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

[Zantetsuken]

Everything you showcased would require reflexes and latency way beyond what Titan Extreme or Twintania ask for. So, again, it's not that I don't agree with you, it's that this isn't really what the OP and the horde of goons is asking for.

EDIT: The FFXI examples, however, is what they want. 100% gear carried encounters. Unless you count the whole "OMG RUN OUT OF THE ROOM" thing in Ultima. Then it's 90%.

Those FFXI battles only became entirely gear-carried after the cap was raised past 75. Prior to that, the gear system was mostly horizontal, which didn't allow players to simply overpower instanced bosses


My point with the MH and DS clips is that the mobs actually react to the players, and the players are forced to react to the mobs.

There is simply no DEPTH to Job Skills, Gear or endgame Battles in ARR. The only challenge is based on memorization and EXECUTION -- with severe punishment for any deviation from it.

An Execution based challenge can not be mitigated with the 'echo' or gear buffs-- as such, it serves as a heavy barrier for advancement for non-static players. That was what the OP was bemoaning.


Also, the lag issue can be alleviated by simply removing either insti-kill or perma-death from select attacks.

to use Titan as an example:

• Landslide could cause a player to fall down to a platform and die, but they could still be targeted by Raise -> insti-kill without perma-death.
• Gaol could have a countdown where if a player isn't freed in time, they become permanently petrified. --> perma-death without insti-kill.

Simple changes like this will make lag spikes or even bad connections less of a critical issue.

[silentwindfr]

you are actually wrong, i want this sort of thing, being hit by the boss must'nt means insta death! healer must have other stuff to do instead to overheal tank and toss area heal when the boss do aoe.
we must have epic fight that will ask us to think to a way to overcome the fight. in past often the offtank had a really important role, even dps had some role that was often...crazy.
i will take wow as exemple, because it's what most people have know. the fight right before Gruul in burning crusade, where you had a mage tanking! it was insane! but was asking the group to think to a different way to approach the fight.

sadly in FF14: ARR we haven't any of this sort of crazy thinking... we haven't any... pfff any team play actually. we are 8 people doing our stuff and praying that everything will go well... because if you are hit, you are dead.

and i don't think he was using this example for the fast paced reflexe based fight, but more about.... the AI that need to be more deep and more... human like. indeed we ask for more random and it's possible to do it on fight like titan and such... because they are design for work like a scripted fight. in a random fight, you have rarely any instant kill attack, or it's one that will be counter by a stun or will ask some technic for avoid it.

what bother me, it's the fact that they don't devellop the deepth of them fight and simply give us the same stuff over and over and over. it's not fun, we must have the feeling that everytime we face a boss, we can die, because we don't know how the whole fight we go! because the boss will act randomly a bit... why not even don't have the same setup of attack each time. like one time he use a big axe and the next time he use two fast sword with different attack!

we are in 2014, a loooot of work was done in the video game for improve the AI of the monster... it's maybe time to do it in FF14: ARR... sadly, i think they are limited by what they can bring because of the ps3 that have soo little memory and they can't add too much developped AI because of this. that the only reason i can see why we get soo little AI improvement in the game.

[IgnisFatuus]

But can you explain what depth is there in any of those two FFXI encounters you linked?

i dont know that much about ffxi endgame design, but at least you should look up the various strategies that people came up with to deal with absolute virtue. that is something that you're never going to see in xiv. the most we had of this is t2 enrage and SE will triple check every future encounter to not let this happen again and make them 100% scripted. you don't need any theorycrafting for this game, that's basically the missing "depth" part (don't confuse this with me wanting encounters like AV in the game, hell no).

in theory fast reaction is a possibility too, but not as long as the servers dictate your place in the world and not the client. and they won't change that, because it would require a complete rewrite of their netcode and server structure.

[Iriadysa]

Forget it.

Sure guys, you want that. I'm sure you do. But Titan super hard, please nerf plumes, I have lag.

i dont know that much about ffxi endgame design, but at least you should look up the various strategies that people came up with to deal with absolute virtue. that is something that you're never going to see in xiv. the most we had of this is t2 enrage and SE will triple check every future encounter to not let this happen again and make them 100% scripted. you don't need any theorycrafting for this game, that's basically the missing "depth" part (don't confuse this with me wanting encounters like AV in the game, hell no).

in theory fast reaction is a possibility too, but not as long as the servers dictate your place in the world and not the client. and they won't change that, because it would require a complete rewrite of their netcode and server structure.

