Twinfinite Interview

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Originally Posted by Driavna

Look at other games with talents points and how people will kick you for not having the best build.

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I can also look at games with talent-like systems that have managed to create something where there are multiple competitive builds. In WildStar, for example, the spellslinger class has 5+ perfectly viable builds that people can use depending on their familiarity with the class, the class runes they have available to them, or the buff/debuff needs of their raid group.

It's possible, but it takes a bit of effort on the part of the devs, as well as a less rigid community.

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Originally Posted by EdwinLi

That a issue I find with Meta and how hypocritical some people can be when asking for new and more options when they themselves will only use that new options when it can fit into a new Meta to replace old Meta.

Meta is like a disease that can ruin a game for anyone and puts a set up imaginary expectation on people to follow or they will become a outcast to the community.

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My group, since 1.0 days (shoot, even in FFXI) has been doing fights waaaay outside the norm and we use all jobs. Meta is really sad I agree...way too much hive mind.

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Originally Posted by Stanelis

That's why in well designed games that have customization on the player's scale, several situations calls for different builds that can coexist.

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Followed by the ability to more or less conveniently swap builds so you can have the meta build for each situation >_>
Because those builds don't really "co-exist": They replace each other. In one situation one is better, in the other situation the other is better, so the best strategy is to switch to the currently better one every time. If you can't do that? You pick the one for the most common situation.

For two builds to truly co-exist, they need to be roughly equally good, i.e. balanced. That is the entire crux behind customization: It needs to be well balanced. Your choice essentially needs to be irrelevant to performance, it needs to be mostly an aesthetic or gameplay choice. I can tell you that even in this game, where the only customization you have is choosing a job to main, jobs will be left in the gutter if the team fails to balance them. Because that's what already happened with AST at the start of HW.

The same would naturally apply to builds within a job. If the choices are balanced? Great! Bring it on. Once performance deviates significantly, issues arise.

The degree of balance needed is decided by the tolerance threshold of the community for subpar choices. Some have higher, some have lower. You just have to guess that one when making decisions.

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Followed by the ability to more or less conveniently swap builds so you can have the meta build for each situation >_>
Because those builds don't really "co-exist": They replace each other. In one situation one is better, in the other situation the other is better, so the best strategy is to switch to the currently better one every time. If you can't do that? You pick the one for the most common situation.For two builds to truly co-exist, they need to be roughly equally good, i.e. balanced. That is the entire crux behind customization: It needs to be well balanced. Your choice essentially needs to be irrelevant to performance, it needs to be mostly an aesthetic or gameplay choice. I can tell you that even in this game, where the only customization you have is choosing a job to main, jobs will be left in the gutter if the team fails to balance them. Because that's what already happened with AST at the start of HW.

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You can perfectly imagine that the two builds can coexist together in the group if they have different purposes. If you were to give a dps spec to current tanks (for example), you could perfectly imagine a group with a war tank and a war DPS. You could also imagine a system where customization alter your rotation but not your output (it is something that blizzard does in the modern wow, some talents only purpose is to alter rotations).

Furthermore, don't forget that we pay SE to optimize and design their game. As such the fact it is hard to come up with isn't really my concern (especially when a) it is a matter solved by a blackboard and a piece of chalk, we re not talking about technical issues here and b) SE has decades of experience designing RPG battle systems).

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Originally Posted by Stanelis

You can perfectly imagine that the two builds can coexist together in the group. If you were to give a dps spec to current tanks (for example), you could perfectly imagine a group with a war tank and a war DPS.

Furthermore, don't forget that we pay SE to optimize and design their game. As such the fact it is hard isn't really my concern (especially when it is a matter solved by a blackboard and a piece of chalk).

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But then what if you only have war dps, becuase most wars i see play it as dps anyway.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

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I'm a ex wildstar player too (also GW/GW2) and those "viable" builds where more about adapting for each encounter and type of content, but yes, the illusion of choice and being able to try stuff for yourself is always nice. However I still remember an article (sadly I can't find it) explaining how people fail at raids mostly due bad talent choices for that type of content during vanilla WoW times. In reality "options" are more often than not a "stupidity test".

I'm not against choices, as I said try stuff for yourself is fun, but there is always going to be a better option and a lot of bad ones.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

But then what if you only have war dps, becuase most wars i see play it as dps anyway.

