Dev Tracker: Discussion

[Bukadan]

even if loot scaled bringing less people (people who you feel are worth asking) would still be the way to go. theres no reason to carry useless players unless the challenge youre creating for yourself is just that, which can be fun sometimes. the new bcs are only worth doing on VD, otherwise youre giving them a shot on difficult to prepare for vD spam.

[Ophannus]

Did they say when the update is? All of the early september updates were 9th-11th. They still have to announce WoE and incursion.

[Kyte]

I'm guessing it'll be on the 8th/9th.

[Malithar]

As annoying as personal treasure can be (R/Ex you don't want; ally does), it sounds at least like it's a step up from the Delve distribution. Wonder how good CPs can get to be in there, they mention it enough that it almost sounds like a selling point to the event.

Maybe it's just a tease, but mentioning that at higher difficulties it exceeds Delve's difficulty is exciting.

[dasva]

But man Velkk in the ravine are going to be murdered so hard especially since everyone participating needs the drop to enter.

I do like how it sounds like everyone gets the coffer

And it sounds like the xp/cp can ramp up a bit

[Sechs]

it sounds at least like it's a step up from the Delve distribution.

Is it?
What was wrong in Delve distribution to begin with? Aside from it being a bit too generous (especially in the recently added lowmen version) I don't think there was really anything wrong with the Delve distribution thing?
Actually I think it was pretty awesome.
I'm not fan of this R/E shit à la Voidwatch where you always get something but 99 times out of 100 it's crap or stuff you don't need/want.
It's the same old issue of random shit. Why do JP devs like to artificially prolong how much a content lasts through random shit? That way you'll have to do that certain content over 9000000000 times to get the one single drop you need for your main while everybody else gets it 20000 times before you and can't trade.
I'd rather get nothing and have lower quantity items dropping in a general treasure pool that this higher quantity shit approach.
Talking in general eh, can't judge until we've seen it but I'm really disappointed for now.

The "everybody needs an item" part too is annoying. It's gonna make LS events much harder to handle for event leaders. They keep on adding stuff that goes in the opposite way of organized group play.
I can understand the will to make stuff more accessible for PUGs and random groups, but why do they have to make it harder for organized groups who have scheduled events at the same time? Sigh.

[Hitou]

With luck the KI will just drop to all party members like it does for entering the most recent mission battle. I look forward to pick-up groups failing to clear this content no matter what the actually difficulty is. Maybe it will be hard enough that people can stop whining for a few weeks. And then different people will whine instead.

[Malithar]

Is it?
What was wrong in Delve distribution to begin with? Aside from it being a bit too generous (especially in the recently added lowmen version) I don't think there was really anything wrong with the Delve distribution thing?

Specifically, the loot not scaling. The drops were fine for an ally, but once it got reduced to 6 man and the loot stayed the same, there really was very little point in doing ally runs. At least with what info we have so far, loot is distributed per person, so it'll be even whether its 6 or 18.

Maybe it will be hard enough that people can stop whining for a few weeks. And then different people will whine instead.

If someone's not whining, they're doing something wrong. :D

[Dotsudoku]

At least with what info we have so far, loot is distributed per person, so it'll be even whether its 6 or 18.

..Which means it would still be pointless to do the event with more than six? lol

[Byrthnoth]

... but there won't be any penalty for taking more than 6 this time, as long as they're pulling their weight.

[Damane]

this could be interesting depending how many times you can ramp up the difficulty. my guess is the first run will be piss easy and on the middle road you reach delve 2.0 level while on the last stage you hit delve 1.0 lvl pre ivlv added skill/stat vomit. at least thats what i am hopeing

[Dotsudoku]

... but there won't be any penalty for taking more than 6 this time, as long as they're pulling their weight.

Ignoring TP increases, that's still a pretty big if.

It's a step in the right direction, but still does nothing to incentivize alliance play

[Damane]

... but there won't be any penalty for taking more than 6 this time, as long as they're pulling their weight.

depends on the flexibility of the people i guess. a melee pt & 3hardcore nuke mages with could work. or you let your support do a buff rotation if the ally is so unflexible with job selection.

