 clears to buy a 200k weapon assuming you don't just get it as a drop. Doesn't seem that unreasonable to get 1 item from 3 runs. Also there's pretty much no other decent way to get plasm. Can blow vouchers on it, eat rocks or eat beads. NMs outside give crap for plasm. Maybe if beads had dropped 100% from the start it would have been a decent way to get plasm. I don't really get artifical caps like daily or weekly either. If you're clearing crap too fast it's your own fault don't blame the game for not stopping you. That said, a lower plasm reward would have been fine from delve. "hardcores" would still have finished it in a week but whatever.

[Karbuncle]

I can't condone anything with the words "Weekly cap" really =x

[arus2001]

Yeah, that pretty much says, "Well, see you guys next week!" in XIV.

[Karbuncle]

Anyway, that new "Full set" macro swapping things looks pretty nice, and not nearly as convoluted as i expected it.

[Hitou]

It looks about how I expected it to. Seems like they had to lower the amount of sets from the initial 100 down to 20. Kind of limiting but not terrible. Might be more limiting if partial sets aren't possible.

[Sechs]

70k is a bit much but I don't think SE really expected people to consistently clear 1-5 +B at least not so early.

That's totally what happened, but even then it was too much.
And they could have fixed.
Stuff like this that gets exploided and makes people hoard currency gets fixed in like 2 days in other MMOs.
They did nothing.
There's no weekly cap on plasm either.
The only think they did to offer plasmsinks is materials for 300k (necessary for reforged relic) and 6x Airlixirs+2 to cap new gear instead of 3.
It was a good very move truth be said, but clearly not enough.
As usual they're always incredibly slow in taking a clear position. They rely too much on the game "fixing itself" and are afraid to give too clear directions to the player base, and this is what happens.

And the 110 crap was useful for about 10 min since it was replaced by skirmish for the most part a few months later.

10 mins =/= few months.
Personally I still have some of those 110 pieces and it took me quite some time to replace others.
Some were really good pieces. Of course this doesn't apply to all jobs, was just saying.
Skirmish didn't really replace everything, and skirmish had the annoying randomness of RNG which doesn't really promote skill or perserverance. There's no progress, just pure random luck.

So who cares if you could buy a few pieces that dropped often enough for the NMs anyway.

This is exactely the issue.
Delve got burned out because it was too easy to get gear.
It's not the system that was broken, is the balancement into the gain:ratio and the cost of items which were off and made the event burn out so fast. The system in itself was fantastic and, imho, one of the best looting system we've seen in FFXI ever.

70k was way too much, and too big of a difference compared to killing just the 5nm. We're talking about 10k from 5 nms vs 60k from a single one. Can you see how numbers are off? Something like 20k or around that would have been much more reasonable.
But whatever, what's done is done, no point crying over spilled milk.
Was just saying that the system in itself was good, it's just a shame they didn't learn from the errors that other devs had to go through when they firs released currency-based looting systems.
SE tends to do that, sadly =/

[Sechs]

I can't condone anything with the words "Weekly cap" really =x

I hate artificial gatings myself, especially when they're set too tight. But there's no other way a dev can realistically control the minimum amount of time an event is going to last unless they deploy systems like that. I consider them a "necessary evil".
Of course they can be good or bad, depends in how expert devs are in balancing out the numbers.
It's not like FFXI doesn't have any, think about it.
JP midnights here and there, daily entry, we used to have the Dynamis and Einherjar old cooldowns to enter, now everything is more or less daily, but that's still another way to "control" through artificial gates.
Would you have liked more to make so you could enter Delve, say, once a day?
To each his own of course, but personally I'd rather have no limit on how many times I can enter an instanced content, but make so after a certain number of times it gets less efficient for me to do so.
It's so much better for me.
Think about the daily stuff. Each time you feel "forced" to do it because if you don't you lose your chance at making gil/getting currency/whatever.
If instead I have a weekly cap it means I could for instance do all that stuff in a single day I'm off work. The final result will be the same, but I would have the freedom of doing a bit every day, or everything concentrated in a single one.

Delve simply had no cap at all, of any form. Could farm 3 millions plasm in a single day if you wanted. That's never healthy for a game content, of course it's not gonna last long if you release a content without any form of control like that.
If they put a cap on the weekly amount of plasm you can farm, set to be not too high and not too low, hardcore players would have been slowed downs, nothing would have changed for many other players, but overall the content would have lasted much longer instead of being rushed out and leaving people bored whining about having nothing to do.
It's not realistical to expect them to release content as big as delve every 3 months becuase what will happen instead is that... we get nothing. Which is exactely what's happening now.

[Prothescar]

Biggest thing I got out of this thread for the last couple pages was some people not understanding the dissonance between difficult, well tuned content and a requirement for many many people. You can have an event that is simultaneously difficult to complete while also rewarding you for bringing more members, but requiring many members for no reason serves no practical purpose. Legion is a great example of this, you could clear it with less than 18 but you'd get through much less final Mul waves as a result, meaning better, bigger groups ended up doing much better as a result of their numbers but smaller, less powerful groups were not locked out completely. If SE did difficulty scaling right and retooled the drop system to not reward you for taking a shit or whatever else you do while inside of a Fracture, Delve would be great too. An event that allows both 6man and 18man parties to complete it with varying reward (not varying difficulty, the difficulty curve should only increase to accommodate more members, there should be no difficulty easing for going with less people) amounts would be fine. Low drop rates across the board (2-20% depending on what the item is, similar to Legion) and have an alliance get a chance at extra drop slots to account for the extra people, not higher drop rates.

