Server Bosses, Large scale PVE, Multiple Shell Fights and Dragons!

[Tonka]

I dont' like large scale PvE, because only the elitest of the elite actually get to do it and win; No one has the muster to gather up 40-80 people for a massive battle anymore. Only the biggest no-lifers have time for that kind of thing.

How about if world bosses scale in difficulty based on the number of people participating and you only need 5 to 10 people minimum to get started? How about if said encounter also doesn't require you to invite people into a party and everyone gets credit? How about if there is no dedicated healing or tanking class and any old combination of players will work? And how about being able to help in an encounter without actually needing to engage the boss directly but provide support through other means?

In other words, your statement may apply to FFXI world bosses, but definitely not GW2 world bosses (which is the example being used in the OP).

[Starflare]

Its all about PSO2. I was hella-addicted to PSO when it came out on the Gamecube. (i know it came out for Dreamcast first) I only got to Level 130 or so and then i couldn't afford it. lol

EDIT: forgot to mention, im only running an Athlon II x2 3.0ghz and i believe that a battle of that capacity would explode my computer to pieces.

Actually no. GW2 is a game being made by people that are competent in graphics optimizing and are using a non-piece of shit engine. If you can run FFXIV without it melting your computer you can run GW2.

- Kurokikaze

[Chiz]

THe work flow model is probably most definately wrong. I was merely trying to point out that, It's very time consuming to create new content. After all Time = Money.
The Polls showed that over all people were very unhappy with the state of the battle system. Argue all you want, but that facts are there. The Devs recognise this and preceeded with the change.

Yes, Time = Money which is why you wonder why they are spending time "fixing" things that aren't explicitly broken or working far better than features that are completely MIA. The Players Poll should've been a guide only, the fact of the matter is, the questions were skewed in a direction that funneled change in a certain direction. Also, you imply the vast majority of players actually know what is good or what will make the game better. The impression I got from the Players Poll was that players wanted a differentiation of class roles and abilities, the main thing preventing that was a lack of challenging content to emphasize the differences in classes. Enter R45 dungeon where THM can't tank everything, melee get punished at close range by AoE, and tanks need to tank and that certainly isn't a concern anymore is it? If anything the content has punished some classes far too much further emphasizing class differentiation in favor of ranged and magic classes. All with the same classes we had from Day 1, with a few minor tweaks.

When the devs say they are looking into cost analysis they mean time and money, not what Victor alluded to:

It's not that FFXIV can't handle large sized monsters or large scale combat. At this moment the time and money to bring these things to the game, isn't the right time.

I agree right now isn't the right time, but once they put the multi-claim system in place there's no excuse for them not to put content like this in the game.

Remeber that post by the devs where they said it takes 6 months to create a set of armour? It took them 7 months to bring out these dungeons. There is a recent post from Yoshi saying releasing the dungeons before all the battle adjustments were finished was a risky move. But i'm sure they feel the lack of cont just as we do.

Yes I do remember that post, and while it may take that long for them to create one set of unique armor, that certainly isn't the case for items that use the same art assets. One example would be Templar's Falchion in the latest release, or even the items that use the same skins/textures with different colors in the same dungeon. Speaking of which, its been around 6 months since that post about "Evil Armor" and BLM AF, yet still no armor, which clearly indicates there are moving parts that are bottlenecking the process....more on this later.

I'm not saying I don't want epic battles like this, but right now there are core mechanics that still need to be addresed. That will form a foundatin for improved gameplay.

The only mechanic missing right now is the multi-claim system, after that's addressed there should be no excuse for them not to start moving content in this direction. Sometimes I think people overcomplicate this and try to reinvent the wheel when they have a flat tire sitting in their garage that just needs to be pumped up.

Here's an idea to get this ball rolling: Have a quest giver in Limsa that gives people a quest and alerts people when Great Buffalo goes on a rampage. This quest giver ports people right to the Buffalo and everyone can take turns wailing on it simultaneously thanks to the new multi-claim system. Everyone gets EXP and a chance for loot commensurate to how much they contribute to the fight. This gives you a sense of large-scale PvE, revisits a mob people have largely forgotten about, and should be relatively easy to implement.

The Devs are split into teams, You have the Chocobo team, The Dungeon team, The battle Team, the Crafting team. It's not 1 dept that shifts focus once one thing is done. As each team Completes a project the move onto the next. When the time is right those completed projects will be patched in. But Some completed projects might depend on other projects being done too. Like Battle Reforms. For all we know the Ifrit battle might be done. But is waiting on the Battle team to finish thier project.

