Fed up

Yeah, I get all that and am onboard with the complaints. I didn't mean that the loot is the same every time. Obviously the chest loads a different amount depending on the number of participants, but I'm wondering if it works more like a BCNM chest than your own random treasure pool; difference being that you only get a few things out of it.

For example, the NM dies and the chest spawns, already loaded with three bodies and five pouches and the rest is crafting mats. I guess it's still down to dumb luck what you can see, but this would explain why the devs think more people = more loot. More chances to randomly generate bodies and plates, but still random whether you get to see any.

Again, apologies if this has already been figured out and proven / dis-proven / whatever. Wouldn't be the first time I was fashionably late to the party. :P

I think dev's thinking that more ppl = more loot is that at max blue light, you can get 5-6 items per chest. So from a total battle for 18 ppl, the entire party can get a total of 90-108 items for 1 NM. Whereas, if you only have 10 people, the total number of items the entire party can get would only be 50-60 items for 1 NM. Yeah, the 'total for the entire' party might be more, but each person's number is the same. Now, whether the Ra/Ex has the same drop rate PER NM or not, that's not anything that anyone has found any sort of pattern yet. Again, RANDOM = RANDOM. And PURE RANDOM = Sucks! I have gone 15+ fight of the same NM and not a single person got any ra/ex (we're not talking about the top tier ra/ex item, but rather the 2nd or 3rd tier ra/ex or pounch) - or at least no one said anything to the ally.

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Originally Posted by MojoJojo

The drop rate is low, but compared to pre-aby, it's alot better. In the grand scheme of things. People can actually participate in fights against these monsters, which i'm sure everyone can be happy about. I'm sure the people making these hate threads wouldn't be moaning if they were the who got the body/boots on their first run.

I wouldn't cry if they upped the drop rate for items, but c'mon, people are throwing venom at the dev's and talking about quitting and boycotting over this shit. It's a joke. When i get annoyed with low drop rates, or competition around Sobek and whatnot, i take a breath and remember what it used to be like, and i thank fuck that's in the past.

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Umm no, compared to Pre-abyssea it's absolutely horrible.

HNM didn't actually have bad drop rates per-say, just only one fight per 20~24 hrs or 70hrs+ for some of them. So at a 25% drop rate means one of an item created every few days. Some of the HNM's only had one item worth a damn, but some also dropped several abjurations / items and what have you. What aybssea did was combine drops, one NM would drop several items and with the easy ability to build pop sets you could fight the same NM four or five times within 2hrs, more if you had a super group. This made it appear easy to obtain items as your time vs monster fight ratio was really high and thus your loot vs time investment ratio was similarly high.

What Voidwatch did was keep a high NM fight ratio (can fight many times) but drop the item acquisition rate into less then 1%. People like to spout off about getting bodies on 3/18 fights, but what they don't realize is each of those fights is 18 treasure pools for a total of 324 treasure pools (18 * 18) any only 3 "bodies" for 3/324 = 0.009, or 0.9% drop rate. To make it worse with no way to control exactly ~who~ gets those 3 bodies you would need many more fights then that 1% drop rate indicates. So you have to calculate loot by individual instead of by alliance. At 0.9% drop rate you need 108 fights to get the item on average, some will be earlier, some will be later. How many fights can you successfully do per day? Four, Five? If it's a LS it's not feasible to do the same NM over and over again every day, so how often will you be able to fight your NM for your drop? Assuming a LS does four straight hours of VWNM with absolutely ZERO downtime, you got 8 fights per event day. That's 13.5 days straight of only that one NM with absolutely nothing else being done and assuming no crazy wipes / murphy's law.

And the funny thing about all that math is that the average drop rate is less then the above 0.9%. Something on the order of 0.5% per loot pool. So your looking at a month or two straight of doing absolutely nothing else in order to get your body item.

That is why lots of people can't be bothered to mess with Void watch, entirely too much time sink for not enough goodies.

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Originally Posted by saevel

Umm no, compared to Pre-abyssea it's absolutely horrible.

HNM didn't actually have bad drop rates per-say, just only one fight per 20~24 hrs or 70hrs+ for some of them. So at a 25% drop rate means one of an item created every few days. Some of the HNM's only had one item worth a damn, but some also dropped several abjurations / items and what have you. What aybssea did was combine drops, one NM would drop several items and with the easy ability to build pop sets you could fight the same NM four or five times within 2hrs, more if you had a super group. This made it appear easy to obtain items as your time vs monster fight ratio was really high and thus your loot vs time investment ratio was similarly high.

