Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

[Aksannyi]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

If that were a playtime thing and not simply a grinding xp thing, that would be utter fail. I'm pretty sure not even SE is that dumb.

[Takelli]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

If that were a playtime thing and not simply a grinding xp thing, that would be utter fail. I'm pretty sure not even SE is that dumb.

Hey, they where dumb enough to put in a fatigue thing in the first place...

[Aksannyi]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

I mean granted, eight hours in the real world is a typical day of work. SE could very well be thinking in such a manner that they're trying to make our characters rest after a full day of work, then again, a day in the life of an Eorzean is probably like a half an hour or something. Are they going to make our avatars rest at night? Lol.

I get what they're trying to do, but you'll always have people who can't play nearly as much as others and naturally won't progress as quickly. That's going to happen no matter how you play it. With WoW, I hardly noticed the rested thing. It was nice, but it wasn't going to make or break my rush from 1-80, considering it took me less than two months anyway. People who want to reach max level quickly will do so, and people who want to take their time and enjoy the climb will do so.

The worst part about not being able to play a lot was finding people to xp with anyway. It had nothing to do with finding the time ... no, you'd find the time to play, log in, put up your seacom and wait for a tell. You might solo some EP for a while to at least get somewhere but for a lot of casual players in XI, you'd log on, lfp for four hours and accomplish very little by the time you had to log back off. So XIV was to address this by adding in solo content. Well there you go, they did that and they fixed it in XI somewhat, as well. Casual players can progress now on their own without the cockblock of needing a full party to get anywhere. I don't see why this was bad. You're always going to have hardcore players who want to spend most of their awake time playing, and you're always going to have casual players who only have a few hours a week. Diversity ftw? Lol. Just seems dumb to try to balance that when that's part of the whole MMO thing.

[Murphie]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

I don't know about anyone else, but I actually appreciated the fact that in FFXI or other MMOs, there are people out there who will rush to the endgame. That means that they explore shit ahead of time, and I don't have to figure everything out on my own. New job released? Well, I'm going to give it a shot. But I guarantee you that by the time I get up in levels, someone (or rather several someones) will have already gotten there, and figured out a lot of the mysteries of the job. I am not that concerned with being the first one to do something. If I did, I'd be one of those rush, rush, rush players. I'm perfectly content to let someone else do the discovering for me.

[Takelli]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

I mean granted, eight hours in the real world is a typical day of work. SE could very well be thinking in such a manner that they're trying to make our characters rest after a full day of work, then again, a day in the life of an Eorzean is probably like a half an hour or something. Are they going to make our avatars rest at night? Lol.

Yea, when you log off, your character runs to the nearest town, and rents a bed for the night so the next time you log back on, you are standing next to a bed in the nearest town...

But still. I just don't like the whole thing anyways. ITS A GAME! NOT WORK! Let me play for as long as I want, not tell me how long I can play before getting "punished" by lowering my exp.
Implement rested exp, not this whole BS SE!

Edit: I mean, I can see this of being a way of preventing RMTs from power leveling from level 1 towhateverlevelisthemaxlevel, and farming for hours on end as quickly.

[Dux]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

Just got back from the pool hall and read something the article on ffxivcore.com and the replies here.

Within the first eight hours of play, you can earn 100% experience. The seven hour period following will see your possible experience gradually approach zero.

I am going to sober up a bit before I decide what this means to me but it looks like this is nothing sort of disastrous for FFXIV.

[Takelli]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

Within the first eight hours of play, you can earn 100% experience. The seven hour period following will see your possible experience gradually approach zero.

But... Is it started when you first log on, or while you are killing monsters? As there are people who will be logged on all day long, and never do anything, except for talk to their linkshell, or just stay idle while online. Then when they want to exp, or get back from sleeping, working, or what ever, they cant...

[Aeni]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

This must be SE's cruel joke in response to the "FFXI hates casual players" complaints. They swung that pendulum waaay too far the other way. They'll probably then ask you of which of the two evils you'd live with, nevermind about that compromise somewhere in the middle. Bi-Polar much, SE?

From what I'm gathering, it's 15 hours of grinding. The players were hitting the cap faster than they expected in beta because the leves were giving way too much exp (and, honestly, they were.) So it doesn't seem to be an actual hourly cap, but just an estimated time they are giving.

(I still have no idea where the ZAM translator got the 8 hours from. <___<)

Translation error on their part, somewhere. We need to wait until an official English version of this news gets out or we'll just have a lot of mistranslation/miscommunication running rampant with rumors. Although I agree with Etra's sense of the original JP post because I read it similarly. Japanese players tend to be more "hard core" and they will definitely not stand for this.

[Malacite]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

They over nerfed guild leves too. I don't know how much they gave in the last phase, but in P3 they scarcely give more exp than regular grinding, and a little gil on the side.


