Heated Endgame Discussion

[divisortheory]

I would disagree, sustainable income is actually a profit over time because of decreased cost through streamlining and efficiency. If what you were saying was correct, we would get fewer and fewer updates with less and less content. That is not the case.

Profit margin = Revenue - Costs.

Any streamlining and efficiency that may take place over the course of their lifecycle will typically be offset by developer turnover. Every person you bring on is going to take them a few months before they can be productive.

Since there is very little they can do to increase Revenue, the only choice they have is to do everything in the power to make sure Costs does not increase, or increases very little. Streamlining of process will save them some money here and there, but it will be offset by turnover as mentioned above, or people quitting. The only surefire way to increase their Profit margin is to increase Revenue. And if you can figure out a way to do that send them a resume, but WoW is so far the only MMORPG in history that still has as many new players as it does so long after its initial release.

There is some kind of irony in here that I'm actually the one with the most hope for the game. It sounds like you've given up on it.

I haven't given up on anything. On the contrary, I'm actually more or less satisfied with the game. I do think it could be better, but not to the point that I'm irate or anything. They release updates and I enjoy them, simple as that.

[Xavier]

I haven't given up on anything.

Bullshit, lol.

Your entire view of the game is that its on a downward spiral, and theres absolutely nothing Square can do to turn it around. You've given up on any chance of significant improvement to change the game.

Its just really ironic that a page or two ago you were calling me lazy for not directly participating in trying to suggest change to Square, and now you're saying change is impossible.

[mikazuki]

div is correct in saying the ffxi playerbase can't be increased in a significant way. that is why SE are working on a new MMO so they can realise the playerbase size that WoW has.

it's technically correct that ffxi could be 'fixed' 'in a night', but that's not how corporations work usually.
if i go to my manager and say 'well here's what i want to do' maybe he'll ask for a feasibility study, there'll be a meeting or ten in which the new direction is discussed and an implementation phase is designed etc. etc.
most business moves slow because it's better to keep making a certain amount of money than risk it because you might make slightly more.

[ringthree]

I would disagree, sustainable income is actually a profit over time because of decreased cost through streamlining and efficiency. If what you were saying was correct, we would get fewer and fewer updates with less and less content. That is not the case.

Profit margin = Revenue - Costs.

Any streamlining and efficiency that may take place over the course of their lifecycle will typically be offset by developer turnover. Every person you bring on is going to take them a few months before they can be productive.

Since there is very little they can do to increase Revenue, the only choice they have is to do everything in the power to make sure Costs does not increase, or increases very little. Streamlining of process will save them some money here and there, but it will be offset by turnover as mentioned above, or people quitting. The only surefire way to increase their Profit margin is to increase Revenue. And if you can figure out a way to do that send them a resume, but WoW is so far the only MMORPG in history that still has as many new players as it does so long after its initial release.

There are two flaws with your logic.

1. That costs increase over time from a revenue of sustainable income. This is not true, there may be some costs but they are reduced over time, no amount of turn over is going to cost more than the income gained in efficiency and streamlining. If that was not the case, SE would never have made the game, because it would never be profittable, because you couldn't cover initial investment. You are thinking in a market of consumables where there is competition for a new purchase all the time, to maintain income (like a car company). This is more like a utilities market (like a cable or phone company) where the initial cost of correction/set-up has to be distributed over a much longer time, but the stability of income means that small changes to decrease cost have a longitudinally amplified effect.

2. If the game was at any point unprofitable they would stop it. This is the simple issue you are missing. If the cost of doing updates overcame the income of the game we would see less or no updates, and if the cost of having the servers up was more than income of the game, they would shut down the servers. There is empirical evidence (EQ and UO) that the player base can support updates and even expansions with a small player base because the cost of operation has become so small that it is still justifiable.

Ultimately, if all things were left static (maintenance, salaries, player base, utilities cost, etc.) the profit margin will increase over time.

[LD]

http://www.uploadfile.info/uploads/2530a278f6.jpg

Hmm...

Where did you get that? It's hilarious.

[DarktaruFM]

Freudian psychoanalysis at its best, you can get it from the source lol
http://www.amazon.com/Sexuality-Psyc...e=UTF8&s=books

[BRP]

Xavier you admit that some tactics, like Kraken Club and Soul Eater, should be nerfed in order things to be a challenge? Because I get heckled whenever I mention the word nerf.

Progression doesn't work unless a lot of things are changed. Somethings in the game, like entire jobs, have almost no use for basic stat improvements.

