Really SE 40+ kills and no drop?

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Originally Posted by Pyree

Adding something to challenge your skill makes something more difficult. Adding repetition of the same task for a longer period of time does not make it more difficult. How is doing the same task again and again more difficult?

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Clearly you don't get what I meant.

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Originally Posted by Pyree

Right, difficulty is subjective, but it is not in any way correlated to time spent as a lot of people seem to believe.

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Equates to saying: this cat is orange, but that's wrong because it's blue.

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Originally Posted by Nexus

So my LS and I just got done Farming the NM who gives the Copper Zahar'ak key and we got the keys but no drops of the Wristband for mages. We farmed it for over 5 hours and some 45-50 kills later still nothing. Explain how this drop rate is even fair or works cause im baffled as to how the hell you can get numerous keys and open the chest over and over and over and be rewarded with crap gear but not the rare item, yet a person can go in and in 5-10 mins get the drop? I believe the drop rate of this item as well as others from the chests in Strongholds needs to be looked at closely and adjusted because come on who wants to farm something for endless hours each night just to not get the item after 100 or more tries?

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It happens. Same thing happened to my LS at Sentinel Celata. 4+ hours with nothing to show for it. The next day though, we got 4 of them in less than three. Sometimes its just not in the cards.

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Originally Posted by Pyree

Right, difficulty is subjective, but it is not in any way correlated to time spent as a lot of people seem to believe.

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I'm not one to agree with Answa, but he's right this time.

Now in any other type of game, I would agree that time spent at repetitive tasks is often a poor instrument to mete out difficulty. It's usually a factor that adds frustration, boredom, tedium to what should be a fun moment. (It's not always true, sometimes it can be even be enjoyably relaxing, but in general, it's usually not welcome).

However, MMOs have the problem of content that runs out fast. At some point, if you want rare, valuable treasures in the game that can't be breezed through by just anyone, you're going to have to use time as a way to keep it that way (rare, that is).

Time is the ultimate difficulty in any MMO. How much you have to waste--I mean--spend is the principle currency of any hardcore player.

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Originally Posted by Answa

Clearly you don't get what I meant.



Equates to saying: this cat is orange, but that's wrong because it's blue.

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I think I see what you're saying but it seems to be a misunderstanding. I wasn't talking about the definition of difficulty being subjective, I was talking about how some things are more difficult for some people than they are for others, which is exactly what the person I was quoting meant when they said difficulty is subjective.

As in, even if it takes one person 5 kills to get an item and it takes another person 50 kills to get that item, it is not any more difficult for the second person, just more time consuming.

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Originally Posted by Pyree

As in, even if it takes one person 5 kills to get an item and it takes another person 50 kills to get that item, it is not any more difficult for the second person, just more time consuming.

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I think the real question is, did the person who took 50 kills to get an item find it difficult to watch someone else get it in 5 kills? ;)

The random rate at which these items drop adds to the motivation, and some will be lucky enough to end the grind early, but for the vast majority, it will be a test of patience. A difficult test of patience.

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Originally Posted by Blarp

It's not, but people like to think they got all that awesome gear and fancy jewelry by sheer skill when the reality is they just banged their head into some content until it fell out of the mobs pockets.

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Exactly but that is the nature of an MMO, put in the time and enjoy the rewards. Its a time sink plain and simple, I just hope the devs put in enough enjoyable content so that I can have fun along the way. Ifrit was near impossible w/o the current strats available, then its killed, then its farmable by top groups, then pickup groups begin getting wins. Just because the fight can be won easily doesn't mean you can't push yourself every time. The problem with scaling drops by just increasing difficulty is at some point everyone starts bitching and moaning about how its too hard, in order to make things rare u either make difficulty so insane very very few can clear it or you make drop rates low enough to balance the drops in the economy.

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Originally Posted by AmyRae

I'm not one to agree with Answa, but he's right this time.

Now in any other type of game, I would agree that time spent at repetitive tasks is often a poor instrument to mete out difficulty. It's usually a factor that adds frustration, boredom, tedium to what should be a fun moment. (It's not always true, sometimes it can be even be enjoyably relaxing, but in general, it's usually not welcome).

However, MMOs have the problem of content that runs out fast. At some point, if you want rare, valuable treasures in the game that can't be breezed through by just anyone, you're going to have to use time as a way to keep it that way (rare, that is).

Time is the ultimate difficulty in any MMO. How much you have to waste--I mean--spend is the principle currency of any hardcore player.

