Ishgard Restoration phase 3 feedback thread

[DoH]

The addition of "bad" procs is a really good idea. I'm not sure if it would be better to have them occur randomly or, to reduce the amount of RNG and promote more careful planning, they should occur after their corresponding "beneficial" proc (like how "Poor" always follows "Excellent" in normal crafts). I tend to think the the latter might be better. I also think they could leave the current procs as is but perhaps add the following:

- Rigid: Makes the CP cost of the next ability cost 1.5x as much
- Flimsy: Makes the Durability cost of the next ability cost 1.5x as much
- Misaligned: Reduces the chance of the next touch or synthesis ability hitting by 20% (this would apply even to touch/synthesis abilities that are normally 100% success rates)
- Poor: Reduces the quality of the next touch ability by 25%

I still believe that raising the collectability cap to something unattainable (e.g., 100,000 instead of 8,240) would promote a more skill-based approach. Also, perhaps make the durability for these 100 instead of 50 or 60 to see how far people can go and reward them heavily for making it into higher tiers (because each craft would take a lot more time to complete). For example:

Collectability: Skyward Points
0~7,500: 0
7,000~10,000: 200~300
10,001~13,000: 600~700
13,001~16,000: 1,400~1,500
16,001~19,000: 3,000~3,300
19,001~22,000: 6,600~7,000
etc.

As discussed on previous pages, this would work best if they limit the number of materials you are given at the outset so that anyone can compete. Instead of being partially a competition of "who has the time/resources/connections to obtain materials?", players would be given a finite number of materials to use for the 10 days, which they could work on at their own pace. To avoid wasting these materials on practice runs, they could use Trial Synthesis much like Feast players can do trial matches. Perhaps granting enough to make 100 crafts as others have suggested would work, although RNG would obviously play into this a bit more with a smaller number of crafts. The problem is that, as crafts take longer, you can't expect folks to craft too many of them or else it once again starts to become a competition of "who has more time." If one of these crafts took 10 minutes to complete, that would be 17 hours of crafting over 10 days for 100 crafts; 33 hours for 200 crafts; and 50 hours for 300 crafts. 100 crafts may be the sweet spot because it would really promote people to think and carefully craft each and every item (instead of the current approach which, for many, is throw it away and start over if the opener wasn't successful in order to churn out as many as possible).

[Zenn]

As discussed on previous pages, this would work best if they limit the number of materials you are given at the outset so that anyone can compete. Instead of being partially a competition of "who has the time/resources/connections to obtain materials?", players would be given a finite number of materials to use for the 10 days, which they could work on at their own pace. To avoid wasting these materials on practice runs, they could use Trial Synthesis much like Feast players can do trial matches. Perhaps granting enough to make 100 crafts as others have suggested would work, although RNG would obviously play into this a bit more with a smaller number of crafts. The problem is that, as crafts take longer, you can't expect folks to craft too many of them or else it once again starts to become a competition of "who has more time." If one of these crafts took 10 minutes to complete, that would be 17 hours of crafting over 10 days for 100 crafts; 33 hours for 200 crafts; and 50 hours for 300 crafts. 100 crafts may be the sweet spot because it would really promote people to think and carefully craft each and every item (instead of the current approach which, for many, is throw it away and start over if the opener wasn't successful in order to churn out as many as possible).

So basically the rankings would be based on who has the best RNG and so the game at that point would be to try to rank on every crafter or make alts and hope for better RNG.
Raising the collectability cap also heavily prefers RNG. There have been times where I've had tons of CP/dura left and hit max collectability because I got very favorable conditions during my craft and other times where I got several 6XXX crafts in a row. You can know the conditions ahead of time and make the best decisions but still there will be sometimes you won't hit max collectability. In a situation where there is effectively no max, you're going to try to spend a ton more time trying to get a ridiculous score because more time = more favorable RNG crafts. If you limit the number of crafts, effectively your ranking is based on how favorable your conditions were especially if you want to add bad conditions.

[DoH]

There is already ranked content in this game that is swayed by RNG. Triple Triad tournaments, Mahjong, and many other in-game competitions are examples of things that are affected by RNG but are also highly skill-dependent. In Triple Triad tournaments, you are limited to 20 games per tournament and can thus be hit hard under some of the rule sets by RNG; I've come in 1st place in some tournaments and not even made it into the top 6 in others because of this. With respect to Ishgard rankings, if the detrimental conditions proposed above always followed a beneficial condition, I think that it would actually allow players to plan ahead better (you could obviously observe through the detrimental conditions, but this would incentivize using other non-touch/synthesis abilities so that you're not burning too much CP on just observe). I understand that limiting the number of crafts would increase the impact of RNG as 100 may not be a large enough sample size to dilute its effects, but the current way of minimizing the impact is just to craft an absolutely ridiculous number of crafts, which gets back into the issue of "more time = higher rank" (which I consider to be a bigger issue). As I mentioned previously, during this ranking season I achieved the highest score on any class on my server (Gilgamesh), but it took a ridiculous amount of time to do that during the 10-day period; it was enough hours to be a full-time job for a lot of folks, and it continued throughout the weekend. I think the Ishgard rankings would be a lot more accessible to people if they had a finite number of materials to work with. Speaking which, to address another point you touched on, you would just be given a set number of materials (e.g., 100) at the outset. It would be like beast tribes or other collectible turn-ins so that you could craft it on whatever class you want, but once you used them up, that would be it. This way you couldn't just switch over to another class and get more materials. If someone wanted to try and get the achievement on an alt that was fully geared out, then sure, why not. If each craft took about 10 minutes, that would be another 17 hours they would have to spend on their alt trying to craft all of the items.

