Feeling Defeated

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

While I think timers should remain as is (just because you can enter doesn't mean you must), I hardly disagree with encouraging people to do speedruns.

My first time in CC I was told to not fight anything. We basically just ran through. What is this? [run away!] Online? It's unbelieveable. It's called Disciple of War for a reason.

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I wholeheartedly agree with you. Yet, when i tell people this, they look at me funny. I WANT TO FIGHT. the only reason i log on is to FIGHT. (and occasionally craft and harvest) BUT MOSTLY FIGHT.

Why, thank you. ;)
And here I though I was the only one.
(oh and I mean strongly instead of hardly. I really need some coffee >.>')

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Originally Posted by Lumen

I have been playing FFXIV for over a year now and there has definitely been a lot of positive changes and I have had a lot of fun.

However, lately I have been feeling completely defeated while playing this game. The total reliance on random drops with ridiculously low drop rates for content such as Ifrit, Moogle, raids, coffers, HQ mats, materia, hamlet, and now apparently artifact weapons will require a combination of many of these, is completely un-motivating. (Yeah this is another one of those threads @_@; but this is a major problem in my opinion)

In all seriousness though, this is a game and should not cause the level of frustration, or perhaps even resentment it does. I'm not saying everything should be handed to us, but for some of us bad luck follows us around (I spent a month and a half doing Darkhold to get the Revolutionary Bliaud, done Ifrit probably 100 times and have only a single totem and a bow i cant use to show for it). This game will need to alienate it's players by defeating them in this manner.

Aside from raising drop rate and such, personally, I would like to see most things changed to system like Garuda drops implemented for applicable content. This would provide a sense of accomplishment as well as a motivation to continue doing the content. I would also like to see a system that would allow for trading in a drop you cant use, either to some one who can or to an npc in exchange for one you can. I realize I am reiterating a lot of things already said on the forums, so sorry about that, but I feel that this needs reiterating.

Thanks for your time reading my rant. :)

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Hmmm. I think there are more threads concerning this topic then actual Primal Drops. Could be wrong but not by much

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Originally Posted by Grimwald

They literally have to make this content last till 2.0, they are going to make it as grindy, and the most pain staking to keep you in the game as long as possible and to ensure continued subscriptions of players.

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Anyone else get seriously irked whenever they see someone say 'They are just making it a grind fest to keep people here and make us keep playing. all they want is our money.' you're still here. you clearly don't care. why bring it up? go do something else if you hate the grind. plenty of free games out there. go play league of legends. go play D3 or starcraft. Go play skyrim. go play vindictus, CoH, or any number of OTHER Games while you wait for 2.0.

Square Enix is a company. they have interests. they have share-holders. profits are a big concern for them. but whenever i see someone say that i dismiss anything and everything they have to say. you don't' know how a company really works. and you especially don't' know how a japanese company works. you have clear misconceptions of business and company culture. just stop talking about it. you don't' know. you CAN'T know what SE is thinking and what their business culture is like. you don't work for them. just let them do their thing. you dont' have to keep playing. you dont' like it walk the **** away.

now honestly. and i mean really use your brain here. How much money do you think SE made off of launch of FFXIV? if you think it was in the black, think again. their next mmo was anounced back in what? 2005? 6 years of development made up in launch? not likely. they were counting on making profit through subscriptions in the long run. now keep in mind there was an extended free period. Now, how much money do you think they've sank into keeping this game alive? How much easier would it have been to cut losses and kill the project before yoshi took over?

To put it into perspective. assuming a $15USD monthly subscription:

a software developer in Japan makes roughly 70k USD a year. that's ~5.8k a month. that means it takes almost 390 subscribers to pay for one developer.

now back in october if you looked at server loads you might see 40k people on during peak times. meaning you might have a total subscription base of 100k. i haven't looked at server log-ins recently. but i'm assuming its lower. let's say half of them stayed on board. 50k total subscribers. which means maybe 9 million over the course of a year. that's enough to support maybe 100 people + overhead if there's an average salary of 70k for all employees on this project. Square-Enix japan reports to have 3.2k employees as a comparison. I doubt they are making money. They might be breaking even on current costs. It's almost guaranteed they are not in the black on this. Keep in mind they need to support the development team, the live team, testers, Quality, servers, marketing, logistics, etc. etc.