Look at Summoner. INT, MND, and CHR mean absolutely nothing to them. For a long time, Summoning skill did nothing for a long time, and in my opinion, still doesn't do enough. They get so screwed in multi-job sets because they only they like outside of MP and Refresh are too job specific. Imagine what a Summoner who needs INT(or MND or CHR) like a BLM does to get the high BP numbers it does looks like? Suddenly, half of the the crap SMNs can wear becomes gear they actually want and can use.

Oh man, just look at Bard. Cringe-worthy. This job is not only broken in this sense, but it actually breaks the use of other things in the game.

Another problem is just how powerful certain stats are. Damage Reduction? Improve Dual Wield?

Finally, this game never had progression. Look how ridiculous O-kotes are compared to Demon's Harness. You'd think they plan ahead at least a little and not have some of the strongest armor be 20 to 40 levels below the final cap. If they did things right, we would be getting Chausable at level 60 and Haubergeon at level 70, if you get what I mean. Then again, Magic Accuracy shouldn't suck.

[Xavier]

Xavier you admit that some tactics, like Kraken Club and Soul Eater, should be nerfed in order things to be a challenge? Because I get heckled whenever I mention the word nerf.

Progression doesn't work unless a lot of things are changed. Somethings in the game, like entire jobs, have almost no use for basic stat improvements.

I think those tactics would have to be changed in the interest of progression, but not under the current system. Presently, nothing really matters at all, so I don't see the point in nerfing anything. Rest of the stuff you said sounded pretty accurate. But I think its important to note that I'm not suggesting the game already has progression, just that progression would've avoided a ton of the problems and probably made it more popular in the end, and that its not too late to shift towards a progressive state.

[Priran]

Hmm...

Where did you get that? It's hilarious.

What's with the Youtube link? Family Guy isn't funny.

[divisortheory]

imo opinion the fundamental problem is that the game relies too much on core stats and everything has a cap, there's only so much you're gonna get. So what if something with STR+500 comes out, it will have little to no effect. That's the fundamental flaw with the game. What is progression in your eyes?

Perhaps equipment that grants totally new abilities would be cool. but balancing that is a nightmare when the game isn't designed around it from the start. Haste+5% on a piece of ammo may make you think "omg that's so amazing, progression yay!!" but it's really pretty fucking useless and won't help you kill shit that much faster, except maybe merit mobs. That's what I mean when I say the design is flawed. And it's a late enough stage in the game that I'm not really sure if there's much they can do to fix it.

[Matricide]

There is plenty that they "can" do, but they won't. How many people are actually on the development team at this point? 4-6? It's been years, SE is not going to change the fundamentals of how this game operates, i just don't see it. I always looked at FFXI as a side project for SE--whereas WoW is pretty much Blizzard's goldmine.

I'm not happy about it and I honestly have no faith that anything will "really" change. This game has no real progression and it never will.

[Quicklet]

There is plenty that they "can" do, but they won't. How many people are actually on the development team at this point? 4-6? It's been years, SE is not going to change the fundamentals of how this game operates, i just don't see it. I always looked at FFXI as a side project for SE--whereas WoW is pretty much Blizzard's goldmine.

I'm not happy about it and I honestly have no faith that anything will "really" change. This game has no real progression and it never will.

I would seriously LOL if the dev team for FFXI is that small, unless you are talking about people who are purely design and have absolutely no programming / testing functions.

One of the biggest problems with SE's design / patch mentality is that they adjust / implement things in very slight ways and seem to have a VERY long QC process compared to design, but unfortunately that means that the content of each patch, while being generally stable in a "working as intended" sense, usually doesn't add up to a lot of new things to do, or it's so exclusive that you can't actually do much with it.

imo opinion the fundamental problem is that the game relies too much on core stats and everything has a cap, there's only so much you're gonna get. So what if something with STR+500 comes out, it will have little to no effect. That's the fundamental flaw with the game. What is progression in your eyes?

Perhaps equipment that grants totally new abilities would be cool. but balancing that is a nightmare when the game isn't designed around it from the start. Haste+5% on a piece of ammo may make you think "omg that's so amazing, progression yay!!" but it's really pretty fucking useless and won't help you kill shit that much faster, except maybe merit mobs. That's what I mean when I say the design is flawed. And it's a late enough stage in the game that I'm not really sure if there's much they can do to fix it.

There are a lot of creative ways they could create new, more powerful gear without completely having to re-do the combat cycle. One extremely simple way to do this is to make gear from particular areas make more of a difference in those areas, and then have the top tier gear from those areas make the marginal improvements overall. An example: Virtue Weapons deal double damage in sea. This is not necessarily the best way to implement it nor is it the only way, but there are a plethora of ways in which the existing equipment system could support some creative itemization (just look at the latent effect system).