I never defended the depth of this game's encounters. I think they are plain and pathetic. That is exactly why people complaining and wanting to make them even easier is so hilariously exasperating

The people in this thread do not want hard encounters that require fast reactions, they want gear carried encounters. They just don't like that wording because it brings to light the ugly truth.

sadly, i think they are limited by what they can bring because of the ps3 that have soo little memory and they can't add too much developped AI because of this. that the only reason i can see why we get soo little AI improvement in the game.

*facepalm*
I guess sometimes I forget who I'm interacting with.

[Zantetsuken]

The OP's post only scratches the surface of the problems in the game. Here is what is needed to fix things, IMHO:

• No content should be 'dumbed down' with ham-fisted tools like the "echo buff". Doing so diminishes the achievements of those who worked hard to conquer it, and it heaps condescension on those that haven't.

• No boss fight should be 100% scripted -- Every Boss should use AI to determine the majority of their actions -- based on their own internal cool-downs, triggers, and the behavior of the players.

• Mainstream boss attacks may inflict insti-kill, or perma-death, but NOT BOTH simultaneously.

• Every boss' stats and drop rates should be together modified from a range (eg. +/-10%) that is randomly applied each encounter.

• Every boss should have a 1~2 extra abilities (from a pool of ~4) that are randomly assigned to it each encounter.

• Every boss and FATE boss should have an ultra-rare (~0.5%) drop, even if the drop is just vanity.

• Bosses and FATE Bosses should enter 'desperation mode' when their HP falls below an assigned ranged of 10~15%. During this mode, they may become faster, more powerful, erratic and/or gain new attacks.

• The vertical gear system should only exist between level caps... as gear reaches the cap, it should branch out and become horizontal providing players with a variety of options for builds.

• Old content should have its party number/build requirements reduced or elimitated when new replacement content is released. (with the obvious exception of CT or other alliance raids)

• If server load is a problem, instanced content should be soft-gated through a variety of methods. Some should have cooldown timers, some should require farming entry items, some use currency (eg GC seals) to enter, etc etc...

• Standard Dungeons should feature an 'open-world exploration option' where players can casually enter and mine, harvest, treasure hunt and encounter FATE bosses which drop some thematic loot.

• Job skills and Limit Breaks should be revamped to reward players who coordinate attacks and actions.

• (a personal wish) New explorable zones.. more open, with higher lvl monsters that pose a serious agrro threat to players

Not only will these changes make the game better, but they will make the player community better as well. In FFXI, even PUG players would often /comfort someone who lost a BNCM battle and they would donate some of their own winnings to lessen the loss.

Randomness and AI add another important factor to the outcome of a battle. To put it bluntly: Without randomness in battles, players can (and will) only heap blame each other if they lose.

[OSUBuckeye4]

This is not an issue with the difficulty of one dungeon and one trial. This is an issue with an overall lack of content in the game because the game is still very young and content is limited for everyone. It's getting a lot better as time goes by. There's a LOT of stuff you haven't done, you're just not interested in doing it. Which is okay, but you can't blame the content and you can't blame one hard dungeon for that.

I agree somewhat with this. The thing you're ignoring is that most of the new content that has been added, has been placed behind the brick walls that are Titan EX and Coil Turn 5.

I know that SE is allegedly addressing the Titan EX problem in a few weeks and allowing players to bypass it, but, it's been this way for months and a lot of damage has already been done.

I've played this game daily since Closed Beta. I still have lots of stuff to do. There is a TON of content for mainstream gamers. This idea that because a small slice of content is "reserved for troll elitists" (for a few months until they make it easier) and somehow this is ruining the game and making everyone quit isn't just wrong, it's ridiculous.

It's not that a small slice of content is reserved for the elitiests... it's that adidtional content that is released is placed behind that wall that 90% of the server can't get past.

THAT is the problem, and you keep dancing around it.

SE says, "we've added these amazing new Turns to the Coil, but, if you haven't got past T5, you can't check them out". Or, "we've added new primal EX battles that will tests your skills, come check them out!" then the player logs in and realize that if they haven't beat Titan EX, they can't access that amazing new content.

That discourages a lot of people.

