Tanaka is the P R O D U C E R. He mostly over seas the game.
Tanaka is the P R O D U C E R. He mostly over seas the game.
Balance? HAHAH- wait hes serious? I can think of a few jobs that would like to have a word with you.
Abyssea didn't destroy that, those were gone a long time ago. Shells will ~ALWAYS~ utilize the most efficient method possible to obtain loot for their members. In the IT world there is an acronym known as KISS. Means Keep It Simple Stupid, basically to always try to make things as simple and straightforward as possible, the more complex something is, the more moving parts, then the more places for a problem to develop. By making something as simple as you reasonably can, you end up with higher overall efficiency. This is why SC/MB died, it was a great concept but required too many working parts with strict timings. One person making a mistake and all that effort was wasted. So by just bypassing the SC/MB and everyone spam as fast as possible, you end up with more total damage by not having mistakes. For this same reason, any complex fight will be broke down to it's simplest form which is a melee zerg or a SMN zerg. Sure you can have multiple staggered stuns and all that nonsense, but someone's gonna make a mistake and all that work would go down the tube. Or you can just have people zerg something to death while having one person on standby to stun a specific move or spell, it'll die fast enough that you shouldn't need a second stunner.
This is why asking to "bring back SC / MB" is useless, anything that a SC/MB strategy would actually work on, a TP zerg would work better.
Everything seemed to be going in one direction after Abyssea was released. Exp was doubled outside of Abyssea. Grounds of valor was introduced. Dynamis was made more casual-friendly.
But I think I see it now. Right now, casuals(like me) are still busy with Abyssea. SE doesn't really have to worry about us for the time being. Instead, they're trying to cater to the players who have gotten everything they want out of Abyssea. These people need a bigger time sink, because they obviously have way more time than the rest of us. So of course, SE made Voidwatch. It actually makes more sense than I first thought.
The only thing that worries me is what's going to come after Voidwatch. Is the rest of the game going to look like this? From the interview, that's what it seems like, but even then, that doesn't seem so bad.
Last edited by Eric; 12-05-2011 at 06:06 AM.
Voidwatch sucks for casual players, it even sucks for hardcore players. The big issue is time vs reward ratio's, this is something SE really doesn't understand how to do. Trying to control it with low drop rates is the worst method possible, many other MMO's learned this lesson a long long time ago. Points systems tend to work the best in the long run, or semi-point systems / collectables like how emp armor seals / coins are done. What it should of been is that every VW fight gives you +points, and you can opt to trade enough of those in for the R/EX bodies and items. They would be expensive enough that you'd have to collect points for months to get, but you WOULD get it and you control the rate you get it at.
I think what stabbed XI was the 30 minimum entry to enter Abyssea, and the other was how easy high level gear was to get.
To compensate they added GoV which also throws normal EXP PT's out of the way -- EXP PT's which were already rare enough. Then they seemed to add new gear that throws the previous set of gear you worked hard for out of the water. Next update seems to have potential to give you 4-5 different pieces per JA/TP/WS.
The team probably just threw away the idea of balance, and yes, it shows in the number of subscribers and the number of people that actually do stuff beyond VW/Aby.
Yeah, and then smartypants devs make post-abyssea content based on stuff from abyssea:"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."
WoE turtles do 1.8k Tetsudo Tremor, WoE Amphithetres do 1.5k dmg attacks, VW mobs do attacks that can easily 1shot the best geared players...
Sorry, I didn't mean that the actual execution of Voidwatch made sense. I meant that the concept of SE changing the type of content they're developing and moving into content that would take more time to complete makes sense.
I agree that Voidwatch's drop system is retarded to any sort of player, and I especially agree with you on the idea that points systems > low drop rates. Too bad SE sucks at understanding this.
Last edited by Eric; 12-05-2011 at 06:20 AM.
Hmm, now that I think about it some more, there's also the fact that the story ended with basically no signs of it ever coming back again. There's a lot of players that stayed for the lore, and the long, drawn-out storyline of WOTG finally ended about the time Abyssea was closing off as well, and the game started losing way more subscribers.
People are constantly asking for a new expansion to which the replay is a "maybe", which might as well be a "no" for the current circumstances given how long it has been since WOTG. Since then 6 mini-addons were added and all of them had (at least IMO) mediocre/pointless storylines. Even WOTG felt like it had been setting up itself up to be a lot larger in scale than what it ended up being, and the drop in manpower adversely affected the original plan (Not to say I didn't like WOTG's story or anything, but goddamn was it drawn out or what).
The same thing happened with ACP- Masato Kato more or less directly stated in interviews that he had a lot of limitations working on the story which led to the final product (Reminds me of when he said Chrono Cross was "the best Chrono we could produce at this time").
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