Seriously, VW loot system..come on.

[Runespider]

Yeah but that's a cheap design ploy to make it more appealing to a greater audience, if everyone knew you would have to go 1/200 very few casuals would bother, it's all about abusing psychology. The fact you can go 1/3 is what encourages those kinds of players to do so, even if it's just 1/3 on one body and 1/200 on the next, it still puts that hook in you that it "can" drop really quickly, or on that next kill (even if it happens to someone else, it still puts it in your mind). It's about getting you addicted, skinner box etc.

I hate that I work really hard and someone else breezes one but i know why they did it and I know why they are so reluctant to change it. Sadly these bodies never were status or reward items, they were just lucky dips that anyone could get lucky and get and should be seen as such. If you worked your ass off going 1/400 and are proud of it the guy next to you with the same body and all aurore in every other slot that did VW twice wants a word with you, this isn't endgame really it's just an nm fight where half the alliance can be carried with a pure lottery game at the end. If they put a point system in next update where you had to kill a set number of each NM and have all the clears to +1 the bodies it would at least even out that the good players would feel more rewarded, VW desperatly needs "I'm good at this event and here's my loot to prove it" and not "I did vw and got lucky".

They didn't make a design mistake in their mind, they planned it all to work the way it does and for reasons. That's why they won't change it, they know why we hate it but the reasons we hate it are the reasons they like it.

[Tamoa]

I really do think that the main gripe people have regarding voidwatch loot system, is the fact that one person can get the same ra/ex item in their personal chest more than once. And I cannot fathom how changing it so that this can't happen, can have any sort of impact on the dev team's precious balance at all.

[Runespider]

I really do think that the main gripe people have regarding voidwatch loot system, is the fact that one person can get the same ra/ex item in their personal chest more than once. And I cannot fathom how changing it so that this can't happen, can have any sort of impact on the dev team's precious balance at all.

Artifically bloats the number of drops and helps with the "it can drop" mindset, as opposed to "it never drops, i quit". They could of easily done a check and make sure people that have it never see it, the fact they left it shows they see value in that happening and as i said above i think it was about artifically bloating the number of drops. Hell they are even adding a "destroy loot" option instead of it never loading if you have it lol

[Mirabelle]

I appreciate your post GG, but I don't think the playerbase is as smart as you make it out to be.

For one, while many of the suggestions we make have merit, at no time does the playerbase acknowledge that the primary purpose of the devs is to keep us playing the game for as little resource investment as possible. SE is a company. They are there to make money. As such, suggesting changes that produce shortcuts in time to obtain a reward will never fly with them.

As a mature player, I'd rather see the devs admit this outright. "We are not changing so and so because it would allow the playerbase to advance quicker than we can make new content". A succinct honest answer. Or "our gaming psychologists say that players are more inclined to repeat activities if we design rewards this way". This is what the game design is all about.

But there is clearly a fine line between feeding the addict and frustrating the addict to the point he chooses a different addiction. SE has been wandering that fine line for a while now with Voidwatch. Judging by the ongoing activity in that system, I don't think they've gone too far yet. Certainly compared to WoE, VWNM has been a success. Compared to Abyssea though its not nearly as fun or worthwhile.

Bottom line: Devs care about the bottom line, players do not. Design will always look at enticing ongoing subscribers to stay ongoing subscribers at the lowest possible expense. Players will always want an ongoing variety of new options as they get bored of material, but that is a more costly way to feed the addiction than just designing rare drops from difficult challenges that people have to constantly repeat to get their reward.

[Dreamin]

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.

I'm sorry that you and other messengers has to deal with us, the angry playerbase. But if you look at the root cause, the playerbase are angry and extremely frustrated because it appears completely that the DEV team do not understands our frustration or even worst, they understands it but doesn't give a crap about it. So after the nth round of complainting without any clear indiciations of any move to fix the ACTUAL problem, you can't blame the playerbase to lose our cool and become rude.

So until the Dev team is willing to accept and fix the MAIN issues that the playerbase have, you can relate this message to them:

Go "POUND SAND" if they want to experience 1st hand as to what and how the playerbase are experiencing with VW because clearly they do not play the game the way their players are playing because they do not share the same viewpoint as their playerbase.

[Brolic]

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.

instead of being vague, how about you tell us what our concerns are? lets see how in touch with the player base yall are


people arent keen on feeling ignored, not for a service they pay for. are you surprised that they're getting snippy?

[Dreamin]

I appreciate your post GG, but I don't think the playerbase is as smart as you make it out to be.

For one, while many of the suggestions we make have merit, at no time does the playerbase acknowledge that the primary purpose of the devs is to keep us playing the game for as little resource investment as possible. SE is a company. They are there to make money. As such, suggesting changes that produce shortcuts in time to obtain a reward will never fly with them.

As a mature player, I'd rather see the devs admit this outright. "We are not changing so and so because it would allow the playerbase to advance quicker than we can make new content". A succinct honest answer. Or "our gaming psychologists say that players are more inclined to repeat activities if we design rewards this way". This is what the game design is all about.

But there is clearly a fine line between feeding the addict and frustrating the addict to the point he chooses a different addiction. SE has been wandering that fine line for a while now with Voidwatch. Judging by the ongoing activity in that system, I don't think they've gone too far yet. Certainly compared to WoE, VWNM has been a success. Compared to Abyssea though its not nearly as fun or worthwhile.

Bottom line: Devs care about the bottom line, players do not. Design will always look at enticing ongoing subscribers to stay ongoing subscribers at the lowest possible expense. Players will always want an ongoing variety of new options as they get bored of material, but that is a more costly way to feed the addiction than just designing rare drops from difficult challenges that people have to constantly repeat to get their reward.