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I'm not one to normally disagree with you, but I will have to at this time. Strange world, isn't it? :)

My personal beef with XIV right now is the fact that everything in the game is a time sink (and other posters, I KNOW MMOs are all about time sinks, so cut that argument out please), but it's not masked enough to be an enjoyable timesink; as Pyree just said, just because other MMOs do it doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing to do. Certain tropes for MMOs are indeed good to follow - an Auction House, a PC-friendly UI, easily accessible place to store your loot, etc, but others IMO are not.

The game in its current state doesn't keep you mentally engaged enough to want to keep doing the same things over and over and over again. I know developers put time sinks in the game to keep you wanting to play on a daily basis and to keep you paying your subscription fee, but there is a very fine balance for that line. IMO you could say there's an almost diminishing returns formula to it where as you make a game more grindy, tedious, and boring to play - ESPECIALLY an MMO that you pay money on a monthly basis for - the more players you will lose. SE has to find that fine line where they can keep the content engaging yet not to a point where it drives away players.

Time can be the ultimate difficulty in an MMO, I agree, but it shouldn't be the only means of progression/limitation for an MMO. Blarp made a great suggestion a few posts back: I would agree with a form of loot reward where they make you "work" for the content through stuff that challenges your ability to play over the course of several days (or even weeks), rather than challenges your mental capacity to deal with a silly RNG - that is a great way to keep you engaged and playing without reducing the game down to a lottery roll.

You think thats bad?

I went 40+ KEYS and nothing from the CHEST.

You got it easy friend.

BCNMs anyone?

You spend time farming seals and then you had to go through a difficult fight for items.
You didn't always get what you want but you almost always came out with something good.

This is how things should be done.

IMO

The amount of times you need to kill Ifrit to get a weapon shouldn't exceed by far the amount of times the fight is actually fun and thrilling.

(Because otherwise it means the game requires a sacrifice in boredom to give you items and that's just wrong)

Lag issues aside (where I would get blown up half a second after cracks appeared, or I would get blown up even if I had moved half the map away from them) Ifrit stopped being a challenge the very first time we managed to form a retard-free party.

By the 5th win it was nothing but boring routine.

So you have a fight that isn't even fun or challenging and you need to do it 50+ times to get the couple of weapons you want.

The fact that you can't pick your weapon only makes it worse.


I understand that the game is broken now and SE is trying to keep us busy, but at least for me this actually makes me less likely to stay.

Grinding bosses is still grinding.


I think I would be (gladly) willing to do an average of 10 ifrits per weapon, if being allowed to pick which one I get. I would likely do twice the ifrits I need, helping people get their weapons and I wouldn't mind either.


As it is now:

-Beating ifrit means nothing. It becomes routine because you are forced to do it ridiculously way too many times if you want a reward.
-The OCD kind of player who MUST have all weapons and switch the lights on and off 10 times is having a blast, too bad they are a small minority.
-The rest of the players are getting bored of having to grind ifrit over and over and over, to the point where the boredom of farming is so huge that the weapon reward is just not worth it anymore. It's not that killing ifrit is hard, it's not fun anymore and there are other games, on and offline where you can do more interesting/thrilling/rewarding things.


Bottomline: SE's idea of retaining players by putting the carrot on a really really long stick is absolutely stupid, it's nothing but negative reinforcement that in your customers' brains translates to:

"Beating ifrit in FFXIV gets me dark matter 95% of the time, that's 0.71% chance of getting each weapon that I care about"

well with out this carrot on a stick you call it then you'd just have all the weapons and gear from stronghold and then what, you'd be done with the game. mmo's aren't meant for everyone to have every piece of gear and they not supposed to be done with ease, that is called paying for your gear and weapons...yes your monthly. cause you just loged in got everything and yaaay can go back to doing nothing again. while i agree with ifrit, the way it is done is stupid, add a really low drop rate is fine but make it so you can pass around the gear to each other so you get the ones you want. other then that low drop rate gear and weapons is fine to me and expect them in ffxiv.

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Originally Posted by weeble

well with out this carrot on a stick you call it then you'd just have all the weapons and gear from stronghold and then what, you'd be done with the game. mmo's aren't meant for everyone to have every piece of gear and they not supposed to be done with ease, that is called paying for your gear and weapons...yes your monthly. cause you just loged in got everything and yaaay can go back to doing nothing again. while i agree with the ifrit the way it is done is stupid, add a really low drop rate is fine but make it so you can pass around the gear to each other so you get the ones you want. other then that low drop rate gear and weapons is fine to me and expect them in ffxiv.

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i only skimmed over thru your fence of text

I never said the stick should be gone, only that progress shouldn't be fueled by boredom and routine, so the stick shouldn't be that long.

Also, the payment thing is a sorry excuse for grind based game design. I pay more for cable TV than the average MMO fee.

