Quote Originally Posted by Clavaat View Post
The game had been picked apart to the point where everyone knew what was useful and what wasn't. Experiments had been made, numbers crunched, and people found what the most efficient ways of playing were, and you basically stuck to it. FFXIV is the exact same way in that regard. The system in FFXI was not complex, and the bosses did not reflect any deeper understanding of the game, either.



This is just asinine of you to say. Mathematically incapable of hardcore...wow.
Quote Originally Posted by Pandastirfry View Post
And yet again your example is BAD. the complexity you're trying to trumpet didn't exist in XI either, there were just as many if not more "Optimal Setups" (we all remember LolDRG) and everything was brought down to the same X DPS, X HPS, keep out of the bad. all XI had was more ability bloat (How many BRD songs were actually useful? 4? 2 if you counted Mage Ballads 1 and 2 as just the same song?) and more redundant classes. Long story short, show me a game where your "math" works, and I'll let it go, but XI sure as heck wasn't it and that's all you've used as an example. Heck even Eve Onlines oft touted "Hardcore"ness can be boiled down to its nature of being "World of Spreadsheets" and punishing Open World PvP environment.
let me simplify it further for both of you:

- pool that contains a certain number of gameplay mechanics > the developers choose what to use from this pool in their battles design (so a subset of what is available) (the larger the number of mechanics available in the pool the more complex these battles can be) > the players grind it and choose what is most effective among what the developers used in their pool (a subset of the developers subset).
as a result the developers can reuse this subset or another subset or mix and match from that larger pool. The players know for a fact that they could get more gameplay mechanics than what they got in these battles they cleared and the developers can actually deliver that because the base gameplay mechanics pool had much more to be used.
*simple but not accurate indication is to calculate the combinations possible of said base pool.

-smaller pool that contains a certain number of gameplay mechanics > the developers choose what to use from this pool in their battles design (so a subset of what is available OR the whole thing if its a shallow pool) > the players grind it and choose what is most effective among what the developers used in their pool (a subset of the developers subset).
as a result the developers has less options in their pool left for the future. The players know for a fact that they could not get more gameplay mechanics than what they got because that's all there is in the base pool and the developers can only shuffle what they already done in term of gameplay mechanics for the new content because that is all what they have.
*simple but not accurate indication is to calculate the combinations possible of said base pool and you will find that you mathematically have less options and thus shallower battles.