Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[RiyahArp]

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.

I think I did it once on launch or so, then just skipped it. Keep in mind 24 mans only give one token per week to upgrade, and you could also do hunts instead for the same token. A lot of people just waited for the tokens to be uncapped to bother doing it.

I think trials are mostly fine as is.
I thought we were talking about 4man content. That has indeed become braindead easy, where I can ignore many a mechanic even when the dungeon is brand new. Imho, that is wrong. When the dungeon is new it should be a bit meaner and over time, as people get the new tome gear, it gets easier.

As for 80% DPSing: I have been in S5 - S7 yesterday, and frankly, I am at a loss as to how people manage to do 2K DPS in there. I was so busy trying to keep everyone alive that I barely managed to squeeze in around 800ish.

If they switch to more of a pure healer playstyle, they will make the game overall harder since DPS is optional, healing is not. People really seem obsessed with making this game harder despite the evidence when the game gets harder, you get a lot more wipes and abandons. Trials isn't too hard, but I still see people ditch groups often enough that if healing suddenly became harder, I'd start to worry.

And yeah, I think people here are full of crap about how easy things are. Not every healer has managed to memorize the fight that well save on the easiest things to do that level of dps.

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?

A lot of success is timing. WoW just happened along at the right time, just like Facebook did. Use in the net was booming, broadband made gaming more feasible, you had more people interested in pc gaming overall as pc prices went down etc.

[Stormfur]

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 did, and they were. I think the only content that was nerfed because of community outrage was the Steps of Faith.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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.

This is not necessarily accurate. Weeping City was a noticeable step above Void Ark yet people "got over it" despite plenty of whining. Likewise, Nidhogg and Shinryu Normal were similar hurdles with equals amounts of crying about its difficulty. Both remained untouched. Increasing difficulty needs to come through smaller increments. Many games make the mistake of simply beefing up numbers to especially high values all at once. It also needs to be established early on, say at the beginning of an expansion. Looking at leveling dungeons when closer to the ilvl. They're mostly pretty consistent. Unfortunately, said consistency all be evaporates later on as the devs release far easier content at the supposed end game.

Simply put, implement a proper difficulty curve and people will up their game without even realizing. FFXIV severely lacks in this regard; going from braindead easy to "OMG" from one fight to another.

And can we knock off the "elitist" crap? It isn't elitism to ask content outside EX and Savage not be entirely braindead. No one wants regular DF dungeons to be Savage level. I, personally, just want an excuse to not have pull the entire dungeon to feel like a tank. Likewise, I want more dynamic healing so my role isn't reduced to being a gimped DPS.

To be honest though: I find the FF-XIV community is far more obsessed about DPS than the WoW community. Apparently one does not need ingame parsing addons in order to breed this fixation on DPS at all. :P

This stems from how offensive focused FFXIV's design is. With on-demand mitigation tools, tanks scarcely have a reason to prioritize defense over offense unless something outright kills them. Bokchoy recently made a post about this on reddit, and goes into better detail.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._tank/dx6d4zw/

[Granyala]

Increasing difficulty needs to come through smaller increments. Many games make the mistake of simply beefing up numbers to especially high values all at once.

Wise words, definitely true. I think Cataclysms dungeons would have fared much better if Blizzard had taken several tiers in order to slowly up the difficulty again b/c at 330ilvl these dungeons were quite hard. Definitely way too hard for pugs.

Not even remotely accurate. [...] It doesn't need to be meaningless. It just needs to reward you for making good decisions and stress you for making bad ones. Stress =/= wiping. Stress can be running low on MP, having several members at consistently low HP, etc. Players will try and find their own ways to improve to reduce stress, then you supplement the paradigm with encounter design that builds on itself and keeps a player engaged and learning.

It depends on the implementation of course but healing is difficult enough for most people. If you now design the classes in a way that a healer can acutally f*** up in a different manner than "forget to heal", you will make it harder for a lot of people that are already at their limit.

People like you and me would most likely cope and maybe eventually like the changes.
Though I do not want to be weak as a healer, WoW did that and it feels utterly frustrating, I play a hero damn it I want to be strong and powerful and not constantly go "yeah you just gimped, sorry, meaningful heals are on CD, nothing I can do now".

In WoW, most of the time, the only thing I can say as a healer is "You are not supposed to take so much damage, play better if you do not want to die". That sucks. Here, I just toss more healing, take the hit on DPS and save incompetent butts (within reason). Feels much better. :P

[SigmaOZ]

I want the Blitzball from Final Fantasy X where I (the player) gets to actually play the game, otherwise they can just drop the idea entirely, I don't want to play a stupid coach game!...

Blitzball in FFX was lots of fun and I really enjoyed it, of course FFXIV has so much to offer that Blitzball could easily be overlooked but it doesn't have to be something that enslaves us yet it could offer some exclusive rewards to keep players interested, nothing too competitive like PVP though!...

The Producer can't expect every single player to make use of the new mini game but the ones that do will surely have fun, as in Lord of Verminion!...

[KaldeaSahaline]

With elite players that negate any avoidable damage and by shoving 90%+ of the healing duty onto the other healer: maybe.
When you are learning the fight (which is the time when content difficulty matters, once the boss is on farm, no one gives a hoot): yeah: no. Just: nope.

Every other player in that log was either gray, like single digits, or green. So not what I personally would call elite.

The thing is, all content in this game (including UCoB) has been solo healed because healers are that powerful. So shifting responsibility to one healer and backing them up for when people mess up, or they fall behind tends to be optimal. Having both healers full time heal, just leads to staggering overheal because of how strong they are.

