Factors Affecting Test Data From Abyssos Savage Delay

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

To be fair, if you didn't create a massive wall of text people might actually be able to properly digest the points you are trying to make.

...

otherwise things will get lost in the sheer amount you posted. I mean for crying outloud, you made a 30000+ character post, which is still at least 18000 characters if you remove all the Japanese.

Formatting constraints aside, 18,000 characters with plenty of sectioning and paragraph breaks is hardly a wall of text, especially when all formatting gets included in the character count the way that this forum does.

A second-year university (US college) essay will routinely exceed that length without counting title pages, formatting, references, or appendices. And this holds in fields ranging from literature to neuroscience, even if the essay is covering a single narrow topic, and while the writer is being concise. Remaining shorter than a college essay while including:

• a foreword to the webmaster,
• various cultural politeness gestures throughout,
• multiple "here's why this is so" sections that a college essay can either omit or defer to appendices, and
• all the aforementioned formatting characters,

seems entirely reasonable and concise for this purpose - a technically oriented letter to SE that has to cover eight different factors. The readers there should be able to go in-depth on the game to a post-secondary level. It's their job.

If you yourself don't want to read that much, simply don't assume you know what the document says!

If you want to see a long essay that needs all those words, try Lockhart's Lament, which is aimed at laypeople. Or for a more technical example that also demonstrates how un-header-able points can be, try Meditations on Moloch. Each of those stands well over 80,000 characters, with good reason.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

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.

...

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.

I'm glad you're having no trouble with your own purchasing power. Meanwhile, every raid tier I open my commissions to people paying in tomestones, and every tier I get customers who can't afford their crafted gear any other way.

Some of your assumptions about other player experiences break down hard, so let me try to relieve your confusion.

I said:

I want both raiders and casual combat-focused players to have the purchasing power to buy what they want comfortably.

It's not about defining "casual", it's about making sure that purchasing power is working out across the whole spectrum from casual to hardcore. So let's dispense with the endless argument on the boundaries of "casual" and look at different points on the spectrum, both in purchasing power and in expenses.

Purchasing power first.

At the root, the primary constraint on a player is not gil. The primary constraints are time and fun. If a player is out of time, they can't make more - they have to drop some content they're doing, which might lower their income. If a player isn't having fun doing certain content, eventually they won't do that content, no matter how much gil it makes. Gil is merely a medium for the exchange of value, including the value of time.

Let's first look at the time aspect. Every player only has so much time they can spend on the game per week before running into Earth limitations. Whether that amount is 2 hours or 60 hours, there's a limit. That limit can also vary over longer timeframes; for example, some people can take a long weekend off work to binge MSQ, and other people can't.

Second, let's look at the fun aspect. Every player has their own profile of content they find fun. And for some players, that profile doesn't include the timegated goodies like retainer ventures and Custom Deliveries. (Personally, I'm quite happy to work with the timegated goodies as a part of my income. But when half a dozen people who don't know each other tell me about the chore aversion / mental burden that such things induce for them, I have to believe them that it's a real phenomenon.) Further, many players will only do so much of a content type before it stops being fun and starts being boring. If they get bored, eventually they quit.

Thus, a player's earning potential - the upper limit of their accumulating purchasing power - is determined by their time and fun profiles, and how the economy gives trade value to those profiles via barter and gil.

Now for expenses.

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.

You've said yourself that you don't do any content harder than Normal Raids, and perhaps similar things like Alliance Raids. Which is all well and good, and also means that your required expenses are effectively zero, both in gil and in time. It doesn't matter to your ability to access content if you get crafted gear later or not at all - the Normal Raid and Alliance Raid gear, along with the tomes you get just for doing those, will keep you above minimum item level for that content. And that means you don't have the time expense of capping tomes either. It doesn't matter to your ability to access content if you meld materia to your gear, because the content you do is designed not to need it. After the minimal repair fees and teleports, which the game showers you in enough gil to cover, you're free to spend your income on whatever you please without affecting your access to content. In personal finance terms, all your in-game income is disposable.

Why do I put so much emphasis on "without affecting your access to content"? Because plenty of expenses do affect one's access to raiding content.

If you're referring to overmelding and raid food, then you're talking about hardcore raiders, and the "casual" part no longer applies.

Those are both examples of expenses, but they kick in at vastly different levels of seriousness.

Let's say that a player decided to take their first step into high-end content with Storm's Crown EX (6.2) at launch. Storm's Crown EX has an official minimum item level of 600, and players take that seriously because the heal checks are designed around it. Going in with less gear than that is putting undue burden on your healers, and PFs will rightly lock it out en masse. At launch, a player who hadn't done high-end content before 6.2 had a maximum item level of... 599, brought down by the one unaugmented ring. So our dabbler has to spend either gil or time getting a current-tier piece to reach minimum item level. But you can do that in Normal Raids or with the new tomes, so that's not so hard, is it?

