Seriously, VW loot system..come on.

[Raksha]

How about mobs can't die unless all lights are capped (Brigandish Blade style).

[SpankWustler]

Please let us know what you think.

Almost every problem with Voidwatch that has been mentioned, from popular or unpopular monsters to players using procs mainly for the drop-related bonuses, starts and ends with one thing. Extremely low drop rates that are further lowered by the "totally random thing is totally random" distribution system.

People fight the same monster 600 times because it is entirely possible to go 0/600 on a very desired drop. People fight a different monster only a half-dozen times because fighting the other thing 600 times has taken a heavy toll on their supply of Voidstones. It's not that some horrible monsters are unloved while others are the object of adventurers' pointy affections; it's much more a matter of limited resources due to forced repetition of fights.

People use procs to affect drop-rate and the number of drops in hopes that something desired will, against all odds, actually drop. Like a man on death row praying to the admittedly made-up deity that is the Flying Spaghetti Monster to wrap it's pasta-tendrils of love around his midriff and remove him from that dark cell and spare him his terrible fate, people will try anything when faced with what's effectively a 0.25%-0.75% drop rate.

The personal chest system isn't a bad idea in and of itself, but combined with punishingly low drop rates even with capped lights, the extra level of complete randomness it adds can be infuriating. Nine-tenths of the whacky things that players do in Voidwatch comes from being infuriated by the lack of drops and trying (and failing!) to obtain a drop in spite of it.

I literally can not imagine any way to make the drop-rates for desired items worse, so any change would be a welcome one. Open your minds and follow your hearts and implement whatever nutty thing you want. Even something ridiculous such as making logs edible, with a food effect of "Red Light +1000%" to "Red Light +3000%" depending on the quality of log eaten, would be a huge boon.

That said, lowering AoE damage or making it easier to cap lights aren't bad changes by any means. It just feels like such changes avoid the core issue.

[Helel]

Howdy!

I would like to make an addition to a planned adjustment that was announced earlier.

The issue at hand is the highest priority issue that we would like to address first before we make any other adjustments. There are many other adjustments we would like to make, but if we make too many adjustments at once, the following issues may occur:

• The balance is shifted too quickly, possibly making the game worse
• It is difficult to see improvement because too many changes are made
• An unexpected adverse effect occurs due to the changes overlapping

To avoid these problems, it would be best to plan adjustments in order based on priority and their effect.

In response to us making adjustments in stages, many of you may feel that we are not making enough adjustments, but we hope you understand that our plan is to continuously make adjustments.

Also, when leaving feedback I would like to ask that you provide detailed opinions with suggestions for improvement, rather than simply stating whether you like or dislike a proposed adjustment. This would be very helpful for us.
　
Now, I will address some feedback that has been submitted.



We understand your concern that players will simply switch to their strongest jobs due to the removal of the necessity to proc weaknesses and we’re carefully planning to address this issue.

In order to avoid content becoming monotonous, an idea we are looking into is not completely separating weakness and loot by increasing the maximum bonus attained through cells and other ascent items. As a result, if there are few players involved, using cells will replace having to proc weakness, and for larger parties, it would be possible to avoid paying the high cost for cells by procing weakness as usual.

We may discover some issues with the above proposal upon our extensive review, but we believe that if we completely separate weakness and loot, it is inevitable that players will lean toward using only their strongest jobs.

In order to allow creative freedom in battle, it is necessary to improve the effects of procing weakness, so that it is more enjoyable to use various tactics to proc weaknesses rather than resorting to using the strongest job available. This is a long term goal for us, so it is not possible to make this change all at once, but we will be taking steps one by one to achieve this goal.

Please let us know what you think.

...What? Alright uh, somebody needs to fill me in here. Since when is using your strongest job a bad thing? Isn't the whole reason it's your strongest job because you like to use it?. Why would anyone want to play a weaker job because they're forced to proc crap? This seems absolutely absurd to me and I literally just yelled at my computer after reading this. There's a whole topic on getting rid of proc systems! What makes you think people want this?

Get rid of the need to proc on higher tiers (to stay alive), and let people come the jobs that they want to for once (since pre-abyssea...).

[Dantedmc]

...What? Alright uh, somebody needs to fill me in here. Since when is using your strongest job a bad thing? Isn't the whole reason it's your strongest job because you like to use it?. Why would anyone want to play a weaker job because they're forced to proc crap? This seems absolutely absurd to me and I literally just yelled at my computer after reading this. There's a whole topic on getting rid of proc systems! What makes you think people want this?

Get rid of the need to proc on higher tiers (to stay alive), and let people come the jobs that they want to for once (since pre-abyssea...).

It won't be "your strongest job that you like to use". It will be the jobs that kill the fastest and whms on all but the toughest nms that actually require procs. Atleast right now a majority of jobs are involved in the event.

