Factors Affecting Test Data From Abyssos Savage Delay

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

As someone who is a dedicated crafter, at least during major patch drops when raid gear is worth a damn, I welcomed the delay because it meant I actually got to participate in week 1 crafting instead of having to choose between it and Savage.

Thank you for sharing your experience. Do you have any suggestions for how to give crafting and gathering skill value outside of the raid tier?

Because right now, SE hasn't figured out a way to do it. And every single person who relies on a public gearset or macro, including Teamcraft Community Rotations, relies on a tiny group of people skilled enough to make those gearsets and macros - and nothing short of preorder crafting has given that group any content.

Prices were also the most stabilized they've ever been since crafting saw repeated nerfs which made everything get progressively easier. ... Crafted gear being a week early was quite welcomed.

Would it work the same way in a different tier? With all the things impacting the tier, it's unlikely, and hard to say exactly how it would work out... which is my point. We don't know, and any interpretation of the data that doesn't take into account all those influences will necessarily be flawed.

The only adjustment I'd like them to consider going forward is delaying the capped tome because P5-7 did not account for it whatsoever and it showed. P8S in its current, post-nerf state, would also not have favored well with the extra gear we normally wouldn't have.

SE straight-up said when announcing the Savage delay that they weren't going to account for the extra week of gear in the DPS checks, and would see how it went in doing so. Thus, I didn't feel the need to point that out, as they're already quite aware.

[Fendred]

The main crux I see here is crafter sharks being madge that they can't sell gear for exorbitant prices after no-lifing the process to reach rush hour in time to get millions upon millions.

,For one, good riddance.

For another, I got told that sales were stable for more than a week, so I don't see the fuss here.

For last apart from nolife crafters and gil sharks, everyone else LIKED not having to rush story for savage.

Agreed. The delay was much appreciated and I'm for one glad they're going to keep that up from now on.

[Almandaragal]

I want both raiders and casual combat-focused players to have the purchasing power to buy what they want comfortably. I want players to use the gear they put in the effort to buy or make, rather than being forced to abandon it and buy more over job balance issues and PF requirements. I want raiders not to be locked out of learning parties simply because they didn't get lucky and win Savage loot. I want the players who want to craft and/or gather on a budget to be able to do so - rather than having their melds broken, their market share taken by bots, and being unable to pay off their gearset. (The rich crafters can afford to remeld, and the bots don't care. It's the people who want to supply their static on a time limit, or sell modestly, that get hurt.) And I want the highly skilled crafters and gatherers to be valued outside the raid tier, but SE has yet to find a way to make that happen, so one day every 8-9 months is better than zero.

All of that is already in my post, and none of it is "crafter sharks being madge".

Further, why would a highly skilled crafter no-life their melds? Anyone that dedicated knows their value of time and gets their materia in advance, even a full expansion in advance. (Yes, we can farm materia before it's released. Entirely within TOS, obviously. It's called Wondrous Tails.) Scrip farming, spiritbonding, simply buying materia in the lulls between patches... it's just not that hard for anyone serious to be ready ahead of the rush.

Bolding mine. Casual combat focused player here. By that I mean I do normal raids every week, level all non-limited jobs (eventually hand/land as well) to cap each expansion, and typically perform in the top half to top quarter in the dungeons, raids, and trials that I participate in. Nothing special, but it seems to fit your description there.

I have purchasing power to get what I need just fine. This from simply doing retainer ventures, weekly custom deliveries, etc. I don't even use crafting to make money, unless you count selling Slithersand to burn my white scrips as I slowly level my crafters. I don't make squat compared to people who actually know how to properly craft and bother with the horribly stupid overmelding and often somewhat luck based crap on the top tier crafts. I buy crafted weapons and occasionally other crafted gear pieces, but use tomes and raids to gear out my alt jobs. All that said, I'm not sure where you're getting a lot of your assumptions. I have no problem getting gear I want outside of the tome/raid piece caps that exist, and that issue has nothing to do with crafting.

As such, I'm a little perplexed as to why you feel that some mystical subset of users is having so much trouble getting any gear. If someone needs to buy THAT much gear that they can't afford a set or two of crafted gear, they are active enough that they should be able to get enough income to mostly cover it, or play enough to fill in pieces with raid/tome pieces. If you're referring to overmelding and raid food, then you're talking about hardcore raiders, and the "casual" part no longer applies.

Either way, between that, your replies since, and my admitted skimming of the first post (because I just found the same basic points being made in more verbose framing than even I'd typically use, and I talk too much), I can't really disagree with other people's summary of it. While "madge because greedy" may be a bit far, the general sentiment seems pretty accurate. Your average player, even your average crafting enthusiast, isn't having the issues that you're describing. Not where I've been reading, seeing, and watching at least.

[Colt47]

all i see is a bunch of whining and complaining when Yoshi-p reported about 90% of the feedback they got was positive for the one week delay for savage launch.

No I understand a lot of the OPs points pretty head on. The feedback for having the extra week to get crafted gear was positively received because it meant that the top teams didn't have to grind like mad to make all the gear day 1, or just buy it outright. There aren't that many people that are going to argue the other side to that because it wouldn't make sense.

