Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[KisaiTenshi]

I mean, they could limit in combat rezes and make healing more demanding.... just a thought.

I'm aware this will never happen, but one can dream

This argument comes up a lot already.

There's really only three solutions:
1) Make healing hard by making gear irrelevant
2) Make healing hard by making instant-death mechanics every 5 seconds in all content.
3) Make healing hard by changing the healer's kit to cast the "Right" kind of healing (eg specific debuff remover, shield, raw heal), that you can't spam/rotate through, and you can't raw heal through actions requiring a shield or debuff removal.

As it is right now, the healing is only balanced when the content is new, and players have the tomes gear from the previous content patch cycle. Once whatever gear/tomes from the current cycle replaces it, it's again a push over, and on all older content, your healing is so pointless that you can play many of the pre-50 dungeons without any healing because the auto-heal exists. Damage in 2.0 to a tank would take a tank down 40% in 2.0 content, now it goes down like 5%, right within the realm of auto-heal.

[RiyahArp]

Nerfing healers simply is going to make it impossible to fix mistakes. If healing is more involved and less potent, if the DPS stands in the fire the healer won't be able to save them; they have to save GCDs for the tank and their rotation is too strict to modify it except at certain times. It also means when the healer wipes, its a wipe period, because the other healer also can't adapt and the content needs two of you doing your rotation to succeed now.

A lot of the potency and quick healing is because you really need to have that to fix a mistake. You need huge potency instant heals because sometimes the dps eats an attack that takes off 75% of their HP and a followup aoe is coming. You need instant raises because you don't have time to hardcast them usually. Overhealing in general enables good healers to spend gcds into dps and soften the dps burden some. And healers really are the only class that can fix mistakes to any real extent; everyone else is too limited, especially when its direct damage or status effects.

I really wish people would just STFU about making things harder, because it would ruin healing in this game. There's no way healers are going to like having a gimped healset with encounter designs that routinely bring people down to 25% health on mistake, and have constant movement and damage. Old MMO healing generally was much less mobile, much more slower paced, and with much less of a tight player limit.

[SaitoHikari]

As for blitzball, I do not understand the worry that Yoshida have. Players will play it once and be done with it?! Then what he plans? We have Fifa and similar sport games that are released EVERY SINGLE YEAR for YEARS now. And those games sell FAST when they are released. The same people buy them time and again and spend hundreds of hours on them. And they are exactly what a blitzball would be. A team-based ball game. Only the rules are different.
Just make sure the play is smooth, the rules are clear, the characters are reasonably balanced and that there is a ranking of sorts, and there may be people playing nothing but blitzball whenever they log into the game. Heck, if they put actual effort into it, there could be people that would buy Final Fantasy XIV ONLY for blitzball. Seriously, sport games are the very first kind of multiplayer games in human history. It is the exact thing that is PERFECT for an MMO. And he worries that it's not suitable?!

You are vastly over-estimating the amount of people that actually care about Blitzball. The FIFA comparison matters little when they're modeled after actual sports and teams, with the main appeal being creating fantasy teams/scenarios. There's virtually no overlap with the FF community there.

[kikix12]

You are vastly over-estimating the amount of people that actually care about Blitzball. The FIFA comparison matters little when they're modeled after actual sports and teams, with the main appeal being creating fantasy teams/scenarios. There's virtually no overlap with the FF community there.

I'm not over-estimating people that care about blitzball. I make no estimation after all.

You may or may not believe it, but people WILL be attracted to fantasy sports IF they are well made. And this is what I am saying. If they make a GOOD blitzball, it will have massive replay value like every single other sport game out there, from racing games, through fighting games all the way to...yeah...team sports like soccer or basketball. If they'll give it the mini-game treatment that is to be made and forgotten, aka. make it with linear advancement and little to no strategy, then it'll be dead on arrival. It's not blitzball itself that matters here. It's the idea of a ball game played in three dimensions with special moves attached. Heck, original blitzball was two-dimensional. BUT the special moves are what makes it.

