Why do so many people complain about Voidwatch being a bad idea?

[Mirage]

Hey how about if they made the currently rare VW loot easier to get (5-10x the current drop rate, maybe?), and then added items to all VW drop pools that let you slowly but surely upgrade this gear to even better versions?

You could make these upgrade items be a bit uncommon, but not so rare that you could spam VW for 5 hours and not even see one single of them. This way, people would get their cool and already pretty good gear after not too long, and people would keep doing VW after that in order to upgrade it even further. Because these items aren't very uncommon, few people would go a long time without never seeing one drop, and each time they got a drop, they'd be closer to getting the even better version. While the initial item would be obtainable within a week or two for most people (95%+), the even better version could take perhaps 2-4 months, and the increase in power should be noticable, but not so much that NQ was considered "gimp".

I would suggest for these items to drop from several different VWNMs, be exclusive, and for one item to be usable on several different types of gear. They could add three different of these items, I guess. One for heavy armor, one for medium armor and one for light armor. Perhaps a 4th for weapons.

[Arcon]

You do realize there's a nice wide space between "instant gratification" and "I did this same fight 400 times and have nothing to show for it" don't you? Happy mediums are happy. Where we are now is NOT a happy place.

I didn't say that we were. SE have no idea about MMORPGs, even after all this time. They're a horrible developer in certain aspects.

Should top of the line gear today be top of the line 6 months from now? A year from now?

As always, it should be balanced. The answer is neither no nor yes. Some gear should, but old gear should not lose its meaning (the "Abyssea effect").

I know that it's a balancing act, and I feel that SE's balance is way off. No Tanaka puns intended. Everyone wants to say what happens when the grind is too short, but tell me what happens when the grind is too long.

Agreed.

Seems like they're failing all the way around then. The content is dull, the grinds are too long, and the release cycle is too slow.

In some aspects, sure. In others not. VW is a horrible example, because I know nothing even remotely as bad in terms of rewards. Especially after Abyssea it came as a huge shock to people who just got used to getting rewarded at a more steady and reliable pace. Overall it's not too bad. Legion is hard, but the drops come in steady, same with Odin v2 and Limbus v2. Only it's not as obvious to most people, because most people don't do that content, because of the steep difficulty curve and high manpower requirements. I'm still hopeful that it will get better in the future.

[Khajit]

I LOVE THAT I'M 0/400+ ON TOCI'S!!! GREAT EVENT GUYS!!!!

Do what I did and win a khrepri jacket from bonanza. It's a far more efficient use of time.
The sad part is i started off sarcastic and then realized it actually is easier to win the items from the bonanza than the actual VW content.

[Camiie]

Do what I did and win a khrepri jacket from bonanza. It's a far more efficient use of time.
The sad part is i started off sarcastic and then realized it actually is easier to win the items from the bonanza than the actual VW content.

I seem to be pretty good at getting gear I don't actually need. That seems to be the trick. The less you need it or want it, the better luck you'll have. You can't fake it though. You actually must have no desire whatsoever.

Right now the banes of my existence are Ogier's Breeches and Toci's Harness. Breeches aren't even pulse gear, but they will not show up in my pool. I've gotten enough Stoertebekers to arm my own pirate crew, but heck if I can find a decent pair of pants. It's so frustrating when someone in the ally says "Oh another pair of pants... /toss." Is that SUPPOSED to be encouraging? It feels more like a slap in the face than an encouraging pat on the shoulder. I actually feel stupid sometimes for continuing to try. It's like I'm banging my head against a wall. Making one feel that way can't be the intention of the system, can it? I guess it's naive, though, to think the devs care about our feelings as long as we're continuing to pay. Money from a miserable person spends just as well as money from someone who's happy. Still, I can't help but think somewhere at SE is a bright-eyed young dev team member who wants more than anything for people to have fun with the game. Probably not though.

[Vivivivi]

I love void watch. My only complaint- it NEEDS a "add to lottable spoils" option.

[Komori]

1/2 Portho's Byrnie, I play Dark Knight once every blue moon because I'm white mage, blue mage or thief to everything.

