People Enjoy hard Games

[DPZ2]

A better question: There have been number of complaints about players deliberately reducing gear levels to 'rig' the system in the daily Roulette. What does this say about the desired difficulty level of such Roulettes?

[Absimiliard]

A better question: There have been number of complaints about players deliberately reducing gear levels to 'rig' the system in the daily Roulette. What does this say about the desired difficulty level of such Roulettes?

There is a difference between difficulty you can enjoy and difficulty that serves no purpose. Pretty much all of the difficulty in, for example, Alliance roulettes comes from having the misfortune of being grouped with people that can't or won't improve anyway. Since those people are now extremely common, you might see how this is seen as a problem. Ever fought Thunder God Cid with people that absolutely refuse to learn from their mistakes? It's not pretty. Fight's not even really hard, but it can go downhill real fast once people start dropping.

The repetition is also a big problem, but you know what would fix that? Memorable, fun encounters that present an adequate challenge. I'm well aware they can't make anything in the roulettes prohibitively hard, but there are options available for adding worthwhile challenges without them either rendering less skilled players incapable of contributing or making the fights annoying instead of challenging. Annoying vs challenging is an important distinction to make, as we've seen many times in the game already. Most of the people manipulating the queue through item level aren't doing it because the content is too "hard." They're doing it because it's annoying, and wiping repeatedly because of people that refuse to play the game correctly just adds to the irritation. People just want to get it done and over with.

[VelKallor]

I want it returned to its original difficulty so that people can see all its mechanics and interact with them correctly, half the wipes in CT are caused by people ignoring mechanics they shouldn’t because it’s CT and they have been taught they can ignore them (robot add cleaving the meteors on behemoth anyone or ignoring bone dragons adds) this slowing of the raid would better balance the alliance roulette because right now crystal tower is too quick to be worth equal rewards, sure the roulettes are to help new people but vets interacting with them is also essential, even square acknowledges this based on the changes being made

< snip for post size - and I DID read it all, I just had to truncate the post for text size - sorry..>

Thank you. MUCH better.

This is what i was looking for. You may die of shock when you see my next words.

We agree.

I think you raise a lot of valid points, your comments on mechanics are, quite frankly, dead on the mark.

WOD has its issues and IMO its more punishing than the first series, which is a step up in difficulty. The main issue and key element is balancing this with the fact that everyone has to run it for MSQ, so that HAS to be a consideration when setting difficulty. It should be a challenge, it should be a little harder maybe, but it MUST have a breakpoint so it isnt that hard for people who have..and I will say this..varying levels of skill.

-14 currently has a terrible difficulty scaling,

I dont think its scaling. I think it is more to do with power creep and ilevel changes over the years, which presents its own problems outside of actual instance difficulty. The two are separate issues.

Dealing with that is more complicated than you can imagine, and I dont have an answer on how that can be done.

Super: Part of what I used to do on a daily basis was planning, and that required a decision tree..if you have never seen one, a decision tree starts with the basic premise then looks at variables, if x then maybe y or z but can go to B instead.

My specific argument was that you MUST factor in the Murphy factor, and what to do if and when your concept goes south.

The idea of 'that cant happen" is at the heart of a LOT of games company snitchups, where they did something and did NOT look to what to do if and when it backfired on them.

NEVER assume it cant go wrong. It CAN happen.

It will.

Bet on it.

Plan for it and be certain that you arent falling into the old trap "We have to do Something -> this is Something so lets do it -> oh HELL we screwed up -> reverse it quickly -> WHY didnt we plan ahead for what could go wrong.

You have given me a lot to think about, and I thank you.

(Now... do you need smelling salts or will coffee do? )

[Soge01]

A better question: There have been number of complaints about players deliberately reducing gear levels to 'rig' the system in the daily Roulette. What does this say about the desired difficulty level of such Roulettes?

People will always find and take the easiest route possible, if given the means to do so.

The devs let people cheat ilvl system for nearly a decade. Its only recently that they've finally decided to do something about this. Probably because they finally noticed other raids are being grossly neglected in the form of lack of playthrough compared to the Crystal Tower raids, which have had a constant overflow of players going through it for the longest time.

[VelKallor]

People will always find and take the easiest route possible, if given the means to do so.

TBH thats human nature across the board, mind you, the other side of that coin is work smarter not harder. If you can find an easier way to accomplish the same goal, that isnt always a bad thing.

[kaynide]

I’ve said this many times, so just repeating myself really:

The way FFXIV is built, currently, the Crystal Tower raids could very well be a player’s first time they are forced to party with real players. Up until that point, they could bumble through the entire game without any need to really “learn” the game.

In addition, this is available to non-paying players and is (currently) the only 24-raid required to progress the MSQ.

Neither of these justify it being so awful, but it is important to be aware that it is probably by design to be so stupidly easy because they want to retain players (eventually to become paying customers!) and ease them into feeling raiding can be “fun” for them.

IMHO, CT series should be turned into an NPC dungeon series and removed from roulette entirely. I would love to go back to old school CT, but as is the devs have chose a solution that “works”… however band-aided it may be.

[TaleraRistain]

The way FFXIV is built, currently, the Crystal Tower raids could very well be a player’s first time they are forced to party with real players. Up until that point, they could bumble through the entire game without any need to really “learn” the game.

If they know to go unlock it right after Ultimate Weapon. But it's not required in post-ARR MSQ until the quest where you find Wilred's body so new people will do Mog, Ramuh, Levi, Shiva, and the HM primals before that.

[Soge01]

TBH thats human nature across the board, mind you, the other side of that coin is work smarter not harder. If you can find an easier way to accomplish the same goal, that isnt always a bad thing.

True. Though in FFXIV's case, the bad thing with daily roulette cheesing is taking away the enjoyment of potentially getting a roulette raid you actually want to do while earning the daily roulette prize because one random person just wants to do the easiest raid to get their prize faster.

[RitsukoSonoda]

I’ve said this many times, so just repeating myself really:

The way FFXIV is built, currently, the Crystal Tower raids could very well be a player’s first time they are forced to party with real players. Up until that point, they could bumble through the entire game without any need to really “learn” the game.

In addition, this is available to non-paying players and is (currently) the only 24-raid required to progress the MSQ.

Neither of these justify it being so awful, but it is important to be aware that it is probably by design to be so stupidly easy because they want to retain players (eventually to become paying customers!) and ease them into feeling raiding can be “fun” for them.

IMHO, CT series should be turned into an NPC dungeon series and removed from roulette entirely. I would love to go back to old school CT, but as is the devs have chose a solution that “works”… however band-aided it may be.

Nerfing the ilvl sync so that people do the CT raids at the ilvl range the raid were actually added would provide a proper experience to party mechanics and content that supports more than 4 players. The way CT is now I fail to see how a new person being barely able to do anything during the raid as people faceroll the whole thing before you even see a majority of the boss or arena mechanics will provide a positive experience in retaining those new players or getting them to sub if they're on the free version.

[Shurrikhan]

...

Anecdote, but still a decently funny/telling one: A friend I introduced to the game likes to use Trusts at least once per dungeon, usually for his first clear. Rarely doing them myself, I asked why, since he seemed played well and didn't seem paranoid about holding others back or the like.

His response was something to the tune of, "Usually the players I get through matchmaking kill everything so quickly that I rarely get to really see what the mechanics do, which just makes everything feel really... half-assed. Trusts feel a bit long and more artificial (duh), but at least I get to see everything through and I can't win that time around if I make a fatal mistake."