The Problem with Persistent Pots in Patch 7.3

What happened to Persistent Pots?
In patch 7.3 Persistent Pots were buffed substantially adding both Silver and Gold pieces to the chests you find as part of the minigame for completing the pot fate with gold contribution.

Overall this was a much needed change as pots were frankly barely worth doing before. This change made pots the strongest way to farm silver as each pot FATE averages out to around 375 silver coins per FATE that gives you a pot with gold coins and other items as a bonus.

The Problem
However, this change brought a major problem with pots to light. There is a hard cap of 20 pots that can be given to players. This cap is mentioned in game in the manual that can be read at the Expedition Advisor under "Exploring the Occult Crescent" > "Persistent Pots" and is clearly an intended feature.

This cap of 20 pots is a massive detriment in the content as it incentives players to work against each other to ensure 20 or less people get a gold on the FATE to attempt to guarantee themselves a pot.

The Solution
There are 2 things that I think need to change in order to entirely fix this issue.

1. The pot limit must be increased to 72: This is the most clear change as it would ensure everyone who gets gold contribution gets a pot. I understand that the Eureka bunnies also has this 20 cap but this is new content and improvements should be made.
2. Increase the rewards for normal CEs and FATEs: Pots really show the problem with FATEs and CEs right now. They give pitiful amounts of rewards for doing them which incentives people to do pot FATEs rather than the other content in the instance.

With just these 2 changes I believe the player experience in Occult Crescent would be improved and it would once again incentivize players to help eachother at pot FATEs.

What's the data supporting this 20-person cap? I see this thrown around, but I have yet to see a source.

Anecdotally, I've seen more than 20 pots after the fate, and I've also completed the Pots fate with only three people and two of them didn't get a Pot buff.

I'm asking because it feels like someone said "20" and everyone else just takes it as the word of god without questioning it.

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Originally Posted by Crafoutis

What's the data supporting this 20-person cap? I see this thrown around, but I have yet to see a source.

Anecdotally, I've seen more than 20 pots after the fate, and I've also completed the Pots fate with only three people and two of them didn't get a Pot buff.

I'm asking because it feels like someone said "20" and everyone else just takes it as the word of god without questioning it.

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I listed the source in the initial post: "This cap is mentioned in game in the manual that can be read at the Expedition Advisor under "Exploring the Occult Crescent" > "Persistent Pots" and is clearly an intended feature."

This NPC can be found in the South Horn within the base camp at x:37.7, y:7.3 and is marked with a book icon above its head.

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Originally Posted by Crafoutis

What's the data supporting this 20-person cap? I see this thrown around, but I have yet to see a source.

Anecdotally, I've seen more than 20 pots after the fate, and I've also completed the Pots fate with only three people and two of them didn't get a Pot buff.

I'm asking because it feels like someone said "20" and everyone else just takes it as the word of god without questioning it.

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"Of those who contribute sufficiently to the successful completion of these FATEs, 20 players will be selected at random to receive an elixir, the scent of which will entice a persistent pot to give chase."
- from the Expedition Advisor, "Exploring the Occult Crescent - Persistent Pots"

The increased rewards further incentivize people to complete the pot FATE as quickly as possible, before more than 20 people become involved, to further ensure that they get chosen as one of the 20 who get a pot. This was already a reality, but now that they're more lucrative, it's being fixated on. People camp out at the pot FATE spawn locations to engage with it as soon as it activates, with fewer people doing CEs and FATEs, making those take more time as well.

I wanted to finish leveling the last two phantom jobs I don't have at cap, but the amount of effort I would need to put in for those exp rewards means it's barely worth it.

Bumping this thread as 7.4 is approaching with even more rewards tied to persistent pots and we've heard nothing about them potentially changing the 20 pot limit. These new rewards could make pots even more competitive than before so the limit should really be removed.

The 20 player limit needs to go.

I would rather they just bump rewards from CEs so that the focus on the area was to actually do the main content that is the most fun, instead of making the optimal path revolve entirely around a 30min spawn. It is not helping OC be more enjoyable to have the pot fate be so important. It is most fun when you can just freely do the content that spawns without having to hyper focus on a specific spawn.

+1. It's already frustrating to not receive a pot, but getting culled from the FATE and then going to the next CE only to see that someone has brought their pot with them is almost insulting. I recognize the limit existed in Eureka but bunnies didn't give meaningful rewards towards progression while pots do. Either the pot limit needs to increase or the rewards have to be nerfed.

It does feel like if they added in more system to balance who got the pots it wouldn't feel as bad. By this I mean having things like,

-Doing Critical Engagements gives you +1 for a Pot Drop, when you get the Pot you lose the Buff
-Upon getting a Pot you have a 45 minute timer before you can get another pot using the "timer" function to keep it on the character. This at least staggers a different 20/20 each time but then at this point I would at least attempt to make the pot audition 40/40 which in theory would give everyone a fair shot at getting a pot. Of course this means you will only be able to farm a pot every hour but at least with this method in that hour everyone should be able to get 1 pot attempt an hour rather than an RNG of 0-2 attempts.

Well written.

The 20 pot limit fosters toxicity in the community, causing players to berate others for shouting the pot timers.

Any small change that doesn't completely revamp and remove the 20 pot limit will be met with resentment from the playerbase.

