Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Kanti]

Flipped through the original while reading. Really nice job on the translation. Good work.

[Sramdi]

Amazing post, and definitely summarizes a lot of what I've been feeling lately and it explains some of the ambiguity/lack of motivation I've felt towards completing some of the end-game content. Thanks for sharing/translating it.

[Zantetsuken]

I totally agree with the blog post, and thanks for the translation, OP...

"Team Jump Rope" mechanics is one of the major design flaws in this game and it places all the pressure of winning on the weakest member(s) of the party. It creates an environment for hostile player relationships, and further erodes the relevance and usefulness of an already weak gear system.

I've enjoyed reading some of the proposed fixes in this thread as well... The idea of a time consuming climb back up to Titan after being knocked off is fantastic. (it could incorporate the 'fall damage' to reduce HP to 1 and put pressure on healing before you reach the top.)


Mechanic-based fights that require memorization are not remotely the same as those that require skill. Skill is gained via familiarity with the game's systems but ARR's boss fight systems are all islands unto themselves. Success in them is determined by their own specific mechanics that exist virtually nowhere else in the game.

I'm not against boss fights with new mechanics, but they should make the fight more difficult rather than be the sole pivot point by which a fight is won or lost.

In FFXI (pre-Abyssea), some of the most memorable fights were the ones that had unique mechanics which ramped the difficulty up, but still allowed for player mistakes and a bit of luck.

• Divine Might (one of the best fights ever)
• Proto-Ultima (Citadel Buster, on <t>, (Run away!) /cry /comfort <t>)
• Kirin (mechanics based on what you learned by fighting the other gods)

One of other neat things touched on in the blog was the fact that a FFXI player could be a 'hero' in a battle by carrying a bit of the weight for the newer players.

Sadly, there is little opportunity in ARR to compensate for someone who isn't pulling their weight. The mechanic-driven battles of ARR put rigid ceiling on skillful play and punish the entire party for those who don't perform.

[Zarzak]

While a lot of this post is solid and makes sense one core point he keeps harping on I will disagree with.

Yoshi-P has said that “making the fights scripted is so that anyone can clear it once they have the patterns memorized”, and designed the fights using this philosophy. But because of the “mechanics-driven” problem mentioned earlier, the fights are never really eased/nerfed and remain only beatable by those who can deal with the mechanics.

We can train pigeons to act as guidance systems for bomber planes, We can memorize the route to take through an entire city to get from A to B, we can memorize thousands on thousands of random facts/words/etc/etc/etc.

EVERYONE can memorize the mechanics. Whether they do or not is entirely up to them.


I still agree having EVERY event mechanic driven is a mistake (should be a mix of mechanic driven, brute force, mix, gimmick [considering mechanics and gimmicks different things.. IMO a gimmick is something semi amusing/supposed to be such as if you summoned a giant mongoose to attack Caduceus], etc)


But I can't agree that, with the exception of diagnostically mentally disabled individuals, there is a person playing who can't manage "if a red circle appears under you... move out of it"



Also IMO the "have as many or as few as you want!" is a really unbalanceable system. If they are tuned to 24 people sure skilled players can do them with 20. but suggesting that 8 amazing players should be able to do what 24 average players can just tells me the event isn't tuned right. (dps check for example to keep adds from piling up in an event like Turn 4... that would be saying 1 amazing player is doing 3x the dps of an average player.. say average these days is 200.. they are doing 600?)

Having larger raids AND more raids would alleviate the problem though. Currently it is not realistic to have a bench. Why? Because a bench would need at minimum someone for every role to be able to fill in no matter who misses (so a melee dps, caster dps, bard, healer, and tank)... In the current raid size that's over half a raid sitting on their hands keeping themselves from getting lockouts in case they are needed. Then with the number of raids. With only 4 events we can't realistically cycle the bench in so everyone gets some raid time for the week. The total raid time start to finish is only an hour. "Ok you get 1 event this week!" is not going to fly with anyone who WANTS to raid"

Having 24 man raids would allow a couple things.

1. a healthy bench (4-5 players)
2. allow particularly skilled groups to still run even if they have 1-2 people miss

Having MORE raids would allow a couple more.

1. allow a healthy bench via allowing you to realistically cycle in your bench to get raid time

- Doing a quick search/going from experience this is what current MMOs have compared to FFXIV

Traditional MMOS (ya know.. the ones where you actually group with people to play the game)

---FFXI can't find a list of the current SoA raids. But if it's anything like it used to be then there are several hours worth of relevant content to raid (used to be SO MUCH MORE but I hear they basically reset gear and made the old stuff irrelevant)

---EQ: VoA expansion top tier had 8 raids (total length of all 8 combined.. ~4 hours) but it was still relevant to farm at least the tier before for months after the top tier was cleared.. which is another 3 raids adding an additional hour or so of content

the big "modern" MMOS

---Rift: Tier 2 (couldn't find info on new tier offhand and quit b4 it released) had 8 raids in 20 man and 4 in 10 man. Again guilds still often went and hit up previous tier for an hour or so a week to fill in slots/new members/etc.