Being minimum item level or just above, now they're expected to fill the materia slots on all their gear for the first time - with current materia X. Suddenly, their damage output matters. Assuming they got a Normal Raid or crafted ring, with a single materia slot, they have 21 slots to fill: 10 two-slot pieces from the previous tier, and the one one-slot piece they just got. (Other scenarios are worse for their total expenses, requiring more investment in gear or melds.) Using the Aether markets since I see that's where you are, materia X in the desirable substats was often running over 25k each. That means over 500k in materia just to set foot in the fight - or any high-end content while it's current - and it's not even the expansion launch rush on materia! Not for overmelding, but for slot melding.

The fact that they're expected to use raid food for the first time pales in comparison. They can use last tier's (cheaper) food, and EX fights only take a few hours to learn and a few more to get a weapon from, with no weekly commitment. 20k or so of old food will do.

The next week, our dabbler takes their shiny new EX weapon into P5S. (Along with at least one tome piece, possibly two, and more Normal Raid gear, which means 75k or more in materia to refill slots as they upgrade despite taking the materia out of the old pieces.) Assuming they find a party accepting item level 600 instead of going "but everyone had time to get crafted" and demanding 610 or even 612, now they need current raid food. Going in without it is asking to die to raidwides. If they take 3 hours to learn the fight, riding the first wave when PF is good, they've spent 30k in food... and maybe hit enrage instead of getting the clear.

The more serious and experienced raiders, who have more polished rotations and have learned to learn faster, were mostly in the 605 / 610 / 612 parties or in statics. Our dabbler's group, determined to clear despite potentially taking a few deaths or Damage Downs near minimum item level, faces an expectation of Savage but not EX: raid potions.

Raid food is used on a per-unit-time basis. Raid potions are used on a per-pull basis when trying to clear. And P5S is a three-potion fight. (So are P6S and P7S. P8S is four-potion, counting both halves together.) Pushing for that clear on the first day of Savage, while their potions could still be 10k each, they could easily drink down 60 potions trying for that first kill. 600k in potions is no joke, an expense almost as high as everything else they needed to get this far!

And for their trouble, they got... access to [Duty Complete] P5S parties next week, a book, a less than 3/8 chance at getting an accessory (one person can win multiple of the 3 drops), and access to P6S once they hit item level 605. Because Savage, unlike EX, isn't farmable. They can enter P6S without buying crafted gear - their second week of tomestone and Normal Raid gear can get them to 605 alongside that EX weapon - but if they want to guarantee getting gear from P5S, they have to come back week after week. Which means two things:

• They have to use food and potions every week. Even after they're well past minimum item level, they'll be expected to use food for heal planning and incentivized to use potions to maybe salvage close pulls. (If they care about logs to show a prospective static, that makes potions mandatory.) A few weeks later, at the peak of PF competence for the early fights of a tier, the prices for food and potions will have settled to about 2.5k each, and they'll have plenty of 100+ potion weeks reclearing P5S and P6S before they can hop into P7S prog for the week.
• Capping tomes is no longer optional for them. Every week they have to make sure to do it, at least for the first ~8 weeks to get their BiS pieces, or they'll fall behind the rising tide of PF item level requirements. And they can't do it in Savage, because each of their reclears only grants 30 tomes.

They don't wind up touching crafted gear, because their tomes and Normal Raids have taken care of the item level 610 requirement for P7S by the time they unlock it. But between raiding itself and capping tomes, they're now spending 9-12 hours and ~300k gil (food, potions, melding gear as they upgrade) every week that they weren't before. That pushes out other content from their time budget, and they can't check retainers often when raiding - when a party enters and leaves instances won't line up well with venture times. The only way (within ToS) that they can make active money in this time is the uncapped tomes they generate alongside capped tomes, and potentially materia / desynth fodder from however they cap tomes.

Do you want to gear up your alts, therefore going back after your main job is done with P5S gear? 300k a week is over 1.2m a month is over 8m a tier even without farming during unlock, and if they clear P7S or P8S they add to that weekly figure. And that's before factoring in the fact that they probably make less gil than they used to, since basically every other combat activity is gil-positive with some diligence and they had to push something out. Suddenly the fact that they can sell tomes to offset their potion costs is a big deal - and so is the fact that they couldn't last tier.

That player didn't use any crafted gear. Now let's consider a raider who did.

