AA Fight instances

[Afania]

Gear barely even drops in N setting, and you think soloing VE will require very little effort? Wow, this wasn't even worth responding to.

Yes, I think soloing VE require very little effort, especially for ppl with mules. Or else you wouldn't see everyone and their mother soloing it all day long. If it require a LOT of effort, then you'd see only 1~2 ppl per server can do it. If you zone into AA instance on JP prime time, at least 1 or more pt is VE solo/duo box PT. That's how the zone ended up 70+ player on JP time.

Whether "something" requires lot of effort or very little effort, is not decided by you, but the amount of ppl that's been doing it in the past. You can tell me "Solo VE requires a lot of effort", but I'm not buying it as long as my friends/lsmate/strangers all enter VE/E and solo everything every day.

And the purpose of any D to VD content should be to challenge "elite" players,

It should be a challenge, and reward. Or else why'd you want to work harder and do D/VD? That's just all be lazy and do easy VE.

And the purpose of any D to VD content should be to challenge "elite" players, not make it so that everyone NOT doing D/VD will take ~500 merits to upgrade one set of armor for one job to 119. That's 25 fights on normal if you don't comment Rem's Tales and/or have competition for them. Do you only play one job? Did you know that there are both Relic and Artifact sets that you can upgrade? And you're saying that soloing something repeatedly (in your own words) means that the player doesn't deserve the gear he's working towards? I guess you don't deserve your Mythic either because you soloed and took 3 years to make it. Seriously, your logic never fails to leave me speechless.

I didn't say anything about soloing something repeated means that player doesn't deserve the gears he wants. I also never say anything about whether X or Y deserve a gear or not.

I only said gear shouldn't be obtained in a very short time frame in a MMORPG or else everyone gonna cap gear and quit, and there should be some sort of penalty if you fail a content, such as needing to get a new KI. You sound like you want to do 6 run at once so you can finish it in 1 go, and you don't want any penalty if you fail in a BC.

If that's the case, single player game + cheat code is more suitable for you. Because games should be enjoyable to play right? I shouldn't be punished if I fail in a video game right? I soooo want to play invincible Mario.

Even if you didn't have to farm merits for a KI, even if the fights had enough instances for everyone, even if you had a group of skilled players in your back pocket that you can summon at a moment's notice, even if you didn't have to explain the fight before entering, even if they all set their seacoms quickly, even if all of them could gear their jobs/get food/gather at HP within 10 mins, failing a fight will still cause you to lose 40+ minutes of your life. I don't know how lost time isn't considered a penalty for losing.

It's work if VE/E version doesn't exist, since you still need to spend the time to make a pt of 6, and that's penalty.

The problem is, VE/E version exist and majority of ppl with right job/mules can just go in and solo.

So that's not much of penalty anymore. My RNG friends used to solo VE/E TT all day and make gil with mat, with 100% win rate. Another friend of mine made PLD on mule just to solo VE/E all day too. They rarely fail, with free KI they'd just go in and solo the content a lot more, instead of actually spend time and play with other ppl on D/VD settings.

Someone never did a last window ground king. :P God, kings were so soul shattering at times.

I didn't camp ground king, but I did camp joytoy NM several times for myself and LS in 75. IMO it's nowhere near as soul shattering as doing 6 AA for 3.5hr. I don't need to /shout, I don't need to concentrate on killing stuff and dodging AoEs until NM pop, I only need to afk and watch youtube video until next window open lol.

[Demonjustin]

Yes, I think soloing VE require very little effort, especially for ppl with mules. Or else you wouldn't see everyone and their mother soloing it all day long. If it require a LOT of effort, then you'd see only 1~2 ppl per server can do it. If you zone into AA instance on JP prime time, at least 1 or more pt is VE solo/duo box PT. That's how the zone ended up 70+ player on JP time.

Whether "something" requires lot of effort or very little effort, is not decided by you, but the amount of ppl that's been doing it in the past. You can tell me "Solo VE requires a lot of effort", but I'm not buying it as long as my friends/lsmate/strangers all enter VE/E and solo everything every day.

You can say it doesn't take a lot of effort, but by compared to doing Difficult or Very Difficult the effort is enormous, you're talking about having to farm 15 more merits every single time you wanna do it. The fact that people are doing it 'all day every day' is a result of the fact the gear drops at an insanely low drop rate on VE, probably comparably as low as VW is on it's high quality gear, which means the effort put in has to include both the constant merit refill and the fight itself. If you look at just the fight itself it's easy, that's why it's called Very Easy, but if you're talking actual effort not just easy-ness then VE is insanely more effort for near no reward rate than anything you could do in current events.

It should be a challenge, and reward. Or else why'd you want to work harder and do D/VD? That's just all be lazy and do easy VE.

Doing VE is actually the less lazy of the two. Your choices are basically do it solo and get your gear eventually(probably 50~100+ fights) or make a group and get your gear in what's likely to be at most, 5~10 fights. You could argue that making a party is a lot of effort, and I'd agree, but equal to 5~10 times the effort of doing VE as well as the additional merits for each battle? No.

