On Difficulty/Accessibility: Looking Ahead to Crystal Tower and Bahamut's Labyrinth

[carraway]

After listening to the Letter from the Producer LIVE VIII, it was tough to not be disappointed by the delay of Crystal Tower, but we understand that tuning raid content is a huge logistical problem. It wasn't until reading the official transcript that we felt severely underwhelmed:

The Crystal Tower is content that can be undertaken by a 24 person party. I don’t think that difficulty is really that hard, and we’ve adjusted it so it’s something that can be enjoyed by everyone.

However, for anyone out there who was similarly disappointed, one of our members, Sirius Taco, has a friend who provided an alternate take on the translation, adding in some details that had been left out:

On BL:

Yoshida: "So basically we've got players all over the company who are exceptionally skilled (Sirius's friend's note: I know some of these guys, they’re hardcore) and we’re testing DPS outputs and so on, crazy math. We can’t actually talk about what bosses are going to be in but as for gimmicks, I can give an example.. hmm, stuff like if you don’t move in a proper pattern, or if you don’t group up properly on time. Bosses have a lot of different phases, and as you might expect, each have requirements on the player in terms of skill, damage output and survivability. Something like, "okay we got this phase down but the next one is too hard! What do we do!"

It’s pretty hard, pretty hard indeed. There are parts where you’ll have to divide your party in half and do separate things mid-boss-fight. Lots of DPS checks, basically if you can’t keep up the DPS (which the requirement will be elevated in successive phases) you’ll be unable to progress. Things like "gear checks" will be a common phrase here. Bahamut's Labyrinth will naturally get more and more difficult as you progress and we intend to keep updating it as it’s got a lot of planned content. One of the things I forgot to mention was something we’re calling shared damage so, for example you have 1 player standing doing something and if he gets hit by attack x, he’ll be one-shot. So we’ll require 2 or 3 players to group up to mitigate damage. There are concepts like channelling too, where a boss might attach a tether to someone and "something bad" will happen so you have to sever it quickly, and so on."

On CT:

Yoshida: "Crystal Tower is a 24-player - "alliance" as we’re calling it - type raid. Actually it’s basically 100% finished and we intended to put it in with Bahamut's Labyrinth but we thought it was far too difficult. So we've started to retune it and hopefully it’ll become something you can enjoy rather than fail repeatedly. We’re going to put it in patch 2.1 and we hope you’ll try it out."

For us as an FC, though we consider ourselves hardcore gamers, we have lives and we have no qualms about accessibility. At the same time, we think it's possible to compromise without diluting the achievement of tackling the hardest content possible. Difficulty, to us, doesn't mean we're throwing ourselves at brick (Demon?) walls over and over again and it takes three months to clear something -- rather, we simply hope that the complexity is there in the encounter design.

So, looking ahead to the Bahamut dungeons and Crystal Tower, we hope that Yoshida and the battle team err on the side of difficulty, particularly when it comes to hard-modes, and we hope that Crystal Tower gets a hard-mode as well. We're all for everyone having a chance at the content; we want it to sustain all levels of the playerbase, from the 2-hour-a-week player to the I-eat-danmaku-for-breakfast-then-win-EVO-for-dinner player (none of us are that good, sadly).

[rina_inverse]

For us as a FC, though we consider ourselves hardcore gamers, we have lives and we have no qualms about accessibility. At the same time, we think it's possible to compromise without diluting the achievement of tackling the hardest content possible. Difficulty, to us, doesn't mean we're throwing ourselves at brick (Demon?) walls over and over again and it takes three months to clear something -- rather, we simply hope that the complexity is there in the encounter design.

I like this. difficulty doesnt equal with time sink. yes, there might be some time to sink for learning process, but after the pattern all clear, no more time sink needed. two thumbs for you guys

So, looking ahead to the Bahamut dungeons and Crystal Tower, we hope that Yoshida and the battle team err on the side of difficulty, particularly when it comes to hard-modes, and we hope that Crystal Tower gets a hard-mode as well. We're all for everyone having a chance at the content; we want it to sustain all levels of the playerbase, from the 2-hour-a-week player to the I-eat-danmaku-for-breakfast-then-win-EVO-for-dinner player (none of us are that good, sadly).

again two thumbs for you guys. you willing to compromise, which is a good thing

[ArkhamNative]

After listening to the Letter from the Producer LIVE VIII, it was tough to not be disappointed by the delay of Crystal Tower, but we understand that tuning raid content is a huge logistical problem. It wasn't until reading the official transcript that we felt severely underwhelmed:

It's a pity that the genius and intensity of Yoshi-P and his hardcore, talented team gets gets completely lost in these generalized summaries. This is yet another glaring example. I can't count the number of times people have worried or argued in ignorance over something an isolated Reinheart or your multilingual friend showed had already been thoughtfully addressed by the dev team.

I suppose that may be off-topic, but it really had to be said.

[PSxpert2011]

What I got out of the Crystal Tower Difficulty is delayed for tweaking because 'they' don't want to discriminate between casuals and hard-cores who enter the content.

The ability to look for a group without the actual leg-work and those already in a Link-shell/ Grand-company/ Free-company with "connections"(or high-speed connection) /wink /wink XD
... should equivocate to the same rewards

...and somehow I find the whole thing silly and funny at the same time!

edit: I decided to climb-up and out of this decussion before getting caught in a hole too deep for my wits! XD

[carraway]

It's a pity that the genius and intensity of Yoshi-P and his hardcore, talented team gets gets completely lost in these generalized summaries. This is yet another glaring example. I can't count the number of times people have worried or argued in ignorance over something an isolated Reinheart or your multilingual friend showed had already been thoughtfully addressed by the dev team.

I suppose that may be off-topic, but it really had to be said.

I definitely agree that communication would benefit from further degrees of clarity. Another hope that I have is that, after a successful release, the development team can afford an on-staff, on-call, dedicated translator.

[Zezlar]

I definitely agree that communication would benefit from further degrees of clarity. Another hope that I have is that, after a successful release, the development team can afford an on-staff, on-call, dedicated translator.

I have to agree with Carraway here. While Reinheart is a nice, and an always welcome addition to our community, he can only go so far as a translator. A lot of the uproar that stems out of this forum, as well as the beta forum is from lack of clarity between the development team and the community. Mistranslated information, or information that simply wasn't emphasized on enough because of lack of time (Live letters).

[Kirito]

I think yoshida was prepared to give us difficult content from the get go? I mean he mentioned before that the content will be really hard at first and then with future patches the difficulty would be reduced... It is a shame that they have to delay the launch of the crystal tower because of this but I guess it is ok, since it will give me time to get a lot of relics...

[ArkhamNative]

I definitely agree that communication would benefit from further degrees of clarity. Another hope that I have is that, after a successful release, the development team can afford an on-staff, on-call, dedicated translator.

Just a follow-up note here. That post where I quoted the OP translations now has 174 "Likes". I do remind myself that those aren't really my likes, but yours. They'll all be deleted soon enough, but anyway, I wanted to pass along my congrats and thanks to you and also Sirius's friend the translator.

[carraway]

Just a follow-up note here. That post where I quoted the OP translations now has 174 "Likes". I do remind myself that those aren't really my likes, but yours. They'll all be deleted soon enough, but anyway, I wanted to pass along my congrats and thanks to you and also Sirius's friend the translator.

Nah, haha, I appreciate the sharing and the source-citation. The More You Know ---===★