Ultimate hiatus feedback

[Remedi]

There's no correlation to the servers being dead and another ultimate, the time spent by the combat team is not that much since they already have most of the assets ready for the battle.

[Ayer2015]

There's no correlation to the servers being dead and another ultimate, the time spent by the combat team is not that much since they already have most of the assets ready for the battle.

It very much does. the types of content SE is developing isn't keeping players engaged. That is a problem.

[IttyBitty]

It very much does. the types of content SE is developing isn't keeping players engaged. That is a problem.

That has more to do with SE's overall content design philosophy than Ultimate. It's not like not having Ultimate would suddenly make other content more engaging, since this was happening before Ultimate even existed.

[Remedi]

@Ayer2015 That is a more broad problem and not really related to ultimate. Ultimate is more engaging to raiders and some have found use of previously never though areas.

Now it only goes to a certian portion of the playerbase k, fair enough but nothing stops you to try so long you defeat the final tier of savage which will become easier.

What you refer to is a problem of the rest of the content ans that needs fixing I don't see why they could not fix both tbh.

[Nestama]

All that we've been getting less of lately is just dungeons, right? Otherwise we've been getting the same stuff (plus more) ever since ARR? That seems like a fair exchange for Ultimate, assuming Ultimate is the main reason we're getting less (mostly boring) dungeons (that are really all the same since around level 50-60).

I enjoyed watching Ultimate streams and waking up to Tweets saying "we were doing it wrong!" was pretty neat.

[swiss_Momo]

Japanese comment, JP home server. I wonder if the "community feedback" SE is basing the decision on came mainly from the JP community. Anyone able to read Japanese know what the sentiment is like over there?

I don't think I ever saw a thread about it on the JP forum, and there's also nothing about it in their General section too. (There is however an almost 45 pages thread about the "preventive ACT callouts on mechanics" thing.) That said, it's possible that they talk about this on external sites, like blogs, 2ch, futaba ect

Also -1 from me. The attention of the 2 devs that do the Ultimate fights is better spend elsewhere during the final pre-expansion patch

[Remedi]

Such as? That's the problem there's nothing they've said will come in place also 2 devs won't make or break something pls.....

[DDkiki]

All that we've been getting less of lately is just dungeons, right? Otherwise we've been getting the same stuff (plus more) ever since ARR? That seems like a fair exchange for Ultimate, assuming Ultimate is the main reason we're getting less (mostly boring) dungeons (that are really all the same since around level 50-60).

I enjoyed watching Ultimate streams and waking up to Tweets saying "we were doing it wrong!" was pretty neat.

Or instead of developing another ultimate for 1% of players they can do interesting dungeons with more mechanics(like Vault pre-nerd) and primals for 50+% of the playerbase? And make it standart expirience so the game wouldn't feel like boring faceroll. More midcore stuff. the "in-between" difficulty of raids, same as it was in gordias and midas before, while current story mode stay the same.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Or instead of developing another ultimate for 1% of players they can do interesting dungeons with more mechanics(like Vault pre-nerd) and primals for 50+% of the playerbase? And make it standart expirience so the game wouldn't feel like boring faceroll. More midcore stuff. the "in-between" difficulty of raids, same as it was in gordias and midas before, while current story mode stay the same.

First and foremost, EX Primal numbers are not even close to 50%. In fact, 50% of the playerbase hasn't even finished the MSQ. Second, what preceding examples indicate they will abruptly change dungeon design to be anything beyond a brain dead faceroll? Not a single dungeon in Stormblood compares to The Vault pre-nerf. Regardless, unless dungeons receive a big overhaul, people are simply less inclined to do them. The devs even acknowledged the general perception is they've become boring. If they had a proven track record, at least I could hang my hat on the idea, but they haven't changed dungeon design in years. And this assumes they need to sacrifice Ultimate for yet another dungeon.

[Sebazy]

Or instead of developing another ultimate for 1% of players they can do interesting dungeons with more mechanics(like Vault pre-nerd) and primals for 50+% of the playerbase?

To add onto Bourne's comment, let's also take note that developing an Ultimate turn is going to require a very different team to a Dungeon. (Note, whilst I don't have first hand experience with SE's workflow, I've got experience of my own to call on here, so this isn't vague conjecture).

Lets say that in both cases, we start with our beloved Sudo who will brainstorm and storyboard out concepts, perhaps with the hand of a concept artist or two. At this stage, an Ultimate and Dungeon would be pretty similar with the dungeon having more of an artistic focus whilst Ultimate would lean more towards rougher concepts focusing on how Sudo envisions a party would tackle his mechanics.

From there, things branch out massively. Dungeon design is primarily art, both 2D and 3D. Modern game content requires very substantial teams of artists to get done at any real pace. Meanwhile, Ultimate isn't art heavy at all, you'll get a few new animations and effects with the bulk of the work being a drag and drop away via the CVS. That's not to say that it's free content though as it just isn't. Rather, it needs very significant amounts of QA due to the extensive tuning required to get the balance and difficulty right.

The TLDR here is that both types of content are using different parts of the team, you're not going to draft QA into the world building team on a moments notice and if I had a QA army at my disposal some 20 years ago, I'd like to think that Yoshida has that luxury in 2018. It simply doesn't make economic sense to have content designers doing their own QA beyond the first pass and SE's bean counters have been around long enough to understand this.

Also, to take this tangent and spin it around some.

Riddle me this, what if one side effect of Ultimate and all the testing that it entails is that the QA team gets a much deeper understanding of FFXIV and it's various jobs than they would simply making sure some random dungeon isn't broken? (FFXIV is very unlikely to have it's own dedicated QA, rather it'll be a fairly substantial team that will be testing all manner of random SE games and content) Surely that bodes well for us next expansion as they will be better prepared to help avoid the utter mess many jobs were left in at the release of 4.0.