Hello, Matsui here.
Thank you for all of your posts.
I have spoken with the lead developers for Meeble Burrows and received some comments I would like to share with you.
With the most recent version update, users now receive more research marks based on having more users as part of their group. I believe that presenting larger groups with bonuses and increased item counts and records is a good adjustment, but increasing research marks is going too far. I think that research marks are essentially being given out for free.
By increasing the amount of research marks being given to larger groups, our goal is to encourage users to cooperate with others. The following are comments from a couple of users that capture the ideas we had envisioned for this content:
Let’s gather 6 players regardless of job, come up with a plan and have some fun!
I usually go with a group of 4, but since we would get more points if we had 6, I want to find 2 more players.
There are more detailed explanations behind this adjustment, but the above two comments capture our reasoning well. We feel that this content has a good flow to it now, so we will be leaving it as is for the time being.
Since I usually play in a group of 3, I didn’t get a strong sense that we are getting a lot more research marks after the recent version update. However, I did get very excited looking at the trading list for wizened worms. I understand that this is simply a bonus element, but I would really like to see Powder Boots on that list. More than that, I would be extremely happy to see Dervish Sword on that list. (In actuality, I only got fish bones both times. lol)
This leads me to my question: are the probabilities for this content the same for all users? For example, as a WHM I earned 21 worms, but a WAR was able to earn 43 worms and 6 morions in the same program. Will the WAR have a better chance because of the higher number of worms, or will the probabilities be the same? Maybe I shouldn’t focus so much on bonus content, but I would really like to know.
The probabilities are all random.
We did think about rewarding users based on their results, but we decided to make the probabilities all the same so that users can enjoy this content without worrying about which job they are playing with.
As you said, this is bonus content after all.
This may be a bit off topic, but I would like to know if the areas for the additional programs will also be Everbloom Hollow, Ruhotz Silvermines, and Ghoyu’s Reverie. I feel that users would get bored if the same areas are used all the time. Even though Abyssea was also a “copy and paste” map, it had a sense of freedom, because it was a field. The Meeble areas are all caves, so they feel very closed.
Since the name of the content is Meeble Burrows (a burrow is a hole or tunnel dug by a small animal) it would feel strange if the map was open and free.
To answer your question, we will most likely use the new areas added in the Seekers of Adoulin. We will put some thought into this, though.
I feel like objective 3 should be more difficult, but do many people disagree?
Our goal was to set the difficulty of objective 3 so that a party of six players would be able to complete it regardless of their jobs, as long as they use all of the support enhancements.
There was talk of a hard mode at the time of development, so we would like to look into this idea as well as related items when the time is right.