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

[silentwindfr]

AbleGamers names Final Fantasy XIV accessible mainstream game of the year

you realize that accessible don't means easy? or casual? worst it don't even make your point valable... it say, people that have handicap can enjoy the game!
god you want the game to be hard that only 3% of the community will complet the challenge here? like Naxx 60, because WoW have already did this only giving content for hardcore... and they have themself change them way... maybe because they have understand that was idiot to use money and time to only care for 5% of the community!

i will be cruel...Even the pvp community have more people into it. yoshida have said they want to touch 15% of the community with the pvp

[Melithea]

you realize that accessible don't means easy? or casual? worst it don't even make your point valable... it say, people that have handicap can enjoy the game!

You're trying really hard to miss the point for the sake of your dogma, and in that I suppose I should commend you. The point is that this game is even especially physically easy to play, even before you get to the content. All of this out-of-control difficulty that people are complaining about is restricted to a very small portion of the game and complaints about it are highly exaggerated. And again, this is coming from someone who doesn't even clear Second Coil.

god you want the game to be hard that only 3% of the community will complet the challenge here

When the hell have I ever said anything like this? What I've actually said, is that it is already true that only a small part of the community is capable of tackling the highest tier content. In fact, I don't believe I've even given my opinion on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, other than expressing my frustration with assembling people who can run it with me.

Loads more easy content is coming, and it sounds like that's all you really want. You want a young game under 12 months old to have 3 years worth of content because 5% of the game is too hard for 90% of players. Guess what? If 100% of players could access 100% of content right away, that would ALSO result in everyone getting bored and leaving. We actually have something pretty close to an acceptable middle ground right now with the way that old content becomes more accessible with every patch. Given everything we know about what is planned for this game, it sounds like you just need to be patient and realize that content doesn't develop itself overnight.

[Pibz]

24-man content is easier than 8-man content by both design and definition. CT2 will be easier than Coil 1. People will be starting new characters and running CT2 two weeks later. Brutal Mode and Shiva aren't 2.3.



AbleGamers names Final Fantasy XIV accessible mainstream game of the year

Wow.. using an award that shows the game is well designed so that disabled people can enjoy most of it to show how the endgame encounters are ridiculously easy,regardless of how i feel on the subject, is just sad. Shame on you.
And wrong, brutal coil is 2.3 don't correct people when you are the one who's wrong.


As for the whole thread, why is this still going on?
They said they are nerfing the one shot mechanics on old fights, and they're introducing new Brutal Coil which is tuned higher and has more randomness in it. So seems more or less what the OP wanted.
So again, why are you guys still discussing this?

Personally I really like Moogle EX because everything is mostly randomized and there isn't a strict order to things happening aside from phase changes, too bad people rarely do it because the rewards are just a neck accessory most people have by now.

LOL, wut?!

[Melithea]

Why do people always see the world in black or white ? Couldn't the alternative to "mechanics-driven battles" just be "battle with mechanics" ?

I want to take you more seriously, but your entire concept of acceptable mechanics appears to be adds and AOE attacks.

Are you just messing with me? Do you want another chance to come up with some better examples?

Wow.. using an award that shows the game is well designed so that disabled people can enjoy most of it to show how the endgame encounters are ridiculously easy

That's not what I did and I further explained the relevance in a follow-up. Shame on you for not having any reading comprehension.

And wrong, brutal coil is 2.3 don't correct people when you are the one who's wrong.

I had to go back and review the live letter because the information doesn't appear to be *anywhere else*, but I stand corrected on this. I didn't remember anything from the E3 special being slated for 2.3. So yay, there is actually going to be some difficult (recycled) content in 2.3 for people who actually enjoy a challenge.

[Kuwagami]

I want to take you more seriously, but your entire concept of acceptable mechanics appears to be adds and AOE attacks.

Are you just messing with me? Do you want another chance to come up with some better examples?

The examples weren't here to give "acceptable mechanics". They are fun fights at some point, but they tend to turn extremely easy after a time (at least for hydra and chimera).

The point was that a fight should not be
"Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > end of boss"
Or, to explain it better, these mechanics should not just come one after an other every 5 seconds with no room to do anything else. Coil2 is pretty much "Follow the path the devs have set or die" and I can't think of anything which can go out of this path. You still have the choice in your party set-up, but that's pretty much all.

In moggle ex, you have choice for pretty much everything (assuming the enrage timer doesn't start at pull, I'm not sure of that) : order to weaken the minions, when you change phases, how you tank the boss (titan egi shines there)






Sorry, I'm at a point where I can't find more words to explain what I want to say. I'll say one thing and hope it achieves to be understandable, wether people agree or not :
one shot mechanics are fine, as long as they are not overused.
A fight should not be :
insta-kill > insta-kill > insta-kill > super hard hitting unavoidable hit > insta-kill > repeat.

