Dungeons we need to talk dungeons

[RitsukoSonoda]

snip

A majority of your responses simply indicate a blind belief that your side is a majority with no indication of understanding of human behavior or any actual data to back any of your claims up.

If you had extremely poor success rates clearing EX trials in ARR with randoms then either you were extremely unlucky or one of the problem elements was you. And if you're going to post a contrary statement then YOU provide proof. Demanding the other party do so simply indicates you were too lazy to verify your own claim before posting it and just points to you being part of that minority that want everything handed to you without having to work for it which your claims of EX trial experiences are also pointing to. All you've succeeded in doing with most of your post is destroy any credibility you might have had beforehand.

The people supporting the game difficulty being nerfed into oblivion fall primarily into 3 categories.
1. Lazy players that want everything handed to them.
2. People that think siding with them will make them look good and get them likes or make them popular. They jump on the side that they think will make more people like them or think they are a better person.
3. People that are only siding with them because they hope the noisy minority that make up category 1 and 2 will stop being loud and obnoxious.

At the same time the side wanting this formula the game has been following to change is also a minority.

The actual majority of players are indifferent. They simply play the game as it is not saying anything or making any waves or ripples. They play it as it is as long as they get an amount of enjoyment from it they feel is sufficient to pay a sub for (provided they aren't just playing the free version). They stick around because it's something they can play with their friends either IRL or the ones they made in game. There are also those that stick around simply because they have a completionist mentality and want to see how the game ends. The actual majority will just take any changes that happen and roll with it making any adjustments needed to keep going as they have been.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

A majority of your responses simply indicate a blind belief that your side is a majority with no indication of understanding of human behavior or any actual data to back any of your claims up.

I've worked in AAA professional game development environments with massive marketing and analytic teams, even once on an MMO. Why do you think the industry as a whole has been creating games with more accessibility or easier difficulty? Because that is the name of the game in today's industry to make profits. Jimmy with his two kids, a 9 hour job and maybe 1-2 hours a night where he likes to relax and enjoy a fun experience are becoming the ever predominant majority in the video game playerbase, and pretty much every major game company knows this and actively designs their games with these people in mind, whether it be inclusion of lowered difficulty, difficulty options, microtransactions to save time, etc. It's no different with Square Enix. I'd say its even more blatant with them, considering how ridiculous JP work culture can be to the point many working adults barely have time to play.

Besides, both our opinions are pretty irrelevant on this. Square likely has terabytes of metrics data floating around on their servers which is literally the only thing they need to make profitable decisions. Their very dev cycle decisions are already proof they know the vast majority of their audience far better than either of us. Data talks, and data is what makes profit.

If you had extremely poor success rates clearing EX trials in ARR with randoms then either you were extremely unlucky or one of the problem elements was you.

Ah yes. Because I, as a Black Mage, can literally do anything when tanks fail mitigation or fail to swap spiny, when the healers fail to keep people healthy. Or when all the other dps kill the spiny.
Yes, the common problem was totally me. I had all the tools to save every run and just kept casting Fire 1 instead : )

...You have done ARR EX trials right? You get bad tanks on Ramuh, and there's literally nothing you can do to win. Get bad healers and you're boned on any of them. Get dps who won't listen and you're boned on Gardua & Moogle mog. Not to mention this was the age of WARs not having provoke because they didn't level GLD, meaning if you were unlucky, some fights were over before they even began! If you were DF queuing EX trials back in the day and getting successful clears on the average, you were either on JP, in partial premades, or getting lucky. Of course, this is all anecdotal arguing that'll simply go in circles anyway, so we'll have to agree to disagree.

And if you're going to post a contrary statement then YOU provide proof. Demanding the other party do so simply indicates you were too lazy to verify your own claim before posting it and just points to you being part of that minority that want everything handed to you without having to work for it which your claims of EX trial experiences are also pointing to. All you've succeeded in doing with most of your post is destroy any credibility you might have had beforehand.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof


You're the one who made the initial claim that Square is dumbing down the game as an appeasement to lazy players (and in the process, literally said false statements like the Shinryu bit which didn't exactly win you any favors). I made the counterpoint using Twinning/Akademia, two dungeons that are completely optional and thus would be primed for Square to do any sort of higher difficulty with, that it's a game design decision around a core audience based on limited resources and prioritizing resources to that which makes up the majority of their playerbase that they know based on data, so burden on proof is on you to prove that the majority is indifferent and that Square just listens to the wrong crowd. And now you're bordering on Ad-Homimen territory considering you know literally nothing about my personal wants in the game lol.

