Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[KisaiTenshi]

Well, now I have what to specifically discuss. So here goes.

This is an issue that all multiplayer games have. Yet playing multiplayer, not necessarily with your neighbors only, is exactly how sport games are played the most. The latency doesn't affect them?! I'm sure it does.

Please show me where there is a MMO-FIFA Online. There isn't.

Sports games was the incentive for "4-player" console designs. You know what's funny, EA FIFA itself introduced a "solo story" campaign. They also only introduced female players in the 2016 years version... you know after having 20 versions without them. FIFA had an "online" game, it never got out of BETA. Instead they came out with a Mobile app, and we all know the kind of rubbish puts out for mobile.

Point is, there is no real way of making a real-time sport game within the confines of the FFXIV engine, nor has there ever been a successful real-time/action game that hasn't been plagued with cheaters and bots. Like just tampering with the nagle algorithm (TcpAckFrequency and TCPNoDelay to 1 in windows) gives you an advantage in MMO games that players may not otherwise have. Living in California or Montreal gives you an advantage or disadvantage depending which data center you're in.

No wonder you don't see it if you just assumed it would be in a very specific way, while completely ignoring the fact that nothing is set in stone. Now, it would be a bit more reasonable if you assumed it would be a faithful representation of blitzball from FFX, but no. Your idea of how it would HAVE to work have nothing in common with it but the name and swimming in a dome, all the while assuming all the worse case scenarios. Sorry, but you are simply overlooking way too many things in the very limited view of sport games you seem to have.
1) There is no reason why it could be played with one person per team.
2) There is no reason why it couldn't have "time stops" for battles, to give few seconds to make decisions.
3) There is no reason why, if there would be teams, it wouldn't depend on those teams logging in. That's how statics work after all.

Nothing is set, at all. You asked, I answered, then you assumed things I had not said. You asked why we couldn't have a real time sports game like FIFA, and that was how I answered it.

There's 4 scenarios

1) There is no player involvement, thus no fun, eg Retainer ventures, squadron missions. It's a collection game.
2) There is single-player vs NPC team, thus being pointless in a MMO context just like Triple Triad vs NPC's. If you want all the rewards you have to find all the players and play it thousands of times.
3) There is 1 on 1, basically "coach" mode where you essentially have a QTE of 3 seconds (same length that QTE for Shinryu is) to tell the player what to do, and the game server has to decide if that is a success or fail depending on issuing a command, ignoring a command, or which command makes sense. Some kind of tournament could be designed around this, but people would just throw it like Verminion to get rewards.
4) There is team vs team, which requires multiple players, just like existing duties, to be formed, but no tournament can be designed around. There's also nothing stopping teams from organizing just to throw it as well here.

It's not simple. There a issues with existing mini-games and existing PvP that need to be addressed, otherwise we're just extending those problems to more content, and that content will get played once and never again by most players, if not ignored entirely.

eg
- Throwing the match needs to be solved (Also a problem in PvP)
- Disconnecting to force a throw of the match needs to be solved
- Bot detection needs to be done (which is a problem in existing PvP)
- Some way of forming "static" teams that can persist beyond one play.

Like the last thing is probably the easiest to solve, but hear me out. There are already FC's and Linkshells in the game. The solution here is for a cross-server "team" being setup/signed up through a draft process like in an actual sports system. You select an "A League" and a "B League" which represent different leagues, of which you want to form a team with. "A Leagues" are cross-server, "B Leagues" are your server only. You start blitzball with no other players and a NPC team to teach you the basics, and it gives you a score of which position it thinks you should play (you can change your mind at this point.) Your draft score ensures that other teams can't just pick every best score either, as there will be a cap (eg can't have a team of all 100's.) On subsequent tournaments your score is re-evaluated if you decide to disband.

Then the game will either assign you to a team where there is a spot open for that position, or you can wait and form a team with other players you know. From that point forward all Blitzball games are played with the same players and matched against teams of the same skill level until tournament time. Then everyone has to be logged on for like 2-4 hours for the tournament to play out, and skipping out, drops your team out of the tournament entirely. If your team was assembled by PUG, then at the beginning and ending of each round you will be asked if you wish to proceed with your existing team and if you say no, the team is dissolved, and your team is withdrawn from the tournament. If someone d/c's, the tournament round will be paused for 5 minutes (timeout), at which point the team with the d/c'd player will get a "replace (player) with a free agent?" prompt and a list of available players online for that position will come up, and their W/L score up to the point they were withdrawn or eliminated from the tournament.

I'm not much of a sports-game player, and I don't really know, or care, how existing sports games deal with multiplayer, but suffice it to say if SE is hellbent on adding every minigame from FF's past to FFXIV, they really need to put more thought into it than the single-player minigames they were derived from. I don't know if these mini games were popular in Japan, but I was someone who ignored all the mini-games in the single-player FF games, primarily because they didn't advance the story. FFX's blitzball was a little different, I didn't care for it, but it was relevant because the main character, and Wakka was supposedly great at it and to get Wakka's final weapon you had to grind through it. I don't see similar rewards coming out of this for FFXIV.

Do we really want another source of grinding for tomes? Or getting "blitzball i375(BiS) gear" ? None of the other minigames give you anything that valuable.