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Please note I m only using this as an example of something functional that has been in wow since 2010 or so. If you were to ask me I'd say FFXIV is sorely in need of a support role and a party size increase to allow for more depths to be added in the group battle system.

Even though a specialization system could be really interesting in FFXIV, especially when a job such as red mage is being released.

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Originally Posted by Stanelis

You can perfectly imagine that the two builds can coexist together in the group if they have different purposes. If you were to give a dps spec to current tanks (for example), you could perfectly imagine a group with a war tank and a war DPS. You could also imagine a system where customization alter your rotation but not your output (it is something that blizzard does in the modern wow, some talents only purpose is to alter rotations).

Furthermore, don't forget that we pay SE to optimize and design their game. As such the fact it is hard to come up with isn't really my concern (especially when a) it is a matter solved by a blackboard and a piece of chalk, we re not talking about technical issues here and b) SE has decades of experience designing RPG battle systems).

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By doing that you have effective doubled the amount of balancing required. You disagreed earlier, but the fact remains FFXIV uses being able to swap jobs on the fly as its diversity. Instead of having Warrior be a tank or DPS, you can play any Dragoon, Monk or Bard. Yes, they all play functionally different but that is how XIV wants to differentiate itself. There is never going to be an instance where jobs hybrid into another role. The closest equivalent we have is Arcanist, which the devs have flatout said they despise because it's a nightmare to balance Summoner and Scholar. None of this attributes to better design. Okay, Warrior is a DPS and Dragoon can play tank. If they aren't properly balanced, one or both builds will be sidelined.

Making the rotation a bit less rigid could be something to touch on. Even if it's merely altering damage, you could perhaps move certain abilities around to your preferred method of pressing them. It's something at least.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

The closest equivalent we have is Arcanist, which the devs have flatout said they despise because it's a nightmare to balance Summoner and Scholar.

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I bet it's salt over 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 and how black mages were inferior to summoners even after they removed Thunder.

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Originally Posted by Stanelis

You can perfectly imagine that the two builds can coexist together in the group if they have different purposes. If you were to give a dps spec to current tanks (for example), you could perfectly imagine a group with a war tank and a war DPS.

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Yes, you would no longer compete with your DPS spec in that case. You would, however, now compete with the tank specs of other jobs. Feral druids had that issue in Classic WoW: Nobody wanted a Feral tank, because Feral tank sucked. I can still remember the whispers at the time:"You heal?" "Sorry, nope." "Then spec it." End of conversation.

I can only repeat: As long as the choices perform within the communities tolerance threshold, it's all fun and games. You can do "anything" as long as that condition is met - Builds, Augments, New Jobs, Roles... let your mind run free. There are numerous examples that you don't need 'perfect' balance to allow people to choose: White mages are currently suboptimal, but people aren't mass booting them. Outside of EX/Savage, most people don't even care whether you choose to meld or not, let alone which melds you choose. There is a margin in which customization can, in fact, happen.

But I do not trust SE to hit that margin, truth be told. They're already struggling as is and they have most experience with single-player games that don't have to consider balance in the first place, because nobody cares how you play your single-player games. Insta-killing a boss with fenix down is almost a staple in the series, but it's just not viable design in MMORPG. Likewise, your characters will never complain because they're walled out of certain jobs in your playthrough - Players will. There's a world of difference and their lack of experience with that shows.

So yeah, I think if SE really did more customization, I'm quite sure they'd do it wrong and just create a mass of non-choices that serve no purpose but to confuse people. Feel free to be more optimistic than I.

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Originally Posted by BigRed5392

this is what my g/f was talking about.

she was around in 1.0 with the blm group only, garuda fight as a group of blm would burn her down with a higher success rate due to an exploit.

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the worst offender would be GW2
99% dungeon party require specific skill build and certain set of equipment
GW2 Supposedly to be very versatile offering different combination of skill sets, yet when the community found out the 1 way better than other, it become a disease spread across the whole universe and killing one of the most interesting game, and I hope it will never happen in FFXIV

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Originally Posted by Misutoraru

the worst offender would be GW2
99% dungeon party require specific skill build and certain set of equipment
GW2 Supposedly to be very versatile offering different combination of skill sets, yet when the community found out the 1 way better than other, it become a disease spread across the whole universe and killing one of the most interesting game, and I hope it will never happen in FFXIV

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I played GW2 & that never happened to me. Me and a friend both ran builds we came up with ourselves, never got any grief for it.

