Delve is ruining friendships and relationships...Follow

They did. The problem was they let a whole bunch of people skip the middle part of their content by doing 3+ hour ki fights, so the vast majority of the mid tier end game scene is doing delve/plasm ... I would do skirmish but I see no shouts... I don't know, it seems like they ffed up. If they had the 20 minute timer in the first place that would be one thing, but hard to imagine getting people to do the middle tier stuff now that they have unlocked the top tier.

That messed up the progression. You need to have people actually doing the content in the middle for it to be viable, well for people like me anyway, not a lot of friends play, I mosty do pick up content and I am not the sort of person that starts a shout for something I haven't done successfully before.

Eh, call me whiny if you want, all I know that is I've logged in twice since finishing my month-of-work-from-hell and one of those times I started trying to farm some grasshoppers for a coalition assignment, got bored and logged off. The next time I took a coalition assignment asking me to complete a rieve, ran around in a circle for 20 minutes looking for one, got bored and logged off.

If someone had been shouting for skirmish, I'd be all over that, but it's nothing but plasm and delve. Not particularly helpful. I'd love to do the content in the middle but SE screwed up, let anyone who happened to be around to get the KI and then shut off the KI tap. I took a look at skirmish and at delve rewards and I am hardly shocked no one is doing skirmish.

Most people will just try to beg/buy/sneak their way to their KIs so they can just get the best weapons available, and I don't blame them one bit. My best geared jobs, BST and BLU appear to be unwelcome in this content (not shocked by BST, was hopeful about BLU since SE seems to have tried a little harder to make that one situationally useful for groups)... eh, I'll see if any of my better friends ever feels like logging in sometime soon to maybe do skirmish so I can be slightly marginally less sucky in comparison to Mr. Huge Damage weapon, but I am very doubtful a skirmish weapon will do me any good since my jobs are fairly much ffed. I guess I could spend the next month upgrading my whm for the current content, but by the time that's done, bleh... who knows.

I guess just feeling like they messed up the whole concept of step by step gearing that they were going for, and it is ******** me over.

Based on what I am reading here. I am glad I didn't invest more time in this game.

I disagree.

The KI fight change, imposing the 20 minute limit, was a major mistake. Once you start doing things like this, limiting entry; placing down an arbitrary limit; expecting you to have a specific strategy that the developer intended causes this reaction in the community. You need proof? Look at CoP. Think back to those days and how long it took to prepare and complete one Promy run. The developer had an idea of the "right" way to do the content. They did not tell us this, but left it for us to figure out. Because of the huge investment of time and energy, you saw players only wanting certain party setups. It was the start of the issue we have today.

Very simply put, SE created and perpetuates this issue by how they design these events. Their refusal to add ???'s, their refusal to allow people to slowly kill the KI mobs, instead requiring people to funnel through content they themselves invalidated weeks after making it. The community has issues, but those issues developed in response to SE's design choices.

This. THIS.
They f*ucked up plain and simple.

**** up #1) Low drop rate on statue pieces to begin with. Skirmish was not easy to access, no one really got into doing it.

THEN **** up #2) They put in these NMs that they think are "super hard" not realizing the player base will immediately flock to the way less gated, more rewarding content, and that players would rather spend 3 hours killing a KI NM so that they can start farming points to buy AWESOME gear than spend 20 hours grinding gil to afford statue pieces for a chance at a drop of an inferior weapon.

**** up #3) instead of accepting that they F#CKED UP by not originally making the NMs zergs if that was what they wanted, they put a 20 min time restriction on the NMs that immediately exclude more than half of jobs from the content, and any player that didn't already get the KI is probably screwed from here on in

They have always sucked at scaling content. They continue to suck at scaling content. And when people started going through the content too quickly, and skipping whole stages from the content, instead of recognizing it was THEIR MESS UP, they then go in and ***** any part of the playerbase that didn't get through the initial rush

This is what I was afraid of when I found out the expansion was going to come out while I had to work for a month straight. UGH. I was right to be afraid.

Nevermind that they never really thought about how much more screwed pet jobs would be with this new damage paradigm. Their bandaids will do nothing to give people who play these jobs an opportunity to participate in the content.

