Huh? (article about anima weapons)Follow

"Finally, though Yoshida wants Anima weapons to remain time-consuming to obtain, the development team will no longer be using "difficult content" to gate them off. We'll need to wait until patches 3.25 and 3.3 to discover their full meaning, but any future boss requirements will certainly be limited to normal difficulty"

What "difficult content" gates off anima weapons? Getting a million poetic and law tomes = difficult? huh?

they could give is something thats "more than just a grind" that isnt difficult....


try giving us content exclusive to relic instead of reusing old content.. FOR example the first step in relic required you beating the first three primals on hard then they had fights that were specific to that quest line (hydra and chimera) neither was "difficult" and it wasnt a grind either.... they could do the same hing with future relic

The hardcore players who have a static in my FC threw themselves at that fight almost nightly for several weeks before they finally won. It's absurd to say that battle isn't hard, especially when so many others on the OFs praised it for its difficulty.

They were at least on A3S.

Yes, Thordan Ex is a difficult fight. Yoshi never said A1S or A2S were easy, either. In fact, they're called "Savage Mode."

Why do you keep insisting that everything is easy, even when everything is clearly not easy? You also implied in your last post that Titan HM was easy back in the day... this isn't true, either. I literally lost friends from the game because that was such a difficult roadblock for so many players.

I really don't know what point you're trying to make by just blindly insisting that nothing is difficult. What you should be doing is calling BS on the kind of difficulty the dev team has put in place for you to wrestle with.

I'm going to take a guess at it -- you don't want the learning curve to be difficult; you'd prefer the fight to be based more on reflexes and general knowledge rather than memorization. Is that correct? That's how I feel, too... and you can still hold those opinions while also acknowledging that the current fights are difficult for many of the game's players.

I mean, you can stand back and say everything's easy all you want. And perhaps you're a truly gifted gamer, or maybe memorization just comes insanely easy to you, in which case these fights would be really simple. Doesn't change the fact that for most players, these fights are difficult.



Also, calling BS on this. What I saw from my FC's hardcore static was echoed from numerous other players on the OFs. I don't recall any kind of widespread commenting from people saying "oh yeah, we beat this within a few hours!" Most of the comments two weeks later were from people talking about how far into the fight their statics had progressed, although there were more groups starting to win by that point.

I wouldn't be surprised if the upper echelon of hardcore groups beat it within 24 hours, but the development team would be stupid to tune content in this game to that degree of difficulty. If the content is difficult enough that most players need weeks to learn the fight, then it's difficult enough.



Edited, Dec 29th 2015 12:18pm by Thayos

Couldn't tell you... those are the two I couldn't get finished. :(

Because if it's easy for *them* obviously it must be easy for everyone else too, durr

A good example of what's being stated is, there's people who struggle with Void Ark, which would lead one to say Void Ark is "challenging content" just because people wipe on Cetus and the 2nd trash pull (the malboro) or constantly wipe on Cuch despite how easy the mechanics are (don't even fool yourself) meanwhile you can have an alliance that has zero problems and actually finish it within 30 minutes but you're not allowed to say "Void Ark is easy" because there's people who struggle with content still. The same with primal fights, including Thordan. The fights aren't that difficult, the fact people struggle with it and the fact there's people who blow through it like nothing means it's more down to players than content design because by design, people should have a tough time with it each and every time if it truly is challenging content, it shouldn't get easier especially when the game doesn't advance past it (everyone is still at 210 ilvl max and majority of players are in ilvl200 or below weapons.) Stating otherwise is just trying to argue against even Yoshida admitting as such. He didn't spend the last 2 letters and interviews post 3.1 and 3.15 stating they realize they overtuned Savage 3 and 4 and didn't properly balance content due to lack of time and from here on out nothing will be as challenging as Thordan Ex (which BY DESIGN is nestled inbetween AS1 and AS2, which everyone (Who actually does the content) admits are the easiest) if people had no issues with the content design nor would he have had created this topic to "explain" the situation:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/276368-The-Current-Status-of-FFXIV-Patch-3.1-and-How-to-Address-it-Moving-Forward

If there was only praises.

Fyi, "Savage" and "Hard" is only stated in Japanese to show the difference in the duty finder, which is EXACTLY why Yoshida stated he's dropping the "Hard" and "Savage" after 3.2 because it no longer makes sense in the grand scheme of things (especially in regards to primals) - it was never meant to state the difficulty because I guarantee people don't find hard mode primals "challenging content", especially these days unless you truly are in that % of players who would struggle in with a boss that kills itself if you leave it alone and still manage to constantly wipe to it. The content isn't hard, it's really not. Players make things harder than it truly is at times. Go into Ravana Ex on Duty Finder and if you get no tome bonus, watch how often people mess up mechanics despite obviously having clears..that will make an easy primal fight see hard, would it not? Thordan is mechanics more than difficult, the guy who designed it said so and Yoshida even admitted prior to 3.1 they NERFED it.

Coil had no credits in the traditional sense (credits are usually rolled after storyline endings, so 2.0/3.0/4.0 etc.) but you did get a video that shows you exactly what happened after we got suspended in time. So there was an ending, but not a long ending of all the people not working on this game like you get with MSQ endings.

