Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[RiyahArp]

Riyah - You claim no one ever posts any ideas for alternative solutions, but when someone does you ignore it? Why did you ignore my responses to you?

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.

This revisionist history stuff is silly. If you don't like WoW, that's fine. Claiming it's a bad game and got lucky because reasons is nonsense. By any objective measure, WoW is the most successfull MMO ever made by an order of magnitude. You have to do something right to be that successful.

PC gaming over the WoW era increased due to accessible broadband, and internet use in general boomed over that period. And yeah, it was popular, a lot of the consoles then had success because they could port pc games and copied them; Xbox in particular. And WoW is a bad game, because all those decisions destroyed what people liked about MMOs and replaced them with stuff that was inferior. And i feel the genre never recovered from that, because not all games can focus on convenience and survive. WoW is the Fallout 4 of MMOs.

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.

Gear Ilvls rose enough to trivialize both. In a week most people jumped 20 ilvls, and people had no choice but to throw themselves at Shin. Weeping could just be ignored after an initial clear, like I said; it was actually better to do hunts because you could gear up faster. but I do remember both being unpleasant enough that if for some reason they had been harder, would have been a nasty experience for everyone.

We also have a pretty good upper limit to what people can't adapt to, zurvan ex and soar. All the raiders went on and on about how easy it was, but it was a nasty affair in general.

[Zojha]

PC gaming over the WoW era increased due to accessible broadband, and internet use in general boomed over that period.

And why exactly did people go to WoW with their new PCs and internet, rather than to the games that were supposedly better...?

The old games were already established. They were already well known and didn't need as much marketing efforts, they already had friend circles playing that the new guard could join and their product had more time to mature and develop, with less bugs and server outages. Yet, people went for WoW. Because it's worse. That just doesn't quite make sense.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Gear Ilvls rose enough to trivialize both. In a week most people jumped 20 ilvls, and people had no choice but to throw themselves at Shin. Weeping could just be ignored after an initial clear, like I said; it was actually better to do hunts because you could gear up faster. but I do remember both being unpleasant enough that if for some reason they had been harder, would have been a nasty experience for everyone.

We also have a pretty good upper limit to what people can't adapt to, zurvan ex and soar. All the raiders went on and on about how easy it was, but it was a nasty affair in general.

Spoken like someone who never ran Weeping City when it was relevant. The mechanics were never trivialized week one. Even several months in, people were still struggling because you couldn't just burn Forgale or Ozma. They forced you to pay attention. Likewise, you were not jumping 20 ilvls unless you're playing an alt job. As for Shinryu, having to throw themselves at him has no bearing on the argument. Granyala cited, when people are opposed with an obstacle, they cry until its nerfed. Why weren't Shinryu, Ozma and Nidhogg nerfed then? All three cause plenty of backlash—Shinryu even being mentioned on a Kotaku article. Evidently, some people sucked it up and got better.

Don't omit context. Zurvan EX had numerous flaws in design, hence its criticism. They were...

- Five DPS was always superior. The OT had virtually nothing to do.
- Skipping Soar was essentially "do your opener". The fact people couldn't shows how poor such information is relayed to players in this game.
- If you did skip Soar, Zurvan did essentially nothing except autos until 50%

Skip Soar or disband may have become popular for meme-ing, however Zurvan had numerous design flaws—something the devs even acknowledged was due to an inexperienced designer.

[DrWho2010]

- Skipping Soar was essentially "do your opener". The fact people couldn't shows how poor such information is relayed to players in this game.

I mean tool tips can only take you so far. The devs aren't going to hold your hand and say "to do a proper burst opener follow this rotation". This is an MMO, you're supposed to discuss with your fellow players and the community at large to figure that out.

[Hestzhyen]

I mean tool tips can only take you so far. The devs aren't going to hold your hand and say "to do a proper burst opener follow this rotation". This is an MMO, you're supposed to discuss with your fellow players and the community at large to figure that out.

That's all well and good but the vast majority of content in this game will not require you to perform well. Unless you're going into the latest Savage or Ex fights within a few months of release, you could be doing terribly and still get rewarded with a clear (provided your healer is healing and the tank is at least trying to hold aggro). People get a rude awakening with fights like release Shinryu NM because you can't just Netflix and chill through the whole thing, you have to actually pay attention and try. At that point they feel frustrated and blind-sided because the game never forced that on them before. For those of us who do the hard content and have already sought out how to be good at what we do, it's no big deal. For the people who have no interest in high-end content, it's a rude awakening because not once has the game even hinted that they might want to seek self-improvement. You just get echo stacks until you brute force your way through it with stats.

SE should do a better job of telling DPS players how they're doing. What standards to use, and how to do it, are definitely up for debate. But there needs to be more feedback beyond eventually killing your target before everyone dies of old age.

[RiyahArp]

SE should do a better job of telling DPS players how they're doing. What standards to use, and how to do it, are definitely up for debate. But there needs to be more feedback beyond eventually killing your target before everyone dies of old age.

The feedback is failing.

I mean, the DPS cause a wipe due to not enough dps and fail an encounter. Thats it. There isn't really much other way to get that feedback. And on this you really depend on the patience of others to ensure the failing isn't negative enough to turn people off the game. It's not a risk that is easy to take, especially now that console mmos aren;t a captive market and many other types of mmo games exist.

[Hestzhyen]

The feedback is failing.