This raider had their experience of getting their feet wet last tier in Asphodelos, or possibly beforehand. Their prior experience has polished their rotations and learning to learn, so static or PF, they expect to set foot in P7S in week 1. Their Normal Raid and tomestone gear will not get them to item level 610 in week 1, and they need to reach that item level before going in or they'll die to raidwides. (Seriously, even now healers need to know if someone's in 610 gear, because that character will need extra heals that the rest of the party at 615+ won't.) They need crafted gear - the only bypass to the current tier's weekly loot lock - in order to access the content they want to do, and they know it. Which means they may choose to get that gear earlier to have an easier time on P5S and P6S.

Therefore, they have a bigger first week expense spike, both from buying (and slot melding) crafted pieces to fill in their gaps and from having two bursts of "first clear potions" for P5S and P6S before the prices lower. A few weeks later, they've cleared P7S and are well into P8S, meaning they spend every week doing three reclears. Then for their prog, they face P8S' door boss every instance, drinking more potions in the hope that the party can get past it to the phase they want to work on. Unlike our earlier dabbler, this player is pretty much guaranteed to clear the tier on content (unless Earth constraints stop them), putting them at four reclears a week including a door boss fight. Their consumable costs still dominate the total; a highly consistent static that reclears efficiently might bring their tier-long costs below the dabbler by reducing their consumable use! Though if that static does optimization runs after reclears... imagine drinking 2-3 potions every pull for 6+ hours. Or 4-5 potions per pull in late Ultimate prog. I've done bulk food and potion orders for Ultimate raiders, and I'll do so again, because they go through so many potions.

(We've still not considered anyone who actually has a strong reason to overmeld their crafted gear. That's reserved for people who'll hit a fourth floor enrage in week 1 of the tier, at latest week 2, before tome and Savage gear makes the DPS check doable without it. Plenty of Ultimate raiders don't clear Savage that fast.)

You say you don't have a set schedule, which means you probably don't reliably have Tuesday evenings open, which means you have basically no access to statics - and would have an even worse time of PFing the tier than I described, having to endure the lower clear rates of non-prime-time parties. Does that sound cheap and easy to manage to you?

Having expenses high enough to struggle with doesn't require anything mystical. It just requires a fun profile slightly different than yours, that promotes raiding high enough to go for it despite limited time. That's what Amarande meant with

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.

Casuals generally don't have required expenses. Raiders universally do.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

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).

The excessive item level requirements have definitely happened in previous tiers, but Abyssos has had noticeably more of them, what with the "everyone's had time to get crafted" assumptions, balance issues, mitigation issues, and people staring at P8S' DPS check. The players may be typing the item levels in, but they do that in response to the game conditions and SE should still factor that into their analysis of the data, hence my point. Exacerbating the "first wave" effect doesn't help anyone.

[Almandaragal]

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.

So, in short, to answer my question: Discord does not have anything to do with the issue at hand. That is, it doesn't have an effect on gearing and/or making money from crafting.

This rabbit hole you went down is largely irrelevant here. Whether or not it has any impact on FFXIV drama I'll leave to people who actually experience/take part in said drama and said Discord communities. I play the game, consume video content related to FFXIV on youtube/twitch, and read/reply on the official forums here, and reddit. I don't deal with that crap, and it's clear that while you seem to, it doesn't actually have any bearing on the intended conversation points of this topic.

It's not about defining "casual", it's about making sure that purchasing power is working out across the whole spectrum from casual to hardcore. So let's dispense with the endless argument on the boundaries of "casual" and look at different points on the spectrum, both in purchasing power and in expenses.

Purchasing power first.

At the root, the primary constraint on a player is not gil. The primary constraints are time and fun. If a player is out of time, they can't make more - they have to drop some content they're doing, which might lower their income. If a player isn't having fun doing certain content, eventually they won't do that content, no matter how much gil it makes. Gil is merely a medium for the exchange of value, including the value of time.

Let's first look at the time aspect. Every player only has so much time they can spend on the game per week before running into Earth limitations. Whether that amount is 2 hours or 60 hours, there's a limit. That limit can also vary over longer timeframes; for example, some people can take a long weekend off work to binge MSQ, and other people can't.

Second, let's look at the fun aspect. Every player has their own profile of content they find fun. And for some players, that profile doesn't include the timegated goodies like retainer ventures and Custom Deliveries. (Personally, I'm quite happy to work with the timegated goodies as a part of my income. But when half a dozen people who don't know each other tell me about the chore aversion / mental burden that such things induce for them, I have to believe them that it's a real phenomenon.) Further, many players will only do so much of a content type before it stops being fun and starts being boring. If they get bored, eventually they quit.

Thus, a player's earning potential - the upper limit of their accumulating purchasing power - is determined by their time and fun profiles, and how the economy gives trade value to those profiles via barter and gil.

