Yoshida-san: Smoother Camera Options, Separate PVP Rules, and Long Term Goals for 2.0

[Xatsh]

PvP and PVE should be completly seperate, because I honestly feel they are impossible to balance.

Something that works great in PvE might be totally off balance in PvP. Like positioning for combos, it was a good thing kept it less tank and spank. Made you go into spots that put you in danger to get off a combo. But in PvP with people jumping and runing in circles around you obviously this would not work at all.

Everytime something gets changed in PvE because it was not working well in PvP... at least in my opinion it is a very bad move on the devs part. This is a final fantasy PvE > PvP, I hope the devs always keep this in mind.



To comment on tiered progression, it is very very very bad. Because once you are at top you have maby what 1-2 dungeons to do. All content should be relevant and there should be NO tiered content for endgame in terms of you need gear from X to do X.

Long Term gear and goals is what will keep this game alive for a decade. The Western model of rush to the top then take a break for 2-3 months and wait for new content will just cause people to leave the game permanently.

[fusional]

it isn't just about new weapons every few months being stronger than old weapons, it was about lacking content to begin with then scaling rewards with content difficulty as new content was added.

weapon strength:

relic > garuda > moogle > ifrit

primal difficulty:

ifrit(ex) > garuda > moogle > ifrit

...so if new content is added which is more difficult than previous content, why shouldn't the rewards justify the additional effort/challenge required to clear it? and as you referenced, if anything is added later that's stronger than relic, we'll be given the ability to upgrade relic.

furthermore, scaling up rewards with content difficulty gives players goals to work towards in that they tackle the easiest challenges first to get started, then use those upgrades to tackle more difficult content with better rewards. and this is pretty much how it worked in 1.0 if you take a step back and look at it from a perspective other than "i had the best stuff since the beginning then you added new best stuff"- for that perspective suffers heavily from self-serving bias. for any player joining the game late, it all worked out perfectly.

as far as players who'd been around since the start, you not only can't expect things to stay static in an MMO for long (generally for the length of an expansion's half-life), but you especially shouldn't have expected things to stay static in an MMO which had a disastrous launch, in which things were heavily in flux thereafter as they tried to save the game.

also, darklight was hands-down the best non-meldable gear you could get in the game before servers went down, even being better than melded gear in many slots- and it stayed the best for the 8 months it was available.

[odintius]

The only way I can see keeping older gear to be relevant even after their outdated by the better gear is to have the older gear be able to have them as a craftable recipe to improve the other best gear that comes out. Either by making them +1 +2 etc or making them a HQ version which gives them an extra materia slot with improved stats.

[bobbygunz]

The point of "Long term goals" is the most important issue you raise.

I don't know if there's much room in the framework of the game they've laid out for there to be a solution to it, though. I think that's why sandbox games allow for more potential because gear grind isn't necessarily the only long term goal. But in many "standard" MMOs, the nature of the game almost mandates a constant replacement of gear in order to provide incentive to keep playing. That's how such games function.

That being said, FFXI managed to keep new equipment balanced with old. But there were a host of issues associated with that too.

[Kiara]

Excellent post. I agree point for point with everything brought up. To add a bit of my own flavor:

Long term goals
Interesting and rich world/lore
Pleasant and involved community

I believe these to be the three major pillars that make up a successful MMO. As of late, most modern MMO's I've played (Tera, Rift, SWTOR, GW2) often lack all three of these assets, instead focusing on instant gratification, minor gimmicks that do little to advance the genre, and solo oriented experiences. Please don't fall into these trappings Square; you may have blundered in a number of ways with XIV, but by the end of it's lifetime you had reached somewhat of a balance of my three mentioned pillars, making the game a shining beacon for those of us tired of the modern MMO market

Hi Jocko,

Thanks. Definitely agree that having interesting and rich world/lore, and a pleasant / involved community would help solidify XIV 2.0 for the long term.

[Kiara]

Since when did that happen? I played WoW up through the end of WotLK and changes to abilities for PvP always affected PvE abilities.

Hi Orophin,

Ah, I was referring to StarCraft II and their hyper-competitive Online Player vs. Player matches and rules sets. They made enhancements and different rules, units / attacks for their "PvE" (Story Mode, Player vs. AI / Bosses) compared to their "PvP" matches (where they have those Tens of Thousands of Dollars Major League Gaming Tournaments, etc.). In other words, they realized that there are things that work great for when a player plays in a controlled environment (Story Mode, against the Queen of Blades, etc.), but then had a separate rules set / unit roster for their Tournaments / PvP.