At the end of the day, I think that someone who really plans out the crafts and tests this out with trial synthesis beforehand would be able to achieve a better overall score than most other folks over 100 crafts despite any unfavorable RNG they may run into on some of their crafts.

[Morningstar1337]

Regarding daily turn ins. I'd think that is a good idea, though I'd prefer if it only affected the skybuilder points and not the scripts.

That said I also think it might be a good idea to have the rankings be active until the district is completed as opposed for 1 or two weeks. I feel it makes more sense to rank people when the areas are actually finished. Combined with a weekly cap of turn ins (30 per crafting Class, not sure how diadem items would be handled)

Having the mob drops only relevant mats for the level is a good idea and should be encouraged.

A cooldown for Diadem visits would also be interesting.

[Crushnight]

I personally don't think there should be a cap on how much you can hand over for points not with the level of rng currently there for expert crafts.

However I am in favor of a 5 or 6 day time limit to appraise items gathered/crafted, this would force hoarders by day 6 or 7 to at least show an idea what they are doing without fully giving it away either(as you could for example craft/gather little day 1-4/5 but do more from day 5/6 etc), basically not getting rid of the strategy but lessening the blow of someone coming outta the blue to take a top 12 spot.

[Zenn]

There is already ranked content in this game that is swayed by RNG. Triple Triad tournaments, Mahjong, and many other in-game competitions are examples of things that are affected by RNG but are also highly skill-dependent. In Triple Triad tournaments, you are limited to 20 games per tournament and can thus be hit hard under some of the rule sets by RNG; I've come in 1st place in some tournaments and not even made it into the top 6 in others because of this. With respect to Ishgard rankings, if the detrimental conditions proposed above always followed a beneficial condition, I think that it would actually allow players to plan ahead better (you could obviously observe through the detrimental conditions, but this would incentivize using other non-touch/synthesis abilities so that you're not burning too much CP on just observe). I understand that limiting the number of crafts would increase the impact of RNG as 100 may not be a large enough sample size to dilute its effects, but the current way of minimizing the impact is just to craft an absolutely ridiculous number of crafts, which gets back into the issue of "more time = higher rank" (which I consider to be a bigger issue). As I mentioned previously, during this ranking season I achieved the highest score on any class on my server (Gilgamesh), but it took a ridiculous amount of time to do that during the 10-day period; it was enough hours to be a full-time job for a lot of folks, and it continued throughout the weekend. I think the Ishgard rankings would be a lot more accessible to people if they had a finite number of materials to work with. Speaking which, to address another point you touched on, you would just be given a set number of materials (e.g., 100) at the outset. It would be like beast tribes or other collectible turn-ins so that you could craft it on whatever class you want, but once you used them up, that would be it. This way you couldn't just switch over to another class and get more materials. If someone wanted to try and get the achievement on an alt that was fully geared out, then sure, why not. If each craft took about 10 minutes, that would be another 17 hours they would have to spend on their alt trying to craft all of the items.

At the end of the day, I think that someone who really plans out the crafts and tests this out with trial synthesis beforehand would be able to achieve a better overall score than most other folks over 100 crafts despite any unfavorable RNG they may run into on some of their crafts.

Expert crafts don't really have a high skill cap that makes up for the RNG though. Your idea is basically going against what you want to accomplish though because people will spend more time ranking in more classes once they hit cap and making alts to rank to ensure a top spot. People that don't have enough time won't be able to do this.

[Ashemmi]

As I mentioned previously, during this ranking season I achieved the highest score on any class on my server (Gilgamesh), but it took a ridiculous amount of time to do that during the 10-day period; it was enough hours to be a full-time job for a lot of folks, and it continued throughout the weekend.

Yes, but that outlay wasn't a requirement to be competitive. Your 2M score was twice what you needed for first, nearly, and 3x what you needed to rank in your class. 400-500K was needed for the most part on the busiest servers. I'll concede the 1M-2M club had a full time job, but that group doesn't really constitute many. More power to you, but I don't consider your level of effort normal. The average top 12 score was in the 500K range. For me this was about 25 hours. There's no way to really know if I was more or less efficient than average.

