Feedback related to Vana'Bout

[Vargasfinio]

What do you like or dislike about the latest Vana'Bout event?
The idea of a "competition" to encourage engagement is a great idea. Giving players both personal goals and community goals can encourage players to take part. Earning points by setting RoEs is a good system.
I would love to see a future VanaBout that isn't tied to "you have to log in every day and grind objectives", though.


How do you feel about the objectives and their difficulty?
Given the content required (Ambuscade), the objectives are too strict and actually interfere with regular Ambuscade runs. Keep in mind that most players only do a few Ambuscades every week, so having to do at least 3 very specific runs every day doesn't make a lot of sense. While having varied objectives is an ok idea as it incentivizes having multiple jobs, the reality is that most players focus on one or two specific jobs and may not be able to complete all of the objectives.
The vast majority of points comes from grinding Ambuscade daily - and this just isn't how players these days actually play the game.


What changes, if any, would you like for future iterations of Vana'Bout?
The first major change would be the rewards. The rewards are, quite frankly, awful for the amount of time you need to spend to get them. I actually don't mind the Etheral Weapons for a low-tier reward, but the Silver and Gold tiers really don't incentivize players to get them. The only real standout award is the 100 Deeds, (at Silver) but all three tiers should have had multiple choices of similar value to really make the event worth it. Also, the reward for reaching the community goal is...you get to do more Ambuscade with free Seals next month. It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Tying VanaBout to a daily RoEs also seems like a poor choice. Yes, you want players to log in every day but a large portion of your current playerbase only logs in maybe once or twice a week and that type of player should be able to take part in the event too.

One final note: The initial estimate of global points to achieve was WAY off, I have no idea where the number came from but it really speaks to the fact that SE has difficulty understanding just who and how many players actually play the game at this point. Yes, it is a 21 year old game, but getting active player counts shouldn't be too difficult. Even with the 75% reduced goal the playerbase still might not hit it as the rewards vs the time investment aren't really worth it.
I would like to see other VanaBouts that focus on content that doesn't need to be grinded every day.

[Sirmarki]

I like the addition of sparks rewards and RoE's. However (as mentioned before)... Can the ability to store more sparks be implemented (similar to pot pourri as an example)?

The spending cap is there for a reason and should remain, but storing them would be nice... There are so many ways to gain sparks now, that most get wasted because there is no where to store them.

[Fawkes]

What do you like or dislike about the latest Vana'Bout event?
I appreciate that it's Ambuscade, if it were all objectives for Sortie or whatever I wouldn't be able to do them.

How do you feel about the objectives and their difficulty?
It's a little weird that the objectives are limited. For an event that's about everyone hitting a goal by filling a progress bar, there's no way to pick up slack. It seems likely some people will get fatigued and stop, or stop because the holidays, or hit their personal goal of 900 plaudits for the 100 deeds and stop. If that happened there wouldn't be anything the remaining players could do to make up for it. And I just started doing it yesterday, so I've already missed days and there's nothing I can do to make it up. It would make more sense to have repeatable objectives so that overachieving players could do more than their share, and everyone could grind at their own pace.

What changes, if any, would you like for future iterations of Vana'Bout?
Either change the daily objectives into repeatable objectives or add additional repeatable objectives.

[Ferth]

It's been said, but I'm going to repeat it. Dailies are bad. Stop piling daily content on to us. I already am not doing sortie every day because I hate it, adding this didn't make me any more inclined to log in.

I appreciate that ROE was implemented in a very clunky old game to try and streamline some things, but ROE is also old and clunky now. I don't even want to assign 9 dailies every day, let alone DO 9 dailies every day. If you are going to make these events use ROE they need to use the same system as the limited time challenge ROE that is always active and changes every 4 hours, have it activate for everyone automatically during the event and reactivate at whatever arbitrary intervals you decide on, this way it also won't count toward the already very limited ROE cap.

In a game with a monthly sub, trying to make this content done via limited daily events is unnecessary. Make the quests repeatable, if someone wants to crank out their 1300 in one day, let em. If they want to keep cranking out more until the event ends, let em.

The rewards are awful. They just are. There is no carrot here. Give us something cool to get or don't be surprised when we choose not to waste our time.

