Lords of Verminion - How to Revitalize

As the title says, I want to see Lords of Verminion revitalized, and here are some of my ideas on how to do that.

1. Reduce MGP cost of participation from 100 MGP to 10 MGP, same as Chocobo Racing.
2. Grant partial MGP reward for participation rather than 0 MGP for losing.
3. Increase MGP rewards for victory.
4. Increase MGP rewards for Challenge Completion.
5. Enable Lords of Verminion queues across Data Center, not just Zone or Server.

To be honest it just feels too sluggish to me whenever I pla it.

We can't play it while queued for Duty finder, right? I think that's what deters me. Also its a pain to navigate on console when compared to mouse control.

I'd start with allowing people to queue from anywhere and removing the entry fee entirely.

Not that I'd play it then - I simply don't like the minigame. But it makes it much more convenient and we all know how much of a barrier convenience can be for people.

My recommendation to revitalize:

1. Search code for Lords of Vermilion
2. Highlight said code
3. Delete
4. Hack a Pokemon game
5. Copy
6. Return to FFXIV code
7. Paste

Lord of Verminion isn't even a little fun.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kaurie

My recommendation to revitalize:

1. Search code for Lords of Vermilion
2. Highlight said code
3. Delete
4. Hack a Pokemon game
5. Copy
6. Return to FFXIV code
7. Paste

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Oh man, could you imagine if they had made a pokemon-style game instead of that abomination? XD We'd probably still play pokemon instead, but the idea is amusing.

and having minions evolve and unlock more minions, making it something you could want to do for collection's sake as well, wouldn't be a bad idea.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ragology

We can't play it while queued for Duty finder, right? I think that's what deters me. Also its a pain to navigate on console when compared to mouse control.

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Why would you risk losing a match to get into a dungeon if your queue was ready mid-match?

Yea I gotta say I want to get into LoV, but the game itself doesn't feel right.It's just not fun. the controls (using a gamepad at least) are terrible. I dont think increasing rewards or letting you play while waiting for DF will help either. Just scrap it and re-imagine it please.

I think Lord of Verminion is very well planned out lol, very competitive and fun if you play the right people, but like others said, controller controls are iffy, and it's impossible to find competitors because it's only on your server and in the room with you lol... The chocobo racing/ LoV (not tournament matches) should be added to duty finder and data center wide

I think the biggest thing that would revitalize it is if they remove the rampant cheating in Verminion (Triple Triad tournaments, too).

Make minion PVP to -Round Based- and I will continue Tutorial 2 <,<;

I still hate how it controls with a controller after they "fixed" it. It still sucks.

Honestly, game is just so boring - way too complicated for a mini-game of its nature. I made it halfway through the tutorial before my eyes started to roll backwards. I promptly skipped through the rest of the chat pop ups and got out as quickly as I could.

Fix the Diadem first!

I think every challenge battle for it should give bonus MGP like chocobo races. I played all the challenges and then stopped. I don't see a point in playing it anymore when I can choco race for all my golden saucer items.

Honestly if it was open world pvp, similar to world of warcraft where I can battle my minions with other people pokemom style then I would be all over it. More people would have most likely would have been into it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jynx

To be honest it just feels too sluggish to me whenever I pla it.

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I share that feeling exactly. I want to like it, but it feels slow. It not being as polished to alleviate such a feeling doesn't help neither lol.

If they really want to bring about more positive attention for it, they need to redo the system... or at least add a new system of play alongside it, ideally in the form of turn based combat with minions. Yes, WoW already did that by following a Pokemon type of combat system. It really doesn't hurt to do something similar though, and I'd imagine it wouldn't be TOO difficult to do or balance.

Well the balancing part would rest solely on how reliant they decide to make RNG a factor. Besides evasion or proc type of abilities, RNG should have no part in that type of game.

I don't like LOV to be honest. At this point I'd rather have the Pokemon fights from WoW :P.

I completed all the challenges and tried a few matches of pvp. Then I quit cause the barrier for entry in pvp was too high, the ranking system does nothing, I, as someone with 0 rank points, got put up against someone with 300, before I could even highlight my first group of troops to send to their arcana stone they'd already destroyed my shields and eye and broken my gates, I didn't stand a chance, the challenge mode doesn't really prepare you to fight in the pvp mode and it's impossible to learn when you get killed so quickly when you have no idea what you're doing.

I loved the boss challenges though, those were really fun and I'd love more of those. They added primal minions, I hope that = future primal challenges. Or have some interesting special challenges like war of the magi where the enemy will only use black mage minions and you only get to use the White Mage minions, which the match would supply for you for the special challenge (to avoid the situation where people may not have the minion).

The HUD leaves a lot to be desired too, I can't tell when an action party has action points or not, I don't know where that's displayed or if it even is. It's very difficult to navigate with a controller and select the troops you want, I remember doing one challenge where I wanted to select a specific action party but one minion from another action party was constantly hiding in their group and ended up going with them, it slowed me down trying to separate him from that group and lost me extra hp on an arcana stone that wouldn't have been lost if I could select properly.

For the game play, it's ok, it could have been done better, I'd have liked to make my own minion action parties rather than just having to mass troops of the same type. E.G. a tank minion, 2 DD minions and a healer minion and then you group them together and can activate one of their actions. It would be more fun to play my own way and build my own team rather than selecting based on what's most effective.

And to those saying they wanted it to be Pokemon, look up ffxi pankration, I'd love that to be added to ffxiv as a separate gold saucer mini game from LoV.

