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

[silentwindfr]

Dragons kick, opo-opo form bonus: reduces targets blunt resistance and INT by 10%, duration 15 sec. (you might want to reread rest of your main class skills too).

mea culpa, you was right about this one...
anyway, you miss the point totally, we do point that memorize and repeat long pattern while doing it with 7 other person and pray that everybody will do it. can be quite hard, if the personal skill of the member in this category is lacking. but, at the same time, it's quite accessible if you have the right person with you.

we are not robot, not everyone is the same... and not everyone want simply repeat the same lesson over and over and over for beat content. we want to have challenge, we don't say that the actual endgame is lacking a sort of challenge, however, it lack deepth. making it really fast boring and tasteless. if your group beat the content 1-2 times, it's over... it will beat it each time. because nothing can happend that will make the fight different.

another point, and this one anger me generally (not you there) the fact that people think that other can't evolve and get better at something... it's quite arrogant to think that the other can't learn, when it's one of the particularity of the mankind. but, for make people want to become better, the challenge need to be fun, and that not the case, it's frustration with all the one shoot mechanic... it's possible to make hard content, without use any one shoot mechanic or frenzy one! sadly in this recent years, most of the dev from mmorpg industry think it's needed to create a content that revolve around this artificial way to increase the difficulty of a content.

instead to offer us various challenge testing different capacity of the community, training them for be able to offer more variation, they fall in the simplicity of this easy mechanic.
and that what people like me say... we don't say that we can't face challenge like the one present, but that we don't feel the thrill to beat it... because it's too much boring. when you come from game that ask you to take decision instantly because the boss simply don't have any pattern... and arrive here. you can't say that this sort of challenge is fun or interesting.

Yoshida talk of make the game better for keep more player... sadly he fail drastically when it's about endgame content. reward are not always what drive people to face a fight... challenge and fun to do it's far more important than the reward.

The easiest explanation is that this kind of combat has been done so much in the massively-multiplayer variant of RPGs that people are not really all that enchanted with it anymore. People come for the content, but stay for the people. However, western developers only pushed the combat ever slightly forward because they hinged the success of their games far too much on that fact. When Yoshida and Co undertook the task of updating their MMORPG (and they've done a great job at that), they looked heavily at western and korean MMORPGs who had been stuck in the evolutionary malaise of the last decade.

They don't need to be revolutionary innovators. All they need to do is handle the problems that should have been dealt with no later than half a decade ago and people would be kissing their boots and calling them god.

this is sooo true. mmorpg, didn't really evolve in the last decade, because WoW did make the genre stagnate, what make a genre evolve and grow, it's the competition for many year wow didn't had true rival... and they haven't try to really evolve... in fact they have even make the genre take a few bad turn and need to be changed.

[Clavaat]

if your group beat the content 1-2 times, it's over... it will beat it each time. because nothing can happend that will make the fight different.

I have a lot of trouble understanding this argument. What would you suggest they do? This is the case of every video game ever. The fights at endgame have RNG, they are not the same every time. Sometimes you have to adjust your strat because a healer got selected for an enemy attack instead of a DPS, for example.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool, but there is no way to program a "true" AI that would all of a sudden change what it is doing for the sake of a player. Take Super Mario World for example: when you get to a boss, you have to first figure out what makes this boss different from a regular enemy, understand the arena, and learn to process beat it. This fight doesn't change. It is the same every time, except maybe he goes left instead of right (parallel would be my above example in FFXIV). Memorizing the fight doesn't mean you win every time, you can make mistakes. This is exactly the same as Sonic, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, etc.

Hell, even FFXI did this. You learn to kite Kirin, pull the adds, wait for the next, etc. I guess it was just easier...

I understand that coordinating that same kind of fight with 7 other people seems daunting, but just like any other video game, you break it down role-by-role and react accordingly. Like any other video game, it takes practice.