So tell me again why they are so concerned about keeping a game alive that clearly costs them a ton of money and might break even a couple of years after 2.0 launch? because any logical businessman would have cut losses and pursued more lucrative projects long ago. hell, bare minimum shut the servers down. re purpose the current live team and just wait for 2.0 launch.

know what i think? I think it's because SE truly loves what they do. they take pride in it. they love their fans. they love their games and they want to make them the best they can be. they want us to enjoy it too. even if it means taking a loss. If i have to, heaven forbid, grind a little while because its the easiest thing to implement while they clean up problems, make better content, and make the game better than ever so i can really enjoy it. guess what? i'm not going to complain. because honestly FFXI was the same way. and i loved that game

END F***ING RANT

Because HAMLET DEFENSE will reset duh~

They should probably replace dark matter in chests with seals. So even if you don't get the ifrit/mog/garuda weapon, you get some seals you can use to buy some green GC stuff, or you can save them to work toward the 25k item for a relic. If you can get quite a bit of seals for an Ifrit weapon, why not give a fraction as a consolation prize when you don't get one?

Then you would be working toward something... Ranking up... Green GC weapons... 25k relic item, crafting/gathering scrolls, etc.

I mean, you can even buy dark matter 20 at a time with seals...

Agree with the OP, I duno how Yoshi-p thinks this kind of content will keep people playing long term.

Most will up sticks and leave out of pure frustration.

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Originally Posted by Lumen

I have been playing FFXIV for over a year now and there has definitely been a lot of positive changes and I have had a lot of fun.

However, lately I have been feeling completely defeated while playing this game. The total reliance on random drops with ridiculously low drop rates for content such as Ifrit, Moogle, raids, coffers, HQ mats, materia, hamlet, and now apparently artifact weapons will require a combination of many of these, is completely un-motivating. (Yeah this is another one of those threads @_@; but this is a major problem in my opinion)

In all seriousness though, this is a game and should not cause the level of frustration, or perhaps even resentment it does. I'm not saying everything should be handed to us, but for some of us bad luck follows us around (I spent a month and a half doing Darkhold to get the Revolutionary Bliaud, done Ifrit probably 100 times and have only a single totem and a bow i cant use to show for it). This game will need to alienate it's players by defeating them in this manner.

Aside from raising drop rate and such, personally, I would like to see most things changed to system like Garuda drops implemented for applicable content. This would provide a sense of accomplishment as well as a motivation to continue doing the content. I would also like to see a system that would allow for trading in a drop you cant use, either to some one who can or to an npc in exchange for one you can. I realize I am reiterating a lot of things already said on the forums, so sorry about that, but I feel that this needs reiterating.

Thanks for your time reading my rant. :)

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It really is a disturbing trend to see so much content reward players by dumb luck rather than skill and/or progression. Sure low drop rates can keep items rare but having that system for almost everything is disheartening.

I hope SE steers clear of this method for 2.0. They want to keep people playing, and this abuse of random number generator will just make players grow weary much sooner.

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Originally Posted by Onisake

Anyone else get seriously irked whenever they see someone say 'They are just making it a grind fest to keep people here and make us keep playing. all they want is our money.' you're still here. you clearly don't care. why bring it up? go do something else if you hate the grind. plenty of free games out there. go play league of legends. go play D3 or starcraft. Go play skyrim. go play vindictus, CoH, or any number of OTHER Games while you wait for 2.0.

Square Enix is a company. they have interests. they have share-holders. profits are a big concern for them. but whenever i see someone say that i dismiss anything and everything they have to say. you don't' know how a company really works. and you especially don't' know how a japanese company works. you have clear misconceptions of business and company culture. just stop talking about it. you don't' know. you CAN'T know what SE is thinking and what their business culture is like. you don't work for them. just let them do their thing. you dont' have to keep playing. you dont' like it walk the **** away.

now honestly. and i mean really use your brain here. How much money do you think SE made off of launch of FFXIV? if you think it was in the black, think again. their next mmo was anounced back in what? 2005? 6 years of development made up in launch? not likely. they were counting on making profit through subscriptions in the long run. now keep in mind there was an extended free period. Now, how much money do you think they've sank into keeping this game alive? How much easier would it have been to cut losses and kill the project before yoshi took over?

