My Eureka Concept

[Shouko]

If you can find a way to make solo content in this game engaging let me know. I haven't found it. Citing specific examples of how you would design it would go a long way.

I long thought about 4 man (this concept was originally 4 man), but found that you are simply limited on breadth of mechanics and it was really hard to make tanking engaging as a 4m party.

You would be turned away from relics because of the number of people in your party? You do 24 mans don't you? You do your trial roulette right? Or do you strictly only do expert dungeons? This seems like irrational bias, but I'll let you clarify your statement before making any judgment.

Relics aren't meant to be heavily mechanic based, they're meant to be a grind, otherwise they would be on par with a major raid and people don't want to raid for their relics or at least the average player base wouldn't.

I haven't done Shin Ex, O1-4S, I only completed non savage of Omega and story mode of the SB primals, haven't unlocked the new 24 man.

Speaking strictly for myself, I play the game roughly 3-4 hours a week. I am capped on every single tome in the game. I have nothing to spend them on. The good news is that if you do it via PF, you don't need any tomes if someone wants to pay your way for you.

Yeah I never claimed it was hard to cap them, I just don't like grinding tomes because well I prefer to earn my gear rather than buy it. aka go through a dungeon and get it as a drop is more rewarding for me than getting a token to buy said gear. Again comes from the old school player in WoW when you earned everything, nothing was handed to you.

May I ask what your aversion to raid content is? What specifically about 'raid content' bothers you?

That's a lot to go in but i'll try to sum up the main points.

1. Too much elitism and not enough statics these days from my experience.
2. I don't care about min/max BIS crap, I did that in WoW for years and burned out on it.
3. Gear elevators, becomes worthless after a few months of a higher tier.
4. Lack of helping learn the fights, I play on a console and I don't use discord.
5. SE basically has made the game into dance dance revolution or DPS sponges instead of actual meaningful content.
6. Generally hate the instant KO mechanics, along with too small areas to move...Not fun imo for raiding.

All in all I love the concepts you came up with just not in an MMO environment, I would love to see stuff like that added to POTD 2.0 or some such, just leave the relic alone, since we're getting relic armor along with weapons it's just too much to handle imo for the average player. SE doesn't have a habit of scaling content down, you can still wipe quite easily on original coil, ARR primals, etc. I love the challenge of soloing back content but SE just keeps the mechanics too heavily in them, to do for the most part.

[Shurrikhan]

5. SE basically has made the game into dance dance revolution or DPS sponges instead of actual meaningful content.

I was wondering if I could a bit more context on this from you. This has been something that I've heard a lot, but have trouble putting a finger on, myself, as in many cases even the "deepest" one may think of will still inevitably boil down to optimal positioning over time (or, DDR). What kinds of mechanics or thought processes draw you in, and which sort of push your interest away?

There's a lot more I'd like to ask, but as I'm already being so officious as to stick my nose in your conversation unwantedly, I'd hate to trouble you with any more than this for now (as all else is predicated on it anyways).

[Shouko]

I was wondering if I could a bit more context on this from you. This has been something that I've heard a lot, but have trouble putting a finger on, myself, as in many cases even the "deepest" one may think of will still inevitably boil down to optimal positioning over time (or, DDR). What kinds of mechanics or thought processes draw you in, and which sort of push your interest away?

There's a lot more I'd like to ask, but as I'm already being so officious as to stick my nose in your conversation unwantedly, I'd hate to trouble you with any more than this for now (as all else is predicated on it anyways).

I don't really mind, it's not like I'm annoyed with this.

Honestly most of my experience is with single/multiplayer games not of MMO's. I think a lot of what OP had to say was great in terms of mechanics and randomizing things, I just don't want added challenges on top of the Relic system.

I think a lot of it has to do with all you really do is stack, kill, run, there's no avoiding AoE by say DRG High Jump like there was in XI, BLM could get a phase to avoid the damage, etc, stuff that fits the job instead of just running away or stacking. One of the biggest problems that i've seen in recent dungeons is literally have no time to move out of the AoE, why bother making an AoE if you can't even get away from it?

But it's not just the DDR stuff that turns me off to raiding. Having to gear up the min/max stats, get the tomes for the BIS, very little statics, most of the time it's just PF/DF stuff. The hostility of players not wanting to help others learn by sticking around, currently my FC has this little clique and even tho they say it's not they tend to only invite the clique group most of the time. The rewards just aren't relevant enough for a long enough period of time other than say Savage and even that's hit or miss.

