Concerns about Content Patch 2.1

[Cycloptichorn]

It is so sad that everyone wants to be spoon fed something to do, because they are completely incapable of having fun on their own.

- Hey, do you want to go play in the dungeon?
- No it is boring.
- There is a new sword in there.
- Oh, I'd love to go, I love dungeons.
later
- Why aren't you doing dungeons?
- I have the sword, dungeons are boring.

This x1000. I sometimes get the feeling that most of our 'hardcore' crowd has no idea why they are really playing this game at all.

Hell, the OP said that it gets really boring leveling up your '6th or 7th' job and that the casuals will be finding this out soon. Is he mental? NO casual is leveling up 6 jobs!!!!

Just a severe lack of perspective amongst the 'hardcore progression' crowd...

I make up my own quests all the time, it's more fun than anything else, really. But that takes imagination and determination, instead of being spoon-fed content, so most have nothing even approaching the ability to do so.

[Taemek]

With respect to the OP, you only have one crafting class (at level 5) and one gathering class (at level 17). You've made a thread about a lack of content when you've ignored more than half of the game's existing features.

And your character isn't wearing any pants.

I have two characters, the one I am posting with is an alt and as I said in the OP, once you have set out everything you plan to se or do, then what?

Crafting is a no brainer, who honestly wants to sit there in a room, crafting the same crap over and over again with a chance of success based on range? That's not my idea of a fun passing of time, now to others sure and they will likely say the same about me enjoying adventuring and killing things.

Should I have to endure something that I hate doing and find no fun in which will lead me to scratching my eyes out just because it is a minor part of the games content? Crafting and Gathering makes up for 20% of the games content, not a major part of it like you seem to think. It is not even required to complete the story line quest series.

And yes, I am wearing pants.

[Taemek]

Hello,

We’ve been seeing comments asking why we cannot make certain changes or fixes quicker as opposed to waiting for 2.1.

When it comes to bug fixes that have been reported and replicated by the QA team as well as changes and adjustments that are requested, the development team makes these change or fixes which are then tested by QA for stability. For each change and bug fix that is made, the team confirms that the rest of the game is unaffected and that server crashes or other issues do not take place.

FFXIV is being developed by a branch-development method, where there is a group working on patch 2.1 while 2.0 is running. Critical bugs that severely affect play, which have been confirmed and replicated, are addressed in the shortest amount of time as possible. Changes designed off of feedback, that also have large effects on the entire game, are ultimately implemented on a schedule decided by the Producer/Director Yoshi-P.

Additionally, the QA team checks and ensures all fixes and changes are stable on both the Windows and PS3 versions. These checks are consolidated and performed when major updates are scheduled.

To thoroughly address each concern, we are unable to perform fixes and changes for everything immediately, and as a result some changes are addressed with major patches and updates. We appreciate your understanding in regards to this.

Hence why doing smaller more consistent patches are better to help retain players and faster to bug test.

While the 2.1 patch looks good and the player housing that will follow likely in 2.2 looks good too, you are relying on this constant grind mentality to retain your player base. Hence why I said:

I would like to suggest that they release the smaller content upgrades i.e. Extreme Primals, Hard mode Dungeons & their Daily Quest Factions (Wolves Den, Beast Tribe and Treasure Hunt) before the release of 2.1 and then focus all their attention on 2.1 and maybe even putting housing in to 2.1 to replace these from being added to the game earlier.

Your extreme Primals are copy/paste of the orginal primals with some new abilities thrown in and a different damage scale which is automatically calculated upon a set parameter which is predetermined by your Dev team. These bug tests are able to be in isolated instances in house and have no direct effect once applied as the primal fights themselves are housed on separate servers, again, isolating any issues of *breaking* things.

Hard Mode Dungeons, yet again as above, isolated to separate servers.

The only remote thing in my suggestion that might break something is the implementation of the Factions as I am assuming this will be done in the persistent world and not instanced or maybe a mixture of both.

