Your thought on Elite HuntsFollow

I don't think anything is going to be nerfed... Yoshi-P has been pretty vocal against nerfing while supporting ways to make fights last longer. If this were a simple nerf (fewer seals given, etc), then I'd think they'd be able to get to this before the 29th.

Just in case, though, I'll be spamming the crap out of these as much as I can this weekend.

Edited, Jul 25th 2014 9:33am by Thayos

I think BrokenFox is wanting more hands on hunt mechanics. By hunt mechanics, I mean tracking, trapping, luring, spawning, better monster AI tendencies, and unique fights.

Are you going out and exploring the world or seeing the world? Or just go to coordinates?
I can go to the grand canyon and see the world just by traveling there. I can see a specific cave by using map coordinates. I can see every inch of the grand canyon If I traverse it.
Is that exploring though? Somewhat. But I can do that without getting my hands dirty or taking a hands on approach. An explorer might examine dung or remains to clarify a creatures diet, habitat, or track them. An alligator smells different than a turkey. Different creatures emanate different noises, stroll in different weather conditions or time of day.A porcupine has different tendencies than a lion when it feels a threat. A zebra might sit there still as 100 people mutilate it with little resistance, not many attackers would be hurt. A kraken will probably not sit around when being attacked and hurt the attackers more. A zebra might hoof you, a kraken might squeeze the life out of you.

The key in making hunts more hands on. Is to make the exploring/hunting more hands on without making it so time/weather dependant that most get left out. Or so monotone that it becomes a grind or means to an end.



The potential: It is there. The problem is that it isn't so much exploring the world as it is seeing it. The adventurer lies in the heart of the person. An adventure is a mystery. When the mystery is no longer and all is known the adventure ends. It then becomes either a matter of appreciation or a means to an end. Can any mmo create a never-ending mystery? I don't think so, especially not themeparks. Thrills come and go and dull with prolonged exposure. But appreciation can last forever if the heart wants it.

The reality: Resources are mass farmed in real life and games. That is how large economies get stimulated. However, there are still people who do these things on their own driven by passion. Developers can create the parks but they can't control the minds of the people who play there ever. The only reward that could alter peoples perception of wanting to get their reward asap and be done with the content. Is to design the rewards to require occasional re-visiting content to reacquire it or re-fill it while still keeping the power of the gear relevant.

Potential beats reality when it fully realized. If you say the problem might be there is not enough to go around. Then that is what SE needs to fix. Sideways looks are fine. If they find the time to give you that look, that might be part of the reason why they themselves are not immersed. Can you truly understand and appreciate a movie by constantly looking at other people in the theater or telling Joe to keep his voice down? Maybe the movie is not their cup of tea? Maybe they should find another movie that does immerse them? Would you watch a movie you detest because it offers free drinks and popcorn over a movie you are completely enamored by if you were limited to one movie?
If this is what hunts are causing players to do. Then those rewards and movies better get revised, and pronto.

"Final Fantasy games have always attracted people who are into story and immersion, but the 'extremely casual' direction this crew has adopted is going away from that. Love it, hate it or be indifferent to it; it's something that we all have to accept."

FF has always attracted that group you say. But casual or hardcore plays no part in that. That was resigned to FFXI solely. Final Fantasy has immersed by having larger than life spectacles. This goes from every character, creature, world, dungeon, story, nook, and cranny. If ARR goes hardcore purely, it will lose many subscribers but form an identity that the remaining niche clings to. If it goes purely casual. It will gain subscribers but lose some identity and push away the hardcore. The balance being struck now is in their best interest financially.

If hunts are not following the FF mantra of immersing us in the way the series has. That is just one content, and that content needs refined.

But it will always be Final Fantasy.

Oh, I'm sure Filth understands just fine. He just doesn't like being wrong.

It's not any good reason.

The problem is that SE's reasoning is flawed. I understand them wanting to control the flow of gear, but allowing people to go through content more than once per week doesn't need to have any bearing at all on gearing up. As other posters have said, your lotting privileges for a turn could end as soon as you've completed that turn. There's just no good reason though for not letting people re-enter content to help their friends and FC mates.

While I agree that blocking off the content for friends of those outside a Coil static, I think that making it like CT and ST would have consequences that you're not considering.

Currently in ST, people are after the upgrade items at the end, so they're passing on all the gear. If Coil adopted this system, then those same Coil statics would continually run turns until they got the drops they wanted for that week and let the rest hit the floor. Currently, there's no reason to not lot on gear, since there isn't a gear lockout.

I'm not defending the current Coil system, but I think the solution that everyone's tossing out has serious problems. Are they bigger problems than the static issue? I can go back and forth on it.

For the people who may be offended by the occasional RMT tell, get over it. I recall people flipping their **** in XI when you had the trial accounts spamming up servers. Blacklist and move on.

While true that RMT will never go away, the best one can do is minimize the temptation without castrating content itself. I mentioned crafting because we have Yoshi on the record saying he doesn't want it being good because he's afraid, in part, new or returning players may see good items and think, "Whoa, that's too expensive for me! Better RMT some gil!" You know how you avoid that? You make the materials fairly accessible and not choked off to a specific, hard to reach source. That way, if the player wants the item, they can go earn the ingredients and then commission a trusted crafter. It might not be as quick or easy as just buying from the AH, but it's really not much different than spamming dungeons for tomes.

