Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Bizniztyme]

My money is on "hardcore" groups like Blue Garter in a landslide. They simply understand how mechanics work better and how to adapt to them much better and much quicker than the "mainstream" player. Plus they will probably maximize their individual role performances much better than the "mainstream" player. If you think otherwise, you're delusional.

Anyway, if someone can't see that there is some skill involved in maximizing individual job performances while handling whatever mechanics the fight throws at you, you're blind. There differences in overall performances between equally geared players on the same fight (and in every fight really) is way to vast. Whether it is from not being able to handle the fight mechanics as well, not being able to perform the job as well, or both, the skill differences are noticeable and are there.

Yup, 8 hardcore players will put 8 mainstream players to shame because get this.......They gots more SKILLS.

[mikoto_qc]

Im between hardcore and casual. i clear the content and get bored of the Learning only mechanics of this game. + the attitude of players with the one fail = kick. thats simply why i quit. Yoshi failled me with V2.0 as a V1 player i miss that old time eorzea.

[RyuDragnier]

This is a very good blog post. I would thank the original poster (and you) but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a feedback/comment section on the blog.

I liked the "Team rope jumping" analogy, so I will continue to use it here.

The boss is rotating the jump rope and every boss does it differently. Gear, along with some knowledge of tanking, healing and DPSing is only a minimum requirement to enter the rope jump game. If someone is said to be a good player, it means that they can get past every rope that comes because they have memorised the pattern for each boss, but not necessarily good at their job.

You may be good at high jumps, long jumps or whatever jumps but they are not recognised because being able to jump is only a minimum requirement and doing "good jumps" simply count as a pass. The outcome of a person jumping can only be a pass or fail. At the current endgame, each player is given say 10 jumps and the only way to pass is for the whole team to get 80/80 jumps. If anyone fails a jump, the rope stops completely its a wipe. The current endgame requires perfection of getting past the rope rather than having players excel at jumping (their job).

Now, what if instead the outcome of a jump is not just 1 or 0 (pass/fail), but can be anything depending on how well the person jumps? As the OP has noted, Turn 4 is an example of this. A good tank will be able to mitigate more damage and a healer heal more efficiently, allowing them to score more than 1 for doing a fancy jump. What if someone is better at high jumps than long jumps? In Turn 8 you can choose what kind of jumps you want to do (to some extent). In addition, your gear will increase the score you get for a jump.

___

So what if you still don't make the required score to pass?

The encounter is broken into multiple phases and the score is evaluated at the end of each phase. In the current system, if someone fails a jump then the rope stops. What should happen is that the rope continues, and even if you don't make the required score you should be able to enter the next phase. In the next phase, you will be required to get a higher score than normal. If you have failed constantly in the previous phases then it will be impossible achieve the required score for the last phase. Again, this is shown in Turn 4 where if you did not do well, instead of wiping, the next wave is brought down and you still have a chance to clear (through the use of LB or whatever).

___

How to implement this?

-Change instant wipes as a result of a failed DPS check or a failed "rope jump" by a single person to some sort of resource drain or detrimental effect for the party, and/or buff for the boss
--Examples
--If Titan heart is not broken, then empty everyone's MP and the limit bar
--Rot should kill the one person who had it only and buff the boss etc

-Change unrecoverable deaths so that it is possible to get back into the game
--Examples
--If you fall of the edge in titan/leviathan, you have to take time to climb/swim back up (which may cause a failed DPS check and make everyone's job harder)
--If you have weakness then you might not be able to survive. Change it so that weakness reduces your capability to do your job well rather than reduce HP.


Make it only possible to come back if members excel at their job (e.g. solo heal/tank for a while).


Additional:

Everything here is exactly how I feel about the system and what needs to be done with this. I've given up on Coil after 4 months because I've never cleared T5 due to a SINGLE PERSON causing a wipe every single time. The worst part about this is that there's actual important story gated behind these Turns. I've read the spoilers, it's amazing story and twists, and yet I will never see it just due to these mechanic driven fights requiring such perfection from everybody. That's the main thing that irritates me about these mechanic driven fight barriers, that there's important story behind those barriers.

[Litre]

Totally agree with Sylkis, glad we're getting back to topic again. This thread is about how fights are eased over time to be more accessible by less "skilled" players.

I know there was a big discussion about skills earlier, but it's all semantics. To me, memorization is a skill, which helps a lot. Another skill that's absolutely required by mechanics based fights is multi-tasking, not only are we jumping rope but we are DPSing/healing/tanking as well, it's easy to forget the next incoming attack when you're juggling multiple tasks. And it doesn't need to be said, that many casual players simply do not have that capacity to multi-task at the level that's required for many fights in the game. If they practiced and practiced maybe, but these are not the type of players (well most) that enjoy being thrown against the brick wall, they will go play something more enjoyable.


Therefore eventually the required level of skill/memorization/multi-tasking needs to decline, and this is only possible by modifying insta-death mechanics in ways Sylkis described so that in the long run gear can make enough of a difference so that failing to dodge a few mechanics can still be recoverable.


