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

[Iriadysa]

To quote the episode (@4:42):



The standard time it takes to beat Titan is 9-12 minutes.

Even if you play perfectly, other players may die, and cause you to fail. The success/failure of your battle becomes arbitrary unless you have an 8-person static where each player is dedicated to spend the time needed get the win.

So, for a casual player (even with echo) every arbitrary death in the final phase results in ~7 minutes of iteration time.

Which means the player has: ~7 minutes of doing something they already succeeded at.

If I understand your argument, you are trying to point out that a failure at Titan forces you to retry about 7 minutes of a fight. I believe that it's important you understand that this was an example in their video. Examples are there to illustrate the problem, not to be followed exactly. There's nowhere in the EC video saying "if you are forced to repeat more than 10 minutes it's punishing". In fact, I believe you are doing them a disservice by understanding things like that, as what EC is trying is to educate people about game design, not create hard directives.

I feel the need to remind you that it was not me who brought the EC video into the conversation, I simply flipped the table to show the poster how wrong he was by trying to quote EC on this and how the OP was, in fact, violating the EC guidance in a worse way than the current design. In other words, if repeating 7 minutes of a fight is "high iteration times", imagine what having to farm spawn triggers for a single attempt is. Also, nothing in Titan is neither arbitrary nor unstoppable, but I understand this isn't what you were trying to say.

Now, about Titan Ex specifically: I'm not sure if you have actually beaten Titan Ex, but a single death in the last phase does not end on a wipe. In fact, I've beaten Titan Ex with as low as only 4 people alive. I've beaten Twintania with just a single tank alive (yeah, shit hit the fan on the fire pools phase... I don't know how).

And really... "other players may die, and cause you to fail". Yes, it can happen. It's an MMO. And that's exactly why you have to go with care when applying what EC says as most of their stuff is directed to single player games.

Edit:

There's many many things I don't like about FFXIV. One of them is the how easy everything is. There's new decisions I also dislike, like Atma, Animus and Novus quests or how little end game content there is and how everything is gated through some really annoying restrictions, etc. However, regardless of what my opinion on XIV is, I have to admit that this game does a really solid job on the overall design department. Watch all the EC videos (all of them, not kidding) and try to do a neutral analysis against FFXIV (saving the MMO/singe player stuff) and I'm sure many will notice how refined XIV actually is. Which is a miracle, considering how fast they released ARR.