Dev Tracker: Discussion

[pancakesandsex]

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.

Again. In what way does penalizing people with lower drops or time limits magically improve your situation?

When you're asking the question "what do I get for the person who has everything" the answer is nothing. Eventually you're just going to be playing because you like the act of playing and not to get some digital tangible out of it. If you're the first to clear, you're going to be the first to reach that point no matter what the dev team does. All gating the rewards and content does is make it take exponentially longer for everyone else to even have a chance.

[Sechs]

Again. In what way does penalizing people with lower drops or time limits magically improve your situation?

How would it penalize people with lower time? If anything it would penalize people with a lot of time.
It wouldn't improve *my* situation. It would have improved the game's situation.
Event lasts longer, less people complaining, less people bored, more stuff to do and to be looking forward at, less random "jumps" between 106 and 119 gear.

All gating the rewards and content does is make it take exponentially longer for everyone else to even have a chance.

If you allow me to, I disagree with that. Bad gating is what you're describing, and I agree with you in that case.
Good gating makes things more relaxed, less stressful and smoother.
Only people somehow mildly affected by a good gating are the superhardcore 24/7 players, but those are usually never happy so no big change in the end

[Zieara]

Everyone arguing over delve, and I'm just excited they're finally adding a nice in-game interface for swapping gear.

[ronin sparthos]

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.

Time gating is horrible. I'd rather see astronomically high values for items (like brews in early abyssea) than an arbitrary "nope" appear when you reach X number of plasm. The value would be high enough that most casuals would never hit it and the hardcores would have no life content in order to even approach it. But if you wanted to no life you could do so. It's that or requiring significant farming to be done to keep you busy before you get to fight whatever it is that needs fighting. Something in the vein of Hakutaku or ZNM without the picture taking. You could also be acquiring JP and Merit Points at the same time grinding trash mobs. It's also an excuse to party up with others and grind. Zones like Outer Ra'Kaznar should be places where people are grinding mobs for triggers.

Like BCNMs you could choose between difficulty levels and loot would scale appropriately when you finally get the triggers.

Alternatively is more Nyzul style content involving objectives which may or may not involve combat with immediate rewards for casual play while those who prove themselves above and beyond can go for more elite rewards. Reuse some of those Moblin Maze Mongers objectives like:

Dodging agro to reach a checkpoint.
Crafting X number of items in X time while farming materials onsite.
Semi-randomized NM encounters.
Kill all enemies.
Survive waves of enemies.

It'd be a good excuse to bring back glow weapons and toss some afterglow to keep hardcores sated. Anything but more stungun style content where everything rests on the ability to stun a raidwide death cone. Cmon, that shit was lame and people cheated it with stunbots anyway.

[Draylo]

Everyone arguing over delve, and I'm just excited they're finally adding a nice in-game interface for swapping gear.

It doesn't look good if there is only 20 sets for all jobs though. I hope that is 20 sets per job or something lol.

[pancakesandsex]

How would it penalize people with lower time? If anything it would penalize people with a lot of time.
It wouldn't improve *my* situation. It would have improved the game's situation.
Event lasts longer, less people complaining, less people bored, more stuff to do and to be looking forward, less random "jumps" between 106 and 119 gear.



If you allow me to, I disagree with that. Bad gating is what you're describing, and I agree with you in that case.
Good gating makes things more relaxed, less stressful and smoother.
Only people somehow mildly affected by a good gating are the superhardcore 24/7 players, but those are usually never happy so no big change in the end

You misread. I was describing the penalty.

[Scythiroth]

It doesn't look good if there is only 20 sets for all jobs though. I hope that is 20 sets per job or something lol.

Based on their comment of potentially adding more in the future, it is probably 20 total for now. x.x

[Sechs]

Time gating is horrible.

I concur, I hate that too. Hence why I suggested they should've used a different gating system from the time one we've seen in the majority of FFXI events ^^

I'd rather see astronomically high values for items (like brews in early abyssea) than an arbitrary "nope" appear when you reach X number of plasm.