But just for my ego on the 'you're part of the crowd that wants everything handed to them' bit: I grinded out every step of the ARR & HW relics while they were relevant & un-nerfed and never complained (multiple times too, 2x during ARR for Bravura + Curtana, and x3 in HW for all three tank weapons). I've world progged every tier since the beginning of HW, taking time off work and wiping literally hundreds of times and spending an upwards of 50+ hours to get week 1 clears on every tier since Deltascape (Since Manipulator & BJ were impossible week 1-2 back then due to overtuning & I was in a casual static for creator.) I've even done well over 100+ duels in Southern Front before Zadnor came along grinding out Gabriel keys for my friends to save them money. I don't need things handed to me on a silver platter. I simply understand business economics from my own work experiences and have many casual friends that I interact with daily and understand their mindsets when it comes to this game.

That being said, if you want to claim the people Square are designing their game for aren't the majority, prove it. Until then, we'll both enjoy our opinions, only mine was formed by observing the FF14's dev's development trends over a 6 year period which are in turn based on hard data Square has along with time spent with professional game development environments where I had to interact with publishers who used analytics, market trends and player data to make decisions on what features or changes we'd be implementing into the next update. But given that neither of us can access the data Square uses to make their development decisions and thus anything we say is merely opinions based on anecdotal evidence, we'll have to agree to disagree.

The people supporting the game difficulty being nerfed into oblivion fall primarily into 3 categories.
1. Lazy players that want everything handed to them.

OR, hear me out. Sometimes people just like having an easy game to play and turn your brain off in after a long day at work that still offers a sense of progression towards working for rewards. Shocking concept, I know, I bet I just blew your mind.

Oh I remember this well, back when even Demon Wall in Amdapor Keep would was too high a DPS check for some parties Titan HM was a PUG stomper. People cleared it sure, it was mandatory content, but even though the difficulty difference between level 50 tome farming dungeons and Titan HM wasn't that big, it was still cause for some.... interesting parties. The idea that by making dungeons harder, players will suddenly level up in skill and make extreme fights more manageable is pure pie in the sky, wishful thinking. The history of this very game proves it.

God the Demon Wall. So many fond memories of waiting 40mins for a queue to pop due to insanely congested instance servers and then spending 30mins of your run wiping to that boss because someone got flung off by repel for the 50th time and you no longer had the dps to make the check it due to how bad most players were back then when everyone was new. Assuming the healer didn't just outright fail to heal me through the bees, despite rolling mitigation.

[Nyarlha]

God the Demon Wall. So many fond memories of waiting 40mins for a queue to pop due to insanely congested instance servers and then spending 30mins of your run wiping to that boss because someone got flung off by repel for the 50th time and you no longer had the dps to make the check it due to how bad most players were back then when everyone was new. Assuming the healer didn't just outright fail to heal me through the bees, despite rolling mitigation.

OG Demon Wall was definitely something. So many things could go wrong.

And yeah, queues were so long back then, between a lack of tanks and the instance servers... That's why I laugh nowadays when I hear people saying "tanks and healers are leaving the jobs because they are too easy/homogenized", despite the fact that I'm getting consistant 5 minutes queues as a DPS.

[Shurrikhan]

Square likely has terabytes of metrics data floating around on their servers which is literally the only thing they need to make profitable decisions.

Ahh, yes, that metrics-driven decision making that has worked so well for Ian Hazzikostas or has offered us the objectively (metrically-proven) 'better' experiences of microtransaction hell, etc.

[Artemiz]

I'm not sure why we're assuming that the only way for dungeons not to feel like mere unvaried hallways is for us to have side-routes that get one no nearer to the core objective...

One (bad) approach does not make for an exhaustive list of possibilities.

True, but I just think that players will very quickly find the fastest route to finishing a dungeon and insist on that. Square could come up with the greatest dungeon layout in history but players are like water, they seek out the line of least resistance.

actually, in brayflox longstop there is a big room with a few packs. Every time i get brayflox longstop the party seems to take a different path through that big room. We could have more dungeons like that where rather than being a literal tunnel, its more of a big room with mobs.

aurum vale's first room is quite similar to this. the reason pulling big in aurum vale is so dangerous is because classes dont have the means to handle that much damage at that level. we could easily have another aurum vale with our high level kits and it wouldn't be nearly as disastrous, just like brayflox big room isn't.

I like those area's too, there isn't much decision making going on though, the tank just picks their favourite route. I don't think more area's like that would be a problem though and I'd welcome it.

Ahh, yes, that metrics-driven decision making that has worked so well for Ian Hazzikostas or has offered us the objectively (metrically-proven) 'better' experiences of microtransaction hell, etc.

Wow has done a bad job of integrating metrics into their decision making, all game companies use them though. The art of making good decisions is understanding the relationship between metrics and feedback, Square seem to have a good handle on this, Blizzard are obviously terrible at it.

[Shurrikhan]

Wow has done a bad job of integrating metrics into their decision making, all game companies use them though. The art of making good decisions is understanding the relationship between metrics and feedback, Square seem to have a good handle on this, Blizzard are obviously terrible at it.