By your logic instead of having a few great shows with new episodes every 8th day, I would be better off watching an endless amount of crappy B movies, as long as they keep me occupied.


I won't pay an MMO fee so I can keep my ass glued to the PC more than it's healthy. I hope SE doesn't share your sad view that they can make up for quality content by simply cheating us into sinking endless hours into the game.

I won't pay for quantity, I value quality more.

tl,dr i want quality too, just think quantity too lol, even though the grind was long in ffxi it didn't really feel like that to me. i have no problem playing a mmo for 5years straight long as it's a great mmo, weather i get 1 class to max or 8 that is the question.

every zone felt different, each party could be different too. like back when blm's actually got invites to parties prior to auht urgan. i was starting skill chains with my blm with AM spells and macro's. can't get no funner then a blm landing am's on magic bursts. it got to point we was tossing in 2-3 blms. every zone never felt the same to me. it just needs to be done well, nice dynamic fights and always things that can go wrong. by time you got your first max in ffxi you actually felt like you did something cool, least that was my feelings to it. every step seemed very well done.

also a problem with mmo's is they keep trying to push everyone into the same areas, if they kept the exp gain bonus in every zone including new and old ...it would never get old, being able to do the new zones, and always be able to go back to old ones would be great. plus most levels had a few different places to go, another reason having a full server is great, having to try other things forcefully is kinda nice. that's just me though and the few lol, i know most don't want these things but they need to have them or it just ain't a mmo. i'll keep repeating this but i'm not paying for a low quality offline game gone online with a monthly.

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Originally Posted by Sephrick

Welcome to the next year of our lives. 1.x is nothing more than a pacifier to keep us occupied to v2.

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The dev team probably divided the active server population by a set number to produce an extremely low drop rate. It's made so that you will run it dozens of times. You could do that, or play an offline game that doesn't do that to you. LOL.

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Originally Posted by Ilean

IMO

The amount of times you need to kill Ifrit to get a weapon shouldn't exceed by far the amount of times the fight is actually fun and thrilling.

(Because otherwise it means the game requires a sacrifice in boredom to give you items and that's just wrong)

Lag issues aside (where I would get blown up half a second after cracks appeared, or I would get blown up even if I had moved half the map away from them) Ifrit stopped being a challenge the very first time we managed to form a retard-free party.

By the 5th win it was nothing but boring routine.

So you have a fight that isn't even fun or challenging and you need to do it 50+ times to get the couple of weapons you want.

The fact that you can't pick your weapon only makes it worse.


I understand that the game is broken now and SE is trying to keep us busy, but at least for me this actually makes me less likely to stay.

Grinding bosses is still grinding.


I think I would be (gladly) willing to do an average of 10 ifrits per weapon, if being allowed to pick which one I get. I would likely do twice the ifrits I need, helping people get their weapons and I wouldn't mind either.


As it is now:

-Beating ifrit means nothing. It becomes routine because you are forced to do it ridiculously way too many times if you want a reward.
-The OCD kind of player who MUST have all weapons and switch the lights on and off 10 times is having a blast, too bad they are a small minority.
-The rest of the players are getting bored of having to grind ifrit over and over and over, to the point where the boredom of farming is so huge that the weapon reward is just not worth it anymore. It's not that killing ifrit is hard, it's not fun anymore and there are other games, on and offline where you can do more interesting/thrilling/rewarding things.


Bottomline: SE's idea of retaining players by putting the carrot on a really really long stick is absolutely stupid, it's nothing but negative reinforcement that in your customers' brains translates to:

"Beating ifrit in FFXIV gets me dark matter 95% of the time, that's 0.71% chance of getting each weapon that I care about"

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Qft i would rather do a difficult raid that gives a guranteed drops then waste 2 years of my life getting AF2 body on my redmage.....

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Originally Posted by Jennestia

Difficulty is subjective. Some people breeze through Nightmare mode on the 3D Ys games like it's child plays, others can't even kill normal monsters in Bellistine castle or Clock Tower or Ruined city of Kishgal.

Rare items are items that aren't in surplus, if everyone has Sword of Reckoning that has an added effect of shattering the land, it's no longer rare, it's common. Time commitment being added to rare gear is what keeps it rare without dropping the drop rate to .01%, i.e Ragnarok Online cards.

If you have gear that will drop at 100% after a certain period of time, it's no longer rare, because after 3 kills it gets to 50+%, what's stopping 100s of others from killing 3 mobs and getting said rare gear?

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I spent 3 months farming wolves for the 4-slot weapon for Assassin, and then another month farming 4 Alligator cards ; ; SO MUCH FUN.

