Brian from Work 2 Game is leaving FFXIV

[MikkoAkure]

Clearly there are positive points that can be applied from both 11 and 1.0. Only time will tell really.

Only if viewed through rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. I have fond memories of FFXI and less-than-fond memories, but memories nonetheless of FFXIV 1.0 and that type of gameplay would not work today.

FFXI combat was menu navigating combat unless you made macros for everything. The game’s structure was less rigid, but every time players found a way to play that the devs didn’t like (remember manaburn?), the devs would nerf it. Pre-Abyssea during the peak of the game, most time spent playing was grinding your levels instead of doing actual content. You would spend hours upon hours pulling mobs to your little corner of the meta leveling spot until you reach cap. FFXI had a lot of neat open-world content, but most of it was spent camping and spawning NMs and HNMs for hours upon hours.

FFXIV 1.0 had a bad sort of fatigue system where every action cost resources and you would end up running out of TP or MP and just sit there waiting for it to come back. 1.23 is what most people refer to as the “golden age” of 1.0 where a lot was overhauled, but it was a stop-gap until Yoshi-P could redo the whole game. Physical damage jobs also had a “sweet spot” for damage depending on how close you were and even lancer and gladiator had different range limits they could hit things but it was more annoying than interesting. The color your gear was determined its sub stats.

Leves were originally supposed to be the main content of the game. People could grind FFXI-style but my friends and I ended up powerleveling all our classes to 50 since it didn’t take long and a level 50 could quit your party after pulling an entire zone and kill them all and everyone would get full exp. Other than NMs and the open dungeons, the open world was complete garbage. Gathering mechanics were neat but not the sort of thing you could do for an extended period of time. Now they’re Gold Saucer attractions.

The only things I would like to bring back from 1.0 are the interesting types of hard content like the body-piece AF fights, debilitating mobs with specific attacks from specific angles, and multi-layered dungeon raids like the old Dzaemel that required one group of people to handle skeletons and ghosts spawning while another part handled Batraal.

From FFXI, I would like to see horizontal gear progression. Burning Circles and Salvage were neat but I feel like Treasure Hunts zones generally scratch that itch. I liked how each expansion wasn’t necessarily a direct sequel to the previous and newer and underleveled players could still do some content of the new expansion until they needed to level up for later zones/content. The gigantic city-wide invasions of Aht Urghan were neat even though my poor PS2 couldn’t keep up.

[Shurrikhan]

FFXIV 1.0 had a bad sort of fatigue system where every action cost resources and you would end up running out of TP or MP and just sit there waiting for it to come back. 1.23 is what most people refer to as the “golden age” of 1.0 where a lot was overhauled, but it was a stop-gap until Yoshi-P could redo the whole game. Physical damage jobs also had a “sweet spot” for damage depending on how close you were and even lancer and gladiator had different range limits they could hit things but it was more annoying than interesting. The color your gear was determined its sub stats.

The fatigue system had nothing to do with action cost. The fatigue system was simply the inverse of the rested exp system. Rather than spending "bonus" exp on just one class/job, you'd effectively get bonus exp on all of them and would swap to another class once the bonus for the given class's bonus ran out. Yoshida then made it far less alt-friendly by limiting the time-accrued bonus to what could be spent on a single class but placated the playerbase by calling it "rested exp" instead of focusing on its opposite "fatigue" (i.e., running out of rested exp). Hurray?

MP regenerated plenty quickly, and TP wasn't generated over time at all. It was more similar to a job gauge, in this case generated by basic attacks (GCD skills that were later replaced with passive auto-attacks, because somehow Yoshida felt the APM was too high, I guess?) and a select few other skills (Pummel, Flurry, etc.). You then spent it on skills of varying cost (until Yoshida consolidated them all down to just the cost of "combo" openers by drastically increasing all costs but then making all further actions within a "combo" free so long as you did them in order, such that 6000 --1000->2000->3000-- TP's worth of actions could be done with 1000 TP, and so the era of 123 456 123 456 began, in place of situational skills, multiple damage types, synergies, and varying attack shapes).

On the other points, though, agreed.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

The fatigue system had nothing to do with action cost. The fatigue system was simply the inverse of the rested exp system. Rather than spending "bonus" exp on just one class/job, you'd effectively get bonus exp on all of them and would swap to another class once the bonus for the given class's bonus ran out. Yoshida then made it far less alt-friendly by limiting the time-accrued bonus to what could be spent on a single class but placated the playerbase by calling it "rested exp" instead of focusing on its opposite "fatigue" (i.e., running out of rested exp). Hurray?

