Factors Affecting Test Data From Abyssos Savage Delay

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

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

You "got told that sales were stable"? Do you have hard data? Do you have hard data from previous tiers to compare with?

Do you know how many people didn't buy gear or consumables because they didn't make much money during Asphodelos, and would have bought supplies if Aphorism retained value? Do you know how much gear went unused because players swapped jobs, meaning that the sale doesn't correspond to a happy customer? Do you know how much gear raiders didn't want to buy, but felt they had to in order to get into PF groups? Do you know how many players got discouraged from raiding because they kept seeing parties with minimum ilevels they couldn't reach, and so stopped buying consumables? Do you know how many people decided to focus Island Sanctuary instead of raid prep? (Do you seriously expect SE to come up with a new type of noncombat content every raid tier?) Do you know how many people crafted and/or gathered less, or not at all, because they didn't want to / couldn't afford to redo their melds? Do you know how many players have stopped crafting, gathering, or playing entirely due to bots? Do you know how many sales were made by bots, meaning that the sale doesn't correspond to a happy crafter or gatherer? Do you know how sales would change if the gathering node breakpoints were set up differently next tier, or if intermediate recipes went back to using 4 of the gathered item? Do you know how many players felt left out because of the way the non-delayed recipes were announced, and how many of them decided not to bother with the raid tier? Do you know how many of those remaining won't be able to pay off their gearsets? Do you know how many players pursued each of the new gear options for glamour, and how that compares to previous tiers?

Somehow, I doubt it. While SE probably doesn't have exact numbers for all of those either, they have more data than they release publicly, and they'll be better equipped to find those answers now that they know the questions are worth asking. Hence why I found it important to point out that those questions are worth asking.

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

I specifically said that in letting people enjoy the story the delay is clearly successful. I suggested that the delay between Normal and Savage continue. But I want to make sure that the decisions are well-informed, and that will almost certainly require more testing. Hence, more testing of how exactly to implement that delay.

Clearly you didn't read my post.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

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. ...

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. ...

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.

If you want moderate difficulty, you are welcome to take the fights at a slower pace yourself. That's how the high-end content works with and serves more than one audience. The fights are presented immediately for the benefit of those who enjoy and can handle a faster pace, especially along with blind prog. Yoshi-P has stated outright that the final fight of a Savage tier is tuned to make a tight DPS check in week 1 gear, because that's what those players enjoy.

"If we were to ship content with the same values which challenged our battle team, the top raiders would be deprived of that by-the-skin-of-your-teeth victory in the initial week of release.

...

A high-difficulty raid is a special kind of battle. We want players to enjoy a satisfying, hard-won victory, and we keep that ideal in mind when making tweaks and balance adjustments. Although we failed to walk that delicate line this time, the experience will help us to design a more perfectly thrilling battle in the future."

Why ruin their fun, and the fun of the people who support them, when you could just take the fights at your own pace and let the guides come out ahead of you?

[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.