But yeah, the current drop rate is fine imo, rare items are rare because they're RARE. Considering the relatively medium/low difficulty of the current NMs in place, this rate is perfect. Although I don't think a drop rate should be as horrendous as to warrant 2 years+ of farming, I think a few months to even half a year of farming for an item is within reason, as long as it's worth it.

A new distribution system would be nice so as to minimize on mages getting Ifrit's Harpoon, or a gold coffer key dropping to someone who's AFK, etc. Excited about the planned need/greed-like system or something akin to it, which should hopefully rectify this issue.

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Originally Posted by Bahn

The game in its current state doesn't keep you mentally engaged enough to want to keep doing the same things over and over and over again. I know developers put time sinks in the game to keep you wanting to play on a daily basis and to keep you paying your subscription fee, but there is a very fine balance for that line. IMO you could say there's an almost diminishing returns formula to it where as you make a game more grindy, tedious, and boring to play - ESPECIALLY an MMO that you pay money on a monthly basis for - the more players you will lose. SE has to find that fine line where they can keep the content engaging yet not to a point where it drives away players.

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I don't know that we really disagree. What I was referring to was time as the "currency of hardcore players," who have lots to spend in exchange for a gaming advantage. However, there's the still a vast and broad network of casual players to consider, as well, and the producer certainly wants to attract as many as possible. Obviously, casual activities will have to be heavy on the engaging side and purposefully light on the time-consuming side.

But even rare items for casual players will inevitably require different type of time consumption, like the one you'd see with FFXI's Limbus. It would have to be something you can only participate once or twice a week as you slowly work your way towards the valuables over the course of weeks and months, but each event itself is engaging and challenging (yet not too long in a single sitting).

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Originally Posted by Ilean

i only skimmed over thru your fence of text

I never said the stick should be gone, only that progress shouldn't be fueled by boredom and routine, so the stick shouldn't be that long.

Also, the payment thing is a sorry excuse for grind based game design. I pay more for cable TV than the average MMO fee.

By your logic instead of having a few great shows with new episodes every 8th day, I would be better off watching an endless amount of crappy B movies, as long as they keep me occupied.


I won't pay an MMO fee so I can keep my ass glued to the PC more than it's healthy. I hope SE doesn't share your sad view that they can make up for quality content by simply cheating us into sinking endless hours into the game.

I won't pay for quantity, I value quality more.

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WHY bother with the genre then? There are plenty of multiplayer games that do not involve a monthly fee AND no time sinks.
Let me hear your STUPID excuse, please.

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Originally Posted by Nexus

So my LS and I just got done Farming the NM who gives the Copper Zahar'ak key and we got the keys but no drops of the Wristband for mages. We farmed it for over 5 hours and some 45-50 kills later still nothing. Explain how this drop rate is even fair or works cause im baffled as to how the hell you can get numerous keys and open the chest over and over and over and be rewarded with crap gear but not the rare item, yet a person can go in and in 5-10 mins get the drop? I believe the drop rate of this item as well as others from the chests in Strongholds needs to be looked at closely and adjusted because come on who wants to farm something for endless hours each night just to not get the item after 100 or more tries?

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We had a similar experience. One person in the LS wanted the sipahi turban so we were farming it. After about 30 keys we allowed someone else to try to get it, and he got it on the first try. Took another 20 to get the turban for the one that actually wanted it.

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Originally Posted by Lucifer

WHY bother with the genre then? There are plenty of multiplayer games that do not involve a monthly fee AND no time sinks.
Let me hear your STUPID excuse, please.

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Well someone woke up with a big stick up his ass, carrot included!

Why don't you go ahead and offer some good arguments to why the game should be a huge timesink? Because the fact that some other games are not timesinks doesn't seem good reason enough.

:)

Let's see here...
From a business perspective, a time sink would enable people to play this games for many months, thus increasing revenue.
From a players perspective, we have a sense of accomplishment, something that took us months to accomplish. Why else would we be paying a monthly fee on top of the initial cost of the game?
I am not surprised you have absolutely no excuse as to why you aren't playing another genre.

Anyway I don't think of them as just time sinks. I think of things like grinding as progression. You put in the time, you reap the rewards. Grinding isn't the only way of implementing progression however. There are many things SE can do and HAS done to avert this feeling.

Let rare drops be rare, I like the drop rate on these chests. It adds excitement when I try to double meld the sentinel's stuff.

Just about every MMO I've been playing people have been complaining about blowing through content and only having PvP left to do while waiting for new content.