The problem I've felt after raiding for multiple tiers in this game is that they greatly underestimate how much variance there is in the ability to learn mechanics in savage across the player base and how it impacts people's experiences. The development team is depending way too much on day one groups to literally tell people what mechanics are, how they function, and where to stand. You can see it in the PF when people start labeling strategies as Mr. Happy Strat, or Ilya, or some other catch phrase meant to ID a specific one. That is the bit that bothers me way more than job balance and everything else.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...acaff4567b4e40

When they talked about adjustments here they mention the top percentage of players are overwhelming better at the game then the play testers. The only reason someone states that is if they are then adjusting and balancing against the top percentage of players, whatever that is. Yet if content is going to get released into a game and made available to all players, and then has rewards that would naturally attract all sorts of different players, what are they expecting to happen here on a social level, especially if the job balancing is always on knifes edge and you got stuff like High Concept on P8S P2? Heck I still remember Light Rampant on e8s and that debacle.

[Amarande]

As such, I'm a little perplexed as to why you feel that some mystical subset of users is having so much trouble getting any gear. If someone needs to buy THAT much gear that they can't afford a set or two of crafted gear, they are active enough that they should be able to get enough income to mostly cover it, or play enough to fill in pieces with raid/tome pieces. If you're referring to overmelding and raid food, then you're talking about hardcore raiders, and the "casual" part no longer applies.

"Casual" may be part of the issue here, as it has such a fuzzy definition.

Those who don't set foot into hardmodes at all until tiers or expansions later to harvest mounts and glam might not feel there's any issue at all.

Those who tend to catch the "yanno, maybe I should try EX/Savage" bug after a while tend to be horrifically affected all over the place.

Communities dominated by Discord servers that are O&O almost entirely by hardcore raiders and ruthlessly silence any other mindset with polemics like "enabling bads" and "not respecting people's time" while there is a deathly lack of discoverable casual-friendly alternatives, especially with the limited number of platforms that players are willing to give the time of day (even forums are often looked down on, especially by the Discord mainstream who even tend to regard Reddit negatively when disagreements come up).

PFs, even learning PFs with the insane requirements OP points out (this has been a thing to some degree or other for some expansions now, and not even just for Savage, e.g., you can hardly even get in on the first wave of learning parties for an odd patch EX without ilvls that demand fairly extensive Savage experience, and if you miss that first wave ... well ... that's been a community problem for years now that no one has really found an effective answer to).

It goes on. The community seems dead set on making sure that there's such a moat between casual and hardcore that the middle tier players (who represent most veteran gamers by this point) are ruthlessly pushed out (more casual players seeing them as elitist, the hardcore community seeing them as "bad and unwilling to improve" which is considered on a level with "kicks newborn coeurl pups") as what at this point seems an absolutely intentional sacrifice.

And inevitably in the end the community tends to say it's an adaptation forced on them by SE, but SE will insist that it's a community issue ...

[Colt47]

I'm not sure why you bring up discord all the time on this. I never felt that discord was a major factor in the problem of the current savage system. But you are correct on the part with "I want to give savage a shot" and then effectively finding themselves in an endless war with trying to tackle the content. Most of the truly hardcore raiders get it done and don't bother with it afterwards, but generally aren't that bad to run with later as they tend to help other people out. The issues arise with the swaths of people diving into content that is balanced literally for those top tier people, even though the majority of those in the community are anything but when it comes to savage raiding.

[Almandaragal]

"Casual" may be part of the issue here, as it has such a fuzzy definition.

Those who don't set foot into hardmodes at all until tiers or expansions later to harvest mounts and glam might not feel there's any issue at all.

Those who tend to catch the "yanno, maybe I should try EX/Savage" bug after a while tend to be horrifically affected all over the place.

Communities dominated by Discord servers that are O&O almost entirely by hardcore raiders and ruthlessly silence any other mindset with polemics like "enabling bads" and "not respecting people's time" while there is a deathly lack of discoverable casual-friendly alternatives, especially with the limited number of platforms that players are willing to give the time of day (even forums are often looked down on, especially by the Discord mainstream who even tend to regard Reddit negatively when disagreements come up).

PFs, even learning PFs with the insane requirements OP points out (this has been a thing to some degree or other for some expansions now, and not even just for Savage, e.g., you can hardly even get in on the first wave of learning parties for an odd patch EX without ilvls that demand fairly extensive Savage experience, and if you miss that first wave ... well ... that's been a community problem for years now that no one has really found an effective answer to).

It goes on. The community seems dead set on making sure that there's such a moat between casual and hardcore that the middle tier players (who represent most veteran gamers by this point) are ruthlessly pushed out (more casual players seeing them as elitist, the hardcore community seeing them as "bad and unwilling to improve" which is considered on a level with "kicks newborn coeurl pups") as what at this point seems an absolutely intentional sacrifice.

And inevitably in the end the community tends to say it's an adaptation forced on them by SE, but SE will insist that it's a community issue ...

