I have a short analysys and a proposed solution to share on which I'd like to gather more opinions and, possibly, to stimulate the community reps' attention.
1. Why do the Augmented Capes have such randomness?
Without any form of randomness included, people would have been done with Incursion since long and wouldn't be interested in doing it anymore.
Thanks to the fact players have no control at all over capes and their stats, people keep doing the event.
This keeps players busy and avoids a scenario where they stay afk in towns whining about being bored having nothing to do: "Hey devs give us something to do!"
This demand would put additional pressure on devs to create and release new content, which is not sustainable atm given their current task force.
The way Incursion is now instead makes the event long lasting and it is hence beneficial for the health of the game and its players.
tl;dr A certain degree of randomness is necessary and unavoidable
2. What is the current level of randomness in the system?
There are several layersPlayers have no degree of control over this. The only things they can choose are
- First there's a random chance for a cape to drop from Incursion Coffers. (other random items/gil can drop as well)
- Then there's a chance for that cape to be one of those you want, out of the 22 possible.
- Then there's a chance for that cape to have one of more augments on it, out of the four possible ones on each cape.
- Last, there's a chance for that augment to have an interesting value, out of the possible range each specific augment has
- fighting one of the 5 bosses instead of the megaboss. Each of the 5 bosses have a specific set of possible capes they can drop from their specific coffers. Megaboss can drop them all.
- raising the difficulty, which will generate a higher amount of coffers being dropped after a boss is defeated (more coffers > more chance that there will be a cape in one of them
3. What are the problems in this?
The degree of control players have over this is non-existant.
Despite what we said about specific bosses vs Megaboss, it's usually not time-efficient to farm specific bosses, given how the chance of a cape being inside a coffer is higher on the megaboss (megaboss NQ coffers have roughly the same chance as specific bosses HQ coffers).
Raising difficulty makes the odds slightly better, but in the long run it doesn't really change the frustration that can come out of the event for players.
This also create other issues.
First: In the ergonomy of FFXI, job specific augments have always been particularly precious and almost game-changing. Aside from small exceptions, they've always been relegated to fixed stats on job specific equipment. Likewise random augments have mostly been on generic stats, before Incursion.
Second and last: it creates additional and unnecessary strain on players inventories. And we all know how already delicate the situation is. (for instance you could get multiple capes of the same type, each with different augments, and you might want to keep them all to use in different situations, hence increasing the amount of wasted space in your inventory)
4. What could a possible solution be?
We already said how randomness is a necessity and taking it out wouldn't be beneficial.
In light of this, I propose the addition of a new NPC.
It will work similarly to how the Skirmish NPC works.
This NPC will accept a specific augmented cape in trade. After that you can trade the NPC another augmented cape of any type, and this will give you a chance to re-roll the stats on the first cape you traded.
You will then see a preview of the re-rolled stats, and you'll be prompted wether to accept the new one or keep the old one.
I feel such a solution would mantain the randomness of the event and hence the long-lasting appeal of it, but at the same time give a more acceptable degree of control to players while mantaining the philosophy of the event sustainable for both players and developers.
Thanks for reading, please discuss.