You're telling me it doesn't... I know it does, because I've watched over a dozen members of the FC I'm a member of leave because they got discouraged by this very issue.



And I'm not saying nerf it and make it easy for everyone, then you're alienating your hardcore playerbase, and that's not good at all. I'm saying, add an additional story mode for people who want to experience it, but don't have the time to find a static and spend hours upon hours getting the memorization down pat. Don't offer rewards, but allow them to experience the content. That's all.

Or, make it stand-alone content and allow everyone to try and fail and experience it.

Just, don't promote all of this awesome new stuff and then have people log in and realize they can't get to any of it. That upsets people.

[Amberion]

The people in this thread do not want hard encounters that require fast reactions, they want gear carried encounters. They just don't like that wording because it brings to light the ugly truth.

Fights in a MMORPG should be based on your character vs enemies. This game focus way to much on you and your connection vs mechanics. It's more like S-E wants this game to be like a action/adventure/shooter kind of game, since stats, gear and abilities/magic has so limited impact.

[Xine]

Put some thought this morning into being a bit more in-depth about the whole "how do you think randomized bosses should work" and came up with this since I've yet to see anyone post anything with any real solid information or examples.

In regards to randomizing boss skills, each skill can be given a percent chance to actually be used. Want to use T5 as an example again? Might as well since its what everyone is stuck on, that and Titan EX being "too hard" to memorize/execute properly. Since the fight is currently sitting in a predetermined script, Scourges > Neurolink at 85% > Fireball/Conflags > Neurolink at 55% > Divebombs x3 > 3 Snakes > Divebombs x3 > 2 more Snakes > DPS Check to kill all 5 Snakes > Profusion > Twisters/Dreadknights > Neurolink at 30% > Hatch/Liquid Hells > Win. The fight could be made with Twin's skills in each phase and given a different % based on how dangerous they are to the party's survivability. Obviously the most dangerous out of the list can be given the lowest percent to decrease the probability of it being used back to back multiple times. However another way to combat something like this is to program the boss/fight to where it can only use Instant Death mechanics once every certain % of the boss's HP. This leaves room for people to be able to hold dps and recover from any possible deaths, provided MP holds out. Now with that said, you have people who may bring in nothing but Bards and Scholars to have "Infinite MP" and hold fights indefinitely. This is typically combated by having a "Rage Timer" during fights, which forces you to not hold a boss indefinitely and to give you a basic time limit before you're faced with the "You took too long, now you die" raging of the boss which typically involves highly increased attributes or an unavoidable instant-death ability. (See the Iron Giants in CT during the Atomos fight when there aren't 4 people standing on the platforms after a set period of time.)

Now, people complain (including Yoshi-P to a point) that making fights randomized will absolutely cause at least 1 group in the world who plays this game out of possibly millions of players/subscribers, will fail a fight, and that someone else will "just get lucky" and win. Creating a True AI in a video game is pretty damned hard I'd imagine, I'm not a computer scientist or a programming genius so I have no idea how someone would go about doing that. However, giving skills that will have a 5% chance of being used, has a less likely chance of being used again immediately after. Because there is a pool of possible skills that can be used and each one has a percent that is higher than 5%. So your chances of getting that instant-death skill twice in a row is not very likely, but that does not mean it will never happen. It can happen, and one day it will happen, whether it happens to you or not isn't the biggest problem here, its "it will happen to someone causing a negative reaction from those it happened to." There is no avoiding bad situations, they are going to happen because nothing in the world is ever simply handed over without some manner of risk involved, nor is the reality of life or gaming perfect. Here its a matter of content being fun, or just plain boring because you've memorized the fight's script. But I'll bring up what's been mentioned multiple times in this thread, you can attempt fights as often as you want without having to start over from the very beginning, be it farming a new pop set or having to memorize a brand new fight or even going so far as to start over from lv1 and losing ALL completed content to that point in the game or even from the very beginning of the dungeon (yes it drops you at the entrance but you do not have to clear all the trash mobs over again including all the previous bosses beaten.)

