Newest interview (abyssea was a mistake?)

[Runespider]

I laughed hard reading this newest interview.

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/story.htm...16&storypage=1

The Legacy of Abyssea

While most players would agree that the Abyssea series of add-ons breathed new life into the game, the consequences of such radical new content still weigh heavy on the developers who created it. Despite the positive response from the fans, Battle Director Mizuki Ito is quick to temper that excitement. "Abyssea wasn't all positive feedback," Ito admits. "There were negative aspects to it, too." In particular, the developers were concerned about game balance. "It became something a little different than what longtime FFXI players were used to. On the one hand, it was great that people enjoyed it, but there is also the loss of game balance to consider. Now we are going back into existing content to re-establish some balance."

So, what exactly disrupted the balance of the game in Abyssea? Ito elaborates, "In Abyssea, the system allows you to boost your parameters way up and just wreak havoc." There probably are not many forum-goers that would have trouble with that, but the developers worry about where that leaves the rest of the FFXI experience. "Users get a taste of that kind of power, and then they have to leave Abyssea and go back to fighting with their regular stats. Having such a huge gap between content is a problem."

One might expect the positive fan reaction would give the development team much to take from Abyssea as they continue to build more content. However, for Ito, the best lessons to learn from Abyssea are what not to do. "The fans consider Abyssea a success, but the developers are very aware of its failings" Ito states. "At this point, rather than reuse aspects from Abyssea, we would like to create something completely new."

Players liked Abyssea, they made it to be enjoyed and now they say no more of that, we should never of done it. BALANCE > happy subscribers.

The only mistakes with Aby were adding brews, and indeed making them really cheap and easy to get. Also very fast XP without adding masses of new endgame content was probably a mistake.

Deeper into the Void

While the recent add-ons may have injected some new energy into the player base, the newest endgame content for Wings of the Goddess, Voidwatch, has received a more mixed reaction. A main complaint amongst forum-goers is that Voidwatch brings back the old grinding days of FFXI with low drop rates and a treasure pool system that keeps items out of the hands of those who need them the most. On this issue, the developers have sympathy for the players, but again, opinions differ between player and developer.

Ito addresses the problem as being another issue of balance. "Originally, Voidwatch was designed as content for an alliance of 18 players. If you go in with 18, there will actually be a higher rate of reward than any other content in FFXI." Essentially, what they have done with Voidwatch is instead of a system where players hash out which members lot which equipment, all players have a higher chance to get something -- it just might not be what they want each time. "Overall, it equals out to a system where you can freelot, but item drops are much lower," says Ito.

Unfortunately, such a system required the developers to disallow trading. As Ito explains, "For example, say each player gets 5 items. You have 5 items times 18 players and they can all trade freely. Now one player could collect 90 items. That's no good." The removal of the trading option was specifically in order to counter item hoarding. Every individual participating in the content has an equal chance to get items.

FFXI Producer Hiromichi Tanaka also weighed in on this issue. During the launch of FFXIV, Tanaka was just as dedicated and involved in FFXI as ever, so he understands what went into Abyssea, and how the new content compares. He, along with the other developers, keenly feels the issues of balance, but Tanaka is also the first among them to hint at some positive changes in store for easing the difficulty of Voidwatch.

"The playstyle of any new content, of any new system, always has some difficult aspects to it." Tanaka explains. "However, I believe that we can work with the players to gradually improve this as we go forward." Tanaka is aware of the importance of the lifespan of content, but at the same time, is willing to meet players halfway to create a less stressful experience. "Right now, we are at the beginning stages of this content, but as we go forward, we can make adjustments to respond to more casual playstyles," Tanaka promises. "If we set the difficulty low right from the start, everyone focuses on that content and quickly grows bored with it. Our style is to give the new content some bite at first, and then start to loosen up, little by little.

The future looks so bright and rosey, aren't we all just so glad we got Tanaka back here?

When they have a success they deem it failure, this game is going to bleed players again soon. None of us are ready to go back to old FFXI now (taking years to get 1 piece of gear etc), and that is where we are headed.