But that wouldn't stop you from doing the event.
First you'd have to reach that cap, and I'm quite confident the majority of people wouldn't even reach it (hence why I don't see them affected, different story for very hardcore players)
Second even if you reach the cap, you can still participate in the event and get all the other things you can get: XP, CP, Ingredients, Items, KIs etc.
That's much better imho than being able to do an event only once a day or once every X days and once u've done that then bye bye until the next chance.
It's exactely why it's stressful *especially* for people with less time. Those people tend to have little time most days of the week, and more time on 1 or 2 days.

Take the example of what they did in WoW with Valor Points farming. Valor points are a general currency, think of them like a broader type of Plasm with which you can buy all sort of stuff.
There's a weekly cap on Valor points, but there also was a thing called "Daily bonus". Once a day, if you ran a dungeon, you would get a much bigger amount of Valor Points.
This generated the habit of doing tipically one dungeon a day for each player. With the result that every day you felt you *had* to get your "daily bonus", and when you couldn't it felt very bad/frustrating.
What they did in Cataclysm was simple and genius at the same time.
The overall weekly cap on the amount of Valor Points you can get stayed the same, but they removed the "daily bonus" thing, making it a weekly thing. You get 7x of those special bonus.
You could do them all in a day, or in a couple of day, and it felt much better and much more relaxing if the other days you didn't have time or couldn't log at all.
People loved this.
(it generated other issues, but let's not go OT now)

It would be pretty similar here. There's a total amount of Plasm you can get every week. Of course this number has to be set high enough it's not a retarded number.
You could cap it in a day if you were to do, dunno, 60 runs, or most likely you would never cap it if you're a player with less time, other players might cap it by the end of the week, but they would still be able to join event with their friends (instead of the "sorry, went already for today!" excuse) and even get many stuff out of it, just not plasm.
It looks like a fantastic compromise to me, and makes the event last longer so that Devs have more time to plan the next tier instead of being forced to rush things because people "burned out" content much earlier than they expected.


But in the end I dunno why we're all talking about this, I mean, even with all of our good ideas, we can't change the past. What's done is done, can't reverse time.
I just hope SE learned something about this experience and that whatever they'll do in the future, they'll come up with something more balanced than Delve was in terms of long-lasting.
At the same time I hope they don't scrap the currency-based system at all. My point is that the system was not wrong, it's the implementation that was, so I'd love to see a better implementation of it in the future for contents to come

[Isiolia]

It doesn't look good if there is only 20 sets for all jobs though. I hope that is 20 sets per job or something lol.

The note even says that it's supposed to be increased later. I suspect that the 20 sets is an adequate amount for testing. I think with even 20 of them there are uses, like Trust XP'ing jobs up or setting stuff up for level capped content, where setting up a full xml/lua might be a hassle.


Far as gating/challenge, I think the most effective way to utilize the full content of the game would be to restrict rewards per job in a given unit of time. It'd greatly increase the amount of progression an individual player would be looking at endgame, as having a wide variety of jobs leveled/skilled/geared would be important, and it'd also mean finding strategies to make more than a handful of setups work.

[ronin sparthos]

I fear people would just quit the content after capping BRD, COR, SAM, WHM, MNK or start rotating in mules rather than devise strategies for DRG, THF, PUP, BLU etc. As much as hardcores scream shits easy, ain't nobody got time for other jobs. The complaint would be 'I capped for the week, I'm bored' a la FFXIV.

Buffstacking should have been addressed years ago.

[scaevola]

Sorry I wouldn't do any content without a buffer, that is just dumb.

Then whatever challenge you're looking for is going to elude you, because again, preparation is more important in this game than execution.

[Sechs]

Buffstacking should have been addressed years ago.

^ this.
As much as I've abused about it like everybody else, it really kills many instruments Devs can use to create challenging content.
Especially the stacking before BCs.

[pancakesandsex]

But that wouldn't stop you from doing the event.

But it would stop you.

Why do you want so badly to stop people from getting stuff just because they have a more flexible schedule, or more resources than you?

