In 12 years the game hasn't innovated

[Shurrikhan]

I'll agree with others that the game hasn't necessarily never innovated, though I feel like it can already be understood pragmatically that there's a silent "significantly" in there, and can see why most examples wouldn't be included in that.

For instance, I could see how...

• the extension of FATEs into Critical Encounters might not quite seem enough to be "innovative", whereas something like instead doing away with FATEs in favor of a more generally dynamic world (using various systems) of intertwined parts atop random horde spawns (say, often influenced by HUNT monsters) would;
  
  
• the near-removal of Enmity as a system in order to streamline it might not seem "innovative", whereas making it no longer merely bimodal switch that exists just to determine who gets Auto-attacked (and maybe to take some special attacks) and thereby instead using it to "sandbox" certain fights so that one can put more or less of the boss's focus onto the tank (and said tank wants neither too much nor too little relative Enmity for a certain approach to the fight) would; or
  
  
• small toolkit debloats on the basis that content won't use it anyways, even if appreciated in that circumstance, wouldn't be "innovative", whereas revitalizing those parts to fit a large-scale revamping of how mobs work (and of boss sub-units or conditionals to similar effect) that'd allow those skills interesting use would be; etc.

I think a lot of the negativity comes from simply looking at a given problem, finding the most obvious few ways to deal with the problem (e.g., "remove them" vs. "make them relevant then" / "improve the system behind them so they're not a bottleneck" / "add enough so that they aren't simply enjoyable but outlying oddities") and usually finding that it's only the least interesting, least forward-looking, least interconnected, least ambitious, least "innovative" approach that gets taken.

None of that is to say we can innovate on everything or all the time, or we'd have no dev time left for the content they already know to be enjoyable enough to enough players to be a fairly safe bet. But one would expect to see at least a few more ambitious and interconnected solutions than we've seen by now, especially given what was said about 7.0 before its release.

Granted, given that any more ambitious project could as easily be for the worse to many, I'm curious what a theoretically "good" example of innovation would even look like to most here.

Will try to give my own $0.02 on edit or in a later post as not to request something I haven't given myself.

[Mikey_R]

Constructive contributions you've been doing all this time sir, my hat to you.

Implying what you have put in this topic is constructive? It isn't, you have just criticised, but not offered solutions and it is the offer of a solution that makes something constructive.

So, if you do not like the fact that the exploratory zones are just hunts and fates, how would you change the system to move away from that? Or, what would you like to see added to break away from it?

Firmament/Cosmic Exploration, again, what would you like to see? What would be a system that makes you go, yes, this is different.

And this is a common thing among many people. They criticise, but they don't do it constructively. You need to offer a solution and not just, 'this is bad, change it'.

[Aidorouge]

Granted, given that any more ambitious project could as easily be for the worse to many, I'm curious what a theoretically "good" example of innovation would even look like to most here.

That's the eternal issue for any problem with the game though; There may not be a viable solution that can be implemented (per the developers own words even) and even if there is one, other people will immediately push back against it (as seen by literally any topic here asking for anything ever).

It's difficult to actually have a constructive conversation to go with the criticism when a lot of people don't want to hear about it, automatically equating all criticism as "whining", or think everything is fine and doesn't need changing in the first place.

[Valence]

Implying what you have put in this topic is constructive? It isn't, you have just criticised, but not offered solutions and it is the offer of a solution that makes something constructive.

So, if you do not like the fact that the exploratory zones are just hunts and fates, how would you change the system to move away from that? Or, what would you like to see added to break away from it?

Firmament/Cosmic Exploration, again, what would you like to see? What would be a system that makes you go, yes, this is different.

And this is a common thing among many people. They criticise, but they don't do it constructively. You need to offer a solution and not just, 'this is bad, change it'.

You seem to assume that I work for SE as a gameplay dev, which I do not. This is feedback from one player in the community, not a professional gameplay dev.

Would you want me to work on a multipage long full game design document with detailed features and gameplay bricks so it can directly be forwarded to the programmers immediately? I do not recall making this thread to humour your gamedesign fantasies, but point out that the game doesn't like very much to create brand new features, but perhaps we moved the goalposts so far that we're already on the moon or what?

The absolute irony in your reply is that someone should really hand you a mirror because all I've ever seen you do on those forums is take the actually constructive threads people make, however clumsy as some may be, and spend your time criticizing them to death. That's literally all you do, without offering any solutions.

