Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[KaldeaSahaline]

As far as latency issues goes - NTT is SE's chosen partner and they are the issue 100%. It's super easy to blame them, but in reality that isn't what fixes this. SE needs to work with NTT to ensure that users coming into their nodes are getting good results. Other gaming companies have done this in the past when widespread users reported issues. Before anyone tries to say it isn't widespread (because it doesn't affect them), please save it, it's documented even here on the OF in a 50+ page thread, as well as a litany of them elsewhere.

Regarding Bliztball - if it is more menu content, it will be a waste of resources/dead on arrival. The game does not need ANY more menu content. Here's the conundrum - do you design the content to be played/visited by the masses or do you simply design it to be the best it can/faithful/fun?

In my experience/opinion - these types of undertakings are best served by simply building the best possible iteration of the content form. In that, it will succeed on its own merit rather than artificially forcing it to be relevant to the masses.

What I would want out of Blitzball is a real live breathing match. Active gameplay elements, matchmaking, both solo and as a team, with ability to play against a range of AIs as well as PVP. It doesn't need to be some kind of scaling progression system, or have obscure rewards gated behind it, simply make it fun to play and people will participate.

It needs to be easily accessible, but deep at the same time. Build in functions to let FC's/statics/linkshells compete against each other for prizes. The idea is this should be something people can do during downtime for fun. Build in spectate options for people to watch.

If Chocobo Racing was basically Crash Team Racing/Mario Kart but with FF paint on it, I'd probably play it every single day with friends, but we got some awful implementation instead, basically dead on arrival.

[Granyala]

But hurt their DPS, they care about that. It gives feedback between failing a mechanic and the consequences, which vuln stacks don't really do.

These are in game and should be expanded upon.
But people also ignore v-stacks simply because the outgoing base damage is too low. V stacks only become a concern if they cause you to die to non avoidable damage.

If, as a healer, I don't care whether I heal people with 0 or 3 stacks, then I know that the incoming damage is simply way too low.

Combine meaner V-stacks + damage debuff + harsher penalties on rezzing and you might get people to obey mechanics more.

Naah lets face it: in this MMO and in pretty much any I have played: it's always the healer that is burdened by "content difficulty" because if sth. goes wrong, we are the only ones that might be able to compensate for it.

[Yeol]

Try running content minimum item level, and see how healing and damage received will go.

Gear increases main stats, HP and defense. You can't have geared people taking the same damage as less geared people, and more geared healers casting the same mount of heals as non-geared healers. Intensive healing has its moments. The more people gear the less intensive it becomes, it is part of progression.

This game is a dps race, everyone is a dps (Including tanks and healers). Some people do not like this approach, others say it is what makes playing certain roles interesting for them. If you want the game to be healing heavy, they can always add more AoEs and TBs. But they need to adjust the enrage timer or increase dps potency to make up for the lack of dps from healers.

In some games, you start the fight with a nasty dot that deals damage to you. It keeps increasing throughout the fight and eventually kills you if you don't beat the content before it gets fully buffed. This is what usually kept healers busy back in old MMOs (Almagest is a close example) Even classes needed to mange their own self heals. "Your job is a healer and you'll be healing 90% of the time."

If you think about it. Keep healing and doing mechanics is much easier than knowing when to heal and when to dps while doing mechanics. Because in 1st case you're healing almost none stop it and less work on your brain. While as timing your heals + certain people that want to cheese mechanics need their own heals/shields + dps is more work on the healer.

And btw, healers keep fixing their rotation very often (Until they have BiS) unlike tanks and DPs. Because gear plays a big role for them. Their heals become stronger, people around them start taking less damage, they no longer have to cast 4 heals and reduced it to 2, and start focusing more on dealing damage. Also lets not forget crit Shields. I really don't understand when people say that playing healer role is boring.

I personally think that what we have now is far more interesting for healers. They can make them heal more and dps less (With more AoEs and TB like i said). But don't make them healing machines.

[Ariannaid]

Another thing to keep in mind is that more involved healing doesn’t necessarily have to mean just hitting the Cure button more often. I’ve never played WoW, but I played several healers at pretty high levels of content in Everquest II, which is a similar type of game in many ways to WoW and FFXIV, and one thing I noticed from there that I really don’t see here is a variety of utility spells on healers.

In FFXIV, you’re pretty much either direct healing, including specialty heals like regen, or DPSing, without much in the way of debuffs/buffs/status cures/etc. Status curing, in particular, is potentially a great way to add more depth to healer gameplay without just reducing potencies on the green-numbers spells, but I’m not sure the basic spell infrastructure is in place to support it. We really only have one cleanse—Esuna, with its limited applicability, zero recast time and single debuff removal—which doesn’t give a whole lot of room to be creative. It also doesn’t give much reason for other roles to want to slot their own status removal abilities (mage DPS with Erase, for example).

My Defiler in EQ2 had a single-target cleanse (basically the equivalent of Esuna), an AoE cleanse with a much longer recast time, and a “special” cleanse with a very long recast time (in FFXIV terms, consider it like being able to remove certain single-target boss mechanics like Prey, Earthshakers, Shriek, etc.), and other healers had generally the same setup but possibly with class-specific variations like a total cleanse, each with power-appropriate cast/recast times. That setup forced meaningful choices, and also interactions between the healers in a group, that went beyond coordinating heals. You had to decide whether a particular debuff was worth burning a high-cost or long-recast ability to remove, and consequently risking not having that ability for something else. Do you burn your curse removal for Twintania’s fire prison, knowing that means you’ll have to heal through the Death Sentence debuff, or do you accept the downtime on one party member and needing to DPS the prison in exchange for being able to remove the healing debuff later?

