Hopefully this is the case since they mentioned second coil by name.
I wish more people agreed that not every part of the game is for everyone. Competitive drive is part of what makes extreme challenges fun. Doing something that is HARD. It is part of what drives the "Hard Core Raids". If something is to hard for you, strive to get better through practice and research or accept that it is not something that you want to invest the time in. Don't ask for it to be easier. Same goes for other play styles. If something is to grindy for you, devote the time to grind it out or accept that it is not something that you want to invest time in. Don't ask for it to be made faster.
Players do not HAVE to complete savage. Players do not HAVE to get relics.
As long as the story is available to all players, the community should accept that in a multi-player game there are different play styles and values of the players. Find what you enjoy and want to invest time in.
Crafted items per se are not the problem, the problem was shoehorning in the specialization. I'm sure the price of the items will go down over time, but it's pretty disheartening when crafters are bragging about making 40+ million gil in profit off relic items alreadyQuote:
Anima weapons involve more challenging content and to not tie it to randomness or crafted items
Blame people who buy the items without actually needing them. I seriously doubt they (everyone who buys the crafted shit) got their 80 tokens already, why would they need the crafted items to go with it? I'm personally waiting last minute. And not making profit off of it, I don't like prices that keep going down down down every single minute. I only craft stable stuff.Quote:
but it's pretty disheartening when crafters are bragging about making 40+ million gil in profit off relic items already
Answered your own question. What percentage is that of the actual playerbase again? We only have the "completed Gordias" data from the player census that ended in September, and ofc we don't have an actual "regular players" number to compare it to, but let's be generous and let's say that's those "end game players" come up to a total of 20%.
And let's be a more precise, shall we? I said it was funny for them to have started the entire live letter (note all the rest of the potential content in it) with this - I said the number of players this actually affects is "practically" insignificant. Ie. not completely, but certainly to a level where it's surprising to give so much focus to this issue, making it an opener for a several hour long "performance". 80% vs 20%? Yeah.
Of course, going on, and seeing how both the entire Diadem chaos and the Anima Weapon chaos was caused by this very same issue - well, yeah, ok, a bit more understandable of an introduction. At the same time though, it definitely sheds much more light on the underlying issue: trying to cater for that top 20% way too much and way too hard. This basically said where it had led: two major content pieces, content that the other 80% would more likely be doing, ending up in their own respective pieces of mess.
Sure, if the top-tier hardcore endgame raid scene was more relevant, more significant, just generally more, I would understand that. But as it is, with hearing things like "the game has no raid content" and "these aren't raids anyway" and the like, on a pretty much regular basis? I'm not so sure so much special attention and care to it is the best way to go.
looking forward to 3.2 tbh , and nothing new about the relic always been like this even in ARR , i never understood the whining cause the major problem with Zodiac (at least to me) the RNG , anima so far RNG is very minimum (the crystals from fates drop rate is fair)
Basically what I read from that for the relic was,
"Suck it up or get Good"
My response, carry on implementing tedious and copy pasted quests. The numbers will start to show when people unsub from pure boredom.
This has been the relic weapons ALWAYS. With the exception of the very first quest in 2.xx, which I actually just finished, even though I subbed after 3.0 came out - just for funs and glam. It was alright, however the issue wasn't the grind, it was that Titan HM was a GATE back then. They moved away from that because relics should be nice weapons for those that don't want to raid hard content. Take that away, and I see 1.Atma 2.Light 3.Alexandrite 4.Tomestones. Read: Grind, grind, grind and more grind. At least now there's less RNG (although they did add specialty crafts, so meh YMMV)
If it is 5% or 20%, there are still a lot of players who care deeply about content such as this and yes SE needs to address it. It is the make or break for a lot of people, and right now, it has gone in the favor of break. Just because not the mass majority do it does not make it any less important. When people are quitting the game over it or transferring worlds for other ones, then those servers become deserted. Even on Hyperion, several well known and great server first groups either disbanded or jumped servers. Even world first groups have disbanded due to lack of interest because SE can't balance raiding content worth a damn.
So yes, this is an issue on many levels and it was great that he addressed it at the beginning. You look at numbers and charts, but not how something not balanced like raids affects the entire game as a whole.