Only really applies to duties with enrage timers and punishing DPS checks. You won't encounter them outside of Savage and EX for the most part, so why shouldn't players just keep being terrible since most things die eventually anyway? The only ones who really suffer for mistakes in dungeons, normal 8 man raids, trials, and 24 man raids are tanks and healers. Tanks who run out of CDs, healers who run out of mana, both who run out of emergency buttons... DPS just keep plugging away and complain when the tank dies and everyone else goes down like dominoes. The game does not tell people to monitor their aggro, read tooltips for use cases, be aware of positional advantages, or even how the targeting circle works. It just plunks you down and lets you go Blizzard things to death for a very long time without punishment. Hall of the Novice, for the little it's worth, is not required either. So we end up with people trying hard end-game fights not knowing some basic stuff like "sing songs at all times" and "know which moves do more damage from flank and rear".

The only pressure to improve DPS face in the majority of content comes from their own motivation. This places the highest visibility and responsibility on tanks and healers. It's not until people try the hard end-game stuff that they have a serious chance of causing a wipe.

[Alleo]

The feedback is failing.

I mean, the DPS cause a wipe due to not enough dps and fail an encounter.

And how can they truly fail if the second DD and the healer and tank can carry one really bad DD through everything in normal content? Most of the dungeons that I saw failing happened thanks to an undergeared tank or a really bad healer. A bad DD makes it often just longer and I cant remember any tight DPS check in SB dungeons. You only fail as an DD when the tank is bad, the healer is only healing and the other DD is bad too. But more often you will have situations where you simply drag that one bad DD with you and everyone has to put in more effort to clear. Because as long as healers and tanks have time to DPS too, the DDs will never have to be at least good to finish normal content.

[KisaiTenshi]

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.

Nobody on the forum has the attention span to read a novel, so the longer your post, the more likely someone will want to argue that one thing that you didn't think was important enough to elaborate on by suggesting you've never played the game. I had actually written a munch longer post in response to the WoW statement but decided that nobody would read it...

And why exactly did people go to WoW with their new PCs and internet, rather than to the games that were supposedly better...?

The old games were already established. They were already well known and didn't need as much marketing efforts, they already had friend circles playing that the new guard could join and their product had more time to mature and develop, with less bugs and server outages. Yet, people went for WoW. Because it's worse. That just doesn't quite make sense.

Wow's popularity had more to do with broadband yes, but the fact that it was casual-friendly, if not braindead easy is why people dragged their friends to it. It's very hard to drag a friend to a grindy (FFXI), expensive (Korean MMO's), punishing (Wizrdry's permadeath), PvP-oriented game. But you can drag your non-gaming friends into WoW because you can skip all the content and not be behind for 10 years.

Each country is not the vacuum everyone makes it out to be. There's three major markets, Korea, Japan and US.

Korea has many MMO's that westerners may recognize like NexusTK, Maple Story, Mabinogi, Dragon Nest, Ragnarok Online, Lineage, Guild Wars, Tera, Blade and Soul, Aion, Archeage, and so forth.

Japan's MMO's have largely made no inroads to the west (largely due to arrogance https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...japanese-games ), with only FFXI and FFXIV being present, despite foreign players wanting to play Wizardy Online (which briefly was here as a freemium P2W game), Dragon Quest X, and PSO2.

In the west, WoW is popular but it's not exported to Japan, as Japanese players are not big PC game players. There are localized versions for Korea and China however.

Europe, Runescape was a UK MMO. Minecraft was from a Swedish developer, who later sold it to Microsoft. EVE Online is from Iceland. Everything else I could find for Europe was mobile P2W rubbish. Of these, these games Minecraft's popularity explosion was like WoW's, it offers a casual environment that can be played with a low-spec computer and even works on mobile and consoles.

Sony before dumping all it's MMO's, was working on Everquest Next (later, before being canceled, Landmark) which was a much prettier Minecraft as a MMORPG. It's kindof a pity it was canceled because the resource gathering in that game put all existing MMO's gathering "nodes" to shame. But this is what some companies thought people wanted... a pretty minecraft, not "a casual friendly game free of grindy combat"

[Tridus]

A Savage like dungeon would be cool. Maybe they could do Aurum Vale Savage? JK, but maybe not lol.

I can already hear the howls of outrage.

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.

It's a soft check, as is the one in Hells Lid. But you know what? The fact that it exists is itself a step up. No other expert in Stormblood has one at all. A tank and a healer can do Kugane Castle as a duo just fine, albeit slower.

Dungeon ones are also heavily influenced by what kind of group you get paired up with. A pure healer, a tank who never leaves tank stance, and a BLM who doesn't understand how to use Enochian are going to make the job of that other DPS player significantly more difficult, and those three likely won't even realize they're the ones doing something wrong because the game does nothing to surface that information.

So the difficulty with tuning this is that if you want the DPS floor to clear the place to be X (for DPS) and Y (for the tank), that means all three are at that level and the healer isn't factored in at all (as they've said). Get a savage purple parsing healer in that group and suddenly a DPS can be nowhere near X but still clear just fine. In another group they may fail it entirely, and that player has no idea why.

It also can't take comp into account because DF will give you all kinds of suboptimal comps. Those need to be able to clear it if the players play reasonably well. So a optimal group will destroy it and probably wonder how it's possible to fail.

So, I mean, I think having a DPS check like they added in dungeons is a good thing. Maybe the next ones are tuned a bit tighter, but it's a step in the right direction. By itself it can't exactly solve the problem.