The initial community goal was laughably wrong and blaming it on "congestion" is embarrassing. I sincerely hope the dev team (?) takes this opportunity to reflect on how out of touch they are with the community and perhaps reevaluate some of the other egregious decisions they've been making recently.

[Shinook]

The idea behind this was good, I like the generic idea, but the implementation from start to finish is really poor.

For starters, the timing was awful for an event that requires daily participation. Forgetting the problems with daily content for a moment, you are running this across multiple major holidays where people are going to be out of town, away from their computer, with family, or doing other things. Reaching gold tier and requiring daily participation across this season really wasn't a good idea.

The initial objective of ~16m was absurdly out of touch. Someone did the math and it would require around 10,000 people to do it daily and reach gold tier, that's just not going to happen. The current goal is more reasonable, but I think you would struggle even with better rewards to find 10,000 people willing to participate daily, again considering the holidays especially, but also considering the rewards and general state of the playerbase right now.

The RoEs themselves are OK. I am not as irritated about the objectives themselves as some, but I would prefer to see options that cater to a more endgame focused crowd, like Sortie or Odyssey. I realize this is exclusionary but Ambu doesn't do much for the endgame crowd and I think we'd rather focus our time doing things that are engaging or interesting, not fairly trivial or mundane daily events. This also plays into the rewards, because for endgame players the time spent doing this would be better off just farming the same reward while doing something more engaging or interesting. I also think there are too many, cut it down to 3-4 daily and make them more challenging or engaging (note: doing something 50 times is not challenging or engaging, I mean make the objectives actually require some engagement and thought). Ideally, this wouldn't even be daily, maybe weekly or something that you can stack up if you can't do it one day, but still I'd prefer to see fewer.

The overall campaign reward itself was pretty poor, as well. The choice of Ambuscade makes some sense as it caters to lower level characters, but most endgame players would just run V1VD a few times rather than spend the time to do objectives and try to reach the goal. It really just isn't worth our time. There is no real motivation to reach the goal across servers for the people who are capable of doing this solo. I think for campaign rewards, you'd get a better response if you ran a combined EP/CP/Exp campaign, this can help the entirety of the playerbase including endgame players. I'd like to see Galli and Odyssey (RP and/or segments), both of which I think would benefit most of the player base. It'd also be ok to rotate if you plan on doing this every so often, run it with Ambu as a campaign to help lower level characters, then a month or two later run one that caters to endgame characters. The other problem is that we don't know if this reward is even going to be reachable or interesting, because Ambuscade runs in rotations with some of them being really annoying or not clearable readily. For example, what if we put all this work into making progress and hitting the objective, only to find out you run the Sahagin ambu next month and no one can take advantage of the campaign? Finally, one single boost to hallmarks/gallantry really isn't that appealing to endgame players especially daily, basically you are running a daily event that must be done on a day to day basis, only to unlock a campaign that....also must be done daily to take advantage of. That is too much daily and not enough opportunities for us to participate or take advantage of the reward if we have to do it every day.

As a rule in the game, you really need to back off forcing people to do things daily, we aren't 17 years old anymore. Most of us have jobs, families, and other commitments, we can't login every day and the time we do have, we'd rather spend doing interesting and engaging things, which these goals aren't, and th rewards aren't worth the time. I think the devs need to take an honest step back when they add content and look at their own lives in light of what they are adding, asking themselves when they go home from work: "Would I want to spend my limited free time doing this?", because that's the question the playerbase asks whenever stuff like this comes out and it feels like no one at SE is asking themselves that question..

The individual rewards leave a lot to be desired. Basically the only rewards worth doing are arguably the Aby Kupon, which could be obtained in less time anyway but does have some value, and the Deeds if you slacked on Deeds or are a little behind. Everything else is just not worth the effort. The gold tier rewards in particular are really poor, I am not logging in daily to spend 20-30min doing mind numbing RoEs across major holidays just to get 10k EP, I could earn that in under 20 minutes with friends in a single day. These rewards do not appeal in any way or form to endgame or experienced players or basically anyone who is "finished" with the critical parts of Ambu.