Think they should add a buff that you get a higher chance of a pot doing CEs (like the other poster said), or they should have just made the items a rare drop during certain ones.

I think the problem should be solved another way besides raising the 20 player cap. Just have the pot fates always be up.

The 20 player cap also existed in Bozja and it was never noticed. Reason being, the "happy bunnies" were always up. Some players ignored them and continued to grind overworld mobs and CEs. But even if you had 30 players on the same happy bunny (never) then 20 of you would win and go play the minigame. Meanwhile the other 10 of you, go over there, win that fate, and start your minigame.

Players used to grind the happy bunnies in Eureka and Bozja for rare cosmetics. For HOURS on end! You can't do that right now with the 30 minute wait between pot fates. Trust me, you don't want them to remove the cap. If they remove the cap then you will do your pot fate, afk watching YT or Netflix for 25 minutes, and do another pot fate. That's terrible. Just let people grind them for hours nonstop like they used to.

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Originally Posted by Catastrophe573

I think the problem should be solved another way besides raising the 20 player cap. Just have the pot fates always be up.

The 20 player cap also existed in Bozja and it was never noticed. Reason being, the "happy bunnies" were always up. Some players ignored them and continued to grind overworld mobs and CEs. But even if you had 30 players on the same happy bunny (never) then 20 of you would win and go play the minigame. Meanwhile the other 10 of you, go over there, win that fate, and start your minigame.

Players used to grind the happy bunnies in Eureka and Bozja for rare cosmetics. For HOURS on end! You can't do that right now with the 30 minute wait between pot fates. Trust me, you don't want them to remove the cap. If they remove the cap then you will do your pot fate, afk watching YT or Netflix for 25 minutes, and do another pot fate. That's terrible. Just let people grind them for hours nonstop like they used to.

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Bunnies have never existed in Bozja. Additionally, Eureka bunnies actually do have a short cooldown of 10 minutes so they won't always be up if people are actually farming them.

Additionally, this sounds like an absolutely horrible idea. Bunnies having a short cooldown in Eureka is fine because they do nothing to further your progression in the content. Having a 10 minute cooldown in Occult Crescent would result in you only doing pots if you were farming silver as they are better value than CEs. This would only make the problem significantly worse.

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Originally Posted by Celliera

Bunnies have never existed in Bozja. Additionally, Eureka bunnies actually do have a short cooldown of 10 minutes so they won't always be up if people are actually farming them.

Additionally, this sounds like an absolutely horrible idea. Bunnies having a short cooldown in Eureka is fine because they do nothing to further your progression in the content. Having a 10 minute cooldown in Occult Crescent would result in you only doing pots if you were farming silver as they are better value than CEs. This would only make the problem significantly worse.

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Honestly you could do this by nerfing the huge amount of gold and silver that pots do give or giving them downsides like completing pots can’t respawn bronze chests

I don’t think it’s a bad idea to make pots more common and easier to get overall

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Honestly you could do this by nerfing the huge amount of gold and silver that pots do give or giving them downsides like completing pots can’t respawn bronze chests

I don’t think it’s a bad idea to make pots more common and easier to get overall

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If they reverted pots back to their 7.25 state I would be perfectly fine with them decreasing the FATE respawn time but sadly the moment they decided to attach silver/gold coins and now rings worth millions of gil to them that kinda went out the window.

With pots in their current state there is no reason to do things besides pots when they are up and that's a core issue that is addressed in the initial post. CEs need to be buffed and pots may even need to be nerfed in order to improve OC.

I seriously had a moment this morning where I wanted to unsub after losing a pot. I originally loved Occult Crescent. I had all the original jobs maxed as well as gold and silver. I was so excited for this patch to give me more to do in OC, but I have barely been able to play the zone. Everytime I log in and try, I get in a very negative headspace and I need to leave. Even on the Dynamis DC there are tons of players trolling everyone over these dumb pots because of the accessories. Just now, in an instance of only 10 people, I lost a pot because a full party of <Travelers> wiped out the FATE faster than I could get a one full rotation off. There was absolutely zero reason for them to deny anybody in the instance a pot, and that created some seriously negative emotions. There is clearly a design flaw with this whole situation. I did not complain before when I first saw this thread, because Gold/Silver is easy to farm in many ways, and we can ignore the negativity that way. However, now that the accessories are a thing, this problem is unavoidable unless you have a ton of gil.

This thought just crossed my mind considering the design of Occult, but I wonder how it would work out if they actually revisited the "Chain" gimmick that was originally designed for leveling and currency acquisition. Given that CE/Chest and such give currency now, the Chain mechanic is not as useful as it once was as people can just farm CE for the accessories however, if they put in a system where every 20 chain each player gets a free "pot-like" chest to appear on the map it would encourage players to partake in the chain gimmick.

As far as I'm aware we currently have a hard limit of 30 bronze chest, 3? Silver when it comes to chest that can spawn through CE, so if you just add in a new chest that can spawn in the "pot" locations, then every 20 chain hit a pot chest will spawn in one of those location but you can only have 1 of those chest types spawned at any given time. So as a party you would chain 20, hunt the chest, chain 20, hunt the chest, rinse repeat until bored or you get the accessories you are farming. With that in mind I would remove the gil reward from these chest and just have it where these "pot-like" chest just have the same loot table as the pot chest without the gil.