All in all, bug testing is part and parcel of releasing new content. You can't use this as an excuse or as smoke and mirrors routine to cover up the fact that people are starting to get bored of the current content that is very limited once you have even 2 level 50 Job roles or 1 level 50 crafter and 1 level 50 gatherer.

Your post, while I appreciate you posting here, has nothing really directly related to what I am addressing in the OP. We are not talking about fixes or changes that effect us immediately. We are talking about separating large content based patches down to a more executable size in a more trivial timeframe and using your exact example, how are you so sure that your bug testing teams will have successfully cleared the 2.1 patch before the New Year with a launch date of mid December like has been said by Yoshi? If bugs still exists as you pointed out, content will be pushed back and the bigger the patch the longer it takes to bug test.

Let me point out one last thing here:

Yoshi said Player housing would be in 2.1, got pushed back to 2.2 and you went with FC housing in 2.1 instead, with a limited amount of building lots, which makes no sense.
Yoshi said Warriors were fine and people needed more time to learn how to play them, then realized there was an issue and they are getting addressed in 2.1.
Yoshi said less then 100 people would have cleared Coil by time 2.1 is out, my last check on guilds who have done it coupled with the achievement count on the database indicates a lot more then 100 people have cleared Coil now.

Anyone else seeing a trend with Yoshi's predictions? Granted not everything always goes to plan, I can accept that. What I can't accept is watching people quit the game daily while nothing gets done when there can damn well something be done to retain them simply because they are bored of the same grind mentality.



Now for those who think they are all high and mighty, I did not level my first two job roles of Fates, why? Because I had two different characters which required the story line to be run on each one. Secondly, how many times do you expect people to re-run Dungeons? Please enlighten us on what you think a good figure is that justifies the grind on dungeons as seeing content? I have farmed 4 DL sets now across 2 characters, how much CM, Praet, WP and AK do I have to do? Do the math on how many dungeons this is.

Crafting is unfortunately, not for everyone and I for one would rather do something more constructive with my time then sit down and spam 1 or 2 buttons for hours on end while at the mercy of range that determines my success rate. If they had a more in-depth and intuitive crafting system that required skill to perform, sure I would be all over it. However, I am not a fan of the drone based crafting system, sorry. Gathering is a little bit more enjoyable, at least it requires interaction with mobs and other variables that come along the way, you even get to see the scenery of the game which is quite nice to look at.

Just to finish here, again, this is not an argument of casual vs. hardcore. It effects both players alike, some just more then others. Anyone who tries to justify peoples intentions here based off the notion that ethier people *rushed* to 50 have no idea what they are talking about, casual players have multiple 50's now, did they rush to 50 too? Or people still have content to do because they have 2 or 3 job roles at level 50 and no crafting class roles need to take a step back and think outside the box, people might have alts, not everyone wanted to level everything on one character.

[Taemek]

It is so sad that everyone wants to be spoon fed something to do, because they are completely incapable of having fun on their own.

- Hey, do you want to go play in the dungeon?
- No it is boring.
- There is a new sword in there.
- Oh, I'd love to go, I love dungeons.
later
- Why aren't you doing dungeons?
- I have the sword, dungeons are boring.

How many dungeon runs does it take to get your Relic + one full DL set of Acc and Gear?

It is a little more then simply, running for a sword and then getting bored because said person obtained the sword, I am afraid.

Getting a little sick of these posts taking the whole concept of what was in the OP out of context, grossly I might add.

It takes 8090 Tomes of Philo to complete 1 Relic and 1 full DL set. That is 81 runs of 4 dungeons to choose from with am average run taking 35 mins for the people who do not speed run. That is 48 hours worth of running 4 dungeons, if you are a robot and have no afk's, wipes, issues etc. Then 3 more weeks of being capped at 300 Myth tomes a week which equates to another 23 runs if you do AK, another 13.5 hours or 30 runs if you do WP, another 17.5 hours. This does not take in to account the amount time/wipes on Primal Hard fights. So from the dungeons runs alone you are looking at roughly 65 - 70 hours worth of grinding in the same 4 dungeons, so please spare us your vague and terribly out of context examples.