I don't care about customizable stats per se, but what I do care about is having gear with unique effects and traits. Think of like a Rod that does more damage with an elemental spell of that specific elemental day, or a Rod that boosts a certain elemental type attack. How about feet armor that make you run faster, but has low stats? or how about armor that extends the duration of certain abilities or buffs like Blood for Blood or Medica 2? How about having actual elemental weapons and enemies taking more damage to certain types of damage and resisting certain elements?

So many variables that could be added but are not for some reason. Things even casual players could pick up on and enjoy.

Gear doesnt exist in a vacuum. The reason we dont meld our gear is not complexity, because as a whole, Yoshi is right, people dont generally do complex stuff when they dont need to.

Gear exists in the context of content, and if the content doesnt ask you hard questions that you answer through proper gear optimization, its a complexity just for its own sake, and should be done away with.

Current dungeons and raids never require those melds or extra stats. In very few raid encounters do you ever hit the gear cap. I have successfully done, within 2 weeks of returning after leaving in 3.1, Baelsars Wall + Sohm Al hard under their item limit. (none of the group had more than 228), and it was not hard.

The content is too easy for the gear complexity to matter. Make the content numerically harder, and people will adjust. WoW had a MUCH more complex gear system during its prime, and 11 million players adapted.

I love unique effects on weapons. What I don't love is how they then lead to really weird minmaxing. FFXI was an extreme example as you could switch gear mid-combat, so you'd have your shoes of +1 damage to sneak attack macroed in with sneak attack then you'd switch to your boots of +1 damage to trick attack macroed to that. Black mages carried eight different expensive staves everywhere to maximise their bonuses for each element rather than specialising in an interesting way, and every spell had a staff-swap macroed in if you wanted to do the most damage. It was sort of stupid in terms of lore - who changes clothes that often? And the best players had tiny inventories because of sheer amount of gear they carried everywhere they went to deal as much damage as possible.

FFXIV has a different system so it would never be quite that insane, but you'll still end up with people wanting to switch gear in between encounters and arguing when someone pulls too quickly for them to change their pants. I like the idea of changing gear around for certain fights or playstyles as-is (e.g. fending accessories to allow for clearing a fight with a particular strategy) but abilities need to be balanced very carefully or it just ends up overcomplicating things for no reason.

Folks go on and on about gear optimization in FFXI, but that simply wasn't a thing most of the time. Why? Because gear was hard to get. Sure, you could theorycraft out the best possible setup, but when each piece of that dream team equipment requires months of dedicated work to obtain, not even the l33test of the l33t were going to expect you to have every single piece - and anyone insisting that everyone needed to have a Relic weapon (for a very long time, THE best weapon for most jobs, generally requiring at least a year of work to make) would be laughed off the server.

Additionally, very little of the endgame content was tuned to the point where it couldn't be beaten unless the majority of participants were decked out in the best of the best. Even if most of the alliance had one or two endgame pieces at most, if they knew the fight and they knew how to play their jobs, they could win. The only difference top-tier gear made was that they could win FASTER, and with a reduced chance of failure due to bad RNG.

This game, on the other hand, practically throws high-grade equipment at you at every turn. It's so easy to gear up, that the devs have to add artificial barriers to keep the fights challenging - specifically, enrage timers. FFXI had enrage timers, too, but not for the same reason; enrage timers were added later on specifically to prevent players from holding valuable monsters for extended periods of time, to ensure that when those monsters respawned it would be during a time period favorable to them (or, in the case of certain infamous monsters like Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden, to prevent groups from risking their real-life health whittling the monsters down over a period of dozens of hours rather than deal with the monsters' mechanics). Enrage timers are a mechanic that I detest; when learning a fight, you should be able to take as long as you need to to win. Your reward for practice and perseverance is that you're able to win faster.

At any rate, the prospect of gear becoming even SIMPLER is a depressing one, but honestly gear is so incredibly boring even now that it doesn't bother me all that much. Bring on the one-stat system! Get rid of STR DEX MND INT VIT PIE. They are a mockery of true RPG stats, where each one has some kind of effect, even if a given job benefits more from some than others.