You may not know it, but there are multiple LARGE franchises that just that. A small variation on sport games known to man with added super moves. Look at Technos games (Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey Bu: Subette Koronde Dairantō, Kunio-kun no Nekketsu Soccer League, Nekketsu Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes and some other), Inazuma Eleven franchise, Blood Bowl 1 and 2. Blitzball is the very same concept. Taking something that is well known (a team-based game where the goal is to put the ball inside a specific area, goalpost), with specific rules for handling it (only with legs, only with hands, only by dribbling etc., with or without contact allowed etc.) and adding a non-realistic element (violent or outright impossible attacks that would cause long-term damage or death in real life). The concept is both simple and fun. It's all in the design. It can be crap or "the new best thing". I'm a realist so I don't expect it to be more than a fun little time-waster here or there for most players in the best case scenario. But that doesn't mean that blitzball itself is an inherently flawed concept that cannot be popular. It can. It's just that it will not be nearly fleshed out enough to have the chance for that.

[Zojha]

Nerfing healers simply is going to make it impossible to fix mistakes.

That's partially the point.

When a healer can easily fix a mistake and a piece of content is not supposed to allow for many mistakes, then you need to prevent healers from being able to fix them. And instant-wipe is the hard form of that, instant death the soft form, because they bypass heals and only allow raises, which are more costly. Those are the two most common, but any measure you take will have to be aimed at healers here.

That has no bearing on how many mistakes a content may allow or how hard a content is. Even if you have no healers at all, a content may allow a lot of mistakes when mistakes simply deal very little damage.
Imagine you have 1000 HP, no means to restore it and the boss only deals damage if you make a mistake. At 1000 damage, you cannot make a mistake, at 500 damage you can make one, at 100 damage you can make nine and at 1 damage you can make a thousand mistakes (minus one).
Now imagine you have 1000 HP and your healer can restore a total of 5000 HP, then he goes OOM and cannot fix anymore mistakes. How many mistakes can you make now? With 1000 damage, you still can't make any. At 500 damage, you can make 11. At 100 damage, you can make 59. At 1 damage, you can make 5999.
Tuning with healers is actually a lot more iffy than without, especially with mana regeneration and all that jazz in the mix.

Another thing is that the weaker healers are, the less damage you can give your encounters, which in turn makes the party rely on them less. Example:
You have a health pool of 30k. The encounter assumes that your healer will heal you for 10k every GCD and thus deals 10k damage every GCD. How long do you survive without a healer? 2 GCDs.
Now assume the encounter assumes your healer will only heal 2k every GCD and appropriately lower the damage to 2k a GCD. How long do you survive now? 14 GCDs.
And if the damage is only 2k and healers can still heal for 10k? Then the healer is just going to be inactive for 4 GCDs. That's expert roulette.
This is actually why VIT accessories are so completely worthless - Like 99% of your health as tank comes from the healer, not your base health pool. There's no point increasing it, it doesn't make you survive any longer, you'll have long hit enrage before the healers run dry and your VIT gets its 1 autoattack of fame.

The stronger healers are, the faster health is going to move in either direction. You can see that in the first example: If you want to allow roughly 10 mistakes, the scenario without healers is going to take chunks of about 10% of your health bar for each. The scenario with healers instead takes about half of your health bar with every mistake for the same effect.

This game is pretty extreme on healer power and damage thus very spiky and burst heavy. It's similar in PvP, where healers make damage that doesn't come in bursts trivial and shift the meta to focused CC and burst.

That said, though... I must admit I also can't imagine the game working if healing (and thus encounter design) got re-designed. Not because of anything healer related, but because there'd be less group DPS to compensate for Yoshida's completely outlandish expectations towards DPS players.

[KisaiTenshi]

You are vastly over-estimating the amount of people that actually care about Blitzball. The FIFA comparison matters little when they're modeled after actual sports and teams, with the main appeal being creating fantasy teams/scenarios. There's virtually no overlap with the FF community there.