Letting the hardcore spam the event as much as they want also puts more drops on the market so the more casual players can skip a few steps and upgrade their new toys faster at the expense of gil, and participate in other new content more effectively. Limits would remove the incentive to do runs for extra plasm to convert to gil. Limits would also destroy any incentive to join a pug to do the content outside of runs done by your core group if you're already capping out.

You are actively wishing to stop a small and slowly dwindling population (who is already complaining about not having enough to do) from playing the game and it makes no sense.

[scaevola]

I mean, I'm fine with the idea of challenging 18-man content I'm unlikely to ever see, I can live with that, but buffstacking has a way of ensuring 18-man content becomes 12-man, then 9-man, then...

If you want 11 to be harder, the very first thing that should happen is that song/roll/spell buffs should wear upon the caster dropping party.

[sapphire]

If you want 11 to be harder, the very first thing that should happen is that song/roll/spell buffs should wear upon the caster dropping party.

Weird question here - though I will say, I hate doing brd swaps with all my blackened heart and I do love playing brd - how do you deal with spell buffs that aren't party specific? I mean a WHM/RDM/SCH/etc can give anyone pro and shell. And when it comes to dropping party, do the buffs go when someone dc's? Something which is very likely out of the group's control?

Just idly thinking of coding logistics while avoiding doing my actual work...

[ccl]

An EASY way to gate delve(or any event) would have been you need item from all fields NMs to enter it; even with a 100% drop rate, wouldn't be as lame as a Timed Gate and would have made the event last a lot longer.

[pancakesandsex]

An EASY way to gate delve(or any event) would have been you need item from all fields NMs to enter it; even with a 100% drop rate, wouldn't be as lame as a Timed Gate and would have made the event last a lot longer.

And while they are at it, why don't they introduce stamina bars that deplete every time you pop an nm and regen over time, but you can refill them instantly with crysta!

Making the event literally take a longer amount of time to complete does not increase it's longevity in terms of relevance. All of the content you complain about having cleared is still very relevant for an overwhelming majority.

[Priran]

An EASY way to gate delve(or any event) would have been you need item from all fields NMs to enter it; even with a 100% drop rate, wouldn't be as lame as a Timed Gate and would have made the event last a lot longer.

I like to call this the "don't even bother resubscribing" plan. Good luck ever getting into a Delve if you weren't active in endgame on patch day!

Where do I start with this? Field NMs are piss-easy in a group yet with a couple exceptions impossible to solo, very unrewarding, nobody could be bothered doing them even when beading NMs was the only practical way to win for a lot of people, and Delve 2's NMs and Fractures weren't even added at the same time so this would have extended the life of that event by a grand total of zero seconds.

[Sechs]

Why do you want so badly to stop people from getting stuff just because they have a more flexible schedule, or more resources than you?

Because in the long run, even if they're not aware of it, it will be for their own benefit too.
In my idea (which is just my personal view, of course) a slightly slower progression would have avoided the burnout that happened, the plasm-stocking and many other bad consequences about which we've been complaining all this time.
Imho it wouldn't have happened, or not as soon, if things had gone this other route.

Letting the hardcore spam the event as much as they want also puts more drops on the market

You talking in general? Or Delve-wise? Because aside from Airlixirs I don't think spamming delve has put anything on the market. It deevaluated the value of stuff fast, which is both good and bad at the same time of course.

You are actively wishing to stop a small and slowly dwindling population

No, quite the other way around.
Not stop, slow down, so that they won't burn out the game, get bored and then quit or stay afk in town whining.
Keep them busy for a longer and more efficient time, totally the opposite of stopping them or dwindling them.

Please allow me to use a silly metaphore, let's say players are like kids who want more and more chocolate. Devs are like their parents, they want to make their kids happy, but they have to look further than the instant gratification of giving a plethora of chocolate immediately. They will not stop giving their children chocolate, but will slow down the pace a bit.
Kids might not even notice, but while they will keep asking for more, the reduced amounts of Chocolate they receive is actually benefiting them and making them apreciate/enjoy the chocolate more than they would have otherwise.

[ccl]

If you take longer to get everything you want/need from an event, it does increase the time the event will last till you're capped on gear. If we could just have popped sky god back then without farming trigger do you think sky would have been farmed for as long as it did ?