To put it into perspective. assuming a $15USD monthly subscription:

a software developer in Japan makes roughly 70k USD a year. that's ~5.8k a month. that means it takes almost 390 subscribers to pay for one developer.

now back in october if you looked at server loads you might see 40k people on during peak times. meaning you might have a total subscription base of 100k. i haven't looked at server log-ins recently. but i'm assuming its lower. let's say half of them stayed on board. 50k total subscribers. which means maybe 9 million over the course of a year. that's enough to support maybe 100 people + overhead if there's an average salary of 70k for all employees on this project. Square-Enix japan reports to have 3.2k employees as a comparison. I doubt they are making money. They might be breaking even on current costs. It's almost guaranteed they are not in the black on this. Keep in mind they need to support the development team, the live team, testers, Quality, servers, marketing, logistics, etc. etc.

So tell me again why they are so concerned about keeping a game alive that clearly costs them a ton of money and might break even a couple of years after 2.0 launch? because any logical businessman would have cut losses and pursued more lucrative projects long ago. hell, bare minimum shut the servers down. re purpose the current live team and just wait for 2.0 launch.

know what i think? I think it's because SE truly loves what they do. they take pride in it. they love their fans. they love their games and they want to make them the best they can be. they want us to enjoy it too. even if it means taking a loss. If i have to, heaven forbid, grind a little while because its the easiest thing to implement while they clean up problems, make better content, and make the game better than ever so i can really enjoy it. guess what? i'm not going to complain. because honestly FFXI was the same way. and i loved that game

END F***ING RANT

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tl;dr Just because they're using a bad system that encourages RNG over fun doesn't mean they're entitled "but we love you guys" excuse. If you don't tell a company that they're doing something wrong, they will continue to abuse the consumer. Why do you think we're even getting a 2.0 in the firstplace? Because we told them their game sucked, really, really badly. They need to constantly be reminded that they are still making mistakes, and that we want them to fix them. FFXIV itself hasn't been a profit for SE, and it won't be for awhile, even with 2.0 it'll take years for them to recover from this loss.

If you think the game is "fine" the way it is currently, and there is no way that they could improve on the current design, or the 2.0 design, you are apart of the problem and are an SEdrone.

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Originally Posted by Onisake

Anyone else get seriously irked whenever they see someone say 'They are just making it a grind fest to keep people here and make us keep playing. all they want is our money.' you're still here. you clearly don't care. why bring it up? go do something else if you hate the grind. plenty of free games out there. go play league of legends. go play D3 or starcraft. Go play skyrim. go play vindictus, CoH, or any number of OTHER Games while you wait for 2.0.

Square Enix is a company. they have interests. they have share-holders. profits are a big concern for them. but whenever i see someone say that i dismiss anything and everything they have to say. you don't' know how a company really works. and you especially don't' know how a japanese company works. you have clear misconceptions of business and company culture. just stop talking about it. you don't' know. you CAN'T know what SE is thinking and what their business culture is like. you don't work for them. just let them do their thing. you dont' have to keep playing. you dont' like it walk the **** away.

now honestly. and i mean really use your brain here. How much money do you think SE made off of launch of FFXIV? if you think it was in the black, think again. their next mmo was anounced back in what? 2005? 6 years of development made up in launch? not likely. they were counting on making profit through subscriptions in the long run. now keep in mind there was an extended free period. Now, how much money do you think they've sank into keeping this game alive? How much easier would it have been to cut losses and kill the project before yoshi took over?