I think the bigger issue is mob design. Judging from the way AV was implemented, assuming they aren't just being gigantic cocks and making it near-impossible to kill on purpose, creative HNM scripting / design is a lot harder to implement than it is for WoW where it was designed from the start. There is only so much they can do with WSes, 2hrs, HP triggers, and whatever other stats they can code into a mob without changing the system.

Honestly though, I think it can be done. I don't see any particular reason why it can't, even with limits to what they can put on stats. I just think they're not willing to mess with new systems / dynamics for the same reasons they've been really bad about making logical progression. They're afraid of fucking up their game by releasing bugged content a la EQ, but they took it too far and made it so that the amount of (repeatable/reusable) content is a pittance.

[bercus]

I wrote a pretty long Email back, I also though it is time to officially invite them to the Forums, I told them about the special section as well, and offered them to tell me when SE people registered so we can give them "Write"-rights.

Will be good enough to know soon if the right people actually read this.

[Siatdiat]

http://www.jetwavecatering.com.au/im...bottleneck.jpg

Cute. ^.^/

There are bottlenecks in the game but many are in place for a reason. I don't care about bottlenecks, I care about when RMT clog bottlenecks.

Bottlenecks are not inherently bad. Its not like people don't spawn JoL. Its supposed to be hard.

A bottleneck is bad when its impossible to gain the item that is needed to progress, like Ullikummi.

So, yes, SE does have some problems, but not everything is a bottleneck, and not every bottleneck is bad. We shouldn't be spawning JoL once a week.

As a side note: Xavier your posts have two issues in general. First, your long quoting posts are very annoying to read, cut it down a bit, you don't have to respond to every sentence.

Second, for some reason you think that SE should be both psychic and prescient. WoW is not a better game because they have figured out the grand formula for MMO's. WoW is better because it learned from the lessons of older MMO's. And the next generation of games will be even better than WoW. WoW was at the right place at the right time, with alot going for it, but in truth all the games from EQ forward are basically the same concept just upgrades on what all the developers have learned about MMO's.

If FFXI was released today it would be completely better than WoW, and would probably destroy the market for MMO's. That is the nature of progress. There is nothing that Blizzard did inherently right or wrong beside learning from other developers. WoW is literally a dirivative of everything before it, and thats not a bad thing.

Have you looked at Dungeons and Dragons Online, Vanguard, Middle Earth Online? They have all come out or are coming out since WoW and they all three are pretty badly designed and either fail to bring anything new to the mmo table, or they try to be just like the old dinosaur mmos that everyone is sick of. Newer doesnt always mean better, some companies just dont get it. Im pretty sure if SE puts out a new mmo in the next few years it wont do any better than ffxi, and part of the problem will be they would have to rise above their track record from ffxi.

[BRP]

FFXI will probably be the last good "not-WoW" MMORPG there is, depending on what you consider Vanguard is. Everything since WoW has been like WoW.

Well, there are games like Conan coming out, that seem to be in a genre all by itself.

[Lordender]

10/22/05 - iGames Tour at College Station Texas Panel Discussion: http://www.square-enix-usa.com/events/f ... cript.html


A linkshell mate of mine was going to college in texas and attended this discussion, he asked how many programmers still worked on FFXI and was answered with 6.

[Kyreth]

Creating key items that are required for access to zones/content that extends from a previous expansion to the newer one could solve that problem. I actually thought of that solution without much thought and Im not even a developer.

Im not sure why you want to force people to camp kings though, unless Im confused by what you mean by content skipping.

Xavier mentioned making new content that required gear from previous HNM's to defeat. What I mean by content skipping is the ability for groups who have already done the sequence of content leading up to such things to effectively give a free pass to anyone with them to do so, by letting new LS members leech better gear/stomping the now-trivial encounters with their shiny uber gear. Newer linkshells would be forced to progress through earlier content en masse in order to experience newer content- and a "next tier" of gear is required, there's an increasing time gap between old LS and new LS that eventually becomes insurmountable. This kind of "progression" is what led to the formation of "uberguilds" in EQ, who dominated their servers because they were able to most easily keep up with progression from expansion.

New guilds ended up left in the cold, often because human nature kicked in and people wanted to take the intelligent route to the newest and best stuff- join the uberguild and skip the "worthless" earlier content. Large chunks of EverQuest are dead zones thanks to this. Nobody wants fourth-best gear that you get bitchslapped across the new areas for wearing.

On the other hand, we still have FFXI players bottlenecking at Zilart-level content fighting for drops, jumping for joy when they win Divine Might, and shouting regularly for ZM's. And fighting CoP monsters whenever they can. And so on. Some of it is bad- bottlenecking, namely. But the idea should be more content that is skill sensitive, rather than gear-sensitive. Everything should be rewarding in different ways, rather than merely a means to an end. And it shouldn't destroy old content in doing so.