Fun.

[Glacont]

Abyssea is fine the way it is; mistake or not.

[brayen]

You would think they would take a lesson from success instead of being such negative nancies lol. honestly the biggest downturn from aby was prolly just the whole crit hit WS jobs were stronger ...at least from a balance perspective. They seem to take all the bad from aby tho, proc is now part of EVERYTHING, soon ull need to proc ur moogle to open ur safe! in either case, there is a silver lining here, Boycott VW till they actually add in drops instead of just ores and logs

[Sonshou]

I think that they consider it a failure becoz it create a content development block. That the abyssea content is so success that it is difficult to pull out something that is better than that. And certainly they didn't plan to make Abyssea the final content for FFXI, or they would have warp them beautifully and put them on the shelves.

Now, if you are a developer, seeing how successful abyssea is, can you make something better than Abyssea and get the players to move onto the new content?

[SpankWustler]

The main thing I take away from all of that is they're not running around the offices naked. Color me impressed!

[Economizer]

When they have a success they deem it failure, this game is going to bleed players again soon. None of us are ready to go back to old FFXI now (taking years to get 1 piece of gear etc), and that is where we are headed.

But they could do a few things that could take years. For example, on the new weapon skills, instead of hard capping us at the ridiculous 15 allocation points they have us at, they could have us spend merits for allocation points at an increasing rate. Basically, you'd be able to get all 14 weapon skills capped, but it would cost enough experience that it would take a very, very long time, even at the accelerated rates that places like Abyssea can give.

The cap is especially ridiculous considering how much work SE put into each weapon skill animation - why are we limiting the ones we will see to just the ones that will be popular?

It is even more ridiculous considering how much they themselves like the job system, they even mention it in the interview!

Players have access to 20 different jobs, so the next step is seeing all the ways these 20 jobs work together and how that can drive new content.

-

On the PS2 comments they said:

"If we were to redo every model to support the newest version of DirectX, just with the massive amount of data that has accumulated over 10 years, it would be almost impossible. So, we will continue looking at individual aspects that we can improve graphically."

Honestly, I don't really expect, nor want them to overhaul the graphics of FFXI too much, but I do think they could go for a more stylized look going forward - the characters usually fit the world very well, I actually think it is certain maps that don't always fit. A "high definition pack" wouldn't hurt... perhaps asking the fans to make one for certain things every so often with contests to support it would be interesting.

-

On Voidwatch... they already let the cat out of the bag with Abyssea. That said, I think they could make some very minor adjustments that would fix the problem very quickly without breaking up the no-lot system, or even changing the drop rates too significantly for their tastes.

I wish they'd have taken away that the proc system was the major failing of Abyssea rather then the ease of the content, because events can be made harder a lot easier if players don't have to worry about killing the monster as it goes into an epileptic seizure from the light show.

Going forward the gear needs to not be balanced with previous gear or Abyssea, but what we should expect out of new end game gear - the AF3 can be for everybody, but the new stuff might not. This is an issue that is pretty frustrating currently, one of the new gear I've seen in reports from the test server is just the NQ Blessed Gloves and the WHM AF1+1 gloves tapped together. I suppose if the goal was inventory +1 and Haste -1%, then good show, but really, this sort of thing should have better stats then merging the effects of TP gear and WS gear that you could get at 75.

I may be wrong, but if the gear was more powerful (in certain cases at least) perhaps people would be slightly more forgiving of the low drop rates in Voidwatch.

[Mirage]

The real mistake is that we got a power creep that should really have been spread out over 6 years delivered to us over less than a year. Had it been spread out over all the years since RotZ it would have been much easier to balance jobs than it is now, when you increase the cap before you've even had time to look at the balance at the current cap.

It really seems like they're just taking shots in the dark when it comes to balance, hoping that at least some of them will hit where they should.

[Arcon]

[..] Fun.

You don't get it. Abyssea was fun, no one argues that. But it's far from a success. It's bad, and it killed FFXI, possibly for good this time.