If the definition of casual is "the" issue, then the OP needs to define it in some capacity. I get said itch to try EX content, but the fact is that I don't have the time or set schedule to do any kind of prog and still actually get my other goals done. Sure, gearing up multiple characters to BiS is definitely a slog and should be improved upon, but that's not a crafting issue; that's a tome cost/rate of acquirement issue. The OP seems focused on the impacts on and from crafting. I mentioned that I have no issues, and that I likely fall into the "casual" bracket. If I don't, then they can define what is and isn't casual, and what this as of now mythical group of people who can't seem to get any gear is.

What does discord have to do with this at all? I can't craft gear for FFXIV in discord. I can't acquire gear (within FFXIV's ToS) via discord. This has nothing to do with off-site communications.

As for the party finder, sure there are stupidly high bars set for entry. I've seen truly high end raiders mention that they couldn't get into party finder parties with alt jobs because the job was "only" in EX gear, and the requirements were set to a point that someone would already need to have cleared some savage to even get in. However, that's not a gearing issue; that's a "people are stupid" issue. Can't fill your party? Well, if you require savage ilvl instead of EX ilvl, that's on you. But again, that doesn't mean that gearing is difficult; it means that people aren't thinking about the ilvl they're setting properly.

Sure, there is a divide, and it does often seem like there are people on "both sides" that really want that hyper casual and hyper hardcore divide. However, this again has nothing to do with the gearing issue that my post was addressing, or the overall crafting issue that the OP seemed to want to suggest exists. It seems that your reply drifted off into some drama related tangent by the end there.

[Amarande]

What does discord have to do with this at all? I can't craft gear for FFXIV in discord. I can't acquire gear (within FFXIV's ToS) via discord. This has nothing to do with off-site communications.

Perhaps I overemphasize or overthink it, perhaps not.

The main reason I so heavily opine against Discord is that it seems that a very large contributor to community problems in FFXIV in particular is that certain groups of players (especially what one might call the "smarter than the average bear casual") tend to be especially poorly served by the currently available communities.

The normal antidote for that would be, of course, to found one's own community; in fact, that's what usually happened with hobby communities especially in the days when independent forums were the dominant form of organization. If a forum was sufficiently disliked, other ones would naturally spring up and the activity would shift. Especially difficult or toxic forum leads would frequently find themselves presiding over tumbleweeds. Everyone was happy (except them, I suppose).

Unfortunately, Discord (due, primarily, to having gone over from becoming just a chat service like IRC or teamspeak to being full-blown social media in the mainstream eye in these times) places a much heavier onus on the owners of (especially) openly discoverable communities than forum hosts ever did (including the possibility of getting removed from the entire platform including other communities for running, or even sometimes for being a member of, an insufficiently moderated server), strongly discouraging people from going that route. Private Discords do abound, but most of them tend to as a result be so small and have so few actively playing members at any given moment as to be of little help when it comes to actual in-game activity desires.

And it's painfully clear that the FFXIV community is not, in this day and age, particularly interested in communities that are not conveniently accessible via a Discord invite. Even SE's expansion of cross-world communications in-game has not particularly helped, e.g., most CWLS (except hunt CWLS) are dead silent even when several members are active.

This, I feel, has contributed heavily to the environment of there being an insufficient variety of communities for everyone to find a comfortable home. Were everyone to be able to readily find an active community compatible with their pace and playstyle, as is the case in other MMOs (even WoW!), I feel like many of the factors under discussion would be of far less import in the first place (with the exception of the ultra-short window in which to make gil off of crafted gear, perhaps). But this is clearly not the case.

[DrWho2010]

i think it's better that things like Discord exist because if a discord like environment was included within in the game, then there would have to be policing of said function within the game. And discord has way more functionality. said functionality doesn't really have a place within the game environment (other than voice chat). there wouldn't be enough resources also to do that much policing.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

It is best you use bold and/or underlined text

I would have liked to use more formatting, but I don't know how well bold and underlined text localize into Japanese (not only direct translation, but also tonal and cultural implications). With a better understanding of Japanese localization I would have used more formatting, but I had to do the best I could with mostly using things like paragraph breaks, numbered sections, and lists.

keep your points concise with some

X.) Headers to explain the next paragraph

Unfortunately, I've seen that I have to include seeming-digressions such as the math showing that bots are a net loss of money for SE, or that the item levels being demanded by PF are in fact impossible without winning drops. Because if I don't, people will come by defending botting or the like, and will refuse to take the discussion seriously for my not having pre-empted them. Further, SE cannot simply call me back to converse when there's a language barrier and a corporate barrier in the way, so I have to go in-depth the first time. Concision is valuable within the constraints of necessary detail, in a situation like this.

Section headers are nice, yes, but for this purpose they're vulnerable to both mistranslations and jumping to conclusions. If I had put in, say, "Simultaneous Release of Island Sanctuary" as a header, people would have absolutely assumed that I was hating on Island Sanctuary, rather than praising it but pointing out that it draws crafter and gatherer players away from supplying raiders. Sometimes a point that needs to be made is, unfortunately, such that headers do more harm than good. Thus I avoided headers, but tried to have a good introductory sentence for each section.