Thread: JP interviews [pre-6.5]

Originally Posted by Arrius

You know they aren't good in that, and they are forced to adjust some of the other older content out of sheer gaps in logic at times, i.e. making Crystal Tower mandatory during Shadowbringer.

What gap in logic was that?

The story moved on until the events of the Crystal Tower plotline, which previously could be kept optional, absolutely had to be integrated into the main story so they could write what they wanted to add next.

The circumstances changed, but there was nothing wrong with the raid being optional at the time they made it.

Originally Posted by PredatoryCatgirl

"We already have tomestone weapons"

No, we don't. We have tomestone/raid weapons. Which would be fine, except that the drops from normal raids are limited to once a week. I'd like to get an upgrade to my green gear on all four jobs I play without having to wait a literal half year. So either keep relics as they are or uncap the drops from normal raids.

You have to wait anyway for the rest of the pieces of tome gear anyway, there is no need to gimp the relic because of that, this is a tome gearing issue not a relic one. On top of that there are some ways to upgrade the weapon without waiting that much like doing Ex/Savage which drop uncapped better weapons (ex) and items to get tome weapons and even better weapons much faster (savage) so there is even less need to lose the relic content

The main thing that grinds my gears is their approach to the relic grind. Yes, relics were never really hard to do, just time consuming, but that was the entire point. It gave players something to do over time, which kept them logging in regularly. It was a mid to long term goal, and those are important in an MMORPG of all things. As of EW, what would have been considered standard tomestone weapons suddenly require more effort to obtain. They didn't need to swing so far in this direction. Trying to appease both parties here is hard, and I understand that. But they didn't even try to make those who enjoy an actual relic grind happy. They just threw them under the bus and said that it was "hard" to satisfy them. It seems like they shy away from anything that they deem as difficult, and that is part of the problem. Not just with the relics this time around, but with the game itself.

We'll probably never know the actual answer and it may be just my own speculation ... but I can't help but think originally the plan for Criterion was to serve as the platform for the 6.0 Relic, but for some reason they decided to decouple them when the content went live. Like think about it, Criterion is definitely an elaborated piece of content, so it's weird to see it came with barely any reward. On the other hand, you have the relic which traditionally the longest grind of the game now just drop from the sky.

It's like these 2 pieces of contents are just half of what they should be, and would have been made whole if they were together.

Looking forward to Zeromus fight being more physical-type than brain-training fight. Hope it doesn't get nerfed to oblivion with unbounded ilvl sync like every other fun trial that now feels like a shell of its former self.

Euphrosyne wasn't necessarily bad as a base foundation for new mechanics, but it was lackluster because of high ilvl sync that caused bosses to not show their unique gimmick (Althyk could die at times before he sped up time to create different mechanics, making Nymeia's mechanics feel like an absolute joke of a boss). Not to mention, mechanics gave way too much time between each other. You barely get to see mechanics or damage. With the increased ILVL, the only reason people die is because they die to one-shot mechanics or because they just don't do mechanics in general. That's not something ilvl sync can do anything about. It feels like artificial difficulty.

The lack of exploratory content really hurt the community as well by creating a lot more divisive topics. Players who find the current casual content too easy but don't like extremes because of how big the difficulty spike in mechanics are pretty much have nowhere to go. If I were to estimate content difficulty out of 100, dungeons would fall within a 10 to 20 range, trials would be 12 to 24, alliance raids can fall anywhere between 12 to 28, normal raids can fall anywhere between 12 to 28, exploratory content can be anywhere from 20 to 50, extremes can be 60 to 80, and savage would be 70 to 85.

Frontlines is okay. Imo, the real improvement would be to make stuff like guard react more responsively for players who don't think as much so they can make it up with reflexes but the overall gameplay is fine. I hope they don't kill this game mode by nerfing unique job interactions though. There's no point in making job uniqueness if you kill the uniqueness of the job. It would just feel as bland as PvE content after.

The Manderville Relics have the highest completion rate of any relic so far. The more elaborate they make the relic content/grind, the fewer people make one.

There is an inherent conflict between people that "enjoy weapon enhancement as content" and people that "want a system that makes it easy to obtain weapons". Satisfying both is very hard.

They will take feedback into account for 7.x's relic series.

Making a system that makes it easy to obtain weapons is not equivalent to removing weapon enhancement as content. Yes, of course the manderville relics is going to have the highest completion rate... that's literally what everyone does when they finish MSQ and go to the newly unlocked tomestone vendor to gear up.
There's nothing unique about that system when everyone in the game already does this. You could have easily just made the tomestone weapon not require savage to unlock and make Savage get its own trade-in for a higher ILV unique weapon instead. All that really happened is that you removed content for people who enjoyed weapon enhancement content and took the roundabout way to make tomestone gearing easier.

IMO, they could really just go back to using the old formula for a compromise. Decouple the need for doing exploratory content for people who don't want to do exploratory content and make obtaining the weapon still possible by passively doing content, but make incentives for running exploratory content to be much richer and quicker than doing without it.
Ex: Relic can still be obtained with tomestones, but will now use the 450 weekly capped tomestone as currency to purchase the dropped material. The total required amount is still 1500 but separated into 15 tokens costing 100 each, but doing exploratory content also gives the item token as a reward. After the currency changes and the new expansion is out, the relic becomes outdated so it requires poetics. The conversion of poetics is 500 per token, thus still incetivizing the use of Exploratory content -- but not required. This is under the assumption players don't do Extremes or Savage as difficult content for gearing up, because if they did, then obtaining a new weapon shouldn't be an issue when EX and Savage also drops a high ILV weapon..

I really wish the CBU3 Devs. would just come out to talk to us.

This feels so tiring at this point.

Just because the forum here has some bad apples...

I think part of the problem with the relic system is that it's redundant even as a catch-up weapon. If you wanted to have a weapon purely from collecting weekly tome drops, then tome weapons already exist (and in some cases look better than the actual relic weapons currently do themselves). If you don't want to collect tome drops, there are plenty of other parallel gear systems to catch up with, including crafted weapons, Extreme Primal weapons, and even Deep Dungeon weapons on tiers that they get released.

Treating the relic weapon as a catch up weapon made sense previously, when these alternatives were not available. It doesn't really make sense now. I think it's perfectly fine to keep the relics as being less accessible and require an investment of effort to get.

After seeing how Yoshi-P referred to himself as a former MMORPG player in a recent interview I really do think it would be best if we had someone in charge who is a current MMORPG player.

I'd like the game to be designed by someone who is passionate about the genre and willing to innovate, rather than increasingly tweak things to appeal to individuals who don't actually like MMORPG's all that much and simply want to treat it like a single player experience with some very light multiplayer elements from time to time.

If you advertise a product as one thing, encourage people to invest in it and then decide to take it in a completely different direction then it should not be at all surprising to see criticism arise as far as I'm concerned.