Eh, it's more of a take-it-or-leave-it. If it's a really really good implementation, it would require doing things in a way that just doesn't work with a MMO setting.

Like the most obvious way to make it "fun" without it being just another "venture" like squadrons and retainers were, would be to take a page from the Chocobo racing mechanics and have a "separate" game space from which it's played and "broadcast" if you will. You don't get to play the actual players, you're more like the coach, calling specific plays from a playbook. Implementations more like that of FIFA/NHL/NBA games can not be done primarily because those are real-time games, and a real sports game takes a minimum of an hour to play. That is just too long for the 20-minutes tops we get with other content. Also MMO players are not that audience, and we don't want that kind of audience in a MMO game, because that creates the type of feature creep where the game client has code for something awesome and complex, but also is neglected by all but 100 people in the game after everyone tried it and got the trophy.

Nerfing healers simply is going to make it impossible to fix mistakes.

Some people believe that they are healers-only, thus without there being stakes to "doing nothing", healers end up becoming an extra DPS, and that is broken gameplay. That wiggle room should not exist, but it only exists because the gear stats-creep tends to mean 4 or 8 players need less healing, rather than the healer does more healing. Hence, the only solutions to making healing as intensive as tanking would require lowering the window for mistakes to be rectified, or be more reactive to circumstances, or nerfing gear to be pointless.

As pointed out in the -many- "to dps or not to dps" threads involving healers, healers do not have enough to do -always-. Even when content is new, that wiggle room exists, as it ages, players pick the most lazy and ineffective strategy (cast regen, do nothing else) because there is nothing else for that role to do, because the game makes no requirement to be reactive in anything but extreme/savage. It would be one thing if more content had "heal the idiot NPC" type of mechanics, it's another where "the DPS are taken out of the arena, and only the tank and healer can release them, simultaneously", and we just don't see mechanics that make the healer do anything but run away when targeted.

Like in a traditional RPG (eg pen and paper) your GM would adapt to idiotic and lazy gameplay. One way of making the Healer do more work is by attaching consequences to not paying attention. We see that with half dozen versions of Doom/Death. Some of the 24-player content is so busy that you can miss things, and I'd argue that the 24-player content is actually the best content in the game for healers, because it does not let you "do nothing", there is always going to be something that you can do because the mechanics often require paying attention to the field and other players. On the opposite side of this, most of the 8-player content has no balance once players have out-geared it, and it's a choreographed dance once you remember the how it goes. The 4-player content is a mixed bag, and as Yoshi-P stated, has no instant-death mechanics, so there is never any reason for a wipe other than people not paying attention.

[LastFireAce]

He no wrong regarless how Blitzball get released we gonna hate on it.

[kikix12]

(...)it would require doing things in a way that just doesn't work with a MMO setting.

Go on. I'd like to know why it wouldn't work well with MMO setting. You seem to have the same idea as Yoshida in this respect, while I'm completely puzzled as to why, so go ahead and explain what part of a multiplayer game is not fit for an MMO game.

You don't get to play the actual players, you're more like the coach, calling specific plays from a playbook.

Strategy games are actually a really horrible implementation.
1) There is close to no interaction between players. This is as far from an MMO as a game can be. Even when playing against another player, you won't be able to tell the difference between them and an AI.
2) Strategy games have no "middle zone". Either players love them or hate them. And there are more players that do not like playing them than otherwise. Doubly so for all those "Tycoon" style of games. Games where players directly control the characters have a lot of middle zone. I really dislike sport games, including racing games, but I actually quite like a certain racing game, there is also a football game of which I played a demo a long time ago that I wish I'd have gotten it to play. I won't be touching a simulator. Ever.

Implementations more like that of FIFA/NHL/NBA games can not be done primarily because those are real-time games, and a real sports game takes a minimum of an hour to play. That is just too long for the 20-minutes tops we get with other content.

