Yoshi-P...Please listen to your subscribers

[Gramul]

Reading the forums lately has shown me something. Every time I see a new complaint thread 9 times out of 10 the person is on Sargatanas. SE, through the use of server mergers and transfers in said period, managed to stick all the whiners on one server. Genius.

My, but aren't you a bucket of presumptions.

[Quesse]

I think people have selective memory.

What's worse? An average drop rate on a monster you can kill every hour or a stupid drop rate on a monster only one person can kill every 21-24 hours.... and has a 3 hour pop window X_X

seriously ppl.

[Leo_Hart]

I think people have selective memory.

What's worse? An average drop rate on a monster you can kill every hour or a stupid drop rate on a monster only one person can kill every 21-24 hours.... and has a 3 hour pop window X_X

seriously ppl.

they gif SE tough work to do, need item rare n good drop rate.

[Zahak]

Is there a thread on changing the instance re-entry timer? I would rather run each dungeon once a day for better drop rates than have to spam it all day for nothing. You know? I hate these instant reenters.

[Hulan]

SE has put themselves between a rock and a hard place. In theory, less than half of the team is working on 1.xx. Not to mention, while we don't know what kind of resources SE is feeding the dev team - as a game that has already failed once - I imagine they're on a tight leash. All of these adds up to a simple conclusion: there's only so much content they can add to the game over a 3 month period.

The only thing that kills a game fast than, as you put it, "...players [feeling] that they are wasting their time for no real reward", is players being done with everything and being bored. So somehow they need to stretch a little content out a long way. One way would be to put in long lockouts to extend the time it takes to do an x number of runs, another is the decrease the drop rate so that x is much larger. Neither option is exactly ideal. The former will bore players almost as much as no content at all, and the latter is what we have now.

I'm not saying their solution is a good one (actually I would prefer longer lockouts myself), but the Dev team doesn't have many options at the moment. They need to be able to produce a surplus of content before they can start easing up on these restrictions - and at the moment, they just don't have the resources for that.

[Hulan]

That's the thing though, given that they're redoing everything for 2.0 the RNG is a lot higher to keep people occupied and while some get unlucky, some get very lucky and have you seen what happens with those who get lucky? They don't even bother to help those who got unlucky because they already got their stuff and don't need nor want to do it....

SE has put themselves between a rock and a hard place. In theory, less than half of the team is working on 1.xx. Not to mention, while we don't know what kind of resources SE is feeding the dev team - as a game that has already failed once - I imagine they're on a tight leash. All of these adds up to a simple conclusion: there's only so much content they can add to the game over a 3 month period.

The only thing that kills a game fast than, as you put it, "...players [feeling] that they are wasting their time for no real reward", is players being done with everything and being bored. So somehow they need to stretch a little content out a long way. One way would be to put in long lockouts to extend the time it takes to do an x number of runs, another is the decrease the drop rate so that x is much larger. Neither option is exactly ideal. The former will bore players almost as much as no content at all, and the latter is what we have now....

Ironically, you just posted most of my own points back at me. I generally agree with everything you have said, I just think we should never stop looking for a better solution.

[Skies]

(Disclaimer: I will work with absurd numbers here)

There is actually a happy medium, two in fact. Let's say that Ifrit's weapon drop rates are something that, by the laws of probability, it would take around 5738 tries for you to get all weapons. We all know that random drop chances are at the very least aggravating, you always feel frustrated when something simply does not drops or you get a token grade 5 dark matter. Yet we do not want to reduce the final planned amount of work to finish that content, after all we do not want it made 'easier', do we?

So there are two possible solutions: Currency, and Progressive Rewards.
Currency - Each victory gives you, say, 329 Tokens, for example. In order to acquire any of the actual desirable reward, then, you would need to trade in 5738*329=1887802 token for the item. That is still the planned number of victories, the same amount of work, but luck has been factored off the equation, everyone needs to work the very same and the duration of the content is the same. That, and players feel happy about filling gaugues and seeing numbers raise to a goal.

Progressive Rewards: So perhaps currency lets you skip all the stuff you don't want and just get the one item you want, and that would remove also the certain random factor of the thing that excites some people! So why not progressive rewards, then? We all want that beautiful Ifrit's Lance, it glows! And according to our previous guess on required number of victories, it'd it 5738 victories to have it for sure. Also we clearly do not want players to finish this too fast so- How about every victory gives a reward? But every victory AFTER the first gives a better and better reward. You probably start right there with Fire Potion, and each victory a better and better item until the last 7 victories give you the Primal Weapons! So it's like a filling gauge, each different reward is, perhaps, but a mere token and pretty useless, but you know that after getting that Blind Fish there's a Grade 5 Dark Matter and after THAT you start getting the Weapons! So you know that only those eight more victories and it's done! And hey, it was still 5738 victories in the end!

There is no actual need for true randomness, there is also no actual need to make the content faster or less spammable, it just needs to be more less aggravating, something that randomness does.

[Hulan]

You're absolutely right, and perhaps I should have made it clear. I was speaking in generalities. Generally speaking, there are only two ways to make something take a while: High repetition with little progress each iteration, and low repetition with much progress made with each iteration. Tokens are a pretty nice solution, though they don't really solve the fundamental problem where you are repeating the same content ad nauseum.

The only way to make the majority (there will always be dissent) happy is to have enough productive content that players have the option to do many different things. Limbus gear might have not have all be as good as Dynamis gear, but some of it was, and it gave us something else to do to keep things fresh (a quick and dirty example, the issue is much more complex than that obviously).

[xCid]

I don't have a problem with the drop rates, thank you for listening Yoshi-p.

[Skies]

Oh, you are certainly correct there, Hulan. The true best solution is having sufficient and varied enough content to be able to do different things every day and not grow bored, that is, enough content that there is in fact not a problem in taking a short/middlish time on the content avaiable.

Of course, I don't feel like we can ask that out of current XIV neither of 2.0 before the first expansion, it'd be simply unfair and thus measures need to be taken.