It's hard to put thoughts of what could be improved for mechanics when the entire game is built around said mechanics vs glamour or other things which is a lot easier to come up with ideas for.

[KaldeaSahaline]

See, I don't see why, given only the same leniency, that would be the case any more than in, say, an 8-man, or even a 4-man. The only significant bonuses are via additional transferable resource or toolkit redundancy (e.g. having more rez-capable people available, or one team being able to fill in for another ONLY if one team is facing a lesser threat than the other). When constraints are already tight, those may reduce the chance for an instant wipe to single- or few-target attacks, but they then come at a cost of resource sustainability, and as the deviation one must account for shrinks as the player count increases, that sustain becomes vitally important. If damage taken potential, for instance, increases with each player added — ToS or A4S levels of if one person fails, everyone's in pain — then necessarily an even scalar cannot be used, but if that damage remains mostly proportionate, it's really not an issue, and you don't need to add exorbitant amounts of leniency just to make the content doable.

I think we're just working off two different assumptions as to the tuning necessary for large-scale content. If one leaves the tuning scalar effectively untouched, and follows a flexible mechanics tables based on the player count (or even gear- or achievement- or whatever-count) per role, I don't see why large-scale content would have to be any more zerg than small-scale. More chaotic-yet-(short-term)-forgiving, perhaps, but no more "zerg".

I'll task you with a project. Develop a 24 man encounter with some example mechanics and a "expected outcome". I.e. how to pass each mechanic ideally based on 'small group, medium, and large'. (4, 8, and 24 respectively).


I am refraining from the scalar discussion bit, because I am unable to work out how I would even tackle that at the moment. I'd prefer to keep that discussion separate (but please know I SUPPORT the concept of flex), I just have no idea how to implement/tune it.

In HW and ARR I could do a bulk of the Relic quest solo. I log into the game to experience the world and I don't necessarily always want to be in a party. Outside of my daily roulettes that I only am currently doing for leveling I would prefer to not have to interact with a PC all the time. Diadem was fun for the first two weeks but then it is the same repeatable content. In HW I had multiple sources of doing the relic for each step, some could be in a group and some could be solo.

While you can some of the relic quest solo, a significant portion requires duties. While I understand your playstyle is that of a single player RPG for the most part, that really isn't what an MMO is about, nor what my content is about. It's fine for us to disagree on this, but hopefully you can see that catering a single player experience in an MMO isn't ideal.

Also Diadem you have to wait for 8 people to queue up to be able to do said content. Once people have their relics the content will die off which will leave several people stranded waiting for the next time SE makes Eureka relevant. Getting 3 other people together is a lot easier than trying to organize 7. I tried getting a dungeon pop for A1-4 during 3.5 and it was virtually impossible. Not everyone wants to go back and queue for old content that they already spammed.

I said to another poster that they don't need to abandon the content. They can easily make it relevant between expansions. Not only that, they could employ a WoW method where they continually retune Eureka based on current game level. I.e. Mythic+ scales to balance itself against each raid tier so that it isn't left behind.

Forced parties.... I don't always want to party which is why I don't touch raids after I complete the story and I only did A1S for light on my first relic. A1S is the only savage content I have ever touched and had the desire to touch. For my PLD relic I did PvP.

Again, I hate to reiterate this statement, but seriously it's an MMO, not a single player RPG. The bulk of the content SHOULD be party content, not single player stuff. That is my personal opinion, feel free to refute it, but you will not change my mind on this.

Relics aren't meant to be heavily mechanic based, they're meant to be a grind, otherwise they would be on par with a major raid and people don't want to raid for their relics or at least the average player base wouldn't.

I haven't done Shin Ex, O1-4S, I only completed non savage of Omega and story mode of the SB primals, haven't unlocked the new 24 man.

They still wouldn't be. You're quite literally the perfect example of what I am trying to convey. A player like you would queue up in DF, pay your 100 tomes, get matched with randoms and go on your merry way working on your 1 star Eureka run to power up your relic.

It'd be equivalent to doing a dungeon with not max ilvl that you don't know the mechanics too. Realistically it'd be no different than your first run of Skalla, but instead of it being once, it'd be everytime you queued into it? Does that sound bad to you?

Meanwhile, a player like me can get my static or a PF group going and tackle a 3 star and work on our relic weapon too and be proportionally rewarded and challenged. We're grinding just like you, but it's not mindless to us and we can get a relic weapon doing content we like, just like you can for you.

Yeah I never claimed it was hard to cap them, I just don't like grinding tomes because well I prefer to earn my gear rather than buy it. aka go through a dungeon and get it as a drop is more rewarding for me than getting a token to buy said gear. Again comes from the old school player in WoW when you earned everything, nothing was handed to you.