[Shurrikhan]

That's the eternal issue for any problem with the game though; There may not be a viable solution that can be implemented (per the developers own words even) and even if there is one, other people will immediately push back against it (as seen by literally any topic here asking for anything ever).

It's difficult to actually have a constructive conversation to go with the criticism when a lot of people don't want to hear about it, automatically equating all criticism as "whining", or think everything is fine and doesn't need changing in the first place.

Oh, I definitely agree. I ask what would qualify to the people here out of curiosity, not some sense of "if you can't suggest better [despite being less experienced and, more importantly, unpaid], shush".

[Aidorouge]

Oh, I definitely agree. I ask what would qualify to the people here out of curiosity, not some sense of "if you can't suggest better [despite being less experienced and, more importantly, unpaid], shush".

Aye, I've seen you post before and you never struck me as the latter example... which is saying a lot its self that some of us are so used to things "being the same" that we're even able to identify/remember each other's posting habits. (With Valence and Mikey_R providing another example of this albeit not so positively, lol.)

But really, I wouldn't even know what to suggest regarding changes because what I enjoy/can handle is different from everyone else. There's people out there claiming to fall asleep during Savage and want content across the board being made harder, while I'm over here constantly on the floor from Seat of Sacrifice NORMAL wishing I could have done it with Trusts/unsynced solo to progress the MSQ/farm the card. And jobs... yeah, that's always a sticking point because even if you could get people to agree that some should be complex while others are simple, they'll IMMEDIATELY start arguing over which ones get put into the easy or hard pile because they don't want their main to end up one way or the other.

Everyone wants a different game and we can't all have what we want, and so we go another round.

[Shurrikhan]

Aye, I've seen you post before and you never struck me as the latter example... which is saying a lot its self that some of us are so used to things "being the same" that we're even able to identify/remember each other's posting habits. (With Valence and Mikey_R providing another example of this albeit not so positively, lol.)

But really, I wouldn't even know what to suggest regarding changes because what I enjoy/can handle is different from everyone else. There's people out there claiming to fall asleep during Savage and want content across the board being made harder, while I'm over here constantly on the floor from Seat of Sacrifice NORMAL wishing I could have done it with Trusts/unsynced solo to progress the MSQ/farm the card. And jobs... yeah, that's always a sticking point because even if you could get people to agree that some should be complex while others are simple, they'll IMMEDIATELY start arguing over which ones get put into the easy or hard pile because they don't want their main to end up one way or the other.

Everyone wants a different game and we can't all have what we want, and so we go another round.

All this is true, but I feel like it's also not... quite entirely relevant to the thread at hand, if only in that "innovation" tends to be more about efficiency of experience-creation (i.e., X hours of development time being able to satisfy a broader span of needs or expand the "zone of attraction" beyond what it normally find for a given [type of] player), not specific to a given difficulty or type. Now, of course, what tends to get the most credit or attention from a given player will depend on what that player most enjoys, but just as we can find a tool well made even if it's of no use to us, I suspect "innovation" would likewise stand out (or fail to stand out) regardless of how much we are dissatisfied with (or satisfied with) those overarching ways of connecting or making greater use of the given content, or with said pieces of content itself.

For example, let's say there are a significant group of players who are fine with the form of a dungeon but not with its difficulty because it's so quickly outscaled into triviality. We might then allow most Duty Variants (or at least the Minimum Item Level variant) to be queued into via matchmaking, allow for a variant of a dungeon and its regular form to be queued for simultaneously (selected variants create a second column of checkboxes), and increase the rewards for Minimum Item Level runs proportionately to stats lost. In this way, they become faintly more efficient for skilled players (for the lesser portion of time spent running) while also offering all players a more even challenge.

We'll thereby have taken some existing system and expanded upon it with ease to meet a (in this hypothetical) significant desire. A small expenditure of resources has therefore been used once to increase the zone of attraction for a large part of mainstay content in perpetuity. Though nothing behind the outcome is "new" per se, the outcome and its regularity would be.