Honestly, I don't like the nerfs. What's the point of my current grind if you're nerfing Endgame content.
I don't understand how this is an argument, of course one's iLv. alone is not going to be enough to down a high-end raid. Tbh I see "HC" players all the time that don't even know what a DoT is, so to hear this invalid argument makes me worry about FFXIV in that if people just complain enough are the producers just going to pander and pander until all we have is a game that requires no effort at all?
I don't want to beat a raid and say to myself, "That wasn't so bad." That's just awful. I want to spend 3 whole days on it about to punch through my monitor, yelling, "VICTORY!" with my neighbors calling the cops saying I'm killing someone. I don't want a Tea Party.
Given the other experiences with raid content and missing most of alex savage, I'm not certain about giving it one more chance with Midas. I appreciate the answers, as a lot of people were looking for them.
Remember you are playing an MMO - which means time sinks. There is no getting around to that - the MMO genre is just that, a huge time-sink with sporadic awesome moments (when you kill a raid boss for the first time, when dopamine gets released in your body when your weapon drops, etc).
"Fun" is a very subjective thing, after all.
Many (most) people fail to realize that MMOs are not much different than gambling, just with a prettier dress. You do repetive stuff hoping to hit the jackpot. Except with Relics. With Relics the jackpot is guaranteed - you just have to feed the slot machine a lot of money before it happens.
I don't mind the grind. What I do mind is sending us back to do old content, over and over and over. They could have added a new fight much like Hydra and Chimera. But no. Let's just copy and paste and hand it out.
That will only get them so far. They really do need to think ahead. Only so long the average person can stomach the same garbage.
I'm happy with everything he said pretty much. His comments on Anima were essentially about what I expected, reiterating much of the same stuff he said back before we got Zodiac weapons to begin with. They should come as no surprise, as the structure is still successful even if not everyone likes it.
Looking forward to tackling Alexander: Midas, since I thought FCOB/SCOB were the sweet spot for me in terms of raiding.
Yea this is what I'm looking forward to the most as well.
I do have to wonder, though.. I mean aside from development time, I don't see why they couldn't still have a difficult savage version. It seems a little strange to have 2 existing savage content which are the hardest for their respective levels, then introduce a new savage that isn't as savage as the last 2. Just seems a little strange. They should make a normal, a "hard/extreme" version tuned like the old coils, and a savage for the really hardcore. They could release the savage after a little while just like with savage second coil.
They did a number of things well in the past and for whatever reason went away (for example the Gordias weapon should have been 215, like with the old coils, they acknowledge not doing so messed up the relic patch timing). So if you did something well and it works why change it? I understand innovation and keeping things fresh, but when it works don't change it. A boring example that comes to mind is a toothbrush, certainly there are a few fancy ones here and there, but they are still basically the same design after like 900 years lol
Just my $0.02 as someone who is still relatively new to this game and a casual, but has played many MMOs.
The biggest issues with the game
- It always seems to prioritize the animation of a spell or action over the actual action or spell itself, meaning that even instant actions will actually take some time (1s) to go through. This makes it difficult to sometimes chain spells rapidly. For example: as a summoner, I find I sometimes cannot just go Tri-disaster > Fester on my commands. Even though I've applied my DoTs, it takes the engine some time to figure out they are there.
- Pet AI is pretty wonky at times.
Other fixes/implements I hope come soon enough
- A button that lets you filter out low level quests from your map
- A different icon for spells that unlock dungeons - similar to how the icons for MSQ spells are different than side quest icons. Many dungeons are unlocked via side quests.
- A way to track dungeons you haven't unlocked - because again, it's a guessing game. I have to ask friends who've been playing the game for a bit about any new dungeons I may be missing. Ends up I have to fly across 5 continents and talk to 8 NPCs to unlock X dungeon. Had they not told me about the dungeon, I wouldn't even know it existed.
- More control over the UI - ability to change orientation of horizontal bars to vertical, and vice versa, same with pet bar. Ability to truncate the max buttons on a bar (instead of having unoccupied slots not show)
Oh and...