In summary, you don't really have a way to set a baseline because you're coming from the place of "everyone has different earning potentials based on what they're willing to do". Which, well, is obvious. There's a reason that I only addressed a specific portion of the original post: That's the part I could speak to. I'm not going to play the infinite hypotheticals game with you, because that's just a rotating door of moving goalposts as opposed to anything objective.

You've said yourself that you don't do any content harder than Normal Raids, and perhaps similar things like Alliance Raids. Which is all well and good, and also means that your required expenses are effectively zero, both in gil and in time. It doesn't matter to your ability to access content if you get crafted gear later or not at all - the Normal Raid and Alliance Raid gear, along with the tomes you get just for doing those, will keep you above minimum item level for that content. And that means you don't have the time expense of capping tomes either. It doesn't matter to your ability to access content if you meld materia to your gear, because the content you do is designed not to need it. After the minimal repair fees and teleports, which the game showers you in enough gil to cover, you're free to spend your income on whatever you please without affecting your access to content. In personal finance terms, all your in-game income is disposable.

Why do I put so much emphasis on "without affecting your access to content"? Because plenty of expenses do affect one's access to raiding content.

And this kind of thing is why I said what I said above. You made assumptions based on what I told you, some of them incorrect given you didn't include the other contextual information in said post. For example, I don't do alliance raids much beyond the first month, maybe two. I notably dislike 24-mans. Any large scale content like that is annoying to me for a number of reasons, even if Aglaia is pretty nice compared to the others I've done (all but nier). Likewise, I mentioned tome restrictions a number of times because I do cap my tomes. I mentioned that I purchase my gear primarily with tomes and normal raid drops. My "cost" isn't zero, given you count time in costs, because I have to spend time farming tomes and raid gear. Like, say, the 10 normal raids I had to do today in order to win 4 rolls for gear turn ins.

You also use your last line to pivot completely out of the realm that I was speaking to. You're now heading towards the hardcore content. All this talk of how you want casual players to have buying power. I mention that I don't have any trouble there with minimal input outside of tomes/raids. Now you transition into EX/Savage raiding. Which, again, isn't the casual's wheelhouse.

Those are both examples of expenses, but they kick in at vastly different levels of seriousness.

Let's say that a player decided to take their first step into high-end content with Storm's Crown EX (6.2) at launch. Storm's Crown EX has an official minimum item level of 600, and players take that seriously because the heal checks are designed around it. Going in with less gear than that is putting undue burden on your healers, and PFs will rightly lock it out en masse. At launch, a player who hadn't done high-end content before 6.2 had a maximum item level of... 599, brought down by the one unaugmented ring. So our dabbler has to spend either gil or time getting a current-tier piece to reach minimum item level. But you can do that in Normal Raids or with the new tomes, so that's not so hard, is it?

Being minimum item level or just above, now they're expected to fill the materia slots on all their gear for the first time - with current materia X. Suddenly, their damage output matters. Assuming they got a Normal Raid or crafted ring, with a single materia slot, they have 21 slots to fill: 10 two-slot pieces from the previous tier, and the one one-slot piece they just got. (Other scenarios are worse for their total expenses, requiring more investment in gear or melds.) Using the Aether markets since I see that's where you are, materia X in the desirable substats was often running over 25k each. That means over 500k in materia just to set foot in the fight - or any high-end content while it's current - and it's not even the expansion launch rush on materia! Not for overmelding, but for slot melding.

The fact that they're expected to use raid food for the first time pales in comparison. They can use last tier's (cheaper) food, and EX fights only take a few hours to learn and a few more to get a weapon from, with no weekly commitment. 20k or so of old food will do.

The next week, our dabbler takes their shiny new EX weapon into P5S. (Along with at least one tome piece, possibly two, and more Normal Raid gear, which means 75k or more in materia to refill slots as they upgrade despite taking the materia out of the old pieces.) Assuming they find a party accepting item level 600 instead of going "but everyone had time to get crafted" and demanding 610 or even 612, now they need current raid food. Going in without it is asking to die to raidwides. If they take 3 hours to learn the fight, riding the first wave when PF is good, they've spent 30k in food... and maybe hit enrage instead of getting the clear.

The more serious and experienced raiders, who have more polished rotations and have learned to learn faster, were mostly in the 605 / 610 / 612 parties or in statics. Our dabbler's group, determined to clear despite potentially taking a few deaths or Damage Downs near minimum item level, faces an expectation of Savage but not EX: raid potions.

