Ishgard Restoration phase 3 feedback thread

[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.

[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.