Thread: 4.2 Updates from Q&A with Yoshida

What he said about the S rank.....

Sorry Yoshida fans, but he totally flubbed that one.

Don't get me wrong, I get that there are multiple perspectives, but what he's saying is that it's ok to keep the hunting community unhappy as long as new players don't get more inconvenienced (than they already are!).

What he should do is actually think of a solution for everyone. To do so, you gotta think about the 4 types of players:

1. High level people who do hunts.
They want more difficulty for ARR (and to some extent HW) hunts because as it is a single 70 can solo ARR hunts, but you can't do that for SB. Forgetting the whole "sharing" thing and first-come first-server, which no one will ever agree on. That change in difficulty makes the ARR hunts boring and require no teamwork at all, in SB people will actually get parties and have at least 1 tank & healer to make sure they'll have success. In ARR hunts, none of that matters for a 70, thus BORING.
They attempt to keep other content somewhat relevant through down or upsyncing, but not hunts..

2. High level people who don't hunt
Won't be affected by anything that happens or doesn't happen. Can safely ignore this group.

3. Low level people who don't hunt
Get ganked by mobs. Having more HP (or difficulty of any kind) means that on servers with less active hunting communities, these mobs stay longer in fate/leve/quest areas and stop low level people from being able to do what they do. However if we do nothing that will REMAIN a problem. This needs to be addressed separately and has 2 potential fixes:

A - No more auto-aggro. Whoever thought it was ok to put ganking mobs in areas with questers don't get that one of the appeal of FF14 was to get away from ganking (in contrast to games with pvp servers). I certainly don't want a mob on a game supposedly free of ganking to take up that role.

B - Update all hunt levels to 70 and make it so only people 65+ auto-aggro.role.
If the A & S ranks stop auto-attacking nearby low-level players (via either A or B), any change in HP/difficulty will become irrelevant to this group.

4. Low level players who want to hunt
This group would be anyone 50-65 who still can't solo/duo hunts. Increasing the difficulty would definitely affect them as they definitely wouldn't be able to beat them then. However, hunts were never meant to be soloable and the ilevel/level creep caused that. The fix to this is to increase partying for this group, but many of these newer people don't know about hunt linkshells or how to join one. The fix for this group is thus to FINALLY introduce the ability to make a LS public and allow people to search, apply/autojoin (depending on preferences).

Summary:
- increase ARR and HW hunt difficulty so they are a little bit closer to SB (or at the very least ARR to be HW difficulty)
- Change the auto aggro, should never have existed to begin with.
- Finally give us a LS search, how LS/FC searching still doesn't exist is honestly amazing.

The above 3 changes, combined, would be the most balanced fix across all groups, rather than keeping a flawed feature that annoys one group so that another isn't more inconvenienced.

There are other things that could fix this, like some kind of fate-style downsyncing, or upsyncing, or balancing the monster based on nearby players. This is by no means the only solution that would help all groups.

However the above 3 fixes, combined, are probably the easiest solutions to implement.

Player : キャラメイクの段階にメガネやサングラスを実装する事はできませんか？帽子とメガネ同時装備したいです
(I want to wear hats, glasses at the same time.)
Yoshi'p Sampo: よくご要望いただくのですが、今の設計ではかなり難しいです。PS5とかになれば、やれるかもしれませんが・・・
(It currently very difficult to do it, may be able to do when we go PS5...)

You can be mad or not, but that line to me as a console peasant makes me happy that the game is going to be released further on ps5, no matter what (at least i hope).

Questions to Yoshida on Anima server