You know that this does have no sense, right?! Football/soccer takes 90 minutes of game time + breaks + extension...professionally. It takes what, 30 minutes at Physical Education in school?! And we're talking about a real life game playing in real life here. And blitzball is...well...it's yet to be even made. Isn't it painfully obvious that it could take even five minutes only if the developers decided that?! There is absolutely zero of anything that would make a "real-time game" take at least an hour or more.

By the way, you do realize that this very game is exactly that...A real-time game...right?! Basically, you say that this game is impossible to make as an MMO, even though...it is already here...Like many other in fact.


Also...there are instant-death mechanics in 4-man dungeons. Temple of Qarn on first boss (but one could argue the bees and wasps as well) and The Wanderers Palace last boss are examples off the top of my head. They are rarer and rather easy to deal with normally...though there were times I partied with people that CONSTANTLY died to the first boss of Qarn even after being told exactly what to do and when.

[Tridus]

I'm not over-estimating people that care about blitzball. I make no estimation after all.

You may or may not believe it, but people WILL be attracted to fantasy sports IF they are well made.

"Ultimate Static Manager" would be hilariously meta as an in game fantasy sport.

[RiyahArp]

That has no bearing on how many mistakes a content may allow or how hard a content is. Even if you have no healers at all, a content may allow a lot of mistakes when mistakes simply deal very little damage.

That's generally not a good model to have, because now you need to expand the encounter time dramatically to compensate for it, and you'd end up with original steps of faith, where the fight can be lost with no way to compensate for it until the clock winds down. You'd also end up with the problem of overwatch, in where you need a healer, but the healer actually can't do anything much to compensate for the group and requires the group to act in unison and perfectly, while still getting blamed and hated a lot for failing.

There's also no real skillful healer play in saving people allowed, and no requirement for them at all if the burden is low enough; just have tanks put down a regen over time aura or or something, and remove the class.

That said, though... I must admit I also can't imagine the game working if healing (and thus encounter design) got re-designed. Not because of anything healer related, but because there'd be less group DPS to compensate for Yoshida's completely outlandish expectations towards DPS players.

DPS could be adjusted easily, its just target numbers over time. Reduce health of mobs. Issue to me is that most people would bow out of being healers, because you at least with most things being dps, you can just skip the gps gcd if you struggle and heal. The less potency and more gcds to heal, the harder it gets because each one counts much more.

As pointed out in the -many- "to dps or not to dps" threads involving healers, healers do not have enough to do -always-. Even when content is new, that wiggle room exists, as it ages, players pick the most lazy and ineffective strategy (cast regen, do nothing else) because there is nothing else for that role to do, because the game makes no requirement to be reactive in anything but extreme/savage. It would be one thing if more content had "heal the idiot NPC" type of mechanics, it's another where "the DPS are taken out of the arena, and only the tank and healer can release them, simultaneously", and we just don't see mechanics that make the healer do anything but run away when targeted.

Like in a traditional RPG (eg pen and paper) your GM would adapt to idiotic and lazy gameplay. One way of making the Healer do more work is by attaching consequences to not paying attention. We see that with half dozen versions of Doom/Death. Some of the 24-player content is so busy that you can miss things, and I'd argue that the 24-player content is actually the best content in the game for healers, because it does not let you "do nothing", there is always going to be something that you can do because the mechanics often require paying attention to the field and other players. On the opposite side of this, most of the 8-player content has no balance once players have out-geared it, and it's a choreographed dance once you remember the how it goes. The 4-player content is a mixed bag, and as Yoshi-P stated, has no instant-death mechanics, so there is never any reason for a wipe other than people not paying attention.

I don't think people really would like this. Make healers busy enough and they get overloaded and stop; healing stress is something that generally is comparable to tanking stress, but in this game is much less. You'd have to improve this without singling out healers, which I feel is what 4 man hard content does.