- Maybe trim down the quests from previous expansion, since there are, literally hundreds of quests at level 50 which are pretty obsolete at this point, and an endless/pointless grind. They include quests that can't be soloed (need a queue) and if you don't have people to run you through them you'll be in queues for days (literally). I know many new players who hit a frustration limit and stall/quit at 50.
- I don't raid on max difficulty but from what I've seen on twitch and youtube, raids are essentially just a DPS check where there is just 1 healer (who is also DPS-ing) and tanks in strength gear just to meet a numbers check.
Cheers.
The "time" factor of relics wouldn't be an issue if the content required was "fun".
/Unsubbed
Imma go have fun
Ok, that's great and all but will we have to beat Gordias (Savage) to do the new raid content?
It saddens me that he did not address the main issue , we want NEW content for relic not go back and carry people though old content! I wish the entire player base realized this. I refuse to carry anyone..so I ONLY do my relic stuff with FC members only. Imagine if no one did the old trials and stuff..how would new people progress? They would get frustrated and probably quit. Meh...need to find another way to entice people to do old content, not relic..which is a classic Final Fantasy item that is not meant to be gimp by any means.
Well, at least he said they read the feedback...hopefully they check this thread. NEW CONTENT PLEASE not old carry stuff ^^;
[QUOTE=Rynia;3494799]So Yoshi-P didn't address the real issue with relics at all, which is the question of why they were pushed back to 3.15.
<Insert what she said here from her post>
They didn't mess up...
<Insert post text here>
Relic should not be a lower level catch up weapon. They SHOULD take a long time to obtain. Basically all of your complaints make no sense.
WAR BiS is Anima. Nice job.Quote:
Will not be the strongest weapon at the same time as the rewards for clearing the hardest difficulty content.
You guys did do this correctly.Quote:
Clearing the hardest difficulty content will not require you to obtain Zodiac/Anima weapons.
Players were getting their Relics 2-3 days after release.Quote:
Creating these weapons will require you to put in effort over a longer period of time.
BTW, super stoked about the new Primals. Hearing that the guy who did ThEX and TEX doing the new one excites me. Although, I have enjoyed almost every single Primal fight (the music is always so GOOD!).
I totally understand the Alexader: Gordias Savage gearing situation is the reason for this "bind" that development had been put into. I did also think they probably could have raised the Gordian weapons to i215 in this anima patch but maybe that would upset the balance a little bit for this cycle. It's also good to hear that the Gobdip, normally "tomestone" weapon upgrade being the same ilvl as the raid weapon was also an issue, and honestly I liked how it was before with Second and Final Coil incentives of getting a weapon tome in the 2nd turns, and the upgrade catalyst in the 3rd & 4th. If they did that cycle we might have not had a larger A3S "wall" either. There was a gearing limit between A1S-A2S, then if RNG wasn't in your raid's favor at-all you probably had to spend 6 weeks of pages to get a real i210 upgrade for your job. So that added more gearing pressure for some.
As for the Anima, I get that it's supposed to be for the more casual crowd. But I also think there should be incentive for those who want to press ahead in the high-end raiding community. Like include Alexander: Gordias Savage Pages for part of the turn-in process. We are limited to one page a week anyway, but maybe something like 4 pages gives some items. Or perhaps add incentives for turning in Thordan, Bismarck, and Ravana Extreme tokens just as to the effect of Alexander: Gordias story mode. These extremes already are starving of more skilled players lately because most of us get what we want from the token system and call it a day. More incentives to press ahead with ALL content is where I think the development team can find a balance to satisfy both casual and hardcore crowds with this chain. I just think it's a bit short-handed to think "well 2.x primals were too hard for some, so we have to cut this out". Why not make it more of an incentive to tackle harder content?
No, i205 Codex of the Heavens from Thordan is pretty good too. It's a baby version of the i210 Gordian Codex with the same type of sub-stats.
Guys, guys...Mr. Yoshi.
Do you remember when you showed that presentation at E3 that was like a ARR development post-mortem, and one of those slides said something like "If it isn't fun, we're doing it wrong"?
