Dev Tracker - Discussion

This is not a minor thing - yes, you lost, but you're still bringing home something that benefits you, even if you're already capped at your current augment tier. Worst case you convert all that back into segments, best case it's there to wait for you when you manage the unlock.


We were asking for years for challenging content where it wasn't enough to gear an army of conduit-only SMNs to win, and we got it. I am happy with it, it's unforgiving and not accessible to absolutely everybody, but it doesn't have to be.

Yeah I don't mind that you actually have to play the game. That said I do not agree with nor enjoy the heavy layered rng elements that they've been falling back on to add "difficulty and replayability".

Doing things like learning to triple box an aeonic weapon or learning to triple box dyna d will remain the most rewarding experiences I've done in recent years in XI simply because it's almost entirely skill and knowledge based. It's a level of personal achievement and challenge that had to be self imposed since the game has become pretty bad at offering the same dopamine hit on an individual level.

You think SE's intended for Amplifiers to work the way they do and are used? The same SE that has said "we cant turn party content into alliance content because reward balancing"? The same SE that made Sortie bosses harder if someone who owns a stage 4 weapon is present in the run with no extra reward for the increased difficulty? This same SE decided to give a massive RoI for failing an event?

They clearly did not meant Amplifiers to work that way.
For some reason they decided to turn a blind eye on it. I have my own thoughts about it, either way we'll never know the truth but I'm very skeptic on believing they purposedly meant the content to work that way.


And for the people wondering why putting so much emphasis on content that only like, what, 1% of the player base will manage to enjoy.
I think I know why SE found that justifiable.
In my opinion in their eyes Odyssey is "balanced" for both hardcore and nooby players because they think people will be happy fighting lower difficulty Odyssey, which is honestly quite accessible.
This is why they created content where the majority of the reward comes from the very first difficulty levels (you unlock the gear and augs up to 15).
It's why the amount of RP scales so fast and you get a tons of level with just a bunch of points, later on you need multiple wins for a single level.


I can't say they're wrong, rationally it sounds like a perfectly acceptable compromise. But psychologically, at least for some people, it doesn't work like that because these people will feel sorta "obsessed" with "completing" something, and if they can't because stuff is too difficult for several reasons, they will simply feel frustrated or "left out".

It's the same old problem of pleasing two different types of customers with opposing and uncompatible needs.
Softcore vs Hardcore. One wants hot, the other wants cold. If you please one part, the other will be displeased. If you settle for something in the middle, more often than not both will be displeased.
This issue has been plaguing MMORPGs since the dawn of time.

All things considered, despite the plethora of things I absolutely despise about Odyssey, I think they managed to find an incredibly good compromise, but of course not everybody will be happy with it.

The same SE that on release of amplifiers they would wear upon death, yes that SE gave the players a bone most likely by mistake but for a first time didn't immediately take it away and ban everybody for it.

At this point it's definitely a feature not a bug.



There are a lot of things to like about Odyssey and so many ways they could adjust or fix it for the problems it does have but SE probably never will. If it wasn't for the boatload of RNG in some of the V25 fights it would be a reasonably challenging and rewarding event. I'd say V20s were a decent balance point for most of the fights except Bumba where it was definitely a clear step up in gear requirements, job availability and execution from V15s while sometimes still requiring a bit of luck, but not nearly as polarized as the V25s are.

Just to clarify - the Reinforcement Points system has been in the game for a very long time now, the first items to have it were original Delve rewards, dating all the way back to 2013, and the values up to r30 appear to always having been in the game, unchanged. It's not something they scaled for Ody specifically, tho probably they did design the RP rewards around it.

Agreed on everything else you said.

Exploit or cheese was the most common answer I received when explaining how this event works to people who don't currently play FFXI. All of them set a threshold higher than 50% to receive the minimum reward. Nobody was willing to accept that the use of a single ability should count as credit for any reward.


FWIW, one of the people who had previously played XI said "It's good to see that people can still make most of their progress in that game while they're AFK."

Oof.

Can dislike it all you like it still doesn't make it an exploit.

The fact it's in the game, hasn't been patched, and no one has been banned for doing it should be a clue.

I think it's per design and is an easier, yet boring af, way for soloers to RP their stuff.

....yet I still see more non-augmented Atonement 3 Gear than augmented.