In all honesty you could bump each rate up to the next highest difficulty level and nothing would be broken. VE drops as good as E currently does, E as good as N, N as good as D, you get the idea. Doing that would leave VD out, but you can just make it so that VD always drops 2 pieces of gear which I believe right now isn't the case, it's not that hard to balance things and still make it not only worth doing on higher levels but worth doing on lower levels as well. With all of that said, if the argument is just over letting it only take 1 KI then I'd honestly see no issue with it provided SE fixed the AA instance issue first. If they didn't then it's just congestion waiting to happen and while I hate using that as a stupid reason for not doing good updates, it's sadly true that it would screw us over in that kinda way.

[Malithar]

If you look at just the fight itself it's easy, that's why it's called Very Easy, but if you're talking actual effort not just easy-ness then VE is insanely more effort for near no reward rate than anything you could do in current events.

To be fair, for the first few months of AAs, it was actually a very rewarding thing to do. RF mats dropped with a pretty good frequency on VE/E, and all of them except for HM (silly 6x orb crafting) were worth millions until only recently. Even now, I'd argue it's a good source of time/money if you're capped on KIs and merits.

Looking squarely at gear though, I'd agree, RNG is pretty rough on those difficulties with getting any gear, let alone the piece you're after.

[Lithera]

So I guess you never did sky/sea with people who didn't have sky warp yet, any of the maps, or have 2-3 other LSes lock you out of fighting byakko because not everyone was at the tele pad or wasn't afk. Or did a pop farm run for the next run and had people camping despot and zippy against other LSes. Before they changed the warp to Kirin's room could be a time eater since you could have tried to get to his room for 15 mins alone. Didn't do sea while it was a high traffic event, but I can see how that could take a while concerning how so many people would get lost on the inside while just doing the missions.

Woo you can solo E/VE good for you. From what I gather most people don't do the AA fights for the chapters, but for the armor that drops from them. Even if you soloed E/VE the whole day you're still trying to get lucky with winning the rng lotto. Instead of the rng and five other people. It's why some might want a leader only needs to have the KI so they can do more and have better odds at geting the one thing they want.

[Afania]

You can say it doesn't take a lot of effort, but by compared to doing Difficult or Very Difficult the effort is enormous, you're talking about having to farm 15 more merits every single time you wanna do it. The fact that people are doing it 'all day every day' is a result of the fact the gear drops at an insanely low drop rate on VE, probably comparably as low as VW is on it's high quality gear, which means the effort put in has to include both the constant merit refill and the fight itself. If you look at just the fight itself it's easy, that's why it's called Very Easy, but if you're talking actual effort not just easy-ness then VE is insanely more effort for near no reward rate than anything you could do in current events.

Doing VE is actually the less lazy of the two. Your choices are basically do it solo and get your gear eventually(probably 50~100+ fights) or make a group and get your gear in what's likely to be at most, 5~10 fights. You could argue that making a party is a lot of effort, and I'd agree, but equal to 5~10 times the effort of doing VE as well as the additional merits for each battle? No.

In all honesty you could bump each rate up to the next highest difficulty level and nothing would be broken. VE drops as good as E currently does, E as good as N, N as good as D, you get the idea. Doing that would leave VD out, but you can just make it so that VD always drops 2 pieces of gear which I believe right now isn't the case, it's not that hard to balance things and still make it not only worth doing on higher levels but worth doing on lower levels as well. With all of that said, if the argument is just over letting it only take 1 KI then I'd honestly see no issue with it provided SE fixed the AA instance issue first. If they didn't then it's just congestion waiting to happen and while I hate using that as a stupid reason for not doing good updates, it's sadly true that it would screw us over in that kinda way.

You're arguing that VE requires a lot of effort, when merit point comes into play. That was exactly my point.

Yes, if merit point and KI comes into play, soloing VE is more time consuming than do VD. If you remove the merit point aspect and hand out free KI, you can just do VE, exit, repeat, exit, repeat with zero down time. If you make a pt of a few people, you can probably repeat VE even faster. I'm also going guess that killing VE with 6 ppl using any setup and finish it in 5 min, and do it for 25 times(with zero downtime and zero risk to fail) is probably faster than /shouting for ppl with right job to do a D/VD with some risk to fail.

The point is that the entire AA drop rate and difficulty mode is made on the fact that you need to farm KI and there are downtime between each runs that you can't spam it repeatedly endlessly. If you don't want to farm KI, then the SE will have to remove VE/E and readjust the drop rate too, you seriously want that? lol.

[Afania]

So I guess you never did sky/sea with people who didn't have sky warp yet, any of the maps, or have 2-3 other LSes lock you out of fighting byakko because not everyone was at the tele pad or wasn't afk. Or did a pop farm run for the next run and had people camping despot and zippy against other LSes. Before they changed the warp to Kirin's room could be a time eater since you could have tried to get to his room for 15 mins alone. Didn't do sea while it was a high traffic event, but I can see how that could take a while concerning how so many people would get lost on the inside while just doing the missions.