I really like this as a general idea. I think it has potential to bring engagement to content that is otherwise overlooked or that needs a bit of a boost, but you need to recognize that players are not in high school anymore and logging in daily especially during holidays is really just not feasible for most people, even if the rewards were worth it. Make the rewards worth it, give us a margin of error or make it not tied to dailies, and people will do it. Otherwise, you are just wasting resources on implementing game systems that people dislike.

Also, please, no more lockstyle rewards. There are enough as is. Give us things we can actually play with.

Possibly community-wide campaign ideas: EP/CP/Exp boost (Ep being the critical addition), Gallimaufry campaign, Segment campaign, Odyssey RP campaign, Sortie earring box campaign (boost # of +1s), subjob unlock in Odyssey Gaol during campaign, Sortie movement speed boost

Individual rewards: +1 cases, Ody RP vouchers, EP boost rings/items, Pre-charged Mog Amplifiers for Ody, Amplifier-type effect for Sortie

I can't do Vana'Bout as a new player which is a huge disappointment. There should have been more options for newer players to take part. I came back to enjoy the world I loved in the 2000's and see the stories. I did not come back to rush to max level and grind one piece of content.

Just something to consider: reaching max level doesn't really put you at endgame any longer, it's more like reaching lvl18 in 75 cap. There is a lot of progression involving gear, earning RP, and such after lvl99 that happens. Most of the more interesting content starts at level cap, which is a little different than it was during 75-cap. I wouldn't hesitate to push to 99 as quickly as you can, there is a lot going on after that, including Ambuscade. So while I get your frustration, expecting new content to cater to players below level cap isn't really reasonable considering the majority of the player base has at least one 99.

[Zhronne]

Greeting adventurers,

We'd like to hear about your experiences with Vana'Bout! We’ll be sharing this information with the Development team for their consideration.

1. What do you like or dislike about the latest Vana'Bout event?
2. How do you feel about the objectives and their difficulty?
3. What changes, if any, would you like for future iterations of Vana'Bout?

* Please follow all forum guidelines and only post feedback related to Vana'Bout in this thread.
* Before posting your feedback, please read through the recent replies and “Like!” any posts that you agree with, rather than create a new post with the same opinion. This helps us get a better view of how many people agree with a certain opinion.

1) The rewards are not strong enough to give players motivation. I'm not talking much about the player-specific rewards that you can choose from the three tiers, but more about the "collective" rewards. Could use more relevant stuff like unlocking special Trusts for a month, boosting Gallimaufry rewards next month, boosting Exemplar Points rewards next month and so on

2) Objectives were cool and fun

3) In addition to the daily and monthly objectives I would add weekly objectives too, and I would give more space for people to be allowed to miss a couple of days of objectives, but still manage to reach the top rewards tier. Feeling like you "have" to do every single day or you're not gonna make it is a stressing pressure on your shoulder and takes part of the fun away from this.

[ManaKing]

1. What do you like or dislike about the latest Vana'Bout event?

I like that you're doing anything at all with the game. Everyone seems happy about the ability to catch up on deeds. Giving us something to work on casually is a good idea, in theory.

I dislike that it doesn't encourage or introduce alliance content since that seems like it would bolster the community aspect of the event.

I dislike that it doesn't address the fundamental pain points of your endgame. There is nothing to use Prime Weapons on that is new and exemplar points are not something you can casually accumulate while doing adventurer campaign events.

I dislike that the Overall rewards for doing a bunch of ambuscade is to be able to do more ambuscade. That's just not an adventurer campaign I want being extended. There are limits to how many capes you can make so it's overkill.


2. How do you feel about the objectives and their difficulty?

The objectives are poorly planned and executed. They created artificial congestion on your servers which lowers the quality of the gameplay experience for your customers. Don't link them to anything that has a solo queue unless you want that queue to become terrible and defeat the purpose of an event that was designed to be enjoyable and rewarding for the community. Womp womp.

These are daily objectives, which is hated by your older/aging community. Sortie is daily, odyssey is daily, this new community feature is daily. People want to log in on the weekends and play for several hours, maybe the whole day, and actually accomplish something. You continue to deny a good game play experience with decisions that cheapen the customer service aspect of your game and the value of your subscription. If you include any kind of daily lock out for ANY content, you should understand that people don't have flexible schedules to play every day. Those daily activities should be weighted much less than weekly or monthly objectives if you want people to continue to want to play. Which we actually do.

