Dev Tracker - Discussion

This comes down to a disagreement on a subjective matter. You believe that their results are great due to quality of design, while I believe their results are not particularly striking.

There are good examples to indicate this, such as geomancer auto-capping magic accuracy and magic evasion for literally years unnoticed. Geomancer in general was designed so poorly that the only way to balance future content around it is to give monsters insane resistance to half of it's arsenal. Both summoner and beastmaster's secondary 1hrs were completely overtooled, and the only way they could balance around them was to give monsters a built in resistance. RUN was unplayable at launch, but quickly gained so much strength that PLD became useless. It took 8 years to get to a point where the 2 are on relatively equal footing.

You say master trial taking a few months was by design, but Iroha was defeated in days. Delve clear rate was 'intended', but they swung huge nerf bat with 242 skill weapons, then again shortly after with HP scaling. They followed those nerfs up with complete joke content, during which time playerbase hemorrhaged because capable players had nothing to do for over a year.

You end with this statement:
This is a gross misrepresentation. The balancing and ongoing content is not great, and I think a majority of players would agree. To me, the job system and equipment system are what made FFXI great. These were created by the original game designers, and by their own admission they had not planned for equipment swapping to become such an integral part of the game. These continue to make the game feel more diverse and make player decisions vastly more impactful than in comparable games. They make the game hard to balance, but FFXI players have never been sticklers for strict balance. We accept the content that's too easy, and the content that's too hard, and while there's bitching most seem to eventually enjoy both.

In the end, you are entitled to your opinions, but they've done nothing to sway mine. I'm entitled to my opinions, but it seems they've done nothing to sway yours. Maybe it would be best to agree to disagree, instead of continuing to clog the thread with this.

Scholar was a joke at launch too.

Puppetmaster was a joke long after the launch because they lacked the vision to design it well. They literally gave it mage gear for years because originally imagined as Necromancer. You have to imagine that's just a line on a spreadsheet they forgot to move for like 5 years.

I think FFXI has a really solid foundation, and it lets them build some utterly baffling things on top of it. This is not new. Remember the first implementations of Synergy and Augments?

I'm not reading these essays but playing during free to play for the first time in 18 months the graphics are so bad and all the strange ways of doing things because of old limitations (#instances etc. Would be nice to just remake FFXI from the ground up with a new engine and fresh coding. Even if they just released it bit by bit over years. They don't need to add all the quests and now pointless items in.

It'd be effectively a new game at that point, there is no real way to do it piecemeal. I'm sure Thorny or someone more familiar with the client as it is now could comment but typically these projects are so intertwined with various bits of functionality and code than replacing one part results in a cascading series of required changes.

That said, I do wish they would increase the number of instances available especially for Odyssey. It's effectively daily content the way it is structured now, but the limited resources and # of instances means you end up standing around in town staring at the wall and waiting for 10-15 pages to disappear. If you don't, you lose the chance to go and, if you do, you waste time not doing something else.

Not really, I mean the aesthetics and the essence of the story would be maintained regardless. I mean those mostly. Canada calculations etc. they would be able to keep the same.

I don't think remaking a 20 y/o MMO is a project any sane manager would sign off on (well, maybe Elon Musk if he was drunk and you wrote him a really persuasive tweet). Getting a new game with the same design sensibilities would be really nice though.

Sure. That's a valid opinion. But to claim one outside person can run FFXI single handedly, or design doesn't take time only because they did poorly according to you, I think that's not just an "opinion", but making a LOT of assumptions.



None of these doesn't actually means throw a random guy on the design position and suddenly they are going to do a better job.

Nobody can accurately predict how fast your player will clear content. Because players will ALWAYS act differently from what you expect until you actually test them for large amount of data. If they expected 5 day clear time and playerbase took 7 instead, it doesn't mean the job is done poorly.

The point is that those MT provided enough challenge and player had fun clearing them based on what I've heard, even though not all players were intended target audiences. And that's good enough of a content design wise in my eyes.


Right. There are lots of "holes" with these abilities. So it's easy to design a content and players accidentally "break the game" like bypassing schah mechanics with SMN burn. And that is exactly what makes design time consuming. which was my main point.

It's possible that they create a new content, test them, found something that doesn't work, redo them, test again and repeat. And that takes time.

And it's also possible that after 5 months of tweaking it's still not perfect, but they have to release the imperfect content Thorny not happy about. That doesn't mean they are wasting their time because the time investment you can see visually is only code and art implemented in the end, but not all that time spent to create something then throw it away multiple times because it doesn't work.

That, is the problem I have with your statement. I think you make too much assumptions and bold statements only based on things you can see on surface.



Don't be silly. stats of current equipment is created by current designers. The original designer doesn't even create some of the newer stats.