---WoW Top tier has 14 raids. Far as I know there are also 2 tiers of difficulty (normal/heroic) and guilds run both? (not sure on that)

2. let you raid multiple nights even during farm so you can do things like have 2 scholars on roster.. One that can't raid every Tuesday/Thurs and one that can raid every night the other can't


Simply put having nothing available but 8 man raids is doing nothing but hurting the raiding environment. Sure do what Rift/WoW did and provide some small scale raids (8 mans) but give us a REAL CT (8-9 bosses tuned for a premade raid like we were expecting) and release alongside the 8 man coil.

[Elazu]

Couldn't agree more with him.

[Seif]

The writer is right about stats and echos.

They're next to useless in the face of pattern memorization.

In XI you could tell who is a great player in a group but in XIV there is no such thing. You either follow the pattern or you don't. In extremes the great players cannot compensate for the mis-steps of the less experienced. Skill in this game is binary. You either follow the steps or you fail.

Now that I think about it; why am I working so hard for gear to begin with?
The animus is not THAT much stronger than easier-to-get gear and in the end it's not going to matter that much especially for a warrior.

[Iriadysa]

Reading all the thread responses is just plain sad.

I would never say the game is perfect, in fact I believe it has many flaws and certainly a lot of things that I don't like... but this apology of the skill-less is just horrible.

I guess this is why we start seeing things like the white tanoki suit, the skip to next check point or all the clue systems.

In my opinion, games should strive for high difficulty with low tedious factors. FFXIV does this well in many of the end game fights: you wipe in coil and everything instantly resets and you can try again. And again. And again. Until what makes you leave is not that that the time ran out and you wasted your weekly entry but the fact that you have to accept you aren't good enough to beat the encounter today and Perhaps tomorrow will be different. (Side note: ATMA quest is the exact opposite: high tediousness, low difficulty).

Maybe I just miss the (not so long ago) times when games weren't afraid of not being politically correct and would tell you in your face: "You suck at this".

[Orophin]

Ok, so I'm going to be the detractor here. I will preface this with some of his arguments are good, but many are a conflict of interest for the continued success (measured in subscriptions) for this game.

A mechanics-driven battle system

At this point (2.25), the current end-game content is the Second Coil of Bahamut. And the previous, first Binding Coil of Bahamut has been made so that even the so-called "mainstream" players can clear them without too much effort. Yes?

Let's take a look at the first Coil as an example:

In Turn 1, you no longer need to feed the slimes to Caduceus, so that's a huge easing of difficulty.
People were skipping slimes before the first patch. As long as you know the fight and outgear it over the bare minimum anyone could do this.


In Turn 2, Allagan Rot is (still) the faster method. However, anyone who cannot properly handle the mechanic will still die and possibly wipe the party. The mechanics has been eased to the point where even if one or two people mess up you may still be able to clear it. Nevertheless, the enrage method remains the mainstream strategy.
I feel that Turn 2 was the major roadblock to lesser skilled people progressing through Coil until the Enrage method was discovered.

In Turn 5, if you cannot deal with the mechanics of divebombs, twister, etc., you will not be able to win no matter what your character or equipment level is, with or without Echo. In fact, if your DPS is too high, you will actually run into trouble with Conflag/Fire Balls.
And this pretty much sets the trend for all the new turns of Coil, and maybe every piece of harder content equivalent to Coil going forward. (I don't think Primals or CT will ever fall under this category) This is also how I feel the cutting edge content should be until something comes out to replace it. People that have it on farm can still screw up occasionally, and it's both refreshing and frustrating to know that even if you know a fight inside out that it can still whip your ass sometimes.

The largest group here, the casual players, have all yet to still challenge the Extreme Primals and Coil. But the reality is that a large portion of this group have already stopped playing altogether.
So you're telling me nearly 60% of the playerbase have stopped playing by now? I find that kind of hard to believe. I'm in a FC full of what I would call "casual" people (I don't actually raid with them) and to this day, as a full FC, have never beaten Titan Ex. They just finally got their T5 kill a few days ago after finally putting some serious effort into it the past few weeks of a few hours a night 2-3 times a week, which isn't something a casual would typically do, but that's the kind of effort that has to be put forth if you're serious about beating something.

Right now they maybe put an hour's worth of attempts into Titan Ex and then give up. That's what casuals do. The people in my FC don't seem too concerned about being at the cutting edge of things, they just want to beat it eventually. They seem content enough doing atma farming, dungeons, gardening, all facets of what the game has to offer.

Changing the battle system

My recommendation is a battle system that does not rely on mechanics/gimmicks.

