Mount Farming and the 99 Totem Issue

[DrWho2010]

it's not a matter of discouragement, it's a matter of how badly you want to flex that you got something before everyone else can get it easier.

[Deveryn]

it's not a matter of discouragement, it's a matter of how badly you want to flex that you got something before everyone else can get it easier.

AKA a personal choice, as I mentioned.

Luck is not a flex. If any mount in this game is a flex, it's one of the Feast rewards. Anything else is eventually obtainable.

[ICountFrom0]

There's something about it being 99 no matter what. It's a nice implementation to try to fix the "long tail" of bad odds and just how random numbers work.

Notice that some of the "harder" ones drop 2 totems? How about if that became the general fix?

Lets just ... bloat... the concept of harder, make more of them drop 2 at once.

Course, on the other hand, keeping completionists playing the game is kind of the point of the game, if more people get the rewards faster, less people who actually know the fights will be there to teach others, and this will actually make the fights even harder.

It's an intersting tossup, aint it?

At a certain point with unsync difficulty becomes meaningless. I was helping someone get their mount today and Suzaku was dropping in 2 min. 30s of that was her phase change.

If you think that has anything to do with what I said you might want to re-read what I said, or I guess I could explain again?


Lets try this again.

If you require everybody who wants the mount, but isn't lucky, to run the trial 99 times vs them needing to run it 50 times, that's 49 more times that the person who needs the mount will be in a trial while knowing what to do, and being able to instruct others on how to do the raid. 49 more times they can be forced to teach the new incoming player who has never done it before how to do it.

They might not have to every time, but they are forced to be there by circumstances.

This gives squenix a collection of free teachers that will be there doing the ex trials.

It's like how the mentor roulette forces somebody into the experience who knows what to do if things go horribly wrong for long enough.

[Haruka_R]

Dont you get enough totems after 99 tries?

Yea. But I stayed for a bit longer for the group I was in to see if the goddamn thing would ever drop again. Can't even remember if it did. I'm so over mount farming dude. And for the wolf mounts, I did them as soon as the EX's came out. I had a lot of free time back then.

[lolicon09]

"The current system of acquiring 99 totems to purchase a mount from any of the EX trials is absolutely ridiculous and a clear indicator from SE that they do not care about your personal time"

By the time the mount becomes available to buy with Totems, you can easily get those 99 totems casually, without doing the same Duty nonstop every day. Source? I just for my 99 Umbral totems today, without doing the Duty many times every day

[LordGiggles]

They're all luxuries. This is not a new concept. It's only ever a grind if you make it so. I don't know why people are getting so heated over this.

You forgot S rank / A rank, btw. If we're gonna rank them, that's the 2nd worst.
I put PvP at the top because you're depending on people that don't necessarily care to participate.

The hunt ones are definitely a great example of an excessive grind, the numbers on some of them are pretty absurd (particularly for arr ones). PvP and the aforementioned triad ones aren't as bad imo just because the content you're grinding varies a lot. PvP can be annoying (and has pretty poor balance and some weird mechanics), but there's a lot of people who just enjoy playing it, with the rewards as just a secondary motivation. Triad covers basically every piece of content in the game. Ex mounts are just running the exact same fight way past the point there's any fun in it. There's no reason they couldn't drop the requirement down to 50.

Some grind is a given in an mmo, but I think that there's still a balance to be struck. Some grinds just are awful to actually to do, like does anyone enjoy doing books for arr relics? Or running aurum vale unsync like 40 times? Ideally a grind should be a motivator to keep doing stuff you enjoy to some degree, but might not come back to much otherwise.

I'm not sure what you mean by saying it's only a grind if you make it so. Spreading the grind out over a huge period of time doesn't change what it is, it just means you're slower doing it.

If you require everybody who wants the mount, but isn't lucky, to run the trial 99 times vs them needing to run it 50 times, that's 49 more times that the person who needs the mount will be in a trial while knowing what to do, and being able to instruct others on how to do the raid. 49 more times they can be forced to teach the new incoming player who has never done it before how to do it.