As for mercenary work, RMT or otherwise, so what? People are getting items who don't deserve them?! Shut. Down. Everything. This is a case of worrying a bit too much about what the other guy is doing, especially if you will never associate with them. And right now, mercing technically is possible, but it's either not as pertinent as Titan HM was for relics or "not quite there yet" on the difficulty curve with later T2 coils. Yeah, I recall the whining about the former from some. I bluntly have no issue with such a contract between consenting individuals. Sometimes people get sick of PUG fail, at least they're taking an initiative to solve their own problem. If this is more about RMTs being account jackers, identify thieves, or just shady individuals in general, there's only so much educating we can do. Inevitably, someone is going to believe that Nigerian prince has a good deal for them. Live and learn. It's not SE's fault. It's not my fault. I wouldn't exactly call it the victim's fault, either.

Are we still talking about raid lockouts? These are the same raid lockouts you find in almost any MMO these days. Castrating content? That sounds dramatized from my perspective. The main reason it exists is still to keep players from burning through content faster than intended. I personally don't care about the tells(though they are annoying), but it still has an impact. I'm more annoyed by the people who purchase the gear and runs showing up in my raid without a clue and dragging the entire group down.

I would have expected SE's stance here to be a bit more pronounced since they've always gone a bit overboard with trying to control it, but their stance is in line with the rest of the industry. WoW has raid lockouts. TERA has raid lockouts. WildStar has raid lockouts. This is just par for the course.

I think it's important to note that sky gods did have their own restrictions attached, not through timed lockouts but through spawn requirements. You couldn't just decide to go pop Byakko 30 times on one weekend to get everyone haidates. Popping a sky god was the culmination of effort previously put in (either by you or by others, if you happened to buy the pop items from them, but even then you'd need quite a bit of money to acquire some of the higher demand items) to make your way there. Without that effort requirement, the gods would have been spammed like crazy, and it would have changed the way the event was approached drastically.

In fact, quite a bit of FFXI end game had limiting factors preventing content from being spammed. Dynamis/Limbus/Einherjar/Nyzul/Salvage were all timed lockouts. Sky/sea/ZNM/BCNM were all limited by the amount of effort your group was willing to put in. HNMs were time based spawns. Had FFXI taken one of these particular events and let people just spam the top bosses within those events constantly, it would have changed that event quite a bit. For better or worse is up for debate, but I'd argue that they'd lose their staying power in terms of incentives, and the fight itself would also lose a bit of prestige. I know I looked forward to fighting Odin when the time finally came for our linkshell to take him on, but I don't quite get that same feeling when I'm fighting a boss that I've fought 35 times in the past week. By then it's more of a "yep, this again..." feeling, and sooner or later it gets to the point where I'd rather just be doing something else.

In short, I don't know if one week lockouts on coil are ideal, but I don't know if a coil that can be endlessly spammed until you get what you want is a better solution.

Edited, Jul 26th 2014 4:06am by Susanoh

Who cares if lockouts are based on a whim or have a good reason from the developers standpoint?That doesn't mean it is a good thing from the players standpoint. Imagine if you were locked out of other pleasures in life whether they were good or bad for you? Case of beer a week limit, pack of cigarettes a week limit, sex limited to one time per month, steak and potatoes allowed once a month,etc. That's like netflix putting a cap on how many hours you could watch content per week. Or HBO only being on the air on weekends even though you are paying a premium for it.

Indulging in addictions is our own fault, and any consequences from that is our own fault. If you choose to smoke 2 cartons of cigarettes a week instead of 1 pack and get sick, that is your own fault. You drink a case of beer instead of a six pack and go out driving, end up running someone over, that is your fault. You watch the entire library of netflix in one month and have nothing new to watch after that, it's your own fault. The same applies to video games. The day video games I pay 60 bucks for start restricting me playing or from finishing the game when I want is the day I stop playing them.

ARR is a subscription based entertainment that should have enough attractions to keep people coming back. And it does have enough. But if you do the same piece of content over and over, the content will be consumed. Waiting on one roller coaster ride for 4 hours and it being worth the wait had nothing to do with a lockout. You waited because there was only one particular ride you wanted to get on most. And that ride was exhilarating. If the only reason you visited that park is for that one ride, then that park will eventually lose your business when you get bored of it. Whether you ride it all in a day or spread out over six months. Hooray for the season pass! But now for the big question. Would you still want a season pass if you could only ride that particular ride one time a week?

I want to talk about the not because there is nothing to do but it's not worth doing to get the most out of it. Every game since the dawn of time has some form of progress.We play mmos to escape reality, usually with hopes of some form of progress. The irony here is that all the good stuff is happening right now not when your goal is completed. Looking back at accomplishments might make you feel accomplished or comforted. But the fun came from playing. Should we stop loving or interacting with our lovers or children just because we already spread our seed or tied the knot?

It's the developers job to create continuous and various content. And it's our play to consume it in whatever ways we want. People want to do things when they want and want to do things they enjoy. Gating or masking content is short spurts might keep some of the players who might of otherwise quit if the end rewards are their primary motivator. But it could possibly breed contempt or resentment. You put a large group of people in a small room with negative underlying or hidden feelings. And it's hurricane Katrina time.

what me and my friends do is this:

we each make a party, usually about 4 or 5 parties depending who is on. All of us are the party leaders of our respective party. We get together in a Skype call to coordinate the hunts. We have everyone in all of these parties spread out across the world looking for anything they can find. More people go to zones in which an A rank is due. As soon as someone finds something, everyone in every party knows about it instantly. This way we are all able to get to the mob as quickly as possible.

This event is all about knowledge. The more you know the better you do. I've been in parties where the information was coming to us way too slow and we never made it to any hunts. Since we have been coordinating hunts, we always make it to everything. If someone doesn't make it we reset until everyone is there. We bring an i110 warrior for resets to guarantee he can pull hate on anything. (if you don't have an i110 warrior friend, find the highest one you know).

Despite how some people may feel about people resetting the mobs, I would rather see as many people as possible get their points.