How's Ultimate?

[Nestama]

@bswpayton: If you have no interest in Ultimate, then why have you been complaining about it? Why are you making it sound like Ultimate literally stole content from you? Ultimate did not delay Eureka and chances are the battle team who worked on Ultimate have nothing to do with Eureka, or whatever else (as a reminder, there are multiple battle teams).

[Jeycht]

Ultimate or not, there would not be more content in 4.1 anyway.
3.1, story, 2 dungeons, raid24, Lord of verminion, Diadem, beast tribe , 1 EX. (nothing later in 3.15 except relic and 1 side quest)
4.1, story, 1 dungeons, raid24, GC dungeons with your squad, new map stuff harder, Delivery quest, beast tribe, side quest, 1 EX, Ultimate, Shirogane. (4.15 rivals wing, perform, Eureka, relic?)

(ultimate or not, they have decide to stop doing more dungeons in 4.1 4.3 and 4.5 patch way before)

Basically, more stuff in 4.1 than 3.1.

[KaivaC]

Ultimate or not, there would not be more content in 4.1 anyway.
3.1, story, 2 dungeons, raid24, Lord of verminion, Diadem, beast tribe , 1 EX. (nothing later in 3.15 except relic and 1 side quest)
4.1, story, 1 dungeons, raid24, GC dungeons with your squad, new map stuff harder, Delivery quest, beast tribe, side quest, 1 EX, Ultimate, Shirogane. (4.15 rivals wing, perform, Eureka, relic?)

(ultimate or not, they have decide to stop doing more dungeons in 4.1 4.3 and 4.5 patch way before)

Basically, more stuff in 4.1 than 3.1.

Thank you for adding this. To say that we have less content is ridiculous. It feels empty...but that's only because some of the biggest complainers here are going through so much content within a week and then whine that they have nothing to do. Blaming Ultimate on the lack of content is just troll bait - except the troll believes the ridiculous statements they are posting.

[RiyahArp]

Thank you for adding this. To say that we have less content is ridiculous. It feels empty...but that's only because some of the biggest complainers here are going through so much content within a week and then whine that they have nothing to do. Blaming Ultimate on the lack of content is just troll bait - except the troll believes the ridiculous statements they are posting.

Squadrons: useless. I had all jobs at 60 at the start of the expansion, and I have tanks and healers, so there's no appeal to taking longer to run through a pre-50 dungeon for no reward beyond a couple of emotes. It's actually worse than squadron's original launch because there is no real long term point to doing them. In a meta sense, squadrons are just players beta testing square enix companion AI for the time when the game goes majority solo for its low level content, but we are doing it as "content."

Delivery quests: take five minutes to craft 6 items. Turn them in once per week for scrips. I get more longevity out of doing the daily cacpot than I do it.

New map stuff/canals: same as HW content, same issues (boring, mostly done for artificially scarce optional items, rewards are pure rng). Actually worse because now its stacking rng just to get the "new" content.

Beast tribe: the same things we have been doing since ARR with no creativity. The tribes were getting tired in HW, with the Moogles at least something different by being a new crafting tribe, but how many times does SE expect us to click on nodes and use a mount's special ability on them, or kill a small amount of enemies? They have the same problem as SB FATES, it;s the same tired formula with slightly better exp rewards.

the ex fights are on par for HW release, and at best had slightly more longevity than them. Even now Susano and Lakshimi are dead, same as Bis and ravana.

Shirogane...come on, that was one day of grabbing a house.

***

SB is bad because too much of it is the same as HW, but slightly worse (albeit with better rewards.) You do the same things you did more or less exactly in HW, down to the same timer and pattern. Leveling a job in SB hasn't changed in any way, there is nothing new like POTD to add variety. Leveling a craft is the same way, just quicker since leves are so much more potent now post 60. The big innovation in SB was redesigning jobs because they reached their maximum threshold of buttons and they couldn't add new abilities and keep them playable for most of the playerbase.

[KaivaC]

snip

So instead of essentially saying everything is useless, why don't you take a break and wait until 4.2? That's what quite a few people do...they take a break once they are done with whatever they wanted to do with a certain patch, and then they take a break from it. If what's available doesn't interest you, I don't see why not just take a break for a few months. Lakshmi and Susano have been around for 4 months...so yeah, of course they will be dead at this point with all the farm parties that have occurred over them prior to Omega being dropped. I actually enjoy squadrons and quite a few others also enjoy it, so it's your opinion that it's useless. You want to talk about patch 4.1 as a whole and get a full blown discussion over it, make a thread about it. I am just mostly contending the complaints against Ultimate in this thread.

[SaitoHikari]

@bswpayton: If you have no interest in Ultimate, then why have you been complaining about it? Why are you making it sound like Ultimate literally stole content from you? Ultimate did not delay Eureka and chances are the battle team who worked on Ultimate have nothing to do with Eureka, or whatever else (as a reminder, there are multiple battle teams).

