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I love Trusts!

I've always wondered why MMOs don't do more with NPCs. Imagine if in FFXIV, you could summon your alt characters as NPCs to fight alongside of you? That would give a ton of incentive to play through the game's content on multiple characters (although it wouldn't make as much sense from a lore perspective, because you'd all be the Warrior of Light). But I do like the concept of being able to level up alts and actually put them to use.

That said, NPCs ultimately wouldn't be too useful in any meaningful FFXIV content because of the game's reliance on punishing jump-rope mechanics. The NPCs would just instantly die, and you'd follow soon after.



Oh yeah, I totally agree. Only like 30 people on the Chocobo server have cleared the current raid content, and that's a server of nearly 13,000 people. It's crazy low -- yet that's the best completion percentage of the current tier by a country mile.

I only used the 10 percent example just to show that even the old, nerfed content isn't being completed by masses of players.

The hardcore raids and Ex primals are FFXIV's only real endgame activities, and the Ex primals are "obsoleted" much more quickly, which does remove the incentive of many people to do them -- which makes finding statics to beat them even harder. FFXI, by comparison, had all kinds of endgame activities.

I'd be willing to bet the endgame participation rate in FFXI was significantly higher than the endgame participation rate in XIV. And that's largely because your ability to succeed in endgame in XI wasn't predicated on finding seven other people with matching goals and schedules.

Edited, Apr 28th 2016 11:11am by Thayos

In this case, that 10 percent completion rate is for top-tier content AFTER it has been nerfed via increased item levels. And that rate only exists on one outlying server... the rate is far lower for other Japanese servers and even lower for NA/EU servers. Overall, the completion rate for that content is abysmal.

I'm guessing the completion rate for coil would be equally abysmal if you could somehow factor in former subscribers who got discouraged and gave up.

Edited, Apr 28th 2016 12:02pm by Thayos

Actually, there are many players who want to clear these raids, but they're unable to because they can't find statics. But that's beside the point.

What matters here is that you can say what you did above, yet you're still missing the point (which is actually buried within your own words).

Don't you see the problem? Aside from hardcore raiders, nobody else can realistically participate in this content -- it's so bad that even as the content ages, casual/midcore players STILL can't beat it because they don't have statics, and the sliver of hardcore players who do complete these raids have no interest in helping them. SE is still trying to shove a giant square peg into a little round hole. This content does not fit the needs of FFXIV's core playerbase. Your own words make this extremely evident.



This is just a smokescreen to the fact that very few people have cleared these raids. Would you be happier if I said the current raid tier had a 2.2 percent clear rating rather than a .22 percent clear rating?

Keep in mind, the clear rating for A4S on some JP servers is below 2.2 percent. So I highly doubt the current clear rate is even close to that.



So what you're saying is that people are clearing all the grind content quickly, then leaving the game because there's nothing left for them to do.

....

So... we agree.

And we should also agree that the most logical way to stem those losses would be for SE to expand endgame in a way the core playerbase can engage in.

I honestly don't get why you're defending SE so hard on this.


Edited, Apr 28th 2016 12:34pm by Thayos

Well, as I stated numerous time, Coil, despite being on the easy side near the end (Final Coil) was the better design. However, there's actually nothing wrong with the current layout because the fights are actually FUN, it's just the difficulty is silly.

There are people who probably want to clear it just like the new players who joined my FC yesterday want to do the old EX primals to experience it. However, when talking specifically about raid content...the only reason to do them is for bragging rights and a mount because you can get 220 gear off the MB..significantly negating the need to get Gordias gear; Either version at that, but you do have to clear Gordias Story quest wise to actually get Midas Story I believe.



The problem is: The only way currently to see the numbers is based on the minion/mount drop, so no matter what, that number will never be accurate unless you choose to expose yourself by basically hacking SE's servers lol or wait till TGS when SE reveals the numbers.



Yep, the only thing I don't agree on is that the raids have anything to do with it mainly because:



Anything that takes ANY kind of skill or coordination doesn't fit the core playerbase, which is why I said before, being so used to MMOs handing out gear then suddenly changing that doesn't go over well. I never once said that's a bad thing in terms of handouts because that's just modern gaming and MMORPGs, but in terms of THIS game's specific setup, it's bad, which is why creating content :for their core playerbase" means handing out gear for little to no work. I'm not even saying it to be mean, there are just so many TERRIBLE players because the game DOES NOT create a need for you to actually be good at your job UNTIL you hit savage which prior to that, was Coil, but you had "readiness" because chances are you were gearing up through Ex Primals and the dungeons that dropped gear you could actually use in your progression.

