What Happened to Customization & Specialization?

[SendohJin]

If you design the enviroments within the game well then it becomes incredibly difficult to have that one mandatory skill set or build set.. And then the choice is real it's not an illusion.

Every instance where the "choice is real" in an MMO that i've experienced, the playerbase ends up making the choice with the players. Many FFXI choices were real, so many guilds end up choosing to NOT bring X jobs to Y content.

[Eloah]

I personally always thought the system was going to be, "once you reach a certain level you can use that role skill" no slotting needed. When I saw it was only 5 slots I was like, "well that seems dumb"

[Eloah]

Also as stated, the illusion of choice is exactly what is needed, illusions. Like give spells and abilities a new coat of paint. Like make WHM cast Water spells instead of stone, use Blizzard for you big damage, something to that effect. Basically, expand on the Egi-glamour system... no seriously we need more Egi skins, lol.

[LineageRazor]

Customisation in the form of additional abilities is very much a case of the illusion of choice. There's quite a few abilities that are a 'must have' and are objectively much better than their counterparts, so by allowing everybody to access the entire list the overall game is more balanced.

In-depth customisation for abilities works much better in single player games rather than in multi-player games where the expectation is going to be to use the 'best' abilities for the sake of efficiency.

Customization doesn't HAVE to be an illusion of choice. While it's certainly the case that the hardcore parsers will eventually work out what combos are optimal, so long as the variance in potential is small it won't stop them from participating in content. It's the same reason why (most) raid groups allow job variance: while certain jobs might be better for certain fights, they all do well enough that turning away, say, a MNK to hold out for a DRG is rarely done and considered petty when it happens.

The potential is there to allow deep job customization without everyone turning to the same cookie-cutter build, for precisely the same reasons that not everybody plays the same jobs in the existing game. The individual mechanics of each job appeal in different ways to different people. With a system of customization, different job builds would appeal in different ways to different people. So long as all those builds are viable, there is still choice.

The danger is that the greater the level of customization there is to be had, the more potential there is for a player to "screw things up" and wind up with a build that is NOT viable. To avoid this, there are three options: They could allow the playerbase to sink or swim, let the folks learn that they'll get nowhere with a nonviable build (FFXI did this). They could endlessly tweak abilities to try to keep everything even, or at the very least shuffle around which build was on top at any given time (FFXI AND FFXIV have done this). Or, they could reduce the amount of customization available, so that there are only a few builds to tweak at any given time (FFXIV's chosen path). The last of those three is the easiest, and upsets the fewest players - at the expense of creating a fairly bland playing field where everyone is pretty much the same.

FFXIV, ever since the disaster with version 1.0, has shied away from taking chances, so it's not surprising at all that they took the easy road. Options for customization have been getting fewer and fewer over time, and I expect that this trend will continue. It would not surprise me to see the whole Materia system disappear eventually, for example - though that one's so deeply entrenched in the game that it might be more effort than it's worth to remove, just to protect players from melding Spell Speed onto their Dsciple of War gear (it'll make my Ninjutsu faster, right???).

[Dzian]

Every instance where the "choice is real" in an MMO that i've experienced, the playerbase ends up making the choice with the players. Many FFXI choices were real, so many guilds end up choosing to NOT bring X jobs to Y content.

As much as I loved XI it had some major environmental issues that meant many of its choices simply weren't real or even considered an option..

My earlier example of elements again comes to mind. A SMN, BLM or RDM putting merits into fire or water for example just wasn't an option simply because if you ever looked at the bestiary you'd note that virtually nothing was weak to those elements. 90 maybe 95% of mobs were weak to either ice or thunder thus those were the only choices for merits.

This was also true with damage types such as piercing, slashing and blunt. Virtually everything shared the exact same resistances and weaknesses which then meant jobs that didn't utilise them were considered inferior..

Another was TP. The primary reason many pet classes were shunned and undesirable was because of the massive amounts of TP pets fed to the monsters you were fighting which in turn made those fights harder. You could see this with Dragoon. Piercing damage which was ideal for many mobs in the toau areas. But the TP issue from there pet made them a lot less desirable. And groups would rather take a samurai with a lower polearm skill instead.