Raid food is used on a per-unit-time basis. Raid potions are used on a per-pull basis when trying to clear. And P5S is a three-potion fight. (So are P6S and P7S. P8S is four-potion, counting both halves together.) Pushing for that clear on the first day of Savage, while their potions could still be 10k each, they could easily drink down 60 potions trying for that first kill. 600k in potions is no joke, an expense almost as high as everything else they needed to get this far!

And for their trouble, they got... access to [Duty Complete] P5S parties next week, a book, a less than 3/8 chance at getting an accessory (one person can win multiple of the 3 drops), and access to P6S once they hit item level 605. Because Savage, unlike EX, isn't farmable. They can enter P6S without buying crafted gear - their second week of tomestone and Normal Raid gear can get them to 605 alongside that EX weapon - but if they want to guarantee getting gear from P5S, they have to come back week after week. Which means two things:

They have to use food and potions every week. Even after they're well past minimum item level, they'll be expected to use food for heal planning and incentivized to use potions to maybe salvage close pulls. (If they care about logs to show a prospective static, that makes potions mandatory.) A few weeks later, at the peak of PF competence for the early fights of a tier, the prices for food and potions will have settled to about 2.5k each, and they'll have plenty of 100+ potion weeks reclearing P5S and P6S before they can hop into P7S prog for the week.
Capping tomes is no longer optional for them. Every week they have to make sure to do it, at least for the first ~8 weeks to get their BiS pieces, or they'll fall behind the rising tide of PF item level requirements. And they can't do it in Savage, because each of their reclears only grants 30 tomes.


They don't wind up touching crafted gear, because their tomes and Normal Raids have taken care of the item level 610 requirement for P7S by the time they unlock it. But between raiding itself and capping tomes, they're now spending 9-12 hours and ~300k gil (food, potions, melding gear as they upgrade) every week that they weren't before. That pushes out other content from their time budget, and they can't check retainers often when raiding - when a party enters and leaves instances won't line up well with venture times. The only way (within ToS) that they can make active money in this time is the uncapped tomes they generate alongside capped tomes, and potentially materia / desynth fodder from however they cap tomes.

Do you want to gear up your alts, therefore going back after your main job is done with P5S gear? 300k a week is over 1.2m a month is over 8m a tier even without farming during unlock, and if they clear P7S or P8S they add to that weekly figure. And that's before factoring in the fact that they probably make less gil than they used to, since basically every other combat activity is gil-positive with some diligence and they had to push something out. Suddenly the fact that they can sell tomes to offset their potion costs is a big deal - and so is the fact that they couldn't last tier.

That player didn't use any crafted gear. Now let's consider a raider who did.

This raider had their experience of getting their feet wet last tier in Asphodelos, or possibly beforehand. Their prior experience has polished their rotations and learning to learn, so static or PF, they expect to set foot in P7S in week 1. Their Normal Raid and tomestone gear will not get them to item level 610 in week 1, and they need to reach that item level before going in or they'll die to raidwides. (Seriously, even now healers need to know if someone's in 610 gear, because that character will need extra heals that the rest of the party at 615+ won't.) They need crafted gear - the only bypass to the current tier's weekly loot lock - in order to access the content they want to do, and they know it. Which means they may choose to get that gear earlier to have an easier time on P5S and P6S.

Therefore, they have a bigger first week expense spike, both from buying (and slot melding) crafted pieces to fill in their gaps and from having two bursts of "first clear potions" for P5S and P6S before the prices lower. A few weeks later, they've cleared P7S and are well into P8S, meaning they spend every week doing three reclears. Then for their prog, they face P8S' door boss every instance, drinking more potions in the hope that the party can get past it to the phase they want to work on. Unlike our earlier dabbler, this player is pretty much guaranteed to clear the tier on content (unless Earth constraints stop them), putting them at four reclears a week including a door boss fight. Their consumable costs still dominate the total; a highly consistent static that reclears efficiently might bring their tier-long costs below the dabbler by reducing their consumable use! Though if that static does optimization runs after reclears... imagine drinking 2-3 potions every pull for 6+ hours. Or 4-5 potions per pull in late Ultimate prog. I've done bulk food and potion orders for Ultimate raiders, and I'll do so again, because they go through so many potions.

(We've still not considered anyone who actually has a strong reason to overmeld their crafted gear. That's reserved for people who'll hit a fourth floor enrage in week 1 of the tier, at latest week 2, before tome and Savage gear makes the DPS check doable without it. Plenty of Ultimate raiders don't clear Savage that fast.)

You say you don't have a set schedule, which means you probably don't reliably have Tuesday evenings open, which means you have basically no access to statics - and would have an even worse time of PFing the tier than I described, having to endure the lower clear rates of non-prime-time parties. Does that sound cheap and easy to manage to you?

