4gamer Interview

[Aldath]

Man, if the JP community ever acts like the developers listen to us, just point them to this. Beyond peoples personal feelings towards job design, the story, etc whatever; this is just an outright lie. There's no good way you can spin this statement other than what it is, the developers not listening to the NA or EU communities or paying attention to them even when they experience the same issues that the JP community is.

The strangest thing is that there's no reason to even lie about this. I'm on Primal right now for Rival Wings and I'm looking at the Party Finder, there is not a SINGLE party for progging the current tier or any Ultimates, and I am fully confident it is 100% the same back on Crystal and definitely Dynamis. You simply cannot play the high end content in this game on NA without a static anymore unless you go to Aether.

This, so much. Asian Dev companies like to listen to "in house" complains first and only adress global ones once the whole ship is sinking.
To the people that say "Just do a PF" or "Join a Discord", that's a band aid fix on a gaping wound, most of the time people just isn't interested. On Primal we usually have to wait over an hour to gather about 5 people for an 8 man party. You enter PF and there are about 3 to 5 parties, most of them are for Blue Mage only runs, and the rest are just Hunt Trains or Venue Ads.

[ForsakenRoe]

'SE reads some data and comes to the correct conclusion' challenge: impossible difficulty

Like, no duh the EW relics have the highest rate of 'people reached the max item level for them', you designed the damn things to be completed within 15minutes even by people who have been on a break for several weeks waiting for new content. Being 1500 tomes means someone can potentially log in, blast the quest, and immediately 'finish' the new step of the 'grind'. Can't even call it a 'grind' anymore, can we

This, so much. Asian Dev companies like to listen to "in house" complains first and only adress global ones once the whole ship is sinking.
To the people that say "Just do a PF" or "Join a Discord", that's a band aid fix on a gaping wound, most of the time people just isn't interested. On Primal we usually have to wait over an hour to gather about 5 people for an 8 man party. You enter PF and there are about 3 to 5 parties, most of them are for Blue Mage only runs, and the rest are just Hunt Trains or Venue Ads.

Maybe related maybe not, it took me and a friend two hours (7-9pm local time for us) to get a PF to reclear P9S and P10S, and to zone into P11S. Both the first two were oneshots. We spent a total of over 90mins looking for a tank for each of the fights, and then 10 mins to actually do each of them (P11S taking 20, we wiped once). The PF on Light at the time was like, 40% Ultimate PFs. The pre-expansion blues have kicked in hard, because now is the time when we'd normally be IN the pre-expansion phase. The extension to the patch cycle (2 weeks per patch) adds up, and the playerbase feels the fatigue earlier relatively speaking. It's very worrying.

Doesn't affect me, I cleared the tier yonks ago. I could stop doing reclears and it wouldn't affect me whatsoever. But I do find it concerning, how 'dead' the game feels now, because I cannot imagine it's going to go any direction but 'worse' as time goes on. Maybe they're relying entirely on the Fall Guys event to keep people around

[CidHeiral]

"If I were to listen to everyone's opinions now, the quickest response would be to close data center travel so that it cannot be used."

[SturmChurro]

Yeah...they are looking at this data and are unfortunately likely using the EW completion rates as justification for their oversimplification of the relic grind. To me, that is learning the wrong lesson. Dawntrail will definitely make or break this game for me at this point. For multiple reasons, this one among them.

Dawntrail is going to be trash tier anyway. Like that is a given.

[Jojoya]

Endsinger - hopefully he realizes that Thordan, Shinryu and Hades all suffer the same problem as Endsinger. They could all use an adjustment with an ilvl sync being a reasonable choice.

Alliance raids - I think the problem is more complex than just difficulty if the discussion is about Alliance raids in general and not just a specific one (like CT). I still feel like they should separate Crystal Tower into a separate roulette then review both Alliance roulettes for changes in participation after one or two patch cycles. That could help identify specific problems more.

Criterion - what does he mean by "since it cannot be removed" - what can't be removed? As for the rewards in the next Criterion, it sounds like we're in for a set of shiny glamour that may or may not go with shiny relics due out about the same time. It also sounds like JP overall is fine with Criterion as it is, with the reward complaints mostly coming from "overseas".

Relics - definitely a more complex problem since he's bringing demographic trends into the discussion. From the sound of it, they're not inclined to include the relics with unique grind content going forward. That doesn't mean that grind content won't be added that has other rewards.

Using hunt trains as a source for tomestones, it would take about 54 hours per stage to get/upgrade all relics for the expansion (that's including estimated travel time between worlds to get to the next train if they're being chained). It's a short period of time for those playing 8 hours+ a day. That's several weeks of effort for those who play only 8 hours a week even if they do content to farm the needed tomestones and nothing else. Not all content rewards the tomestones and many players aren't interested in limiting themselves only to the content that does.

I don't think he's misinterpreting the data. I think that players are misinterpreting what type of content SE wants relic weapons to be. What those who want a grind should be looking for is new grind content with new rewards that SE is fine with making exclusive to the grind.

DC Travel - okay this one shocks me. He acknowledges they do receive and pay attention to feedback from NA and EU in his response to Criterion rewards. Why has he missed that NA and EU are having the same DC travel issue as JP? Is it because it developed for us slower than because we had larger world populations than JP to start with? Did the Community Team miss the feedback and so nothing was forwarded?

I'm sure YoshiP will hear about this soon enough because it's highly unlikely MrHappy won't say anything about it, and we know for certain that he's one NA content creator that gets watched by YoshiP and part of the dev team.

High completion rates of Manderville weapons are a result of people simply spending tomes just because they have too many of them due to the tome type required being an outdated type with no weekly cap that the game hands out like candy on halloween.