To put it into perspective. assuming a $15USD monthly subscription:

a software developer in Japan makes roughly 70k USD a year. that's ~5.8k a month. that means it takes almost 390 subscribers to pay for one developer.

now back in october if you looked at server loads you might see 40k people on during peak times. meaning you might have a total subscription base of 100k. i haven't looked at server log-ins recently. but i'm assuming its lower. let's say half of them stayed on board. 50k total subscribers. which means maybe 9 million over the course of a year. that's enough to support maybe 100 people + overhead if there's an average salary of 70k for all employees on this project. Square-Enix japan reports to have 3.2k employees as a comparison. I doubt they are making money. They might be breaking even on current costs. It's almost guaranteed they are not in the black on this. Keep in mind they need to support the development team, the live team, testers, Quality, servers, marketing, logistics, etc. etc.

So tell me again why they are so concerned about keeping a game alive that clearly costs them a ton of money and might break even a couple of years after 2.0 launch? because any logical businessman would have cut losses and pursued more lucrative projects long ago. hell, bare minimum shut the servers down. re purpose the current live team and just wait for 2.0 launch.

know what i think? I think it's because SE truly loves what they do. they take pride in it. they love their fans. they love their games and they want to make them the best they can be. they want us to enjoy it too. even if it means taking a loss. If i have to, heaven forbid, grind a little while because its the easiest thing to implement while they clean up problems, make better content, and make the game better than ever so i can really enjoy it. guess what? i'm not going to complain. because honestly FFXI was the same way. and i loved that game

END F***ING RANT

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We have a WK here.
Your math makes totally sense, since FF XIV is their ONLY game. Wait a minute, its not!
They are definetely not making money out of XIV, but i can assure you they are not starving or firing people.

They're not changing the actual content. We'll keep getting the same thing until 2.0
All we can do is hope that they take our feedback and use it to improve 2.0

5778 words and counting!

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Originally Posted by Hulan

Someone on the dev team really loves Skinner Boxes. That being said, my suspicion (and I'll admit, it's entirely a hunch and has no grounding in fact), is that they are doing everything they can to keep the 1.0 game going and populated with a skeleton crew while the rest of the team works on 2.0. Skinner Boxes are the fastest and easiest way to artificially keep someone playing a "game" for a long time, so it's no wonder they would be over-utilizing it to keep people around until 2.0.

If that is the case, hopefully we will see a substantial decrease in pRNG based content in the future (read as 2.0+).

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Agree 500% with you, FFXIV has way too much Skinner Boxes.
Which is why I play less instead of playing more.
I'm just hoping for 2.0 to have significantly less Skinner Boxes.

Saying the game has too many skinner boxes is not quite the right way to put it. A skinner box rewards the test subject with unconditioned stimulus for performing the conditioned action, and can eventually condition a subject to continue to perform the action even without the stimulus.

Operant conditioning, which is what the skinner box researched, are in fact vital to gameplay. When you learn to play a game, you are essentially being conditioned to perform those actions. This usually occurs first in easier areas, where the benefits of an action are more apparent, and as the player progresses the process doesn't always work, or is not as effective as before, but if properly conditioned they will try anyway, because they know it can work. Long story short, operant conditioning is essential to teaching players how to play a game.

The reason I'm being anal about this is that if we want change, we need to use the right terms. I know what you guys mean when you say a skinner box, but someone unfamiliar with the connotations might think you're asking for less conditioning... and with no conditioning, there would actually be no real game. What you should be asking is for the player to see some sort of reward or progress for victory, rather than entirely luck based mechanics. This gets the point across clearly, and effectively, and shows what we all want. We want to be rewarded for our hard work. We want our stimulus for doing our operation.

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Originally Posted by Urthdigger

Saying the game has too many skinner boxes is not quite the right way to put it. A skinner box rewards the test subject with unconditioned stimulus for performing the conditioned action, and can eventually condition a subject to continue to perform the action even without the stimulus.

Operant conditioning, which is what the skinner box researched, are in fact vital to gameplay. When you learn to play a game, you are essentially being conditioned to perform those actions. This usually occurs first in easier areas, where the benefits of an action are more apparent, and as the player progresses the process doesn't always work, or is not as effective as before, but if properly conditioned they will try anyway, because they know it can work. Long story short, operant conditioning is essential to teaching players how to play a game.