Having expenses high enough to struggle with doesn't require anything mystical. It just requires a fun profile slightly different than yours, that promotes raiding high enough to go for it despite limited time. That's what Amarande meant with

That's a WHOLE lot of unnecessary text to say that it's difficult to go from a casual playstyle into competitive hardcore early weeks progression style savage raiding. It ignores the fact that someone will have to play far more than your standard casual player to even attempt to prog savage. It ignores the fact that even casual players such as myself won't need to buy much, if any materia if they aren't overmelding, because various roulettes throw crystals at you to trade for IX/X materia, not to mention all the materia you get from extracting spiritbond. I haven't purchased a single materia, and I have a couple dozen of each potentially useful X, along with 40-70 crystals to trade in for them should I need any in a pinch. That's without doing In Need roulettes more than once or twice a month.

Seriously, this is basically just an elaborate "but it's hard to move from casual to super hardcore with no delays". Duh? I even mentioned in one of my posts that I don't do the content of actual challenge because of this level of time committment. That time being either gathering and crafting gear/food, or earning gil, or even the time for prog itself. The whole incredibly specific scenario is only slightly more realistic than me trying to go into UCOB and beat it in a single lockout with a random PF group despite the fact that I've never tried it before.

All in all, you're basically assuming absolutely worst case scenarios for everything, and combining them all together to create far larger problems than actually exist. Problems along this kind of thing DO exist, but not nearly in the numbers and with the frequency you make them out to be.

You'll need to come back down to Etheirys and maybe not throw out a novel of mythical theoretical scenarios when a chapter of properly grounded possibilities will do. At least, if you would like your ideas to be considered by those who matter.

[Colt47]

Since there's a few posts that are mentioning the time gated content and it would be a bit of a challenge to quote all of it, I'll say this real fast.

Savage is absolutely time gated content just like the rest and has always been time gated content. The way the gate is setup is different since it depends on the gear level of those playing and what the average individual raiding is capable of. Like people get very disillusioned by the world first groups and the hardcore gamers, but hardcore raiders are really burning about a full time jobs worth of hours mastering these fights, and they have to deal with maximizing absolutely everything due to the limited gear they have at the start of a tier.

Most people who are doing savage are doing it at most like a part-time job or below that standard, so something like 28 hours or less per week. It doesn't matter what people think: You can't expect a group of people going 28 hours or less to match people who are doing 40+ hours on the content.

In all honesty, it's not a very good system even though it is a tried and true system. The amount of time it takes to get through all of it is highly variable and difficult to schedule as people doing it have different goal posts and times. Usually all the fire hits the fan on the third and fourth fights when it comes to the raid drama and burn out.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

In summary, you don't really have a way to set a baseline because you're coming from the place of "everyone has different earning potentials based on what they're willing to do". Which, well, is obvious. There's a reason that I only addressed a specific portion of the original post: That's the part I could speak to. I'm not going to play the infinite hypotheticals game with you, because that's just a rotating door of moving goalposts as opposed to anything objective.

Are you willfully misreading me?

As I have said repeatedly, I care about the entire spectrum from casual to hardcore. Therefore, I care about raiders too.

I am not interested in setting some single-point baseline and ignoring all other points, because I am not interested in ignoring other players' experiences. The fact that you personally have no problems on your specific point of that spectrum does not mean that there are not problems for other people on other parts of that spectrum.

You made assumptions based on what I told you, some of them incorrect given you didn't include the other contextual information in said post. For example, I don't do alliance raids much beyond the first month, maybe two. I notably dislike 24-mans. Any large scale content like that is annoying to me for a number of reasons, even if Aglaia is pretty nice compared to the others I've done (all but nier).

I assumed no such thing. I said

You've said yourself that you don't do any content harder than Normal Raids, and perhaps similar things like Alliance Raids.

See that word "perhaps"? As in "maybe, maybe not". And you do, in fact, do Alliance Raids, even if you choose not to do them for very long after their release.

Likewise, I mentioned tome restrictions a number of times because I do cap my tomes. I mentioned that I purchase my gear primarily with tomes and normal raid drops. My "cost" isn't zero, given you count time in costs, because I have to spend time farming tomes and raid gear. Like, say, the 10 normal raids I had to do today in order to win 4 rolls for gear turn ins.

None of which you require to access the content you choose to do. If you choose not to cap your tomes or get your preferred Normal Raid pieces every week, you will still be able to access next tier's MSQ and Normal Raids (and Alliance Raids, and everything else casual). You are of course welcome to do it, but you do it because you want to, not because the game requires you to.

You also use your last line to pivot completely out of the realm that I was speaking to. You're now heading towards the hardcore content. All this talk of how you want casual players to have buying power. I mention that I don't have any trouble there with minimal input outside of tomes/raids. Now you transition into EX/Savage raiding. Which, again, isn't the casual's wheelhouse.