I'd like to think the intention was to give a much better reward for failed attempts, so that people would be willing to try the NMs until they won. It may not have panned out that way, and SE may not have intended for people to do 5% cheese, but it's pretty clear at this point that it isn't an exploit and is allowed.

Anything that encourages you to know how to play without BRD/COR/GEO every encounter is probably always welcome.

I don't love Odyssey, but as Lili is saying, it's effect on the community was transformative.


The bigger issue with Ody was that it was stressful, difficult, and non casual and the next end game event they put out wasn't an alliance free for all so we could relax and enjoy ourselves. They just dimmed the lights and put sortie on repeat, which is non casual again and not very pleasant.

Except that those three jobs are very present in all of those fights.. lol

Had to edit to agree with your second point. It could have been a more relaxed - alliance type of event. And easy to implement! For example, one mooglephone per party. If you bring a full alliance you will use all three mooglephones at once. Like AEONIC bosses, HP increases with the number of players. More adds based on the number of parties.

I think Sortie begun to feel the way you describe it when they set the bar so high with the Gallimaufry requirements for Prime Weapons.
Before that, when it was "just" an event to farm Empy+3, it was really casual friendly if you ask me.
Relaxing, slow paced, lots of space for errors, lots of space for so many different setups and not a single artificial restraint, other than the daily entry gating, which was partially compensated with the secondary KI (good idea, albeit a bit too convoluted, but I apreciated the effort).

So really, as much as I'm very close already to being completely burned out on Sortie (I've been doing it very often since November 22 after all) I wouldn't really say it's "not casual friendly".
There are many, many, many things I could criticize about Sortie, but not that.

I have to admit, the only way I can see myself making it to that stage 5 tier (and beyond to see that those who run with me hit it as well) is Discord. If I couldn't *** my way with 5 other guys for an hour a night, no way that content would hold up for 4-8 more months....so it takes something non-SE to make it tolerable to me ;)

I'd like to agree with you, but the spirit of that idea is lost here. "You were unsuccessful, but you made good progress toward your goal. Here is a reward that matches your effort.".


I'd concede that 5% is not an exploit and I think cheese fits better, but it's certainly not an 'attempt' either.

Tanaka would've banned everyone that did it.

It can be a cheese, but it doesn't have to be.

Giving players a good chunk of the available RP at 5% opens up the opportunity for players to solo farm RP or low man it at higher tiers like v20 or v25 (for some). It also allows people to low man charges for later runs with their groups and makes charging more efficient of a strategy. I got a big chunk of my Mpaca RP soloing Arebati v20 on DNC during off hours, for instance.

That said, people are definitely cheesing Bumba and Kalunga regularly with Arthur, sometimes others as well. I don't think they accounted for that in the design and considered you can cheese 10% using a BST pet. The idea of going in knowing you are going to fail kinda sucks, but it's also still not trivial to do low man or solo and meet the threshold required. I would find it too restrictive if you had to get a near kill to earn any RP #s of substance and I think given how volatile the fights can be, it'd be unfair.

Arthur aside, I don't think it's that out of balance especially at v25

I am willing to bet that Arthur is an example of the dev team being unaware of (or forgetting about) older obscure abilities/mechanics. The current team (or whatever additional amount we had during Odyssey/Sortie development) probably has no idea about Ancient Sword, Genie Weskit or Genesis Shield either, although getting those to fire off represents more of a challenge than "use 1-2 actions". Thinking about it now makes me want to see if there's magic accuracy checks for Oscar Scarf/Reikyo Hairpin...

It is almost like there is a significant time requirement to just be able to enter the fights to RP odyssey sets.

Basically, everyone wants Nyame R30 and not everyone wants <insert A3 set> R30. By the time a player is done RPing one set, it can be a challenge to gather the will to do a second set, especially solo.

I'd be more inclined to believe that when SE found out about how the Amplifiers were being used, they tried to fix it and literally couldnt figure out how.


https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/56242/did-amplifiers-change-in-any-horrible-way-sep14/
Damn, lotsa people in this recent discussion stanning the bug / cheese / exploit / whatever you wanna call it who were really disappointed that the bug / cheese / exploit wasnt fixed in that patch.

At this point, SE cant fix it, it has become meta. Same reason why they cant add repeated BP resistance to Reisen helms even though its the norm for new content.