If someone has limited daily play time (most of your community), why would they prioritize these dailies instead of all the other dailies you've already packed into the game that have rewards that we will miss out on if we don't do them?

These objectives were clearly created with data you had for ambuscade. A large portion of your ambuscade is done by bots. Those bots don't care about doing community events. Your target numbers being completely unrealistic confirms this. Please take a closer look at your game so you can make choices that that positively grow your actual player community and the longevity of the game.


The difficulty is fine. Difficulty has never been an obstacle for this community. This is not where you are failing to motivate people.

3. What changes, if any, would you like for future iterations of Vana'Bout?

Eliminate the required daily aspect of the system. Weekly and Round RoEs only. You have too many other events that have to be done daily. We can do Vana'Bout on the weekends after we've run through all the dailies we can do. That way the adventure campaigns add value to our play time instead of detracting from it by making us choose between forced daily login ins that we might not be able to do or missing out on rewards.

Give us a reason to party up and do stuff together. The larger the party, the more the community building aspect of this will be felt. Pick things that allow for more than a single party and rotate them monthly with an associated adventurer campaign to enhance as the flex goal.

Past Campaign is perfect for this with reworks. You can leave the original zones untouched for returning/new players and as you get close to the throne room or beastman strongholds, the difficulty ramps up significantly to iLevel to encourage people to band together. These zones give experience points, capacity points, and exemplar points for evaluation rewards to incentivize all players to want to participate and keep them cleared. The Union registration process is eliminated during this month and everyone is automatically registered to the Vana'Bout Union so everyone is eligible for potential coffer spoils at the end of a battle without going through the extra tedious menu steps to get rewards. Make the experience/capacity/exemplar points from evaluations increase with party size to encourage parties and alliances. Even if they are just superfluous for the sake of rewards, it will still encourage socialization and community building.

The weekly rewards for Vana'Bout would be to just open X amount of Union coffers in a week. When you get done with that RoE another identical RoE opens up after it so that you don't have to take up more than 1 RoE slot with weekly RoEs. There are 7 of these RoEs, when you're done with your weekly RoEs you are capped on Plaudits just like the current system and will get more once the week rolls. Less clutter for players and less maintenance for devs coming up with unique objectives. Save that for the Round Objectives.

The Round Objectives can be anything but I wouldn't want more than the 5 we have right now for RoE space concerns. They don't even have to be tied to the current event.

The overall goals being met means people can do campaign ops for longer if they need materials for making weapons and a larger window for campaign battles that rewards capacity and exemplar points. Make sure both are lucrative enough to be a reward that people will want to do them and you will address anyone that plays this game.

The additional benefits of this approach are: Valaineral and Noillurie will be readily available for new players going through the Voracious Resurgence, the Stronghold Campaign OPs (Splitting Heirs, Cracking Shells, Plucking Wings, and Fiat Lux) will actually be available on the month of their bonus, there is no experience loss penalty on death when under the Allied Tag effect so people can bring whatever jobs they want, you can play with campaign weapon skills on something relevant, normal leveling zones will be less congested, and there is no queue to clog up.

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Dust off Voidwatch. You can do a lot with Voidwatch because it still has good rewards. The only thing you have avoid is clogging up the spawn points by making some of them much more lucrative than others. The weekly objectives are open any voidwatch coffer X times. If a voidwatch location doesn't drop plates/cinders/dross, then during the campaign, they drop plates at the same rate as a plate only mob like Akvan. That's what makes the adventure campaign worth trying to get to the extended goal. To add iLevel adjustments for more geared players, do it to Aht Urhgan and Tavnazia encounters so that it won't get in the way of new players using the event to fast track the story. Include capacity and exemplar points to the voidwatch coffers in that area that scale up with the size of the party/alliance. That is 10 mobs with 3 locations each that can accommodate 18 people, so 540 spots. That's probably larger than some servers total population at this point.

If you need to add an Alliance Level Primer so you can have an Ambuscade for the month, go for it. Dynamis D and Omen both accommodate alliances already and have adventurer campaigns to enhance. Just make sure you add enhanced Exemplar points to the adventurer campaign event and you'll make everyone happy.


