Overall Battle System Adjustments for the Future

[Tamarsamar]

Here's a fun analogy for the current situation.

There are two restaurants. Let's call them restaurant A and restaurant Z. They both have the same 20 items on their menu. The managers of restaurant A and Restaurant Z both notice that only two dishes on the menu ever sell in any substantial numbers, while customers tend to dislike the other 18 dishes. Let's say it's the chicken and the fish.

In order to fix this problem and get some action on the 18 other menu items that are constantly going bad and having to be thrown out:

Restaurant A decides to Make the fish and the chicken taste like crap.

Restaurant Z decides to remake all the other menu items so that they are of a similar quality and diversity as the fish and chicken dishes that are so popular.

Which restaurant do you suppose manages to keep it's doors open longer?

This analogy would make more sense, were all the jobs not already buffed to high-heaven and beyond. If anything, I'm glad that our new producer has the guts to finally say "enough is enough" and start throwing in some nerfs in an attempt to counteract the obviously out-of-control power creep among the players (and, consequently, the monsters that need to be made in order to provide some semblance of a skill challenge, which players inevitably exploit the crap out of some skill and complain that said monsters are too hard to face otherwise).

Of course, what I take objection with is some of the decisions of what to nerf. Twilight Scythe, as the focus of this thread has been shown upon, is really meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and the fact that it's used at all shows only how broken the fights it's used for are, more so than how powerful the Scythe itself is.

To extend your analogy, Restaurant Z ups the quality of all 18 of its other dishes, at great cost to the company. The end result, however, is that the customers are now only eating the chicken and the sloppy joe. People love the restaurant but start to complain when they notice the prices on their favorite meals rising. Somewhere down the line, costs need to be cut.

What Matsui is proposing is that we spend less money on the quality of the steak. Very few people have cared thus far about the steak, and the few steak fans there are seem a bit offended by this proposal.

[Phogg]

Edit: Not worth the bother, won't be considered anyway since this is the english forums.

[Riggs]

I'll cancel my 3 accounts if SE does not go through with nerfing Twilight Scythe. Then I'll cut off my own hands and run around punching people in the face with my bloody stumps until the police catch up and taze me into submission. They'll try to handcuff me, but I'll just slip right out and continue my freakish rampage. Bereft of other options, they'll be forced to taze me repeatedly and eventually my heart will beat its last and I will pass from this world to the great MMO in the sky where the devs actually implement my every idea, my dad lets me eat ice cream for breakfast, and the police let me stump-punch as many faces as I want.

The stakes have been raised!

You miss read or i was probably not very clear in what i wrote, its not just the scythe that bothers me its just the tip of the long list of nerfs SE has dished out for the last year.

Its always been my though that SE brought out abyssea to keep people playing until they fixed 14 but when not everyone then swapped to 14 they though crap we are going to have to fix this game now to make future content, but they had upped the gear so much with abyssea they are having to nerf some to give them room for future equipment.

[Yinnyth]

Here's a fun analogy for the current situation.

There are two restaurants. Let's call them restaurant A and restaurant Z. They both have the same 20 items on their menu. The managers of restaurant A and Restaurant Z both notice that only two dishes on the menu ever sell in any substantial numbers, while customers tend to dislike the other 18 dishes. Let's say it's the chicken and the fish.

In order to fix this problem and get some action on the 18 other menu items that are constantly going bad and having to be thrown out:

Restaurant A decides to Make the fish and the chicken taste like crap.

Restaurant Z decides to remake all the other menu items so that they are of a similar quality and diversity as the fish and chicken dishes that are so popular.

Which restaurant do you suppose manages to keep it's doors open longer?

A good analogy, but remind me again why an executive chef would care that people love his fish and chicken so much that they're willing to eat it night after night without even trying the eggplant parmesan? In the restaurant, it's a non-issue. Just keep serving up what the customers love.

In this game when that happens, we complain about every fight being handled the exact same way, just with a different weapon equipped. We also complain that DRK has an unfair advantage over the other jobs and every job deserves their own version.

I suppose that is a direction they could wind up taking for this problem: give every job their own Twilight Scythe. Magic jobs would need to be boosted up to the point where they're better at magic damage than the twilight weapons though. That would most likely result in BLM becoming a stronger job in all events and BLM becoming ubiquitous. Difficulty for all current events would take a small drop, as long as you bring a nuker in your setup. And when they balance future events, they'll have to factor in the fact that every job can ignore damage resistence. How do you make a difficult fight when everyone is capable of ignoring all defenses, but do it without making twilight weapons required in order to win?

I dunno, it seems to me like it would just be less work in the long run if they nerf twilight scythe just a bit.

[FrankReynolds]

This analogy would make more sense, were all the jobs not already buffed to high-heaven and beyond. If anything, I'm glad that our new producer has the guts to finally say "enough is enough" and start throwing in some nerfs in an attempt to counteract the obviously out-of-control power creep among the players (and, consequently, the monsters that need to be made in order to provide some semblance of a skill challenge, which players inevitably exploit the crap out of some skill and complain that said monsters are too hard to face otherwise).{/quote]

Wasn't the whole point of raising the level cap supposed to be increased power?

