|
Articles
WoW The End of an Era summary in terms of both people and progression, 2 weeks before TBC What Became of BG? after a year of WoW, how are things? Moving On leaving the biggest part of our lives behind, and hoping for something better FFXI FFXI Outlook on the brink of quitting The Promathia Problem a reponse to Sundi's weak claim that everyone hates Promathia Five Values five changes that could repair tons, and cost little |
Problems with Chains of Promathia
CoP doesn't stand for copout
I'll use Sage Sundi's quote as a starting point to try to show some solutions for the more massive problems of Final Fantasy XI that were borne from the expansion. "I know
everyone hates Promathia" Sage Sundi, Global Online Producer, FFXI In CoP a lot was done well. For example, ENM and Limbus are two incredibly entertaining and rewarding additions to endgame. There are also non-endgame things that I'm not very familiar with such as Fellowship NPCs that I've heard have gone very well. These and other positive additions to FFXI, however, according to Sundi and a large majority of players, are overshadowed by its poorly designed aspects. My main focus is endgame, but a few of these points apply to level 1-75 players, so the remedies include far more than a majority of players. Saying everyone hates Promathia with no intention of fixing what went wrong is a sidestep that is very difficult to understand. Leaving damaged content in its damaged state and merely taking that into consideration for future content is a lot less preferrable than both fixing the damage and assuring quality in future content. Missions' Level Cap vs Missions' Difficulty ProblemsCoP missions have undergone significant changes since they came out, but the big issue that has always plagued players is the inconsistency between level cap and difficulty. The harder CoP missions are of "level 75 difficulty," meaning that even if the cap is 40 and level 40s can go, the necessary strategies will be beyond an average level 40 player. As a result of this, a huge proportion of people - approaching 100% - who have completed all the missions are 75 anyway. If the level caps were implemented to try to involve level 30, 40, 50, and 60 players into the expansion, it did the exact opposite. The issue of inventory space also created lots of anxiety when doing missions, because players had to cram their inventories with lower level gear. There are a couple of possible changes that could have prevented this error: Solutions -Balance level cap and difficulty, so that level 30 cap missions are extremely easy, so that players whose highest jobs are 30 will have a shot. This would have successfully incorporated lower levels into the mission scheme, then when they hit a mission they couldn't finish, they would need to level up to meet the cap to be able to win. A setback is that higher level players would have had no problem, but that's how it already was with Zilart and NAs who were 75. -Make the missions exactly how Zilart missions were: no level cap, ridiculously easy to 75s until the end. This change creates the obvious problem of missions being too easy, not enough timesink etc etc, but missions were never a timesink and I think trying to change it so that they were was too zealous anyway. -Scale gear down, perhaps multiply the stats by a percentage based on the level caps, so that players could bring the gear they already have. -Add enough convenient storage so that people can hold equipment for multiple levels of the same multiple jobs. Al'Taieu - Close But no Cigar ProblemsAl'Taieu, called "sea" by NA players, was expected to be the new Tu'Lia, called "sky" by NA players. The area itself was released 6 months before the HNMs were put in. When they were, though, we were expecting a new sky. Sky was rich in loot, had a balanced system for the amount of time required to pop Kirin, and most importantly factored out the incredible inbalance involved in the claiming system. This most important factor is there still - which is why NAs' expectations for sea were so high - but once the vault was breached the joke was on the robbers because it was empty. To explain this empty vault, I'll refer to some of our (BG's) sea experiences. Our first run into sea had one main target - "the new Kirin." Thus we were very interested in getting quick trigger drops. Our best drop rates were 1/1 for Prudence and Justice, and our worst drop rate was 1/3 for Hope. I've heard of people on other servers getting 0/5 and 0/6 on Ix'Aerns, which is absurd. Why was the balance of sky mutated in such an unreasonable way? The way the tier system for NMs works, if you get no drop at an upper tier you have to repeat the multiple mobs in the lower tier again, making it a grueling process. If drops are 67%, which is our record in 22 kills, the chance to get virtues 4, 5, and 6 in 1 kill of each mob is 2.7%. This means the average number of total kills you have to do to pop Love once is 37. Sky, on the other hand, required 12 kills every time to pop Kirin. Aside from pop items, the drops themselves from mobs are ridiculous. Each Jailer drops a Ridill type weapon, that uses easily obtained stacks of stones to proc, all of which are useless beyond skillup except one or two. Aside from that, the only drops are basically job specific Peacock Charms (+7skill = +7acc +7atk on that weapon) with +5 to a related stat. The Torques themselves are pretty solid, but the drop rate is low. We are 20% on 15 kills, which isn't an unheard of drop rate for powerful items, but the problem lies in that there are no other useful drops. Byakko drops a large sum of gil 60% of the time, a revolutionary 5% haste piece 50% of the time, and a 100% seal to pop Kirin, every time. Kill