Only one of those reasons is why people will continue to do field clears.

For #1 most people would take 3 45 minutes sessions at a guaranteed gear of their choice, as opposed to hoping it drops, and they can outlot 17 other people.
For #2 you get way more airlixir potential just farming inside and buying it with plasm.

#3 is the only reason people will continue to do these NMs. The only problem is the people likely to do this are a LS and will not being doing it in a PUG. This is one of the major problems I have with Delve. There is near 0 incentive to do these NMs after you have your 6 clears. It's a shame because fighting NMs is much more fun for me than killing junk mobs for 45 minutes.

Kinda says something about your ls members just as much as it does for that Delve ls tbh

If you got Devle damage dealers only and only get 3k exp in a Ceizak party then something is really wrong. Hell we inv smn to our parties and still come out with over 4k. Sounds to me like you are hanging around the wrong people. Come to phoenix we have nice people here. :)

Oh, SE released content that is getting too much negative attention when on the heels of their new MMO relaunch. Color me shocked.

On Odin, there's not that much elitism going on with Delve shouts. If you're known as a bad player or a ****, you aren't invited. Typically, in a shout, people will still ask if anyone knows a JobX or a JobY. The nice thing about Delve is, if you strike out with one group or decide to leave another, there's likely another group about to shout in the next 10-20 minutes anyway.

If you don't have E/R/M/D, you really should go do Skirmish. I went in with 5 friends recently, spent 200k for the pops, and we got 4 weapons without any idea of what we were doing ahead of time. Also, it was pretty fun. One guy walked away with 300k in mats to sell on the AH. You can clear it with a Meebles-level group of players.

If you honestly can't do that much, then talk to the leader. Let them known you have various gear sets and aren't a complete derp. If someone with the best AH weapon possible tells me they have a decent accuracy set with capped haste, I'll take em. If someone wants in who hasn't bothered with that, then they obviously aren't ready for this content yet. Too many people think jumping straight to Delve gear will allow them to go from 75 or 90 cap gear in one shot. There's some sh*t you need in between, sorry.

Edited, May 20th 2013 8:03am by SFChakan

95% of groups won't get more than 6-8k a run right now and end up waiting on pops for the back half of the run. What's funny is, usually it's not DDs holding the group back, but PLDs who think you just afk with Ochain (requires additional support in PLD pt to keep mp up), healers who let the DDs die, and buffers who don't reapply when the buffs are dispelled.

No it's SEs. They had the right to design 20 minute fights for Delve field NMs in the first place, thus requiring most to finish Skirmish first in order to be able to participate.

That's not what they did. They left open a backdoor where most 90+ R/M/E could complete the content if a few well geared players in the alliance pulled a lot of the weight. Now a lot of average geared players have 30k plasm weapons and have upgraded them. I'm among them for one of my jobs, Thief, but for another, my 99 Warrior I can't even get the Morimar T4/5 win (although I came close in a really good led alliance hybrid fracture run, timed out on NM #4 with about 10% to spare in Morimar Fracture on Saturday night).

Can we please stop blaming players for making choices that benefit them? After 11 years of FFXI as an MMO and probably another 5 or so of MMOs in general, it just ain't going to happen, so this is a strawman at best.

If you design a community game, it's best to put in some pretty forceful community based incentives rather than assuming the players will figure out what you want and actually also do those things.

I was just about to bring up Promyvion. This has happened before and will happen again; after the initial surge of interest tapered off, CoP was dead content for over a year. Compared to how unresponsive the company was then, I believe SE is responding much more quickly.

When the fixes finally came, playability improved dramatically and people started doing CoP again -- but I think SE learned the wrong lesson, as they continued to nerf it, turning Promyvion into a boring stroll-through. Too easy will destroy content as much as too punishing, and this is what I am worried about with Delve. Even worse, the speed at which we whipsaw from one extreme to the other breaks the illusion of Vana'diel, reminding us of the reality that the world we are playing in is just a bunch of database transactions, governed by arbitrary and easily changed rules.