soiled promissory note?

[Hulan]

I've always found it fascinating (in a scientific, social science sort of way) how people in general put up with so much nonsense in MMOs that they'd never put up with a "real" video game. What if you had to kill the final boss for a chance for the ending to "drop"? And it was possible you had to kill it 100+ times for that to happen? The first 99 times it was all like "as you prepare to deliver the killing blow, mist rises from the earth, obscuring your sight. you quickly strike, but you hit nothing but soft earth. quick! find the villain!" then you have to go find the boss again, and he's fully healed. Oh, and this fight takes like 30-60 minutes each time. Would you kill the boss until you got the ending? You'd seriously devote 100 hours to that? I kind of doubt it.

Haha, I'm sorry if that came off as a little oddly put. I was just trying to get across that I do not disagree with the complaints, so much, as I find there existence interesting. Game design at a theoretical level interests me, so a violent response like this is fascinating to me. I have myself actually argued for a more robust drop mechanic that does not diminish the difficulty of the respective task, but encourages the player instead of taunting them, in another thread.

It's a complex problem. The developer needs to preserve content, while keeping the player interested in the content long enough to produce more. Ideally, content has a half life (I prefer to refer to a content's lifetime in terms of half life because the decay of interest often looks closer to half life formula than anything else) longer than the development cycle, thus producing more content than is consumed.

Random chance has a base response in the human psyche. There is a reason why gamblers often end up in alcoholics anonymous. It's untrue to say that random drop mechanics have no place in preserving content, or even interest. At the same time, even an addicted gambler will lose interest in a machine that never wins. Similarly, constant progression gives the players the sense of constant progress towards a goal. However, it also feels very mechanical. Go to Ifrit, punch time card, work, receive credits, go to ifrit, punch time card, work, receive credits.

Put simply, just a pRNG or a token system alone will not preserve player interest long enough to sustain a small pool of content (FFXIV's real problem, but that's another topic entirely). Each needs something to counter-balance their flaws. For all of the fact that many came to despise Dynamis after years of running them, I think they found an excellent balance, as you said. The frustration of the pRNG (Relic AF) was offset by the fact that the drop rate was 1:20(ish) with any monster in the zone able to drop an item. Not to mention, even if you did not receive an item, you could work toward the ultimate goal of a Relic weapon. The mechanical nature of the token system of the relic weapons, on the other hand, was offset by adding a market mechanic to the system (simply by making the items trade-able).

I suppose in the context of FFXIV, we can only hope that once the full team is working on the game again (post 2.0) they will be able to produce more content, thus reducing the load on current content and freeing the developers up for more creative drop systems.