Live Letter from the Producer, 1/12/16Follow

I didn't take time out from farming. I got my arming done first, and then I had extra time to do the story.

Next storyline will gate a dungeon, so people will probably prioritize it higher.

Edited, Jan 18th 2016 4:55pm by Thayos

Yep.

Fortunately, most people aren't a-holes about cutscenes... it was always a problem of a sliver of people making life unpleasant for the rest. I've done more Castrum/Prae runs than not where people were totally cool with waiting for others to watch their cutscenes. You'll find rude gamers in any community.

And the key is to find a good FC, just like how in XI having a good linkshell was so meaningful.

They need to do both. There are a lot of servers that are not Hyperion or Gilgamesh that need some access to the greater raid community.



Because the Diadem exists, raid equipment is currently not always the best. Bumping it 5 item levels corrects this in most cases.



I'd expect it to work the way relics did in the 2.x series where they're just behind the raid weapons until the end of the series when they finally catch up. That seems reasonable to me.

It's not just a matter of difficulty though. It's a matter of community. There are small servers that have, no kidding, like 1 raiding FC. Even if the raids become more PUG friendly you'll still need people capable and willing to organize others and a lot of smaller servers just don't have that.

Worked perfectly fine in Research Facility, you actually can't progress unless everyone views (or everyone skips) the cutscene - another reason I said it was the perfectly designed dungeon and why that along with cues from XI, they could have so much better designed dungeons and content if they really wanted.

Edited, Jan 19th 2016 7:07am by Theonehio

Yeah, they want to get rid of as many 1.x elements as possible but hold onto the stuff people still seem to like. So while I agree the plot should move forward...it's still disjointed as all hell.

That too is why I love XI's approach, while you aren't always "HEY I'M A CHARACTER I'M DOING SOMETHING!" you actually "fit" into the world and a part of the overall storyline. Yeah you're "the chosen one" but you're not the storyline's instant win button like you are in XIV. You can literally get rid of any "villain" in this game and still have a storyline.

Take for instance when you grappled with one of the Legatus and you had people cheering him on and such, it's an interesting fight (and over used trope) but they could have done more like that, especially with the Relic Quest in 3.x, but they aren't and won't.

The storyline really isn't going anywhere honestly, they put their best foot forward with 3.0's story and 3.1 and 3.2 is setting stuff up - They tend to waste some good elements on side storylines: For example Omega Weapon - we'll never see him in the main story because they shoved him into being a PvP element to give that a storyline. Omega traditionally was designed to seek out and destroy Shinryu, which will be a main story element in XIV and while that lore wasn't told in FFV, it was in the FF history book thing, so that's why even in XI, Shinryu was chosen as the "ultimate form" of Promathia, to keep Omega being designed a purpose, and Ultima being the "countermeasure" incase Omega went stray.

What would be interesting is if they start taking the XI approach and start weaving storylines together rather than self containing them in every update. I know certain people loved to say: "but but every update in XIV blows an entire XI expansion away!!!!11111!111 (it really doesn't)" but when you really sit and think about the story, it doesn't really feel like a storyline, and before anyone say it, yes I do read every line and listen to every cutscene (kind of have to since they rarely match up with the non Japanese localization) and did every side quest, which rarely even involves the storyline or lore.

Even if the story moves forward, it still should weave into every other storyline, I know they want to keep things in a way to "not confuse the new player omg!" but Coil, which obviously even SE agrees with (hence why they're choosing a Coil 2.5 type difficulty and possibly even design for Midas), was the better design as the storyline was linked to not only 1.x, but 2.x as well. I'd like this game's storyline better if it didn't just feel like an after thought at times.

Why do we seem to disagree on everything? Ugh. I'm really not trying to disagree with you just for fun.

But yes, I disagree with this too. A basketball team can't be made entirely of Chris Pauls, and a raid group can't be made entirely of people who are drawn toward organizing. People need to be motivated, for sure, but being motivated to follow is just as useful as being motivated to lead. Good raid groups have room (and need) for both.