Making content more open, on the other hand- that is an avenue that should be explored. HNM's that are bottlenecks should be given instanceable versions that can be spawned with items gained through defeating the monster once (who in turn drop once again an item to do so again later- the reward for victory should be cutting out a timesink). Linkshells would drop out of HNM rotations as they got first wins, giving everyone a fair crack at the HNM over time. Linkshells that did poorly would eventually be forced back into the rotation by running out of drop items- but if you have a LS wiping to something that badly, they need more practice on the "real thing" anyway.

[Xavier]

I mentioned near gear but I don't think I made it specifically required to win, just increadibly helpful and time cutting. Also, I don't think the problem with the EQ cock-block would be as big of an issue because I'd rather most of it be done through instances instead of worldspawns, which have always been a problem in any game.

Honestly, I've always wondered why they didn't just make the KS99 Behemoth, Fafnir and Aspid slightly stronger and drop their respective 3 Kings gear. It would've solved a ton of problems a long time ago. 99 Kindred Seals takes a while to farm, so its not as if you'd be fighting the Kings 10 times a day, and as long as the fights were hard enough, the challenge would still be there. The fact that you can't get 99KS in a timely manner would mean that people would still probably camp 3 Kings daily anyway, for another chance at the gear. Game breaking and radical design, I know, but I've always been a dreamer. Its just always been stupid that the hardest part of FFXI isn't the fights but the claim.

And if you really don't want gear progression, at the very least, you should spread the best gear in the game out over more than 2 and a half mobs. CoP Wyrms, ToAU HNMs are fairly well designed and pretty fun to fight, but far less rewarding then their counterpart Kings. They take longer to spawn, longer to fight, and usually require more people. The rewards are universally worse than 3 Kings. Anyone who defends that type of expansion really confuses me. If progression is really impossible, at the very least the abjuration system should be spreadout to all worldspawn HNMs just as incentive to kill. Would it really break the game if Jorm's Barone Body was an Adaman Hauberk?

[Kyreth]

Holy shit you're right, there aren't 300 people in Aery cock-blocking each other with bots daily. How could I have thought progression was a better alternative to a bot-inducing society.

See my prior post. "Progression" eventually would lead to the death of new endgame groups on servers, simply due to the increasing timesinks involved in not kissing the top dog's ass to get a hand up.

No shit. Did you just ignore where I said "marginally better gear"? I'm not talking about making previous content obsolete, I'm talking about making new content worth it.

Oh? What was:

You compensate by simply raising the mobs level to the point where people without the gear from the previous tier of HNMs can't effectively damage it.

Do this twice, and you've just rendered the inital "endgame" gear obselete, and hence the content that goes with it. Force people to go through it, and you're tossing an increasing timesink into the game, which I believe you and I both loathe.

I think you missed my point kinda. I'll never understand why people feel they "deserve" exactly the same content as another player. This wouldn't have even been a problem if Square had started addressing the problem years ago. Its a huge issue now because the number of 75 players has never been larger, while the content hasn't changed.

I think they are- the solution is instancing as much endgame content as possible.

Systems like Limbus, Sky, 3 Kings are really well done, but they can't never progress. I don't care if you have absolutely identical versions of them that are 5 levels higher with +1 or 2 to the stats of gear, -anything- for the current playerbase to move onto while the older playerbase

The biggest reason I see people quit is because the game has no progression. They sit in Aery for 2 years, finally get their drop, and have no reason to keep playing the game.

Yet we have a 30+ page topic on a single ToAU HNM at this point and folks are popping boners every time someone mentions Salvage armor. The problem is with bottlenecking, not progression. People burn out not on "Oh I got all the shinies", but on "Fuck, I did 2 years of camping in Aery for THIS? I quit, thx 4 relics bye!!1!!"

And I think the core of bottlenecking is the HNM/NM system as it stands today. Fix that, and you fix the biggest collective pain in the ass we have in the game.

[Lordender]

Easy fixes to these problems imo.

- 21-24 hour kings worked well in 2004 when there was maybe 4 linkshells camping each one, 72 people assuming they all had full alliances.

Problem: its more than double the people now camping on the same repop timers.

Solution: instance the damn fights in a BCNM. You can make kings much much stronger than what they are now to balance out more people having access to these fights.

- Add alot of newer HNM's (atleast 5-6 new ones) to spread people out that are like Khimiara with worthwhile items and somewhat reasonable drop rates.

- overhaul sky for the same reasons, there is way too many people at the end game level these days than they were in 2004.