[Damane]

Ignoring TP increases, that's still a pretty big if.

It's a step in the right direction, but still does nothing to incentivize alliance play

that depends on the move you want to avoid. geo-vex does wonders for annoying mob debuffs

[Sechs]

Specifically, the loot not scaling.

That's a BIG problem, but it's not an issue with the Delve system itself, rather a consequence that appeared after they adjusted Delve to scale to different amounts of players but "forgot" to make drops scale as well.
In the end I'm not even sure we could definie it a real "issue", it's just an annoying thing that creates unbalancement because promotes lowmen play instead of rewarding the hardest thing to do (i.e. large groups).

And this random chest thing solves nothing. Yes, if we just look at "quantity" stuff will be more even between small groups and large groups, but it creates a plethora of other new issues, real ones, like stuff not dropping, like you not being able to adjust who-gets-what as an organized group, like you getting frustrated at having to repeat that content for months and never seeing that item drop while everybody else gets it 900 times and have to trash it.
So is it really worth the change? I don't think so. I'd rather keep my unbalancement between small and large groups (a thing against which I whined quite a bit on BG and official forums alike) than getting even more fucking random shit
Sorry if I'm getting heated up, it's nothing against you personally of course, but I hate this shit and it makes me mad they're going back to that model after all the shitstorm Voidwatch chests generated. It makes me feel like the Delve system (a very very good system, aside from the following scaling problem) wasn't "good" because they had learned something from past experiences, but only by luck...
It's depressing.

[Sechs]

Ignoring TP increases, that's still a pretty big if.

It's a step in the right direction, but still does nothing to incentivize alliance play

Blizzard did it right several times throughout the years to incitivize that.
It's a natural progression of MMOs changing through time and players changing their habits too, and what they "need" from a MMO, so in the end Blizzard couldn't stop this process (in WoW "large groups" are 25 and "small groups" are 10), as in 10men saw their success rise and 25men saw it go down.
But at the same time they slowed down the process, and they offered real incentives to do 25men.
For many people those incentives weren't enough, but at least they were there and they were real.

In FFXI it's the other way around, larger groups had it WORSE, much worse, and what this chests move is gonna do is "just" reduce the amount of how much worse it is. Which is a step in the right direction from that point of view, but way not enough and honestly achieved through very wrong means which are going to create much bigger problems (see my previous post)

[Malithar]

Not that it detracts from the point(loot not scaling is horrible design), but in all honesty, the increased difficulty has much less to do with increased TP generation as it does with having to incorporate large amounts of mediocrity into your alliance. Generally speaking, most players fall somewhere between mediocre and bad. That includes your linkshell members. If you tend to run with a full alliance, and suddenly invite a group of 3-4 friends to a delve zone, you're going to see dramatic improvement mostly because of who you decided to bring along.

Buuut again, that doesn't change the fact that static loot for 3-18 bodies is a joke, and is what really needs to change to make alliances worthwhile again.

Ignoring TP increases, that's still a pretty big if.

It's a step in the right direction, but still does nothing to incentivize alliance play

dat flip flop

It'd be easier to take you seriously if you just came out and said "I don't want alliance content to succeed."

@Sechs: See Hitou's point about another group getting it's turn to bitch. For all we know if could all be rare only gear too, who knows. I've got the same apprehensions about personal chest loot, but at the very least, as Byrth put it, you're not penalized loot wise by taking more.

[Sechs]

Sorry I over-reacted, and it's too soon to get to conclusions since we don't know the details of the system yet.
I just don't want to get through the same random bullshit crap VW put me through, I'm sick of this excessive and unnecessary random stuff :'(
Delve looting system was freaking awesome, aside from the scaling part but as I mentioned earlier I don't consider it an issue within the system itself, rather a consequence of hasty adaptation of content which was meant to be experienced in another way.

[Toth]

Looks pretty solid. I hope that the higher difficulties need 18 people since I hate for the event to be simply 3 specific job DDs, tank, and support

[Kyte]

I kinda wish they had made a new instance zone for this, even if it reused textures from Dho Gates.