There are other complexities to the healing kit that could be considered as well, like maintaining temp debuffs and party buffs or handling mechanics—either accidental failures or deliberate setups—via death preventions; imagine if you lost the ability to use Swiftcast on Raise, but in exchange, you instead had a short-duration, long-recast ability that would 100% prevent the next instance of damage on a party member or instantly heal them up to 50% the next time they dropped to 0 HP in a given time window. The ultimate effect is similar, but it shifts the emphasis from reactivity to proactivity. On the buff/debuff side, a mix of indefinite upkeep effects (along the lines of how Miasma used to apply a healing debuff, but actually meaningful) and comparably short-duration, high-impact effects like AST cards could provide a similar level of activity to what we have now while still shifting emphasis away from spamming DD spells.

All of this could be done in addition to the straightforward “make HP go up” type of healing, but it would require investment in the form of new and modified spells, as well as more fundamental systems-level changes (for a start, make debuffs more prevalent and meaningful—give regular dungeon bosses debuff-inflicting attacks on the level of pre-nerf T7’s Venomous Tail). I really do like the idea of being more than a green DPS, and the one-dimensional healing mechanics are one reason I don’t play this game all that much any more; at the same time, I’m also not sure that the complexity of healing in a game like EQ2 or, from what I hear, WoW is achievable within the bounds of where SE seems to want to keep FFXIV (and, as noted by several people, it’s not really something that applies to existing content).

[RiyahArp]

1. WoW is popular not because it's good...in fact, it pretty much sucks compared to most MMOs before it in terms of mechanics and breath of gameplay. It was popular because it anticipated the need to move away from "everquest widow" style of gameplay to something a lot more casual, and fixed a lot of issues the old school style had. The long term cost has been ruining the genre, though; its shifted far from the "living world" idea of something like Star Wars Galaxies to what people call the theme park model, where we just go on different rides as we like.

2. There's no improvement going from 80% stone, to 80% busywork in maintaining selfbuffs and debuffs. AST is an example of healing busywork; pseudo rng buffs you have to decipher and cast, and I've always found it tedious. I'm afraid SE would just extend busywork, because it takes far too much to redesign the battle system to make actual balanced pure healing.

3. Hard content...look, I do trial roulette for fun sometimes. It's pretty easy. but a lot of times, I come into one in progress at the 16 min mark because people abandoned after one or two wipes. Sometimes I switch to tank because otherwise its getting vote abandoned.

I cannot get why people want the content we all do to be harder. I mean, you all know how much of a pita it is to pug savage or ex content...you really want that to be spread down to lower ranks?

[Alleo]

1. WoW is popular not because it's good...

I would dare to say that there has to be something that WoW did great otherwise you wouldnt have millions of people playing it. And if those before it were sooo great why did they not have the same big amount of subs? Maybe because those gameplay parts were more for a niche and not the mass?

Also about content being harder: Thats probably quite subjective but imo other than extreme primals and savage nothing is hard in this game. Honestly if you dont have certain DPS checks with bosses you could do most of the dungeon half-asleep and with probably two skills and still beat it. The problem is that a lot wont try to get better at their job if they can get most of the things done without at least trying a bit. And I think most people in this thread have more of a problem with the healer class being more of a DPS class than a healing one. I mean if you are a pure healer and your group is at least decent you will stand around for most of the time..not sure how this is great gameplay. (And as a scholar you have even less to do thanks to the fairy)

[Granyala]

The problem is that a lot wont try to get better at their job if they can get most of the things done without at least trying a bit.

Just an FYI: WoW tried what some here suggest. Dungeons were like FF-XIVs in Wrath of the Lichking, in the subsequent expansion, Blizzard severely beefed up the content. Suddenly you had soft enrages because healers ran out of mana, debuffs were mean and needed to be dispelled ASAP or peps would die. Mobs needed to be CC'd, casts needed to be interrupted, boss mechanics mattered enough to be life threatening, the whole shabang.

For me, who went in with guild groups it was awesome and fun. For the genreral population that got thrown into it via party finder it was a nightmare. So much so that Blizzard was forced to cave and nerf stuff / make the following dungeons considerably easier.

To be blunt: once a MMO introduces easy content with great rewards it is no longer possible to go back to meaner content w/o a massive backlash. Contrary to popular elitist belief, most people will NOT rise to the occasion and try to better themselves when faced with hard content. They will simply whine a bit and eventually quit.

[Remus]

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Didn't people rise up for Ozma? I remember people calling nerfs for Weeping City but people were told to "git gud" Ozma wasn't hard but for the general DF when it released was hard for people.

[Granyala]

Didn't people rise up for Ozma? I remember people calling nerfs for Weeping City but people were told to "git gud" Ozma wasn't hard but for the general DF when it released was hard for people.

We don't know that. We do not have empirical data about how many people actually stopped trying. Also, people did not "git gud". I remember many a catastrophic group that was dragged through by a few raiders, esp once Ozma targeted the right people. I believe that gear influx did way more to ease the burden than people gaining skills. Hell even at the end of the contents lifespan, people still stacked meteors, it was just that healers like myself knew how to compensate for it.

My above statement about people not rising to the occasion was actually uttered by a WoW Developer. I'm sure he had hard data about how many people actually "got gud" and defeated the content and how many were left as corpses on the side of the road.

[Gleipni]

Didn't people rise up for Ozma? I remember people calling nerfs for Weeping City but people were told to "git gud" Ozma wasn't hard but for the general DF when it released was hard for people.

They rise fora laughable content,for me,ozma was super fun,at least had to reason to do that raid,but the FF comminity is just lazy people that want to play but nor invest 1% on their brain in the game.

You people tell,what was so hard with the meteor,the thing that did most of the wipe ? you just have to spread them,yet,it was a "nighmare" for people.
At some point,SE should stop making thing more and more easy and people should just invest whats left of their brain into doing things right