[Laraul]

By releasing new equipment that turns out to be the best (#1) every few months, it makes your most dedicated players feel like all their hard work was thrown away, and is very unsatisfying.

If you consider accomplishing tasks in the game work, I think you should re-evaluate why you play this game. It's to have fun. And what people remember most is the trek, not the reward.

[Kiara]

Agreed!

Weirdly, I do get motion sickness from some games (eg Oblivion), I haven't from the FFXIV vids, or some other FPS (Counterstrike was fine for me), so I've got my fingers crossed.

I feel more strongly about the other two issues.

As for rewards; from the perspective of a player who previously hasn't been able to challenge most end-game content with much success (via PUGs), making old end-game content rewards obsolete makes it so those of us who have taken their damned time getting to said content find it very hard to find groups to challenge those fights. If rewards are kept relevant (eg through side-grades), or a separate incentive for those who have a lot of time to play is introduced (eg reputation increase, rather than tradeable tokens), I feel it would lead to healthier long-term reward system.


For the majority of players, who don't complete 100% of content before the next patch, it becomes very difficult to do older content. It might be more sensible at that point to skip it entirely, which just leads to a dead in-game resource. For instance (pun!), returning in March to 1.0, I found it nearly impossible to access Toto-Rak. I know the gear was unnecessary, but I wanted to experience the dungeon and collect all the U/U pieces (I hate inventory space). If the gear from all dungeons around that level was the basic form for a gearset that could be upgraded through new content every time there was a level-cap increase, that would ensure it was kept relevant.

Hm. Who says you can't put Materia in raid content? I think it's actually a pretty good idea, as long as only one of that kind of Materia can be melded to a given item (alongside other standard Materia). We'll see how the new Materia system shapes up soon, I guess!

Hi Mjollnir,

Yah, I just hope for some Camera Turning / Speed Options, it's especially noticeable for Keyboard Only players (who don't use Mouse), with the way the Alpha Camera behaves and looks.

Your experience you describe about Toto-Rak is something I ran across helping some friends of friends as well: There were some people who hadn't gotten their Moogle Weapons yet. It was a rather arduous, long process for them to eventually get competent enough groups of people to want to go in and repeatedly "farm" Good King Moggle Mog to try and get their desired weapons (or enough tokens) (this was, of course, during the last few months of 1.0, when Moogle was already "old news").

I still know people who don't have any Garuda Weapons yet. But if SE keeps up a pace of releasing items that invalidate the older items, it will certainly be harder and harder for those not on the cutting edge to keep up.

Re: Materia in Raids - That's a great idea. I was thinking something similar for a way to keep Older Raid / Dungeons / NMs relevant...

Potentially having Rare Materia drop from Raids / Dungeons / NMs only, and that way, people that want to try and say, Double or Triple Meld some Rare Materia will want to repeat a previous Content that dropped that specific Rare Materia (because they probably blew it up trying a Double / Triple Meld).

That, and potentially also allowing some limited form of Materia Melding for Unique / Untradeable Gear, so that people can retry older content again to customize that gear with various new Materia that come out?

[Kiara]

Kiara, you always post such great ideas! I hope they take them into consideration!

Thanks for the kind comments. I just want to see Final Fantasy XIV 2.0 improve and refined to be a long term success for years to come.

[Alhanelem]

Please Separate the Rules for PVP and PVE games.

No, No, No, No. PvP and PvE should be seperate, but not seperate rules. Everything you do in PvE should work exactly as the player expects when he or she plays PvP. If you treat them like different games it is very disjointing and a barrier to entry.

They are carefully desgining the spells and abilities of the game such that they shouldn't need seperate rules in the first place.

They should be different parts of the same game, not treated like two totally seperate games.

Look at BLIZZARD and their worldwide success. Even Blizzard has separate rules (different rules) for PVP games and PVE (story gameplay / normal) games.

I don't know what WoW you play, but this is completely untrue of the one I played. You can't have the open world PvP that is possible in that game if the rules of PvP are different. Some abilities have additional/different effects in PvP- Just like how it was done in FFXI- but that's about it.