I was with you up until the 'like FFXI' part. While encounters in XI didn't follow patterns like today's MMOs do, it was usually a matter of always planning for the worst and being prepared. To do so, you still needed to understand what mobs were capable of so memorization was still a part of it.

If you were going to point to any encounter as an example of 'think on your feet', I'd offer the Faction Champions from the Trial of the Crusader raid in WoW. For anyone who never experienced it, your raid essentially PvPs a group of NPCs of various jobs. The jobs of the opponents varied, their behavior was not consistent and it was basically a gigantic ************ They couldn't be tanked like normal mobs because just like a player in PvP, you're free to attack anyone you like(unless you're CC'd of course).

I have to ask though... if players can't execute properly when the actions are pre-determined, how do you expect them to confront the unknown? I honestly feel that if you put a Faction Champions style fight in XIV, players would grovel and beg for their memory game mechanics back.

The only truly dynamic content in MMOs comes in the form of PvP. Love it, hate it or remain indifferent; you won't find anything else that comes close in terms of having to think and react.

The problem is that what separates normal content from difficult content is the level of execution required to defeat each of them. The more difficult that a developer wishes to make their content, the closer toward perfect execution the players participating need to be. I remember Yoshi saying something about adding another level of difficulty, but I'm not sure if that was a probability or a possibility.

Either way, I wouldn't expect to see it until the level cap increases and leaves them some room to implement it. Current content is balanced around just normal and difficult.

That's why I didn't mind the gates in XI because there was enough content to rotate and even enough side content (that wasn't just for "glamour purposes") to keep you busy as well even beyond the leveling process.

In XI 75 era you had Dynamis that was on a few days cooldown, gathering sky sets to pop them same day or some other time, gathering sea sets for the same purpose, Einherjar on same few day cooldown, limbus on same few day cooldown and people scheduled the events so you'll always be within a day or two your next content rotation and this lasted for years.

XIV's gates are pointless because it's purely designed to keep you from finishing the content within the same day..week being generous. Void Ark having a lockout on loot despite it dropping ilvl 200 gear..when Diadem drops 210 gear even post changes (but a bit slower now that it's not as loot pinata..y.)

Then Savage is still gated and even to exhaust those drops not only do you need to beat 3 and 4, but you also get a token drop, which you need at minimum 4 to even get anything, so you'd still have to spam it plenty gated or not. Vertical progression is all well and good, but XIV's is a bit too severe, especially if they're supposedly hurting as badly as they say they are in terms of resources.

Yeah, and I also don't think we should kid ourselves about FFXI's lasting for years being entirely a good thing.

I don't agree with this at all. Most people I play with in game do the majority of content. The only content that most players don't do are the hardcore endgame raids, which are just a sliver of the game's content, especially now that those raids have a story mode.

In fact, I'd say it's the people who don't play the game's content who are most likely to complain. But that's to be expected. Because if they enjoyed the game, they'd be playing the content.

By the sound of what interests you Xizro you seem to be in the wrong genre. Storyline has never been the strong suit of mmorpgs. Even in the case of a storydriven mmorpg like Star Wars the Old Republic if you compare the story to most decent single player games I would say it pales in comparison. For me the advantage would be doing the story with friends, but in games like XIV for the most part you can't even play with your friends through the story. Not to mention there is not even any challenge when doing it, I mean I don't think you could say there has been any challenging content for storyline in XIV aside from that dragon on the bridge before Heavensward was released (which was quickly nerfed).

From reading your post all I really saw was that you think endgame in just about every mmorpg is bad and storyline is all you care about so I am not even sure what you are arguing. That games should have more storyline content? Because I don't think anyone here would mind something like that, but I also don't know how many people I've seen really not caring at all about story (more in my experience than players like you who only care about story, but that is purely anecdotal) so there needs to be other content too. Or is it that there should be no content gating? Because from what I heard you would not be playing the content either way so what does it matter? Not that I would mind it really, but there would need to be something else that keeps people from just quitting after a week.

Player retention is a large issue for a lot of mmorpgs and whilst I agree that gameplay being fun could be improved upon in most mmorpgs there is more to it than just saying the mechanics of it all needs improvement. Players play and enjoy the genre for many different reasons, gameplay, adventure (which is a large part why I don't enjoy most new mmoprgs, because I feel that is entirely gone), progression through content, progression of your character, story with/without friends, challenges (I would love to add competition as well, but that is for the most part gone nowadays) etc. That is a problem with mmorpgs compared to MOBA in my view. MOBAs can more easily keep their players because their content is PvP and based around that. Whilst mmorpgs can do the same many playing mmorpgs don't even want PvP at all, not to mention their focus is often character progression and these things make it harder to keep the game interesting in the longrun as opposed to MOBAs for example. Regardless of how fun the actual gameplay might be or not be.

As for vertical/horizontal progression I agree that vertical progression does not have to be bad. I think it creates issues of developers keeping up with content development, but I am not against it entirely. I think there can be a good mix, but like Theonehio said XIV is just too extreme. Not to mention I think their order of releasing the content is one of the most convoluted ways I have ever seen it happen, in any mmorpg I ever played.