Turn 4 of the first Coil, prior to the nerf, had almost the perfect balance in terms of difficulty. It was built so that it can be cleared long as the players can fully exercise their skill potential, and is directly affected by measures such as the Echo and gear ilvl.
So essentially you want a battle system where you don't have to dodge anything? I guarantee you will lose far more players (your hardcores and your midcores) if you have a battle system like this because it will be bland and unimaginative. I hate to pull the FFXI card, (but it was already done in this post at one point) but it seems like you want a battle system that mocks FFXI where all you do is trade hits with a boss, heal through the damage, and occasionally use a devastating attack. FFXI had one of the most boring battle systems I've ever witnessed. Its only redeeming features were skillchains and magic bursts.

I'm not saying that gimmicks/mechanics are evil and should be removed completely, just that fights should not be “driven” by them. “Why not just make the boss or enemy simply strong?” is the basis of my recommendation.
That's exactly what you are saying though. I read this as you'd rather have a boss hit your tank for 75% of their health and put all the skill based play around your healers being able to precast/react around that. The wide array of abilities that a boss can use that affects the whole party is what I feel brings that certain level of challenge for the encounter. It's also what separates the good players from the bad, as one weak link will ruin you on the harder encounters.

Having more freedom in setting your own party size... or not
I don't think the development team quite understands just what made these contents so good for many players. And that is “as long as certain key jobs are in the party, you're more or less free to build the rest of the party any way you liked” (a FFXIV raid leader reading this is probably thinking “I wish!” right now)
FFXIV works the same way? You need tanks and healers, and a bard would be preferable. (sounds familiar...) Everything else is your choice, although there are certain setups that may work better for specific encounters, just like in FFXI.

Yoshi-P says “people get tired of contents after about 3 months”, and that's absolutely wrong. Everyone played these things for years at a time, and even the more recent Abyssea update had me playing for well over a year.
People played that content for years because it's all they knew. They had fun playing with their friends and continued to play the game. People that didn't enjoy this branched out and experienced new games like WoW and preferred its content that had less of a time investment for it. I can guarantee that this game will lose more people if all we had to do for a year was the first Binding Coil of Bahamut.

Now, what about the current FC/LS situation in FFXIV?

After each patch, you'll see your FC/LS's static teams in coil all day, and wonder whether anyone will even have time to talk to you.

If the system is changed so that more people can participate then you might have been able to go “Hey I just got here, let me join you guys!” (this wasn't easy to implement even in FFXI, but they did it)

The obstacle here (besides the obvious 8-man design limitation) is the instant death mechanics. As long as these mechanics exist, people will only want to play with those who won't make mistakes and would never want to *add* more people into their party.
I agree that I'd like to see larger party content other than CT and the two open world encounters that we have, but this isn't the obstacle. If WoW proved anything, you can carry less skilled people in content that required more people. The obstacle is the dev team afraid of taking a chance on making larger scale content because it will exclude smaller FCs that can't/aren't willing to branch out to other people to team up with to do it.

Weekly lockouts and other time-gate measures

There are a number of weekly lockouts in FFXIV, however, there are no attempt lockouts. You can try something for as many times as you want until you win. This is another factor that pushes the system towards being mechanics-driven.
If you want to implement something to drive away a large portion of your players, then this is the way to do it. FFXIV doesn't have an alternative like WoW's Heroic Raids for content. WoW has its normal difficulty that people can play through for the majority, while the minority of more skilled people could go through the Heroic raids with limited attempts, but the rewards are better. The common player simply wants to clear the content and may not even want to farm for gear. If you gate content behind a certain amount of attempts, you're going to lose your lesser skilled players (which make up the majority of the player base) simply because they can't experience it. You'd lose your Hardcores too who are trying to figure out mechanics for a fight because there's no alternative for them to do in the meantime.

To summarize, I feel this specific writer either can't handle mechanics themselves, or feel they're at the mercy of other players that can't, and want the battle system watered down to where it becomes so simple that people barely have to think or react. This might help lesser skilled/casual players get through the content faster, but on the same hand they'll be in the same boat as the hardcores (who will clear everything within the first week of it coming out) who get bored after doing content after so long.

(I notice I use "you" a lot in my post, it's not directed at the OP)

[Cap75]

In my opinion, games should strive for high difficulty with low tedious factors. FFXIV does this well in many of the end game fights: you wipe in coil and everything instantly resets and you can try again. And again. And again.

That exact repetition is tedious by definition because the fights are exactly the same every time due to the extremely scripted nature of them.

[Iriadysa]

That exact repetition is tedious by definition because the fights are exactly the same every time due to the extremely scripted nature of them.

A fight only becomes tedious from repetition once you master it.

Otherwise you are just looking for blame outside of your own inability to improve. Although... I suppose you could get tired of sucking at a fight. Well, that's the game right there telling you "You suck at this"