In reality, what happens when you have too many leaders and not enough role players is you get too many statics with not enough members to go around.


Edited, Jan 19th 2016 12:56pm by Thayos

That's ... totally unreasonable. I'm a great raider. I've been doing it for 20 years in one form or another. I'm AWFUL at organizing raids and I'm a good enough player to know that. Just because I'm bad at organizing other people doesn't mean I'm not cut out for raiding.[/quote]



There was never a real need to spam that place, so most people going through it are doing so for the first time and will want to watch the cutscenes (because frankly they're great... pretty much all of Azys Lla is great). CM needed to be spammed for tomestones, so people got irked because of all the cutscenes.

Dungeons that need to be run repeatedly do not include mid-zone cutscenes.

Edited, Jan 19th 2016 7:34pm by Callinon

I think you disagree with me most of the time because you read far too much into what I'm saying. I'm not suggesting that everyone trying to raid has to be ready for Elysium or Method. I'm just pointing out that raid finder tools tend to attract the type of players who don't care. They can't be bothered to form a group, they're not there to learn and they have no patience for wiping on easy content while everyone else figures out why they suck. The mentality is why waste time with a group that wipes once when I can just queue up until I get lucky enough to get a carry.

Absolutely nothing good has come from LFR. What's worse is that when it proves to be unsuccessful, SE will attach some sort of necessary 'incentive' for players to act like they care even though they hate it. It would literally become another weekly chore that you'd be responsible for if you wanted to earn the maximum amount of whatever currency is hot at the time.

@Callinon
It's not specifically organizing or running the raid as much as it's showing that you want to be there, you're willing to learn and you care. You sound like the type of player who isn't great at coming up with a strategy, but you have no issue understanding it and executing it. That's why most people dedicated to raiding have trial runs. You're not expected to run the raid, but nobody wants players who are there just to collect some loot and unfortunately that's what LFR amounts to.

Let's be clear about the difference between WoW-style LFR and a cross-server raid builder. LFR has its uses but I don't think FFXIV would benefit from it. Cross-server raid building tools are akin to tools like openraid that allow the building of premade raids across different servers. Not automated matchmaking where you will never meet those people again to do content that's balanced for a full raid, half of whom are snacking on paint chips.

Realistically I don't understand why anyone would be opposed to the idea of being able to put premade raids together across server boundaries.



What you said was:



If you'd like to revise that statement, by all means. But please don't act as if that's not exactly what you said. It was all of 3 posts above mine.

Edited, Jan 20th 2016 11:12am by Callinon

And the only reason for that is because whether people clear it or not, unlocking the new raids immediately means people will farm it faster and thus exhaust the current game's content that much quicker.

The main reason to oppose it is because Yoshi has a hard on for "think of the new player" and "balance." He's even went on record to state any content that can be done via duty finder has to be adjusted in a way that anyone loading it will have the chance to clear it. So cross-server means unless it's still locked off content (i.e Savage Alexander not being in Duty Finder) it's going to further be nerfed down or else there's literally no incentive to use it because it FURTHER takes away from server communities than the game already does.

Think about it: You have almost no reason to care about your server community because most content is solo or done through DF, then the VERY few "Server only" content is obsolete, now in DF or shattered most end-game communities for its asinine difficulty - Now extrapolate that to being able to pull people from another server - why would you ever try to find "locally" again? It will help short term, that much is very true, but long term...it simply means content will further be nerfed down in order to get people to actually use it, because as some people even said here, they wait until content is nerfed before even setting foot into it and that certainly echoes true through the "targeted playerbase", because of how often you get new player bonus in even older ex primal fights.

Since the real issue is content design, not even finding the players. This is why most raiders moved to Gilgamesh, because it started being advertised as the refugee camp for people who lost their statics due to A3S genocide.

It's actually a lot different.

If you make a raid listing to recruit a group, then you're saying, "I'm the leader here, I'm going to put in the time and effort to organize this, and the buck stops with me."

If you "put your flag up," then you're saying, "I want to raid, and I'm open to joining a group."

Edited, Jan 20th 2016 1:51pm by Thayos