The reason I'm being anal about this is that if we want change, we need to use the right terms. I know what you guys mean when you say a skinner box, but someone unfamiliar with the connotations might think you're asking for less conditioning... and with no conditioning, there would actually be no real game. What you should be asking is for the player to see some sort of reward or progress for victory, rather than entirely luck based mechanics. This gets the point across clearly, and effectively, and shows what we all want. We want to be rewarded for our hard work. We want our stimulus for doing our operation.

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I completely agree, and I should have been more clear. I do not think that the Skinner box is a bad thing (all the time). I do, however, think that they are using the premise behind Skinner's work as a cudgel instead of an instrument - and for completely valid reasons as far as I am concerned. As long as they ween themselves away from black and white operant conditioning with an emphasis on random chance as a motivator in the days following 2.0, I have absolutely no complaints with the current direction.

At most, I was trying to inject a plausible explanation for the large number of pRNG based content into the conversation. And while I admit that psychology is not my field of study (though I do have a friend who does study psychology and often talks about it) content like Ifrit seems to be exactly a Skinner box. If it is not, what is the difference? As I understand it, a Skinner box, or rather the behavior induced by a Skinner box, is characterized by an choice (to try Ifrit one more time) induced by secondary motivators (gear) which has been shown to have the strongest effect when the reward has an element of chance (pRNG).

It's fairer to say that the whole game is a skinner box. Existing in a vacuum, by itself, nobody would do content like Ifrit. The rewards are too little for the effort involved, and if that's all the game was most people would have long moved on. However, things like Ifrit do not exist in a vacuum, and in fact that's the beauty of the whole conversation. The Ifrit fight is not the skinner box. The Ifrit fight is what BENEFITS from the skinner box.

What's actually an example of operant conditioning in this game, is in fact all the content OUTSIDE what people are bitching about. Quests, levelling, Toto-Rak, Grand Companies... let me explain. In quests, you put in the effort to do the quest, and you get your reward in xp, gear, and plot. For levelling, you put in the effort and are rewarded with higher stats, and more abilities. This firmly sets into your mind that effort equates to reward. That if you keep working at something in this game, it will reward you. Then we have Toto-rak, a low level dungeon. However, it differs from the endgame dungeons in one important aspect: Every chest from the boss has a 50/50 chance for items of equal value. The chests scattered about have random rewards, but the big reward from the dungeons is 100%. You're gonna get something, it may not be the weapon for your job, but you're gonna get something. Finally, Grand Companies are a method of earning endgame gear through pure effort. Just get the seals and buy your gear. All of this firmly conditions you to play the game and get better gear. THAT is the skinner box. THAT is the chamber performing operant conditioning on you so you'll repeat a conditioned response.

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Originally Posted by Urthdigger

It's fairer to say that the whole game is a skinner box. Existing in a vacuum, by itself, nobody would do content like Ifrit. The rewards are too little for the effort involved, and if that's all the game was most people would have long moved on. However, things like Ifrit do not exist in a vacuum, and in fact that's the beauty of the whole conversation. The Ifrit fight is not the skinner box. The Ifrit fight is what BENEFITS from the skinner box.

What's actually an example of operant conditioning in this game, is in fact all the content OUTSIDE what people are bitching about. Quests, levelling, Toto-Rak, Grand Companies... let me explain. In quests, you put in the effort to do the quest, and you get your reward in xp, gear, and plot. For levelling, you put in the effort and are rewarded with higher stats, and more abilities. This firmly sets into your mind that effort equates to reward. That if you keep working at something in this game, it will reward you. Then we have Toto-rak, a low level dungeon. However, it differs from the endgame dungeons in one important aspect: Every chest from the boss has a 50/50 chance for items of equal value. The chests scattered about have random rewards, but the big reward from the dungeons is 100%. You're gonna get something, it may not be the weapon for your job, but you're gonna get something. Finally, Grand Companies are a method of earning endgame gear through pure effort. Just get the seals and buy your gear. All of this firmly conditions you to play the game and get better gear. THAT is the skinner box. THAT is the chamber performing operant conditioning on you so you'll repeat a conditioned response.

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I give you a tip of the hat good sir, very well done!