Maybe that wasn't the case when sea/sky was just out, but back in 2009 when I did sea/sky with a few friends, I remember it's possible do those with slightly less ppl than a full LS/alliance. Unless I remember something wrong, my friend can usually DB or lowman most of the sea NM @75 on MNK. With less ppl in ally it's less likely to have 1 person d/c or stuck/get lost and waste time.

Woo you can solo E/VE good for you. From what I gather most people don't do the AA fights for the chapters, but for the armor that drops from them. Even if you soloed E/VE the whole day you're still trying to get lucky with winning the rng lotto. Instead of the rng and five other people. It's why some might want a leader only needs to have the KI so they can do more and have better odds at geting the one thing they want.

I don't solo E/VE because I like to play with ppl. Most of the time I do VD or at least D for AA, I find VD way more enjoyable than doing anything below D. I highly doubt ppl would ever want to do VD/D again if KI doesn't cost merit, that's why I don't want them to change that.

Also "Some might want a leader only needs to have the KI so they can do more and have better odds at getting the thing they want" is doesn't make it better game design. The way they design difficulty setting is suppose to reward players trying harder difficulty. So you either try harder difficulty and get stuff faster, or try easier difficulty and it takes longer. If easier setting no longer take long, what's the point to do VD?

[Demonjustin]

You're arguing that VE requires a lot of effort, when merit point comes into play. That was exactly my point.

Yes, if merit point and KI comes into play, soloing VE is more time consuming than do VD. If you remove the merit point aspect and hand out free KI, you can just do VE, exit, repeat, exit, repeat with zero down time. If you make a pt of a few people, you can probably repeat VE even faster. I'm also going guess that killing VE with 6 ppl using any setup and finish it in 5 min, and do it for 25 times(with zero downtime and zero risk to fail) is probably faster than /shouting for ppl with right job to do a D/VD with some risk to fail.

The point is that the entire AA drop rate and difficulty mode is made on the fact that you need to farm KI and there are downtime between each runs that you can't spam it repeatedly endlessly. If you don't want to farm KI, then the SE will have to remove VE/E and readjust the drop rate too, you seriously want that? lol.

I fail to see how VE/E would have to be removed when redoing the fight 100 times for a 1% drop, excluding merits, would take so much more effort than making a party for D/VD and only having to do the fight 5~10 times for a 50% drop. Oh, and as for making a larger group of up to 6 people to spam VE? Yeah, great sounding idea, except that now when my piece of gear drops after fighting it 100 times I now have to go try to outlot anyone else who wants it.

Do you really honestly think people would do dozens of fights with groups of 6 people with hardly any chance of their gear dropping rather than making a party for N~VD especially when they would have to lot against other people for their drops on the extremely slip chance it drops? I think not.

[Afania]

I fail to see how VE/E would have to be removed when redoing the fight 100 times for a 1% drop, excluding merits, would take so much more effort than making a party for D/VD and only having to do the fight 5~10 times for a 50% drop. Oh, and as for making a larger group of up to 6 people to spam VE? Yeah, great sounding idea, except that now when my piece of gear drops after fighting it 100 times I now have to go try to outlot anyone else who wants it.

Lol, there's something quite wrong in your example even if the number you use is true. Let's assume you go with PUG and spend time on /shouting.

Do VE 100 times, each time= 5 min= 8.3hr total. You lot against 6 people. Let's say if 1 run takes 2hr, after 2hr pt disband you make a new pt, you'd need to make 4 pt. Let's say if you need to /shout for 15 min each time, the total time to see a drop from VE is 9.8 hr.

Do VD 10 times, each time let's say 25 min a run= 4.1hr total, let's say if you /shout twice after 2hr and each /shout takes 1hr because RNG+PLD is harder to find. The total time to see a drop from VD is 6.1hr.

3 hr difference, which you may argue that VD is still faster, but if you factor the fact that there's quite a bit of chance that VD may fail(it's also very hard to recover if PLD d/c and shit in VD), but VE is nearly 100% win rate no matter what, the difference isn't very big.

Also, BOTH group, VE or VD needs to lot against 5 other people. I don't understand the logic behind "VE is slow because you need to lot against 5 people", since you always need to lot against other ppl in VD too.

However, in VE the chance of lotting against 6 people is smaller because you can probably bring mules and still win, but not everyone may want to bring mules in VD.

A lot of times, "effort" is more than the drop rate and the actual time it takes to do something, but also the difficulty to get right jobs and the risk to fail a run. I'm pretty sure a lot of ppl would rather bring 3 mules to VE and kill it in 5 min with 100% win rate, and do it 100 times, get 3 chances to lot on an item by lotting on mules, instead of spending 1hr to make PLD+RNG pt and take risks with PUG and lot against 5 person.