Or perhaps a new form of side-content is released wherein players are able to collect and, agreed upon as a party, apply certain additional "Trials" "Gambits" to said content, such as in greatly increasing healing requirements or the deadliness of key mobs or by causing mobs to self-destruct after a certain amount of time for massive damage or giving each mob type in the instance 1 to 3 extra special attacks randomly drawn from within a pool based on very general mob type; or perhaps there's a XIII(-2)-ish way to, as you move through the side-content's branching paths, to change the weather or time, varying what mobs you're fighting. That's a start, but let's say we go further by taking what players liked best from that bit of experimentation. Perhaps that was the compositional variety (50% healers, for instance) possible by emphasizing different challenges, or maybe how the content difficulty scaled to party-size (from 2 players to 8), and we then apply that backwards into all core content. Or the added mechanics per mob. Or even the "Gambit" system itself. Whichever.

In each case, though, the systems-level "innovation" tends not just to provide more content but also disproportionately more available experiences, which in turn allows people more to play what they want, how they want, etc., since it's allowing us to play (some significant part, at least, of) what all we had before through a new lens.

[hydralus]

You seem to pay a sub in white knighting so I'd love to see some innovation away from that as well but here we are.

Constructive contributions you've been doing all this time sir, my hat to you.

If you want to suggest some innovative ideas that will make this game different and not just a copy of MMOs you can already play then I will happily encourage it as I have other nice ideas people have had.
Sadly through all the posts you've made this doesn't seem to be something you nor Gurgeh are capable of.

[Avenheit]

i disagree, they have done a lot of innovative things to the game.

I think you're getting mixed up with innovation and enjoyment.

[Gurgeh]

... I'm curious what a theoretically "good" example of innovation would even look like to most here. ...

In an abstract sense, but it's still an answer to your question, the less it looks like everything around it, the more innovate it is. The more it looks like that around it, the more that profoundly limits how innovative it can ever be considered. Your scope of reference for that can either be limited to just this game, or all games.

Now that sounds obvious when said outloud but it's important when you consider how deeply systemic the problems might be, if a cornerstone and interwoven theme of your production process is "how can we optimise this to minimise the development input, and reuse and reprocess the results".

Less abstractly?
It could look like:
- we have a massive problem with the total disconnect between the casual gameplay and the high end game. So we are going to tear down the high end game, rebuild casual game, and rebuild the challenging game as a progression from there. Casual first with challanging as a holistic extension from there. As opposed to the current high end first, with casual as a gutted after thought of that game, just because balancing is easier if you just focus on balancing high end, develop your high end then just give that a cheap shave to deliver some casual.
- An island sanctuary with large-scale planning it even landscaping, which is unlike the small scale cookie cutter estate gardens.
- using reward systems to really incentivise progress, and helping progress (real mentouring) over and above toxic optimal farming and clears
- using reward systems to really incentivise duty finder over and above partyfinder to make that content more conveniently accessible.

What innovation can't look like:
- innovation can't ever look like backdating removing innovation, by homogenising old content to fit the mould of solo Trust content.
- innovation can't 'look' like backdating removing job innovation by homogenising job design and function to make balancing high end easier.
- innovation can't 'look' like recycling a 3x3 dungeon formula packages because it enables you to recycle a production spreadsheet.
- innovation can't look like new challenging content 24 man content that follows the same tired formula of relentless personal responsibility and stand in the right place at the right time *ahead of time* 'perfection', such as already used by savage, and that breeds all the same old culture of high-end PF exclusion, and reliance on out of game guides and study.

If you want to suggest some innovative ideas that will make this game different and not just a copy of MMOs you can already play then I will happily encourage it as I have other nice ideas people have had.
Sadly through all the posts you've made this doesn't seem to be something you nor Gurgeh are capable of.

Hydralus. I used to. You should see the optimism and trust I had in my fellow WoLs in very earliest posts. Until I watched fellow casuals being shot shot down nastily for any and every change to the status quo of end game equals high end and furthermore PF discord culture. Even just wanting to join Forked via the ticket mechanism that was created expressly to let them in. But your right I don't suggest detailed solutions now, because as you suspect, I don't really care all that much to help anymore. Its not my game, my community and culture has already left, and I want as little to do with the dominant community (and DOMINANT is so much the operative word here) as they wanted to have with me in CoD or Forked.
Oh and Hydralus, you know your tone and your own sentiment there was personal-'nasty', a good example. That said, my critiques do still have some value, it's just that they are targeted at the deeper systemic and so I'd argue perhaps more important issues. At the same time I belive only experienced game designers can translate that into solutions.
If one can't recognise that on my posts then that's frankly because of a intellect deficit on the part of that observer, that precludes them from coping with abstract thinking.