State of the Game: Savage+ Dungeons and End Game Leves

[KisaiTenshi]

Why? The whole idea is discovering cost efficient alternatives so it doesn't impact the budget too severely. That being said, if we absolutely have to shelf something. I doubt too many will be miffed about losing a by-the-numbers dungeon or the host of niche content they've released in Stromblood.

Here's a solution. Don't nerf it. That has been among their biggest issues. They keep nerfing everything yet wonder why people complain there isn't anything to do. Well, yeah, if the content can all be done in a day because it's brain dead simple, it's never going to last. Conversely, when they actually refused to nerf content (Weeping City, Final Steps of Faith and Royal Menagerie), people eventually "got over it."

You want to basically add a "challenge mode" / "boss rush" mode to content that is still otherwise has an option to unsync. With no budget. QA goes into balancing everything. So you're only saving SE the development costs of designing a new dungeon or primal in favor of adding a "double the HP of everything" option that adds nothing and has no reward.

Like the kind of thing I'd like to see is put a fixed handicap option list, and if 95% of the players who have played it (not runs, players) can clear it with that handicap, that handicap becomes the default, and thus any potential reward requires being able to clear with that handicap, solo. For party, the handicap has to be work like HoH/PotD does, where the players have to play a specific party configuration for it to count (like, ... all bards)

[Tsumdere]

You want to basically add a "challenge mode" / "boss rush" mode to content that is still otherwise has an option to unsync. With no budget. QA goes into balancing everything. So you're only saving SE the development costs of designing a new dungeon or primal in favor of adding a "double the HP of everything" option that adds nothing and has no reward.

Like the kind of thing I'd like to see is put a fixed handicap option list, and if 95% of the players who have played it (not runs, players) can clear it with that handicap, that handicap becomes the default, and thus any potential reward requires being able to clear with that handicap, solo. For party, the handicap has to be work like HoH/PotD does, where the players have to play a specific party configuration for it to count (like, ... all bards)

What? Did you breeze over people asking for titles and leader boards? Those things would take such minuscule amounts out of the budget to do but add a ton of replayability for a good chunk of players. Grab a few mobs that are already modeled and animated and make them mounts. Wham. Three different rewards for very little development time and a new group of happy players.

Hell. Even add a gil sink of Savage Dungeon Sustain potions so they can do crazy things like Keeper of the Lake + 4 BLM + Double Enemy Health + Blind or something.

[KisaiTenshi]

What? Did you breeze over people asking for titles and leader boards? Those things would take such minuscule amounts out of the budget to do but add a ton of replayability for a good chunk of players. Grab a few mobs that are already modeled and animated and make them mounts. Wham. Three different rewards for very little development time and a new group of happy players.

Hell. Even add a gil sink of Savage Dungeon Sustain potions so they can do crazy things like Keeper of the Lake + 4 BLM + Double Enemy Health + Blind or something.

You have no idea how much it would cost them, titles take up RAM in the game client. Mounts take up disk space, because you can't just make a boss a mount by rescaling it. It needs to have all the mount animations for swimming and flying too. Why do you think we haven't seen all the 2.0 mounts fly yet?

At best, a permanent leaderboard system would be the easiest thing for SE to maintain as they already have a system in place for it for PotD and HoH. Extending it to other content requires tracking points, and to do that, take the HoH strategy for doing this content by syncing the content to minimum ilevel, and have the handicap be a permanent debuff applied at the start. Separate scores for solo and party.

[Tsumdere]

You have no idea how much it would cost them, titles take up RAM in the game client. Mounts take up disk space, because you can't just make a boss a mount by rescaling it. It needs to have all the mount animations for swimming and flying too. Why do you think we haven't seen all the 2.0 mounts fly yet?

I do know how much it would cost. Titles cost next to nothing as they are just text and state switches. Two or three more titles are not going to take up more than a sub-inkling of space.