Your opinion on this matter is some of the most biased opinion that I've read from you on this site lol. And I generally agree with you on most things.

At this point, we need adjustments that affect the whole game and not just Asura. Personally I think Ody would be better if t required you to defeat the mob for RP. It would force players to actually participate and improve their play.


Ody as it stands now is as entertaining as whatever else you're doing while you're waiting to time out. Kinda depressing if you ask me.

They did kinda bone that one.

The intent was to give (some) reward for legitimate attempts.... if you can't win you should get (something) for "trying"

....However, why the *** bother trying when you can get that many points without trying. They really don't put the minimal thought into things.
(why would they)

It really seems like you want to have it both ways. Design is hard because it's so easy for these things to happen. But, SE is doing a great job at design despite all these things happening, because really so many more should've happened and they threw out content X times(citation needed). You're presenting a subjective opinion of balancing based on your personal experience, and crediting them for work that may or may not have been actually done.

This line in particular feels intentionally obtuse. I was specifically referring to the idea of having equipment swapping in general. I don't think throwing every single stat on Nyame so you can be invincible in your WS gear was some masterpiece of design. I think the way gear swapping evolved added a huge degree of depth to the game, and if anything, recent design has eroded that away by making it more work to isolate the strengths of a piece and creating pieces that are BiS for many more things.

Again, it comes down to a fundamental disagreement on something subjective. You are entitled to believe they do a wonderful job balancing content, and the problems are in spite of that. I personally do not believe they do a great job balancing content.

Gaol giving partial points for not killing is fine, and the system even rewards you for killing by doubling the points received.

The issue is amplifier bonuses being based on the kill RP instead of what you actually manage to gst.

If it were me, I'd be happier with a system where you don't get points for 5%-no-kill runs, but you don't lose the KI for failing.
Sorta like Ambuscade.

Too late for that, things will never change by now, but I think it would've been a way more "inclusive" and friendly system, without touching the difficulty level at all.

Also allowing people to participate without Moglophones, but without gaining points/clear status either, of course.



I dunno, as much as I've used the "5% then afk until timeout" system myself, I think it's something that shouldn't happen in an online multiplayer game.

Geomancy auto capping macc is not a bad idea because roll/songs has no acc issue. Geo is designed as the same job role, it makes sense to design it this way.

The problem is % based value. Def- is as potent as attack buffs if NM has 900 def. If NM has 3000+ def then def- will be WAY superior.



Like you presenting a subjective opinion based on YOUR real life experience? Okay.


Players are smarter than SE I suppose. Does this Thorny who apply for the job has 100% confidence that he can avoid it though? That's what you offered, 1 guy for FFXI so it's your job to avoid it now!

Maybe, just maybe you are the next Sid Meier level of genius so you never let any player break the game, who knows!


I think it makes sense design wise though.

What doesn't make sense is myself TP in 50 DT set because I'm making the right decision during the oh ***moment. Then *** died in WS set ONLY because I take hit during that one sec. And ONLY because I am a vanilla player so I swap out of my WS set 0.9 sec slower than GS users.

THAT doesn't make sense. And I'm glad Nyame solved this needless problem.

Any other stat that you don't like on Nyame? Like that SC bonus which people never gear for unless it's on a WS set? It makes perfect sense to me. The only thing that I don't like about Nyame is it's on all jobs lol.

He meant when Focus/Languor were bugged and made everyone casting with those active auto-cap their magic accuracy.

Thank you. That's a "bug" then. QA problem! Why is it designer's fault?

Because it took them years to notice and were designing monsters around us having buffs that potent. Then they were "oh oops, we just realized Focus/Languor/Attunement/Vex were programmed as percentages instead of flat values like we meant them to".

It's something that couldn't be caught by Q&A because for all anyone else knew, they meant for them to work like that.

If it's true Why would they lie about this though? If they meant to change how the value works they could just make it a "job adjustment" not "bug fix".

Seems needless to me.

Edit: it's a guess, maybe, just maybe, they wrote the right values on GDD and entered value wrong. Then they test/balanced the game with the wrong value on so their contents ended up designed balanced around buffs that potent.

It's totally entirely possible, makes more sense than SE lie for no reason.

We're not saying they were lying, we're saying they're incompetent for missing a bug that was so potent and long-lasting that they tuned content based on it.

For literal years, not once did they think "Huh, I wonder why players are having such an easy time capping MACC and MEVA, let's see if something is wrong", and instead just introduced monsters that were designed around needing those buffs.