Nor it should be :
weak Aoe > adds > medium Aoe > weak Aoe > repeat. (

The first allows no room for error and becomes quickly boring if you can't find consistent players, or after a few consistent wins (doing the same exact dance everytime is not really appealing). The second is obviously not fitting a raid. It's fine for a dungeon though, but shouldn't be overused as well.

Rather than that, if you have a pool of attacks, like :
- strong unavoidable hit on tank *3
- room medium AoE *2
- one shot mechanic *1
- hard hitting AoE *2

and if the boss picks randomly 4 attacks from the pool then repeat, you'll have a fight overall more fun, and while better groups can win every mechanics, less skilled groups can hope to have an easier time on that phase. (more fun because it wouldn't be always the same fight)

Keep some timed mechanics (let's say like a 30 sec timer on blighted bouquet), phase changes with "do it or lose" mechanics, as the firsts can be a good reactivity check if you can't keep track of the timer, and the seconds are somehow necessary to give a "tough boss" feeling : they're growing in rage and show they aren't here as garden plants.

Just do not rely solely on them. They do not make a fight fun if they are overused.


(Numbers and examples are purely made up. I know there aren't fights that much of a cliche in the game yet. But a vast majority of top-end content at the moment relies solely on "do it or lose" mechanics.)

[Archulak]

The point was that a fight should not be
"Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > Mechanic > end of boss"
Or, to explain it better, these mechanics should not just come one after an other every 5 seconds with no room to do anything else. Coil2 is pretty much "Follow the path the devs have set or die" and I can't think of anything which can go out of this path. You still have the choice in your party set-up, but that's pretty much all.

So first off I think that most people have some misunderstanding of how the bosses in coil work they're all basically the same as players and they have CD's on all their skills the reason that the fights happen the same way all the time is that the AI uses every skill as soon as the CD is up. The reason that twin can be hard if you push at the wrong time is that as soon as it hits an hp threshold the CD for it's new mechanics starts ticking and twin always uses whatever comes up first, like delaying fireballs cause it needs to plummet or use DS. It's not about it being mechanic > mechanic > mechanic > mechanic (in coil, titan is a different story) it's just an AI using whatever is available. Btw no combination of atk's in this game can't be overcome by understanding the fight and knowing what's actually going on, though some of them can be quite inconvenience, so the player base learned what these things were and then how to force the easiest outcome.

And now for my second non-tangential point to the quote. I have literally watched vids of at least 4 different ways to do t6(briars, LoS, Super Slug, burn), 3 different ways to position the party in T7, 2 ways to handle the t7 ogres(stack, kite),6 different ways to push towers in T8, 5 different ways to drop meteors in 9, 3 different ways to handle the ghost during heavens fall and 2 ways to dodge the dive bombs. To say that there's 1 way to do everything in coil is insulting to players that come up with these strategies, and just sounds like ignorance coming from someone who has decided that the only proper way to do something is from whatever guide they read first.

Sorry to burst your bubble but FFXIV focus target is not a perfect indicator for Twintania during that phase since it happens when you're forced to focus on add dps. Which is why I said, "VoIP is really needed".

You could resize your focus target bar to be massive and stick it right in the middle of your screen if you fail to realize there's a bar casting that says twister, that shows it's exact cast time, that's not an imperfect indicator it's called a lack of awareness.

[Gormogon]

You could resize your focus target bar to be massive and stick it right in the middle of your screen if you fail to realize there's a bar casting that says twister, that shows it's exact cast time, that's not an imperfect indicator it's called a lack of awareness.

Getting people to do that during the middle of a fight is pointless.

If I was a tank I'd go in with a macro that indicates twisters are being casted. There's many alternatives but a surefire way for a fight like this is VoIP since we don't have access to DBM in FFXIV.

[Melithea]

Sorry, I'm at a point where I can't find more words to explain what I want to say.

Well that's unfortunate because the reason I'm here is to try to extract a more well-explained position from you and the people who share your mindset. Half of you claim that your complaint is that mechanic-laden fights just aren't fun, but you struggle to actually explain or define what a fun fight is. You (general) claim that the problem is not the difficulty of the fight, but your only real complaint about the mechanics in the more difficult fights is that they are too hard (or that failure is too "punishing", thus motivating you to actually succeed rather than ignore the mechanic).

What really blows my mind is the proposed solutions. Because all of them are either bad or would have unintended consequences that make things worse. For all the thought and passion that's gone into this, the people who don't like the current way Titan EX and Second Coil work can't seem to agree on what they would actually rather have.