What Voidwatch did was keep a high NM fight ratio (can fight many times) but drop the item acquisition rate into less then 1%. People like to spout off about getting bodies on 3/18 fights, but what they don't realize is each of those fights is 18 treasure pools for a total of 324 treasure pools (18 * 18) any only 3 "bodies" for 3/324 = 0.009, or 0.9% drop rate. To make it worse with no way to control exactly ~who~ gets those 3 bodies you would need many more fights then that 1% drop rate indicates. So you have to calculate loot by individual instead of by alliance. At 0.9% drop rate you need 108 fights to get the item on average, some will be earlier, some will be later. How many fights can you successfully do per day? Four, Five? If it's a LS it's not feasible to do the same NM over and over again every day, so how often will you be able to fight your NM for your drop? Assuming a LS does four straight hours of VWNM with absolutely ZERO downtime, you got 8 fights per event day. That's 13.5 days straight of only that one NM with absolutely nothing else being done and assuming no crazy wipes / murphy's law.

And the funny thing about all that math is that the average drop rate is less then the above 0.9%. Something on the order of 0.5% per loot pool. So your looking at a month or two straight of doing absolutely nothing else in order to get your body item.

That is why lots of people can't be bothered to mess with Void watch, entirely too much time sink for not enough goodies.

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I disagree here, there's never more than a 5-10 min wait for a voidwatch run on Asura(during prime time), also I've never encountered a pug where everyone doesn't have at least the 1st round of temps.

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Assuming a LS does four straight hours of VWNM with absolutely ZERO downtime, you got 8 fights per event day.

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This hypothetical LS is terrible, FYI.

The only reason i still even play this game is because i have a lot of friends that sill play... I hate what SE has done to this game and what they have done to the RDM job, which is my fav of the entire FF series. They keep saying they are going to something to improve the game, add this and that, and add a direct place for feedback but yet they keep on messing up this game and not following threw with what they say. I recently dropped from 7 characters to just my main and 1 mule and i went from playing 2-3 hours a day to maybe 2 hours a week. I don't wan't to leave just yet, like i said i still have a lot of friends that play but SE is really making this easy for me to stop paying them anything for this BS.

Thank god 11-11-11 came around cause now all i spend time on is Skyrim a much better game and development team... they at least listen and ACT on what their fans want or would like to have in a game. Take some notes SE.... you need to learn something over the last 10 years since your last FF hit game came out and all you have now of this series are failures.

I kept hearing great news about Skyrim - and read many great reviews as well, is it that good? Maybe it's time to jump ship and have peace of mind.

There is two big factors between Skyrim and FFXI, or bethesda and SE for that matter. Bethesda encourages user created content and supplies kits to further develop content which prolongs the life of the game exponentially, but Skyrim is an offline game. SE does not encourage user created content, and even frowns on most of the content while rarely ever considering implementing anything of the imaginative changes dat/motion modders have made over the years.

As for which listens to the customer better? I'm mixed on this to be frank. Some of the key issues people would like to have addressed are either ignored or flat out denied with a lucid reason dictating why when it comes to SE. The worst part being that players have to literally deal with this weather they like it or not because it is an MMO. When it comes to bethesda, I've only ever played their offline games (do they even have an online one?) which is possibly why they are more flexible on what they allow since eventually it isn' in their hands at all due to Creation Kits/Developer Kits they release for their games. These allow players to create weapons/gear all the way up to expansive additions in the form of unique quest lines with the only restriction being the imagination and the inability to take it and use it to develop/market your own game off of it.

Why people want to compare the two or say one is better than the other is based on individual perception. Skyrim is a good game, but until the kit is released it can easily be short lived (and by that I mean you can run out of anything quest related in about 200 hours), but I am avidly looking forward to what user created content will become available once the kit is released. It kept Oblivion alive for years and I can see it easily doing the same for skyrim.

As far as SE goes....I hope they take a better look at some of the issues players have with certain game mechanics and try to "balance" them out a little better. I've enjoyed Squaresoft, Enix, and SE games for many years, but on an old MMO like this sometimes the smallest issues can be a big deciding factor for some if they want to continue paying/playing or not. I enjoy the step backwards in that it forces people to work together.....but the loot system that is only better in theory, and not in practice due to lack or check (IE: Check that player doesn't already have) makes it worse than the theory states it should be.

So basically this whole thread can be translated into this:

"I'm not getting what I want fast enough because I think the Voidwatch / Abyssea / Einherjar drop system sucks! Give me what I want now SE!"

See there in lies the rub. Give you what you want too quickly, then you're bored because there's nothing to do and quit. If you don't get what you want because you think the events too hard or has a crappy drop system? then you rant and eventually /ragequit. Then after you get what you want, you don't do the event anymore and help everyone else get their stuff too. (Which we are all guilty of to some extent or the other). SE is trying to find a balance to keep everyone playing for as long as possible. Trying to find a balance that pleases everyone is nigh impossible.

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Originally Posted by Teraniku

SE is trying to find a balance to keep everyone playing for as long as possible. Trying to find a balance that pleases everyone is nigh impossible.

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Well, wouldn't you say the balance is skewed in VW? Just about everybody who does VW regularly has played this game for years and has been conditioned by SE to expect drops at a certain rate. Nothing significant, just enough to keep oneself motivated to keep going. All that is being said is that many people can't even see the carrot on the stick. We're just told that it's out there, but if we find it, it might be inside another person's box.