[Demon6324236]

I seem to be pretty good at getting gear I don't actually need. That seems to be the trick. The less you need it or want it, the better luck you'll have. You can't fake it though. You actually must have no desire whatsoever.

This is so true.

List of things I didn't want, but got:Ganesha's Mala, Mextli Harness, Wroth Scythe, Hoarfrost Blade, Ace's Mail, Fajin Boots, Strophadic Earring, Lux Pugio, Bizen-Osafune, Langeleik, Whirlwind Dirs, Ogier's Gauntlets, Ogier's Helm.

List of things I wanted, and got:Heka's Kalasiris, Phalania locket, Rubeus Spats, Rubeus Boots.

I think I'm starting to lose my desire for Ephemeron... should go spam Aello a few more times, might get lucky. Sadly though, your right, you cant really fool it by trying to.

[Afania]

"Everyone does it" is not a justification.



It is, but every time you do a max level dungeon you at least get points to spend on relevant gear. I know you get cruor and vendor trash from VW, and you can make gil from that, but that's a rather roundabout method of gear acquisition.



So you agree that it's not a very innovative formula.

First of all I'm going to point out that MMORPG is a merchandise, it's made to be selling and make profit. In the past 15 years or so(I think UO released in 1997?), many MMORPG released, and dev slowly find the forumla to make more money and attract more players.

If everyone is doing it, that means it's a successful formula, nothing more and nothing less.

You can try to come up with something new, but it doesn't mean it will sell better. If it's a fail MMO, then you lose money to make it, it's as simple as that.

There are MMOs tried to do something new every once a while. One of the old SE F2P MMORPG, called Fantasy Earth Zero, actually come up with a lot of new things, even in the realm of F2P MMO. It's highly PvP based instead of "grind your gear", and puts the impact of grind gear to minium. As a F2P, it also sells gears that you have to buy with real money, but those gears aren't really overpowered. But players that didn't spend any real money can still compete with those who did with just skill. There are many other design that changed the concept of how F2P MMO should be, but none of them made this MMO sell better.


IMO, the current MMORPG market is fairly small, and have very little room to come up with ZOMG awesome design concept that have no grind your gears involved. Every once a while you see a MMO tried to be new, and after a while it died.

There's always a winning formula for any type of game, that will make the game more popular than it is, if everyone does it, that means it worked for ages, need anymore explaination?

Innovation is good, but it doesn't make your product sell everytime.

As for "collect point and get gear", FFXI already has such event, that is Einherjar and Legion. However, this sort of thing will face another problem- Can you get ALL the gear by just spending point?

Both Einherjar and Legion doesn't let you get ALL the gears by spending point. So if you want Odin drop, you still have to kill Odin. If you want Gallu/Rex drop, you still have to kill them.

If they let you get ALL the gears by spending point, then nobody will do Odin/Gallu/Rex, everyone would just grind T1 hall/chamber with small pt over and over until they can get everything, doing harder boss become pointless. If boss reward only drop after you kill them, then causals still can't get them, so it's exactly the same as you complained, that ppl can't get what they want and do event for nothing.

Personally I think legion has the most correct Reward:Effort ratio as an event in this game though.

I never said SE weren't the only idiot developers out there. They're just one of the worst offenders. The drop rates are extraordinarily low and there's no real secondary reward system to help ease the pain. With WoW you do usually have to kill a boss multiple times, but not hundreds upon hundreds.

Time wise, the way they design VW, doesn't have the room to give players gears in 5 kills. Each VW dies in 1~2 min, if you only need to kill 5 times, you can get the gears in 5~10min of work.

If a rare gear require 20 hours of game play to get it(spending 20 hours of play time to get a gear in MMO is very common in many other games too and certainly not too high), and VW only need 2 min to kill, then 600kill is about 20 hours of work.

Then the entire problem is VW being killable in 2 min, thus you need 600 kills.

The real limiting factor is development time. It's not that the larger companies don't have the resources, they just choose to allocate them to different things.