What the crap SE? I'm beginning to wonder if the Collector's Edition is a good idea... 8 days early access isn't going to compare to increased skill up rates, especially with this bullshit anti-grinding mechanism.

[Aeni]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

My theory on surplus.

X - experience gained during penalty free time every week.
Y - experience gained during penalty time (until you case to gain any).
Z - experience in the form of gradually increasing surplus gained with Y.

450% or 550% accumulation of surplus experience (depending on how it is implemented) before no experience is gained. The % is the amount in relation to 1 hour of penalty free experience gained (This can vary widely, but emphasis is likely placed on efficiency of experience gained per hour in order to maximize experience production)

If experience gained is stable and consistent, then 65% (or 79%) of experience gained (X) is stored in surplus (Z)

Your total experience gained for the week would be X + Y, with Z in surplus. Now, the system can work in different ways, so this is my theory.

(1) Your next week, your timer is reset, so you'll have a fresh set of time to work with before you are capped for the week. You first of all have a surplus of experience which will be in the form of a buffer. Once you have released all of the surplus experience (you won't get any additional from your activities while doing this, you are just releasing your withheld experience gained from the previous week) any additional activity will start the timer. This whole process repeats itself. It's therefore advantageous to be as efficient as you can DURING the penalty period and not during the non-penalty period.

(2) Your timer has been set for the week. You also have surplus experience from the previous week in the form of a "bonus" that will be added to the experience you gain during both the penalty and non-penalty period, not to exceed a certain % or flat rate amount of the experience you are currently gaining. Any experience not exhausted will be added to any surplus gained for the current week. This can be a good insurance during a week where you aren't as efficient as the previous week.

[Etra]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

I'm sticking with my own translation until we get one from SE. I still don't see where the poster at Core pulled out eight hours and starts diminishing for seven. What I'm reading is you're fine for seven hours, then it slowly starts diminishing from there. From what I'm reading, they don't come out and tell you how long you have, unlike the 15 hours everyone else is adding up.

So, in my opinion, you have seven hours (estimated to the amount of EXP you should be getting from constant leveling -- down time does not contribute), then it starts going down from there until it reaches zero.

[Malacite]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

Just found something interesting, it may not be as bad as we think;


http://www.ffxivcore.com/topic/11964...komoto-speaks/

Well it looks like Mr. Komoto escaped his shackles keeping him in Gamescom away from working on FFXIV, and he has an announcement to make to quiet all the rampant speculation going on. Taken from the JP Beta Test site and translated by me, your friendly neighborhood Savalithos.


We’d like to thank all the beta testers out there for their hard work and support! We’re applying all those ideas you’ve sent us to make for the best possible Open Beta test and official release.

Now we’d like to take a moment to answer the many questions we’ve received about character balance in the current B3 phase.

First off, the main concept behind FFXIV is allowing those players with little time on their hands to play effectively, and game balance is based off of that. Furthermore, it is being designed to not give those with more time on their hands to play an unfair advantage. Because of that, systems such as Guardian’s Favor (a bonus to Guildleves) have been implemented to make leveling in the short-term easier than leveling in the long-term.

To achieve this balance, the amount of possible skill/experience points earned after a certain period of time has a threshold. Think of it as real-life “fatigue” from working at improving your skills via battle *(aka. No one could train ad nauseam in the real world with no ill effects).

Within the first eight hours of play, you can earn 100% experience. The seven hour period following will see your possible experience gradually approach zero.

This system is on a weekly timer. After a week has passed since you began skilling that particular weapon, the timer will reset. It will start anew when you skill up again.

Any experience earned past that point is saved as “surplus.” There is surplus for each class, and if you begin to see it please consider playing another class and adjust accordingly.

However, experience points are not specific to any class and therefore the decrease in experience points is not affected by changing classes.

That’s how the system stands as of right now.

Also, this system wasn’t implemented just in B3 but was set in motion from the very start of beta. Despite this, we have received many opinions regarding it in B3. There are a few reasons why:

-B3 allowed for longer sessions in single sittings.
-In order to promote party play, skill/experience points earned were greatly increased.
-The skill/experience earned from weak enemies was lowered, but had failed to pop up on initial bug reports (and was later fixed via maintenance).

According to the last bug report skill/experience able to be earned was above what had been planned, therefore people hit the limit much more quickly than hoped for. That is the biggest cause. Yet another problem was that we were unable to adjust guildleve experience and the experience-earned limit at the same time.

Our lack of explanation regarding all of this was a mistake, and we heartily apologize.

This all is still currently under development, and we have plans to make the limit more palatable in answer to all the tester feedback we received concerning this. In particular we would like to address the speed with which experience begins to drop off and are already looking into it.
Also, since experience points fatigue carries over despite changing weapons, we plan to make it not so harsh.