How many times do I have to repeat myself that raiders should also have purchasing power? We're in a thread about Abyssos Savage, for the love of Hydaelyn. You're the one who's taking this as purely about casual play.

Sure, I also care about casual players who have expenses for other reasons (glamour contests, house decorating, etc.), but raiders having a problem is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of a problem.

That's a WHOLE lot of unnecessary text to say that it's difficult to go from a casual playstyle into competitive hardcore early weeks progression style savage raiding.

If you think someone doing their first Extreme is "competitive hardcore early weeks progression style savage raiding", you are woefully misinformed. Even my second example, with the person hitting P7S in the first week, is merely high midcore.

True competitive prog, the world races, mean arranging the statics well in advance, arranging for a 9th man and in some cases a 10th man as support, taking time off work, pentamelded gear, 12-16 hour days at minimum ... Savage tiers are often raced in a single roughly 24-hour shot, multiple raid days are more for Ultimate races.

And then there's the non-competitive hardcore statics, the ones that don't bother with the world race but still want their week 1 tier clear. Those usually form closer to the tier and dispense with the support players, but they still take time off work and they have a new expense of their own: split clears. As in, outfitting two characters per player, a main and an alt, with pentamelded crafted gear, and clearing each of the first three fights twice. (Why? Because that gets them two sets of raid drops to help with the final fight's DPS check, via using four mains and four alts in each clear and feeding all the loot to the mains. World race statics don't bother because split clears mean falling behind groups who can go without the extra loot.) Which means more expenses - those statics can easily break 10m per player for that one week, without having to preorder their gear.

Did you see any of those in my last post of examples? No, because I wasn't talking about hardcore raiders.

It ignores the fact that someone will have to play far more than your standard casual player to even attempt to prog savage.

I explicitly said that each player's available playtime per week is fixed. If you have a time machine to get around that, maybe you should be marketing it instead of posting here.

And yes, some players have little time and still choose to spend it raiding. Ever heard of "raid logging"? It's a colloquial term for logging on just to raid and then logging off, and it exists because plenty of players do that.

It ignores the fact that even casual players such as myself won't need to buy much, if any materia if they aren't overmelding, because various roulettes throw crystals at you to trade for IX/X materia, not to mention all the materia you get from extracting spiritbond. I haven't purchased a single materia, and I have a couple dozen of each potentially useful X, along with 40-70 crystals to trade in for them should I need any in a pinch. That's without doing In Need roulettes more than once or twice a month.

If you put that materia from roulettes into your gear, that means you can't sell said materia, and therefore can't make gil off it, and therefore would have less gil than if you didn't use the materia. In economics terms, that's the "opportunity cost" of using the materia. So it doesn't matter much whether you get your materia from roulettes or the MB, because using materia you already have can't save you any more than the MB taxes.

Seriously, this is basically just an elaborate "but it's hard to move from casual to super hardcore with no delays". Duh? I even mentioned in one of my posts that I don't do the content of actual challenge because of this level of time committment. That time being either gathering and crafting gear/food, or earning gil, or even the time for prog itself.

I specifically used two different player examples, one starting from a player's first Extreme, to show realistic scenarios of player growth that you could hopefully relate to. And once again, even with my example of an experienced raider I still didn't touch hardcore anything.

Since you don't want to do Savage, why are you so interested in posting here?

The whole incredibly specific scenario is only slightly more realistic than me trying to go into UCOB and beat it in a single lockout with a random PF group despite the fact that I've never tried it before.

All in all, you're basically assuming absolutely worst case scenarios for everything, and combining them all together to create far larger problems than actually exist. Problems along this kind of thing DO exist, but not nearly in the numbers and with the frequency you make them out to be.

Nope, those are perfectly normal Party Finder numbers. In fact, let's go to your local Jenova MB and see how expensive potions currently are. I'll save you the trouble:









All the HQ potions are over 4k each, in week 10 of the tier! (NQ is useless for any actual clear attempts, as is firmly evidenced by the frequency of people buying HQ. So are Vitality potions.) The 2.5k per potion settled price that I used in my estimates is nowhere near a worst case scenario.

You'll need to come back down to Etheirys and maybe not throw out a novel of mythical theoretical scenarios when a chapter of properly grounded possibilities will do. At least, if you would like your ideas to be considered by those who matter.

Square Enix has the numbers on potions being drank, food being eaten, crafted gear being used, and so on. They already know that raiders are an important segment of the in-game economy, and that starts well before "super hardcore".