That's precisely my point, though. Metrics won't supplant the need for long-term planning or vision.

WoW has made its fair number of negative examples, but can we honestly say XIV hasn't been following suit in its own way?

[Artemiz]

WoW has made its fair number of negative examples, but can we honestly say XIV hasn't been following suit in its own way?

Um, I wouldn't agree with that to be honest. I think the player/dev relationship is much healthier in FFXIV. Not everything Square has done has been a roaring success with the players obviously but I do think they at least try to keep us happy. Blizzard try to keep the shareholders happy and the players hooked, seems like a very different approach to me.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

That's precisely my point, though. Metrics won't supplant the need for long-term planning or vision.

WoW has made its fair number of negative examples, but can we honestly say XIV hasn't been following suit in its own way?

To be fair, metrics are far from the issue when it comes to WoW's many problems.

Blizzard is effectively the hostage of Activision, arguably the most profit hungry company in the entire gaming industry. I doubt Activision cares one bit about WoW's internal metrics or long-term planning or vision; they only see the immediate profits and how to create systems that force players to play for longer to squeeze sub money from them in the short term. Ion is just a yes-man for Activision at this point. Speaking from my own time working in the game industry, publishers alone can be the most annoying force to deal with when it comes to creative decisions. Let alone a publisher like EA/Activision that is insanely profit hungry to the point of sticking the metaphorical middle finger to the gamer's face because they know the playerbase will still eat up the big franchises they put out.

Compared to Yoshi-P who isn't beholden to some higher up publisher, and was even promoted to the lead of creative business unit III, showing that his fellow leads on the board have much respect for him. That being said, FF14 already has its long-term plan and vision. 6-7 years of consistent design in how certain types of content are tuned is a really hard statistic to ignore; FF14 has been advertising the demographics each form of content they create is aimed at for a long time now. Every piece of content in the game has its purpose and will not be deviating from said purpose this late into the life cycle of the game.

Rather than wasting time asking Yoshi-P for harder 4 man dungeons which have been so rock solidly integrated into the design of this game as the easy, spammable daily task, people should be asking him for more unique 4 man content like PoTD. I think asking for more unique 4 man content will go much further in their feedback than asking for harder dungeons, which I can pretty much guarantee any feedback of such is likely just auto-deleted by their sorting AI program.

[Shurrikhan]

Compared to Yoshi-P who isn't beholden to some higher up publisher, and was even promoted to the lead of creative business unit III, showing that his fellow leads on the board have much respect for him.

Yoshida absolutely is beholden to a higher up publisher. It's not as an invasive a publisher as Activision, but he's not suddenly freed from commitments. We have seen this many times already, such in trends to focus design around sale points (see the many abilities that had no reason to be abilities outside of the fact that actions demo and sell better than traits) and iconizing grinds like those of our relics.

Rather than wasting time asking Yoshi-P for harder 4 man dungeons which have been so rock solidly integrated into the design of this game as the easy, spammable daily task, people should be asking him for more unique 4 man content like PoTD. I think asking for more unique 4 man content will go much further in their feedback than asking for harder dungeons, which I can pretty much guarantee any feedback of such is likely just thrown out the window immediately.

And it's funny that you're passing something as broad as asking for more than a barebone, grinded experience in a content genre as staple as dungeons as somehow "waste[ful]" or, unless your grouping here was coincidental, negatively profits-minded.

Most of those asking for interesting dungeons are the same people who asked for unique and polished 4-man content previously. What did they get instead? The barebone grindfest that is PotD and HoH... and even further dumbed down dungeon grinds. And here's the thing: giving the option for dungeons to hold difficulty sufficient for their mechanics to act as actual mechanics, rather than ignorable suggestions, not only allows for more engaging experiences but reduces the development costs otherwise wasted in building those dungeons. It takes virtually zero time to simply slap a HP and damage modifier onto a dungeon. And for that you get greatly increased engagement. Virtually no cost. Large, centralized gains, especially for those who have already enjoyed your game, but wish there was something more that wasn't shuffling them off to the side again.

But, alas, what's the one thing a mob stat scaler doesn't do, despite its efficiency? It doesn't sound sexy. It doesn't sell. Because gods forbid it's something that makes sense to those who actually play the given content and enjoy its genre and possibilities, rather than merely attracts people to it (historically, to then quickly become nonsensical, like our dungeons' present scaling).

...Which is why we instead build altogether new content genres from scratch, badly fail to flesh them out, and treat the playerbase as unappeasable if they're not thereby satisfied, I suppose...

I can pretty much guarantee any feedback of such is likely just thrown out the window immediately.

And yet metrics will save us all, even as any reason for a drop in related playtime, or even subs, can be spun any which way since specific feedback is irrelevant?