Also too many people are failing to grasp the change we are asking for, we are not asking for FFXIV - Easy Mode, we are asking that 2-3+ month old content be eased to a point where players without the time to rehearse the script to perfection can beat it. We are saying that insta-death mechanics are merely balanced to be insta-death now, but not insta-death later. So mechanics should never be guaranteed death, but just so much damage it'd be impossible to survive it when the content is released, the game is largely unchanged for the hardcore players and eventually by the time the casual players reach that content it's easy enough for them.

[Ninjasmine]

This thread is has a lot of contradictory statements in it. 'Mechanics aren't hard and don't take any skill, just simple memorization.' Yet, 'only a small portion of people have cleared these simple memory battles'. I'm lead to believe that either the majority of the populace have horrible memories and thus that's why they can't finish it, or that their reaction times exceed 5-10s so the battles need to be adjusted to where the time it takes you to move out of the way is increased.

If the story is all that matters, why not just look up the cutscenes? I do this with games I cannot afford at the moment, but if I'm still interested in playing the game afterwards, I still buy the game. The battle itself has no story elements, so can logically be skipped with no penalty to you.


There is NO fight in this game where if one person wipes that's it, we have to start over. Example, in a T6 I was in while learning, I was healing along with an amazing co-healer, and managed to get to 10% of boss health(phase 3) with SIX stacks on Roflesia, we weren't over geared. If that's not an example of "individual skill shining through regardless of the skill of the members" I don't know what is. The problem I've ran into more often than not(this coming from someone who enjoys Titan EX even after failing over 50 times), is that a LOT of people in this game give up too quickly. Casual or not, even in learning parties I've participated in people get in, wipe twice and quit. I don't know why you would even join a learning party if you're not there to learn. What's the point of it? Especially if you're gonna leave and not get past first phase. All you're doing is bringing down morale.

All of this 'elitist' and 'hardcore' derogatory talk is sort of amusing. I mean if casuals are the majority of the player base, then more often than not(due to elitist/hardcores sticking to statics and fc/ls i would imagine) wouldn't most of the people you run into would be casual? So maybe the people who you think are rude elitist, are just rude casuals. There are also casuals/non-hardcore who make PFs with the whole 'kick' mentality as well. It's kinda stereotypical for all you casuals and middle people to blame the hardcore for everything, when more than likely you're running into other casuals and middle grounders.

All in all, I think coil is fine. They are eliminating the gate to the primals come next patch, so the mainstreamers will have even more content. The echo's and nerfs DO help, but of course they will never help that one person who just has to get this last skill in and/or who simply refuses to move out of the colored ground effects because they know the healers will raise them. Most of the battle system in this game comes down to individual responsibility and if you look at CT, when you do have a lot of other people to 'pick up the slack', there is more chaos there and less people who know how to play their jobs. Even if the instant-kill mechanics were taken out(like in a majority of the normal dungeons), it's quite clear that people don't have the 'skill' to even play their class to its potential.

[Ryihito]

What I want the most in this game now is to be able to explore dungeons/go into dungeons without the number restriction and with chocobos.

[EmiliM]

It's rather heartening to see the thread also gaining a fair bit of traction in the Japanese forums as well. If anything, there appears to be a ton of pent-up frustration all around.

It is unlikely any dev will ever respond to this thread or the Japanese one (to do so would be the equivalent of acknowledging this as an issue, which opens up a whole new can of worms). But I have faith they're being read and monitored and at the very least is giving them something to think about.

I mean if casuals are the majority of the player base, then more often than not(due to elitist/hardcores sticking to statics and fc/ls i would imagine) wouldn't most of the people you run into would be casual? (...) It's kinda stereotypical for all you casuals and middle people to blame the hardcore for everything, when more than likely you're running into other casuals and middle grounders.

Consider, if you will, the following:

Player A clears the Second Coil with his/her static weekly, including T9. This player has already obtained the best gear there is to get for his/her job.

Player B, who - for all intent and purposes - is just as "skilled" as the person above and actually plays twice as much, cannot clear coil because he/she cannot find a static/pug with 7 other players who possesses the same level of "skill" to clear the content with. Thus, this person is stuck with other "lesser skilled" players, who are often labeled as "casuals".

Does Player B qualify as "hardcore"? Or is this person a "casual" who "cries" too much about contents needing adjustment? What if Player A later loses his/her static because some people quit and he/she falls into the same situation as Player B? "The second person needs to find a better group" certainly would sound like a nice answer, if only it wasn't something that everyone is already doing.

It would be nice if everyone neatly fit into categories like "all you casuals" or "us hardcores", wouldn't it? It would be so much easier to oversimplify the issue.

[zPanda]

...
There is NO fight in this game where if one person wipes that's it, we have to start over.

One person can definitely wipe a raid on their own though. Consider T7 for example - you could put 7 of the most elite players in a party who know this fight perfectly - the 1 other person can wipe the raid all by themselves if they don't know that one mechanic ahead of time, no problem lol. In fact, even in T5, if once person is standing in the wrong spot during divebombs, he could basically push the entire party into the barrier and insta-kill the group.l

[Penguinmayhem]

I think this man has good ideas and the development team might want to actually pay attention to some of this stuff.

[Vladislav]

+10 for awesome post