My Long Overdue Eureka Topic

[Aster_E]

Combat, Development, and Story, part II

As I mentioned before, there were chokepoints created around the north-central canyon of death. There were also a few caves with the same dragon right outside.

Its favorite meals include fairies, egis, and the faces of anyone experiencing lag between server ticks.

Let’s take a step back, however. As I mentioned earlier, the story has us scouring the frozen landscape for magicite that are completely drained and cannot be used. In terms of character development, this essentially stagnates growth outside of leveling up and hoping it’s enough. People who want to solo are unable to put additional points into attack or defense. People farming Mutations are unable to compensate for the elemental change without wasting charges on the Magia Board. Above all, it’s a disappointment that makes us ask, “Wait, why are we even risking our butts for so-called disturbances that are just rocks at this point?”

For the first few weeks, the train was effectively dead, derailed in the snow like the end of that one movie I’d rather not spoil more than I already have. The move basically killed Eureka for a lot of people, many of whom still haven’t returned to it. So many folks were forced to beat up even meatier monsters than before, for so little gains, with just as many button presses per minute. It was carpal tunnel syndrome (https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/diseas...nnel-syndrome/) waiting to happen, much like many of us complained regarding the lockboxes in Anemos.

Some monsters have a chance to mutate, and become other monsters with different elemental alignments. They’re worth more light than the plain monsters that didn’t mutate. Oh right, there’s a light grind now, starting at level 25, and it’s totally rng-based in terms of how often you get a tick. Mutations, in addition, have a chance to drop loot, and that loot has a ridiculously high chance at dropping material, as opposed to the drops that might actually interest people (ie., mats for eye clusters to get a Gold rating in one NM encounter, an emote, a minion, etc.).

To level up in Pagos, people discovered that the best method became going back to Anemos and running those Notorious Monsters while filling out the weekly Challenge Log and continuing to socialize in text chat. I often told people to only go to 25if they were to do that, because the light grind starts there, and less time spent on the light grind should be a welcome thing.

Back in Pagos, people were dying to random crap and not getting their raises, even if there was a party a stone’s throw away, because parties that bothered with the chains were too focused on building their chains to 30 in hopes of better exp and light. The social aspect of Eureka ran cold there, because the average player didn’t have the time to say anything without hurting their party’s kill chain combo. Honestly, for this sort of content, monsters needed less health, the chain timer needed not dwindle so quickly at higher numbers, and second parties cutting in to face the same mobs needed to not demolish the same monster’s worth in exp or light. No, really, if one or two come in to fight the same monster then the rewards take a massive dump. Do you remember what I said about the landscape screaming anti-fun? It applied here as well, since it stripped the content of social aspects. Some people did the no-life thing and reached max level this way, and earned a ton of light somehow. “Some people” are in no way the same as the main of your playerbase. Some people also claimed to enjoy Pagos, whereas so many of us did not.

I sure didn’t. Pagos was triggering bad memories I had of the lowest point in my life, due to how closely tied my memories of FFXI leveling was to those days. I swore off Eureka as a whole for a time.

A patch eventually came to improve the exp. of the Notorious Monsters and, at least according to the patch notes, the spawn rate of the NMs. We would discover within the week, thanks to an interview YoshiP had, that the spawnrate increase was a load of crap. Thanks to that same interview, many of us also got a sense of arrogance from YoshiP as he said we needed to learn how to play, rather than complain that this style of gameplay is not to our liking.

Almost pictured: Yoshida in regards to us players

With the experience boost, however, people relaxed their fingers, or rejoined Pagos, and took this opportunity to reform the NM train. A couple people I argued with about Eureka—one of which was partly responsible for forming the original Anemos trains, but totally forgot why that was so successful or happened for people in general—stopped doing Pagos. So many of us hit level 35, but then hit the next little snag in the development of our weapons.

Not the armor, though; the “relic armor” was put on hold without a guarantee to when it would be continued.

We still needed to grind out light for our shoehorned kettles. This meant going back to chaining against monsters. Dragons were more frequent in ticks of light, but the light was moderately weak for Feeble (because “Feeble” couldn’t just mean one amount) and there were really only a couple feasible spots to farm those sleeping dragons. There were griffins by the geyser, Morbols as well (though they hit harder and kill party members quickly), and chimeras inside Louhi’s cave. On the other hand, despite their light being stronger, it ticked half as often or less, because the RNG element was so damn strong.

One of these days, I ought to write a post about locking progression behind heavy doses of RNG.

That’ll be a long day, far into the future from now, if ever.[/IMG]

I will say that RNG has its place. You don’t want people earning things too quickly, and you don’t want the thrill of winning to die out even faster, so low risks are fine for progression. I stomached four Elemental weapons, finally relics after so long, which might have been four too many. I did so, so that my four main jobs could stand a better chance at running content to receive better weapons a few short weeks later.

Square Enix, you love using RNG to stall people from beating content too fast. However, Pagos came out so late, the fix to exp. from NMs came even later, and the weapons were barely still relevant. Consider that. I mean really, truly consider that. The time and energy people put in at that point makes heavy doses of RNG totally unwelcome, in general (Related: Portnow’s Postulate, as presented by Extra Credits on Youtube).

Well after I was done with Pagos, the amount of light given by monsters and NMs was increased. This sounds nice, in fact I went in to take my screenshots and did Louhi just to see the boost, but that honestly should have accompanied the experience boost, and both should have been there when Pagos came out, in addition to other tweaks to any combination of monsters’ health, chain timers, or the ability to share monsters without detriment to multiple parties involved. Farming dragons should not have been as long and painful as it was for me, be it finding a party plus farm spot or doing so much of it so close to i370 losing relevance, and trying out other monsters should have been more reliable for light. Yes, that includes the likes of sprites.

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