It's very logical to put your resource/investment on things that can make profit.

If you're the one running company, you need to analyze what to do will make most profit, so you don't spend money on nothing.

A 10 years old MMO, you put a 200 ppl dev team on it to make 100 more super big dungeon/raid, you won't get approprite return when active subscribers so small. And a 10 year old MMO isn't going to attract new player to support such big investment also. If you want to attract new players, you need to do something like FFXIV 2.0, re-release the game under a new name and new game engine. And even that can't promise whether it will attract new players or not.
FFXIV is currently a very huge gamble SE made, just to save the name of Final Fantasy.

Putting large resource into a 10 year old MMO is not the smartest thing to do, from game dev's POV. As a customer, if you don't like it, you don't pay for it. It's as simple as that. Not putting large resource in FFXI is not a crime or "stupid thing" to do, you just don't pay for it if you don't like it.

If SE put a 200 ppl dev team on FFXI to release new dungeon every week, and ended up having less profit, you think that's a smarter option for anyone running a company?

Then why do people replay other games, even ones with no special reward for doing so? Once you beat Bowser, pummel M.Bison, or win the Madden Bowl why go back and do it again? Oh, because the game play is fun.


Considering most MMOs aren't that successful, I wonder how much of a win this really is. WoW is a monster because it actively minimizes the pain of the grind. Diablo is not an MMO.



Weren't you saying something about fun being subjective before? Abyssea is a blast for me, and I still go to it and still enjoy it. It's things like the old school HNM, Salvage, old Dynamis, VW, and WoE that get on my nerves and wear down my patience. Going time and time and time again and getting nothing but a slap in the face by the random number generator is very very tiring. I and my friends could beat every NM to a bloody pulp. It gets to the point where we could practically sleepwalk through every fight because we did them so often because stuff just wouldn't drop. Where's the fun in that? That's fun to you?

Talking about sleepwalking the NM, that's exactly what Abyssea did, lol.

I don't replay content in single player games, after I beat it for 1st time it's no longer fun for me. I replay same content in FFXI for other reasons, other aspect that single player game or even multiple player game doesn't have.

And I do think that everyone wearing same gear is more harm than good in a MMO.

Player base will have both hardcore and causal, and somewhere in between, you can't expect every player be causal, some ppl bound to play 10 hours a day instead of 2, and some ppl play 4 hr, some plays 6hr etc.



So the best way is to make every gear have different value.

If every gear in the game only need 5hr to obtain, After 1 week of release, hardcore player cap gear and quit because they can no longer make progress. After 2nd week, semi-hardcore also cap gear and quit, after 3rd week, semi-causal also cap gear and quit, after 4th week, causal players won't have anyone to play with.

Thus ideally there should be gears you spend 5hr to get, and some gear you spend 20 hours, some gear you spend 100 hours. That way no matter you're causal or semi-causal/hardcore, or very hardcore, you always have something to work on.

Thus Abyssea only is a bad idea, and Abyssea era is bad. I'm not hardcore in anyway, I play only 2~4hr a day, not 10hours, and I didn't say this because I want to be different or something. I don't mind players playing 10 hours a day have better gear than me, I'll just stick with my 2~4hrs a day semi-causal gear and be happy with it, because that's what I am, semi-causal with 2~4hr a day play time. I'm semi-causal, so I wear semi-causal gears. Let causals wear causal gears and hardcore wear hardcore gears, it's all fine by me.
Irl is the same as well no? You don't see rich person dress up the same as person living on street.
Forcing everyone wearing same gear no matter how causal/hardcore you are, just makes the game less fun and more harm than good for MMO, and less diversity too. It removed sense of community/virtual world to a certain degree. Unless this game implement some sort of score/achievement based system, or have score shows up after every raid, it makes no sense to make every gear causal only.

Server merge happened twice during Abyssea if I remember correctly, proved that Abyssea didn't save this game at all. I don't mind game has event such as Abyssea, so Causals can have something to do, but if ENTIRE game is nothing but Abyssea, then that's where it went wrong.