This game was literally just a skinner box when it started. No content. Only grinding. So I assume steering from that until after 2.0 is hard. However, that does not excuse the new end game content that is a ridiculous waste of time.

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Originally Posted by Ventus

I give you a tip of the hat good sir, very well done!

This game was literally just a skinner box when it started. No content. Only grinding. So I assume steering from that until after 2.0 is hard. However, that does not excuse the new end game content that is a ridiculous waste of time.

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Grinding does not equal a skinner box. Whether something is a skinner box or not has nothing to do with how much time it takes, or the rate of effort towards the reward. I'd actually argue that when the game came out, it FAILED at being a skinner box, since the large number of people who quit says that it didn't do a very good job of conditioning the players to stay glued to the game.

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Originally Posted by Urthdigger

Grinding does not equal a skinner box. Whether something is a skinner box or not has nothing to do with how much time it takes, or the rate of effort towards the reward. I'd actually argue that when the game came out, it FAILED at being a skinner box, since the large number of people who quit says that it didn't do a very good job of conditioning the players to stay glued to the game.

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You're contradicting yourself. You claimed leves and questing were aspects of a skinner box, the core of this game when it came out and thus part of the grind. If you watched the video hulan posted it made a good comparison of diablo's reward system to skinner boxes. Players will go on quest (leve) kill mob get loot and reward and level up to feel progression. They are fooled into repeating the same task long beyond monotony and thus are trapped in a skinner box.

Perhaps you are confused on the definition

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Originally Posted by Ventus

You're contradicting yourself. You claimed leves and questing were aspects of a skinner box, the core of this game when it came out and thus part of the grind. If you watched the video hulan posted it made a good comparison of diablo's reward system to skinner boxes. Players will go on quest (leve) kill mob get loot and reward and level up to feel progression. They are fooled into repeating the same task long beyond monotony and thus are trapped in a skinner box.

Perhaps you are confused on the definition

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Actually, I think I just misread your prior post. Grinding (Or, more precisely, the way the level curve works in games) IS an example of operant conditioning, because as the individual is more conditioned they can taper off the reward rate (the level gain) slowly until it hits the point of monotony, without reducing motivation. I was saying that how "Grindy" it is (How much you need to grind in the first place before we even consider the level curve) doesn't have to do with whether it's conditioning or not. Both FFXI and WoW employ conditioning in their level curves, even though we can all agree WoW is a lot less "grindy" than FFXI was.

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Originally Posted by Noir

Don't blame the ppl that got garuda weapons before patch. Blame the whiners that bichted about it. It happened what I said it would happen. The noobs can't get a group and win it. And the good ls got them and still keep getting it now. You guys have to understand that good ls will always get everything. Easy or har way. The pick up groups had a chance before patch. Now deal with it. Think before bitching about non existent "exploits".

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Um excuse me? Did I hit a soft spot?

And would you quit with the "noob" crap? A lot of people that first start Garuda are going to be "noobs", HELL everyone was a noob when it first released. With elitist @sstards like you, these "noobs" won't have anything to do or anyone to teach them what to do and they'll just quit. I'm so sick of people like you.

And fyi, it might not have been an "exploit" in Yoshi's eyes since it was a mistake.. but it was an exploit. People abused it for their easy wins. Doesn't make everyone else a "noob" because they don't resort to craptastic, easy peasy strategies like the "good LS's" that are out there. Now go elsewhere.

Regarding the OP: I totally hear you, i too am finding that i get sleepy after about 30 min of gameplay no mater the time of day. i start doing the head bob then find myself dead. maybe its because i'm not level 50 yet and cant seem to find an active guild, but it shouldnt matter. this game puts me to sleep. i like that the battles have become slightly more interesting but there is nothing to get the blood pumping and adrenaline flowing.
sure the primal battles might do that but the over all pace of this game is too tedious with little done to excite the player until endgame, even that is sadly lacking from what i hear. i'm hoping beyond hope that this will be fixed when 2.0 launches.
i hate having to post this kind of negative sentiment but i really want to like this game. something has to be done to make the process of getting to endgame entertaining. a game that does not entertain is not a game.
feel free to flame me, i know i would....