FFXI is a MMORPG, and one of any MMORPG's main goals should be longevity. Part of longevity is finding the balance between enjoyable content and slow progression. Too slow, and players lose interest, too fast, and you're not able to dish out enough content in time to keep people entertained. Abyssea tipped that balance way into the latter category. It's as if the development team forgot what most gamers, especially online gamers, are like. They plow through content. Just a few weeks after Heroes of Abyssea was released, all the mobs in there have already been defeated, more than once. Three months after it was released, many HNMLS have quit for good, because they had all Empyreans finished and every piece of gear they wanted. And for casual players it only took longer (and not much, because they're getting the hang of it as well.

In short, Abyssea removed a large chunk of the hardcore players from FFXI. However, those players were the ones who were able to deal with real content better, which is why now everyone complains about Voidwatch. It's very hard to go back to "normal" FFXI, after Abyssea, which was FFXI on ecstasy. And I'm not sure if people will ever be able to recover.

Old FFXI had it right. You may have considered it too slow, or too hard, or whatever, but thankfully what you think doesn't count, only numbers count. And in the decade that FFXI existed, never have more people quit than after Abyssea was released. Maybe some people will return some time from now, but a large part of the damage is done. We'll see what will become of this game, but whatever you wanna think, Abyssea was a bad move on SE's part (and they know it, as you can see).

About the interview... I'm quite surprised SE admitted this. Honestly, I wasn't even sure if they even knew what was going on. But kudos to them for saying it like it is, let's hope they get back in gear to give us real content.

Also, shut up:

During the launch of FFXIV, Tanaka was just as dedicated and involved in FFXI as ever

The future looks so bright and rosey, aren't we all just so glad we got Tanaka back here?

[Runespider]

In short, Abyssea removed a large chunk of the hardcore players from FFXI. However, those players were the ones who were able to deal with real content better, which is why now everyone complains about Voidwatch. It's very hard to go back to "normal" FFXI, after Abyssea, which was FFXI on ecstasy. And I'm not sure if people will ever be able to recover.

If you took the hardcore element (which has vastly decreased since most of them kinda went and got jobs/kids after leaving college etc) and weighed them next to the casuals the hardcore would fly off into space, they make up such a small amount of the playerbase they make they are almost unimportant. Also very few hardcore left till the last year when Aby content dried up and there was little else left to do, they were all in Aby grinding..if more content would of been forthcoming they would still be here.

During the launch of FFXIV, Tanaka was just as dedicated and involved in FFXI as ever

It's written down, so it must be true. Do you believe everything spoon fed down your throat cause someone somewhere wrote it down?

In short, Abyssea removed a large chunk of the hardcore players from FFXI. However, those players were the ones who were able to deal with real content better, which is why now everyone complains about Voidwatch.

VW isn't amazingly hard, JP and English speaking PUGs taking them all down daily. People complain about a drop system custom made to make people do the content for years, not how hard the fights are.

[Kincard]

I don't think it was so much the system itself that was the problem as was the target audience. When you consider that XI survived alongside a bunch of other MMOs that were considered more "casual" (Or whatever you want to call it), a lot of the players that ended up staying with XI were the ones that actually preferred the slow, horizontal growth of XI's endgame (among other things of course), rather than having everything be reset with each major patch, which is what is happening now (And is what a ton of other MMOs do with their endgame, though XI is doing it at a mind-boggling speed, with level caps being raised by 5 within, like, 3 months of each other from 75 to 90, then 95/99 coming a bit later but still really fast by MMO standards).

Now they're trying to play cleanup by going back to what it was back at 75. Unfortunately, the damage is done- a lot of those players have quit because the stuff they spent a long time getting is now either obsolete, or outclassed in some way. Furthermore, SE has attempted to half-stick with the horizontal growth by making all kinds of sidegrades to the point where all of us are running around at 75/80 inventory just to make sure we min/max every single JA, WS, and spell we fire off- I definitely don't remember item management being this annoying at 75, even with that.

I would say Mirage is right in that if they had spaced these significant changes over a longer period of time, the players probably would've been more receptive to it.