Now that every dungeon drop useless gear because its 10-20+ ilvl behind, there's no way to truly gear up unless you do tougher content. This wasn't done for anybody other than Yoshi's own desire, because not one person stated they wanted something harder than coil and wanted dungeons to drop gear you can't even really use while you can easily buy stuff off the market board or run allianced based content. Hell pretty much everyone want more routes, because they did it perfectly fine in XI and DQX...there should be no issues with XIV other than the fact despite everything, they make so much money (especially on mog station..if you actually check out some houses since the update 3 days ago), they don't..have to change anything.

What was wrong with 2.x setup? Nothing. People asked for an accessible version of story mode not realizing that's just going to **** up the actual raid version...It's not their fault either - because if this was any other MMORPG, it would be multi tiered like usual. Even XI does it now and does it beautifully because you can even do it with NPCs.

You're right that it isn't what SE is doing, but that's more a product of them just trying to copy something from other games without going all the way in understanding how and why it works. It's true that in WoW the carrot is moved the same distance ahead, but that's only for the first few bosses. As you get deeper into a raid the bosses start scaling upward in terms of difficulty. That's how it's supposed to be but SE missed the mark.

More "how it's supposed to be done" vs "how SE interprets it and implements it into XIV".


If you consider that it's more than 10 times the completion rate of WoW, it's ******* huge. Unless SE had been shooting for a much higher number then they should be patting themselves on the back because they're doing much better here than most. Unfortunately it speaks to the player base, their patience and more importantly their skill.

I'd say a better comparison would probably be Mythic BRF clears prior to HFC opening. I don't have the numbers on that right now but it's probably a better apples-to-apples comparison.

The only thing "abysmal" in XIV is the content base in general. I have nothing against the yo-kai collab event, but yet again, the near 2 years working on that collab could have been better spent on other things.

Take that time, effort and resources and slap it into properly balancing raid content or recreating the coil+ex primal format and no one can complain, aside those who complain regardless.

Low clear rates on raids (which has always been a thing simply because it's like tackling any hard game, not everyone can do it) paired with extraordinarily high "handout" rates of modern MMOs is an indication something needs to change for sure with the current formula of mainstream MMOs.




XIV is more song and dance than other MMOs. That aides greatly in clearing content compared to a lot of WoW's raids. (Since XIV is designed after WoW after all.)

Edited, Apr 29th 2016 6:05pm by Theonehio

And don't get me wrong... I actually don't have much of a problem with raids designed for the upper echelon of players, or other kinds of content that don't jive with either my playstyle or lifestyle. My main reason for bringing this up often is the XIV dev team seems fixated on a low-completion system, despite what seems like a pretty obvious need to create true endgame content that's not so rigorous. The high volume of players who come and go with each patch tells me two things:

1) That people remain interested in playing FFXIV, and
2) That there's not an adequate endgame/progression scene to hold their interest.

As much as I appreciate what Yoshi-P has done for the game, he seems to be a much better manager than he is an innovator. This game really needs something outside the box.



That's actually a very good point. But yeah, no way to know.

Edited, Apr 29th 2016 6:46pm by Thayos

Edited, Apr 29th 2016 6:48pm by Thayos

Well, this could be dispelled because that's actually looked down upon in JP communities (by Japanese players anyway, SEA/Australian players still do it.) lol (also why RMT is nearly non-existent on JP data centers.) But XIV certainly does have a tiny playerbase so just in terms of numbers it'll seem overall higher, but at the same time, XIV is also on their easier side (even the "hardcore raids" are easier compared to other MMOs) so it's hard to say without SE's actual numbers and even then those numbers may not be accurate since they don't like revealing real numbers (as proven by almost any PR despite parsing their database showing otherwise.)

And people never do things that society disapproves of. Never. Nope. Can't happen. Literally impossible. Glad the Japanese are so much more civilized (and probably more hygienic) than the rest of us poor barbarians. Now where did I put my cudgel? Need to go bash me some dinner.



It's funny because I was just thinking while I was writing the last post about how the opposite is true. XIV's raids are actually a lot harder than say WoW's raids. WoW's raids tend to have more interesting mechanics, but XIV's leave basically zero margin for error. It's rare to find a WoW raid boss these days where a single mistake by a single raid member equals a wipe. Those bosses still exist but they're pretty rare. In XIV that's the norm especially at Savage level. XIV's fights also tend to take a lot longer, increasing the chance for error.

As an example of that, look at AS4. How long did it take for a world first clear of that fight? Compare that to umm... every WoW tier ever. A WoW tier will generally take a week or two tops for the best guilds in the world to knock over. AS4 took like two months or something ridiculous like that. And I don't think it's because XIV's raiders suck either.

Bosses ramping up makes a little more sense in games where gear gives you other substantial boosts (ie. set bonuses, procs, ect.). SE admitted that they overshot the mark there.