Timesinks aren't bad, it's just people with no time to dedicate to MMOs complain about them, like "I only have 30 minutes - 5 hours a week to play I should have content for me", this is why we're able to blow through all content and have nothing to do but spam Rifts and PvP.

It's a complaint in almost all MMOs, because 9/10 if you've been playing long enough all you have left is PvP because you can do everything and obtain everything in short order then you have to sit and wait for more content that'll be completed in the matter of hours as well as loot pool depletion since apparently "timesinks" are a bad thing.

Timesinks are what gets you money if you don't utilize a cashshop. The longer you can keep players playing the more money you get over time, everyone wins, you also can't say "but if they make the content fun.." that would work if MMO players as of late didn't prove they don't care for fun, because "Just for fun content" will need rewards to be "worth doing."

I guess there is just no golden mean here, probably because our brains are wired completely different.

I've heard it all from the time-sinkers, I've been called a casual when I was beating Ninja Gaiden on the NES before most of them were born and still play as hard as RL allows it. I've been accused of wanting everything handed to me by lolteenagers, LOL, try that again once you have a full time job, are married with children and paying a mortgage.

I'm sure it's only about time until most MMO companies shift their revenue models away from entrapping people into doing the same thing over and over again so they feel the game is worth paying lol13 bucks a month, to actually providing thrilling and memorable content that doesn't need to make up for its shallowness with artificially inflated gameplay.

Anyway, I think I made my point in a previous post, you guys still haven't, "Because I feel more accomplished" isn't a valid point, some people feel accomplished when they self mutilate themselves.

So far it seems your only valid reason to demand timesink design is that you have way too much free time. Since people who don't need to work or who can live on a half time job are a minority, shouldn't SE be designing FFXIV's content with balanced human beings in mind?

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Originally Posted by Ilean

shouldn't SE be designing FFXIV's content with balanced human beings in mind?

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Yep, however the extremely casual base are being extremely loud when it comes to MMOs these days, which is exactly why MMOs as of late can be plowed through and people are stuck with nothing but PvP to fill the gaps.

You can't strike a balance when one side is demanding content be one way and any other way is deemed "archaic" or "stupid to do in 2011." See the problem? You can't get that balance when one side of the equation feels the another option "shouldn't be done because it's 2011."

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So far it seems your only valid reason to demand timesink design is that you have way too much free time.

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The problem with this is it's not "because you have too much free time", it's because logic dictates that if you design content for people with no time to dedicate to your MMO, those who simply MAY have enough time to dedicate to it will be the first ones out the door of your MMO when they complete everything in one or two sittings.

So if they're supposed to design the game to meet middleground, one side has to accept the other or the middleground can never be met, simply because anything done in the past is immediately dismissed.

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Originally Posted by Elexia

Yep, however the extremely casual base are being extremely loud when it comes to MMOs these days, which is exactly why MMOs as of late can be plowed through and people are stuck with nothing but PvP to fill the gaps.

You can't strike a balance when one side is demanding content be one way and any other way is deemed "archaic" or "stupid to do in 2011." See the problem? You can't get that balance when one side of the equation feels the another option "shouldn't be done because it's 2011."

The problem with this is it's not "because you have too much free time", it's because logic dictates that if you design content for people with no time to dedicate to your MMO, those who simply MAY have enough time to dedicate to it will be the first ones out the door of your MMO when they complete everything in one or two sittings.

So if they're supposed to design the game to meet middleground, one side has to accept the other or the middleground can never be met, simply because anything done in the past is immediately dismissed.

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A thousand times this.

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Originally Posted by Elexia

So if they're supposed to design the game to meet middleground, one side has to accept the other or the middleground can never be met, simply because anything done in the past is immediately dismissed.

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The way I see it it's one side demanding fun content, along with rewards that don't require that "your life suffer as a consequence" to obtain them.

The other side is asking that they lock as many people out as possible from said rewards, so they can feel special.


The only middle ground I can see is having no-life mode servers, DIFFICULTY STAYS THE SAME but drop rates are ifrit weapon low. That way hard-core* players can feel they are much better than regular players just because they spent 10x more time doing the exact same thing.

*There are no hard-core MMO players, they are only free-time-core.

i wouldnt mind paying for a game that i enjoy to play but when thinking about getting a weapon that hugely relies on a silly RNG. it really broaden the frustration about getting said item.i know timesinks there for a the sole reason is to play for years but it doesnt justify the issue. like pyree said adding timesinks in the game does not mean its a good thing.

anyone remembers how the endgame dynamis scene was like? people farming for dynamis for the rare of bills upgrading relics and getting AF2 for years that take the fun away from you. people often told me that selling those gils in RMT is alot more rewarding then upgrading relic,s.