Gear becoming even more simplified -.- Jesus at this point just take all the stats away and just give pdef and mdef and be done with it. Wasn't expecting anything close to what ffxi did, but adding gear set bonus or hell trait/ability enhacement materia isn't overboard imo. /sigh

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Originally Posted by odintius

Gear becoming even more simplified -.- Jesus at this point just take all the stats away and just give pdef and mdef and be done with it. Wasn't expecting anything close to what ffxi did, but adding gear set bonus or hell trait/ability enhacement materia isn't overboard imo. /sigh

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Adding set bonuses may actually be a way of simplifying progression. Instead of even allowing for the possibility of "Alexandrian boot with Scripture gloves may result in 2 more points of the stats I care the most..." you out right say "progress to get the full set and you will unquestionably have The Best Full Set" (BiS may become an obsolete term.)

To be honest, in a world were we got to manage a single character's inventory for so many jobs, I welcome a simplified equipment system. If managing equipment for multiple jobs was not a thing, then I would be much more open to ask/beg for gear set lines that are designed specifically for PvP, or Raiding, or Dungeons.

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Originally Posted by Ogulbuk

Adding set bonuses may actually be a way of simplifying progression. Instead of even allowing for the possibility of "Alexandrian boot with Scripture gloves may result in 2 more points of the stats I care the most..." you out right say "progress to get the full set and you will unquestionably have The Best Full Set" (BiS may become an obsolete term.)

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Not necessarily. If you balance the set bonuses properly with the secondary stats on alternative pieces of gear, there comes a point where you have to weigh which is better - more of a main secondary stat, or the benefit provided by the set bonus. Granted, this still often ends up with people figuring out an "optimum" configuration.

I like how WildStar handles their class rune sets. When you manage to reach a level in gear where you can slot your class rune set, it often can lead to completely changing your rotation for dps, or changing the way you approach healing/tanking, or encouraging you to swap out one ability with another, or whathaveyou. It injects some variety in how you can build your character as your character progresses post-level cap.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

Not necessarily. If you balance the set bonuses properly with the secondary stats on alternative pieces of gear, there comes a point where you have to weigh which is better - more of a main secondary stat, or the benefit provided by the set bonus. Granted, this still often ends up with people figuring out an "optimum" configuration.

I like how WildStar handles their class rune sets. When you manage to reach a level in gear where you can slot your class rune set, it often can lead to completely changing your rotation for dps, or changing the way you approach healing/tanking, or encouraging you to swap out one ability with another, or whathaveyou. It injects some variety in how you can build your character as your character progresses post-level cap.

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I'll be honest when I played I got super side tracked by housing so I didn't get to that much end game (which is probably why I toddler about here sometimes saying SE needs to look at that game's housing and change their current system into FC Garrison project - a big fat long term group project, WS Housing was THE BEST system I've ever seen). Anyway lol, the second point you make is where a lot of the fun of runes/relics (WoW's ability materia basically), enchants, glyphs, set bonuses, ability affixes, passives, trinkets, etc, etc littered in examples and proven in other MMORPGs to work and imo are great fun because they take what you've been doing for the last 100+ hours and tweak it.

Everyone has made legitimate points that while developers and players sometimes make it seem like you have "over 200 different choices" its more like 3 - the other ones will get you in trouble once you're in real content, but the point is you have THREE different styles of playing the thing you love playing. Its not about abandoning a job you love, its about changing up slightly what you love so its still fresh. Also would like to add you could be aboslutely goofy and not get in trouble in a lot of content in WoW, people only started to care in content that was actually moderately challenging - so you could still do what you thought was fun for some portions of content, and then in the more end game stuff you still had 2 to 3 choices.

Which feels great~ Heck, even when it doesn't "change" the rotations - it doesn't give you "3" different choices, but just makes their effects different, it's still great fun to see how you can incorporate that change and feels fresh on the last bit you've been playing around with. I remember making an on hit hunter for a short while way back when, although it was actually OP enough that Blizzard nerfed it lol, I had like 4 on hit effects and a double hit sword - basically looked like I was a rogue but I also had a pet lol.

What Ogulbuk was saying though I think is that SE could still be linear growth and make things simple on player's, because the newest gear would always have the best or at least the best in combination so you'd always know what you want to collect next - the ability affix idea works both in linear and horizontal ideas. As I said before I personally dont want to see years worth of horizontal because I'm a casual poop (used to play WoW hardcore lol), but I would like shorter term horizontal options. Like primal gear not immediately killing the one previous to it.