[PSOfanatic]

It's not about 3-4 song bards. It's about bards, period, or more broadly, the degree to which buffing jobs in FFXI are totally broken.

I would be interested in a video of a 6-man Tojil with no buffing jobs.

Draylo,
This is when you're normally supposed to say "Challenge accepted" but I doubt a video will ever be made. I think it's cool there are still some players out there that do sky @ Lv75 with older gear to enjoy the content as it was originally. Draylo...Give it a shot. You might start to enjoy the game again

[Hitou]

10 mins =/= few months.
Personally I still have some of those 110 pieces and it took me quite some time to replace others.

That was hyperbole, I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. Also I didn't say it was all replaced, a few rank 15 pieces still have some uses. I mostly meant the weapons as people quickly got 113 or 119 shortly after.
Biggest issue with Delve was it was released way too early in adoulin's life. Item lvls should have gone up progressively instead of adding 119 near the beginning and then filling in the gaps for months after. But people have been saying this for a while.

[scaevola]

I can do with tsurumaru or even with my Oatixur mnk if you want.

And what about the other 5?

MAN OF A THOUSAND EDITS: recreate the Duty Roulette experience.

[pancakesandsex]

Sechs, your clamoring for artificial gating on delve makes me sad. There's already the requirement for an item for entry (albeit a relatively high drop rate item). Any further gating placed on the event would only serve to make it less accessible, make people less willing to experiment, and create the same issue people have with AA's all over again.

Regarding content difficulty, if you're blowing through everything 6 man already fully decked out in the best of the best, I don't think you can reasonably expect new content to challenge you in the same way it does someone with fewer resources at their disposal. You get to clear content before everyone else, and monopolize the expensive crafting materials before everyone else figures out what's what, that's your advantage for being on top and staying there.

This is anecdotal of course, but here's how things are for me. I have the benefit of being in a pretty well geared LS with a fairly high population that meets 3 times a week. We regularly field 18 people for DM every saturday, and we recently got our first VD clear as a group. We also bring an alliance to delve and have been working towards strategies that allow us to clear kamhir and yorcia with a full alliance. We downed yorcia 1-5 this week with 15 people. Felt pretty good to get those wins, and it's nice to know that an alliance 1-5 win in non-marjami isn't out of reach. Several of us are rather time constrained (myself included), and can't spam delve on our own as much as we'd like, so it will be nice to be able to obtain the qaaxo / xaddi / artsieq pieces we're missing via drops instead of having to spend large amounts of plasm on them which could be better used on +2s or crafting mats for relic upgrades.

From this perspective, I'd like to have another option or 2 for an 18 man event (not necessarily one that requires 18, but one that allows 18) so we have something else for an option on saturdays that doesn't involve splitting people up into smaller groups. Existing content is still pretty difficult, there's stuff we haven's cleared with an alliance yet, but I can see the end of the tunnel now, so eventually we're gonna need something new to do as a group as our current conquests lose their shine. That's what I'm looking for out of new content.

If you're playing this game without a group, find one, ask them to join up socially, prove you know what you're doing, and be around at event time so you can fill in the blanks when they have a spot open. No group has 100% attendance.

[Toth]

How about making certain drops in delve only for 12+ groups? Like crafting items specifically? Decrease the amount of plasm you get with less than 12 and maybe achieve some balance.

[pancakesandsex]

How about making certain drops in delve only for 12+ groups? Like crafting items specifically? Decrease the amount of plasm you get with less than 12 and maybe achieve some balance.

What's the point in restricting content to large groups? I don't see why accessibility is a problem that needs to go away, or penalized just because other people are able to clear it rapidly and efficiently.

[Sechs]

Sechs, your clamoring for artificial gating on delve makes me sad. There's already the requirement for an item for entry (albeit a relatively high drop rate item). Any further gating placed on the event would only serve to make it less accessible

Hence why I said the gating should have been on the amount of plasm you get per week, and not on the entry.
That way you would have been able to enter as much as you want, test all you want, get all the drops you want. The limit would have been only on the amount of plasm you get.
It's similar in WoW (altough there the gating is much stricter since there's a one-time lot chance on each boss every week).
It would have still been a much smoother and lighter gating than any other we've seen on FFXI, but at the same time that, paired with more coherent plasm rates from full runs, would have made the event last longer for sure.
Of course it would have ended that way too one day or another, but things would have been less rushed out imho.

[Draylo]

What's the point in restricting large groups who enjoy playing together? Why is it fair to them to force them to split up when they've been playing together for years? Try to look at both sides. I haven't asked for people to be restricted, but its common sense that the more you bring the more mouths you'll have to feed. Scaling drops should be something that is a given.

Draylo,
This is when you're normally supposed to say "Challenge accepted" but I doubt a video will ever be made. I think it's cool there are still some players out there that do sky @ Lv75 with older gear to enjoy the content as it was originally. Draylo...Give it a shot. You might start to enjoy the game again

Sorry I wouldn't do any content without a buffer, that is just dumb. We've used buffing jobs since the beginning of XI events lol.