You didn't understand this when Amarande gave a short explanation. You continue to insist that it's "mythical" when I gave grounded cases with actual math, because the short explanation didn't work. If you refuse to understand the reality of raiding, then you have nothing to contribute to this discussion.

[Colt47]

What is truly perplexing is why release all fights for savage right away on the patch if the second half is geared for people to have higher item level in general? Pretty sure the majority of issues with savage content could be fixed by simply not pushing people or giving people the opportunity to wreck themselves on content. As much as it might take away the fun for a rather small set of players, breaking the savage into two wings is just a safer option.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

What is truly perplexing is why release all fights for savage right away on the patch if the second half is geared for people to have higher item level in general? Pretty sure the majority of issues with savage content could be fixed by simply not pushing people or giving people the opportunity to wreck themselves on content. As much as it might take away the fun for a rather small set of players, breaking the savage into two wings is just a safer option.

The item levels required for the second half of a Savage tier are entirely attainable immediately by buying crafted gear, and plenty of players enjoy the challenge of taking them on with 'imperfect' gear before tome and Normal Raid caps allow for higher item levels and better substats. An experienced midcore raider can easily reach the third fight of a tier within 6-8 hours even in Party Finder, and spending that kind of time over a launch week is hardly "wrecking oneself on content". Splitting Savage launch in two would deprive even midcore raiders - quite a large population - of their fun, and likely break the raid gear system and tuning to boot.

[ForteNightshade]

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.

Unfortunately, much like most content in this game with recent expansions, SE didn't interested in skill value but rather accessibility.

My own preference would be a sort of light version of Expert crafts being required for Master Recipes and for the whole Augmented Crafting gear to actually require new crafters. It's always bothered me the odd numbered patches have next to nothing for crafters to partake in because by that point everything has been marked down into oblivion. I think the Augmented sets should be craftable with a new mat to breeze a little life back into the market instead of essentially being a handout that only further devalues what little recipes we have.

None of this will happen, of course. The dev team dislikes the idea of crafters seeing gil itself as a ranking system.

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.

We won't know until 6.4 comes around. All we do know is this tier proved surprisingly profitable despite almost everyone assuming the markets would crash within hours. Even Yoshida himself acknowledged that very same concern, and his subsequent surprise when the opposite happened. 6.4 will more or less be the litmus test since they've all but confirmed Savage will be delayed again.

What is truly perplexing is why release all fights for savage right away on the patch if the second half is geared for people to have higher item level in general? Pretty sure the majority of issues with savage content could be fixed by simply not pushing people or giving people the opportunity to wreck themselves on content. As much as it might take away the fun for a rather small set of players, breaking the savage into two wings is just a safer option.

Raiders essentially have only five fights dedicated to their preferences in nearly the span of a year. Delaying three of them would feel awful while accomplishing absolutely nothing in terms of speeding up gear progression. There is no "issue" in regards to pushing people. Show some self control and simply raid at a lighter schedule if you either can't keep up or simply don't want to spent a lot of time progging. There's no shame in it taking you several weeks or even months to clear compared to those clearing week 1-2.

[Colt47]

The item levels required for the second half of a Savage tier are entirely attainable immediately by buying crafted gear, and plenty of players enjoy the challenge of taking them on with 'imperfect' gear before tome and Normal Raid caps allow for higher item levels and better substats. An experienced midcore raider can easily reach the third fight of a tier within 6-8 hours even in Party Finder, and spending that kind of time over a launch week is hardly "wrecking oneself on content". Splitting Savage launch in two would deprive even midcore raiders - quite a large population - of their fun, and likely break the raid gear system and tuning to boot.

It definitely doesn't feel like the gear is enough if it takes a top tier playgroup to manage to barely kill the fight with what is considered to be "good enough" gear. That kind of thing makes sense in single player titles where you absolutely don't have any issues with internet connectivity, but when it comes to online play and savage, fights in the second half don't feel right until most people have a mix of crafted, tome, and coffer gear.

But this also isn't stating that they need to nerf savage as much as they need to create content that has the ability to work with more than one audience. If they can add a mid-tier wing and just increase the DPS checks on the higher tier wing, that would work far better in terms of progress and gives those who are not interested in true savage a way to access the same cosmetic options (weapons, dyable armor, etc). Would it break the current end game? Probably would considering raid finder in WoW did exactly that when they introduced easier versions for random groups, but honestly that is just showing that people were bottled into an environment that didn't work for them.

And going to mention that this is also why we have so many discussions on savage in the second half, because the tuning on the fights are not really meant for those who are more into "I like hard content but not the nightmare level content" kind of groups. I mean many of the savage fights have mechanics that without a guide would take forever to figure out for most people. Week 1 savage runners are pretty damn methodical on figuring out the strategies blind.