Its not quite like that, you have certain departments that actually require specific "skill sets" or "talent", like the art team and programming team. The rest are largely worker drones that may have more experience working with specific game features than others, but can largely be shifted and allocated from one project to the next. The development leads are static and in-charge of their various departments, like combat, UI, content etc. and they are constantly wrangling and jockeying for allocation for this pool of worker drones. Its obvious that Yoshi-P has allocated most of this manpower toward combat system changes as that has clearly been the focus of his efforts from both his own letters and what we have actually seen in patches. Instead of allocating 80/20 in favor of combat changes, they should've gone 80/20 in favor of content.

If I had to guess there's two major bottlenecks in this pipeline: programming and Q&A. Artists are probably twiddling their thumbs and working on stuff so far in advance that they aren't holding things up. But its obvious programmers are struggling to keep up as they can't even implement the minor changes people want in a timely fashion, and the Q&A process has been cited by Yoshi-P as the bottleneck on at least 2 occasions for holding up the dungeons.

Once many of these changes are in place, you can expect to see ramped implementation of content into the game.
What we are seeing now in the next few months is the fruit of the devs labor from that last 6 or so months.
The point is, They have to build a foundation. They had to rebuild the house of FFXIV from the ground up. W/O a solid foundation the bigger you build the less stable it becomes.
Disagree with me all you want. But the truth is the Devs will devote time and money where it is needed first to build the things the players want. Not the other way around.

And again, I disagree, because the fact of the matter is, any player new or old would have a much better game experience with more content like the newly released dungeons than a bunch of revamped systems like combat or crafting with no content at all. Battle Reforms are not going to significantly change how a group of 8 tackles a particular dungeon, you're still going to have your basic archetypes like tank, melee DD, ranged DD, magic DD, healer, buffer, debuffer etc. Once Jobs and class changes go in, you'll have to make some minor adjustments here and there but for the most part, people will still be playing the same roles they are tasked with TODAY with the very same "flawed" classes and Armoury System in place that we've had since Day 1.

[Chiz]

I dont' like large scale PvE, because only the elitest of the elite actually get to do it and win; No one has the muster to gather up 40-80 people for a massive battle anymore. Only the biggest no-lifers have time for that kind of thing.

This the kind of antiquated mindset the OP's video is meant to do away with. The whole idea is that no single LS, guild, or in-game organization would be required to muster the numbers to tackle a particular monster. You would have a pool of the entire *SERVER* to pull from. If the server can't muster up 50 people to kill a dragon at various times of day, might as well close up shop because the game has clearly failed. You can tackle the mob solo or in a small group and be rewarded individually for your contribution, so no elitist-only reward there either.

[Tonka]

This the kind of antiquated mindset the OP's video is meant to do away with. The whole idea is that no single LS, guild, or in-game organization would be required to muster the numbers to tackle a particular monster. You would have a pool of the entire *SERVER* to pull from. If the server can't muster up 50 people to kill a dragon at various times of day, might as well close up shop because the game has clearly failed. You can tackle the mob solo or in a small group and be rewarded individually for your contribution, so no elitist-only reward there either.

Word. But again, ArenaNet has stated in a recent interview that the world bosses would require 10 or even 5 people minimum and it'd scale from there. Perdy cool, indeed!

[Seif]

I dont' like large scale PvE, because only the elitest of the elite actually get to do it and win; No one has the muster to gather up 40-80 people for a massive battle anymore. Only the biggest no-lifers have time for that kind of thing.

I can tell you as a fact that even 40-people-anything won't ever happen on the smaller servers. Why make content we can't even play?

[DoctorMog]

I can tell you as a fact that even 40-people-anything won't ever happen on the smaller servers. Why make content we can't even play?

I swear some people have selective reading,

Please re-read:

Posted by Tonka:
How about if world bosses scale in difficulty based on the number of people participating and you only need 5 to 10 people minimum to get started? How about if said encounter also doesn't require you to invite people into a party and everyone gets credit? How about if there is no dedicated healing or tanking class and any old combination of players will work? And how about being able to help in an encounter without actually needing to engage the boss directly but provide support through other means?

[Griss]

All i can say is this. Its amazing what happens when a game is built from the ground up in a specific direction with a solid plan in place and is not kicked out onto the world stage far to quickly.

[Tsukino]

Sadly, this is yet another thing that the FFXI team had figured out that didn't get applied to FFXIV from the start.

Besieged and later Campaign were excellent ways to bring people together and have them complete essentially open-world objectives together while participating on their own terms. The functionality was just a bit primitive compared to the GW2 example because it was being added to a framework that wasn't designed to accommodate it.

They should have taken the positive player response to those events when they were added to FFXI and created something just as good as this dragon fight in FFXIV right at the beginning.

[Coyohma]

I may have had more fun watching that than anything I've actually done in XIV. And I've done everything outside of getting all nineteen classes to 50. Pretty obvious reminder why XIV has bombed and continues to struggle along.

Seeing that really sort of kills my motivation to grind away SP in this boring game. This coming from someone who has never liked an MMO outside of FFXI, and who has really enjoyed the FF series before XIV.