July 2021 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

[Krogoth]

The cost per fight is immaterial to how many people are waiting for the fight. All that matters is how many fights it takes to get the rarest drop, and how long each fight lasts. Sure, you can change the cost to make it "balanced," whatever that means, but the key metric determining how long the arena stays congested is the total amount of time each person spends fighting.

[Jvd]

So, obviously there's a lot of upset among the player base.
Even if they had began this new HTMB with a queue, we'd still have complaints.

Luckily, there are still some useful drops to think about.
I was originally excited to see the new take on an ilvl belt or neck.
Can you imagine how those might've looked?
Knowing there are some good accessory options for ranged is nice.
So, it's a mixed bag through and through.

While we wait for them to make more tweaks and adjustments,
Indeed, there will be even more backlash.
No doubt that's it's impossible to please everyone.
Do you think they'll eventually just put a queue on it?
Or do you think we'll get to deal with overrun merit camps?
Who can say?
SE, we're not mad. Just dissapointed.

[Zehira]

And any comments they don't like will get 'cleared out' as well. lol

Not only comments they don't like. It's a long story though.

Welcome to the "official" forums. 0 w 0

[Zehira]

The communities of 14 are quite different. Kids these days don't like players who don't like 14 and those who play on a private server will never play retail unless something else they have been demanding for many years.

In Vana'diel, we have main character syndrome.

[Allreadyinuse]

Making it cost 30 merits solves nothing if the drop rate goes from 0.01% to 0.03%. JUST GIVE US THE PROC SYSTEM!!! if your goal is to make annoying content you done good here. No one cares about congestion if can finally get a drop besides like asura? who cares about asura!!!

[Alhanelem]

Making it cost 30 merits solves nothing if the drop rate goes from 0.01% to 0.03%. JUST GIVE US THE PROC SYSTEM!!! if your goal is to make annoying content you done good here. No one cares about congestion if can finally get a drop besides like asura? who cares about asura!!!

it would be more likely 1% to 3, 4%. and that means 1 in 100 vs one in 33 or 1 in 25. that's statistically a lot fewer runs of the battle.

[Coffeegood]

it would be more likely 1% to 3, 4%. and that means 1 in 100 vs one in 33 or 1 in 25. that's statistically a lot fewer runs of the battle.

after 14 VD's seen 5 ammo, 3 rings, cloak and Body armor people just need to get better and do higher difficulties, the fix is just pushing congestion to the few XP areas it is going to still be annoying, you won't win any medals for fighting this war just do the math padawan.

[Alhanelem]

after 14 VD's seen 5 ammo, 3 rings, cloak and Body armor people just need to get better and do higher difficulties, the fix is just pushing congestion to the few XP areas it is going to still be annoying, you won't win any medals for fighting this war just do the math padawan.

"few xp areas?" there's about a million places you can max out merits in a reasonable timeframe.

[Krogoth]

after 14 VD's seen 5 ammo, 3 rings, cloak and Body armor people just need to get better and do higher difficulties, the fix is just pushing congestion to the few XP areas it is going to still be annoying, you won't win any medals for fighting this war just do the math padawan.

It isn't a hard fight. People are already doing VD, and most aren't getting as many drops as you. But hey, let's take your results and run a back of the envelope estimate with them. It will be informative for all involved.

If we assume all people group up and git gud to the tune of only spending 5 minutes in the arena per fight, that means 12 fights per arena. This isn't exactly a great assumption, but it's our spherical cow for this scenario.
Each server has 3 arenas. That means 36 fights per server per hour.
You report 1 "rare drop" per 7 fights. 36 / 7 is slightly above 5. We'll round down because it makes the math easy.
That means 5 drops per server per hour under ideal conditions. By coincidence, 5 is how many different "rare drops" there are. For someone to "catch them all" they'll need this many drops.
So we can estimate that for every server, one person's worth of drops will take 1 hour.
Every 1000 active characters on the server will result in the arena being 100% full for 1000 hours. That's 41 days.
I don't know how many active characters there are (though square enix will be able to guess) but let's pull the number 3000 out of a hat for Asura.
To get 3000 people through the system will take 123 days, or 4 months. That's 4 months of the fight being 100% full every moment of every day of every week. Under ideal conditions, and assuming perfect coordination and cooperation.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't need to put in work to get rewards. But more work can only result in more rewards if there's room for more workers to work. When the arena is full, more effort cannot create more drops. And that is the issue.

(It's also an issue that the almighty devs have said they want to address. This post is largely for them, so they have the tools to think about how to actually address it.)

[Coffeegood]

It isn't a hard fight. People are already doing VD, and most aren't getting as many drops as you. But hey, let's take your results and run a back of the envelope estimate with them. It will be informative for all involved.

If we assume all people group up and git gud to the tune of only spending 5 minutes in the arena per fight, that means 12 fights per arena. This isn't exactly a great assumption, but it's our spherical cow for this scenario.
Each server has 3 arenas. That means 36 fights per server per hour.
You report 1 "rare drop" per 7 fights. 36 / 7 is slightly above 5. We'll round down because it makes the math easy.
That means 5 drops per server per hour under ideal conditions. By coincidence, 5 is how many different "rare drops" there are. For someone to "catch them all" they'll need this many drops.
So we can estimate that for every server, one person's worth of drops will take 1 hour.
Every 1000 active characters on the server will result in the arena being 100% full for 1000 hours. That's 41 days.
I don't know how many active characters there are (though square enix will be able to guess) but let's pull the number 3000 out of a hat for Asura.
To get 3000 people through the system will take 123 days, or 4 months. That's 4 months of the fight being 100% full every moment of every day of every week. Under ideal conditions, and assuming perfect coordination and cooperation.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't need to put in work to get rewards. But more work can only result in more rewards if there's room for more workers to work. When the arena is full, more effort cannot create more drops. And that is the issue.

(It's also an issue that the almighty devs have said they want to address. This post is largely for them, so they have the tools to think about how to actually address it.)

Theres alot of fake math in here considering fights take 2min 30 sec average with buff time included, also left out 3 earring drops too and I doubt that out of the 420 people online at any given time on Bismark that 1/2 of them would be able to do VD the fix is obviously just for Asura and the Massive 1.6k+ online presence lately on the most overcrowded server.