As for mounts, all of the mounts swimming animation is the same as the flying animation, and for half the mounts the flying animation is them floating in the air. It doesn't take a animating genius to see that it's not more than a few days work to make a hover animation. The only reason we haven't seen the 2.0 horses fly is because it's not their prerogative right now. Or that they are too lazy to make some particles and put the Sleipnir animations on them flying.
Besides, I personally was thinking about having an Lost City of Amdapor Savage. Tons of people want a giant morpho to ride, what a better candidate for a reward. It already has a flying animation so it would be a literal scale up and reuse the mount code on it.

[KisaiTenshi]

I do know how much it would cost. Titles cost next to nothing as they are just text and state switches. Two or three more titles are not going to take up more than a sub-inkling of space.

Right, are you a SE developer? Yoshi-P had made claims before that seem like no-brainer changes, yet people on the forums still insist on being armchair developers about how easy something should be to add to the game. Adding a title adds maybe 1-4KB of memory, but adds another entry into an array or hash lookup every time a title has to be looked up. Remember every discussion ever about why we don't have more inventory space?

The matter of fact thing is, we do not know how much QA cost goes into this, and using Blizzard as a comparison is not even reasonable as they do all their rebalancing as the players break things. They don't test anything anywhere near as much as SE does, and instead allow their player base to provide feedback via PTR, which only touches a fraction of a fraction of the player base. For all we know Mythic+ changes far more than what it shows at the surface. It's would not be a simple switch to implement by any means otherwise it would be the exact same experience, even if the handicap for the player is from disabling the job crystal or actions or some other thing. Just compare a the regular and hard versions of a dungeon, or the hard and extreme/savage versions of a primal/raid. It's not simply making it trivially harder like WoW's Mythic+ does.


This is asking for QA time to be spent on returning old content to be fun again instead of creating new content, and at some point I do expect them to be forced to retune old content, because some of the old content is quite embarrassingly easy and deprives players of actually having any challenge and gives the impression it's always been that way.

[KaldeaSahaline]

Right, are you a SE developer? Yoshi-P had made claims before that seem like no-brainer changes, yet people on the forums still insist on being armchair developers about how easy something should be to add to the game.

The matter of fact thing is, we do not know how much QA cost goes into this, and using Blizzard as a comparison is not even reasonable as they do all their rebalancing as the players break things. They don't test anything anywhere near as much as SE does, and instead allow their player base to provide feedback via PTR, which only touches a fraction of a fraction of the player base. For all we know Mythic+ changes far more than what it shows at the surface. It's would not be a simple switch to implement by any means otherwise it would be the exact same experience, even if the handicap for the player is from disabling the job crystal or actions or some other thing. Just compare a the regular and hard versions of a dungeon, or the hard and extreme/savage versions of a primal/raid. It's not simply making it trivially harder like WoW's Mythic+ does

You chastise him for making assumptions, yet in the same post you make several that you have NO WAY of knowing unless you work at SE/Blizz.

Always the hypocrite.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

You want to basically add a "challenge mode" / "boss rush" mode to content that is still otherwise has an option to unsync. With no budget. QA goes into balancing everything. So you're only saving SE the development costs of designing a new dungeon or primal in favor of adding a "double the HP of everything" option that adds nothing and has no reward.

Like the kind of thing I'd like to see is put a fixed handicap option list, and if 95% of the players who have played it (not runs, players) can clear it with that handicap, that handicap becomes the default, and thus any potential reward requires being able to clear with that handicap, solo. For party, the handicap has to be work like HoH/PotD does, where the players have to play a specific party configuration for it to count (like, ... all bards)

... What? I literally said in my initial post they could add titles, mounts, minion and a leadership board. Even simply achievements go a long way to make the content worth doing. How does this cost any additional resources? Like Tsumdere said, you'd be reusing everything. Take The Vault, add some of the aforementioned stipulations, increase mob HP and/or frequency of their mechanics and you're golden. WoW has been doing this for years in the form of Mythic+, I can't imagine SE being incapable.

RAM and disk space? Come on. We're talking minuscule amounts. If they can add a new cash shop mount, they can handle a title and mounts. Hell, they add titles to trivial things like 20,000 FATEs. Stop doing that and make titles more meaningful. Bam.