If people can't handle Titan landslides now you really, really, REALLY don't want a random fight no matter how much you may think you do. The problem with a random fight is that you basically can't tune the difficulty, unless all of the "random" choices are essentially the same. So the fight is either so homogenized it's not fun or challenging except both at the perfect ilevel and ideal luck, or the same players who can neither memorize nor react to the current content will simply get blasted and be right back to complaining that it's too hard and not fun (because in the end fun = winning).

Unfortunately, not every fight can be Gilgamesh. Coil was clearly intended to be more hard than fun.

[Kuwagami]

If you just bring in a bunch of random atks then you end up with fights not being determined by skill but by luck in which RNG pattern you happen to get, you also need to make sure that it's actually possible to survive the combinations that can occur meaning that even your hardest hitting skill a boss can have can do NO MORE than half a players hp pool if it can happen twice in a row.

Again that "black or white" thing... Randomizing attack order doesn't mean it's 100% RNG. If you have a pool of attacks in which the boss takes (let's say) 70% of them before repeating, and if you code it a way that hard hitting attacks have a counter (i.e, hard hitting blow for 80% of tank's health can't occur again before 4 other attacks, even if it's the ending attack of the previous rotation), you have a non-scripted fight where you can have hard hitting stuff as well.

snip

Actually I suggested a way to do it right under that quote. I also said a few comments after that obviously it wouldn't work for everything (Titan being effectively the best example of that). Gilgamesh is at the other extreme side of the balance, with only one gimmick being here for the lulz rather than for any sort of difficulty.


I obviously can't speak for all. That would be pretentious and preposterous. But what I would find more fun are hard fight without that many super punishing mechanics. overuse versus balance.

If T5 was able to keep its difficulty after mastering dives/twisters, it would probably become my favorite fight for one simple reason :
There is no overuse of mechanics. Punishing ones are twister and dives (but even dives aren't that punishing). Conflags too if your reactivity isn't that great. Yet the fight overall was difficult the first times, when the gear was barely enough to let you live through DS, or to kill DK without problems unless derp.

I will probably enjoy the brutal version of it if they release it. I know however that I don't like T6 at all due to the mechanic > mechanic > mechanic > mechanic > mechanic aspect of it.

Well, we can always agree on a disagreement, but what I find fun in hard fights is when I have to figure out how to play my job the right way to overcome difficulty. Not dealing with mechanics all the time and doing my job when these mechanics let me do something I actually decided on my own.
The latter was my feeling on Coil2 and that why I stopped it. It's also why I wasn't proud of beating Titan HM back in time, or Ex a few month ago, but just relieved. Relieved that the painful experience was finally over.



Edit :

Unfortunately, not every fight can be Gilgamesh. Coil was clearly intended to be more hard than fun.

That sentence made me sad while reading it again. Indeed, not every fight can be Gilgamesh (which is only here for the laugh). They should not be anyway. A few of them is fine to give a smile when we do them.

However, every fight should aim to be fun, even if insanely hard. Else you just don't want to do them, and the purpose of creating it is lost.

There is nothing such as enable easy mode but having the same rewards. Even for a game like Dynasty Warriors the best tier weapon drops from Chaos Mode. If you selected Easy Mode it drops shit weapons. There was a suggestion around for an easy mode coil with no loot rewards or maybe just Allagan Tomestones which by all means I would welcome it if SE decides to do it. Probably for the sake everyone able to follow the story and lore which to me is a good thing that SE should probably consider. The only bad thing about now is that casuals who can't clear coil are gated behind the story and lore (although they can watch from youtube but that's totally not the point, the feeling is different when you experience it in-game) which I think an easy mode coil with no top tier loots should alleviate this.

But if you are the kind of person who wants the best thing but without working hard for it then FFXIV isn't the place. I'm not even sure if there exist a game that has an easy mode but gives the best items.

I can't remember someone serious asking something like that.
=> easy mode with no reward for the sake of the lore was asked
=> no overuse of team rope-jumping was asked

There were also personal attacks, trolling attempts, stuff like that happen every now and then. But this thread isn't about "give ez mode with same reward"

[Roris]

(because in the end fun = winning).

Coil was clearly intended to be more hard than fun.

Winning is fun yeah, but that second quote is precisely the issue the OP talks about, it's just plain not fun getting those wins. Some people do get all their enjoyment from knowing they're above everyone else and have progressed beyond them so props to them I guess.

Personally seeing all the cutscenes up to T9 even after having Youtube'd them was great, just getting there every week is so unfun and not enjoyable, and I really get zero kicks from knowing some people can't get there or are still stuck in T5 so it's just a drudge, when it could all just be better executed to you know, have fun in a videogame instead of turning into an unfun chore.