They outright admitted that focus, languor, vex, and attune were giving percentage based increases, rather than flat increases. The percentage based increases were so large that characters were effectively able to cap magic accuracy and magic evasion against anything by using them. When they corrected them, they changed them to flat values and threw a formulaic adjustment at every major endgame monster that was currently relevant. Many of these drastically changed balance, but they didn't really care at that point. The fact that the game designers took years to realize spells of that significance were giving many times the effect they should is evidence they were out of touch with balance in general.

Frankly, I tried to exit this at the start of this page. I'm not going to argue over this ridiculous premise any more. You win, I shouldn't have stated that I can run a better game than SE. I should have stated that I do not feel they're doing a good job running it with the resources allocated, and left it at that.

The fact you get RP for doing 5% or more damage means people that aren't as well geared, are working on sets, learning jobs, etc all have room to participate and work on their gear. If you make it so you don't get RP for doing some damage, then it excludes a lot of people and doesn't give people room to learn or improve. Every RP farm I've been to except Bumba cheeses, everyone participates, everyone learns, and everyone benefits regardless of whether someone screws up. These fights are also not consistent, they have variables like aura that can make one run go absurdly bad and another go very smoothly.

IMO, this is a major thing they did right with Odyssey, the fact you can cheese one fight with Arthur doesn't really negate that and can easily be addressed by forcing Bumba to open with something more damaging. The C farm meta is punishing enough, allowing people to earn RP via failed attempts gives room for growth and experimentation.

I don't see how anyone would get RP if everyone wasn't participating currently, Bumba being the exception. Every RP fight I've been in aside from Bumba cheeses required 100% participation.

Yeah I edited the last post addressing the possibilities why it was tuned that way. Realistically it's only possible to tune the balance in a real test environment so maybe the value was already entered wrong at start, as they test the game.


Blame the QA! Designers are innocent!


Yes.

That means they never once tried to test using any setup that did not include focus/languor/vex/attunement. No other combination of magic evasion or accuracy equipment and buffs was able to get you anywhere near the required m.acc/m.eva for the monsters designed in that era. Even if they assumed it was working as normal, they never stopped to consider a setup should be able to get a reasonable m.acc or m.eva without GEO..? It just doesn't scream 'meticulous design' no matter how you try to defend it.

It's impossible for QA to report something like this, because all indications were that the designers meant for the bubbles to be percentage based.

I really don't know about that. Because if that is true that means SE is lying. It's impossible to claim they are not lying if this is true. You meant to use a value then tell the player it's a bug later? Unless it's a translation error that's very intentional to me.

It's generally a bad strategy for a dev to lie and destroy the trust between Dev and players over one value change. I don't see a good reason to lie but I don't work for SE so what do I know? Maybe they do in fact lied on this matter to hide a mistake or something /shrug.

It doesnt have to be lying, its just not bothering to check the values of a buff and assumimg its fine. They made a mistake and never caught it and no QA is going to catch that because they have no idea if thats intentional or not. It took players noticing it far later iirc and they initially just said it was working as intended before circling back on it later.

Ah that actually makes sense this way. Thanks. I guess you can blame the designer in this case for entering the value wrong, lol.

I'm not suggesting kill or no RP, just that the reward more closely match the effort. I'm not trying to shame people for cheese, but 5% is really sad. The point about learning and gearing is moot because you have to defeat the NM to RP in the first place. The idea that it would be a struggle for you to do more than 5% to a mob you already defeated is really just depressing.


At minimum you should have to do 30% and it should increase as vengeance increases. Even just 30 feels bad, but I understand that people want to be lazy sometimes.

The clears required to use RP and the clears required to earn RP at a reasonable pace are two different things. Aside from a few jobs, requirements to fight, participate, and win at v20 are different than they are to simply obtain RP, there is also a level of randomness to many of them where some things just go poorly and you lose even if you do everything right. I'd hate for winning to be strictly tied to RP.

My point was that if RP was only issued on kill then it would be prohibitively difficult for some fights to gain RP. I don't necessarily disagree that the 5% threshold is too low, though. Personally, I'd rather see them increase the threshold to gain RP and reduce entry requirements.

Getting RP only on kills wouldn't make earning RP impossible for lesser geared/experienced players. There are 20 vengeance levels, and people could lower the difficulty to something they can win reliably. It's just the amps and especially charged amp that is totally unbalanced and makes failing V20s more rewarding than winning V19s.

Right now you get most of the credit for nearly none of the work. Instead, you should get all of the credit for most of the work. Furthermore, you should get extra credit for doing all of the work.


Basically if you are doing higher vengeance and "some things just go poorly and you lose even if you do everything right", you should get full cred. If you did everything right you're likely coming very close to a win and I think you should get it all. Like the 9th chest in Trove, should be given.


If you are able to actually win the encounter you should get a bonus based on how much time you had remaining when you cleared. It doesn't have to be easy to be inclusive, it just needs to be rewarding at all levels.