People just make farm parties, people entirely new to the raid generally aren't even allowed in those groups outside old unsync stuff. You get some helpers in clear runs, but you get those people anyway, even blu raids get helpers.

[Deveryn]

I'm not sure what you mean by saying it's only a grind if you make it so. Spreading the grind out over a huge period of time doesn't change what it is, it just means you're slower doing it.

Spreading it out means you're pacing yourself vs. grinding it out. Grinding is just going at it repeatedly. At least that's how I see it.

My approach to frontline mounts is to do one duty a day, as long as it's not borderlands. If I get a win, I'll do a bonus run. It's not a grind, but a pretty casual pace. Anytime the new EX comes out, I don't do more than a few a day. If I do, there's a big break in between. I don't consider that a grind.

Unsync groups for older mounts were a grind because it's normal to go for 10 or 20 runs in a row.

Someone said SE doesn't care about people's personal time. It's each individual that cares or doesn't care about their own time (or other people's) in one way or another. I want to keep enjoying the game and I have no interest in other games, so I'm not going to burn myself out.

[Hypn0tyk]

Personally I think the mount should not drop at all and we should be able to buy it for 99 totems right away.

I don't think you should be able to short-circuit many hours because you got lucky in your first few clears. If anything have a random chance for extra totems so you can still get lucky and speed up getting to 99. Maybe let us desynth the weapons into totems. I think 2-totem fights are good, but the fact you can't buy the mount until several patches later is still a bit awkward.

The fact that somebody can do 99x the work of somebody else and get a worse result could be made a bit less silly. As of right now, primal mounts are just a sign of how lucky a player is.

[Raven2014]

a clear indicator from SE that they do not care about your personal time.

New flash, they made an MMO, in which the raison d'etre is to waste your time. This is like complaining about the tobacco company not care about your health.

What makes it worse is that many players defend it, either because they acquired the mount early on, slogged through the trial 99 times and feel everyone else should suffer like they did, or just generally enjoy wasting away countless hours of their life on one instance.

There is one thing you get right, and that is some people just generally enjoy wasting time. As I said above, I'm playing an MMO, I'm literally wasting time for which I can use toward much more productive and healthy activities. That's why I at least make those time enjoyable. Since stormblood I run most EX well into the hundredth (I think I clocked in ~220 runs on twintania), and for the most part, I enjoyed those times, not antagonized over them. You know my secret?

- It's the perfect testing ground for new classes. There is only so much you can practice on dummy, and I don't want to trap people fumbling around in savage. EX is the place where I can practice while still do meaningful contribution.

- I use it to cap weekly tome when I needed instead of running roulette or daily. A bit less efficient but more fun, and go toward multiple goals.

- I set a daily limit of 3 runs a day, unless I just feel like I want to run more (and thus can enjoy it). Like really, with the time frame between when the EX come out and the token exchange become available, just 2 runs a day will net you 99 totem long before that. Heck, I can even suggest more extreme, wait a couple expansion until you can solo the instance, or when they made it into the moogle quest. That's exactly what I did for the Phoenix mount.

At the end of the day, I have multiple reason to run EXs, getting the mount is just one of them.

And before you say "but I run out of thing to do but to grind" than just take a break. I had often come to the game defense on here, but even for me, I know how to take a break. After hundred of savages and EX runs, I legit arrived at a point where I think I don't have any contents left to play. So ... I decide to take a break, today is actually the last day I can post because my sub run out tomorrow. And I won't renew it until the next savage tier patch. It's not hard.


Face it, the only reason it feels like a grind to you because you want it ASAP and throw yourself into it. SE made a game, it's not their fault some people decide to turn it into a job.

[VerdeLuck]

If anything, the ability to run it over and over in a couple weeks to get 99 totems and then never touch it again has more of an impact in killing the content in the Party Finder. Endsinger parties are few and far between already and people I've talked to have said they ran it nonstop to get their totems early on, and then are never setting foot in it ever again.
Reducing the number of totems that are required without changing anything else just seems like it would severely reduce the life of the fights in Party Finder and you'd have people sitting in parties struggling to fill much earlier into the life of a patch.