But it also had an impact on the end game gear crafting markets because players that had been buying up the tomestone materials to sell to crafters were now using those tomestones to get their relics instead. It wouldn't have had much impact on the week one raiders who expect the high prices but it certainly had one on those who want the crafted gear as a quick ilvl upgrade over waiting for the newest tomestone gear.

[Amenara]

I am a little concerned about the mindset SE seems to have with some of the answers to the questions. I hope they add an ilvl cap to the x.0 final bosses to keep them more in line with how the fights were at launch of the expansion. If SE has no intention of making alliance raid gear relevant beyond glamour then I think they should focus on just making really fun fights more so than difficult fights. The criterion dungeon answer doesn't make much sense to me and I imagine there is something lost in translation. The DC travel part just shows me there are some problems with SE's understanding of issues outside of Japan which is concerning when you remember the issues with ping that they didn't know existed because they have no issues with it in Japan on JP servers.

I don't think he's misinterpreting the data. I think that players are misinterpreting what type of content SE wants relic weapons to be. What those who want a grind should be looking for is new grind content with new rewards that SE is fine with making exclusive to the grind.

I think the disconnect is also no one really knows the purpose of relics anymore since SE decided to change the formula completely for EW. It used to be the thing you worked on over the course of the expansion to essentially get a fancy glamour weapon and feel like you accomplished something and in EW it was turned into a weaker version of the tomestone weapons with no actual accomplishment in getting one or all of them.

[sindriiisgaming]

On Relics: "In the past, the idea was that it would be okay if you just made one job, and the time calculation for Zodiac Weapon was set at 120 hours, but now that the range and amount of content has expanded, there is less time to devote"

"If you plan to have multiple jobs produce items, it will take a toll on your inventory if you go around collecting special reinforcement items, and it will be difficult to tell how much you have strengthened. Therefore, we made it so that Allagan tomestones"

"young people who play online games these days choose not to play unless it is easily available. However, as I mentioned earlier, if players are enjoying playing multi-jobs these days, I think our game design should be designed to reflect that."

"On the other hand, there are also voices saying that they want enhanced content or exclusive content for weapon production. It's a voice that never existed before... However, in Bozja we created a system where weapons could be strengthened both inside and outside of the content, but in the end it came down to efficiency. For that reason, it is difficult to know what to do with the next series, but the fact is that many players have strengthened the Manderville Weapon this time to the highest level ever."

this is honestly really concerning to read, because it sounds like he wants it just to be some easy collectathon for all jobs, but this weapon replaces savage bis, the grind was the reason it was so high ilevel... now if we continue on this path.. with 12 dropping no chest.. what would even be the incentive in future to do 12 on current content... i hope to god above he goes back on this decision. because catering to casuals or multi jobs is a terrible idea... cater to the people who loved the content before... they deserve it for there dedication

[sindriiisgaming]

Yeah...they are looking at this data and are unfortunately likely using the EW completion rates as justification for their oversimplification of the relic grind. To me, that is learning the wrong lesson. Dawntrail will definitely make or break this game for me at this point. For multiple reasons, this one among them.

agreed. if dawntrail remains the same as EW, and if they continue to favour the complacent japanese audience over the meat and bones of the player base (western) then im afraid im out too mic drop

[CNitsah]

On Relics: "In the past, the idea was that it would be okay if you just made one job, and the time calculation for Zodiac Weapon was set at 120 hours, but now that the range and amount of content has expanded, there is less time to devote"

"If you plan to have multiple jobs produce items, it will take a toll on your inventory if you go around collecting special reinforcement items, and it will be difficult to tell how much you have strengthened. Therefore, we made it so that Allagan tomestones"

"young people who play online games these days choose not to play unless it is easily available. However, as I mentioned earlier, if players are enjoying playing multi-jobs these days, I think our game design should be designed to reflect that."

"On the other hand, there are also voices saying that they want enhanced content or exclusive content for weapon production. It's a voice that never existed before... However, in Bozja we created a system where weapons could be strengthened both inside and outside of the content, but in the end it came down to efficiency. For that reason, it is difficult to know what to do with the next series, but the fact is that many players have strengthened the Manderville Weapon this time to the highest level ever."

Ho boy. This doesn't look good for the future.

We've told it many times, for month... There is 2 new thread on the subject per day... It's about having long running content available, objectives on the long term, and yet they achieved to still miss that.
The "Young people" part made me smile. I'm pretty sure the average player age in mmo is pretty high. I hate that trend that consist of let's do things a way it will bring young audience/more casual audience in and give nothing to do for the mmo crowd, which is the historic heart of the playerbase. God they're lucky the correct alternatives don't really exist in that market...

their focus on completion rate is baffling. I don't know what to add.

[VictorSpoils]

On Relics: "In the past, the idea was that it would be okay if you just made one job, and the time calculation for Zodiac Weapon was set at 120 hours, but now that the range and amount of content has expanded, there is less time to devote"

"If you plan to have multiple jobs produce items, it will take a toll on your inventory if you go around collecting special reinforcement items, and it will be difficult to tell how much you have strengthened. Therefore, we made it so that Allagan tomestones"

"young people who play online games these days choose not to play unless it is easily available. However, as I mentioned earlier, if players are enjoying playing multi-jobs these days, I think our game design should be designed to reflect that."

"On the other hand, there are also voices saying that they want enhanced content or exclusive content for weapon production. It's a voice that never existed before... However, in Bozja we created a system where weapons could be strengthened both inside and outside of the content, but in the end it came down to efficiency. For that reason, it is difficult to know what to do with the next series, but the fact is that many players have strengthened the Manderville Weapon this time to the highest level ever."

Why not make the first weapon the long grind and subsequent weapons more lax? Basically the previous relics but with more one-time steps to account for all the extra jobs.