You're preaching to the choir here. This content is about powering up (earning) gear and earning other gear via drops (inside the instance). You even spend tomes to get in which further reinforces that concept.

That's a lot to go in but i'll try to sum up the main points.

1. Too much elitism and not enough statics these days from my experience.
2. I don't care about min/max BIS crap, I did that in WoW for years and burned out on it.
3. Gear elevators, becomes worthless after a few months of a higher tier.
4. Lack of helping learn the fights, I play on a console and I don't use discord.
5. SE basically has made the game into dance dance revolution or DPS sponges instead of actual meaningful content.
6. Generally hate the instant KO mechanics, along with too small areas to move...Not fun imo for raiding.

Fair enough, appreciate the insight. I will say that you don't need to min-max BIS stuff (at least I don't and I have 90%+ logs) and I personally haven't seen much TRUE elitism lately; mostly just the nonsensical people who are bad who think x y z is good, when it is objectively not.

You can easily get discord on your phone if you truly were interested in being a part of that.

I agree with the heavy choreographic nature of encounter design.

I also agree instant KO and predictable encounter environments are clear detractors to FF14 raid design.

All in all I love the concepts you came up with just not in an MMO environment, I would love to see stuff like that added to POTD 2.0 or some such, just leave the relic alone, since we're getting relic armor along with weapons it's just too much to handle imo for the average player. SE doesn't have a habit of scaling content down, you can still wipe quite easily on original coil, ARR primals, etc. I love the challenge of soloing back content but SE just keeps the mechanics too heavily in them, to do for the most part.

I am not opposed to pulling my concept out of relic territory and into somewhere else. That said, I hope my response above about your expected experience would help mitigate your concerns about the concept.

I was wondering if I could a bit more context on this from you. This has been something that I've heard a lot, but have trouble putting a finger on, myself, as in many cases even the "deepest" one may think of will still inevitably boil down to optimal positioning over time (or, DDR). What kinds of mechanics or thought processes draw you in, and which sort of push your interest away?

There's a lot more I'd like to ask, but as I'm already being so officious as to stick my nose in your conversation unwantedly, I'd hate to trouble you with any more than this for now (as all else is predicated on it anyways).

I'm going to butt in here with my own input. Not sure if we covered it previously, but my largest gripe with the raid encounter design is that everything is so fixed. Failing a mechanic almost always results in a death, or a full wipe. That's not FUN imo.

Ideally I'd like mechanics to be more organic in that failing the Shin EX heart doesn't wipe you, but maybe it spawns an add, that then channels a cast to break one of the random squares left. or maybe the add pulses AOE damage based on how close you are to it, meaning you now need to be more aware of tethers etc and stay away from it, or kill it when other raid damage dies down. Stuff that allows decision making on the fly, chances for people to excel and recover.

[Shouko]

They still wouldn't be. You're quite literally the perfect example of what I am trying to convey. A player like you would queue up in DF, pay your 100 tomes, get matched with randoms and go on your merry way working on your 1 star Eureka run to power up your relic.

Tomes are a stupid idea, you have to grind those tomes to get into a dungeon, I don't want to waste 100 tomes or even 1 tome on a dungeon of any sort. I don't like randoms that's my major complaint with raiding as it is. I prefer a static of like minded people that want to go in to have fun and get some loot not go in for the loot itself.

Meanwhile, a player like me can get my static or a PF group going and tackle a 3 star and work on our relic weapon too and be proportionally rewarded and challenged. We're grinding just like you, but it's not mindless to us and we can get a relic weapon doing content we like, just like you can for you.

I'm not looking for mindless content, as I keep saying i like the ideas, they just don't fit in for relic grinds. I disagree about you being able to get your relic faster because you chose the harder content, not everyone has the time to put the effort into raiding (not talking about myself)

You're preaching to the choir here. This content is about powering up (earning) gear and earning other gear via drops (inside the instance). You even spend tomes to get in which further reinforces that concept.

Spending tomes isn't what people are really interested in doing though.

Fair enough, appreciate the insight. I will say that you don't need to min-max BIS stuff (at least I don't and I have 90%+ logs) and I personally haven't seen much TRUE elitism lately; mostly just the nonsensical people who are bad who think x y z is good, when it is objectively not.

Might hold true for you but I hear about my FC leader not being able to get into O3S even tho she's geared and knows the fight. I've seen plenty of elitism on the forums as it is. It's always there, regardless of you seeing it or not, count yourself lucky.