[Camate]

Trust me when I say that I understand what your major concerns are and that discussions are taking place about them. However, when the team outlines other areas of adjustment, it does not mean that ways of improving what you care most about is not on their radar.

As a side note, being rude to me or other members of the team is not going to help your case or make the development team look at these points of concern any quicker. Please try to keep your comments on target without being rude or offensive.

[Daniel_Hatcher]

Why was my post deleted, I only commented on the "Add to Treasure Pool" comment. /sigh

[Alhanelem]

It's interesting in that this reveals that their intention with the VW proc system was to encourage job variance, but I nisist still that it's not a very effective means of doing that. The reason players will gravitate towards "the strongest jobs" is because they are the strongest. That's the disparity that should be resolved. It shouldn't be "Golly Gee Whiz, we need a dragoon in this party or we're not going to get treasure!", it should be "A Dragoon would be a nice addition to our team! let's get one!"

Replace dragoon with your job of choice.

[Arcari]

Camate, before I report YOUR POSTS for being OFF TOPIC....

Read the first two lines AT LEAST in ANY post in ANY voidwatch post/thread. Start with THIS THREAD that you are "responding" to.

Feedback:

Everyone is saying it repeatedly, listing in order of importance:

1) The REWARD item distribution system* for Voidwatch is demoralizing, insulting, painful, and borders on punishment for participating in the event.

>> Simple solution: Add an "Add to treasure pool" option to the chests.

PROBLEM SOLVED!

2) Voidwatch is a Fun event; The challenge and "play" is there, and sufficient. It is dynamic, requires group play, teamwork, and is just difficult enough a bad pickup group cannot progress, but a good one can. No other aspects of the actual event other than the reward item distribution system* need changing at this time.


*Stating "Reward Item Distribution System" because for some unknown reason I think the devs think we're talking about "Temp Items". I say this based on YOUR feedback being so off the mark you'd have to do post graduate work in stupidity to be that dense.

You say you play the game, Prove it. There's no way you could be this off the mark.

Help us out here man.

Wow, really dude? You've heard of "don't shoot the messenger" right? I'm positive Camate is relaying everything we say about Voidwatch, it's not his fault that the dev team keeps dancing around the issues and giving him crap to report to us.

@Helel: I think what the devs are trying to avoid is the DD job selection in Voidwatch dissolving to "WAR MNK SAM ONRY!"

[Nightfyre]

In order to allow creative freedom in battle, it is necessary to improve the effects of procing weakness, so that it is more enjoyable to use various tactics to proc weaknesses rather than resorting to using the strongest job available.

No. No no no no no.

That is fundamentally wrong. It is not necessary to throw a tedious bandaid on a gaping wound in game design. If anything your highest priority, your necessary adjustment, should be fixing the fact that such imbalances in job choice exist to begin with. Otherwise you just end up making roundabout adjustments to all your content that do technically fix the issue but often not in such a way that makes the jobs that have been made artificially desirable fun to play in said content. The backlash from "balanced" procing jobs (speaking of which, notice how they're specifically referred to as "procing jobs" by the community - should make it painfully obvious that this is the only reason they're getting invites and as such they're expected to focus on procs rather than actually playing their job) should have clued the devs in to this months ago.

Spamming arbitrary triggers is NOT ENJOYABLE. I don't know how I can make that any clearer. It was tolerable in Abyssea because you only had to deal with a maximum of three procs per kill with a very limited pool of triggers to draw from (though still annoying in that my job choice was dictated by procs as much as job suitability - guess why I hardly ever play BLU when farming Abyssea?), now it's almost unbearable. If anything, the procs system should be removed entirely and temp item reception/mob mechanics redesigned from the ground up to compensate. A lot of work? Yes, but the low droprates of Voidwatch combined with the inability to pass drops to other members dictates that anybody wanting rare drops will also be putting in a lot of work.

[Nightfyre]

Trust me when I say that I understand what your major concerns are and that discussions are taking place about them.

How are we supposed to know?

It's a nice thought, but discussion needs to be followed by results. When we see words like "highest priority" and it doesn't line up with what the playerbase wants, especially if the playerbase has seen their wishes shitcanned previously (adding VW loot to pool, nevermind the rage at the "logic" behind it), there is definite cause for concern and we will naturally become more vocal about our desires in the hopes that tangible results will follow quickly. Dev time is a very limited resource, it should be spent wisely. Even if it's not always what we want, it should at least have a solid rationale behind it and that has been noticeably lacking without significant prodding from the community (hello RDM/enfeebles in general).

I'm sure that you know given your job on the community team (and I don't envy your position one bit), but if the devs were really listening I'd think we'd see a shift in content design away from undesirable mechanics and this has been largely lacking. It seems to be slowly coming, but not enough and not widely enough. I'd be more comfortable if shifts were happening without origin in vocal complaints, and I'll also happily offer praise for the devs when/if that happens.