All of the Alliance content I'm suggesting shouldn't be harder than Dynamis D or Omen is currently. The point is to let people casually work together to accomplish a goal and encourage people to group up for the rewards and avoid congestion in instances from solo queues.

I envisioned Vana'Bout as something like an updated besieged that did something like rebuilding Ishgard from FFXIV. A live event that we could enjoy as a community and see some kind of tangible progress or rewards. To me, the reward is being able to play the events that are put on adventurer campaigns more similar to how we used to when the game supported alliances and the social rewards that came with it.

[Kylos]

Have no issues with the daily objectives (although they are not "fun"), however, when you look at the rewards, the only truly unique reward is the 100 Deeds. Everything else can be found easier with less effort, either by doing the content, or by paying for it on the Auction House. Some will get the 100 Deeds and not bother with the rest.

Having this tied to an annoying fight like the Soulflayer/Imps makes it a chore for anyone wanting to get Hallmarks/Gallantry for their monthly income. It seems mostly catered to those who solo the Flan on Very Easy difficulty. Teaming up should be heavily encouraged in any newly introduced content, and defeating higher difficulties should be more rewarding. Also, the objectives should line up with the fight you are doing. How many groups are using Ice/Thunder magic with Magic Bursts this month? I would say very few.

And then there is the monthly goal reward, which in itself is underwhelming. It basically offers you a free Abdhaljs Seal each day, but you then feel obligated to do more Ambuscade. Players didn't need more encouragement to do Ambuscade. It is already well-established as the most rewarding content in the game.

Instead, Vana'bout should be about encouraging players to do other, lesser-done content with significant rewards for doing so. To provide an example, you could tie a month to the Odin/Alexander/Cait Sith/Lilith HTMBs, and give players who already have all the equipment, the motivation to do it in a party of six. This may encourage players to bring others who have yet to do this content, so they can pick up the equipment, while the veterans accumulate plaudits for unique rewards. You could do the same with Dynamis-D. Give significant rewards for clearing wave 1, 2, and 3 bosses in an alliance.

This content feels poorly implemented. Square Enix should have gathered more information from its player base before introducing something like this. It felt like the developers don't really understand how its players view the game in 2023. However, SE has a track record of this. Look at what happened to Unity and the Assist chat channels. Nobody uses them, because it makes little sense to use them when we have linkshells. Get people who actually play this game onboard, and this could end up being a nice addition to the monthly campaigns.

PS: If you are going to add lockstyle rewards, make sure those lockstyles look BEAUTIFUL! Nobody cares for Ethereal Weapons because they look terrible. Otherwise, I'd rather you added some sidegrade equipment that either helps returning players to reach endgame, or are proper choices for veteran players in some scenarios, without blatantly killing off other equipment.

Look at what players are using for spells like Stoneskin and think... could we replace Shedir Seraweels/Haven Hose with something stronger? We shouldn't still be using Limbus gear for anything. There are so many ways to make new equipment interesting without churning out a bunch of red models of old weapons, and then calling them "Ethereal"... like that somehow makes them worthy of wasting time for.

[Rinjo]

What do you like or dislike about the latest Vana'Bout event?

I like that it gives players that aren't doing sortie and odyssey something more to do. I find it to be OK in pace. Players that are maxpilled are probably not going to benefit from this system. Ambuscade queue can be long at times.

How do you feel about the objectives and their difficulty?

I have been able to complete all daily objectives on a red mage with out any challenge in DynaD/Pre-Odyssey gear on Normal Mode. I would like to see objectives outside of ambuscade and higher-tier difficulty objectives for more reward.

What changes, if any, would you like for future iterations of Vana'Bout?

More objectives in other battle systems, while remaining solo/low man. Offer slightly better rewards from moogle and or reduce the cost. Level 99 Campaign Battles.

[ManaKing]

Feedback from people who can't post on the official forums:

It's simple, they design the content for a party of 6 like usual, but then just allow up to 18 to enter if they all meet the entry qualifications.

And that's it, no need to screw with rewards or scaling or anything to discourage or punish friends casually hanging out.

If they made Sortie 18 man I’d resub.

I get why Ody is 6 man. That’s fine. Albeit 18man Mboze would be hilarious.

Feel free to delete if this isn't allowed.