You can easily get discord on your phone if you truly were interested in being a part of that.

I know you can get discord on your phone but I dislike voice chat, unless it's with friends over the PSN.

I am not opposed to pulling my concept out of relic territory and into somewhere else. That said, I hope my response above about your expected experience would help mitigate your concerns about the concept.

At this point I doubt it really matters, I'm sure they have Eureka pretty much fleshed out and how the relic is going to work in the start.

I however would like to see your ideas put into a POTD type of system, whether it's single player or party content. I think your ideas are great and whatnot but I just think it's better suited for a filler type thing to do outside of raiding. I think there needs to be more focus on harder 4 man content and less on 8 man content, they've started doing this but I just never really liked raiding, it's more about the player count than anything else tbh.

[Wintersandman]

While you can some of the relic quest solo, a significant portion requires duties. While I understand your playstyle is that of a single player RPG for the most part, that really isn't what an MMO is about, nor what my content is about. It's fine for us to disagree on this, but hopefully you can see that catering a single player experience in an MMO isn't ideal.

I said to another poster that they don't need to abandon the content. They can easily make it relevant between expansions. Not only that, they could employ a WoW method where they continually retune Eureka based on current game level. I.e. Mythic+ scales to balance itself against each raid tier so that it isn't left behind.

Again, I hate to reiterate this statement, but seriously it's an MMO, not a single player RPG. The bulk of the content SHOULD be party content, not single player stuff. That is my personal opinion, feel free to refute it, but you will not change my mind on this.

Why not just make Diadem 4.0 and not include the relic? Relic is meant completely for casual play and past relics had some dungeon content yes but I got to choose for almost every step what content I wanted to engage in. For the items I could do beast tribes, A1S or turn in tomes. I had an option for solo play and an option for group play.

The thing that makes this game is amazing, as I can do group play and I can do solo play. SE is already catering to this just as you can't do story duties in a group. They designed the game for this intent in mind because their past MMO you couldn't even level without a group.

Yes SE could refresh the content but now you have content that is either too far ahead or too far behind. 3.1-3.5 wasn't that massive of a shift but massive enough people in their 270 gear would steamroll A1S where as someone in i190 gear would be suffering.

Plus a bulk of the content is currently gated behind group play. End game I get to... grind fates and do beast tribes I already have maxed.

[Shurrikhan]

The thing that makes this game is amazing, as I can do group play and I can do solo play. SE is already catering to this just as you can't do story duties in a group.

Hasn't that actually been blamed on yet another net code issue, rather than a decision based on design philosophy? I really doubt it was by ardent decision so much as it was simply easier not to allow for multiple players (by reasons of netcode, progress querying/ticking, and scaling).

Yes SE could refresh the content but now you have content that is either too far ahead or too far behind. 3.1-3.5 wasn't that massive of a shift but massive enough people in their 270 gear would steamroll A1S where as someone in i190 gear would be suffering.

But given that the lowest ilvl given in levelcap content was i160, I would hope that someone 110 levels above that would perform noticeably better than someone a mere 30 above. While creep may have been slightly high, there still needs to be a difference sufficient to convince people to raid (short of some god-level content designs that anyone would play through sheerly for fun).

[Wintersandman]

But given that the lowest ilvl given in levelcap content was i160, I would hope that someone 110 levels above that would perform noticeably better than someone a mere 30 above. While creep may have been slightly high, there still needs to be a difference sufficient to convince people to raid (short of some god-level content designs that anyone would play through sheerly for fun).

My point is that to keep it challenging you would need to raise the difficulty of the monsters which would leave people just starting out not being able to even begin due to the ilvl gating.

[Shurrikhan]

I'll task you with a project. Develop a 24 man encounter with some example mechanics and a "expected outcome". I.e. how to pass each mechanic ideally based on 'small group, medium, and large'. (4, 8, and 24 respectively).

I am refraining from the scalar discussion bit, because I am unable to work out how I would even tackle that at the moment. I'd prefer to keep that discussion separate (but please know I SUPPORT the concept of flex), I just have no idea how to implement/tune it.

Challenge tentatively accepted, though I probably won't have time until the weekend.

...This is going to take a lot of pages.

...And I'll have to cope with perfectionism even over superfluous constructs.

Definitely the weekend at the earliest.

EDIT: Sorry, things have gotten badly busy this month, and it's been hard to come up with anything cohesive in the half hours breaks here and there. Also, it's been quite difficult to separate from larger combat overhauls or encounter settings.