Enmity System Explanation and Planned Adjustments

[Demon6324236]

Why not just roll back the enmity system until it's working properly instead of making the player-base deal with this crap? It was obviously rolled out before it was ready and has been causing much more problems than "fixes". Scrap it and start over if you have to but do something soon.

Rolling it back does nothing, no one uses the test server, not even SE, so nothing is tested to see if it works well, and no changes are made, the only way for real changes to be made actively and accurately is to put it on the live servers and see how it plays out, then adjust it accordingly.

Yet another notch in SEs "fix what's not broken" belt.

Enmity has been broken for a very... very... long time, its not fixing what's not broken.

[Vivik]

Rolling it back does nothing, no one uses the test server, not even SE, so nothing is tested to see if it works well, and no changes are made, the only way for real changes to be made actively and accurately is to put it on the live servers and see how it plays out, then adjust it accordingly.

Enmity has been broken for a very... very... long time, its not fixing what's not broken.

I'm speaking in terms of pets only. Sorry should have been a bit more clear in my post.

I agree that enmity has been broken for a long time. It just seems like with every fix lately there have been huge problems which any other professional gaming company would have caught in testing. It just makes SE look like amateurs.

[RushLynx]

Your proposed solution is admittedly quite clever; players are reaching the enmity cap too fast? Simply slow down the rate at which they accrue enmity! Brilliant!

However, I cannot "Like" the post for the following reasons.



The above bolded statements offend me. Has SE learned nothing over the past decade of FFXI as well as the past couple years of failure for FFXIV? Obscurity is the least effective form of security; FFXI's players have only suffered from you withholding the meaning of vital game statistics from them, such as Enmity and the Attack/Defense Ratio.

If you all weren't so stubbornly tight-lipped and more freely shared information in general, then maybe it wouldn't take a decade for you to receive feedback on how poorly implemented certain in-game systems are. I don't think you have any reason to doubt the validity of that statement, given that the implementation of the test server is basically the logical conclusion thereof.

So why do you nonetheless continue with the hush-hush attitude? I would certainly hope that this isn't a matter of immature and stubborn pride, and not wanting to hear that a poor implementation was implemented poorly.

They don't want to give out specific formulas and values because it would make the game infinitely easier and more predictable... People already do plenty of calculations on their own ahead of time... I can open a spreadsheet on my desktop right now and tell you all about my cure amounts, magic damage, damage taken, DA/TA rates, TP/hit supposing various haste and spell effects, etc supposing I were to go obtain or buy various pieces of equipment... It makes it very easy for people to prove/conclude what is the "best" setup for various situations... No one wants that to happen, it completely ruins the game. And yet it's only natural that people continuously experiment and try to derive these formulas on their own, thus there are tons of wiki pages and forums scattered around on collective input and data analysis trying to figure this stuff out... there's still a limit to the amount of data you can divulge through experimentation as a player, and they want to keep it that way... I want them to keep it that way too, because I hate elitists who insist on having the best of the best and the most optimal setup all the time...

People already use Windower to automate their battles... let's say the complete details of the enmity system were given here... What's stopping anyone from making a Windower plugin that would just completely automate a whole battle dual-boxed such that enmity would be perfectly balanced at all times? Suddenly the whole game is just watching a program exploit another program..? Yay... what fun... short of this everyone will just have their alliances exact enmity values constantly displayed beside their names like they already do TP and MP... no wait, don't cast that cure, wait a few seconds for his voke, his enmity isn't high enough yet... LAME.

[Economizer]

there's still a limit to the amount of data you can divulge through experimentation as a player

Yes and no, but for the purposes of your views, no.

We knew everything there was to know about enmity with the exception of specific job abilities or spells nobody bothered to test (the only reason this has changed - very temporarily - is because there was an update). We know everything about how nuking damage is calculated, and have specific numbers for the majority of nukes players can cast. We know just about everything about Cure spells and Curaga spells, even the obscure way they act as nukes.

We know enough that we often have to correct the Community Representatives or puzzle at why they're approaching something we've known for with extreme caution.