At the very least, we promise to not have people hitting these limits in a short period of time, such as during the start of B3.

We would also like to make an announcement regarding something else.

The decrease in earnings when gathering is based on your actions taken with that class and is unrelated to the aforementioned limits. This is also currently under review and is planned for adjustment in accordance with many testers’ opinions.

Surplus experience is currently not being used. However, we have received many comments suggesting some sort of reward be put into effect regarding it, and we think that’s a pretty interesting idea. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, though, and we’re currently investigating the possibilities.

Open Beta will not just see changes to the issues stated above but will also see adjustments made to encourage party play even more (such as an increase to skill points), which the team is currently hard at work on adjusting. We hope you’ll all test it out when the time comes.

Finally, we would like to apologize for the lateness of any developer comments due to my attendance of Gamecom this past week. In my absence much fuss was raised over speculation, old information and some mistranslations on overseas fansites *(what?! /panic. Though I wonder what that’s in reference to in particular). I hope to avoid this from happening again by delivering developer comments as promptly as possible. Thank you all for your understanding.

And thanks in advance for your hard work to come in Open Beta!

Final Fantasy XIV director
Nobuaki Komoto

So I guess there is still hope for this game, if SE has any damned sense about them. And I'm speaking as someone who loves to multi-class and play various roles because I tend to get bored fast just playing one or two roles. I understand why they're doing this system, but I still think it's ultimately stupid and they can find better ways of keeping people from hitting the level caps too quickly.

Like Aky-chan said, some people might only have a day or so during the week in which they get their groove on and just want to chill out on the game for the day. SE has to realize that they are in serious risk of alienating their primary demographic, FFXI players. Furthermore, the whole fatigue thing really comes off as a very underhanded attempt to get people to play both games. For the last time SE, you keep people playing by providing stimulating content, not punishing the player base.

[Etra]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

@Mal

http://www.ffxionline.com/forums/gen...tml#post894154


Although, I did just realize this was a core site and not ZAM. Oh well. xP Buuut like I said for the gajillionth time now (and I think Aeni agrees), nowhere does it say eight hours for surplus to start. Waiting on an official English announcement.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

Furthermore, the whole fatigue thing really comes off as a very underhanded attempt to get people to play both games.

If they wanted me to play both games, they wouldn't have banned me from their first one for changing credit cards. Just sayin.

Not that I couldn't just start over, but meh. After all the work I put in perfecting my character I definitely had no motivation to start from scratch. Hell, half the time I couldn't even stand to level my mule unless I was sitting at kings on my main.

But that's getting off topic. If I can manage to get myself a new computer for XIV, I'm going to be playing only XIV, not XI and XIV. I just fucking won't have time for both. I played WoW and FFXI at the same time (sometimes literally at the same time, sitting FFXIAks at Khim and grinding WoWAks) for about two months but I had nothing else going on in my life at all. I will barely have time for one MMO, let alone two. Even if I wanted to play two. But shit. I know I'm only going to have weekends to play, so why in the bloody fuck would SE want to limit me from getting as much done as possible? It will piss me off, and it will make me quit. I don't think I'm the only person who believes that. Eight hours of grinding is not a lot - especially spread over a whole week. Even the hardcore players who change class every time it hits will eventually run out of shit they can do without being "too tired." And when people run out of shit to do, they log off. FFXIV {Death} {You can have this.}

[Aeni]

Re: Amazing recap of the state of FFXIV

Besides, SE can adjust that time, too. It's not set in stone and looking at my theories, if even one of them is correct, then it's not that bad going forward from the second week on. I'm fairly certain they are doing this specifically to limit your time spent on the first week in the game to help alleviate network congestion. Sort of a built-in load system. They want you to LOG OFF and not want you online 24 hours a day for 7 days straight in the first week. Besides, both copies of the game comes with a free month, so it's not like anyone is justified to go balls-to-walls with their play schedule.

I need to explain.

Even in WoW, there's issues of network congestion. Each time they've released an expansion, it's like they've released a whole brand new game. The way they alleviate this mess is to have adjustable monster respawn timers. They (Blizzard) also accommodate for content releases (i.e., a new quest hub and instance release)

We do not know if this is possible for FFXIV. It may ... or it may not ... exist. And thus another reason why they've built this limiter at least for the first week. I'm optimistically hopeful that going forward from the second week on that the experience "cap" issues won't be a problem for anyone. And of course it also helps to "slow" down hardcore raiders so that gives developers time to fine tune end game play and finalize decisions on loot tables and what have you. I actually don't really mind this addition so much ... although it may suck for players who decide to cancel accounts and then reactivate it (because the surplus may not be properly recorded or saved for a long time)