Part of why the improvements you made to 1.X and the release of 2.0 were as successful as they were was because in those cases I believe you were making the game you wanted to play. With 3.0 for whatever reason you lost the plot, and you made it into a game that makes easy quick money. But that isn't sustainable, as has been proven by the plethora of MMORPGs out there that haven't been as successful as FFXIV thus far.
I suggest you take your roadmap for 3.0 and 4.0, chop them up into fine pieces, and examine each piece. Seriously ask yourself, "Is this fun? Is this something I would enjoy?" And if the answer is anything other than an enthusiastic "Yes," then trash it and figure out something better. And always remember: Quality Over Quantity.
For all those wanting "new" content for the Anima.
The only time unique content was added for the relic was the Chimera and Hydra. Which, compared to all the grinding for tomes/atmas/lights/alexandrite was probably one-tenth of one percent of the process of Zeta. Yoshi doesn't want trial gates anymore because the relic isn't intended to be difficult, and he said this and made good on in since Titan HM. Everything since was rehashed. If you had a problem with it then, fine, but don't expect it to suddenly be different now.
For those who will expect new content even though there is hardly any legitimate precedent for it, well, you're not getting it. Why? Because the new content takes development time and that time is doing toward the MSQ, no surprise. Resources are not unlimited and I think, given the choice between new MSQ and new relic storyline 99% of the playerbase would choose the former. Sorry
So why not utilize 3.x content rather than reusing 2.x content that doesn't need to be revitalized or doesn't give player interaction (2.0 hunts and beast tribes)? They put off the anima questline for so long, you'd think they have something to show for the 4+ months of development, or even planning. They've had plenty of development time and very little to show for it, it really drops my expections and hopes for what they've actually been doing behind-the-scenes.
Step 1 requires FATEs, but honestly this is something that should've been in since 3.0, and was delayed to 3.15 and seems incredibly out of place to reward i170
Step 2 has you going into 2.x dungeons, and the option to unsync is there, so a typical player isn't even going to use duty finder.
Step 3 has part of the steps (if you wanted to finish before 3.2 anyway with daily tasks) that requires you to do 2.x beast tribes, which is solo content and doesn't really make sense if they wanted to make it more lively. If anything, CT is in desperate need of attention and they completely opted out of that.
Simply admitting that you messed up and are trying to fix it is only a first step.
Alexander: While I disagree with some of your findings I do agree that the way loot was distributed/earned within Alexander Savage was a huge misstep.(Loot in Coil was much better handled). But this is not the only problem with Alexander Savage. Part of the drive to continue to work towards clearing all of the three Coil raids was that we wanted to see the story. By removing that driving factor by delivering the entire story in Normal mode and that story turning out to be completely uninteresting, AS failed. It became a boring brick wall that a great number of players gave up on. When you combine the fact that the Savage mode encounters were often times boring and unsurprising dps checks you end up with even the hardcore world first groups giving up on them before next tier shows up. If Savage had the same mentality to the encounters as (Hard) does with dungeons this would eliminate a lot of these feelings.
Diadem: With Diadem you failed in many ways. You failed because your insistence to not bring the Alliance UI into the open world. You failed because of your insistence to make the zone work for too many groups. You failed because of your insistence to make the content into a race to see how many you can kill before the timer is up. You failed because of your insistence to make even the Rank 3 enemies have too much HP that a single group could not kill them with a reasonable amount of time/effort. You failed because your continual insistence to look at the types of content FFXI gave us that worked and then implement modernized systems that would work in FFXIV. A lot of us had hoped that Diadem would end up being XIV's version of Tu'lia/Sky. Where we would have to find/farm/buy triggers to spawn high level enemies. Where a Free Company mattered more than it didn't. This was the content that was going to allow us to schedule FC events, bring in a full alliance of our FCmates, strategize and enjoy ourselves. What we got was Hunts 3.0 with randomized loot. The "points" style of obtaining loot is not a bad one. It has worked many times before. But 1) if you are going to give us points for loot, make them a currency. Inventory space is already a premium, stop giving me more tokens that have no reason to be tokens. If you are ARE going to do this, make them keyitems. 2) Give us actual gear from these tokens. How difficult would it have been to sell bronze, silver and gold boxes for 10, 25, 50 spoils that would have RNG rewards? How challenging would it have been to add actual armor sets with static stats and interesting skins in there? How about accessories at the very least? (Having only 2 sets of accessories available has been horrible since day 1, you knew that once and gave us Titan/Ifrit/Garuda extreme accessories back in the day, why did you stop?)