If there is something we don't know, it is because we haven't tried hard enough, or it is something that actually is hard to test (the overwhelming majority of which begins and ends with Treasure Hunter, and occasionally the way obscure mobs are spawned).

And if you think that revealing how the game works in detail would make FFXI less of a game, I counter that we knew exactly how much enmity was being dealt out and how it was decaying, we knew how much our cures would cure for, we knew how much the damage dealer would hit the mob for, we knew exactly how the mob's special abilities worked and when it would use them... but did this make us use bots? ...did this make us use one defined setup no matter what? ... did this make us not argue about which macro sets were the best for our job abilities (e.g. should I be going for recast reduction or enmity reduction on my cures)?

The answer to all of those is no, because your premise is wrong, knowing more about the game does not make it inferior, in part because that wasn't the case before, but also because if the game was bad while knowing everything about the mechanics it would be bad even if we didn't know the mechanics.

You can know everything about the rules of Chess, but that does not diminish the game. Players aren't even asking SE to tell them everything about every little mob in the game (the real puzzles), they're just asking for some straightforward answers to straightforward questions about basic game mechanics.

[RushLynx]

... but did this make us use bots?

Where were you in, idk, 2005... when it was impossible to claim an NM without the use of a specialized mule with altered game files and provoke to bot claim for your LS? You know, the issue that was so huge that they had to make a new system, still in place today, for spawns whereby you can't claim for a randomized amount of time after it spawns? When that didn't completely work they made lots of drops rare/ex and moved their previous trade-able versions to BCNMs, where they still exist today? What about when position and speed hacking was popular? And Fish-botting? The issue that was so huge they had to completely redo fishing so that it was more difficult to bot?

Players aren't even asking SE to tell them everything about every little mob in the game (the real puzzles), they're just asking for some straightforward answers to straightforward questions about basic game mechanics.

Part of my quote, which was the bolded quote from the OP, was excluded... but most of my post was regarding his objection to the OP's reluctance to provide specific values for things such as Provoke... Admit it, if we knew these things there would already be a windower plugin that displayed exact enmity values for everyone in the alliance... We automate our macros to adjust for things such as day and weather effects without having to do anything special, why wouldn't we automate it to delay spell casting until the necessary enmity values were present?

Your post seems to insinuate that SE is unaware that we've figured a lot of these things out... like they don't know about our wiki pages and forums... like they have no idea that we conduct this extensive research into finding these sorts of things out... They do know, and obviously they recognize that we are missing some pieces... In fact, in FFXIV's redesign they are encouraging this sort of discussion by designing the new Lodestone to support player-created wikis and discussions of this sort... in the most recent update they mentioned making a mobile app so people could access such content while playing on the PS3/4... They want us to talk about these sorts of things, but they don't want to hand us every little detail because that's when people start exploiting things...

[Areayea]

Originally posted by Camate: We had looked into taking another approach by adding an enmity+ stat to avatars like beastmaster's familiars have, and to ease up on the enmity lost when taking damage; however, this was geared more towards solo play and there are times when it would be best for avatars not to take hate during party battles, so we decided to adopt the adjustment mentioned above.

that's where i took i think they may give smn's snarl... if that truly is the case, it is why I said that avatars can be an emergatank, but otherwise i believe that this would give summoners a huge use again...

[Economizer]

it was impossible to claim an NM without the use of a specialized mule with altered game files and provoke to bot claim for your LS?

That has nothing to do with understanding game mechanics at all.

but most of my post was regarding his objection to the OP's reluctance to provide specific values for things such as Provoke... Admit it, if we knew these things there would already be a windower plugin that displayed exact enmity values for everyone in the alliance...

I don't use third party tools since they're against the terms of service, but I keep myself aware of their functions. As such I'd like to give a bit of an explanation of how such third party tools function from a fairly academic standpoint to better serve this conversation.