I'm not saying it has to be talent trees, or item bonuses, but these changes to what you love and not saying "stop playing what you like to get a different feeling" are awesome. I love sphere grids and a FFX meets FFIX could be interesting, but I fear the aspect of collecting items might make people less desired if they haven't for example collect Ifrit's Brand from the primal fight 2,000 iLvLs ago lol. I imagine it'd just be much easier to balance if they added it to the items themselves like many other major MMOs do. For both a materia based system or the FFIX/X example it may help to just let you sell them on the MW as well - so people can choose to do old content or not (anyway, strictly based on items would be the literal easiest to balance and manage for players and devs).

Still want to see a sphere grid just because they're cool but I think Duelle's suggestion for a aesthetic merit system would function better for that, so people still have something to look forward to at max and gain some neat aesthetic options.

It'd be cool if the spirit-bonding changed to give us unique "materia" through rare gear or rare crafted gear. Since the IV/V to an extent is handed to us like candy now, it makes the gear materia system a bit aged for what we are capable of now.

Take the 2.0 Primal weapons, bond those up, extract Garuda's weapons, obtain a "En-wind + Earth Resist" materia, only useable on weapons, grants ability "Adds X elemental dmg and increase resist to y element."

As it stands now, the materia system is a somewhat stagnant system as it just entails "Which secondary?" A system which players can feel like it's worth obtaining other gear because they can use them to enhance other gear would add a bit of customization to the game.

With Diadem Coven weapons, give them a convert ability, only useable on weapons and gives the player a "+25% dmg Diadem creatures" and a "+75% dmg 1/4 of the Emergency bosses." Your utility changes because you might get a bond that goes towards the ice boss.

Not really sure that the system atm would support that kind of materias, considering that atm elements are mostly fluff things, but I do believe that a rework of the whole materia system would be good

About gear more simple, I'm all for it, because less gear sets to grind means more time to do other stuff.

On the other side, adding anything more complicated have the risk to fuel more division between players that does things "right" and those who doesn't.

more simple gear could also mean removal of elemental stats and accuracy and/or parry. things that have no use or make things more complicated than they have to.
unless you read up outside the game a player would naturally think parry is a good thing for tanks or that player wouldn't have an idea about how much acc you need. these are stats noone needs anymore.
gear that adjusts abilities is probably hard to balance cause it could be either too powerful for it's ilvl or makes no real difference at all and you would go with the higher stat gear anyway.

So why add new jobs at all if what you going for is dumbing down all parts of game play.
Just make it ion job for any role . 5 jobs and that all.
How much more will se do to lick the ass of the new players that are not there.

This happened because they cannot do stat customization worth beans. Of course they want simplified gear and claim people don't meld materia. The payoff of materia is one brand of awesome requiring a calculator to see, and people wanted several brands of awesome seen with the naked eye.

And is this going to be their defense when the jobs end up feeling "samey"? Because this is sounding like they want to make the jobs "samey".

I'm not sure I really enjoy the way gear works in this game but it would be hard to implement something fun like they have in destiny, etc. where you get some abilities, etc. that are made available more frequently bc of stats. I don't think you could really do that here but it could be fun.

Fun fact, I don't know if it's been mentioned here yet since I'm not going through all the pages. But he mentioned the word "onmyouji," the closest word to that in english wouldn't be "oracle," rather a better word for it is "exorcist."

We all know accuracy is only good to cap, then useless beyond. Parry has been on the table for a rework for some time, and elemental resistances are so trivial they might as well not exist. Right now, Crit/Det is what most DPS jobs want, with a few notable exceptions preferring Skill/Spell Speed over either of those as need be.

If simplifying gear and easing up on rotation possibly means they can create more mechanically interesting/complex content, I welcome it. But if it's just simple for the sake of the lowest common denominations of players, I feel that may be a step entirely in the wrong direction.

http://i.imgur.com/Rt40A.jpg

Please bring this back!

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Originally Posted by Trishin

http://i.imgur.com/Rt40A.jpg

Please bring this back!

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The underwear slots? Yes, please!

Oh, you mean these. Yes please for these too!!!

http://www.gwcdn.com/albums/images/4...2b8800065a.jpg