Dudes in here afraid to call it an exploit have the same vibe as the dudes insisting multibox isnt a form of p2w lol

I think most high-effort player's perspective on the moogle amplifier are skewed. Couple things to consider:

- using an amplifier increases the cost of the fight by 50% (3000 -> 4500).
Most people that write on ffxiah are long-term, high-effort players, thus have been doing Ody since it got in the game, have probably millions of segments stored, and are able to get 10k+ odyC runs regularly. Most of the players don't have that and are stuck with 2-5k runs. That means between 3 and 7 boss attempts per week, and likely even less because players who get 3k/run are not players who run everyday.

- to be able to effectively "cheese" your RP with 5% damage, you need to be able to pop at least v20.
V15 nets you 793 RP. V20 gives 1425, almost double. This means having enough clears to do so, which for Atonement 3 NMs means having all Atonement 1+2 cleared at least at v20. If you're doing it with a group of players in the same situation, that means 85 fights at the bare minimum: 17 for all v0 clears, 16 for all v5, 16 for all v10, 16 for all v15, 10 for t1-2 v20, 10 for t1-2 v25. Most likely a lot more, because they're not easy fights even at lower vengeance levels. It's not something you do in a day, especially if you're doing 3k segments runs.
If you find a group that lets you in with their clears sure, you can gain access immediately, but then you're not able to do it on your own, you depend on those people - regardless if they're friends or mercs. And there's a change that t3s will still take multiple attempts to clear. And you still need enough segments.
And if they decide to help you get all the clears, it's still 17 fights (plus failures) until you're able to pop anything on your own. And you still need enough segments.

- to be able to charge an amplifier and do the MegaCheese (henceforth known as the Gorgonzola strat), you need three jobs that fit the v25 strats, geared well enough to do the fights, OR a well coordinated group of people willing to work with the job selection that you have, OR the right jobs to not be a detriment while your friends/mercs do the v25 fights for you (takes an afternoon to make a dunna geo, max, but you still need two more jobs). Again, it's not something that you do from the get-go.

The effect of all of this is that sure, the moogle amplifier enables some nifty tactics to RP, but it takes a while, in some cases a really long while. Ody seems designed to start out reeeeaally slow in regards to rewards, then pick up pace as you progress along it, and the curve, if you ask me, seems to be pretty good overall.

(personally I am still stuck on being only able to pop Bumba v5 because *** Mboze, but I'm still able to get 7100 RP from it with a charged amp. But it took me 8 months to do so tho, and it'd have taken longer if a) I hadn't had somebody that very generously got me Nyame r20 unlocked the day I resubbed and b) I didn't stumble my way upon a group that decided to help me skip ahead. I was stuck on Procne v25 for the darnedest time because)

No one is "afraid to call it an exploit" but is obvious that SE does not consider it an exploit at this point. So calling it an exploit at this point is a bit weird.

Again, without defining P2W, it is impossible to to reach an understanding of the arguments presented on Multibox and its P2W status.

There's a difference between 'stanning' it and acknowledging that it is the way it is and is apparently intended by SE. I also made a bug report at that time, which was accepted, then no action was taken. There's no doubt that they are aware of how people are using it and have chosen not to do anything about it.

Further, that conversation was just under 2 years ago, and even at that time I said they'd left it a long time to get rid of it. Getting rid of it now would just screw casuals, at least 2/3 of existing augments were acquired using it. It's not going to hurt any of the serious endgame players, they already have their augments. It's just making it that much harder for people who are already struggling.

The fact they accepted it as a bug instead of working as intended leads to belief that it wasnt the intended result.

And I did say its too late to fix at this point for the same reasons you mentioned.

The full credit multiplier portion of bonus RP is without a doubt unintended. I think the great majority of players agree on this.

Early on in the dark ages of uncertainty of if there was a fix coming or not and when players scrambled to pump out RP as fast and as often as their segments allowed it sure felt apt to use the term exploit, derogatively or otherwise, but for whatever reason SE couldn't/wouldn't fix so now it's a feature. Exeunt exploit, entrant cheese. Every player has benefitted from the same bug since day one, what's the point of amp shaming now?

This whole topic came up because someone said they quit because they were bored of the current content that was either mundanely repetitive or mired in luck (to put it as simply as possible).

That moved on to Gaol, which devolved to where we are now. Its not”amp shaming”, its just stating facts.