Basically, the third party tool that you're referring to has a feature known as plug-ins (one I would hope SE emulates to some extent with the revamped UI they have planned). These plug-ins allow the player to add functionality to the base of the third party tools. These plug-ins are limited to the information the player's game client has access to and any information from non-SE sources (such as the databases that the websites FFXIAH and Guildwork use).

In this way there is a plug-in that shows TP of party and alliance members. Now, there are two ways this could theoretically be done. One could be to calculate how much Store TP and total delay each player has and count each hit they perform, however this is impossible for party members since you cannot know how much Store TP they have at any given moment, and parsing the chat log to determine hits is not always ideal. Keep in mind that self-calculating this number is impossible, this will come back in a minute. The second method that could theoretically be possible is if the client was sent information about party and alliance member's TP already but it isn't shown. This is the case and this is roughly how the plug-in in question performs its function.

Now, keeping in mind that self-calculating TP build of other party members is impossible due to Store TP not being something you could realistically check in real time, try to imagine Enmity as being perfectly solved - you still wouldn't know because you can't check how much enmity gear any particular player is wearing. From there we have to wonder about if the number is sent to the client, however I don't believe this is the case.

So even if we knew the formula down to each Provoke, we wouldn't be able to have a third party tool keep track of enmity unless the data was already being provided to the client. But let's go deeper, did we know how much enmity a Provoke gave before the sparse numbers they gave us?

We knew.

Note the date on that. We've known exact numbers with certainty for over five years. It has been incredibly public knowledge and we modeled the enmity model and knew everything about it short of new spells and job abilities we never bothered to test after the level cap increase, not that it would have been particularly hard to figure things out. Even now it is only a matter of someone actually doing the testing to figure out the new values.

And there is nothing SE can realistically do about it to stop us from figuring it out again.

Your post seems to insinuate that SE is unaware that we've figured a lot of these things out...

It does not. We wouldn't puzzle over why they restrict information to us that we already know if we thought they shouldn't know we know. It isn't like they can't read plain English.

but they don't want to hand us every little detail because that's when people start exploiting things...

If the game mechanics are exploitable in undesirable ways then whether or not we know about it explicitly is moot, players will eventually exploit it. Wouldn't it be better to have a system that isn't exploitable in an undesired manner regardless of if the players understand how to play the game or not?

[HimuraKenshyn]

I vote a roll back hell anything is better than this cluster blank we have atm. I don't recall my healer ever getting this boned at all before >.>....

[saevel]

I vote a roll back hell anything is better than this cluster blank we have atm. I don't recall my healer ever getting this boned at all before >.>....

If your healer is pulling hate then your doing something horribly wrong. Healing took the exact same reduction that damage did in CE accumulation. Healing and damage both accrue 30% of the enmity they did prior to the update, so if their pulling hate then either your doing a really sh!tty job of hitting the target, or their spamming Cure V instead of Cure IV / Curaga's.

Seriously how sh!tty are you playing? Pet jobs I can understand due to pets not wearing gear, using gear swap macros, using food, buff abilities or receiving mage support buffs and generally having the stats of a nearly naked player. If an actual player is having trouble keeping hate off a healer then their definitely doing something wrong.

[HimuraKenshyn]

If your healer is pulling hate then your doing something horribly wrong. Healing took the exact same reduction that damage did in CE accumulation. Healing and damage both accrue 30% of the enmity they did prior to the update, so if their pulling hate then either your doing a really sh!tty job of hitting the target, or their spamming Cure V instead of Cure IV / Curaga's.

Seriously how sh!tty are you playing? Pet jobs I can understand due to pets not wearing gear, using gear swap macros, using food, buff abilities or receiving mage support buffs and generally having the stats of a nearly naked player. If an actual player is having trouble keeping hate off a healer then their definitely doing something wrong.

Yep shitty when I raised casted refresh 2 on myself while pally supertanking and mob turned and killed me certainly was the worst thing ever >.>...

Three characters fell cleaving and the mobs goes after the sch its been a fun ride as of late... Shit never happened before this crap was implemented seeing whacky hate all over this mofo to be honest.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...mity-imbalance