Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

[Squiggs]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

Mal, seriously, I'm not sure why you are so angry about this. It doesn't affect you. It gives you an option to upgrade your GK to the 99 version without going through the trouble of amassing 1000 something-or-others (and seriously, link that for me, because I couldn't find it in a short search. Maybe I'll do a more in depth look for it later, but if you could link that for me I would appreciate it, and it its from the Test Server, then I have my doubts that that will be the actual number). I'm not saying it isn't an absurdly high number, because it is. I'm just saying I don't have a problem with it. I understand why it is the way it is. Maybe, one day, I'll have one of these weapons, and I'll get all butthurt like you are and demand Tanaka's head on a platter. Or, more realistically, I'll have one of these weapons, see the trial for the Stage 2, giggle a little bit and then do the Stage 1 like the majority of the people in the game.

[Raydeus]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

And that's exactly what bad game design is.

In my case I'm waaaay more concerned about seeing Tanakaism back into the game.

[Armando]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

And that's exactly what bad game design is.

Well...yes, but FFXI was built on bad game design from day one. It's something intrinsic to the game. I think the time required is outrageous, but I also think it's par for the course and throwing a hissy fit over it is a bit silly. I figured after all these years people would be more desensitized.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

You'd think, but with all the changes made to the game I think a lot of people truly believed that SE had turned over a new leaf, everyone was happy with the game and "easymode" and all that jazz and suddenly they throw a mega-grind right back at the playerbase and they feel betrayed ...

Sorry, but an abusive husband who says "I'm sorry, it won't happen again," might change for a little while but eventually, they start beating their wife again. SE isn't ever gonna change. And they know you'll keep on coming back, sadly. Dark analogy but it's true and everyone who played this game for any length of time knows it, and most have come to terms with it I'd say.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

^ True facts.

The Abyssea era was a breath of fresh air and exposed a ton of the inherent flaws in FFXI's core design. Now that they're trying to crawl back into their hole of terribad game design players aren't terribly receptive. They've been exposed to not-god-awful game design and they want more of it, not more grind to cover up all the flaws.

Basically you can't feed people cardboard sandwiches for years and then give them a juicy BLT one day and expect them to go back to cardboard sandwiches the next day.

[Malacite]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

Mal, seriously, I'm not sure why you are so angry about this. It doesn't affect you. It gives you an option to upgrade your GK to the 99 version without going through the trouble of amassing 1000 something-or-others (and seriously, link that for me, because I couldn't find it in a short search. Maybe I'll do a more in depth look for it later, but if you could link that for me I would appreciate it, and it its from the Test Server, then I have my doubts that that will be the actual number). I'm not saying it isn't an absurdly high number, because it is. I'm just saying I don't have a problem with it. I understand why it is the way it is. Maybe, one day, I'll have one of these weapons, and I'll get all butthurt like you are and demand Tanaka's head on a platter. Or, more realistically, I'll have one of these weapons, see the trial for the Stage 2, giggle a little bit and then do the Stage 1 like the majority of the people in the game.

First off, the only reason they even split it like this is because there was no split originally - it was just the 1000 drops from said BS mobs for the 99 stage, period. People on the test server flamed the hell out of the devs over it, and so they've tweaked it a bit. But that's irrelevant - the very NOTION of this kind of "i have no life" content is bullshit and shouldn't even be contemplated in this day and age. Nevermind that afterglow is utter garabge, as it doesn't affect the user and aftermath overrides it (so if you use Ukko's Fury with Ukonvasara, everyone around you gets a measely 30 seconds of +crit, unless they themselves have an aftermath effect already up. And a lot of people have empyreans now)


And it's not just this one instance, it feels like the game post-abyssea has shifted right back into everything I hated about pre-abyssea XI. I still like the game and have friends playing it, but I'm done tolerating the dev teams penchant for extreme bullshit. This is why I will defend XIV and Yoshi P to the death, because lord knows XIV has a lot more going for it than XI does - it's just buried under the mountain of turds that Tanaka & Komoto left. Every time I see an update to XI, I get excited about possibly coming back, and then I always manage to find something in there that just ruins it. This is just the latest in a series of continuing incidents. Maybe Legion will be worth while I don't know, but so far I'm not impressed at all and continually baffled by their appalling design choices.

Don't forget that the 95 stage is also an obscene barrier, easily on par with the original relic weapon quests, and I mean back at 2003 level where we didn't have half the amazing shit we do now to make it easier.

So no, as someone who's done pretty well everything there is to do in that game and only gets a kick out of completing Empyrean Weapons & socializing with friends, I will be staying the fuck away from the game until SE gives incentive otherwise, which I don't see happening anytime soon. But go on, keep defending their EQ mindset and dated ideas with all their design flaws.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

I just want to see you provide examples of MMOs where extreme bullshit doesn't happen. The fact remains that there are indeed "I have no life players" that exist for "I have no life" content and those people love it. They loved the bullshit of HNMs, they loved the bullshit of Dynamis, they loved the bullshit of farming demis and popping sky gods, they enjoyeed the bullshit of Sea, of PW, Einherjar, Assault and Salvage.

I detested most of endgame's design. Limbus and Nyzul were the only things I found remotely palatable and fun. Maybe ZNMs, too. I never made plans for a relic. Relic was bullshit and Dynamis was bullshit.