The best solution I've seen is shorter seasons within the larger. If the season were a month long, there could be ten three day seasons. Allow only winning three, perhaps. A gold, bronze, and silver award for the number of times you've won. I think what you'll see is the first 9 days the heavy hitters will be going at it hard. Then competition will wane. If you miss it, there's the next. Generally no more than 15 put any serious investment in to the event per class.

Require a buff to be picked up while crafting, have the buff last for 2 hours. Before the buff can be regained, crafts need to be turned in.

There are creative ways to keep the nature of the competition in place, while making the reward a little more available. Honestly, not much more is needed. IMHO, ~9 people got a really raw deal. So what are we trying to fix? An outlay of 400k, for the most part, was all that was 'really' needed. 84% of whoever hit 400K grabbed the achievement. 400K isn't that high of a bar.

96 Titles
146 100K+ (50 without title)
122 200K+ (26 without title)
115 300K+ (19 without title)
102 400K+ (9 without title)
81 500K+ (3 without title)
55 600K+ (all titled)
39 700K+ (all titled)
27 800K+ (all titled)
23 900K+ (all titled)
16 1000K+ (all titled)
4 2000K+ (all titled)

[DoH]

Expert crafts don't really have a high skill cap that makes up for the RNG though. Your idea is basically going against what you want to accomplish though because people will spend more time ranking in more classes once they hit cap and making alts to rank to ensure a top spot.

I think part of the problem is that there currently isn't enough variance in the conditions to allow for a higher skill cap, and there is a literal cap right now (8240) that would prevent any real skill from showing through in any event.

As for the ranking more classes point, I'm suggesting that when you sign up for the Ishgard ranking season, you're given 100 base mats - that would be all you receive for all of your classes. You can spend it all on a single class, or you can split it up and use it on multiple classes (much like the items you buy for the weekly collectible turn-ins). I think that this would probably entail getting rid of the class-specific DoH rankings and just having a top 100 for Saint and top 101~800 for Beatus/Beata. This would resolve a lot of the complaints of "you shouldn't be allowed to compete on more than one class" because for someone to rank on multiple classes they would have to really know how to use their finite resources to do so. It would also address some of the complaints that folks had about certain classes being easier to rank on than others. For example, I did ALC on Gilgamesh and the 12th place was over 750,000, whereas 12th place for GSM was under 350,000. It's a little unfair to the 13th~15th place folks on ALC didn't get the Saint title even though they all turned in more points than the GSM 12th place person.

Yes, but that outlay wasn't a requirement to be competitive.

The point is that this competition is at least 90% about how much time you have and only maybe 10% "skill" (because you have to have a basic understanding of how expert recipes work even if you're looking at some sort of a guide / finisher spreadsheet). I was able to get 1st place on my server simply because I logged a ton of hours. As someone who went through this process and is posting in a thread about feedback for this ranking season, I'm saying that I personally would've enjoyed it a lot more if it were more about skill instead of time commitment, and am trying to provide ideas of how that could be accomplished within the current framework of expert recipes.

Of course, it would be even cooler if expert recipes weren't relegated to random achievements / Ishgard rankings and instead were the norm for how the best crafted DoW/DoM gear was made, and instead of just normal or high-quality items, they had different grades (e.g., grade 1~5), and only the best crafters with the best gear would be able to achieve grade 5 items. This would give a much greater purpose to expert recipes as well as hopefully revitalize the crafting community... but that is beyond the scope of this thread.

[VeganPete]

There are two problems with this:

1) If it's a "first" 50 crafts, this is subject to huge swing by RNG. I know I had several crafts this season which hit max without even using Byregot's. I hear the argument, RNG averages out. Imagining it does over a relatively small sample of 500, it also ties with the next problem.

2) If it's a "best" 50 crafts, crafters are just going to craft 50 perfects, and there will be a giant first-place tie. In the cast of RNG average, in a perfect world, it would be tied as well.

Limiting it isn't going to do what anyone needs, not in this manner. Eliminating hoarding makes it more visible, you can choose whether or not you're going to keep up with a false sense of security.

Regarding point one I believe the RNG will average out and everyone is dealing with it. For point 2 it wouldn't be your best 50. It would count your points as soon as you complete the craft. So if you messed up and failed your craft you get zero points for that turn in.

[SamSmoot]

Diadem:

Heatwave, please never have this be default weather again, it is not good weather for the eyes and having it go to it for 10 Mins every 20 mins was horrible. Please make it clear skies or night time for next season I beg of you on this one.

The first time I experienced heatwave in Ahm Arang, I thought something had gone wrong with my eyes. I stopped playing for a while to check them out in a mirror, and look at other things to see if the effect persisted. I finally noticed it was a nauseating weather effect.
I don't quest or gather in an area that has it up.