To extend your analogy, Restaurant Z ups the quality of all 18 of its other dishes, at great cost to the company. The end result, however, is that the customers are now only eating the chicken and the sloppy joe. People love the restaurant but start to complain when they notice the prices on their favorite meals rising. Somewhere down the line, costs need to be cut.

Costs only need to be increased if you have a shitty chef and his new improved meals don't garner high return rates and new business. In this case, a lot of new restaurants have opened in the area and people who like steak no longer have to decide between a crappy steak or an excellent chicken. They can just go to the place across the street that has both. So what do you do to keep their business? Do you improve your recipe to compete? Or do you just make all your food equally bad? So that all of your customers feel let down?

And let's be honest with ourselves here. These people are not mercenary coders / chefs. They are on salary. It doesn't cost any more to nerf twilight scythe than it doesn't to add a new dagger or club with the same effects. It doesn't cost any more to develop a fight that doesn't rely on crappy mechanics to prolong the win. This is a decision to not do anything new or inventive with future fights. Nothing more, nothing less. That would probably be fine if people actually liked the mnechanic that they are trying to keep, but in reality, people seem to feel that the mechanic is cheap and over used, which is what lead to the use of the scythe in the first place.

A good analogy, but remind me again why an executive chef would care that people love his fish and chicken so much that they're willing to eat it night after night without even trying the eggplant parmesan? In the restaurant, it's a non-issue. Just keep serving up what the customers love.

The problem with that view is that this restaurant (FFXI) is not full every night (far from it), so crapping up a dish only exasperates the problem. If you want people who are not huge fans of the steak etc. to keep coming back and / or possibly bring friends, you need to make the items that interest them worth ordering.

No one ever says

"Hey guys, let's head to that one restaurant that used to have awesome steaks. I heard they made the steak really crappy now, so we can all order the risotto that sucks just as badly and know that we aren't missing out on a great steak. YAY!!!!!"

[Yinnyth]

Anologies can be fun, and they can help to highlight some aspects of a situation that would be otherwise overlooked, but you should never consider them to be a perfect parallel. You can't brush off the realities that people bring up just because they don't fit into your analogy the way you'd like.

It doesn't cost any more to nerf twilight scythe than it doesn't to add a new dagger or club with the same effects.

If you have people on salary, they receive the same money every month (or agreed upon timeframe), so the cost is measured in time. Which takes longer?

1. Nerfing one weapon.

2. Creating 10 weapons equal to one unique weapon, balancing magic damage so it falls in line with melees new abilities, then balancing fights so they can still pose a threat.

This is a decision to not do anything new or inventive with future fights.

This is a decision to not burn bridges. Imagine a weapon which always hits regardless of evasion, perfect dodge, shadows, flying, etc. If the weapon has no significant downside, then it makes it impossible for devs to use any of those options for future fights, and possibly force them to make some current fights harder if the presence of that weapon is significantly increasing success rate beyond what it should be.

That would probably be fine if people actually liked the mnechanic that they are trying to keep, but in reality, people seem to feel that the mechanic is cheap and over used

PDT is cheap and overused? I'm more tired of melee zerging everything than I am of enemies who have phys shield, PDT, or cerb who it was actually well-implemented on.

which is what lead to the use of the scythe in the first place.

People don't use the scythe because phys resist is "cheap and overused." People use the scythe because it works. The problem is that the scythe is far too simple and far too effective so people would never even consider using a different solution.

For delicious irony's sake: That would probably be fine if people actually liked melee zerging everything all the time, but in reality, people seem to feel that strategy is cheap and overused.

[hiko]

People don't use the scythe because phys resist is "cheap and overused." People use the scythe because it works. The problem is that the scythe is far too simple and far too effective so people would never even consider using a different solution.

salvage boss
no! people use twilightDRK because for >80% of the run(no special resist) DRK is better than other jobs that can also do magic dmg and bringing one more player is a big slow down for event completion.

and with incoming magic changes casting=>reso might become the new best combo

[Yinnyth]

Reading the majority of your post makes me believe that you agree with the points I raised, but the "no!" on the second line confuses me and forces me to reconsider that possibility. Do you disagree that people use the scythe because it's simple and effective?

[hiko]

Reading the majority of your post makes me believe that you agree with the points I raised, but the "no!" on the second line confuses me and forces me to reconsider that possibility. Do you disagree that people use the scythe because it's simple and effective?

i disagree that TS is "far too effective".
IMO it's just less ineffective than other 'physical DD' and less effective than hybrid DD for the boss.
people go with DRK because 80% of the run DRK dont use TS and is one of the most effective DD.

[Okipuit]

Hello everyone,

Below is a brief message from Producer Akihiko Matsui.

Matsui here.

I'm sorry I haven't been making much of an appearance on the forums lately.

Especially since I promised that we would be releasing information related to the enmity system and calculations, I realize I continue to make you all wait. I'm sorry to disappoint you all again and I'm sure there are some of you thinking "don't apologize, just tell us the essentials."

Unfortunately a lot of things came up suddenly which led to me becoming extremely busy this week and wasn't able to write anything up. I'm really sorry about this and I'd like to ask for just a bit more time to get you all the information you've been waiting for.