Tanaka back in charge?!

[Atomic_Skull]

No one sane--or at least honest with themselves--is buying that on Allakhazam, nor will it sell here. We're not lab rats, and the developers would do well not to play us as such if they hope to keep the game going.

I've seen what gets posted on Allakhazam in the BG thread on fail posts from that site. That really isn't saying much. There's a reason why every MMO in existence uses these methods.

[SpankWustler]

I've said that limiting scrolls that certain jobs need to event drops was an invitation to HNM LS people to jack up prices to the moon and beyond.

My level 91 Beastmaster, which I am leveling to 95 solely by throwing sheep at the contents of new Walk of Echoes confluxes over and over, is a HNM LS?

Now that the token lame joke is out of the way...

About the direction of the game as a whole, I have mixed feelings. I like a lot of the new battles and battle systems. As for the drop rates and distribution systems, however, they provide me with a burning desire to tie a chain around a toddler and wield him or her as a morning-star against my enemies.

I can totally understand the Salvage comparisons, even though it's a totally different kind of event. I had tons of fun in Salvage getting negative tons of drops.

[Sparthos]

Been said before more times than one cares to mention but...

POINT SYSTEMS. USE THEM. THEY WORK.

[Rearden]

WHAT IS EVERYONE YELLING ABOUT POINT SYSTEMS

[deces]

I thought Tanaka decided to fall on a sword.

[Insaniac]

Using the skinner box method is highly effective at keeping people playing. Why would they switch to something less effective? If they aren't doing everything in their power to make as much money as possible for their shareholders then they aren't doing their job.

Yes there always has to be some delay in MMOs between deciding you want something and getting the thing you want. Tanaka takes it to a level that drives more customers away than it keeps playing. He also uses systems with no promise that you will EVER, even if you play for 10 years, get the thing you want if you get unlucky. Like Sparthos said. Point systems work. They can be huge grinds and people will still do them because they can see the progress instead of the mounting level of fail (aka 0/200+ on the drop you want). In VW you can kill a T3/4 100+ times and still be no closer to your goal than you were on kill 1. -1% drop rates on anything need to gtfo. I don't care what MMO you are playing. People need to see a light at the end of a tunnel for serious grinds to actually work anymore.

[saevel]

Using the skinner box method is highly effective at keeping people playing. Why would they switch to something less effective? If they aren't doing everything in their power to make as much money as possible for their shareholders then they aren't doing their job.

Skinner's box's have proved to be highly immoral when applied to human beings. Skinner designed his experiments as a method to train and program animals to do specific behaviors and to experiment with how they reacted. When put into real life practice they only work until the creature being trained (that's you) realized it's being coerced and manipulated, then they tend to rebel / walk away. Using the gamblers fallacy (I must win eventually) is what Tanaka FFXI was all about, it tried to get you addicted the same way people get addicted to gambling.

And while all MMO's use some form of randomized time / reward ratio, most successful ones have a set method of progress, you ~know~ your moving forward. FFXI under Tanaka had you have absolutely forward progress, Salvage and VWNM are prime examples of this. You can keep throwing hours and hours, every moment of free time you have, at these events and get absolutely nothing. The only thing keeping you going is the rush and addiction to the feeling that you ~might~ get something and the cognitive dissonance that takes place to prevent you from walking away.

When Tanaka was "busy" with FFXIV (lets get real, someone else was direction FFXI while he screwed up FFXIV) this game become immensely fun and actually started to gain subscribers back. Abyssea actually rewarded you for time invested, it was a tangable and countable reward not subject to an extremely arbitrary RNG. Tanaka's abyssea would have you require 500 Briarus helms with a 25% drop rate, or 50 helms with a 5% drop rate. Same with Sobek skins, except all three KI's would be from timed spawned NM's with a 10~60 min timer. You can see this with the Magian system, everything has a nice predictable growth rate / requirements until Tanaka took charge again, then it's a sudden wall of "WTF". Ridiculous requirements for very small incremental gain.

Anyhow Tanaka = VERY VERY BAD for any MMO.

[noodles355]

Ah, hello there. Good to see you're blaming everything you like and dont like in the loot systems in the game on one man without any proof of how much involvement he did or didn't have on them.
Guilty until proven innocent? Glad you're not running the justice system in my country.

[Veigar]

Players don't know what they want. They're going to be biased toward "make it easier", but when they finally get what they want, they realize what they were asking for was a pointlessly easy, dumbed-down mess with no depth to redeem it.

LOL @ anyone calling for a point system. Because that has worked so well for WoW. Btw, Blizzard is reporting substantial stagnation (WotLK) and losses (Cataclysm) with this "easier is better" model-- with the point system greatly attributing to that model. According to the investor conference call, 650k subs lost Q1, another 300k lost in Q2, and further losses expected for Q3. At the end of the day, you just want visual confirmation of something like a typical member of the current ADD generation.

When there's nothing to aspire to, people have no reason to stick around. WoW is lucky it was able to ride off of the success of vanilla and most of TBC for so long. It can weather those kinds of losses, FFXI can't.

[Sparthos]

Players don't know what they want. They're going to be biased toward "make it easier", but when they finally get what they want, they realize what they were asking for was a pointlessly easy, dumbed-down mess with no depth to redeem it.

LOL @ anyone calling for a point system. Because that has worked so well for WoW. Btw, Blizzard is reporting substantial stagnation (WotLK) and losses (Cataclysm) with this "easier is better" model-- with the point system greatly attributing to that model. According to the investor conference call, 650k subs lost Q1, another 300k lost in Q2, and further losses expected for Q3. At the end of the day, you just want visual confirmation of something like a typical member of the current ADD generation.

When there's nothing to aspire to, people have no reason to stick around. WoW is lucky it was able to ride off of the success of vanilla and most of TBC for so long. It can weather those kinds of losses, FFXI can't.

So your solution is to simply stick with the "grind to infinity" model that was FFXI pre-Abyssea.... yeah no. Im sure you know that XI subs plummeted because there was "nothing to look forward to" simply because the game became endless grinds to nowhere and SE abandoned resources to the game.

Point systems don't have to be handouts and having a goal to work towards trumps being subject to the random lootpools that hand out drops on a whim.

Honestly, the only reason SEs returned to this model is because the development team is so small that they fall back on the terrible droprates to kill time till the next patch. If this is the case, it'd be much better to simply place items like say... the Ephemeron (Aellos HQ drop) at 250k points where a successful kill rewards 1500 max.

Currently no one wants to do Voidwatch because the only drops you're getting are random logs or ores.