Yeah, Ultimate is literally all recycled assets. If anything, Hidden Canals has a higher likelihood of delaying Eureka, and even then that's a stretch.

Also, I decided to look at bswpayton's thread creating history, and now I'm trying to decide whether or not he's trolling. A normal person does not make a thread advocating for people to kick DPS who don't AoE in dungeons AND a different thread about why SE doesn't allow parsing when they keep designing fights with enrages, and then turn around to complain about how the devs choose to spend development resources towards a specific portion of the community that's at the opposite end of the spectrum.

[RiyahArp]

Also, please...the actual asset creation is the smallest part of creating a fight. The length of development is about balancing the fight as it is played, to prevent bugs, people cheating, the fight breaking the servers due to memory leaks, the fight actually being within human reflex time and capabilities, the time it took to think of and layout the attacks they wanted, and to conceive of the level of difficulty in terms of game mechanics. They didn't give this to an intern and told him to make a hard fight, which he coded in a weekend. Stuff like this is the experimental content they talked about when they reduced the amount of dungeons we'd get in a patch cycle, and even the experimental content they do give is sparse.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Also, please...the actual asset creation is the smallest part of creating a fight. The length of development is about balancing the fight as it is played, to prevent bugs, people cheating, the fight breaking the servers due to memory leaks, the fight actually being within human reflex time and capabilities, the time it took to think of and layout the attacks they wanted, and to conceive of the level of difficulty in terms of game mechanics. They didn't give this to an intern and told him to make a hard fight, which he coded in a weekend. Stuff like this is the experimental content they talked about when they reduced the amount of dungeons we'd get in a patch cycle, and even the experimental content they do give is sparse.

You act like this took ample time away from something else. Do you have any experience to claim such or are you assuming? The devs themselves said Ultimate had no impact on us only having a single dungeon, but let's assume it did. Who really cares? Yes, let's have another dull dungeon where no one cares about mechanics, tanks pull everything and nothing requires any real challenge because things barely tickle. If they actually changed things up in regards to dungeon I might care. Alas, they don't. So I'm far more interested in Ultimate, personally, even if I may never clear it.

[SaitoHikari]

Also, please...the actual asset creation is the smallest part of creating a fight. The length of development is about balancing the fight as it is played, to prevent bugs, people cheating, the fight breaking the servers due to memory leaks, the fight actually being within human reflex time and capabilities, the time it took to think of and layout the attacks they wanted, and to conceive of the level of difficulty in terms of game mechanics. They didn't give this to an intern and told him to make a hard fight, which he coded in a weekend. Stuff like this is the experimental content they talked about when they reduced the amount of dungeons we'd get in a patch cycle, and even the experimental content they do give is sparse.

Speaking as someone that has actually seen how the development process worked for a different MMO...

Asset creation is NOT the smallest part of creating a fight, what the actual hell are you smoking? You can't even begin balancing until you create the assets in the first place, and that you're sure the assets clearly convey to the player exactly what's going on in the first place. If there's any confusion on that front, it's back to the drawing board, and that's likely something that will take longer than a single weekend. Anyone can contribute to the balancing process, but few have the skills to create said assets. And considering that Ultimate is pretty much entirely recycled assets aside from new music at the final phase, the only thing the asset creators would have done is to oversee that the assets are combined in a way that isn't graphically confusing to players.

Did everyone suddenly forget that the devs at one point admitted that it took approximately 5-6 months for them to plan out the design of equipment in this game? Now imagine the work it takes for everything else. Calling asset creation the smallest part of ANYTHING is insulting.

Freaking Hidden Canals probably required more new assets than Ultimate, but I don't hear anyone blaming a completely unnecessary second RNG loot box (when modifying the first would have been perfectly fine) for the lack of content.

[Miste]

To all the people complaining that Ultimate exists...

This game is not catered to you and you alone.

If everyone could just be like "I don't like X so X shouldn't exist" this game would lose money.

This is normal for a MMO, they have tons of different kinds of content in order to cater to tons of different kinds of players. The game isn't meant to cater 100% to one type of player.

Person A likes leveling, questing, and dungeons so they play.
Person B likes savage raids and difficult content so they play.
Person C likes gathering and crafting and working the market board so they play.
Person D likes RP and housing so they play.

I mean I don't like PVP in this game much should I say it shouldn't exist just because I don't like it?
I don't RP either so should we remove housing and all RP elements to the game and delete Balmung just because I don't like it? ( just a joke don't lynch me D: )

Oh and btw this is from someone who doesn't have access to ultimate either. My static is pretty casual and we are still working on the last bit of getting Neo Exdeath down.

I also probably would never put in the time and effort needed to clear Ultimate either since I am lazy, but it is there for people who love that kind of challenge even if I am not one of them.