Anima Weapons: Lets just get this out in the open. I have only TWO problems with the Anima Weapons and their questlines. Let's get the smaller one out of the way first. 1) The final grind is far too much. I understand completely what you did and why you did it. but 20+4 items and their prices are entirely too much. The questline needs to be a bit arduous, but this one is far too much for something that is far too late to truly help the majority of players. 2) Well I just said it. Its far too late. Why do we even have Esoteric weapons? If the first Anima questline had been introduced with patch 3.05 we'd have all looked at it and been overjoyed. A mostly "Free" weapon that takes a large chunk of time and effort to complete for new players and a decent chunk of effort for returning players with a Zeta would have looked awesome to ALL players back in late August/early September. But now it falls flat. If the second part of the weapon was added with 3.1 even in its current form, there would be a lot less backlash to its grind. Yes its a tad overboard on the time/effort wheel, but if it was added in November, and not late December a lot more people would be looking at it as a viable way to get ahead. As it is now, we are 6 weeks out from a patch (I sincerely hope its not much longer away than that) and the majority of your targeted playerbase for these weapons will not be completing them in that amount of time. These weapons should be there to help those players who want to work and clear content but need a little help in do so. That is NOT what these weapons will end up doing for most players and it needs to be completely reevaluated because of this.
The Void Ark: Going a long the same train of thought, Void Ark equipment (just like Labyrinth, ST, and WoD before it) should be designed to push those players a long that want to complete the current "raid" content but just don't have the level of skill to do so within the first 3-4 months of a raid tier. During its initial incarnation Crystal Tower did just that. The i80 gear helped a lot of players get over that threshold and at least into actually attempting Twintania if not defeating her outright. Since then, the difficulty of the raids has increased and the gear is no longer the push it needed to be. Since Labyrinth, you also implemented a manner to "upgrade" tomestone gear making the 24 man gear less and less valuable outside of alternate jobs and the super casual or new players. Making matters worse, the Diadem was added that may reward higher level gear than Void Ark. Even if you made the gear 205 in Diadem, it would still outshine Void Ark. To toss more fuel on the fire, we may earn upgrade tokens for tomestone gear through 24 man raids. Making the actual drops in the raids worth even less. So please do what you SHOULD have done since WoD and give us the option to upgrade the 24man drops to the same level as the tomestone gear can be upgraded to. It is the exact same time to gear ratio for gloves, belt, head and boots. It requires ~1 week to earn these via tomestones and 1 week to obtain them from the 24man.
New Content/New Types of Content: We want content. Diadem was a failed experiment but at its core it was a good idea. As a former FFXI player I can't help but to look at all the very "cheap" ways that team created content. BCNM/KSNMs were the cheapest of content but also some of the content that I participated in quite a great deal. Reusing battle arenas and existing monsters in unique manners a long with incentivizing the continual farming of outside content for tokens was a brilliant style of easy to produce content. So much so that the team regularly added more and more of them over the years with varying party sizes, difficulties and reward levels. Sky/Sea/etc was pseudo casual end game content for organized groups. We do NOT have this in XIV and we desperately need it. The only organized group content we have is made by the groups themselves. Its all fine and good that a select handful of FCs put on in game social events in Eorzea but we also need game content related events. We do not need a return of the "HNM Camping and Latency related Pull competitions" we had in XI but we definitely need some content each patch that is for the FC. Change Diadem into real 8-24 man content. Give us more 8-24 man content that we can organize within our FC (or multiple small FCs/Linkshells) that isn't a zerg fest and is rewarding. I miss this type of content.
One thing i don't understand:
If that is true, why some Anima waepons are BiS right now and better than Gordian weapons, like for Bard or Warrior, and other are even worse than upgraded Eso weapons, like for Ninja or Dragoon?Quote:
Similar to Zodiac weapons, Anima weapons are based on the following concepts.
- Will not be the strongest weapon at the same time as the rewards for clearing the hardest difficulty content.