Tanaka back in charge?!

[Hayward]

The reason most people were/are willing to do certain events that they don't like, is because they want the best possible gear. Any endgame event with incredibly low drop rates only serves its purpose of drawing people to continue doing the event as long as the gear obtained from it is the best.

The success of Salvage was that the Salvage sets were the best for certain jobs (at least certain pieces), so people went through the event, even if they didn't like it or its horrible drop rates, and the expense of creating the gear. The fact that the gear is no longer the best shows directly in the unpopularity of the event outside of mythic upgraders or those looking to make money off said upgraders. (For completion's sake, I still have several pieces of gear I'd like to finish, but nobody I know wants to do it at all, even to take out a force-popped NM to complete a piece.)

The success of Abyssea gear wasn't just how "easy" (I use the term loosely) it was to obtain gear, it was combined with the fact that people knew it wasn't the "ultimate" gear. The effort required and time spent was proportional to the expected performance of the gear and future prospects of its usefulness.

The problem with the current "new endgame" events, is that we still have another level cap increase on the horizon, and a whole new selection of "the best gear" close at hand. Who in their right mind would put themselves through events like that for a year or more with those drop rates for something that will only be the best for a limited time (for any significant period of time... longer than the time it took to obtain it) which they know they'll have to replace -- perhaps within a year!.

Most of the current rewards have extremely low drop rates and yet, they provide only small increases in performance, and we all expect better gear to be revealed at/after level 99. These "intermediate" endgame events need better drop rates for gear that is certainly not going to be the best.

Real "final" endgame events with real "ultimate" gear can have fairly low drop rates without overly angering most players, since this is what we've been conditioned to expect from FFXI's "random" drops.

However, for players who play the game for fun, not for work, an even better system for endgame should invoke feelings of accomplishment rather than the thrill of the lottery, knowing that by our effort and time spent, we're making progress little by little. This is why in-game point systems (and even the Magian Trials) are better than random drop systems for rewards, in my opinion - and while it may not keep a person with only one job leveled busy as long as they'd like, many players have multiple jobs, increasing the points they need to gear up each individual job.

Anyway, that's my analysis of the game's design moving forward, and hopefully the intended audience understands the reasoning presented.

I'll agree and disagree with this post. There were many things I did not like about Classic Dynamis (low Relic armor drops, absurd monster distribution in certain places, and artificial rarity of 100 drops that discouraged the majority of players from even thinking about building Relic weapons/shields/instruments being chief among them), but I enjoyed the experience and the armor, for the most part, made it a worthwhile trip.

Were Dynamis anything close to being like Salvage, I'd have never even tried it. Repeating the same event over and over and getting nothing done is no more "hardcore" than running headfirst into a brick wall repeatedly and expecting it to crumble the next time around. The caliber of gear involved isn't and wasn't THAT important for me.

Any game should ultimately be played for fun and that goes for MMOs, too. Wanting to be the best at what you do in game is fine, but at what point does it come at the cost of enjoyment of the game itself? It has become more than obvious over the years that Mr. Tanaka's way of game development was counterproductive and gave players little to no reason to go for the best items (some of you can attribute this to laziness all you like, but I wonder if the reflections in your mirrors would believe that, much less anyone else). Abyssea was a reaction against this carrot-in-front-of-a-treadmill approach to gaming and people breathed a cathartic sigh of relief when Visions was released. The only people that were griping were those who rode bandwagon jobs and lost their excuses for excluding other jobs from various activities. Regrettably, S-E listened when Scars and Heroes arrived, but that's a different topic.

This update really makes me uneasy about the final stretch of this game. 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. I can only hope that S-E's ears aren't only tuned in favor of the professional endgamers who want the game to be only about them.

[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.

[Asymptotic]

. 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.

You need to be in a HNMLS to do HKCNM fights?

[Hashmalum]

To be honest, when I saw Tanaka's name on the test server announcement, I had hoped that it was an honorary type of thing--once a producer, always a producer, or something. Looking at the way that the game developed over his tenure, and even more so looking at the way FFXIV turned out at release, made me think that neither Tanaka nor anyone over him ever asked himself some key questions. Questions like "What did we do right, and what did we do wrong?" and "How has the MMO marketplace changed?" It seems as if there has been a serious failure to reflect and Tanaka has been associated with it.

Because of this association, I am less hopeful for the future than I was for the past few months, when I began seeing encouraging signs from the FFXI dev team. I am not saying "I'll quit because Tanaka is in charge"... but... once I've finished my near term and medium term goals, I'm going to be more skeptical and less hopeful about what's coming next. I won't be undertaking any longer-term projects, like an Empyrean, or leveling more jobs. And if I don't have a lot of hope for the game's future, I am likely to take another break from playing (and paying) while waiting to see what's next, instead of simply assuming it's likely to be worth sticking around to see.

[Sparthos]

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

POINT SYSTEMS. USE THEM. THEY WORK.

[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.

[Insaniac]

When there's nothing to aspire to, people have no reason to stick around.

Aspiring to beat the odds on a .02% drop rate? That's stupid. Aspirations should involve more effort than blind luck.

[Rearden]

WHAT IS EVERYONE YELLING ABOUT POINT SYSTEMS

[deces]

I thought Tanaka decided to fall on a sword.