July 2021 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

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Originally Posted by Coffeegood

Just people whining because they want instant gratification, you created a monster by making World of Warcraft version of final fantasy in 14 and these people come and want that level of instant wins here. Create Content to keep people busy and feel like they are accomplishing something alot of us beat the game already and getting bored of flux content and bcnm's just to get gear to repeat old content we have everything from with.

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The number of people who come here from 14 is not that much. And anyone who plays long enough to get to the content most people are playing will have understood by that point that there's no such thing as instant gratification in this game. For the vast majority of 14 visitors, especially any that came from WoW before coming to 14, they're not even going to have the patience to get far enough to get in your way.

The communities of 14 are quite different. Kids these days don't like players who don't like 14 and those who play on a private server will never play retail unless something else they have been demanding for many years.

In Vana'diel, we have main character syndrome.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

The drop rates are being increased, which should tell you the total amount of time any one person or group spends fighting should be lower.

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Oh, it will help. The question is how much it will help. There are multiple ways to "increase the drop rate," and they're not all the same.

[EDIT]
Upon reflection, and knowing that Squeenix devs are not active players, maybe I should explain the basics more.

When you release gear, people are going to want it. When you release gear that has a viable use, more people are going to want it. When you release different pieces of gear for different jobs, in a game where people have multiple jobs, they're going to want all of the pieces, not just one.

When people want gear, they're going to keep fighting until they get it.

When there is a large difference in drop rate between two different pieces of gear that people want, only the lowest drop rate is going to matter in practice.

Consequently, the following argument is only in the context of the lowest drop rate among all the gear in the pool of potential drops, because that is the biggest determinant of how long people will keep fighting:
[/EDIT]

First, they could increase the number of drop slots for gear. I can't say that it will have no effect, but when the rarest drop is still 1%, the effect isn't as big as you'd think. If they add one drop slot to the two existing on VD, then it's still going to take 66 fights instead of 100 to get the drop, on average.

Second, they could increase the odds of drop slot being filled. This will have almost no impact on players who fight on higher difficulties, because the slots are almost always filled as it is. This is the worst scenario, and might actually increase congestion by encouraging players to do fast, low risk fights instead of longer ones. See Maiden of the Dusk for an example.

Third, they could multiply the lowest drop rates in the drop slot. This will clearly help. The average time to get rewards is decreased linearly with the multiplier. 3x drop rate for 3x entry cost yields the same number of rare drops per merit, but people work through the system faster than before.

Fourth, they could remove the complication of having "rare drops" within the drop slot. This amounts to a large multiplier on the "rare" drop rate, by a factor of 12 (because there are 8 drops total). Across an entire server population, the effects are linear. But on the individual level, higher drop rate means less variability in how long it takes to get the drop. In statistical terms, the standard deviation changes alongside the median number of fights. This means fewer players needing to use up the arena for significantly longer than average, getting more frustrated each time. Fewer players complaining that they see the same faces taking up arena slots time after time, in a manner that looks a lot like griefing. Again, it gets the whole population through in the same linear fashion as multiplying drop rate, but with a lot less negative feedback.


It's good that Squeenix is acknowledging that competition for limited arena slots is a problem. And they are technically correct that the problem will go away ... on one timescale or another. But when they release a fix for it, they should be able to estimate how long it will take for the congestion to ease, and they need to have a target time to compare those estimates to. It was always predictable, there's no excuse for doing things at random and hoping they work.

Making it cost 30 merits solves nothing if the drop rate goes from 0.01% to 0.03%. JUST GIVE US THE PROC SYSTEM!!! if your goal is to make annoying content you done good here. No one cares about congestion if can finally get a drop besides like asura? who cares about asura!!!

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Originally Posted by Allreadyinuse

Making it cost 30 merits solves nothing if the drop rate goes from 0.01% to 0.03%. JUST GIVE US THE PROC SYSTEM!!! if your goal is to make annoying content you done good here. No one cares about congestion if can finally get a drop besides like asura? who cares about asura!!!

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it would be more likely 1% to 3, 4%. and that means 1 in 100 vs one in 33 or 1 in 25. that's statistically a lot fewer runs of the battle.

It certainly won't be a whole % they have tables for much lower.

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Originally Posted by Leny

It certainly won't be a whole % they have tables for much lower.

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Only a few items actually use the very lowest values on their table. the stuff people want from this I honestly don't think qualifies.

But the point is, regardless of what the value is, doubling it means half the number of attempts on average, triple means a third, etc etc. We don't get to change what math means just because the numbers are small.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

it would be more likely 1% to 3, 4%. and that means 1 in 100 vs one in 33 or 1 in 25. that's statistically a lot fewer runs of the battle.

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after 14 VD's seen 5 ammo, 3 rings, cloak and Body armor people just need to get better and do higher difficulties, the fix is just pushing congestion to the few XP areas it is going to still be annoying, you won't win any medals for fighting this war just do the math padawan.

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Originally Posted by Coffeegood

after 14 VD's seen 5 ammo, 3 rings, cloak and Body armor people just need to get better and do higher difficulties, the fix is just pushing congestion to the few XP areas it is going to still be annoying, you won't win any medals for fighting this war just do the math padawan.

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"few xp areas?" there's about a million places you can max out merits in a reasonable timeframe.

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Originally Posted by Coffeegood

after 14 VD's seen 5 ammo, 3 rings, cloak and Body armor people just need to get better and do higher difficulties, the fix is just pushing congestion to the few XP areas it is going to still be annoying, you won't win any medals for fighting this war just do the math padawan.

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It isn't a hard fight. People are already doing VD, and most aren't getting as many drops as you. But hey, let's take your results and run a back of the envelope estimate with them. It will be informative for all involved.

If we assume all people group up and git gud to the tune of only spending 5 minutes in the arena per fight, that means 12 fights per arena. This isn't exactly a great assumption, but it's our spherical cow for this scenario.
Each server has 3 arenas. That means 36 fights per server per hour.
You report 1 "rare drop" per 7 fights. 36 / 7 is slightly above 5. We'll round down because it makes the math easy.
That means 5 drops per server per hour under ideal conditions. By coincidence, 5 is how many different "rare drops" there are. For someone to "catch them all" they'll need this many drops.
So we can estimate that for every server, one person's worth of drops will take 1 hour.
Every 1000 active characters on the server will result in the arena being 100% full for 1000 hours. That's 41 days.
I don't know how many active characters there are (though square enix will be able to guess) but let's pull the number 3000 out of a hat for Asura.
To get 3000 people through the system will take 123 days, or 4 months. That's 4 months of the fight being 100% full every moment of every day of every week. Under ideal conditions, and assuming perfect coordination and cooperation.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't need to put in work to get rewards. But more work can only result in more rewards if there's room for more workers to work. When the arena is full, more effort cannot create more drops. And that is the issue.

(It's also an issue that the almighty devs have said they want to address. This post is largely for them, so they have the tools to think about how to actually address it.)