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

[KisaiTenshi]

Why is there always a big discussion on whether Enix can code new changes/has the resources/servers will blow up? On literally everything.

Because Yoshi-P has said things on multiple occasions that the playerbase has dismissed as "ps3 limits" or "ps4 limits", or "V1.0 legacy problems", of which none of it's really true, it's just the fan base needing a strawman to argue against changes because they know Yoshi-P doesn't want to say "absolutely not"


SE can put whatever they want into the game, but often the features people want, come from other games, and those features grew out of trying to solve a problem in those games. Like Mythic+ from what I've seen was literately a way to make their old content last longer, because in many MMORPG games other than FFXIV, you can steamroll over ALL content by simply out-leveling it. Never mind out-gearing it. Another flavor of this "old content+" can be seen in Mabinogi where you get recolored dungeons with recolored mobs that are larger, and a different end boss, but the content plays exactly the same, and the difficulty is little more than making the mobs have 10x the hp, so you can still steamroll over it by outleveling and outgearing it. But comparing a freemium game with wallet-robbing as it's business model to a subscription game is like comparing an onion to an apple. The business model of a freemium game demands making the content punishing so players are foolish enough to pay for cash shop items to give them P2W powers. Subscription games have to be balanced against the ENTIRE PLAYERBASE being able to complete it.

Our FFXIV game already has this feature as "Minimum iLevel" and people don't play it precisely because there is no reward to doing it. The only people I've ever see play this regularly are the dudes on the Speakers Network, who basically run the game in the proposed "Savage+" way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk65HixoG_4 , they have a roulette wheel on their podcast where they let RNGesus decide on what feature to turn off, and which dungeon to play.

Players would rather "unsync" content to get the clear/reward and then never play it again. Hence "simple changes" are not going to be simple things to implement, no matter what arm-chair developer idea is thrown out. Add titles? Yeah, and titles are tracked by achievements, and achievements have a currency that can buy premium items with. So if you put that into the game, they have to re-price the items, thus making them impossible to get for the 99% of the player base who probably would ignore, or be unaware of this. Mounts? How many mount slots does the game have and track? Is it 256? Is it 65535? Adding anything as a reward will come at increased loading time at some point, front-loaded (between zones) or back-loaded (when the feature is accessed.) FFXIV favors front-loading, and likely because the PS4 version has a slow hard drive. Back-loaded things are things like the orchestration rolls and mount music (which I believe Yoshi-P said there was a limit as well.)

And as I said earlier before people decided to nitpick the point I wasn't making, this will come at a cost. If implemented, it would likely come at the cost of no additional primals or raids during a patch cycle that would normally have it. So let's put the question to the floor.

"Would you rather have all the old ARR content revamped like Mythic+ in WoW, and have patch 5.0 pushed off to 2020?"