Another issue casters faced was the amount of mobs that would either throw your magic back in your face or silence you every 2 seconds made them a undesirable choice at the higher levels. Because the reflected damage made it even harder for the party and the endless silence was crippling.

The jobs them selves though were generally fine and you could do some amazing things with many of them. Monk made a pretty solid tank at 55 when you got counter stance. Samurai was in many cases a better tank than ninja with seigan anticipate an attack that would strip all your shadows..

Many Sub jobs combinations could have been great if they simply scaled properly.. especially the caster ones... cure 1 or even cure 2 on a level 75 player was a joke... some decent scaling of such would have many many more sub choices actually work... the same with subs like thief SATA would have been more viable if it worked with a greater variety of skills for example.

It was the game environment and world mechanics that created many of the problems not so much the jobs themselves..

There were however genuinely questionable skills and abilities. Such as zanashin and the merits to increase zanashin rate.... an ability that offered a chance to attack again if you missed. But there was no logic there because no one would ever build around missing attacks enough to benefit from enhancing zanashin.

But yeah many of XIs choices could have been better simply with some environmental changes.. If you stopped pets feeding mobs so much TP for example drgs would have almost instantly become a lot more popular and viable choice.. So would SMN PUP and hell even BST all from a simple environmental change.

Same goes for for casters. If bestiary was better balanced and more diverse in terms of weaknesses. Casters would have had a legitimate choice to put merits into water potency or wind potency... another environmental change..

A good environment would make his or must haves almost impossible

[Freyt]

I mean I've played MMO's where BIS isn't really a thing. There are good choices and bad choices. Things that work and things that don't work.

And I'm sure a number of people here have played those same MMO's and have forgotten what that's like. Or maybe these people have simply followed the "meta" without ever thinking of challenging it or being challenged with it.

[LineageRazor]

There were however genuinely questionable skills and abilities. Such as zanashin and the merits to increase zanashin rate.... an ability that offered a chance to attack again if you missed. But there was no logic there because no one would ever build around missing attacks enough to benefit from enhancing zanashin.

Zanashin's value was in the fact that FFXI put a cap on accuracy. No matter how you built your character, the best accuracy you could manage was 95%. Zanashin was the only way to BREAK that 95% blockade, since a percentage of those inevitable missed attacks would get a second chance. Additionally, certain mobs in the game could use evasion buffs that were pretty serious - Zanashin helped with additional attack chances in those cases, too.

I'm not saying that this necessarily made it worth the resource investment, but unlike in this game misses were unavoidable, and therefore had to be taken into consideration. Zanashin helped mitigate that.

[Shurrikhan]

Customisation in the form of additional abilities is very much a case of the illusion of choice. There's quite a few abilities that are a 'must have' and are objectively much better than their counterparts, so by allowing everybody to access the entire list the overall game is more balanced.

In-depth customisation for abilities works much better in single player games rather than in multi-player games where the expectation is going to be to use the 'best' abilities for the sake of efficiency.

No more so -- necessarily -- than job choice, minus the limit gauge gimmick...

The additional abilities in XIV have wholly amounted to illusion of choice, but that's an issue with implementation, not an inherent flaw.

For now, though, I'm glad to see Role Action swapping gone. That stuff couldn't even manage the illusion part.

[Odstarva]

It does seem rather... redundant that role actions should exist at all anymore then, isn't it so? I mean, if we can select them all why would we keep them separate from all the other skills?

While I appreciate and welcome the change, I'd rather they just abolished role actions altogether at this point, ahah.

[ElHeggunte]

It does seem rather... redundant that role actions should exist at all anymore then, isn't it so? I mean, if we can select them all why would we keep them separate from all the other skills?

While I appreciate and welcome the change, I'd rather they just abolished role actions altogether at this point, ahah.

They probably will, but this isn’t generally the kind of thing you make such a sweeping change to in the middle of an expansion. It’s better to go halfway with the slot increase and overhaul it later in 5.0.