Producer Letter LIVE VIII English Translations: Phase 4 8/17Follow

I found the blog post!

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/blog/post/171

If there's a fourth, chances are it will be Ramuh. When SMN was first announced, Ramuh was in the data-mining. Quite a few things have changed since then, but the other summons are correct if you ignore the names of the Carbuncles.

Personally, I hope I'm wrong. Shiva is a thousand times more awesome than Ramuh could ever dream of being.

You're right that nobody knows how difficult Crystal Tower is, because it wasn't available in beta. But is it reasonable to assume that they'd open it up to DF groups if it wasn't completeable by a DF group? My concern isn't that the dirty casuals might get their fingerprints on my hard content. My concern is that the reportedly hardest content in the game might already have been nerfed to the point where 24 strangers can do it.

With no replacement for it.



And if LFR had been the only endgame option in WoW?

I agree that LFR existing in WoW is a good thing, because other difficulty modes exist as well for people who want a greater challenge.



I agree. But high-end players also need content. You can't just deprive content in the other direction and it's suddenly fine.



You may want to look into the origins of that word, and reconsider its use here.

This was an unusually venomous post from you, and I'm not sure exactly why you felt it necessary. I hope it was cathartic for you, and I also hope that Yoshi and the dev team don't share your seemingly-blind hatred of high end raiders.

I generally agree with that, Bartel. My concern is that without difficult content at launch, players looking for that kind of gameplay just won't stick around. SWTOR had that same problem, the raids were too easy at launch, it crippled their endgame. I don't want to see that happen here.

I'm a big believer in accessible content. And we won't really know for sure one way or the other until we see it. But doing this out of the gate was a red flag for me. The other big thing is going to be SE's development cycle. I have a feeling that a year is too long to wait for difficult content, especially when you consider that the players that content would be for are the ones who will reach THIS content the fastest. While development cycles obviously can't revolve around the top 0.1% of guilds (because that would be insane), they still need to account for them. I have a feeling that a year is too long a wait for new content, especially if the "hard" content here turns out to be too easy.

Let me also clarify that I'm someone who's done heroic raids in WoW. My guild was ranked third on our server at the end of Cataclysm for progression. At the same time, I don't believe having accessible content is a bad thing. I believe that casual players are healthy and necessary for a game to survive. I also believe that creating ONLY less difficulty content is equally exclusionary as creating only super hard content.

I know you don't want to be that guy, but I didn't actually say SE needed to cater to a tiny minority of players. I said they needed to account for them.

Having hard content gives people something to work on, which in the world of MMOs means time for the dev team to work on the next thing. That obviously shouldn't be the only content available, but it should be available. Content that requires progression is a good thing.

This could be entirely academic for all we know. I don't like judging things before I've seen them myself, I consider it sloppy and rude. Why don't we see what actually happens, and THEN break out the pitchforks and torches.

Your leve is to craft a fabrege egg, and.....GO!

I like the idea of crafting jobs. Basically Master [insert craft here]. It would be cool if crafters could create one masterwork item per craft, the culmination of their crafting career.

I think the Master crafters would be just that, able to craft things a standard crafter couldn't. Super difficult content for crafters basically. The one masterwork would be character crafted relics, named weapons like Anduril, Excalibur or Aegis-Fang. In mythology heroes usually have named weapons and armor, FFXIV should be the same. No idea how it would work mechanically but it would be neat.

The NPC needs to look like Ron Ben-Isreal.

I still have flashbacks involving me running out of invisibility powder while solo hiking the 85 miles through Aht Urghan to get blue mage (I started on XBOX so I was a lvl 30 rdm main at the time), or even worse was spending two days on the beach in Valkurm Dunes waiting on the 1% carbuncle ruby to drop for SMN. The skill factor being up there is one thing (Promyvions were challenging, but do-able provided you weren't in a party with Patrick Star), but the luck factor could have been toned down a notch.

Edited, Aug 9th 2013 3:02pm by Valkayree

Oh ok yeah that would be freakin sweet! I feel therr is alot of options they coulf take, im excited to see how it all plays out.

And it was intentionally so. I've simply played too many games where the vocal minority quite brazenly advocate exclusionary content to the point where if you can't get into that, you don't really have a game worth playing anymore. And for some reason these devs continually pander to them, never winning that rat race of producing content fast enough to please them while you've probably got an 85%+ share of users that'd love to see even a fraction of that attention put into things they might actually get to see. Overall, I'm not against the idea of high-difficulty content. Rather, I'm against the idea of it needing 10+ people because it means matching schedules, job roles, and all the other little logistics that ultimately don't wind up being pick-up-and-play friendly. If this steps on the toes of all those out there thinking they're the next little Napoleon, so be it.

With more of my early days being in XI, the whole "World First" scene didn't seem all that important. You'd still see people gloat now and then, but ultimately finishing some new piece of content went from awesome to the mundane, especially if you were forced to grind it. In Rift, it got a bit more asinine, as not only did the game announce first discoveries on items or boss kills, you eventually had whole guilds hopping servers just to "steal them" from other established guilds on the shards. At times this involved said guilds exploiting bugs or unintended tactics, but in the end, it really just boils down to another aspect of ego and prestige gaming, which inevitably follows those who demand harder content carry superior rewards with no reasonable alternatives. So, again, we slip back into the problem of advocating exclusionary content.

The guy I mentioned in my last post basically went on to whine that WoW is losing subs because people had nothing do after LFR "EZ Mode'ed" content. And you know, that may be true for some, but I don't think that's the big reason. There are other games out there despite their pros and cons. RL can do its thing, too. It's also possible to simply get bored even if you still have some objectives left to tackle. They might love to argue that casual players come and go, never being loyal and being fickle, but I wonder how many might realize they're being treated as the lesser player, both socially (ridicule about gear/skill, not playing the FoTM, being a first-timer to content, the curious hypocrisy of only getting into groups if you're already geared from a given tier/event, etc.) and by the devs (No matter how many level 50 FATEs you grind, Timmy, that random CT drop you'll never get will beat it!), essentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of revolving door players.

So, as extension of Bartel's "that guy" pitch, why the hell should I defend these asses, let alone tolerate their presence when they'd gleefully let a game wither to nothing as long as they can maintain their insignificant digital prestige? Do I need to hop to the BG forums to link you to threads solely dedicated to mocking and harassing FFXI players here, in-game, and on the OF? I'm a big fan of the whole, "Do unto others..." philosophy, of which I do give individuals their fair shake. But if they want to treat people like sh*t, they should not be surprised when people want to treat them like sh*t in return. Hence, venom. It is avoidable, but this falls into my sentiment that game mechanics inspire player behavior. So, what's worth more to SE, a few bitter hardcores or a lot of unhappy casuals? You might not like the answer when looking from it the business standpoint, but I also wouldn't automatically label it the wrong answer for the game in consequence. And that's where SE needs to not half-*** things and get lazy.


I wouldn't be so sure... and even that is some of the sense of ego I allude to. No, not all hardcore players like the a-holes I generally rally against, but we can't exactly pretend things they discover wouldn't be discovered by others if they hadn't been already and simply not shared. So, while the majority of players are indeed casuals, they are also not visiting sites like this. Are they ghosts not "contributing" to the community? Do their own desires for the game hold no merit? I'd say no to both, but at the same time, I'd love to see more games doing in-game surveys with small rewards for actually participating in them. Yeah, you might get some who spam click through them, but even removing the fear of retaliation from your peers for a spoken thought can embolden some to actually speak their mind.

Edited, Aug 9th 2013 6:14pm by Seriha