MP regenerated plenty quickly, and TP wasn't generated over time at all. It was more similar to a job gauge, in this case generated by basic attacks (GCD skills that were later replaced with passive auto-attacks, because somehow Yoshida felt the APM was too high, I guess?) and a select few other skills (Pummel, Flurry, etc.). You then spent it on skills of varying cost (until Yoshida consolidated them all down to just the cost of "combo" openers by drastically increasing all costs but then making all further actions within a "combo" free so long as you did them in order, such that 6000 --1000->2000->3000-- TP's worth of actions could be done with 1000 TP, and so the era of 123 456 123 456 began, in place of situational skills, multiple damage types, synergies, and varying attack shapes).

On the other points, though, agreed.

You are missing a bit on fatigue. you could get 0 exp for jobs after a bit. It wasn't just the opposite of rested. It could lock you out of earning any EXP whatsoever after a while leveling, after making it prohibitively inefficient first.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abE09-tqhoM

Gotta love this old video explaining it.

[Shurrikhan]

You are missing a bit on fatigue. you could get 0 exp for jobs after a bit. It wasn't just the opposite of rested. It could lock you out of earning any EXP whatsoever after a while leveling, after making it prohibitively inefficient first.

Which differs, per job, from rested exp only in terms of scaling.

Let's say we remove both fatigue and rested exp entirely, leaving only that fatigued/unrested baseline. How many hours/at-level-kills' worth of experience should it take a job to reach the level cap?

Now we add that pre-fatigued/rested state. If the base were the same, the two would likewise be effectively identical. Both are finite. The only difference is that the bonus "rested" exp is spent all one job and the bonus of "not yet fatigued" is spent on each.

If the goal is to extend/gate the time it takes to level a single job, the two leveling experiences remain identical for single-job levelers, while fatigue pushes ahead for multi-levelers. If the goal is to extend/gate the time it takes to level a few jobs, then "rested" tends to be faster in getting a single job to cap and "fatigue" tends to be faster in getting a few jobs to cap.

That's it. All that fundamentally changes is a shift in what is incentivized between single-leveling and multi-leveling. The rest is just turning the knob on the base exp acquisition rate relative to what's required to reach cap.


Hot take perhaps, but I preferred when we were a bit more incentivized to multi-level. The later "Additional Actions" were a muddled and disappointing half-measure, but lower MSQ experience and lower experience required per level, etc., would certainly go a decent way, just as retuning the base exp rates while retaining the old fatigue system would have before, especially since you generated margin against fatigue continuously instead of only when in rest areas, allowing time spent on other jobs not to detract from leveling efficiency on others.


Note: Both systems had the Armory Bonus.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Which differs, per job, from rested exp only in terms of scaling.

Let's say we remove both fatigue and rested exp entirely, leaving only that fatigued/unrested baseline. How many hours/at-level-kills' worth of experience should it take a job to reach the level cap?

Now we add that pre-fatigued/rested state. If the base were the same, the two would likewise be effectively identical. Both are finite. The only difference is that the bonus "rested" exp is spent all one job and the bonus of "not yet fatigued" is spent on each.

If the goal is to extend/gate the time it takes to level a single job, the two leveling experiences remain identical for single-job levelers, while fatigue pushes ahead for multi-levelers. If the goal is to extend/gate the time it takes to level a few jobs, then "rested" tends to be faster in getting a single job to cap and "fatigue" tends to be faster in getting a few jobs to cap.

That's it. All that fundamentally changes is a shift in what is incentivized between single-leveling and multi-leveling. The rest is just turning the knob on the base exp acquisition rate relative to what's required to reach cap.

Yeah, but without rested, you can still grind out that job to max level. When you hit the fatigue wall you were done.

All nuances aside, fatigue was a stupid way to do it.

I've always leveled my jobs/classes serially, not in parallel. It makes more sense to me to do it that way. Fatigue sucked for that.

[Shurrikhan]

When you hit the fatigue wall you were done.

Which would have remained the case for having run out of rested experience if they hadn't also increased the experience acquisition base. But that is, again, just a matter of scaling/tuning/turning-the-knob.

I've always leveled my jobs/classes serially, not in parallel.

I mean, even now it's kind of inferior to do so after reaching whatever endgame content you need to rush to, especially if you're not paying for retainers. In terms of inventory space, it's better to do a whole gear class (Aiming, Maiming, Striking, Scouting, Casting, Healing, or Fending) at a time.

But fair enough. I understand that preference. I just prefer taking breaks occasionally from my main to play on alt jobs. Rested experience as a system actively detracts from that because you can't choose on whom to spend the rested experience and you only acrue rested bonus experience while resting, whereas fatigue was rolled back (non-fatigued bonus regenerated) regardless of actually resting, meaning you could regain leveling efficiency for a given job just as much by playing any other job as you could by logging off.