Corrected, so therefore the only reasonable and most profitable ways to operate is for SE to SPENT the RESOURCES and add new Content to this game. You keep feeding the addicts (that would be US) the stuff that they wanted and they will keep feeding their coffers with their money. Win-Win all around. But when you stop feeding the addicts with contents that they want, they will move on to a different addiction and may/may-not come back at all.

However, somehow that mentality is lost to the business folks upstairs @ SE who still have dreams of the failed FF14 to make a come back when they roll out v2 next year. While they frustrated enough existing customers on FF11 to have quit (if you dont think there are enough ppl quitting due to lack of real content since Abyssea you haven't been looking around hard enough).

[Camiie]

I think the issue for me is that I don't really feel comfortable making a long term commitment to FFXI as I did in the past. I'm not really up for a goal that may take me years to complete like getting certain rare, coveted gear from HNM or Dynamis back in the day. I don't really want to get into something where there is a high chance that my goal will never be attained due to sheer randomness.

What works for me now is having goals I can work toward at my own pace, and having more short term goals as opposed to a few long term goals. That's the sort of thing I'd like to see rather than a return to the old ways of randomness and devoting my life to some event LS.

I'm not who I was when I started. MMOs aren't what they used to be. I know better now and so do most game developers. I don't want to go back to relive the glory days of hardcore and elitism. Looking back, many of those days weren't all that glorious. These days, I just want to log-in have fun and get stuff done with my friends in a Final Fantasy type environment. As is, I feel VW isn't really for someone like me. As the current primary focus of the game it'd be nice if it was more palatable for me. Nothing the devs have addressed so far has served that purpose.

So, what's in store to lure in someone who's on the fence or wary about participating in VW because of the horror stories of the drop system?

[Greatguardian]

I appreciate your post GG, but I don't think the playerbase is as smart as you make it out to be.

You highly underestimate the FFXI playerbase. I know more FFXI players with Masters degrees and Ph.Ds than players without them. I can count the number of actual teenagers I know on this game on one hand.

We don't need to explain SE's corporate marketing strategy to them. The fact of the matter is that Developers are not corporate or marketing professionals. They are game design professionals. Their only goal should be the creation of fun and engaging content that the players enjoy. Marketing can come in and yell at them later if said fun content somehow causes a severe drop in subscriptions, which is unlikely.

Even so, many of the qualms the player base has with the Development team do not stem from manpower or budget issues at all. We all know that FFXI's server hardware is maintained by 2 red pandas and a schizophrenic homeless man named Karen. In fact, it really just gets on our nerves when they claim that time/budget issues prevent them from making what most programmers or design professionals would consider a 5 minute fix, such as the issue of Recast timer indexing.

Besides, like I said before, there's nothing wrong with asking for help. FFXI is 10 years old. No one gives a damn about the secrecy of the source code any more. If the Developers really don't have the time to re-index recast timers as 32-bit or 17-bit numbers, why not ask one of us to do it? Let's be real, it's not like we haven't been cracking their data files and taking apart their UI for years. All it would take to increase the amount of available recast timers in the game is to add a few 0's to a bunch of numbers and maybe change a data type here and there. Really not a huge deal.

Players do care about the bottom line, though. When players are happy, the bottom line is good. It's just a natural consequence of players, you know, being happy with the game and thus continuing to pay for it. When the bottom line goes south, it means that players are not happy - generally, players do not enjoy being unhappy. Maybe some are into that sort of thing, maybe not. However, those who are into that sort of thing will probably stay subscribed in order to continue feeling unhappy so any net effect on the bottom line is going to be brought about by players who are unhappy and do not like being unhappy.

I am not particularly unhappy with the state of the game right now, personally. I don't take drops seriously enough to care that I probably won't ever get a voidwatch body, if only because my luck with drops is always epic-tier bad. I love how Legion looks, especially considering it is essentially what I've been espousing as the ideal in drop systems since day 1.

However, I am upset that the Developers seem to insist on treating us like children rather than functional adults. It's bad for us, and honestly it's bad for them too. I can understand being daunted by the plethora of often-conflicting feedback presented by the player base, but that does not mean that legitimate concerns are not being raised. I feel that the Developers have an extreme disconnect in perspective from the actual players of the game, and that they will not be able to understand what it is we want until they resolve that. Beyond that, they will be functionally incapable of resolving that disconnect until they learn to view us and treat us as equals.

[Mirabelle]

You highly underestimate the FFXI playerbase. I know more FFXI players with Masters degrees and Ph.Ds than players without them. I can count the number of actual teenagers I know on this game on one hand.

I follow the 80:20 rule which states that in any situation 80% of the people you deal with are morons. Sadly that even works amongst the educated. Common sense is decidedly uncommon.

I would agree that the devs should be less insular, more honest and more willing to work with the playerbase that at times has some excellent ideas (albeit 1 good idea for every 5 lame ones).

But at the same time, I think they've always been following the Skinnerian rule that the surest way to keep people paying to play is to offer rare intermittent rewards for any given task. Its been there from Land Kings, to Sky drops, Sea pops, camped NM's, VW chests, brown chests everywhere, etc. Its clearly a design strategy as its so pervasive.
But I'm sure an alternate strategy where people are given fun challenging tasks that are non-repetitive and engaging and have good rewards, is every bit as good a strategy for retaining subscriptions. Just more costly.

SE needs to understand we are older. Killing the same NM 500 times in a row is no longer an acceptable waste of time for most of us with jobs, spouses, kids etc. I thought the empy trials were about right. If done casually (6-9 hrs/week) with a small group about one 85 empy a month could be obtained. And casuals and hardcore could work at it. That was good balance IMO.