Now, will making the fights more randomized make them easier/more difficult? No. Will making fights more randomized make them more fun? Yes to some, No to others. Will leaving fights scripted exactly as they are while simply increasing ilv and giving out the Echo buff continue to be fun? No, I don't think I've seen anywhere where someone actually said they enjoy doing scripted fights, but that does not mean some people don't actually enjoy that. Will making fights more randomized make them less about team jump roping and completely scripted? Absolutely. Will making fights more randomized help fight against severely punishing/instand-death mechanics? Not at all. Then what's the point of doing it this way? It makes the fights more interesting, if people are bored of doing the exact same routine every single time they go to clear content because the fight follows a specific script, this will give them something else to deal with. It definitely CAN make fights more challenging, especially if certain skills/abilities aren't tweaked enough to work with a more reactive playstyle vs knowing what's coming and moving before it happens. You know those little AoEs the dogs use in the first boss of Pharos Sirius? The orange circles show up (at least on my screen) for less than half a second before disappearing and being used, they also are not used at any specific point in the fight and have nothing that prompts their use (beyond being in range for them to actually initiate their use.) Now obviously this doesn't really hurt in the slightest and probably isn't the greatest example, but my point here is you can't dodge it even though it shows up on your screen, so in that instance it fits perfectly to what I'm trying to get across.

I'm sorry but against the argument that making content more randomized without some form of control over the insta-death mechanics does not make a game any easier or harder, in fact it adds a more real feel to fights in that you never know what a boss will throw at you next, however you CAN know what abilities the boss has in store for you and you can also learn what they are and get an idea of how to react to them before going into the fight. I have lead multiple fights in FFXI which uses a battle system very similar to this and I will say that I have had extremely few problems with random pugs with a short simple overview of the upcoming fight before jumping in. I lead my own runs through Chains of Promathia before it was made faceroll easy as well as Divine Might back at lv75 caps before Mythic weapons and Abyssea were introduced when gear actually did carry you through a fight because it was years old content. You CAN have difficulty and challenge to a fight while still keeping it fun and enjoyable. Its actually finding that mixture of challenging and fun that is hard and does take some time to figure out for new games using a brand new type of mechanics and gear. (Note that FFXI never had item levels until Seekers of Adoulin was released, the only complaints I ever heard in FFXI for the 7-9 years I played it were people couldn't comprehend some of the more "complex" mechanics such as how aggro and the hate table worked which is in all honesty extremely simple and easy to understand for a person who can think beyond the inside of a cardboard box.)

Playing fights in this game DOES work for reactive playing styles, maybe not every single fight, but enough of them give enough leeway for a player with a decent connection and reaction time to get out of the way without being forced to memorize the boss's script. Honestly, I've been doing Titan HM since I first started doing my relic weapon quests back in 2.0-2.1, sure, before they updated the server updating speed I had problems dodging and was required to memorize the script. But I didn't memorize the script, I cleared Titan HM perfectly fine after that update and still to this day have not memorized Titan's exact script. I just know "see circle on the ground, this means I need to move." Adjusting/tweaking boss's skills to match for reactive play styles given a randomized skill set vs a perfectly scripted fight would not have to be so drastic as to make Landslides or WotL any less "deadly" then they already are/may be. If anything some skills/abilities would need maybe .5 seconds added to the cast time, but even that might stretching it a bit too far.

If there's any holes in this, point it out to me and I'll look over it and see if I can't remember what was running through my head when typing this all out. I tried to be as thorough as possible and read through my own post 2 or 3 times before hitting "post reply", however I am only human and humans do make mistakes.

[Yukiko]

Just, don't promote all of this awesome new stuff and then have people log in and realize they can't get to any of it. That upsets people.

That maybe is the source of their problems...

[Roris]

a lot of the art assets are ripped right out of 1.0, including "recent" content. i expect a drop of "new content" once they run out of stuff to reimplement. but that might actually be when the expansion hits.

Don't forget XI, XII and XIII too and I'm not talking about stuff that uses reference designs from XI and updates them with more detail like Goobbues or Adamantoises which is fine, they're straight off ripped from those games as is. Even stuff like Dullahans, Ziz or those Meracydia dragons were already in the 1.0 DATs, only a really small handful of enemies were created entirely from scratch for ARR. Going into Second Coil and seeing Rafflesia is just an oversized neon Ochu and The Avatar is an interesting take on Treants but it's still using their same base rig and some animations is kinda disappointing.

I'm sure I've said this before, recolors are practically a staple of Final Fantasy but at least they used to come up with unique designs for traditional monsters in each game and also unique bosses, using enemies as is without changing their designs is more of a DQ thing which is no surprise given the circumstances really.