Then people, like yourself wonder why speed runs have become a common trend......

[Malamasala]

How many dungeon runs does it take to get your Relic + one full DL set of Acc and Gear?

It is a little more then simply, running for a sword and then getting bored because said person obtained the sword, I am afraid.

As I said, it is all about enjoying the gameplay. When you can do that, you don't need updates. I still play DOOM today, and it is not because ID Software came out with an update last week or something. It is just the game being fun.

I suggest you just abandon the game if you don't like it. I did just like these people with FFXI, waited update for update for update for the game to become fun, while being mainly bored by it. And 10 years later, it was still boring because that game fixing update never happened. I'd hate to see you be bored that long just because you are still naive.

[Ceridan]

I've had a fun time reading this thread at work while waiting on the build server to spit out the result of my latest check in.

My opinion is: Just be patient.
Software as complex as a modern video game cannot done in one's basement in a weekend.( no developpers are not wizards capable of creating code by waving a magic wand...)
It takes lots of effort to make sure everything is right. (As well as good processes, good architecure, good tools and QA).

I find it laughtable that some in this thread wants new feature now, saying that "They can do it in a day", but forgetting that new features must be tested, class changes must be tested for balance sake, Bugs must be found and squashed.

PS: I do agree however that a Patch Test server is a good tool in modern MMO's toolkit, since it allows to have a greater pool of testers for new content and allow to see issues that only occurs when a large population is doing content.

[silverhope]

This is all well and good but why do they keep adding things to the patch when most of this was ment to be released on launch day.. If the things are ready do a smaller patch or split it into 2 medium size patches insted of pushing 2.1 to god knows when

[ilivetogame]

It boils down to PS3. It's very expensive and time consuming to release a patch on the PS3. Each client update must go through Format at SCEE and SCEA and neither of them have very fast turn around. I've seen updates take as long as 2 months to get approved (or denied) after submission. Then, if the update fails Format QA, then they start the process all over again.

That's why you dont see a new update coming out every month or two.

[Wildsprite]

Hello,

We’ve been seeing comments asking why we cannot make certain changes or fixes quicker as opposed to waiting for 2.1.

When it comes to bug fixes that have been reported and replicated by the QA team as well as changes and adjustments that are requested, the development team makes these change or fixes which are then tested by QA for stability. For each change and bug fix that is made, the team confirms that the rest of the game is unaffected and that server crashes or other issues do not take place.

FFXIV is being developed by a branch-development method, where there is a group working on patch 2.1 while 2.0 is running. Critical bugs that severely affect play, which have been confirmed and replicated, are addressed in the shortest amount of time as possible. Changes designed off of feedback, that also have large effects on the entire game, are ultimately implemented on a schedule decided by the Producer/Director Yoshi-P.

Additionally, the QA team checks and ensures all fixes and changes are stable on both the Windows and PS3 versions. These checks are consolidated and performed when major updates are scheduled.

To thoroughly address each concern, we are unable to perform fixes and changes for everything immediately, and as a result some changes are addressed with major patches and updates. We appreciate your understanding in regards to this.

why not make player accessable test worlds for content and release it in smaller doses?

that way you get player feedback long before you release the content. you know this could work. you should seriously consider it.

[Mook_Mook]

As I said, it is all about enjoying the gameplay. When you can do that, you don't need updates. I still play DOOM today, and it is not because ID Software came out with an update last week or something. It is just the game being fun.

I suggest you just abandon the game if you don't like it. I did just like these people with FFXI, waited update for update for update for the game to become fun, while being mainly bored by it. And 10 years later, it was still boring because that game fixing update never happened. I'd hate to see you be bored that long just because you are still naive.

do oyu pay 15$ every time you wanna play doom. If not they dont really compare