The main problem is that there is little to no strategy involved...
You can say its to unbalanced...
The other problem is that there is way too much happening all at same time, no human can keep up with that speed...
It needs more of a tug o war like DotA games and not a minion fight where you need inhuman reaction speed...
Look at pokemon, there is a reason why you dont have them all fight at same time! Pokemon survived more than a century!

How do you kill something that is already dead?


...You don't.

Game plays to slow and giving all minions abilities was a bad idea.

The weakness system is decent, but something that should change is the way abilities work.

So instead of destroying 3 towers or whatever they are called, what if each side has 3 Leaders, and the "Leaders" are the ones with abilities, and upon defeating that Leader you eliminate the ability that the opponent can use.

So now before the match you can set your three leaders and then let's say 6-9 minions around those three leaders.

Leader abilities are accessible by killing opponent with x type, so if your leader is a poppet, killing with Poppets fills the bar for that leader type. When you gain enough power you can use x ability which could be target-able to x range/radius based on ability type but overall by reducing the abilities each side gets to 3, you can then set your strategy around those abilities rather than pretty much having a free for all when it comes to party composition.

Another potential thought is each Leader could have 3 minions that you attach to them, and of course if x leader dies you lose access to summoning those 3 minions. Depending on what you set to your Leader as their minions those minions can gain perks, so if you put Poppet Minions on a Poppet minion it improves their attack power or reduces the amount of ability points to use Leader ability.

Overall I just think the current issue with Verminion is ability bloat. By giving everyone abilities you just create an overwhelming experience that can turn off most players, because they see everything and it's just to much to take in to have fun with the game. Pulling back on how many abilities can be used would help slightly curb one issue with the game and hopefully speed up the gameplay.

I wanted to like Verminion. I really did. But it's practically impossible as a controller player to win against someone using keyboard/mouse. Controller is so much slower. It's a huge disadvantage. It even makes the Verminion challenges unnecessarily difficult. For no real reward - the one I just completed ended up costing me MGP because I had to try it about 7 times (100 mgp each) for 150 mgp when I finally beat it.

Meanwhile the chocobo challenges pay out 20k + each, and only cost 10 mgp each attempt!

I love Verminion but I have no one to play against nowdays. I like how the skill gap between players can be huge (as is with most RTS style games). However I do agree that there is no way for a controller player to beat a keyboard player if they are both similarly skilled.

Anyway, I want to play Verminion and I used to spend all day queueing when it came out, but nobody queues for it anymore. They need to make it cross server queues, and increase the incentives. Minions and titles are not enough, just look at the statistics:
http://www.xiv-minions.com/statistics.php
Amongst the minion collectors, the two verminon minions are the 2nd and 3rd most rarest, because no one can be bothered to do Verminion.

They need to up the incentives (ie: 450k MGP is what it took to revive Chocobo racing), but keep in mind Verminion is also extremely easy to "game" by just playing your own alt, especially for things like the tourney. So they probably need to make it cross server first before adding more rewards or people would be done with it day one by playing an alt.

Do not compare with minion statistics please...
As collector i can tell you: it just open old wounds, dont salt them!
Look at "Slime Puddle", it was a 100% drop in a chest back then and still how few are owning it... same goes for "Bite-sized Pudding"
There was apsolutely NO reason to make them ALL rare drops (i did not say super rare drops, as we have with "Wind-up Echidna")

To make them all that rare just hurts those who like to collect them, nothing more!
Pokemon: Catch them all, but not here in FFXIV...

someone i know once had an interesting idea about LoV: make a mobile app for it

an app with which you can play the game from smartphone and/or tablet against NPCs and other players. all players should be in one pool (per server center) and be able to play with each other, from ingame and from the app.

the player would start with a list of basic minions, unlocks more by winning and maybe SE could even add some as micro-payment in-app-purchase minions like the ones we have in the mogry station now and some semi-rare drops like from the 24man raids. add some achievements and stuff and it should become pretty interesting
edit: you should of course also be able to login using your XIV login if you have one so you can play on the app with the pets you have ingame

by doing this there would be tons of more players for the game. the game most likely would need some rebalancing for this (which it needs anyway) and the server barrier could become a problem but the idea would be quite interesting.
i could also add something about tournament wintrading prevention but its not like SE cares about that in the first place (tripple triad anyone?)

I was excited for LoV when it first came out, but I just don't have fun with it. Putting more/juicier carrots on a string only provides a temporary boost. They either have to make the game itself fun or there's little point in wasting resources trying to save it. Maybe they can limit it to one of each minion on the field (bigger minions at that) and remove that odd 4x minion of the same kind to use an ability limitation? Maybe morph it into a different type of tower defense game? Possibly change up the field a bit so it's not just a handful of boring crystals in the middle of an arena? Honestly I don't know what to do to make it fun for me, but the prizes aren't it.

Being a rabid minion collector I really wanted to love this game. I wanted a use for all of them.

And I still haven't finished the tutorial.

It is just not fun compared to the rest of the other stuff I could be doing.

From a design perspective the biggest issue is that LoV is just too inaccessible. Having to be in spot without being able to do anything in the meantime while waiting is the antithesis of good design.

I know that this is done because they want to have it make sense, you wouldn't just starting playing cards without being in the same "room" after all, though when these systems reduce the players ability to interact with the systems, that is malicious design. It's trapping the players if they want to participate, but cannot find a match, which brings up the second point that a lot of people have already brought up.

The GS games needs to have a duty finder that spans the data center. These minigames thrive on community and having a lot of people participating is essential. By restricting it so heavily they basically made the system D.O.A.