Jailer of Prudence and you can possibly get a mage melee weapon. That's it. Err, a mage melee weapon and the knowledge that you'll have to spend 100s more man hours getting the set to pop Prudence again. Lastly, and you can disregard this if you want to, Jailer of Love. We spent 2 months total getting 1 set to pop this, with very lucky 2nd tier god rates. We were expecting a huge fight so we brought over 2 alliances. When we popped it the fight was incredible - triple summons at a rate somewhere in between 1 and 2 times the speed of Vrtra, elemental shifting, a large array of powerful -ga spells, and usual interesting Yovra WSes. This seemed like a very well designed fight, except for one thing - it's undamageable. A 1500 damage Chi Blast did 1% of its HP, which was regenned in roughly 15 seconds. That demands 100 damage per second for at least 150,000 hit points.. which simply isn't possible at this point in the game. We stopped after trying different things for 4 hours, and lost the past 2 months of our in-game lives. If the regen were to be dampened this fight would still be much more challenging than any other Al'Taieu NM, and worth the rewards (speculation) Novio's & Novia's earrings + shot at Absolute Virtue & his pool. Solutions The proposed solutions for Al'Taieu are so simple that most would involve merely changing a number. -Make pop items 100%. This would still require 9 kills to pop Love, and if Love is included in the hierarchy to pop Absolute Virtue (all speculative) 10 to pop "the new Kirin." If that's still too softcore, just make Hope, Justice, and Prudence's virtues 100%. Then you would need around 13 for Love and 14 for AV at a 67% drop rate in tier 1. -Add more loot to Jailers, make their pools more like 4 gods. Right now every mob's pool resembles a Zipacna, Ulli, etc (small chance for bonus item like Ushikirimaru). -Reduce Jailer of Love's regen. Lack of Communication
ProblemsThis issue extends beyond just CoP, but was a large source of frustration during the gradual release of the expansion. The main comparison used for this point comes from another game - World of Warcraft. If one reads any patch notes, or looks at the official forums, one can see the specific level of depth detail that is communicated to players. While we were at iGames in college station admiring cosplayers, Blizzard was giving in-game in-depth comprehensive previews of three new massive raid dungeons. FFXI, on the other hand, uses incredibly vague and useless language, such as "The behavior of certain mobs in Al'Taieu has changed," to notify a change. On top of meaningless information like that, no sorts of plans or details on sea were released before or after it was implemented. All of the know how that comes about in this game about where mobs are, how they pop, what types they are - any sort of inference comes from hacking the game data. Solutions I'm not demanding the devs to say things like "Don't get aggro behind Wyrms or you'll get Spike Flailed," I just want to see a larger amount of reasonable communication. Basically, I want to see more specific language. Instead of "so-and-so was changed" state how it was changed. Where they said nothing about adding the new wyrms when Tiamat, Jorm, Vrtra, and Ouryu were added, a simple mention would have been nice. Even outside of content, explaining the reasons behind the unscheduled server maintenances that took place frequently throughout CoP would have greatly improved company-player relations for little to no effort or risk. HNMs - Effort vs Reward
ProblemsYou find a Fire Crystal on Tiamat. You find an Earth Crystal on King Vinegarroon. You find a Dark Crystal on Xolotl. We've all seen them - multiple times. The perverse relationship between effort and reward that was magnified by CoP is the nastiest problem that plagues the endgame today. The simple but cardinal MMO concept of getting more for more effort and more time is completely ignored by CoP HNMs - and other aspects beyond CoP such as relic weapons. An example:
It's very clear to players who know what stats matter which of the rewards are the best. Nidhogg > Vrtra > Tiamat > Jormungand. The point is Nidhogg is a nearly 3 year old NM that's level 90 and incredibly easy to kill with 12 people in 20 minutes, while CoP wyrms are 95 and range anywhere from needing 24 to needing 40 to kill in 1-3 hours. Nidhogg, along with Aspidochelone and King Behemoth, drops far better loot than any of them. This discrepancy ruins players' motivations when they accomplish something as amazing as killing Vrtra, and get far less than they could get from killing a much easier NM. This issue meshes a lot with that of Al'Taieu, in that you can spend 10 hours with 18 people and there's a good chance you get nothing. The biggest design flaw with FFXI right now is that you can put in so much and succeed over the hardest and most time-consuming strategically complex encounters - and receive no meaningful loot for it. Solutions Add deeper loot pools to NMs that take large numbers of people. Great examples of loot pools to emulate are those of 4gods, Kirin, King Behemoth, Nidhogg, Aspidochelone, and Fafnir. Poor examples are Tiamat, Jormungand, and Vrtra. Make the relationship between effort and reward in this game linear and not random. Summary
With all due respect, calling CoP worthless is a major cop out. It held amazing
potential, and was just executed ineptly. Even after CoP has run most of its course,
repairing the problems above with the solutions above would immensely improve
the level of satisfaction with the game among endgame players. Leaving it as it is, however, no matter how improved new content is, will most likely have the opposite effect of immense damage to the player base. |