The thing about progression is that due to the design of the game you should effectively be a master of each phase after seeing it like 2-3x. You don't need to clear the fight and farm it to learn when it's good to DPS. Halfway through progression you should have that down already. You can optimize the back half in later clears or while pushing enrage progression

@ lily idea: sure you could do that. But it would have to be pretty meaningless or else 90% of the community can't cope, the class does not get played and DEVs go haywire. You do realize what happened to the HW Black mage, right? In case you didn't: SE does not want too much of a gap in between a skilled player and a non skilled one. That's mainly why they simplified the Enochian mechanic.

Not even remotely accurate. You're better than that. You sound like RiyahArp. Cut it out. It doesn't need to be meaningless. It just needs to reward you for making good decisions and stress you for making bad ones. Stress =/= wiping. Stress can be running low on MP, having several members at consistently low HP, etc. Players will try and find their own ways to improve to reduce stress, then you supplement the paradigm with encounter design that builds on itself and keeps a player engaged and learning.

Yes I am familiar with HW BLM. It was a grossly punished job for dropping its buff. They decided that they didn't want jobs to be deadweight if they dropped their buff and made them easier to maintain because Enochian was particularly tedious to maintain. That has very little to do with our discussion.

You wouldn't be 'grossly punished' for not using lilies optimally. You wouldn't be grossly punished for being poor at MP management. Enochian was an on/off switch which is why it was so punishing. MP management and lilies would be dynamic which inherently makes them less punishing, but in the same vein they give clear feedback as to areas you can improve in the moment.

To be honest though: I find the FF-XIV community is far more obsessed about DPS than the WoW community. Apparently one does not need ingame parsing addons in order to breed this fixation on DPS at all. :P

IMO - its because it's forbidden. I know we've previously discussed this at length, but in my experience, no one really talks about DPS in WoW anymore. Sure they did back in the day, but its common knowledge now where everyone can see theirs and yours so there's no need to tell someone they're awful. They can see it with their own eyes.

I think if parsers were made official and widespread there'd be a brief period of pain before it normalizes (harassers get punished and banned) and things go back to the way they were. My .02.

[Remedi]

This reminds me of that guild where I was who insisted that bringing 3 healers in there was the only way to do them........

[Granyala]

Considering that I am a mana-god (WHM :P ) and the fact that mobs hit like wet noodles with serious self esteem issues.

Erm... I can heal them until the 90 Minute timer expires.

So, yes: there is absolutely -0- feedback in the game for DPS to "up their game if they want them lootz™". They just get dragged along by the collar if necessary.
Unless they enter extreme or savage. Then they get hit by a brick wall of difficulty, because apparently the DEVs of MMOs are incapable of using the vast territory of difficulties that lie in between the two extremes. <_<

[Remedi]

tbf They did add a "DPS race" to the final boss of fractal hard, though admittedly it's very hard to mess it up, but that's not something that a better tuning can't fix

[KaldeaSahaline]

I get four or more people responding to me on posts sometimes, each with multiple points. I cull my responses so I'm not writing massive books each time I make a post.

Oh I understand trust me (i'm probably this forums worst offender in that regard).


That being said, you still haven't acknowledged it. Please go back and read it and respond. I'd appreciate it. You're being hypocritical by not responding to something you specifically asked for, and it makes me question your intent of the discussion. You're either invested and have something to say about it, or you're intentionally being inflammatory. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt (which is infinitely more generous than other posters here give you), please respect that.

It depends on the implementation of course but healing is difficult enough for most people. If you now design the classes in a way that a healer can acutally f*** up in a different manner than "forget to heal", you will make it harder for a lot of people that are already at their limit.

People like you and me would most likely cope and maybe eventually like the changes.
Though I do not want to be weak as a healer, WoW did that and it feels utterly frustrating, I play a hero damn it I want to be strong and powerful and not constantly go "yeah you just gimped, sorry, meaningful heals are on CD, nothing I can do now".

In WoW, most of the time, the only thing I can say as a healer is "You are not supposed to take so much damage, play better if you do not want to die". That sucks. Here, I just toss more healing, take the hit on DPS and save incompetent butts (within reason). Feels much better. :P

I don't know that I agree that most healers are at their limit. I think that if my model was implemented well the nature of healing would lend well to it. Much better than a bursty pass/fail model. I think that's much more stressful to your average healer because there's no chance for recovery. It's simply press Heal here, or someone dies, whereas my model a healer with slower reactions might struggle to top them off, but can at least stabilize them. In the event things go awry they can blow significant MP to help get things under control at a cost to their longevity. Something that the DPS can then back up and help cover (assuming encounter design shifted, which under my model it would). I think it gives them more time to make decisions and more options in how to triage various scenarios.

tbf They did add a "DPS race" to the final boss of fractal hard, though admittedly it's very hard to mess it up, but that's not something that a better tuning can't fix

Very hard? It's near impossible. I don't know a single person who has EVER died to it. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, that'd be stupid. I'm saying that statistically speaking, I'd be willing to put money on it (even with this playerbase) that it would be considered a statistically insignificant amount of failures.

DPS checks need to be organic and they need to be less pass/fail and have more dynamic consequences. Not boring/binary stuff like vuln stacks/one shots. They also don't need to be at the end of the fight, they can be in the middle, beginning, etc. They can even put competing DPS checks at the same time, forcing you to make a decision between which one to try for and have supplemental mechanics that prevent it from being a binary decision.