[Demon6324236]

As for "collect point and get gear", FFXI already has such event, that is Einherjar and Legion. However, this sort of thing will face another problem- Can you get ALL the gear by just spending point?

Both Einherjar and Legion doesn't let you get ALL the gears by spending point. So if you want Odin drop, you still have to kill Odin. If you want Gallu/Rex drop, you still have to kill them.

If they let you get ALL the gears by spending point, then nobody will do Odin/Gallu/Rex, everyone would just grind T1 hall/chamber with small pt over and over until they can get everything, doing harder boss become pointless. If boss reward only drop after you kill them, then causals still can't get them, so it's exactly the same as you complained, that ppl can't get what they want and do event for nothing.

I give you, Voidwatch, the Ticket Point System idea!

I have posted this idea in many other threads in the past however this is a more in depth look at my idea and how it could be implemented. It has been adjusted to go with current and upcoming changes being made to VW since the idea was originally presented. This is my Voidwatch Ticket Point system!

1 ticket is awarded for each win against a VWNM. Tickets are exclusive to a NM, and are locked to the rifts in the area the NM is spawned in. For instance, when fighting Kaggen in Qufim Island, you will get a ticket for Kaggen's items only upon winning a fight. Also you may only spend these tickets when at one of these rifts. If you are in Lower Delkfutt's Tower you will not be able to spend Kaggen's tickets, instead they will be Akvan's tickets, and only ones retrieved from Akvan may be spent.

Tickets should be just as cruor is, when finishing a VW fight, you will be told the amount you have with the 1 you earned. With enough blue light, such as 500%+, you would earn 2 tickets. Also the amount of tickets you have are only seen at the proper NPCs, or rifts.

To show an example of how a chart would look for drops, I will use Kaggen and its drops.

Example:Kaggen

Notable Drops
-Mekira Meikogai
-Phasmida Belt
-Kaggen's Cuticle
-Mantis Eye
-Heavy Metal

Ticket Buy List
-Mekira Meikogai = 100 Tickets
-Phasmida Belt = 75 Tickets
-Pulse Cell: Me = 35 Tickets
-Kaggen's Cuticle = 30 Tickets
-Heavy Metal = 5 Tickets
-Mantis Eye = 5 Tickets
-Crystal Petrifact = 1 Ticket

Trade List
-Mekira Meikogai = 25 Tickets
-Phasmida Belt = 20 Tickets
-Mantis Eye = 2 Tickets

With this system, R/EX gear does not goto waste, rather it can be used to provide more tickets to go toward the rewards you are pursuing. Items will not seem unattainable, or severely luck based, they will allow players to obtain the items they wish given time and determination! Tickets will only count for the NM in question, you will not be able to have tickets from Kaggen used for Akvan drops, however, this is why Heavy Metal is in the buy list, it provides a use for tickets even if one already obtains all drops while having tickets left over. This would also heighten the supply of Heavy Metal, making Emp95 easier to obtain.

Adding to this, with the new update allowing "Obtain All" to ignore R/EX items in the case you have it already, these could automatically be changed to tickets, allowing for fast disposal of gear unneeded, and giving the player better rewards.



That is my idea for the ticket point system, it would allow a fair chance at rewards given time, would remove the need for wasting R/EX items, increase the supply of items such as Heavy Metal, and give a good reason to keep coming back to VW more and more.

You see this idea allows you to get points for killing a NM, however the NM in question must be beaten for points to be spent on it, beating another NM will not give you points to spend on any gear, only the gear tied to said NM. This makes sure players do not spam NMs such as T1 City NMs for points to buy drops from T6 Mobs, and keeps balance in the drops. It only allows players to obtain items after many fights with the same enemy, so long as luck does not give them the item of their desires.

[SNK]

Do what I did and win a khrepri jacket from bonanza. It's a far more efficient use of time.
The sad part is i started off sarcastic and then realized it actually is easier to win the items from the bonanza than the actual VW content.

Oh you! I didn't even win anything on the Golden Gobbie Bag contest!!!!