People put up with a lot of that bullshit and continue to. There's clearly a market for bullshit in MMOs. Some of that bullshit is easier now, but still bullshit.

There isn't anything here you can call bullshit on and if you do, I'm calling bullshit on you. You couldn't expect the steamroller ride to just keep on knocking things down for you, they were going to throw a challenge at you eventually. The fact that it comes with a ton of bullshit and its mostly just bait for the gilbuying drama whore is hardly surprising.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

I thought the appeal of HNMs was the opportunity to trash-talk, not waiting around wasting time waiting for the things to pop.

I'm also fairly certain that no one genuinely enjoyed farming sky pops when their goal was to fight sky gods.

You've confused "market" with "tolerance for". Most of this shit isn't a challenge, it's just an arbitrary time sink that's grown to absurd proportions due to bad game design. You're full of shit, as usual BBQ.

[Raydeus]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

Now now, let's not get pissed when we can all agree Tanaka is batshit insane and this has his mark all over it.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

I thought the appeal of HNMs was the opportunity to trash-talk, not waiting around wasting time waiting for the things to pop.

I'd save the trash talk for something that was actually competitive and not based on who had the faster bot claim. I had plenty of better things to do during windows than rub elbows with idiots.

I'm also fairly certain that no one genuinely enjoyed farming sky pops when their goal was to fight sky gods.

By your logic the opportunity to trash talk is there. I actually didn't mind farming sky as it was a time to just shoot the shit with other people while we roamed from objective to objective. At least it was doing something and moving, not just sitting there and looking for someone to troll. I can't imagine you appreciating it, though, given your lack of social graces.

You've confused "market" with "tolerance for". Most of this shit isn't a challenge, it's just an arbitrary time sink that's grown to absurd proportions due to bad game design. You're full of shit, as usual BBQ.

Well, enlighten us as to how you can make this challenging while keeping the new relics extremely rare? I want to hear your ideas and the burden of proof is on you as you're the one saying its "bad design." I never asserted it was good design, in fact I said it was pretty much supposed to be bullshit. I've stated my belief as to why it exists.

I'll be interested in your ideas, I'm sure, as they will probably come from someone else, who you with thank for doing the critical thinking for you.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

Put legitimately difficult fights between players and the shiny. What a novel concept, making the barrier to access be some degree of aptitude rather than just making sure someone has utterly absurd amounts of free time and minions at their beck and call.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

They should do some type of scenario where you need to fight something ten times without losing. Solo. And only once a week. Don't make it some "you lose all your pops if you fail" bullshit like the mythics were, but you should have to redo something if you fail or pay some amount of gil. Make the fight challenging but not impossible. It shouldn't necessarily get harder as you get from 1/10 to 10/10, but there should always be some random difficult scenarios that pop up that require actual skill to react to and pull out the win. And if you can do it ten times consecutively then you deserve the end reward.

I'd like that a lot more than just some insane grindfest. PW pops were a huge pain in the ass to get quite honestly. Make the pop items drop off something difficult-ish, require a prerequisite quest and some type of gilsink. Considering your first few tries might not be successful if you have to do ten consecutive this could take up to several months or maybe even one year to complete but it sure wouldn't take five years. And honestly since I have little faith in SE to make an actually challenging fight that's winnable and not retardedly hard (ohi AV), I'd be willing to bet that the real version and not my imagined version would be pretty damn simple and easily winnable after maybe a couple "freak" losses and no one should spend more than half a year to complete one of these.

Oh, and you can only do one at at time.

I win, SE.

[Malacite]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

PW isn't that much of a challenge anymore.

ADL on the other hand, is a whole other story. That prick is on some serious steroids.

There's just no reason to justify that level of nonsense. I never claimed XI had a monopoly on it either, hell as far as my experiences go iRO still takes the cake for ultimate BS grinding, but that's neither here nor there. The point was, SE finally made fun, accessible content with rewards that had a fair challenge but were generally accessible if you wanted to devote to them, as opposed to a priviledge (if you can call it that...) for few people in the game who hoarded loads of gil from inflation and/or have legions of willing slaves at their beck & call to farm this shit for them.

yes, because those people really need catering to. Empyreans have basically gone from being the cream of the crop to utter BS that rivals the original relic requirements, while Mythics simply continue to require inhuman levels of devotion to max out. I mean honestly, 4 years estimated time required? And this assuming you have enough people to regularly spam ZNM for PW pop sets. I can't be the only one who'd like to see this kind of bullshit abolished from MMOs.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

As much as I hate to be

this guy

I'd like to comment on how ridiculous it is that Tanaka has become a pariah for everything ever done by anybody for FFXI pre-and-post-Abyssea.

Sure, I can understand that the FFXI development is likely direly understaffed.

I don't think, however, that it's such an exaggerated problem that Tanaka Hiromichi is literally the only person programming stuff into the game, like the imaginative folks on the official forums would (arbitrarily!) have the entire FFXI community believe. That Tanaka is there for everything bad that happens and somehow mysteriously absent for anything good is a completely unfounded idea spreading like wildfire, to the point of practically becoming a memetic.

Why? Is it somehow easier to type profanities at a six-letter name than to simply reasonably disdain any arbitrary piece of content that any number of people may or may not have contributed to?



My two gil.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Has Tanaka Finally Lost His Mind?

That's why I prefer to just complain about the game design in general.

Fucking things up is a team effort.